Tech
The Startup Speaks: Al Taylor of tootle
Al Taylor, founder and CEO of tootle, talks about dos and don’ts of shaping a successful start up.
Al Taylor is the founder and CEO of tootle, an online platform in the used car market which brings private buyers and sellers together in a safe, fair and hassle-free way. The company is looking to restore buyer trust in the used car space by ensuring every car sold on the platform has passed background checks and an independent mechanical inspection. For sellers, tootle makes the process easy by handling the advertising, enquiries, payment and handover process.
Prior to launching tootle, Al co-founded WorkplaceDynamics, a specialist employee survey and organisational health company that he helped grow into a multi-million dollar company. He also played an integral role in the turnaround of Triumph Motorcycles and worked with a range of businesses while at consulting firm McKinsey. Here, he talks about the do’s and don’ts of shaping a successful start-up.
Dos and Don’ts of the race to start-up
So you’ve got a great idea but a blank sheet of paper on how to execute on it – what to do first? And how to deploy the limited resources of time and money that you have?
Do work out what your key differentiation / selling points are
Be very clear as to why you think someone would buy/use your product or service versus competitors or doing it themselves. What problem is the product or service solving? How are you solving that problem in a different way to competitors? What benefit is the buyer getting? A broad rule of thumb is that you can’t be the cheapest, fastest and have the best service. You can have two of those but not all three. With tootle we offer customers the best price and great service – but we are not the fastest way to sell your car.
Do focus on finding customers before fine-tuning the product
A surprisingly common mistake is to build a product or service (that obviously you think is brilliant) in an ‘ivory tower’ somewhere, to then discover that either no-one is willing to pay for it or you can’t cost-effectively reach your target customer to make them aware of it.
My first business was a graduate recruitment magazine, where we sold £90,000 of advertising for the first issue armed with just an idea. We literally cold-called large graduate employers, arranged meetings with the person who held the advertising purse-strings and sold them on the concept of a new magazine. By listening to what they wanted, we evolved the idea (and pricing) – so each meeting would have a different spiel and greater sales conversion. We only actually wrote, printed and distributed the magazine once we had all the advertising sold (and paid for!).
A really sensible thing to do is test the marketing channels without a product. If you think AdWords will be an effective marketing channel for you then perhaps create a holding site (with ‘launching in 2016’ plastered all over it and a smart mechanic to capture email addresses) and see if you can drive traffic to it with a test budget.
Don’t forget - the hardest thing in business is finding a product or service that people want and finding a channel where you can reach those buyers. Actually building the product or service is the easy part – so focus on the hard part first.
Don’t automate and scale until you’ve found the winning formula
So you’ve worked out why someone should buy your product and have tested the water on how to find buyers – now it’s about learning, fine-tuning and perfecting before going after scale. Your final product or service is going to be completely different to what you imagined when you started out. To fine-tune you need to be able to make changes very quickly, and that usually means doing things manually if you can. It doesn’t matter if the cost of serving the first fifty customers is way more than what you are being paid or what it would be if your processes were fully automated – the key is to learn what customers value and are willing to pay for.
For example, try to find out if price is the most important thing, or the level of the service? With tootle, we originally considered delivering cars to their new owner’s front door. Although this would have provided a fantastic customer experience, we realised it added a layer of cost that fundamentally contradicted our target market’s mindset: people who buy/sell cars privately are doing so because they’re price-conscious. What matters most is a safe, simple and financially compelling process - not the bells and whistles. So that’s where we’ve invested our time and efforts.
Don’t look amateurish (i.e. don’t skimp on branding)
Even if your product is light on features, make sure it looks professional. Have a think about the values you are trying to project (trust; best price; convenience; luxury etc.) and look at how existing brands that exhibit those values project themselves. It’s worth paying a professional designer to get the brand look and feel right. Remember that customers want to buy with confidence!
Don’t expect to be successful within 12 months
It just takes time to get a business going – most entrepreneurs are optimists, which means they think world domination is in their grasp over a summer. A favourite business mantra of mine is that ‘most people over-estimate what they can achieve in one year but underestimate what they can achieve in five years’. Once you think you’ve truly understood what delights customers then you’ve got the right foundation from which to ramp up marketing and grow fast.
