Shortcuts to Startup Building—the Second Time Around

Today's Technology is Making it Easier to Get off the Ground

A few weeks ago I wrote about my reasons for jumping back into the startup game with Hearty, our professional network where great people help each other find opportunities. One of the overall themes I noted was that it’s easier this time. Now, I flinch a little writing that because getting a startup off the ground is in no way “easy”—the work never stops and the odds of success are crazy long. But having been through the journey before, things get easier in that you tend to avoid previous mistakes and go forward immediately with the people and processes that worked before.

Starting up anew is also a chance to discover fresh software and services, and today there is flourishing market of solutions aimed at helping startups and other small businesses. Some our favorite, best-known startups built first to help other startups, including Carta, Fiverr, Mixpanel and Logrocket. However, we builders are often so heads down that we don’t know these shortcuts. My goal here is to share a a few of the tools that have helped us make progress much faster this time around.

Handling the Paperwork - Coterie for Insurance

Startup founders and small business entrepreneurs hate doing anything that takes them away from their core business. We’re constantly focused on the important and urgent items that need to happen ASAP. Any spare time to look ahead is best spent thinking about the big picture direction of your company.

Figuring out how to get insurance for your new company is one of the last things you want to think about…until that new client contract requires millions of dollars in coverage. This was one of my many responsibilities at our last startup. I spent hours Googling for “startup insurance” to understand the options and requirements. There were no easy solutions. I ended up calling my homeowner’s insurance broker and begging him to help. He, too, struggled to find a solution and eventually brought in a large commercial insurance company—which in turn brought a giant binder of paperwork and price to go along with it. I think we paid more in insurance than that our first contract was worth.

When we started Hearty, we had insurance on our to-do list again. But this time we decided to try Coterie, which promised to make the small business insurance process simple. And it truly blew away our expectations. It’s fully digital so I didn’t need to find a broker or set up a meeting. Literally within seconds we got to a perfect policy, at around 10% of the price we paid last time. You know you’ve got a hit when a product saves you precious time, stress and money, and Coterie does this in spades.

Creating Like a Pro - Canva for Design

We’re building a professional network, which means we’ve got to pull in new members from where they are today—which is often other social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter. But the competition for attention in these feeds is high, and the bar for quality design is rising. Unfortunately we’re not designers, we’re short on time, and don’t have a huge budget for outside help.

Thankfully we discovered Canva. This unicorn has earned a place in a lot of founders’ hearts by making it dead simple to design high quality creative. At Hearty, my co-founder, Ryan, created a handful branded templates for social posts within minutes. When I sit down to do a daily social post, I can drop fresh images and copy into his creations. Before I’m finished with my first cup of coffee I’ve got a high quality post in our prospects’ feeds. Not only are they easy to create, but we’re seeing industry-leading engagement as well as a lot of new members come in through our posts. Here’s one recent example.

Engaging with your Members - Intercom for Customer Support

This is my second startup, but the first time where I’m part of building a consumer software product. I quickly realized that the thousands of people on our platform have lots of questions—in large part because we continue to launch new features and change or eliminate old features. Expectations are high, because they’ve been set that way by the Googles, Amazons and Facebooks of the world.

Fortunately we plugged in Intercom from day one, and it’s been an incredibly efficient way to provide great service to our members. People feel good knowing that the little chat button in the bottom right corner is there when they need it. Our team linked Intercom with Slack so that when questions come in we can get to them quickly. Not only does this help provide immediate service, but we get real-time feedback on our product.

For times when our team is offline or when members just want to self-serve, Intercom allowed me to cover their questions by writing dozens of searchable posts, ranging from “How to Build Your Network” to “Why the Name ‘Hearty’?” Plus, I can go back to see the number of people who have read these posts, which adds further insights about what is important to members and where we need to make further fixes.

Building your Network - Hearty for Top Talent

It’s funny, we didn’t start Hearty to serve startups, but we’re seeing a lot of our early members come from the startup community, and several founders have discovered and hired top talent through our platform. Maybe it’s because we’re building a product we wish we had the last time. Our networks are important as shortcuts to find potential hires, partners, investors and clients—but it’s far too hard to make them work today.

We created Hearty as a community of people who help each other discover key people and opportunities. Members contribute their recommended people to Leaderboards—crowdsourced lists of top people in a skill, role or interest. You can find hundreds of people on Leaderboards as broad as Top Product Managers and as specific as Leaders in Supplier Diversity. It’s a much more efficient way to find people, and recommendations are an endorsement rather than just a “connection.”

We let our members drive where Leaderboards go, and they are already creating a ton of resources for fellow founders. Aside from specific roles, we’ve got Leaderboards for Angel Investors, Startup Legal Support, Early Stage Mentors, and even Founders Looking for Technical Co-Founders. We’re also seeing some communities form, as fellow founders identify and connect with people in their space, such as Sustainability, People Tech and Ed-Tech. All of this activity led me to create an Intercom page just for how startups can get more value from Hearty.

It’s also starting to pay off in making connections between people that lead to startup breakthrough. One of our early examples was Bo Howell, founder of Joot, a compliance technology for investment advisors. He was ready to go all-in but needed a technology lead. Through Hearty, Bo discovered and was introduced to Joe Stazak, and they are now building together.

The business book classic, Innovator’s Dilemma, describes how many of today’s industry leaders got started by focusing on small, low-profit, under-served segments of a market. They stayed below the radar and won more and more customers with a disruptive approach. Startups are increasingly the under-served segment of a market that new disruptors go to first. But building for fellow startups isn’t just a stepping stone to the big customers—increasingly you can get big by riding those disruptive startups’ journey to the big leagues. And it’s a lot more fun buying from and building for fellow entrepreneurs!

(If you’d like to join us on Hearty, here’s an invite link: https://app.behearty.co/i/Bob)

What are your favorite killer apps for building? Put ‘em in the comments and pay it forward!