How we learned from our mistakes: 10 lessons for developing a startup

Since 2009 and our humble start, when we founded Fueled, we have learned a lot. Now customers from all over the world come to our mobile design and development agency, we have been awarded various awards. Our company has offices in New York, London and Chicago, and we look forward to opening new branches.

Over the years we have met with many difficulties, learned from them, adapted to the situation and worked on how to make Fueled a thriving agency. Now we can share tons of useful professional advice. We present to your attention the best "ten".

1. Choose a specific direction for your business . From the very first day, we represented the Fueled brand as the first and only mobile agency, and we caught a wave of mobile leadership, and we have been maintaining our positions ever since. We are grateful that a decent part of our new business works with friends and customers who come because our other clients advised us. We do not only mobile applications, we are also engaged in web design, branding, SEO, creating communities. But it is our mobile brand and our expertise in this area that attracts customers to our offices.
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2. Do not hesitate with dismissal. If things are not going well with someone from your team, then say goodbye now. Perhaps this will add to the work of the team, and you have to plow on weekends. Just bite your teeth and do it, and then thank us.

When we hire someone, we immediately tell them that we have a three-month probation period. After two months we have a check and an assessment of the relations of both parties. We give them a month to improve or to continue working in the same spirit. If the main problems are not resolved by the end of this three-month period, then we say goodbye. If something goes wrong, then most often feel it both sides.

3. Take a flat fee for only some things. Hourly fee or payment for the project? We finally found the perfect balance: set a fixed reward only for a series of well-defined discrete tasks with given boundaries.

When the project is in development, for a certain amount of work, we switch to a fixed-reward model. For us, this usually means that we are developing an application with a certain number of functions. Customers know what they are paying for, and we know what we are developing. If customers add features, then we create a top layer for new tasks, for which we take a fixed reward.

4. Take an advance . Do not start working until you receive an advance. Seriously, stop. Do something else until you get the money.

It may seem audacious, but the quickest way to bring an agency to death is to accumulate debts for unpaid customer bills. We ask our customers to pay in advance for each two-week period of work. If they do not pay, we do not work.

5. Avoid cheap customers. If a potential new customer is trying to bring down the price or asking for big discounts, then say goodbye to him.

There is a strange inverted pattern, expressed by the "rule of increasing discounts." The greater the discount or the more we make concessions, the more unrealistic the client’s requirements will be. For some reason, customers who demand discounts will never be happy with your work, and they are hardly worth your time and worries.

6. Create simple products . Encourage your customers to develop less, not more. Some clients are surprised when we try to incline them to simpler contracts (which means less profit for us). But on our own experience, we were convinced that six months of creating an application with 150 screens is a guaranteed disaster. First focus on what you can create in a maximum of eight weeks. Then every week or two add the most necessary additional functions.

7. Provide many conference rooms and places from where you can safely talk on the phone. Remember this ratio is 1:11. Our company has deployed a team in its own building in The Fueled Collective, in New York, where 150 people and 35 startups work in the same space. And we discovered that the magic ratio of conference rooms and people is 1 to 11.

Spacious conference rooms for five to eight people are wonderful, but mostly these spaces are used for phone calls by one or two people most of the time, so plan wisely and try to create something like telephone booths or small conference rooms. Several cozy nooks for solitude also do not interfere.

8. Customer interaction and process management are two different things. When we started, we had managers who were engaged both in working with clients and managing the process and the finished product. Since then, we realized that people are good either in creating a product or in building strong relationships with customers. These two skills do not go side by side.

Now we have different managers who are engaged in projects and product management. The stress created by differences in their skills and priorities gives rise to a healthy conflict that leads to the creation of a quality product - quickly and cheaply.

9. Experience is a valuable resource , especially in the technology world, where it is easy to underestimate its importance. When we started, we took people on the basis of their talent, not their experience. We thought we could just teach them everything.

But since then we have understood that experience is very important. The appearance in our team of experienced talented employees and managers was critical for the success and happiness of the company, and it was worth every extra cent spent.

10. Think before you sleep with your colleagues . Talented creative people who work together on amazing projects? Yes, it happens and love, and other "heart affairs."

But first think carefully about everything before giving free rein to your desires. How embarrassing will it be if you "do not grow together"? How much time and energy will have to spend to fix everything? Do you risk losing someone valuable to your company?

It also makes sense to think about what the consequences might be if something goes wrong. In general, it is worth a good thought before you start it with your attractive colleagues.

We hope that these business tips will help you improve your company. But whatever you do, do not stop experimenting and learning from your own experience. We came to what we are now, thanks to the constant adaptation and iteration of how we develop our business.

Ultimately, our passion for experimenting and expanding boundaries has become the core of Fueled success.