How to start a tech startup (even if you know next to nothing about tech)

Strategist. Analyst. Creative. Engineer

Koko Ombu

What’s all the rave about tech startups? At every turn, and almost every where you look, you see a new launch, a new venture backed tech startup, and a whole lot of hoopla about startup founders. You’ve thought about how tech startups come to be, and are probably wondering how to start one. Starting one is definitely a great idea and this article will take you through how to achieve this, even if you know next to nothing about tech.

In this article, you will learn what it takes to start or launch a tech startup. The following subtopics are included:

1. Tech is all around you
2. Anyone can have a tech startup
3. Anyone can have an idea
4. Tech can influence your idea
5. Tech as a business
6. How to start a tech startup without being techie
7. Do we start?

If you are very quizzical because you know next to nothing about tech (which I very much doubt – I’ll get back to this later) you may be asking how. Why start a tech startup to make more money? Why not start any other business? Well, starting any other business is awesome; it is great and would definitely bring your senses to life as you try to activate the goals of the business. But when it comes to tech, there are many, many reasons why you should be opting for it, or even feel inspired to start one.

Now, you may be going, “But I know absolutely nothing about tech, how on earth am I going to start a tech startup?” The truth is that you do not know absolutely nothing about tech, you know quite a handful about tech for the following reason;

Tech is all around you

Look all around you, and you will see tech. From gadgets like your home appliances, media hardware, computers, phones, the apps that control them, tech is all around you. And you know what? You use these valuables every single day. They are part and parcel of your life and for some people; they are second nature as they can hardly do without one form of tech or the other running the daily activities of their waking moments. From going, “How does this app work anyways?” most people move to, “I can show you how that works.” While a few outliers will swear off tech, outside influences beyond their control ensure they remain part of the tech ecosystem and growing knowledge whether they like it or not – like think of the ‘big brothers’ of the world trying to keep you safe, that you can literally do nothing about and you will catch my drift.

Having established that indeed you are not all dumb on tech, let us progress on how you can start a tech startup with the following points;

Anyone can have a tech startup

Anyone can have a tech startup and I mean absolutely anyone, and now that is even without being techie. It is usual for us to look at being techie with the world’s definition of a nerd – that person who stays indoors, is married to his or her computer, talks little to every other person, has one or two friends and collectively, they spend their time writing code. Trust me, that is a very poor definition about being techie. Yes, it is quite normal for a techie person to love computers but there is more, oh, so much more to this. Having a tech startup is about having an idea you can integrate into all the functionalities of tech, it is that simple. Instead of having an idea and treating it just like any other idea, it is as simple as treating it like a tech idea, fitting it into the perspective of a tech based business model and seeing how it evolves from there.

Anyone can have an idea

Have you ever had an idea before? Well, having ideas is a very common thing. We all have them and they are the seeds to products we buy off mall shelves, programmes we watch on TV, items and gadgets we love, the games we play etc. I mean, ideas are everywhere and they fall on everyone. I want you to have a vivid picture in your mind of a large number of people walking under the rain? So imagine them for a few seconds. This is a recurrent sight so it should be very easy. Now, imagine this same scenario but with the rain drops falling like idea bulbs. The truth is we are all living under a massive cloud of ideas as our God-given right and men, do they fall on the head of every human. It is what we do with the ideas that fall on us that count. So as long as we have ideas, are receptive to them and are able to determine its integration into the functionalities of tech, we can start a tech startup. In fact, anyone can and here’s why.

Tech can influence your idea

Tech can influence an idea that seems like a plain Jane and turn it to something extraordinary. We have seen this happen with some of the largest tech startups in the world – a simple idea like connecting friends turning into a $500 billion dollar business, a la carte, Facebook. Or a simple chat idea being transformed into something even technology terms simple to recreate, Whatsapp. In the words of Mark Zuckerberg himself to the Whatsapp founder Jan Koum, “Whatsapp has a simple use case”, meaning, you use it without giving it a darn thought, you just use it as a seamless form of communication to your buddy wherever, whenever. Now, because these ideas have become gigantic corporations, we tend to fool ourselves that they are outstanding. No, they are not outstanding as ideas but have become madly outstanding with the tech behind the idea, propelling them to something really, really enormous. In reality, there are not many ideas you can liken to a tech idea but there are many ideas done in a tech driven way.

