66. From Idea to Beta

Erin Allard, a Platform Support Engineer at Heroku, interviews Philippe Vanderstigel, who has launched several start-ups, most recently, RocketChart. RocketChart is a cash flow management and forecast software solution for businesses, and while it's been a success, it wasn't Philippe's first attempt. He's built products that managed online gaming subscriptions to selling sausages online. Some of these ideas worked, and others didn't. Undeterred, Philippe mocked up an image of what he envisioned a budgeting app to look like, and within twenty-four hours had hundreds of people expressing interest in an app that didn't exist.

Philippe talks about the difficulties involved starting any business, namely raising funds and validating your ideas. Philippe very strongly believes that founders need to be directly engaged with their customers, especially in the early stages of the business. He personally responds to every message he receives, and asks direct questions to his users about what features they would like to see before his team spends time building them out.

Of particular importance to Philippe is managing the expectations of his users. He is the only one working full-time on RocketChart; the other two employees, his friend Elie and brother Marc, have day jobs to pay their bills. What this results in is a very calculated and gradual acceptance of new users, which also receive direct one-on-one correspondence with Philippe. This also makes it easier to divide the workload, so that the three of them can continue building a sustainable business without taking outside funding.

Links from this episode

• Philippe's post detailing how he validated a SaaS idea in one day to 150 beta signups
• Philippe's LinkedIn