Category: Startups

Startups

Customers Go First — How To Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Score and Net Promoter Score

Jan 8, 2017 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 1 Comments , , , ,

Many entrepreneurs, technologists and product managers will nod upon hearing this universal business truth: customers go first. In the end customers are the reason businesses exist, by adopting and paying for a company’s product or service.

The term “customer success” is a hot topic these days, and can mean various things, but below I’ll explain the term with the meaning — how your company interacts with customers to guarantee success for it after the interaction.

These five words and different topics are what we’ll try to identify in the text below (or the video above).

  1. Ask — Who, what and when to ask questions to improve your product.
  2. Listen — Summarize and organize the information and share it with the team.
  3. Measure — Connect trends with business objectives.
  4. Understand — Get insights from the information you’re receiving.
  5. Act — Make decisions to improve your product, service and customer experience.

CSAT

If you have a SaaS company or any kind of software company, you need to make sure the customers have a way to communicate with you.

In this communication, you need to think about what kind of user you want to open your lines of communication with, what kind of questions they should be answering and when they should do this.

The developers at itnig are trying to figure out what kind of features to focus on next to keep CSAT and NPS high.

To make sure your customers are happy, you should measure customer satisfaction rates (CSAT). You can rate it however you want, a normal way is by numbers, stars or faces with different expressions.

In SaaS products a good CSAT is 98 and above, and an acceptable score is 90. Everything else is bad. Because the customer usually is telling you what you’re doing wrong, it’s (usually) fairly easy to get a good score, just make sure you have a great customer service team, that’s key.

NPS

The juiciest part of the acronyms mentioned is Net Promoter Score (NPS).

It measures what kind of attitude your customer has towards your product. Only the 9th and the 10th best customers are promoters, which are the best customers you can hope for. These people will promote your product to people they meet. The neutrals in the middle, the 8th and the 7th, don’t do anything for you. And last, but not least, the detractors that represent the bottom 6 of your customer base. These people have a negative influence on your product or service.

To measure NPS you can use platforms such as Wootric, Delighted or Zendesk.

You don’t need to be a Mensa member to understand that getting a good score can be pretty hard, when 60 percent of the bar is detractors.

The formula is: NPS = % of promoters – % of detractors.

So if you have 20 percent promoters, 50 percent neutral, and 30 percent detractors, you’ll have -10 in NPS score, which is really bad.

Some NPS problems are simple to fix, you need to segment the customer base and try to solve as many of the recurring customer-issues as possible. Other NPS related challenges take longer time and need bigger and more drastic changes to fix. After segmenting the customers, you need to group the feedback into components of your product and service, and put your team to work on item after the other.

Companies that takes NPS scores seriously, aim at scores between 60 and 80.

https://upscri.be/285782-2

Listen, intensely and honestly

If you didn’t pick up that listening closely to your customer is extremely important, it’s time to note that done.

But listening and organizing the data isn’t enough alone. A customer that actually contacts you to give you feedback on your product or your service is valuable so make sure the people they speak to are understanding and empathic.

Don’t try to push other or cheaper products on a customer that contacts you about an issue. You have a valuable shot at solving important problems for your company, don’t ruin it by trying to sell them more stuff they don’t want.

To get any value from these processes, you need to share all the customer feedback with the team, not only to implement changes. You never know who might sit on solutions or ideas for improvement.

To get real life examples see the video above, where Jordi explains how Redbooth tackled some of their challenges with CSAT and NPS.

This post was transcribed by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.

Startups

How I Got Hired & Ditched By UBER

Dec 4, 2016 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 0 Comments , , , ,
This is not a picture of me.

There is a lack of engineers everywhere, but finding talent is especially hard in the Bay Area.

I’m from Spain but 5 years ago I went three months to SF, to attend a couple of conferences and visited some friends.
At that time I was trying to start something, but I changed my mind and I started looking for jobs in the US instead.

Getting in contact

Every single company I visited was recruiting.

Tech companies provided pizza, beers and tons of famous, smart people to talk about smart things. All to attract talent.

I sent out many resumes, but 90% of the times I didn’t receive any response, and I couldn’t figure out what was missing.

