When leading a successful, rapidly growing tech startup, it can be one of the most amazing and thrilling experiences, but also a very stressful endeavor.
When it comes to setting priorities for a startup, they may not be the same all the time. You cannot just follow a template and expect results. It just does not work that way anymore.
The answer is that technology is not the same each day, which means you need to adapt to new ways of handling the developments.
Technology advances with each passing day; people adapt to new technologies and tend to not really care about the old ones. The companies which fail to adapt to the new technology or fail to manage are the ones which fail as startups.
This is just one tactic you can do; there is another effective way to run a successful startup.
Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. were all once startups and they have something in common. They always try to innovate and create new ways to outsmart their competitors.
Each of their new products or services are better than previous ones and capture the market share they have in mind. Their amazing growth and huge potential in the tech arena inspire many people and companies to venture into this field.
Therefore, what are the top priorities you need to have as a tech startup in 2018?
- Note how technology has changed or evolved
- Use conversion based design instead of basic UI design
- Build customer experience
- Build customer trust and engagement
- Build a launch strategy
- Work smarter not harder
These are the top priorities one should keep in mind to make a startup thrive and not have one of those that perishes in a year or two.
Yes, we all know that many startups do not last more than a year or two, so for you to survive as a startup, these are the things you need to know in 2018.
Things have changed a lot in the past decade, especially when the smartphones came about. Technologies have advanced to enable users to get the best experience.
We are at a stage where every task you would want to do can be done online through mobile apps and web applications and tech companies have come up with products that are new and advanced from what we already have.
We have a mobile app for every little task, from paying bills to ordering food. Every small thing, which was once a physical task, is now converted into an app.
I live without a television and I have no complaints on entertaining myself and getting information. My phone and my laptop, mostly the smartphone, replace it actually.
The smartphones’ numbers have surpassed laptop/desktop usage, encouraging techies to work more on smartphone technology.
Smartphones are not the same as where they were last year; there are no bezels left on most phones now. This has made quite a stir among mobile app developers to optimize their apps for these edge-to-edge screen phones.
So yes, you need to keep up with the technology to come out on top of your game.
Keeping up with technology always mattered; it does in 2018 too.
Conversion Based Design Instead of Basic UI Design
If you run a startup and have not been able to make many conversions with your online presence, you could choose to either redesign your website’s UI or make your marketing game better. If you have decided to redesign your website you need to remember that “conversion based design is the go-to option” rather than make minor changes through a basic UI design.
Why do you have to do that?
Because making changes in a basic UI design is not really a great strategy. Due to the staggering competition we have, it is hard to make conversions by just moving some buttons and changing colors.
There are many factors which could enable conversions for you:
- First and the foremost, an important thing is to keep things simple. Yes, keep your website simple and don’t make it too complicated where a user will get confused and choose your alternative or competition over you. Keeping it simple doesn’t mean you make your website boring, but make things easy for your visitors to understand and ultimately lead them to make conversions for you. Conversions can be a purchase on your website, a request of a service, building partnerships, or even subscribing for more updates on your website.
- You need to understand your audience; this is what helps you to decide what changes are to be made on your website and what changes could bring conversions to you. Understanding your audience and targeting them is a basic and easy step which people do not follow or ignore because they think they know their audience.
- Identifying or defining your hierarchies will make your job much easier in redesigning. There are some elements and features of an app that are clearly more important than others, and they definitely need to stand out. You can identify your hierarchies with the help of your targeted audience and demographics; this will help you identify what is important and what isn’t. While consistency is also an importance factor to be taken care of, the things that command attention from a user’s point of view are the color, size, typography, etc.
- Fonts and colors may be overrated as part of the UI, but they are important too. You cannot ignore these two aspects because they are integral parts of UI design. According to the designing rules of typography, only two types of fonts should be used on a single website. Nope, not a single page; the whole website needs to have two fonts. You could go crazy with colors but your colors must represent your product or your business. There are many colors which can connect with different moods of the users and also project the theme of your website. You need to think through the colors you use as the background and the text colors do make a difference in what you want to achieve. Hire an experienced designer who could suggest the best options.
- As we discussed earlier, you need to know your audience; there is a way you could get to know them better. Feedback and reviews of your app or website will provide you much better information than the details you would get from research. Look for the most common issues that you could possibly work on and make your app or website a better place for your customers.
