“Ensuring your product or model satisfy a real business need is everything.

The decision to purchase needs to be a no-brainer – it should be a ‘must have’ rather than ‘nice to have.’

At FolioShack, we’ve built a platform that creates interactive and trackable documents that work on any device – a true end-to-end solution. Simply put, our product makes it much easier and quicker to generate documents, creating cost savings for the type of business that use our service.

Our clients are able to integrate these into their business in a very sticky way. Once you’ve identified this value and the place you occupy in your market, ensuring you focus on pursuing it is key. Do this well, and clients and customers will become your champions. Continuing to deliver great product and service will ensure they’ll help spread the word far and wide.”

“Funding the early stages of growth is a common challenge and like many, we hit a funding roadblock last year. We needed to continue to invest, to develop our brand into a SaaS online store builder, giving a cost-effective solution and delivering certainty to SMEs.

To raise this investment, we partnered with the Conduit Consultancy to guide us through the investment cycle.

Our clients are able to integrate these into their business in a very sticky way. Once you’ve identified this value and the place you occupy in your market, ensuring you focus on pursuing it is key. Do this well, and clients and customers will become your champions. Continuing to deliver great product and service will ensure they’ll help spread the word far and wide.”

To run a successful start-up you need to have a great idea but you also need to be able to run a business

Our advice is to spend your time and energy on the stuff you are great at (being an entrepreneur) and get yourself a great accountant.

One of the main things our accountant does is to prepare monthly management accounts. They also run our payroll, ensure we pay our VAT, and meet our other compliance requirements.

However, what makes our accountant special is their understanding of the start-up world. We can call him directly whenever we want to ask him questions; he appreciates the need to be flexible as well as the need for the quick turn-around of information. A good accountant is invaluable – get one and free yourself to focus on the other stuff!

Fast-growing, early-stage companies face huge challenges in terms of expanding their teams to support the pace of growth. We’ve built an incredibly talented team of 150 in fewer than three years, but perhaps our toughest recruitment challenge has been growing our Engineering and Product team – the backbone of a technology-enabled business.

It’s still difficult to find start-up ready technical talent in London, and for us this is where the Silicon Milkroundabout’s events have come into their own

We have always been impressed by the crowd they attract – so much so that we’ve never come away without a new member of the team.

Meeting top technologists without hefty recruiter fees makes Silicon Milkroundabout one of the most effective channels for recruitment, and they’re also encouraging ‘working at a startup’ as a career path in London. This will be invaluable if Tech City UK is to continue to grow.

We’ve faced a challenge around a real shortage of engineering talent in the UK. After hiring through domestic recruiters, we began placing adverts online, which provided global reach and attribute-matching to advertise roles to a broader audience. Bringing someone over from San Francisco is expensive but still cheaper than the fees to pay a recruiter for a C-level hire.

After we decided on the guy for us, we worked on getting him a Visa which turned out to be very easy: fill in an application form online for granting a Tier-2 visa, and then hold an interview with the UK Border Agency.

The interview is straightforward. All of the documentation is available on the UKBA website, with their chief concern being that the company has a history, a future, and some credibility, so provided companies can demonstrate this there should not be a problem.

The key to getting a good deal is understanding how as a start-up, you are different to most other companies.
In six months, you’ll likely either be bankrupt or double the size

This makes it irrational to have a three-year lease. If you’re happy to potentially move around every 6-12 months, look for “fag-end” leases – the remainder of a 5- or 10-year lease taken by companies that have gone bankrupt or moved to a bigger space.

You can get significant discounts (up to 80% off) in return for accepting a short-term lease and a potentially slightly grubby office. We found brokers were expensive but quite unhelpful, and instead went straight to commercial estate agents for these leases.

If you’re lucky it will contain furniture from the previous company or you can keep an eye out for other companies upgrading their offices.

The difficulty we have, is we’re just so busy getting the business going that we haven’t got a great deal of time to focus on finding space that is the right size and location.

Not only is it difficult but it’s massively time consuming and outside of our area of expertise – it’s hard to know where to begin.

Our experience has been that there is a lot of small spaces (approx. 600 sq. ft and below) and a lot of large space (5,000 sq. ft).

Through London and Partners we’ve been in contact with an independent commercial property adviser – and they’ve been very helpful, navigating us through the whole process of finding the right place and managing the negotiations with the landlord.

It’s definitely an area where we’ve benefited from expert advice and support.

We were trying to service our European customers from the US – the wrong side of an eight-hour time difference. We needed a base in Tech City to get closer to our European clients and grow our customer base. The spread of sectors in London is also a real attraction, it’s an inspirational, up-and-coming and vibrant scene.

There are lots of companies here that we might partner with because of the convenience of meeting up.

Both London & Partners and the team at Tech City know the city inside out, we really benefited from working with them. London & Partners and UKTI helped us with office location and introductions to fit-out companies and related service providers.

As a result, we opened our HQ in London with 15 staff in February 2011 and are on track to double over the next couple of years.

Never hire a person to do your marketing who doesn’t have a very thorough understanding of product and technology. Learn what your market is and don’t target the tech community by default.

Don’t press the hype button until your product is ready – which is when your engagement numbers are through the roof (in the early stages the amount of users you have doesn’t matter). You’ll never grow if your user’s actions don’t touch people outside of your website’s immediate network – make sure this happens.

If you can, create a pull instead of a push strategy in regards to developing business networks. We don’t reach out to any of our clients – they come to us and they can sign up without having to contact us at all.

The other major lesson I learned is to call – you don’t need to have a physical meeting with a client to get their business.

We’ve just announced $6 million early-stage funding led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures – his first in Europe. This is a fantastic match for Peter Thiel didn’t come to us – and we had to get a few things right before we approached him. Firstly, we had to show traction with our product.

Fundraising is not about knocking on investor’s doors with a long business plan. Investors want to see working products and happy customers.

Secondly, we had to explain the size of our vision and how we were solving a problem that many people have. It’s the first question every good investor asks!

Sell the skills and credentials of your early team – top class talent attracts top class funders. Never forget that finding investment is a two-way process. Do your due diligence on possible investors.

Do they have experience in your sector? Avoid the temptation to take money from just anyone.