I have a CS degree, five years of experience and lots of open source contributions in cutting edge technologies. My best guess was that US companies were not willing to sponsor me a `H-1B` visa.

I was close to giving up and going back to Spain when I received two calls from a couple of companies. One of them was Klout, the social media analytics company that sold for $200 million. The second call was from a company that was just starting up at the time, they wanted to disrupt the transportation industry.

The interviews

The first interviews are always done by telephone. They ask you about your background, some theoretical questions and some *puzzles*.

When they have decided that you’re smart enough to meet face to face, the real interview starts, and it’s not a normal meet and greet, it can last up to three hours.

You talk with people from different departments, answer more questions and solve more *puzzles* on whiteboards.

– Implement a function that calculates square roots
 — Sort and concat arrays in a optimal way
 — Guess the two missing numbers in a array with `n — 2` length containing `1..n` unsorted numbers
 — Calculate the number of digits for a given number
 — Implement a function to detect palindromes
 — …

Most of them were doable, but I think they were missing some amazing developers that may not know how to solve those problems,
but they are capable of solving real-life problems (fix this bug, port this library, refactor this code…).

Some of the theoretical questions I had (mostly javascript related):

– What is a closure and which disadvantages does it have:
 — What is hoisting.
 — How does `this` work.
 — How `float` works and which issues does it have.
 — How does the event loop work on the browser and how to delay a function to the next tick.
 — How to optimize CSS, and how does specificity work.

The offers

Both companies I interviewed for offered to sponsor me a H-1B visa and a good salary.


I ended up accepting one of the offers because they where more transparent with the stock options (which I later discovered not to be so great after all), and because they told me that I could work remotely until getting the visa.

I signed the contract, opened a bank account, left my job and came back to Spain.

The silence

Back in Spain I started to prepare myself for the new job — I was looking forward joining a new team. I learnt Python because I saw some people using it at that company’s offices.

I was super motivated and willing to start! I even sent some emails to the CTO to get some instructions on how to setup my development environment.

At my starting date I received the first email from the CTO saying that they were not able to get my visa and that they were thinking about the aspect of working remotely.

I answered them that it wasn’t a problem for me. I had been working remotely for a while and it had never been an issue.

What happened next? Nothing. Silence. I was completely ignored.

The problem

Getting a working visa in the US is not easy. If it was, most developers would be working there. It has gotten a lot better the last years, but companies should start to be more open minded about hiring remote workers.

There is a huge deficit of talent in the US, and a lot of wasted (and way cheaper) talent in other countries around the world. An average engineer in the Bay Area can cost around $100k+. In Spain, the same engineer costs significantly less.

Even though I’m happy I didn’t end up in the states, it would have been cool to be one of the first developers at Uber.

The solution

Ironically, while I was on holiday in San Francisco I was working for [Teambox](now Redbooth), a company with their development team based in Spain.

It was an amazing experience, the development was happening 24 hours a day. The git repository was constantly receiving commits, never sleeping.

It was a great time, that I now look back on as me and Jordi Romero are working on our new project Factorial.

Luckily there’s more and more great companies being built in Europe, and there’s no need to go to the US to land a fantastic job as a developer. Both Madrid (14th) and Barcelona (9th)are climbing on EDCI’s digital city index list every year, and more and more startups are getting funded.

A recent report by Atomico predicts even greater times for European tech in the years to come, so no need to apply for the green card lottery this year, just hold on to your European passport.

This memoir was written by the CTO of Factorial.

Startups

The 4 Biggest Accounting Mistakes Startups Do

Nov 27, 2016 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 0 Comments

Startups have different business models, but all of them are in a situation where budgets are tight. In other words, accounting turns into a very important element.

Hopefully these tips will help you take better business decisions, as the flow of income and expenses are something all entrepreneurs should worry about.

To keep your startups accounting updated and well-organized at all times is a hard job, and that’s why there’s a lot of mistakes young companies often do.

Use a professional accountant

The first mistake startups often do because due to lack of experience, is to not hire a professional accountant.

