3 things to be learned from the fuckup: Have a well-defined market, know who I'm working for... Thinking about people, knowing what they really want and not what I want to put in the product. And finally... Choose people who are willing to suppress their egos and have the desire to build a successful company for the sake of these points.
Andrea Knopová is the founder of several start-ups. She is now closing her ImpromtMe. But she's not giving up. She's building SeeYouThere on its ruins. She talks openly about what happened, what she takes away from it and why she thinks she is now better prepared to enter the world of virtual and online networking.
In the episode, we look for answers to the following questions:
How not to get laid off from the fuckup and how to use it for your own growth?
Where did she make the biggest mistakes?
How to properly validate a market opportunity?
How to choose the right startup partners?
How will they network in the coming years?
Important links:
TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this... this is Ignition. Ignition is the beginning of acceleration, and acceleration is something you need to move from a place. And if you're listening to this podcast, which I thank you for, by the way, you've taken the most important step to actually accelerating, which is the first step. In Ignition, we share experiences from B2B business, sales, innovation, working with people, and more. Today we'll be accelerating with Andrea Knop, co-founder of SeeYouThere!
Hello Andrea.
Andrea Knopová
Hello, Martin.
Martin Hurych
SeeYouThere?
Andrea Knopová
SeeYouThere!, that's right, see you there, see you next time.
Martin Hurych
Tell me about the company. What do you do, what do you do, how long have you been in business?
Andrea Knopová
SeeYouThere! is being created right now. It's a very fresh venture, which I'm really excited about, not least because it follows on from the company I'm closing at the moment. Or rather, it's kind of a continuation of me, because I decided to go into another business instead of getting employed somewhere. SeeYouThere! is being set up in England at the moment. I'm setting it up with my British colleagues Dan Wheatley, Ben Lecley, who I met during my previous stint at ImpromptMe where they were my mentors. SeeYouThere! doesn't have a launched product at the moment, but we already have some twenty beta members from all over the world who are actively helping to develop the product and define those basic functionalities. What we're doing is we're actually focusing on a new market that has been created because of, or rather because of, or unfortunately as a result of the global pandemic that we've all been living in for the last year. It is the concept of speeddating brought into the business world.
Martin Hurych
Okay, we'll get to this one for sure. You and I met when you had your ImpromptMe. And I'm intrigued by what happened to ImpromptMe, so, if you don't mind, let's dig a little deeper.
Andrea Knopová
We could get into a fight. I can take it very quickly, or I can break it down a little bit. If I take it very quickly, it was a fuck-up.
Martin Hurych
So tell us about your fuck-up.
Andrea Knopová
Well, sure, I'm happy to, I think that's always important for everybody.
We pivoted the ImpromptMe company two or three times at the end, until it got to the stage where I decided that it really wasn't worth dragging it out any further and we needed to draw a line. We founded it in 2017, after I came back from my studies in England. The original idea was to help people like me, expats who were new to the city, make new connections in their personal lives as quickly as possible, both on a professional and personal level. For this reason, I, along with two developers and a graphic designer, created a mobile app that allowed people to arrange a meeting somewhere in a cafe, restaurant or bar with three clicks without having to chat for weeks and weeks. Well, this is actually where the first fuck-up comes in, because we were really adamant that this was a completely brilliant product that was unrivalled in the world and that the moment we told anyone about it, they would steal it immediately. So what we did is we built the product, and then we started asking people what they actually wanted. We didn't really start talking about it publicly until it was finished, where we released the app, and you'd be surprised, it actually almost didn't happen when we released it. So it wasn't until then that we started doing proper market research and that's when we started to realize that actually most of these people wanted to use it as a dating app. Which really wasn't the direction we wanted to go in, so that led us to our first pivot. Because we looked at the market, we said, well, where are these people who actually have a need to meet, skip actually all the online babble and meet for a few minutes as soon as possible and see if they have something in common. And that's where we realised that these people are concentrated in international conferences, so that's where we turned.
