Hi there,
I'm Dan, the CEO and Founder of Quuu.co, we provide an easy way to find the very best content to share on social media, and on the other side we promote content to those people looking to share.
People often ask me how do you go about starting something like this...It's not easy!
Firstly, you need an idea, one that you are passionate about (because if you don't love what you do, then you'll fail when it gets tough). Remember, there is nothing wrong with failing, it's merely a stepping stone to your eventual success. You probably hear this all the time, but one will hit if you just keep pushing.
So, let's assume you've got an idea, but now you don't know what to do next, maybe you're not a developer yourself. The key to most success in startups is...Networking!
Even if you haven't got an idea just yet, get networking. Join the huge communities on slack, get involved on Facebook groups, but remember, give more than you take. Don't be all about me me me, be about the community and people will respect that and support you in future endeavors.
Networking is how I managed to build Quuu.
After speaking with a developer called Mubs over a period of time on a slack chat called MakerHunt, I decided to reach out and tell him my idea. After persuading him that it was a cool idea and one that could help millions of people, he was well up for building it!
After 3 days (YES, just 3 days) Mubs come back to me with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Now the nature of Quuu involves a lot of manual work, what with ensuring the content inside is high-quality and that we have enough of it to share with future users.
Before pushing live to the public, we pre-launched on Betalist. Betalist gives you a platform to share your idea or beta product to the world for early feedback and potential early users. After a week on Betalist, Quuu had built up a 300 strong email list. This is 300 people that are all interested in using Quuu!
This was awesome!
This gave us the incentive to spend hours on curating content for a variety of categories before pushing live on Product Hunt!
If you've never heard of ProductHunt.com, please do go check it out. They list new products every day and give people the opportunity to upvote and discuss them with the community.
Launching on Product Hunt is an entire article in itself, so please follow me now so you don't miss an article I'll be pushing out shortly :-)
We launched Quuu on Product Hunt!
48 hours, 800 new users later, we were now sharing around 1000 posts per day!! We were frantic adding new content to all our available interest categories to ensure our new users didn't run out! We needed a plan! Networking!
Using my contacts I've built up over about a year, I reached out and told them that my new company Quuu was picking up steam but it desperately needs content! Most of the people I talked with are bloggers or writers, so they were more than happy to add new content for others to share. We called these guys Quuurators (Curators ;-)).
Networking has been fundamental to the success of Quuu.
Now, I had users sharing, and Quuurators curating content every day, and we were slowly adding new interest categories as more requests came through.
My personal situation. At the time of launching Quuu, I was a designer for my own agency Infinite Visions. We were falling on hard times with the work drying up so we were at a point where money was going to decide our fate.
My business partner Matt who ran Infinite Visions with me and I decided to gain some investment for Quuu. We knew it had legs, it had a great start and a strong future potentially. We managed to raise £30k at our first meeting :-0
This gave us enough time to really test the idea and take it to a point where it could scale.
After that initial 6 months, we were earning around $3k per month, and needed some more funds to keep going. The next round was slightly harder, but after a meeting with over 90 investors, we managed to raise another £110k. We haven't dropped below £100k since we took this funding.
We've now got a team of 8, user numbers are over 50,000 and we now share over 60,000 posts per day! We've got some big plans for Quuu so I'll keep you up to date.
So how do you start a startup. Start networking now, and test your idea with a relevant community.
Give us a follow and a cheeky little upvote if you liked the story...so far!