Start-up founders are constantly on the run. If it’s not a technical issue they are looking at, it’s the finances, the legal requirements, or the sales strategy. They are constantly having to keep up with changes and work on multiple requirements at a given time – from documentation to overall organization.
The best option to manoeuvre this maze is to use tools/services that can pick up the slack for you. However, the biggest challenge to this approach is the problem of plenty. Take any requirement and you have a zillion SaaS options available today. Navigating this multi-SaaS mess is an art by itself. Let us understand why.
Founders use multiple tools for internal work
Consider the tasks lined up in a day of a startup founder. A flurry of mails to begin with, and multiple actions for each. Planning the day’s calendar. Interacting with internal employees. Working with client issues. Tracking client engagements and new leads. Reaching out to customers at various stages of their journey with appropriate artefacts. Analysis of all the data. Technical simulations to assess product performance, even if the actual development is left to the coders.
These are just some of the major day to day activities. To perform each of these tasks, the founder adopts a purpose-specific exclusive tool, one that makes it easier to manage and keep track of the concerned assignment; easily amounting to over 10 different tools in all— intercom for customer feedback, mailchimp for mailers, amplitude for analytics — to name a few.
There is no tool that makes a single dashboard for founders
With so many tools in place, a major chunk of a founder’s time and effort is taken up by switching from one application to another, especially if it involves a long setup process or involves some preparatory time to get into the right mindspace.
When in need of particular data, there is no one place they can look at. It is like saying you have multiple excel sheets for every task, and you need to search multiple workbooks for one single analysis. Founders have to switch between multiple applications to arrive at a single informed decision. This is a never-ending juggle.
Product KPIs are not connected to effort
Sadly, the multi-app juggle goes unaccounted for in the long run. The effort and time spent in navigating between tools is simply your loss. A product’s Key Performance Index (KPI) overrides all these trivial activities, while focusing only on activities, revenues, costs, and usage. Simply put, effort that converts is the true measure of performance. The KPI is what drives a product’s success or failure, and in turn, decides the business venture’s fate. The final statistics is what matters, and most often it is not a direct reflection of the effort involved.
No good tools available for managing investor relations or raising funds
Furthermore, adding to this burden, is maintaining a good relationship with investors and your sponsors. While founders can easily be overburdened by regular tasks, it is critical to maintain regular cadence with the stakeholders. The onus is on you to effectively share the data they need to understand your journey and support your venture. Which brings us to our next hurdle.
Data sharing with stakeholders is also not clear.
While we have established that regular cadence with stakeholders is important, founders are often left in the lurch when it comes to the actual cadence. The right information can pave the way for long-lasting relationships, which can then convert to funding, valuable advice, and even reliable marketing.
It is important to structure the cadence with carefully chosen regular updates, ensuring you handpick the stats they want to see. The best way is to ask them what they are looking for and match your updates accordingly. On a broad scale, the regular cadence must include KPIs , portfolio valuation updates, deals under valuation and leads closed. These must include both the highs and the lows for a realistic picture and feedback for betterment. Sadly, most founders lack this clarity when it comes to information sharing, thus not being able to position their work and efforts correctly.
The need is an all-in-one bundled tool which connects company internals to externals reliably.
The one solution to avoid all these problems is an integrated tool. While there is plenty of software available to address each of the above discussed problems, they are siloed. Thus, the onus falls on founders to integrate data between these software manually. A single bundled tool can serve as a center point for all data, making it easier to handle data and also easier to present to stakeholders.
Todac’s Sherpa provides a platform that can integrate all your data into one place, enabling one-touch access for all data and related analytics.