Here are some examples of the simplest ideas that have turned into tech startups. I want you to intuitively think about them and then, imagine what is possible with what you may presently consider as not even an average idea.

• Willing

I remember the very first time I heard of the startup idea, willing.com, it had just won a chance to be on the famous accelerator programme, Y Combinator, achieving this with such a straight forward idea you would most likely toss in the bin if you thought about it – protect your family and property with a legally valid will. Common, can’t you get that from any solicitor on the street? What is so techie about that? In just three years, Willing.com has been funded to the tune of $7.12 million dollars by investors.

Huh? Yeah, huh! For a crazily simple idea as this, you never know what this world is going to give until you look very well at what’s really out there and maybe, take them to heart. For God’s sakes even amongst solicitors and lawyers, this is just a sub sect of what lawyers have to deal with, and could be easily brushed aside as one which cannot turn out to be the proverbial ‘cash cow’. But with his torturous experience trying to get his brain tumour ridden Aunt’s affair in order, a thought flashed into the head of Eliam Medina, “Can’t the process of making a Will be less complicated, less expensive and less time consuming?” This singular thought was the birth of a simple idea from someone with no legal or tech background whatsoever – Wills in 15 minutes and for absolutely free.

• Eventbrite

What was the thought behind this idea? ‘If people could find when events would happen, they could get tickets cheaper than what they are getting them for’. This was the birth of Eventbrite by husband and wife duo Julia and Kevin Hart, which is today, the world’s largest event posting and ticketing company. Where they previously working in ticketing? No, just concern about where events happened and ridiculous ticket price tags.

• H Bloom

Bryan Burkhart founded H Bloom out of the nervousness, inquisitiveness and research he forayed into trying to create something unique for the tech industry. His first idea, Flowers! He thought the flower industry lacked tech innovation. Flowers, lack tech innovation, can you believe that? Why should fresh flowers have anything to do with tech? Was this guy even a florist? No, he wasn’t.

• Joor

‘Why can’t small stores easily stock high end designer clothing?’ was the thought which set up the process of creating Joor. The simple idea behind the startup – find a way to connect big fashion brands to buyers created by Mona Bijoor. Joor has become a wholesale marketplace for small fashion stores to purchase and stock the biggest brands seamlessly.

• ZocDoc

Finding a Doctor was cumbersome after a cross-country flight which caused the ZocDoc founder a burst eardrum, leaving him to search for a Doctor for four days, and the idea? There should be a way to access Doctors for specific needs with a lot less stress.

• Skillshare

You are a teacher, if anyone can listen to you. This was the idea behind SkillShare which has a goal of turning every address into a classroom.

Ideas can come when you are looking and a lot of times, when you are not looking at all and those sampled above are simple ideas, aren’t they? All these simple ideas were launched as tech startups, though they could have been plied as normal everyday businesses. This goes to show that anybody like you can have a simple idea which can be translated into a tech startup, all you need to be is always receptive to the things going on around you.

But what is their connection to tech, is the question?

Can you just put these simple ideas in a tech startup machine shake as hard as you can and voila! Out jumps a tech startup. Is it that easy? Well, let’s find out.

Tech as a Business

In this context, we focus on tech as businesses propelled by the global surge in internet use. So a tech startup as a business entity is one whose founders choose to trade their ideas with the use of the internet as a base model or channel for the distribution of their services.

In this regard, an ordinary idea is transformed into a tech startup by utilising tech’s functionality to drive it no matter how small the idea may seem. These functionalities include;

• Web: The number one tool driving the digital world is the internet. And the use of the internet as a free distribution channel is the base for online businesses which could be largely termed as tech startups.

