From Shack 15 News
https://news.shack15.com/five-founders-share-5-tips-run-startup-london/
Launching a company is no small feat. Running it, though, and hopefully steering it on a successful course, is even harder.
While London is close to be the ideal place to be a startup founders, even the best have to come to grips with challenges and work hard to reach important milestones. What are the best ways to do it? We asked five companies — residents and former residents of SHACK 15 —for advice.
What does it take to scale a startup?
Speaking from an enterprise SaaS product point of view, it’s confidence in the product and having a clear picture of how it is helping improve the customer’s lives. This can only come from customers using and buying your product. As such, keeping focused on revenue-generating development is the first rule.
Then a second rule is strategically prioritising the client opportunities to the best of your capability. You’re continuously burning money by just breathing air. It sounds retardedly simple, but you just need to make sure that for every £ spent, there’s going to be an equal or bigger return in revenue, market value, or historical significance. No time to waste.
What is the hardest challenge when it comes to running a data science company?
Getting to the bottom of which data sets and insights has the most direct ROI for each of our customers. Also, learning and edducating from customers is always a challenge with B2B.
What opportunities does London provide?
It provides an English-speaking market which makes it relatively easier to setup sales with a larger number of companies and initial pool of good quality talent.
How important is the workplace for a startup’s success?
Having the right homebase is always important. Our startup is inherently distributed with many remote workers. However the product decisions are made here in London, so being in an environment with other startups also working with big data is crucial in the exchange and nurturing of ideas.
If you could give one business recommendation to yourself five years ago, what would that be?
Fail faster and improve even faster. It’s difficult with B2B since sales cycles are long but some of the lessons learned could of been improved upon much quicker such as bad hires and bad features.
Written by Aki Tsuchiya
Founder & CEO
A TV / OTT innovator, Aki’s foundations in the content business were built at Viacom together with the executive teams who launched MTV in Japan and other Asian markets. He subsequently joined the Skype founders to build Joost in 2006 – pioneering online TV products, strategies, and business operations now widely adopted by the industry. As CEO of Streamhub, Aki oversees the evolution of the SaaS product and business operations.