Online marketer, Steven Noble, decided to move his family from Sydney to Gerringong, a small coastal town two hours away, so that he could afford to focus on Testivate; the startup he has worked on full-time since September this year.
Testivate is a benchmarking tool, allowing you to compare your website to those of your competitors. It uses a technology developed by Noble, which assembles relevant criteria to benchmark your website. Criteria are filtered out using Houdini API, to crowdsourcing sites like Amazon Turk and oDesk; where contractors undertake the benchmarking and filter the information back through Testivate.
Testivate then compiles a report presenting a gap analysis and recommendations to improve your website that you could work on yourself, hand over to a contractor, etc. The report will be of a similar standard to what you would receive after potentially months of consulting time and thousands of dollars, if you had gone through a traditional market research consultancy. The cost of a Testivate report will depend on exactly what is required, but a basic benchmarking report is expected to cost less than $1,000.
There are some challenges to living and working outside of Sydney, says Noble; it can be hard to get to events and there is some necessary commuting involved for meetings. But, there is a growing startup community in nearby Wollongong — when we speak, he is working from StartPad, a co-working space run by the University of Wollongong. While he’s not based there full-time, he visits when he can.
“It’s a small community,” says Noble, “but there is that energy now.”
The higher cost of living in Sydney was a key factor for Noble, who had previously worked as a consultant for Forrester Research and Hill+Knowlton, deciding to move to Gerringong. The lifestyle choice allows Noble to work on a startup, while still raising a family of three kids.
Many people attempting to build startups are younger — pre-mortgage and kids — with a freedom to fail. Noble says moving South helped him launch his own company.
“One of the reasons a lot of young people try doing their own startup is that they have the freedom to live on ramen noodles… (I had to) find a way to break through the golden handcuffs.”
Over the past few months he has been busy coding and conducting customer development interviews. As Noble explains on his blog, he has tried to use lean principles throughout this process. He’s conducted two rounds of customer development interviews with two different groups:
- Executives in large organisations. The key lesson here was these organisations weren’t going to move fast enough. Noble realised he needed to discover the early adopters;
- Small business owners. This group were much more interested in the product. 50% of people interviewed in this round said they need it now, compared with the 10% who said so in the first round.
I ask Noble what you need for a successful customer development interview. “Two things”, he explains; “First, you need a clear script, and then you need to be able to throw it out the window.”
The script should provide a list of hypotheses you’re testing; it helps ensure the conversation is a structured one, and you get the information you need. As Noble details on the blog, his assumptions were:
- That executives in larger organisations [target market assumption]…
- …would pay a four-figure sum…
…- …for comprehensive benchmarks [product assumption]…
- … that would help them juggle clashing priorities, such as whether to invest in mobile or in video [customer need assumption]
While the response was positive, it turned out some of the assumptions were incorrect. At this point, Noble decided to test a new set of assumptions with a different customer group — the small online business owner. The response was much better. The assumptions were:
- That online small business operators [target market assumption]…
- …would pay a three-figure sum
…- …to quickly benchmark one aspect of their site, such as just mobile, or just video [product assumption]…
- …in order to quickly gather all the facts about that area, which they had already decided was a competitive priority [customer need assumption]
While he’s still completing this second round of interviews, he’s noticed a big difference in the response. For that reason, Noble’s advice to other startup founders is be open to where a conversation may take you. A potential customer may provide advice or feedback which is unexpected, but this can help redefine your hypothesis.
“You want the script to allow you to wander off the path. You say to people ‘I have a theory that people like you have the following issue — is that right or wrong?’ but you need to be open to those serendipitous turns.”
One of the other challenges that comes with operating outside of a major startup ecosystem like Sydney, is that it’s even harder to find a co-founder. Noble has reached out through his blog, on the Silicon Beach Google Group and elsewhere.
While working remotely is no longer an issue — Skype and email make it possible — it can be hard to build that critical relationship with someone in the first place. You want to bring in a co-founder who is as passionate about the startup as you are. He’d like to find someone before applying for Startmate, but plans on applying either way.
“I don’t have a co-founder yet, and I’m definitely open. But in the meantime, I can’t let it consume me — you can’t let that distract you from the business.”
I wish Steven a lot of good luck, even if he is going to be just one more competitor for the few spots. Considered the whole moving further out to save cost, but living away from Sydney also has the disadvantage to not being able to easily do Face to Face insight interviews.
Fully agree that the startup scene seems to be favouring the under 30’s without kids.
Congrats Steven. Working on a start up of my own, I know how hard it is to do with kids, mortgage etc. But why do you need a co-founder? This wasn’t explained. Maybe a partner which could be an agency/platform/something else? Claudia