- Forms must be simple and shouldn’t make your users feel they are a hassle or complicated. Simple forms which could fetch a lot of information are the goal. Straightforward forms are considered to be better for user experience. Social media logins could help fill out some parts of the form, which I personally like. Make sure you are using these options.
These are a few factors which help you with conversion-based design. Refrain from opting for basic UI design changes, which will just give you a bill and no real conversions.
Building Customer Experience
If you ask a web or a mobile app developer what their goal is for a few years from now, it would be giving the best user experience. It is the ultimate goal of all the mobile and web development companies around the globe.
So how do you gain or build a great customer experience?
There are so many articles out there on the internet that will help you; I am summarizing all the basics here.
The basics to building a great customer experience is knowing your customers. Knowing your customers is not a hard task if you ask me. The first place to find them is by checking your demographics; you can do that by using a simple tool like Google Analytics. It will provide you with information such as where your customers are from, how old they are, if they are men or women, and a lot of other integral information.
In addition, another way to know about your customers is via feedback and review pages. Check the reviews of your mobile app or your website and you can determine what is great and what’s not so impressive about your app.
Try to take note of all the issues and solve the ones that you think need changing; there could be complaints where they completely miss the intention of your website or the app. You can ignore those comments but work on the valid complaints and resolve them so you can build a great customer experience.
You will not just gain new customers but you could retain your customers as well. Who wouldn’t want that?
Building Customer Trust and Engagement
Again, feedback and customer complaints and queries are the aspects that you should concentrate on.
However, things have changed a bit. Companies use their social media presence to interact with their customers. Some companies put great effort into updating their social media, which builds a strong bond between the business and the customer.
I have seen some companies respond to complaints on social media. The replies were witty and humorous which made them love the brand or the company more.
Therefore, it is not just the feedback and reviews but also social media that is important for gaining trust and helping you to engage with your customer.
Remember that it is social media and people will come up with all sorts of ways to put you down. He or she could just be a negative person or someone who is trying to kill some time. You need to have a strong social media representative who knows the difference between a troll and an actual complaint. Someone who could handle the keyboard warriors.
Responding to customers is just one part of gaining trust. If you can provide a solution promptly, your customer and any random reader will appreciate that.
Building a Launch Strategy
Building a launch strategy is not simply submitting your app or website to be live on an app store or the web. Nope!
That is one part of it but the launch strategy is a way for your app to gain some momentum and provide the expected business you desire.
The factors which make an app launch strategy successful are:
- Building an app or a website with an amazing user experience.
- Killer marketing strategy.
- And keeping the conversions in good momentum.
To achieve the last factor, the other two must be successful.
To start, you need to have an app which offers a splendid user experience. You need to test it rigorously to achieve this. Try to build an app or a website which can be easily understood by your customers or audience.
Never confuse your customer with your website or mobile app. Keep it simple and make sure everybody can navigate through your app.
You need to be aggressive with your marketing strategies and start your campaigns way before you launch your app. You need to make sure that people know that your website or app will be on the market soon.
Get on social media, write blogs and make informational videos about your app. One of the newest ways of promoting is by getting your meme game right. We all know memes and I have seen businesses promote their apps using humorous memes.
Your marketing campaign should be for at least three months in order to reach optimal success. Once you achieve conversions, the goals you have set should increase. Do not rest or take things for granted; make sure your goals increase with your business and your numbers will increase too.
Working Smarter Not Harder
Working hard will not get you anywhere because you do not own a construction company, you own a tech startup.
As a tech startup owner, you need to learn ways in which you can see results. Hard work will help but the results will come too late and nobody has time to wait around.
You need to learn ways to gain instant results and strategies that can take you to new heights.
Snapchat is one of those examples; they have taken the social media arena by storm. It was a simple concept which all the other social networking apps or sites had, but then it included the implementation of filters, which made them unique.
One of the ways to succeed is by being unique; most of us fail in this regard. Even if you are not unique, try to make your business better than what your competition does and let your customers and visitors know about it.
There are many ways to reach people. You can do so on social media, blogs, YouTube or invest in paid promotions like Google and Facebook ads.
Working smarter is the way for tech startups in 2018.
Conclusion
Since we are in an era where quick results are expected and there is not time for startups to wait for results, decision-making plays an important role.
You need to be able to understand what strategy will work and which strategy will not before you implement it. This will save a lot of time and efforts, which is why I emphasized “working smart” and not hard, which can be time-consuming. Working smart will surely help you reach new levels with your venture.