Here, in the context of this pivot, we made one fundamental mistake that, looking back on it, it's hard to say if I would have done it differently, or within our team, if we could have done it differently given the people, the experience and the know-how that we had there at the time. Because we got pulled into the fact that if we wanted to do quality networking at these international conferences, we had to have all the other functionalities that the conference apps already had at that time. So in order to address that core there, we literally had to build another 80% of the functionality.
Martin Hurych
Did they have to, or did you assume?
Andrea Knopová
We thought so. We thought so, and I think a lot of it was due to some overall intrinsic motivation of people within our team, because on the one hand we wanted to address networking, which I'm still very much drawn to today. And on the other hand, actually, the other motivation within our team was to build a software company and a third to deliver quality services at unbeatable prices, which I look at today and I know that was really, really stupid, given all the other aspects, but that's what we convinced ourselves internally that just to address that quality networking, we needed to build everything else that's actually standard today. But at the same time, there was the aspect of wanting to solve this at these unbeatable prices because we are all about the networking. We knew that that was a barrier for a lot of our conference organizers, actually our target audience at that particular time. And realistically, we didn't get paid for it. So...
Martin Hurych
However, there was interest in the market?
Andrea Knopová
The interest was there, we found that interest, or rather we found our target audience, although at that time we didn't have such a good grip on it yet, but we gradually worked our way up to it.
Martin Hurych
From what's happened so far. What was the most critical mistake? They say it's best to learn from other people's mistakes because they're cheaper than my own, so what are the audience and listeners supposed to learn from? Because you said, if I got it right, de facto twice: Underestimated validation by the market. And once the market was whispering something to you that you, in turn, did not accept, so where did this sequence of missteps actually originate or be sown by?
Andrea Knopová
Before that first pivot, it was just about not doing the validation right. We weren't talking about the product, we were doing our research, but we were actually tiptoeing around it because we didn't want to talk about the product. We were just naive fools. And then the second pivot happened, we were...
I don't really remember exactly how it came about, but we came to the conclusion that we needed to have basically A to Z to bring the product to market. And for me it was only the A that was important, but we needed to meet x number of other points and functionalities in order to get people interested in the product itself. It could have been done differently, but instead of going to market with a product, we convinced ourselves that we needed a platform. And I think that was a fundamental mistake, because then we needed another year of development just to have those end-to-end services, and if anybody ever tells me again that they want to do end-to-end services from scratch, I'll tell them they're crazy.
Martin Hurych
You said: We're convinced. Did we convince ourselves, or did the market convince us that it was necessary?
Andrea Knopová
Well, I think we asked the wrong questions.
Martin Hurych
So in the end, we have a product on the market, we have some pricing, someone buys us, what happened next?
Andrea Knopová
What was next? Well, things didn't look too bad with the product for a while. By the spring of last year we had some clients behind us, quite a few big names as well, so it was all rolling along nicely. The problem was that we didn't have a huge amount of things automated and we were losing out hard on that. We were losing an awful lot of money and an awful lot of time on it. And at the same time, we didn't want to make it more expensive, because one, it wasn't a long-term goal to have that product or that platform somehow unaffordable for our clientele, and two, we were actually perfectionistic about the product. We were saying we can't have you pay for this because it doesn't have that D and E and F etc yet, so terrible, it was a combination of bullshit, and I would say almost childlike naivety.
Martin Hurych
You then told me that everything seemed to have turned for the better, big clients came, but then another disaster came.
