Subly Weekly Vlog #5– OUR 3 TOP TIPS ON BUILDING A START UP (during a pandemic!)

SUBLY WEEKLY– VLOG #5

Guess who’s back…back again…Subly CEO Holly Stephens on how to build a start up in the current climate. Follow us on LinkedIn for updates www.linkedin.com/company/getsubly

Transcription below by Subly Pro launching this September.

There’s lots of people out there that are starting businesses during Covid-19.

Starting a side business or just start something completely new and we kind of wanted to dive into the journey of Subly so that we may help others out there too.

One thing that we did do before we even launched anything [was] we built an amazing community that could give us feedback on our product. That started 18 months ago. We had nothing.

We just had a landing page and we just asked people to join if they were interested in in this product. It was also wasn’t called Subly.

• So one thing you need to really start doing is building that community and understanding what people need and the features. Because something that they need may be completely different to what you want to build. You’ve kind of got to map the two.

So, that was the first thing that we did.

The second thing was that we kind of built a core team. A core team that really believed in our products, what we wanted to achieve in the future…
And so, getting those foundations right from the start was really important for us.

We really didn’t realize how big it would become in 18 months.

• So, the foundations of the team were super important and also setting
  our values and our culture was one of the biggest things that we could do as we grow.

And, in terms of the growth and fundraising and all that kind of thing.
We actually bootstrapped Subly all the way until this February.

• So, only a few months ago we decided to fund it through pockets, both me and Kevin to kind of get this going, and to really understand more about what we need, and how much funding we need to get from investors. If we need to go that route? Or can we just monetize it straight away and generate revenue?

So, in terms of fundraising during Covid-19 as well, it was all down to really our product, the community we’re building, and then the fundraising element happened quite quickly for us.

We were able to close a significant amount of funding because we’ve done all of that initial work.

So if anyone out there who’s starting a business and think it’s really gonna be tough during kind of the fundraising element is really tough out there right now. We are seeing that.

But what we do for our start-up and the top three tips are:

• Community, kind of built that up,
• Build core values/the core team, and really get something going,
• And then, the funding and the revenue will come from that,
  too.

There’s our top three tips I hope you enjoy, and it hope it helps you too!

Get started with Subly today — it’s free.

Want to learn more or need help with your video? Read our Subly blognow for our video tips!

Sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date!