LAUNCHING a business is challenging. Exciting, but still challenging. So you might logically think that launching a second or third business might be less so.
You would be wrong, because when your first business provides a service and your second creates and sells a software product they are as different as apples and oranges.
When Sarah Lee launched her first business — Scotland’s first specialist tech PR agency Hot Tin Roof — 15 years ago it was from her kitchen table, with dial-up Internet and an old fashioned rotary dial telephone.
Lee says she was selling her skills and her time and didn’t need a fancy infrastructure. Now with PingGo, a DIY press release tool, the startup experience is “massively” different.
“I thought I knew everything I needed to know about launching a digital product, having done PR for countless startups over the years. Turns out I didn’t. I knew nothing. Recognition of my mistakes probably came quicker though,” confesses Lee.
“PingGo needed cash and people with skills I did not have to build it, from software development to graphic design and user experience. Hot Tin Roof needed nothing except me and the equipment I had lying around at home.”
Lee discovered she needed a completely different set of skills and a very different approach; she had to learn to manage the product roadmap, specify software, communicate with software engineers who have a very special way indeed of communicating as well as registering trademarks, defending IP and navigating the investment and funding landscape which, she says, has been a minefield. She admits she tried to build PingGo three times before she met the current development team.
Ironically, for an experienced businesswoman and communicator, the most difficult thing for Lee was communication.
“It is one thing having an idea, but explaining that idea to other people who then have to turn it into reality and build your product is extraordinarily difficult,” she explains. And surprisingly, she found that creating the software turned out to be the easy bit, while user experience and the process of onboarding customers was “the toughest nut to crack”.
PingGo is already in use in 50 countries — the first customer to obtain media coverage using PingGo was actually in Arizona.
Lee is ambitious for PingGo: “In five years’ time, I want every startup to use PingGo the way they use Mailchimp. Startups will be able to get their news out early and punch above their weight far earlier than in the past. And we’ll be used by large corporates too, supporting their own PR efforts.”
A word of advice for fellow entrepreneurs considering launching a product? Lee says talk to your potential customers before you spend a penny.
“Ask them what do they want? Why do they need it? What will they be willing to spend? And then bring software, user experience and graphic design together in one room. You need all three elements to make a digital product that works. If you are weak on one it’ll not work.”
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