Andrea Knopová
Yes, then came COVID. That was really almost tragicomic because it was two weeks after we got accepted into the Startup Wise Guys accelerator, which was a moment we were proud of because we got in as one of 12 companies out of some 400+ that applied from all over Europe and it looked like it was only going to go up for us now. They liked our direction, they wanted to support us, and we fitted in well with their portfolio and their activities because they also organise similar conferences, in fact they were very much our target audience. And then two weeks later there was basically a global lockdown and we were faced with another decision, whether to pivot again or to close the company, and in the end we decided to pivot, even though it seemed completely crazy at the beginning, because even our slogan was literally that everything starts with a handshake. So the idea of suddenly doing conferences online was completely out of the question, but we committed to it because our clients were pushing us to do it, actually begging us to do it themselves. Because they took their conferences online, of course in a very limited form primarily on Zoom, but what they missed the most was the networking amongst the attendees. That was something that we could add in there, so we decided to go for it, but even though we added x amount of new functionality at the time just to support virtual conferences, our pricing didn't move much, honestly, at least compared to what it should have. And again, there was, let's say, some general sentiment within that team of ours at the time that, after all, we had to deliver those quality services at affordable unbeatable prices, which is complete bullshit. It's just that if you somehow deliver the kind of service that we were delivering, you have to charge an adequate price for it.
Martin Hurych
Were those customers willing to pay that price, or was it again your belief that we couldn't go any higher with the price?
Andrea Knopová
I think we could definitely go higher with the price, so at most we would have other customers.
Martin Hurych
Okay, so how did it all end? We have COVID, you have a rewritten product, you're going to market for a third time?
Andrea Knopová
Actually, yes, that's how it ended. It was looking good again at the time. Because we had got a good grip on the market, even the clients were coming to me asking for advice on how to proceed, what to do with their conferences and so on, so I was in a very good position from that point of view. At the same time, on the sales side, it was at a time when we had already met my mentors in the program from Startup Wise Guys, who then started working with us more and more. Even within that sales process, we defined a specific target audience that we were really good at targeting. We've even pulled the offer for them because that was another problem, that we were offering too much. So we narrowed down the offer, at least on paper, and we offered them a specific defined product tailored for that very specific type of conferences that that particular or that particular clientele was doing.
So it was looking good again, it really looked good at times, but then what happened was that there was a big fuck-up from the edge of this year. And that's where it happened that the product, to put it very badly, just fell flat on its face during one of our conferences, which is really the thing that I regret the most for me, because I was absolutely helpless at that point, and I had no way to help that client, and even though we did the first last one to make that conference run as well as it could, it was a big stop for me. We needed to investigate it, see what happened on the business side, what happened on the technology side, and after some more internal discussions, the whole situation led up to really major changes within the team by the time we started talking to a couple of software studios. We were in discussions with QEST in Prague specifically to take over the product and get it on its feet a little bit and make sure that situations like this never happen again.
And this was the original plan, that we would go forward with the product, narrow the offering, raise the prices, move it all to the cloud and make sure that we can really rely on the product. And when we had this priced and especially when we looked at it in terms of time, we ended up getting a very similar response from all these studios. After actually looking into the whole product and the future direction of those plans, they all said the same thing at the end: The easiest, cheapest, fastest thing to do would be to build it all over again, which of course, given how complex the product already was at that point, would mean some 12-15 months of complete downtime where we couldn't deliver anything.
Martin Hurych
To put it bluntly, how long was it from zero to zero in years when you actually built ImpromptMe and when you said yourself, they fell flat on their faces during the conference, so that means in time -
Andrea Knopová
4 years
Martin Hurych
Four years. Four years of walking on a knife's edge. What does that do to the co-founders, because this is a trial by fire?
Andrea Knopová
It's definitely a tough test of nerves.
Martin Hurych
How many of you were there?
Andrea Knopová
Us... We've had a lot of renewal in the first few months. Well, when we started actually the very first product, there were two developers and one graphic designer.
Martin Hurych
Sorry, I meant how many of you owned ImpromptMe, was that just yours or were there more of you?
Andrea Knopová
No, there were more of us. We had the largest share, the main co-founder and CTO had the second share, and then some other employees had smaller shares. Plus, of course, our investors.
Martin Hurych
How easy it is to argue for a change of course in such a relatively complex structure, and how much you had your WHY behind which you had built the business, how easy it was to always tell yourself: Yeah, we're rising from the ashes, let's move on.
