A business owner reflects on lessons learned after leading his company for five years.
What really goes into starting a business? You need an idea, of course, but you’ll quickly learn that your execution often matters more than the idea itself. Whether it’s a storefront, app or product, you need to bring your idea to market to test it. Then you need to do what most entrepreneurs ignore—you need to sell. You need to roll up your sleeves to determine, “Will this work?” all while embracing obstacles stacking up against you.
People, products, market, competition—how do you respond when these elements change? Evolution is key for maintaining a successful business. Being able to adapt to your environment is what sets a company apart from the competition. For the past five years, my company, Belly, has been evolving. We’ve been testing and analyzing and refining all while sticking to our core vision of making businesses personal. We’ve learned through this process, a lot of which is valuable for any founder and business owner, whether your startup’s app was just approved or it’s your first day out driving your food truck. Here are some of the lessons we’ve picked up:
1. The mission matters.
It takes more than top talent for your business to stand the test of time. You need people who care about the mission and believe in what your business is trying to solve. When Belly first started, the early press we received positioned us as a high-growth tech startup and our team was great at bringing our product to launch. But as our business grew, we realized we weren’t going to be able to disrupt the loyalty space overnight and we needed to be in it for the long haul. We’re still here today because at our core we want to make the everyday lives of business owners easier and more efficient. We dive deep into their customer retention and marketing needs to build solutions to support their livelihoods. Look at your team. Make sure it’s filled with people who can explain, “This is why we’re here” not “This is why I’m here.”
2. There’s truth in data.
Belly has always been about creating and enhancing the relationships between a business and its customers. When we began, our focus was on loyalty programs. Stick an iPad on every checkout counter to help SMBs launch and grow a program to keep their customers coming back. Our merchants told us that loyalty was working, but they also needed help communicating with their customers after they’d left their store. So we built them a tool to create and send marketing campaigns. Campaigns 1.0 was entirely self-service; small-business owners could log into their dashboard and build their own marketing campaigns from scratch, as well as draw conclusions from their customer data to apply to their next campaign.
We thought we’d given our merchants precisely what they’d asked for. But after analyzing feature utilization of Campaigns, we noticed high drop-off rates when it came to the actual email creation. Something was up. Our merchants reminded us that they’re a little busy (you know, running their businesses and all), so they needed a solution that was more automated. This prompted us to build Auto-Engage, a solution that enables merchants to set marketing campaigns to run in the background so they can focus on running their business. We streamlined the data review process too, so merchants can see at a glance what is working and what isn’t. You may think you know what your customers want but your data can actually show you what they need. Just be sure that your product evolves to match.
3. Be the best at what you’re the best at.
A final word of advice: Don’t try to do too much. Most companies are built on a foundation of doing one thing world-class. It allows for focus, execution and clarity of mission. We’ve always built loyalty technology, but there was a period of time when we launched products and features outside that scope. A few years ago, it was normal for a single solution to provide everything its customers needed—loyalty, point-of-sale integration, payment capabilities, etc. We realized that we couldn’t be the expert of everything, so we chose to have a maniacal focus on being the best in loyalty tech. Now all of our resources are funneled into achieving that. When it comes to hand-picking the goods and services they need, make sure your business is the one your customers choose.
Author: Logan LaHive || Founder/CEO, Belly
