Imagine you have a startup idea and you are really confident to launch it, what you do next?
It was me around five years ago: I was impressed by Alibaba success and wanted to try something similar. Here is a brief story with LOTS OF GREAT TOOLS to launch and market YOUR STARTUP.
STEP 1: REALIZE YOUR IDEA
The old-school plan was to write the business plan, go with this idea to investor, get money, hire software engineering team, spend 2 years to build the product and voila – you are rich and successful!
– Forget it!
I tried it step-by-step and failed completely. Main brief idea: nobody invested or even listened to me (to the guy living in Ukraine). What was my next step? – I made efforts to build and MVP to try what I have.
STEP 2: BUILD A QUICK MVP (Minimum viable product)
Yep, I started to search how is possible to build an MVP of a marketplace. I researched internet nights long and found lots of tools: wordpress plugins (NO – everything looked ugly), constructors like cs-cart (I event tried Arcadier platform), it was not a solution again: lack of flexibility and high cost.
I tried to find a technical co-founder and failed! I spoke to four programmers, but they were not persuaded, and did not agree to work with me.
Later I rambled upon a magic: Bubble.io – no-code development platform. If you don’t know: Bubble is a constructor of SaaS platforms, websites and landing pages, that acquired a great ecosystem: lots of developers, lots of plugins and APIs connecting various services. Great UX design features and connected own one fold database. With Bubble you can build bright looking websites with many pages, internal dashboards, signup/login group, make internal search, filtering, sliders, lots of popular visual elements. Finally: you can connect services like transactional email providers, payment systems or whatever you want (almost). Of course there are limitations, but for the year 2021 you can build a robust app with mobile version and lot’s of core features you need in your web-app startup.
Finally: I spent about 6 months to learn Bubble.io and build my platform version A. Later I spend another month to smooth everything.
Now I give no-code development as a service: you can hire me to build your Bubble platform, or I can teach you how to create your project. And later, you manage your startup yourself or hire other people to develop it.
STEP 3: GET FIRST CLIENTS AND EARLY USERS
Here are a few great ideas for your marketing:
1) Producthunt.com launches. Make a campaign at Producthunt if your startup is for technology people;
2) LinkedIn/Shapr/Xing – use social networks for business for your lead generation. Especially, if your startup is B2B.
3) Content is a KING. Use websites like quora.com, reddit to answer questions of other people and attract attention towards your product.
4) Make own communities in facebook/telegram/clubhouse to generate attention of people, attract customers and get early user feedback. Example: my facebook community for VendorHub grows constantly and gives me fresh blood for my project.
STEP 4: RESEARCH INVESTORS
Here are my best strategies to find investors and talk to them:
- GUST platform – great to make a single profile for all your needs;
- F6s.com – this platform provides lots of events
- Angel.co + Crunchbase – allows you to find similar competitive startups and monitor the industry angels that invested into competitiors;
- Pitchdrive – excellent platform to test your pitch deck and get a professional 3D analytics from investment perspective.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE:
Here at GrowSpire Agency we provide many services to help you quickly realize your startup’s dream:
- No-code MVP on Bubble + education;
- Recruitment, education and grow of professional sales team for your company;
- Early marketing campaigns to attract early users, make research or build your audience (B2B and B2C);
Why work with us?
- Huge experience: among our clients are EXY token, on the.io, metadata.io and other product and servicing companies from Europe, USA, Israel, Russian speaking world;
- Flexibility in price: fixed cost monthly packages or bespoke workflow on time-and-material basis, with AGILE iterations;
- Get MVP + Marketing in one place.