Andrea Knopová
Well, it was easy until we ran into that last problem, because when we did the first and second pivot, I think we all agreed on that, which was great, but now we've reached the stage where I'm like, that I really had enough and I didn't want to do it anymore, I mean I did, but it turned out to be a bit of an impossible task and it would be more crazy than anything else, so it was really time to put a stop to the whole project and start from scratch in a slightly different field. And now I'm wondering what the question actually was, if I can ask it.
Martin Hurych
What was your WHY, how were you united for those four years on what you wanted to do.
Andrea Knopová
For me it was always the networking because I saw a huge power in connecting people and what can happen when the right people get together, get to know each other and start working together on different levels, so my WHY is still there. What I think was very much the problem was that again the WHY of some of the other team members wasn't quite the networking as much as it was the vision to build their own software company. Which today, looking back on it, that should have actually been some sort of warning to me because to me that company was never about the product per se, or maybe it was for a while, but it can't be. The product is just the result, some way of execution, my WHY is really the way, the need or the desire to connect the right people, but I certainly have no ambition to build a software company on that.
Martin Hurych
So when you were choosing new co-founders for SeeYouThere!, what was your guideline?
Andrea Knopová
Well, by motivation, because right now these two co-founders really did the first last thing they could do to help me save the previous company, and it wasn't until it actually became apparent that it would take at least a year to rewrite the whole product that we decided to shut it down and talk about what to do next. And I have to say that these are the people who also have a very pragmatic view of the world and of business in general, and one of them is Dan, he's a salesman through and through. And the other one, Ben, his background is in technology, he built or sold a software studio that at its peak had something like 150 employees. And so, even though he's a techie, he's much closer to business than he is to technology, so the important thing for me is that they're both very results-oriented people. Yes, they want to build a successful company, no question about it, but let's just say that, this is probably going to sound really stupid now, and I don't mean this in a bad way, but their personal ego doesn't really play a role, almost any role, in what they do, and I think that's a really big...
Martin Hurych
Have they proven themselves and have they already accomplished?
Andrea Knopová
For both of them, yes, you can say that, given what they've been through.
Martin Hurych
Okay, so let's move on to the more positive side of the business. You're starting a new company today, you're a networking enthusiast, so you stay in networking, online networking.
Andrea Knopová
Well, that's awfully interesting.
Martin Hurych
Online speed networking and you and I know each other from my networking and others, so I'm extremely interested in this. I had a guy on the last podcast who's in a similar industry and even from talking to him and what's going on around me at the moment where people are hoping to forget about online and get back to coffee and wanting to meet up for beers and in parks and so on, what's actually the prediction of that market going forward?
Andrea Knopová
I see him in a very positive light. The very important thing is that I get asked quite often: Do you think the online one will stay? Or are we going to go back to the offline one? And I don't really see any sense in that question because it's not an either/or, it's a combination of those two aspects. What's terribly important is that I myself have been the biggest proponent of face-to-face, that everything that's online is wrong and yet we have to move as close as possible to the offline. Well, today I see it a little bit differently, because what I've realised over the last year, and I see it more and more in just the different events that I attend around the world, is that the last year has changed people's mentality tremendously and opened up completely new possibilities just at the level of international collaborations, because whether it's people who previously didn't have the time, the finances or the ability to travel, for example they were sick, they had a broken leg, after all they could be pregnant or pregnant, so these are different...
Martin Hurych
More likely pregnant.
Andrea Knopová
Yes, more likely, these are actually all people who have faced enormous constraints. And today, clearly, like networking events, which and exactly, whether we're talking about the ones that you organize or ultimately the various networking events that various business accelerators, co-working centers, chambers of commerce organize, most of those events have moved online. And although I'm not saying that everybody grasped it perfectly at the beginning, but I meet a number of organizers who have really done a great job with it, given the tools that they have at their disposal today, and what they have realized is that their events used to be attended by a circle of maybe five hundred or a thousand people at the most, and they used to rotate there, and each event would have maybe 80, 100 or 150 people coming from a, let's say, fairly limited pool, so nowadays, for those virtual events, for example, one of our beta clients, Professional Women of Toronto, they're realizing that all of a sudden, when they do these events online, they're getting people from all over the world.
