Popular startup: practical recipes

We continue [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] to compare approaches to work in a startup in Russia and the United States. Today, Sam Altman's (Y Combinator), Adora Chyung (Homejoy) and Peter Thiel (Founders Fund) statements on aspects of popularity, positioning and PR startups will be commented by Maria Lapuk (@lapyk) - head of the press service of the Internet Initiatives Development Fund .

Sam Altman is quite critical of the myth of the need to chase popular for a startup. He suggests focusing on a small market niche and only then move on to expanding its influence.

How often do Russian startups speak out loudly about themselves, making the most effective use of a large audience reach with business benefits? What are the most common mistakes when working with a mass audience are made by startups?
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Startups rarely think about loudly announcing themselves. Rather, what we see as “loud” is either an accident or the talent of a particular person, and with few exceptions it is a planned campaign.

On the one hand, this is quite understandable: the team needs to launch a product, test it, start selling, scale, etc. When the CEO has a choice: to spend even not money, but time and effort to finalize the product or think through an advertising campaign, then the choice certainly falls on the product.

Maybe, in conditions of limited resources, everyone would have done that, but at some point the product comes to scale, and this is where communications issues begin. It is advisable to come to this point with tested working tools of PR and advertising. Otherwise, you can hang out for a long time here, doing tests and developing PR tactics.

In any case, if you are doing a massive b2c service, you cannot do without communications. It should be at the very beginning of the way to decide at what point you will do them, you need to have in mind a vision of what customers should think about you and much more. PR, marketing communications - a great tool for solving business problems. Do not forget about it.



Based on your experience, can you say that at the moment there is really a trend in the emergence of an increasing number of successful niche startups?

Making a successful niche product is much easier than making a successful mass product. You have a specific audience, you satisfy some very specific needs of this audience. For example, pressfeed.ru for PR and journalists. Quite a great niche professional service. There is a need for a large number of new interesting speakers - here is a service for you that helps to collect comments.

I do not see a boom in niche projects right now, as long as everyone wants to do big projects for a wide audience.

Sam talks about the importance of understanding which of the market niches will show rapid growth in the near future. He stresses the need to assess the potential growth of the market niche with which the startup plans to work.

Sam compares this approach with following someone, “taking the elevator” or belonging to a community. Which of the similar techniques that have shown their effectiveness in the Russian market would you point out? Can you name three of the most promising market niches for work within a technology startup?

Of course, it is very important to choose a market and a niche in which you will work. For example, to get into the IIDF accelerator, the market size must be at least $ 10 million, otherwise the project will not be very interesting for venture investors. Of course, it's always cool to find the “blue ocean” and work on it. But to sell a niche, about which few people know where there is no demand yet, is difficult. But on the other hand, the opportunity to become the first, the only one, to remove all the cream from the market, is higher here.

If we talk about those niches in which I believe, then I would call the Internet of things, mobile advertising, digitalization of real life. I think that in these areas it is quite possible to do a lot of interesting things.

Homejoy's Adora Chyung identifies communication with customers (or users) as one of the main drivers of positive product changes. She speaks about answering machines, interviews, personal meetings with clients and other approaches, but always emphasizes the need to create a trusting atmosphere.

One way to get feedback is to keep a startup’s own blog. How it is necessary to distribute the power to work with project blogs on thematic sites (such as Habr, Geektimes, etc.) and the preparation of materials for specialized media?

How to create that very trusting atmosphere in the framework of publication in a large edition or a series of publications on your blog so that it [the atmosphere] allows you to get true feedback from customers as well?

Communication with customers is important. This will tell any specialist. You can never make a perfect test of a product, you will never know about all the needs of customers without listening to them. If you are benevolent, it will be really interesting for you to listen to customers, there should be no problems with the atmosphere. In this case, it is not necessary to be conducted on consumer extremism, which has recently appeared quite a lot. Develop common fair rules for working with clients. Work on them, adapting as reality changes.

Now, about how much time I would spend on thematic media and specialized media. You need to decide which audiences are prioritized for you in communications. Maybe you are looking for investment, and you need to focus on the media that investors are reading. If you are looking for staff, do not forget about Habr. If you are in the growth stage and spend more than 30% of your time on the media - hire a PR man. This is the threshold after which the PR man should deal with the media for you.

Peter Thiel noted an interesting approach to the formation of its own monopolies and the correct positioning of the business within a certain market niche:

The US advertising market is estimated at about $ 500 billion - from this point of view, Google occupies only 3.5% of the market - this is a tiny share. If you do not like being an advertising company, you can always call yourself a technology company. The technology market as a whole is estimated at about a trillion dollars, and in this case, Google will, “according to legend,” compete with all companies that are involved in the development of UAV cars, with Apple TV and iPhone, with Facebook, with Microsoft in the “office” market, with Amazon in the field of cloud services: this is a huge technological market, where competitors are approaching you from all sides - and there is no question of any monopoly, so the state certainly has nothing to worry about.

Of course, manipulations of this kind are the lot of the largest players in the technology market, but for young companies, correct positioning can play a decisive role in the early growth and scaling phase.

Do you have any interesting examples of this kind from among Russian startups who managed to form an expert image in a certain niche? What do you think helped these projects seize the initiative from other players in their industry?

Positioning is important because it allows your team to understand who you are, who you work for and why you do it. When this understanding appears inside, you can broadcast it to your customers, partners and other audiences. If we talk about Russian projects, then there are wonderful examples of this.

For example, SurfingBird is a personal recommendation service; guys are one of the few in Russia who are involved in this field. There are LinguaLeo and Netology, without which there is more than one material about online education. Each of these projects tells about itself, about the business, gives comments, as a whole is engaged in communications. It’s not very difficult to become an expert. In my opinion, the media still lack very good interesting speakers. So this is a job that just needs to be diligently engaged, and everything will work out.