Creating a startup without a fixed idea is like building a startup backward. But that’s precisely how our startup, Zupyak, unfolded — and it worked.
Our journey began when my co-founder, Qi Cao, was exploring various startup ideas. The one he went on to build was a blog platform designed for businesses, emphasizing industry-specific communities for content marketing, like a B2B version of Medium. The platform organically grew its user base to over 300,000 globally, with 50,000 articles shared monthly. Witnessing this rapid growth, we identified a strong market trend. Due to the increased paid marketing costs, finding new and cheaper ways of acquiring customers through content has become top of mind for startups and small businesses.
Growth only happens if you allow yourself to test and test again
Getting attention from your target audience has never been more complex, and it’s not getting easier. The cost of advertising on Facebook went up by 89% last year. Although arguably positive for us as consumers, the privacy trend is causing paid marketing costs to soar.
The most significant advantage over others in your industry is your ability to move fast and adapt.
Marketing is usually the problem you tackle after you’ve figured out what product to build. However, for us, it was the other way around. Qi ran the content platform as a side project, and after extensive testing of different marketing efforts, he successfully built a growth loop. Users who posted content also shared it, leading to a compounding effect on user growth.
Network effects are challenging, but the key lesson is that you will know what works once you test. Keep testing various marketing tactics until you strike gold, and measure your results to see if they were successful. For channels like paid ads, it’s relatively straightforward — you can track click costs and customer conversion rates. However, measurement becomes trickier for other channels, like community outreach or forums. You can create unique tracking links for each test using tools like Bitly. This allows you to evaluate which messaging or community engagement strategy yields the best results.
Understand the customer problem at the core
How you can understand the core pain points of customers varies depending on the customer group you’re targeting. In the B2C space, you could interview friends and family about the problem space you’re looking to solve. In the B2B space, it could be more difficult, but you can use your network to get access to companies in the domain you’re looking to target. Cold outreach through LinkedIn can be effective as a last resort, provided the outreach message is tailored to showcase the value of investing time in a conversation with you.
Being new to the industry you’re entering can be a good thing. You’ll likely ask questions that challenge the status quo and how things are done. If you know the industry well, that’s great, but try to avoid making assumptions. Premature assumptions often lead to slow and costly failures. It takes time to realize that what you thought you knew wasn’t true — recognize failures quickly so you can iterate and progress swiftly.
In 2022, we took Zupyak from a side project to a full-fledged company, focusing on addressing marketing challenges for small businesses. For us, conversations with our platform users revealed a common struggle — marketing is expensive and challenging. They felt content marketing could be a great way to lower marketing costs, but creating impactful content was challenging. Our research identified gaps in the content creation process for small businesses, from idea generation to research, writing, and publishing.
Don’t try to build a faster horse
As you move from the problem space to a solution, the key is to build hypotheses and find the least risky way of testing these ideas. The challenge often lies in the difficulty for potential customers to imagine new ways of solving their problems. Most of the time, they want a “faster horse.”
The only way to get around this is by testing your ideas in some shape or form to reduce the risk of building something no one wants. Gather potential customers and give them something to react to — whether a high-level description on a whiteboard or a fully functional prototype of your product. The goal is to get as many different perspectives on your ideas as possible and lower the risk of the product you plan to build. Seek feedback the cheapest and fastest way; only code a working prototype if a pencil sketch can’t do the job.
For us, we went through various stages of testing ideas, with AI being a key component in addressing content marketing challenges. Our users faced difficulties crafting search engine–friendly content, so we showed them a prototype of a product that did SEO keyword research as they wrote their article, eliminating the need for pre-article research. We got great feedback, so we decided to build it.
Going from launched product to loved product — iteration, iteration, iteration
You can easily get a product shipped, but going from a shipped product to a beloved product can be a long journey.
The key here is to build feedback loops into your workflow. Every week, you should talk to users and understand how they feel about the product. There are different ways of doing this, like sending emails for short surveys for user feedback, incorporating chat into your app for real-time interaction, and gaining a deeper understanding of their thoughts.
There are also “moments of truth” that you want to ensure you’re making the most of. If someone wants to stop using your product, ask them why and how you can improve.
The first version of our SEO-enabled AI writer was limited, but it did the job. We had challenges keeping users engaged after they generated their first article. To address this, we worked with our users to create an AI-powered editor, which enabled them to improve and adjust generated articles more easily.
The most significant advantage over others in your industry is your ability to move fast and adapt. As you grow, this becomes increasingly hard. Even without all the answers, choosing a direction is much better than standing still — because you’re likely to learn something.
Build purple cows
Apply Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow” in everything you do. The Purple Cow philosophy is to avoid the safety of ordinary products and instead aim for innovation and distinctiveness. It’s about daring to be different and pushing boundaries.
You need messaging that stands out in a crowd, and it’s the only way to get attention in today’s cluttered feeds. For us, it meant swimming away from the “AI writer category” by positioning our tool to replace a freelancer or a marketing agency with AI. Many of our users are fatigued by the traditional freelancer or agency model. It makes users reflect and ask questions, as it’s something new — what does the AI equivalent of a freelancer or an agency look like? How does that work?
Lack of a fixed business idea doesn’t mean you will scare away investors
The absence of a fixed business idea should not be a deterrent when seeking investors. Instead, it underscores the importance of finding investors who understand the market you want to build in. In our experience, we gained interest from investors even before solidifying a fixed business idea because they saw that even if we didn’t have an exact idea, we had a large user base and a good understanding of the problem.
Jumping into the startup world without a fixed business idea is like setting sail on a boat without a fixed destination but with an intended continent in mind. You will navigate many obstacles on the way, but as long as you know that the continent is big enough, the exact location to drop anchor becomes less critical.
By staying open-minded and problem-centric, startup founders can discover uncharted waters and build solutions that solve problems they may not have thought of when they set sail.