The title should say it all, right?
Well.. Not really.
We as a human beings never thought that world could literally lock within 24 hours.
But it happened.
But you know the story so there’s no reason to repeat everything for the 1000th time.
We are marketplace application. So that means we need to serve both businesses and customers.
It’s simple right? When there are no businesses there’s nothing to do for customers and when there’s no customers business doesn’t receive any value.
So our plan was to launch in the middle of March.
It was on our roadmap for quite a long time.
We weren’t doing any social media presence, like hype building, etc, because it was our first version and we wanted to make sure we can fix major bugs as fast as possible with as little damage as possible.
We wanted to get the product to our customers as quickly as possible to get their feedback.
Of course we did plenty of Alpha launches, collected feedback, but in order to be fully functioning we to launch both for businesses and for customers.
When in the middle of March every caffe and restaurant was literally closed our first reaction was : “Fuck, we were literally days for launching and now we can’t do that for God knows how long”
Second thought was : “Okay so that means we have to take advantage of this opportunity that basically whole world is closed, how can we do that?”
First thought was enter delivery space, but at the same time we realised that competitors are already long enough in the game and our average product price is not high enough to be able to cover the margins of delivering, etc.
So the logical option was :
- Get as much feedback as possible.
- Prioritise the most important features and build them.
- Acquire new business partners.
- Make strategy of what’s next after it will be over.
We were patiently waiting and building at the same time and when we saw that the situation worldwide and nation wide was getting better and better.
We launched in the first days of June. Of course many of our friends were bugging us for a long time already so we were really happy and they were happy as well.
But launching is just the first step.
Actually, do you remember any of the big platforms that we are using right now daily launch days?
Exactly.
The work starts after launch.
As good feedback as we were getting and still are getting the real story is behind the numbers.
So in the 4 months that we are launched right now the numbers sound very promising.
Once again we are working on application daily and it is getting better and better everyday and of course it takes time to build something significant.
And that is our mission right now.
- Get value proposition as clear as possible both for businesses and for users.
- Acquiring new businesses and users.
- Creating better internal processes.
- Integrating new members of the team.
- Learning daily.
Everyone that has ever ran a startup knows how hard it is. Of course there are levels to this “hard”, because everyone of us has different point of view of what is “hard”. For someone is hard to hire a great talent, for someone hard means when they’ve been rejected by VC’s 10 times, for some 200 times is just an beginning.
For us it was hard and it still hard to keep everyone on the same page, starting from business department going to design. We have to be on the same page no matter what because when there is small team, the roles doesn’t really matter that much. You have to do what you do best and to do it as much as possible.
So this is 1st of 3 part series “Launching a startup during pandemic.”
In the next parts we will dive deeper into what exactly happens in daily life in super early stage startup.
