Founder's advice. Alexander Beletsky, CEO SocialSearch.io and Likeastore

The “founder’s councils” continue to acquaint Megamind’s readers with the most prominent creators of the innovation business in Russia and abroad.

Alexander Beletsky alexbeletsky is from Kiev, but his second business, SocialSearch.io , was founded in Berlin, using the expertise accumulated in Likeastore and focusing on the B2B segment.

SocalSearch is a lido-generation service for marketers and young companies that helps to track the social channels of interesting companies, competitors and opinion leaders in a particular market, with the aim of obtaining profiles of the involved audience. The project was launched in May 2015 and is now preparing MVP, which will be presented in a month.

Do what’s important

In the early stages of becoming a company, you will have a million and one task on the list. You should always remember that each kind of task has its time. If you are just starting out, the validation of the problem and the solution is the most important. Only those who managed to do something really necessary survive, solve the problem of a group of people. Who are these people, where to look for them, does your proposal seem interesting to them - these are the most important questions on which the first 3-4 months of a startup need to focus. There is always an inclination to do something wrong. Product, brand, design - it can all wait until such time as you do not understand the market.

Surround yourself with smart people

At the end of 2013, I founded my first company and came with a team to a business accelerator. One can argue about the benefits of the accelerator as such, but what I understood for sure - by surrounding yourself with smart people, you significantly increase the chances of success. Smart people tend to give smart advice, your task is to listen to them and draw conclusions. The team must meet the same requirement. Your co-founders are people who do not ask what to do, but say what to do to you. Look for good mentors. I am not ashamed now to write letters to the founders with questions that describe the situation and ask for advice.

You can't do all the work

In a startup, you need different roles. The more orthogonal skills of the founders, the better. The perfectly balanced team is described by the well-known “3H” formula - Hacker, Hipster, Hustler. Technology, design and sales - the essence of a startup in three words. If you have such a team - you are very lucky. What to do if there are two founders, or you start a new company alone? Firstly, if you are a technical founder, learn marketing. If you are good at design, upgrade your skills in programming. But to combine all three roles, though possible, but very difficult. Outsourcing and labor exchanges come to the rescue - design, logos, email templates, press releases and other small but extremely important tasks can be solved without loss of time for the founder.

You do business

From the very first day before the shutting down email you should know that you are doing business. And business cannot be done without two things - risk and capital investments. If you do not invest and risk, you do not do business, then you do not do anything. Many dream of their business, but when it comes to investing their own money - the heat drops sharply. If you are not willing to spend $ 1000 just to validate an idea, if you are not ready to risk the work and the next two years of uncertainty, then it doesn't cost anything to start.

Road going by walking

The tale of the "overnight sucess" can be forgotten. The road to success is long and thorny. Look at the big players like Slack and Mailchimp (based 2009 and 2001, respectively). Recently, I made an account on GoSquares, and received a friend email from the founder. As a mentor support, I asked him how they validated the problem, and how they validated the solution after that. I received the following response: “I’ve been the customer who’s been making it so far.” And this is the picture:

Spoiler

The three founders go to their success, from a product for real estate, to real time web application analytics.

Editorial note: if you have a desire to participate in the “Founder’s Tips” section, write to us at editor (at) megamozg.ru