At a previous company I co-founded and sold we were publishing ‘top workplaces’ lists in conjunction with US newspapers. After two years in business we had published a grand total of five lists - by year five we were doing 40 a year.
November 2015
Prior to launching tootle, Al co-founded WorkplaceDynamics, a specialist employee survey and organisational health company that he helped grow into a multi-million dollar company. He also played an integral role in the turnaround of Triumph Motorcycles and worked with a range of businesses while at consulting firm McKinsey. Here, he talks about the do’s and don’ts of shaping a successful start-up.
Dos and Don’ts of the race to start-up
So you’ve got a great idea but a blank sheet of paper on how to execute on it – what to do first? And how to deploy the limited resources of time and money that you have?
Do work out what your key differentiation / selling points are
Be very clear as to why you think someone would buy/use your product or service versus competitors or doing it themselves. What problem is the product or service solving? How are you solving that problem in a different way to competitors? What benefit is the buyer getting? A broad rule of thumb is that you can’t be the cheapest, fastest and have the best service. You can have two of those but not all three. With tootle we offer customers the best price and great service – but we are not the fastest way to sell your car.
Do focus on finding customers before fine-tuning the product
A surprisingly common mistake is to build a product or service (that obviously you think is brilliant) in an ‘ivory tower’ somewhere, to then discover that either no-one is willing to pay for it or you can’t cost-effectively reach your target customer to make them aware of it.
My first business was a graduate recruitment magazine, where we sold £90,000 of advertising for the first issue armed with just an idea. We literally cold-called large graduate employers, arranged meetings with the person who held the advertising purse-strings and sold them on the concept of a new magazine. By listening to what they wanted, we evolved the idea (and pricing) – so each meeting would have a different spiel and greater sales conversion. We only actually wrote, printed and distributed the magazine once we had all the advertising sold (and paid for!).
A really sensible thing to do is test the marketing channels without a product. If you think AdWords will be an effective marketing channel for you then perhaps create a holding site (with ‘launching in 2016’ plastered all over it and a smart mechanic to capture email addresses) and see if you can drive traffic to it with a test budget.
Don’t forget - the hardest thing in business is finding a product or service that people want and finding a channel where you can reach those buyers. Actually building the product or service is the easy part – so focus on the hard part first.
Don’t automate and scale until you’ve found the winning formula
So you’ve worked out why someone should buy your product and have tested the water on how to find buyers – now it’s about learning, fine-tuning and perfecting before going after scale. Your final product or service is going to be completely different to what you imagined when you started out. To fine-tune you need to be able to make changes very quickly, and that usually means doing things manually if you can. It doesn’t matter if the cost of serving the first fifty customers is way more than what you are being paid or what it would be if your processes were fully automated – the key is to learn what customers value and are willing to pay for.
For example, try to find out if price is the most important thing, or the level of the service? With tootle, we originally considered delivering cars to their new owner’s front door. Although this would have provided a fantastic customer experience, we realised it added a layer of cost that fundamentally contradicted our target market’s mindset: people who buy/sell cars privately are doing so because they’re price-conscious. What matters most is a safe, simple and financially compelling process - not the bells and whistles. So that’s where we’ve invested our time and efforts.
Don’t look amateurish (i.e. don’t skimp on branding)
Even if your product is light on features, make sure it looks professional. Have a think about the values you are trying to project (trust; best price; convenience; luxury etc.) and look at how existing brands that exhibit those values project themselves. It’s worth paying a professional designer to get the brand look and feel right. Remember that customers want to buy with confidence!
Don’t expect to be successful within 12 months
It just takes time to get a business going – most entrepreneurs are optimists, which means they think world domination is in their grasp over a summer. A favourite business mantra of mine is that ‘most people over-estimate what they can achieve in one year but underestimate what they can achieve in five years’. Once you think you’ve truly understood what delights customers then you’ve got the right foundation from which to ramp up marketing and grow fast.
At a previous company I co-founded and sold we were publishing ‘top workplaces’ lists in conjunction with US newspapers. After two years in business we had published a grand total of five lists - by year five we were doing 40 a year.
November 2015
