vital to launching a successful FinOps start-up

As a startup veteran, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard from the founder. “I have an idea for an app. Do you know a programmer?”

Make sure you have a wide range of practical knowledge about your target audience. And I know how to code.

It’s not that easy, so I’m tired of hearing this. You can’t expect to be able to hire someone to build your idea.

Building a business software app requires a lot of skill. The main thing is to know how to find and collaborate with the right engineers and get people to use the app. Just because you have a great idea doesn’t mean that people will immediately understand its value.

So what happens so often? Even if the app flops and fails to launch, it will fail when it reaches that point. I hope we can reach this stage of our business. In particular, it’s getting worse and more difficult to convince investors to support their vision.

Where are these companies and their leaders going wrong? Or, more importantly, what should they do right?

Two best practices for a successful startup

As a serial entrepreneur who has developed some very successful apps that serve retailers and restaurant owners, I have the potential to prevent at least 50% of these startups from failing before they get off the ground. I can offer you two tips.

1. Make sure you have a good working knowledge of the target audience and business for creating your app. Ideally, you should have been responsible for that function at some point in your career.
2. Know how to code (or at least understand software development best practices).

Well, this may not completely unleash space-level wisdom, but it reflects the common sense needed to make a FinOps business successful.

Are you skeptical? Let’s share how my own experience of following this advice led to two very successful tech startups.

Learn from experience

After learning the coding skills to manage software development projects at PwC and the Wall Street trading desk, he launched the Green Grocer and Wine Store in 2004.

I loved building these businesses. But I hated the old fashion point-of-sale (POS (point-of-sale) system that wasn’t user-friendly, which employees and I were forced to use.

So I decided to use my coding background to build a better POS platform.

It wasn’t as easy as making a sound. POS software has been around for 20 to 30 years, so I had to deliberately think about what problems my platform would solve. I decided to build the simplest system to perform the tasks my retail business needed. Finding the right engineer was part of this task. I found a strong engineer and worked with him to prototype and test his skills. Even if it looks good on paper, you can’t hire an engineer. When he passed my test, we changed the prototype to the first version.

Turned out to be a busy grocery store, the wine business was a bad place to test such core operational software systems, so I found a better beta business in my neighborhood. And after deployment, there were multiple updates until everyone was happy with the speed, features, and ease of use.

After adding the iPad as the main interface and quitting the use of expensive touchscreen devices, ShopKeep has grown explosively. Eventually, over 25,000 retailers became ShopKeep customers and used this system to streamline payments and expand their operations.

Since selling ShopKeep to LightSpeed LSPD in 2021, I have launched several new companies. One of these is a bookkeeping company that provides customer accounting services to retailers and restaurants.

Working with a team of bookkeepers and certified public accountants (CPA), we quickly learned how frustrating jobs have become with the proliferation of e-commerce platforms, online payments and fulfillment systems.

Today, many retailers in physical stores sell their products online using e-commerce platforms such as Amazon Marketplace, Shopify, and Etsy. Most restaurants use online booking vendors such as Resy and OpenTable, as well as shipping vendors such as Grubhub and UberEats. And each of these online platforms may use multiple online payment vendors.

While these online services make the life of business owners much easier (and more profitable), they can be an endless headache for bookkeepers. Various sales taxes, service fees, discounts, fees, and fees that these platforms deduct from each sale.

After directly witnessing the bookkeeper suffering, bookkeepers and accountants can automatically download daily journal entries from Amazon, Grubhub, Shopify, and other platforms, post them to QuickBooks or Xero, and match them with banks. I decided to launch an accounting automation platform. Deposit in a few minutes.

As a retail entrepreneur and business owner who has managed his books for years, he knew what his platform needed to be successful, so it was potential. We got off to a good start over our competitors.

Beta testers are important in developing new technologies and share honest feedback, but they can’t interact enough to get all the details they need. Using your technology in your business to solve real customer problems is a way to get the subtle insights you need to properly improve your tools.

Currently, my company, Bookkeep, owns the category. But it never “finishes”. Every new client presents its own challenges and we are constantly updating the software to meet their needs.

So whenever the founders of aspiring tech startups ask for advice on how to get a company up, they always say that they shouldn’t start putting together a feature list until they get up. Client shoes.

This kind of hands-on experience helps shape what a product should be, not what it should be.

And once you have that information, start coding. If possible, do it yourself.

Why is coding knowledge important?

I’m not saying you really need to write every line of code in your app. That’s what your engineer does.

However, I think it’s important for the technical CEO to have some knowledge of how the code works. I didn’t do much code for ShopKeep, so I wish I could. So when I started Bookkeep, I deliberately handled most of the product coding. I had some basic knowledge from my past work experience, but needed additional guidance and coaching. This is the step I took and others can follow to get started:

• Download self-learning apps such as Solo Learn and view workflow automation tools that you may already be using for educational purposes in your business such as Zapier. Zapier’s simple no-code drag-and-drop process is basically like a code module, giving users a mini lesson on what they can do with their code. I won’t explain how to write software or social media apps, but it will help you understand B2B and back office coding. Airtable is also the perfect app to use to learn how databases work.
• Decide that you are responsible for coding part of the product. If you need help, work with a team of engineers to take full ownership of the design and implementation. I finally programmed an onboarding and billing system. So, from experience, the more familiar you are with coding, the more efficient your software development process will be.
• Relatedly test every part of the code.. In the early days, you need to be the number one power user of your product.

Knowing the code shows that software development is an iterative process. It’s not about building the perfect app all at once. It’s about testing yourself, then in a real business, through multiple iterations and prototypes. Even if you haven’t written the actual code, you still need to be familiar with using prototyping tools to create screens and workflows that show how your app works. Show these to potential customers of your future. Get feedback on what’s working and what’s missing.

When you’re happy with your prototype, give it to an engineer so you can start building your actual app. But keep an eye on it, and don’t forget to continuously test it while they develop it.

If you know how your code works, you won’t be at the mercy of developers or product teams to convince you that you can’t do what you want, or do it quickly or cheaply. You know enough to be able to counter their argument. You can even write some of it yourself to show them how it can be done. And if what they give you doesn’t match your vision of what it should be, work with them to fix it.

You are using trading tools to build your startup from scratch. You are giving your customers what they want. And you set an example. That’s all about successful technology entrepreneurship.

About the author

Jason Richelson CEO and co-founder of bookkeepingIndependent bookkeeper, accounting firm, accounting automation platform for growing companies.

He is also the creator of ShopKeep, a cloud-based point-of-sale system used by over 25,000 retailers and entrepreneurs.