• Infrastructure: The development of a software, website or application on a purchased domain name e.g. shoes.com, and hosted on the web.

• Viable Idea: An idea possessing a visible marketplace need validated by a distinctive target market that is ready to pay for it is a viable idea. This idea should at least be in the form of a minimum viable product in terms of its infrastructure workability which means the smallest product or service version of what can be sold to clients in exchange for their money.

• Innovation: Your idea should provide an innovative solution to your target market who will be delighted to opt for your service as a result of a certain value proposition which may come in form of ease of use, cost effective, convenience etc.

• Global Reach: The ability to serve global markets (from China to Guinea, Madagascar to Bangladesh) with ease and minimal costs at the same time like ecommerce companies such as Amazon and Ebay in comparison to normal business models that can serve only their localities.

• Scalability: The power to scale revenue exponentially without increasing costs is the basis of what makes a tech startup lucrative, as growth opportunities and profitability skyrocket and can happen within a very short timeframe. Costs could include employment or human capital development expenditures like Whatsapp serving over 500 million users with 50 employees before their acquisition by Facebook and Instagram serving over 100 million with only 13 staff.

• Business Model: The business model is uniquely spurn to generate a form of recurring income from its users either via subscription, a recurring service demand or a streamlined partnership model allowing leverage of other people’s assets like Uber and AirBnB riding on vehicles and rooms respectively to earn through their apps which enables the tech startup to have a clear estimate of income projection with user growth.

• Investable: As a result of the sporadic growth which can be realised by tech startups they are investable by design. This means that as a startup gains more paying users, like bees to flowers, they attract investors who wish to be in on the action. This brings in all kinds of people coming with all forms of resources, from skills to cash. At this point, a tech startup does not belong only to the idea creator or founder but to everyone with vested interest in its building.

How to start a tech startup without being techie

With an understanding of the above, how do you start a tech startup without being techie? By being techie here, I mean not having the ability to speak the Latin of tech – call it code or programming and you will be on track – the foundation for the creation of your website, app or software. Is this the most veritable skill to have when starting a tech startup? Yes, it is. But can you start a tech startup without having this skill? Of course you can.

The list below is proof of successful tech founders who knew next to nothing about how to write computer programs for their tech startups but launched tech startups which have become or are soon to become some of the world’s most phenomenal companies (the first person threw me completely off my feet – I found it hard to believe);

• Reid Hoffman, started LinkedIn (we all most likely use this website) with a degree in Philosophy and no programming skills. He has all the trappings of a star programmer but is not. He recently sold his company to Microsoft for $19 billion in cash.

• Jack Ma of Alibaba Fame, with its network of sister tech companies, was an English teacher before venturing into the exciting world of tech startups.

• Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, Founders of one of the world’s largest disruptive startups, Airbnb didn’t know how to code.

• The cheeky sisters led by Dawoon Kwang of dating startup, Coffee meets Bagel, were new to tech when the idea for making dating easier with a coded language popped into their heads.

• Willing Founder, Eliam Medina had to take a crash course in code to build the first Willing platform.

Now you’ve sampled this list, let’s go into the nitty-gritty of how you can start a tech startup without having a hang of the internet’s golden language;

1. Build your Interest in tech

Purposefully spike your interest in all things tech by becoming a daily compendium of all things tech. This is the very first step to starting a tech startup and how can you achieve this? You go to every place where tech lives and become a full time learning member. This singular act will expose you to all kinds of tech startup ideas people like you are launching into the marketplace. You will learn firsthand how the idea behind the startup was birth, about the founders, their plans and how they hope to impact the world with their innovation.  This should become a lifestyle, you want to get your interest up and keep it there because it is the momentum you need to maintain a successful outlook in this pursuit. Here are a list of things you can read to arouse your interest in tech, you can find more and add to this list;

• Tech Crunch: Get daily news within the tech startup world as they happen.

• Cruchbase: Crunchbase is the world’s largest directory of tech startups and it offers quality information about companies, website, founders and their investors. This may be the most important tool you have free access to in developing your curiosity into the tech world.