Martin Hurych
That's right.
Andrea Knopová
People who want to do business in that country, or they're just trying it out and suddenly it actually adds value to the whole event for everyone involved.
Martin Hurych
That's right, how big is the global networking market?
Andrea Knopová
Right now, the prediction is that market will double in the next nine years.
Martin Hurych
Doubling down on what?
Andrea Knopová
It doubles from roughly some... now I don't really want to slap it because I have a lot of numbers in my head, but...
Martin Hurych
So we'll grow.
Andrea Knopová
We will grow, we will definitely grow.
Martin Hurych
The good news for me is that online networking will grow, that's great. After four years, in hindsight, the mistakes that you learn from, so how do you validate that business case today, what do you look at, what do you pay damn close attention to, how do you validate a project or a product today?
Andrea Knopová
I think that the major step that we took at the time that we came to the conclusion that OK, we just have to close the company, and I wanted to find some other direction to go in, so I started going to these networking events that we're doing today, and others, and I had nothing in my hand, which was completely different from what I had always done before. I didn't have anything in my hand and I was just actually openly listening to the market, talking to the organizers, talking to the people, and by not really having anything at the back of my mind that I wanted to do, it really allowed me to listen very honestly for probably the first time in my tenure without looking for something to prove.
Martin Hurych
You talked about 20 beta testers or beta testing organizations, so I understand from the fact that we're talking about Toronto that they're globally distributed.
Andrea Knopová
They are primarily in Canada, the United States and England. This is where we see the greatest success in moving organizations online.
Martin Hurych
With the experience you have from ImpromptMe, is that a sufficient group to tell you what the market looks like?
Andrea Knopová
Oh, not by a long shot, but it's a big enough group for what we needed to prove in that first phase, because we were after some of that first specification. This group is just one of the segments we want to target. But the group of those 20 beta members is really a carbon copy, so for that particular segment, yes.
Martin Hurych
This is a pretty strange market because at least at the video conferencing level we have two or three big players that are adding functionality at light speed, so what's the potential plan B, what if Teams comes out with the same functionality before you guys are in the market?
Andrea Knopová
With Teams, I really find it hard to imagine.
Martin Hurych
Zoom, or any of the bigger ones.
Andrea Knopová
The important thing here is that we don't position ourselves as a competitor to Zoom at all. We are realistically an extension over Zoom if we want to look at it that way, because yes, we have some competition, we know about it already, but it's really units at the moment. For us, what's terribly important is just focusing on that scalable sales, and that's what we're working on now because what we perceive, and what's maybe very different from the previous company, that product really sells itself.
Martin Hurych
For a product that sells itself, I'd like to be. Someday I'd like to be lucky enough to sell a product that sells itself. However, how do you think about the sales process at this point? What should your future sales process look like?
Andrea Knopová
This product, which is a huge difference from the platform that the previous company was offering, here it's a classic SaSko, so we have clearly defined pricing, clearly defined items, or basically just one item that we're pricing in some way. Exactly how much we're going to charge for it is something else that we validate with the market, it's very possible that there will be different pricing for America and different pricing for Europe, but again, it's something that we're working out with the beta-members. Just how much they are willing to pay. It's also very important for us, it's going to be one of the last stages of preparation, if they actually buy the product and subscribe to the annual license...
Martin Hurych
That's what I was going to ask, how many are already buying?
Andrea Knopová
They literally ask me every week if they can buy it yet, but we're not at the stage where we can do it that way yet.
Martin Hurych
How many of them participate financially in the development? Because that is the best validation by the market.
Andrea Knopová
This is something we want to work towards before we launch the product. The plan is to somehow offer them a discounted annual license just for buying it before the product is launched. What we're working out now is how much that license should cost, and because the price list is, give or take, already done, but there are still some things we're testing. We can't offer it to them until that's done. But honestly I'm terribly sorry that we're not having this conversation in September, which I originally thought was a set date, because by then I would have had to say...
Martin Hurych
Andrea, we're not in September, and we're not in Karlín.
