Culture, customer service and don’t be afraid of MIUAYGA. MI-what? Read on for the full story.
The successful re-launch of Startup Grind Auckland featured the awesome Sam Gribben from Serato and now pad drumming tutorial app Melodics. We were lucky enough to all be able to sit down and pick his brains for an hour with some good pizza, good beer and better company. Here’s the key takeaways.
Getting from 4 employees to 75+
Serato not only crafted a global brand loved by some of the biggest DJ’s on the planet, they also managed to get from 4 employees to 75...all being based out of little ol’ New Zealand! An impressive feat, but what was the formula to their scaling success? Sam felt culture was key. Scaling and keeping the culture right is tricky, even with an intensely passionate area such as DJ software. They made a few mistakes along the way.
Sam's advice was no matter how much pressure you’re under to scale quickly, take time hiring the right people. Rejecting someone is much easier than firing an employee later down the line. Take time, if you’re hesitant about a candidate don’t just pull the trigger.
Customer service should be your biggest asset
Serato really cared what their users thought, this was before the days of intercom and other plugins so they built an online forum just so they could interact with their user base and answer questions, solve problems for them and hear what they had to say. A risky strategy but in making all their customer service public on the forum they fostered real brand loyalty. People could see they cared and were actually passionate about the product.
Don’t build. Validate first. Then build. Maybe
Sam had some good advice here, mimicking the lean startup approach of knock together a quick prototype and get out of the house, watch people interact with it and listen to their thoughts and feelings. Developers especially can fall into the trap of ‘because I can code I might as well just build this cool idea I have and then put it out there’ which, as we know, is a startup sin.
Related: The Startup Framework to Validate Your Idea Before you Spend $1
Don’t be precious with your idea, open up!
Talking to people and hearing what they think was a huge help for Sam when he left Serato and had a few ideas. Melodics was one of those ideas, but until he put himself out there talking to people and showing them some rough prototypes he wasn’t sure which idea to pursue. Melodics was the outright winner and as he rightly said “no one is going to steal your idea, the chances of them having the drive, resources, time and energy to drop everything and try and rush it out before you is minimal. Don’t go giving away all your secrets but you need to verbalize it”.
MIUAYGA
Making it up as you go along. There’s no shying away from it, you have to sometimes, so don’t be scared by the fact that you feel like you don’t know everything. Even after Serato, Sam was still experiencing so much stuff for the first time with Melodics. Learn as much as you can...and make the rest up as you go.
Read Next: The Question Every Founder Should Ask Themselves: What's my Story?