Mashable/Business
5 Tips for Startup Success From a Co-Founder of HootSuite
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Digital agency Invoke has a habit of creating products instead of purchasing them. HootSuite, a third-party client for accessing social networks like Facebook and Twitter, is the most successful of the in-house tools that the company has launched as products.When Dario Meli, David Tedman, and Ryan Holmes launched the company in 2006, they weren’t necessarily planning on selling products. But as they developed the tools that they needed, they discovered other agencies needed them as well. Today more than 800,000 people use HootSuite.
In 2010, HootSuite spun off of Invoke to form an independent company. We talked with Dario Meli, a co-founder of both companies, about his advice for identifying opportunities, the importance of maintaining focus, and what he’s learned as a founder of a constantly evolving company.
1. Address a Real Problem
Meli says Invoke toyed with the idea of getting rid of the agency and focusing only on the products. But ultimately, the work that the company did with clients was their most important tool for discovering opportunities for new products.
“All of our products stem from client needs…We created HootSuite because we needed those tools ourselves, as an agency…[We've been successful by] listening to our clients, figuring out what they needed and then just identifying that opportunity.”
2. Work with the Right People
Invokers and Owly, the official HootSuite mascot, show the loveMeli knew Tedman for years before they co-founded Invoke, but he met Holmes for the first time face-to-face at a Vancouver coffee shop. They spoke for half an hour, and, says Meli “after that we were pretty much immediately talking about partnership.”
This gut feeling alignment of personality and objectives is something Meli says is important when choosing whom to work with. When Invoke searched for venture funding for HootSuite, it’s one thing that he considered.
“It’s troublesome if you find yourself in a space where you [and your partners] aren’t on the same page, and that goes for partners in general.” he says. “David, Ryan, and I — the three partners at Invoke — we have different skill sets, but our goals are aligned. And that’s enabled us to grow quite rapidly.”
3. Division of Labor is Your Friend
The lobby of Invoke’s Vancouver office“Don’t be afraid to partner — division of labor is core,” Meli says. When they started the company, he and David were more design-focused and Ryan was more tech-focused. Bringing their respective talents together helped them build a better company.
Invoke now employs a team of about 20 and HootSuite has a team of about 35 who also add their talents to the mix. Meli, unlike many entrepreneurs, says he doesn’t experience a reluctance to relinquish responsibilities as the company grows.
“I think it’s important to realize as an entrepreneur that you can’t do everything — that you need to hire the best people and not be afraid to give them that responsibility, not be afraid to let go, and not be afraid to hire people who are smarter than you,” he says. “It doesn’t mean they’re going to overrun your business. It just means the business is going to run that much better.”
4. Stay Focused
“If you’re reading blogs all the time in the technology space, there’s always somebody doing something cool,” Meli says. “And you can drop everything and jump on that, but you’re going to be doing the same thing the next day and the next day, and you’re never going to get anywhere.”
Invoke has learned this the hard way. He says that the company has probably had about five ideas that were 90% complete when the team realized that they were working on a distraction that wasn’t going to pan out.
It’s not as though Invoke has extensively narrowed its scope. The company does client work with iPhone and Facebook apps, runs contesting platform memelabs, is experimenting with geolocation, and only recently spun off HootSuite. But Meli says the company is better able to silo teams to focus on specific projects than it was when it first started.
“It doesn’t mean you can’t modify [your project when a distraction pops up],” says Meli, “But if you’re looking at building the best contesting solution, and then Facebook comes along, don’t just stop doing it. Build your contest into Facebook. Or build it into the mobile landscape. You can make adjustments as things pop up.”
5. Be Visible
Meli opened an Invoke branch in New York City so that he would be more visible to the companies that buy Invoke and HootSuite’s products. He says that being in the Big Apple has been integral to Invoke’s success.
“We create tools and sell them to agencies,” he says. “Every agency in the known universe has an office in New York City, so that’s the place to be.”
Invoke has also recently started to make their first PR efforts.
“We’ve been able to stand out [through products and client work], but a lot of people didn’t know who we were,” Meli says. “So at that time we thought it might be good to start talking about what we’ve been doing…it wasn’t just talk — we could point to the work. I think that’s important. Nobody likes hollow talk. It just doesn’t work.”
Disclosure: Mashable is a HootSuite Pro Partner
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