Andrea Knopová
I know, everything is out of order, but at least I'm in Prague, so it's good.
Martin Hurych
It's cool. I think this is an interesting story to look at, maybe after three quarters to a year, how you're doing with your other startup. To summarize it in a positive way, what are the three most important things in retrospect that you've done completely differently now versus ImpromptMe?
Andrea Knopová
The first one is that we have a very well defined market at the moment, of course there is still a lot of work to do, and it has to be said that the market is changing very dynamically and it is a continuous work. But at this point we know exactly who to target on LinkedIn, what are the parameters that we know that this is going to be our person. The other thing is that we rely a lot on a combination of inbound and outbound marketing because we know roughly what type of people we're targeting and also what their exact problem is, if that's the right client for us. So what we're doing or what's going to be the second phase of our beta program or also how we're going to onboard people is we're literally going to target or run targeted advertising to a group of people and wait for someone to say, here's me, I have this problem, please call me.
Martin Hurych
If I understand correctly, the first thing is a detailed and correctly defined target group. Tell me two more.
Andrea Knopová
The second thing. And yes a defined target group and a clearly defined sales process. And the second thing, definitely don't prioritize.
I'm not really used to speaking Czech for a long time and then it turns out like this, but the other thing is to focus much more on the market and people and much less on the product. That's a very important thing for me, and I think that's a huge mistake that we made before.
Martin Hurych
In what sense on the people and not the product, because the people will need the product, so just explain what you mean?
Andrea Knopová
I mean, we built the product in a very unique way in the previous company, because first of all, I didn't understand it, and I probably could have done a little bit more in that time, but we let ourselves be convinced that if the company is unique and the services are unique, then the product must be unique and the technology behind it must be unique. And today, when I look at it, I think that's really bullshit, because I can only compare it to skyscrapers in the city, because one might house a bank, another one might house a hospital or a non-profit, and the interior will be different, what they do will be different, but the construction of the building will be exactly the same. I don't think that just because the product or the services or the company is unique that we have to have unique technology. Of course, there are exceptions, but in our case it was not going to be rocket science.
Martin Hurych
So we have a target audience, we have a focus on people, not on product.
Andrea Knopová
So focus on the process and the clients, and much less on the product.
Martin Hurych
And the third one?
Andrea Knopová
And the third one. I really hope I don't upset anyone with this and I mean it in the best possible way. But I would probably never go into business again with people who are motivated more by their ego or lust than by the need to build a successful company they can get behind. Let's put it this way, because we all make mistakes. I think I'm the first person to point to, I've made plenty of mistakes, but for me, the ability to admit those mistakes, learn from them and move on and do things differently is terribly important.
Martin Hurych
Is the willingness to admit mistakes or the ability to admit mistakes and rise from the ashes the most important quality of a startup?
Andrea Knopová
Well, now I've been trying to think of another one and I can't really think of anything.
Martin Hurych
I guess so. What are we gonna close with tonight, Andrea, on a positive note?
Andrea Knopová
Well, for me, definitely the fact that we have something to look forward to in virtual networking events. Obviously we're loosening up the playing field, so I hope to see everyone back in real life as soon as possible, but I would take this as a huge opportunity for all of us, because I see it for myself. I'm working with people these days that I never would have reached before, in that way, so it's opened doors to the whole world, and we're not limited by the borders of our city or our country in any way anymore, so grab the opportunity by the armpits.
Martin Hurych
So take heart monitors and cameras, because there is a world behind them?
Andrea Knopová
There is a world behind them too.
Martin Hurych
Okay, thank you very much.
Andrea Knopová
Thanks for the invitation.
Martin Hurych
So that was Andrea Knop, if you found this episode interesting and it sparked something in you, I'll definitely be happy if you subscribe to more, either on YouTube or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to check out my website as well, www.martinhurych.com, where you'll find both the transcript of this episode and other tools to help you accelerate. Thanks so much, fingers crossed, and best wishes for success.
(Edited and shortened | Automatically translated by DeepL)