A startup must know, at all times, its liquidity; How much money it owes to its suppliers, and the bills that haven’t been collected yet. It must also know the average of days that the customers take to pay, and detect those customers who are slow payers.

Being helped by a person with deep accounting knowledge will allow you to know the condition of the income statement, showing how the business is performing.

Many startups don’t see the value a professional accountant can add to the business. Apart from the actual accounting, it’s a person who can help them to develop their business, offering some advice about tax benefits, incentives and about corporate constitutions, etc.

Apart from being helped by a professional accountant, startups can use invoicing programs to make many of their daily tasks easier and better. These tools will allow them to control their business activity.

Lack of income and expenses control

We often encounter startups that doesn’t have records of their income nor of their expenses.

As soon as you get your first paying users or clients you will have to save a copy of each operation made between you and the customer.

Having full control over all expenses can be challenging and frustrating.

To make it easier, a good way to organize it, is to order it chronologically (monthly), or in alphabetical order by the clients name.

As you’re organizing the payments, it’s just as necessary to organize all the expenses. You should divide them into categories, for example: offices expenses, stock acquisitions, supplies, insurance, taxes, etc.

Small expenses become big expenses

When every penny counts it’s easy to not register the tiny expenses, they seem so small, and everything would look better if you just kept them off the balance sheet.

This is a big mistake because you’ll lose the the right to deduct taxes from these expenses.

This means that each team-member in the company needs to write down all their expenses, including the teeny-tiny ones.

Just as your grandma tells you to save your cents as a child; “because enough cents will in the end make a dollar”, it’s the same with companies. There’s a lot of small expenses, and as the team grows, all people accumulated small expenses becomes significant.

However, remember that personal expenses never should be mixed with business expenses. This is one of the biggest reasons why companies get an unpleasant visit from the tax authorities.

TAX

This might seem obvious to most of you, but working closely with startups and their accounting, remembering to pay taxes is a bigger issue than you might think.

Any business activity is subjected to taxes, and startups and entrepreneurs, just like any other business needs to present different types of fiscal statements to the tax authorities, like VAT, PIT, corporation tax, etc.

Remember, that as an entrepreneurs you can deduct money from your personal taxes, when you every three months have to present the different tax models mentioned above.

It is also recommended to save a copy of your tax declaration (ordered by chronological order, every 3 months and every year), as well as a registry of the taxes that you have paid and what tax authorities has paid you back.

Coworking, Startups

How To Design Offices For Startups In High-Growth

Nov 21, 2016 by Meritxell Viladomat 0 Comments

In every startup and company there is always a “first office” where everything began: this office is never planned and it can be whatever space that you get as cheap as possible.

You are just at the beginning, just trying things and there is no need to have expenses before the idea has been validated. As so many before us, itnig started in a small cubicle inside a parking-lot that belonged to the CEO’s family. It has no natural light nor ventilation.

Even though it’s all good memories, we quickly (and luckily) moved into a big desk that the young Teambox (now Redbooth) borrowed us in exchange of support. And then later to the first office we actually paid for, a weird space of 50/sqm with low ceilings in a passageway close to Sagrada Familia (huge cathedral in Barcelona). We were just jumping from one space to another looking for the cheapest place where we could fit all our members.

The reasons why I’m telling you about all of our weird offices, is to make the point that you don’t need a fancy place until you have regular income. Before that, you only need internet, enough desk and coffee.

So, how to design offices for startups in high growth?

The main requirement is to have flexibility. When looking for an office check that you have more space available in the same floor or building to keep fitting all the new employees. If you’re a startups your main goal is often to grow fast, and jumping from office to office creates unnecessary expenses.

We want everything at itnig to be as transparent as possible.

Co-working spaces can be a good choice but check first that they have more free spaces where to fit your growing team. Also, when signing the rental contract, negotiate a 3 and 6 month rolling break so you have more flexibility to leave the office once it for some reason doesn’t fit your startup anymore.

AIR!

Go for an open space, it’s everything. It makes it easier to be flexible, as we already talked about, but it also makes it easier for your team to interact, be social, share knowledge and be creativity.

Just as humans, rooms need air to breathe.

