🏆 What Investors Look for in a Startup…

Hi there,

If you weren’t there, our Design Synergy event was the bomb! It’s been described as everything from powerful and insightful to just so much fun – see what all the fuss is about right here.

As always, we’re here to add value at every stage of your innovation journey:

1. Startup Phase

2. Growth Phase

3. Scale/Sale Phase

Positioning Your Startup for Strategic Growth

Getting star-struck around today’s most successful, big brands is easy. But there are valuable lessons in how those past innovators got to where they are today. We looked at how Visa and Mastercard grew in their early days, and 3 strategies might inspire any startup: 1) Partner with large corporates to solve your distribution, 2) Make data-driven decisions and 3) Focus on convenience and security. 

The Fastest Way to Roll Out a New Product

Need to get to market faster? We’ve shown how getting professional help with low-code development can help you roll out 3 times faster – and for 60%-80% cheaper. From unlocking greater flexibility and enabling more team members to engage directly in your product’s development, low-code safely and securely offers many benefits.

What Investors Look for in Early-Stage Startups

SaaS VC CEO Michael Cardamone gives some important insights in this video into what investors want to see from a founder raising seed round funding, including: 1) Proving your potential to build a big company by showcasing your ability to attract paying customers in a dynamic market, 2) Showing the key hires you’ve made with pre-seed funding and 3) Showcasing your traction and revenue growth in frequent and consistent updates.

Are you in the start phase? Have questions? Hit reply and let us know how we can help.

Forging Strategic Partnerships

Collaboration is a key tactic at every growth stage – as our recent look at the new MTN-Huawei partnership illustrates. Combining MTN’s reach with Huawei’s know-how, the two have created an innovation hub, which will likely deliver new technologies and applications for them to entrench and expand on the continent, while also benefiting startups and the tech industry at large – which sounds like a win-win.

Building a High-Performance Startup Team & Culture

Stripe CEO and founder Patrick Collison gives over 12+ extremely empowering insights into teams and culture in this video. Some highlights include: 1) The harder the problem you’re solving, the more attractive you are to high-calibre talent, 2) Having a longer development window (years instead of quarters) allows you to make better hires more slowly, 3) Hiring your first 10 employees based on whether they intrinsically exhibit the qualities you want your company to become known for (happiness, for example) is better than trying to train someone.

Implementing Scalable Infrastructure

One of the least-talked-about core steps in growing your venture is Product-Scale Fit, i.e. building your original solution to be able to handle massive scale – like if your user base suddenly grows by 10x, 20x virtually overnight. Good problems to have, for sure, but it’s part of a founder’s job to be aware of and plan for every eventuality with a plan for software scaling and solutions such as cloud computing for scalable partnerships.

Need help growing faster? Maybe it's augmenting your team, or perhaps coffee with one of our growth experts — either way, hit reply and let’s find your solution.

Next-Level B2C Customer Retention Strategies

When serving solutions directly to the consumer, data shows you can prevent churn and foster loyalty with better experiences and on-point journey analytics, and it all starts with your first engagement: Get 12+ insights on streamlined customer onboarding here and then dare to take it a step further by experimenting with even more personalisation with machine learning. 

Optimising for Maximum Valuation

UK investor Nick Bradley not only gives direct advice for founders looking to sell at max value in this video: 1) Have the right talent and culture in place (and independently verifiable) and 2) Have some proprietary IP in place, clearly identifiable as your own; but also gives insight into how investors want to build for value in this second video: A) Investors want to buy a range of businesses to B) Bundle together to form a more attractive “group” of companies that have apparent higher value. Knowing this, how would you develop and position your company as a more attractive (and thus more valuable) option when you want to exit?

Balancing Innovation with Stability

In industries that prize innovation, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that business success requires extreme stability. So how do you find the ideal balance? This video of a gym owner’s stabilising response to Covid has some key insights: 1) Don’t over-innovate or move away from your core (pivoting from a restaurant to a college, for example) and 2) In unstable times, focus your innovation on streamlining your internal processes to retain users and protect income. And this second video teaches: A) Innovation works best within strict parameters and it needs to be B) Clearly and continuously communicated where and when you want your team to innovate (i.e. what’s your company’s risk appetite at any given moment).

Want to scale faster? We have people that are comfortable with the discomfort of the scale phase. Hit reply and let us know how we can augment your team.

Have your say…

What’s happening at Specno

We’ve once again been honoured as the Clutch Champion and Global Winner of B2B companies in the tech space for 2024.

A huge thank you to our awesome clients and our remarkable team for the unwavering commitment to quality and service excellence!

Hit reply if you think we’ve hit or missed the mark, tell us what you’d like to see or hear more of and, just in general, what would really add value to your journey…

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