Make Users Your Buddy
Hey T-Tribe
Today we share some advice from Ire Aderinokun, a frontend web developer and user interface designer from Lagos, Nigeria. She is the Co-founder, COO and VP Engineering of Buycoins, a cryptocurrency exchange for Africa. Ire is a Google Expert, specializing in the core frontend technologies HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and has written over 100 articles on these topics on her blog.
She talked about some of the lessons she learnt and dropped some nuggets for you.
An impactful daily activity…
I will say using things like calendar reminders & to-do lists have had a really big impact on my productivity and have also made my life more organized. Right now I write everything down. For example, if my friends inform me of a hangout later, I write it down. Because I also have a really bad memory I tend to always write things down and I use productivity tools such as Google calendar for reminders, a to-do app called “things” and Notion for writing different stuff down has actually made a huge impact on my life.
Advice for an early-stage founder…
To be honest, starting a company is hard so I’ll say don’t. However, if you feel you must start a company make sure you do it with good people you can trust. People that are equally invested in doing this thing with you. Trust is important when starting a company with someone. It is actually the most important one because even if you have disagreements or other types of disputes, as long as you can trust the person and you know that they have the company’s best interest at heart then I think you can deal with pretty much anything else. You have to really build a company with good co-founders and a good team you can trust.
An important lesson I lean on daily…
The importance of really listening to your users especially as a new company. This is something that we learned and were told so many times at Y Combinator. We are always calling up customers and getting feedback which has definitely made our product a whole lot better. Not like we were not listening to feedback but we were not actively trying to get feedback from our users. Most times, people won’t just give you feedback unless your app sucks.
Talking to users made a big difference between Bitkoin Africa and Buycoins. So Bitkoin Africa had a glaring problem that we didn’t realize because we were not talking to the users but after speaking to a lot of users we built Buycoins which approaches that from a completely different standpoint.
So at Buycoins, our customer support representative actually calls people every day to find out information from them to better improve the product. That is one way to listen and get feedback. Another approach that has helped us pay attention to our users was hiring a consultant who is also a user of our product but now works with us. Anytime there is something wrong he is the first person to bring it to our attention. He has direct access to a bunch of other users which gives us a direct plug to the users.
So I believe calling is the best thing you can do before you can start developing actual relationships with your users.
Something I know now that I didn’t before…
I think that part of being a founder or starting a business is basically just learning how to deal with existential components that come with your business every day, week or month. This is something that we also learned during YC. During the three-month accelerator program, there were so many things that just went wrong and I am still surprised how we didn’t give up. My guess is because we were in California and the environment helped us a lot that we couldn’t really give up but if that had happened when we were in Nigeria it’s very possible that we could have just been like this thing wasn’t meant to work so let’s give up.
So now, whenever something happens we are not really fazed by it. We just try and figure a solution and think of the next steps to take. It would have been less daunting at the time if we recognized that things going wrong or bad, is part of running a startup. When things happen now, we take a more measured approach in solving them because we know that this is just part of what we have to deal with and it’s up to us to solve the problem and figure out a solution.
Book recommendation …
I don’t read a lot of business type books but I will recommend It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried, Basecamp Founders. I and my co-founders just read it. The book focuses on how to build a good company culture and gives lots of tips on how to interact with the rest of your team as a founder; knowing what things you can or can’t do. It was really interesting and easy to read.
I also liked the Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. It was a really interesting book. I am not sure it directly applies to a founder but it sure teaches you how to tidy up your environment and also how to be calmer in your life.
Avoid repeating mistakes…
So luckily, I have not made company threatening mistakes, however, there’s a way we approach mistakes at Buycoins and how we overcome them.
For example, if for any reason something is done and leads to losing valuable data or document (which hopefully will never happen), what we always do is make sure that whatever happened is documented — meaning knowing what the root cause was, then figure out what actionable steps to take to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Given that mistakes do happen, we have to make sure these things don’t happen again by documenting them.
Documenting things is super important when trying to avoid making the same mistakes.
Focus on…
It is easy to focus on what you are creating and forget the people you are creating it for.
One of the things I and my co-founders learned from the book — It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work — was to think of your company has a product. So things like your employees, your users, the experience of working at a startup, team meetings, the culture, company processes, etc. become as important as whatever it is you are working on. These are things that founders ignore especially at the very beginning when it is just founders alone but as the team grows you need to start paying attention to them.
Speaking to users is definitely another thing you have to pay attention to as a founder. It is easy to focus on what you are creating and forget the people you are creating it for.
There you have it,
- Start companies with people you trust
- Talk to your users and get feedback from them
- Things going wrong is part of running a startup
- Document processes
I hope this has helped you.
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