Even though everyone at itnig has a desk, you’re of course free to work from where ever you want.

It can be hard to find an affordable office that also has a lot of space. A smart thing can be to look for an office with a lot of windows, or high ceiling, at least if you pay per square meter, and want the rent to remain as low as possible.

Have fun

When you close your eyes and picture a startup office, you might think of ping pong tables, colorful walls, big comfy sofas and big kitchens with company breakfasts. If this is what you imagined, you saw the itnig office.

When you work in a startup, going against the stream, betting against the odds, it helps a lot if the office you’re working in support your hard work with elements of fun.

The itnig salsa lessons is always the highlight of the week.

Don’t have a boring office. For almost three years we had a white and grey office, it looked like the inside of a bank. Sterile, serious, boring. We’re lucky that the office has a lot of light with huge windows showing beautiful Barcelona, but we didn’t add any value to it.

When you work with startups, one of the biggest goals is to attract talent. And when you’re able to hire the best people, you want to keep them. You want them to feel like home at the office. Investigate your employees, find out what they like and don’t like, and in the end make the office reflect the people that are working there.

Startups

The issues with the startup accelerator business model, & the emergence of venture builders

Nov 21, 2016 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 0 Comments , , , ,

According to the internet it’s thousands of startup accelerators programs & incubators out there, looking for the most talented startups to accelerate.

What started with Y-combinator back in 2005, was followed by Techstars, 500 startups and a couple of thousand other organizations which now all are competing for the same talent, according to Angel Garcia, director of Startupbootcamp IoT, Data & Cybersecurity in Barcelona.

It’s turning into a very crowded space, it’s much harder to find good startups for every round we do.

He continues:

Online I’ve seen lists of thousands of so-called accelerators. Many of them provide mentors, a table to work at and other perks, but they don’t run sustainable businesses.

From the left: Angel Garcia (Startupbootcamp) Patricio Hunt (Intelectium) & Bernat Farrero (itnig).

The business model

Just like venture capital investors, both accelerators and incubators are betting on a large volume of projects, and hope one out ten get’s a big exit.

That’s why it’s hard to say exactly what accelerators that are successful and which that are failing, says itnig president Bernat Farrero and points to the business model:

In practice, we’ve had virtually no time to see any of this models succeed just yet, even the few biggest ones have kept growing their expectations and none has yet consolidated and shown a real business success case.

Unlike most accelerators that are funded by VC’s, Startupbootcamp is funded by corporations that all get access to the products the different startups are creating, according to Garcia.

We’re different from most of the accelerators out there. It’s not only our business model, but 82 percent of our startups that have gone through our program is still going, and that’s a high number.

Evolving into venture builders?

Both Farrero and Hunt used to run accelerator programs, but later chose to leave the space to dedicate a deeper focus on fewer projects.

President Farrero explains that itnig didn’t find it sustainable to have a large number of startups go through a fixed program:

If we look at all of the accelerators today, both the ones we call successful, and all the others, I’ve never heard of anyone being profitable.

Startup studios or venture builders has been gaining more and more tractions lately, with studios like eFounders, Betaworks, Idealab & itnig pumping out new companies annually the last years.

Also Patricio Hunt, managing partner at Intelectium has been transitioning over to an approach of building talented teams, instead of accelerating already existing startups.

We have, as Farrero, evolved into more of a venture builder the last years. We study the markets, talk with corporations and possible future customers, and create products we know are needed.

Talent-focused

Farrero says their approach has changed drastically the last years, they now focus on finding makers:

Instead of using valuable time on accelerating tons of projects, we are using that time to study the markets and current trends, as well as attracting the best talent to come work for us.

Even though Startupbootcamp is working with a different business model, also Garcia stresses the importance of knowing your markets.

As we work in industries where everything is changing very fast, we need to understand the markets better than most people do.

The amount of accelerators getting started is not decreasing, but as the amount of programs increases, the less credibility the accelerator gets.

All the three directors agree that the few accelerators with an established brand will survive, and so will the ones that have implemented sustainable business models, but the rest will have to pivot or innovate into something new, something startups actually need.

To get the full interview, go to the video in top of the article.

The post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.