• Mashable: This is another top startup blog with a very interesting perspective on all things tech.

• TechinAsia: Tech in Asia is an interesting space which provides up to date info on tech and tech startups across Asia. It is innovative also in the sense that you can actively participate and contribute in this community with insightful write ups on tech and read what other members have to share also.

• Seed-db: Seed database is an interesting idea collation hub bringing together funded ideas from accelerator programmes from across the globe.

• Growthhackers: Growth hackers offer in-depth reviews and analysis on some of the most successful tech startups, discusses ideas and offers users a chance to post some of the most exciting articles on tech in the world as they happen.

• Forums: Join forums like Reddit and Quora and follow sub-forums or tags of tech startups and you will learn firsthand from real people in tech, what you need to know. You can also post questions and receive feedback from real startup founders.

• Paper.li: Paperli is a news aggregator application you can sign up to for free. By picking keywords of your interest, for example, innovation, tech and startup, Paper.li aggregates all the latest information on your subjects of interest into your personal paper on a daily basis.  

• MIT OpenCourseWare: Go to MIT OpenCourseWare and access free online course materials on Tech Strategy. In the course, you will understand the strategy behind some of the world’s largest technology companies like Apple.

• Stanford Graduate School of Business: Watch Stanford Graduate School of Business videos on Youtube, they have hosted the most successful tech CEO speeches you would learn a lot from.

• A tech industry review: Read my article on the tech industry to understand how far it has come and where it is headed.

• theHustleco: Your smart good looking friend that sends you an email each morning with all the tech and business news you need to know for the day.

• Research Ideas

Begin to research ideas and this is especially easy with Crunchbase, where you can research tech startup ideas as far back as 6 years ago or even more. What are you looking for by doing this? You are trying to understand the simplicity behind the ideas. Some of the ideas may be way off your league at first as a result of them being proprietary technology startups in fields you may know nothing about like biosciences, nanotechnology, hardware etc., read and understand their underlying themes but you don’t have to dwell on them except you absolutely need to. What you are trying to do is to be inspired by the ideas of people. You can also check out our startup reviews category to understand the inspiration, insights, strategy, models etc., behind some tech startups. For example, with a company like Ubeam, how can a girl just think that laptops, phones and electrical devices in general can have wireless charging? And how would the devices be charged? By sound. Sound? Yes, sound from the noise you make and all of the noises going on around you, in the park, on the streets, in churches and pubs etc. By researching the ideas of others, you begin to think differently and you will live in an expectation of finding your own.

• Pick an Idea

You have been doing a whole lot of study on various ideas. To enable you select or develop your own idea, do researches in industries that may be of interest to you and think about how you can innovate upon the existing tech startup ideas within this industry to create an updated version or an idea that has never before existed. You can have a list of a series of ideas that may be of interest to you to choose from. You may also wish to just duplicate an already successful idea to cater to your own locality. There have been a great many successes from entrepreneurs who took this trail; it is very easy as you can have a template application and business model to duplicate to create yours. The Amazon ecommerce model has been the most duplicated tech startup idea catering to specific needs of the individuals within these communities; an example is Jumia in Nigeria.

• Give your Idea a name

Your idea is coming to life. You have picked it. It is time to make it a living entity. Obviously before this time, you would have been wrestling with a name to call your new baby and that’s not a bad thing. A name is a big deal in tech. It can either make your startup outstanding, or it can turn it to drab. Sample the names of startups across the world? How were they created? Sample the names of tech startups in your industry, if they all sound alike; please go in the opposite direction. What has Coffee meets Bagel got to do with online dating? The founders thought it was a code for people to say they were going to meet up with someone. Isn’t that interesting? Or what is Zappos? The word does not even exist but it is one, or I could say the most successful shoe tech startup in the world. You can come up with as many as possible and zero down to one. Be creative about the name and try to hit perfection – zesty, two syllables, created and legally yours i.e. buy the domain.

• Have a Lion’s heart

You have decided on a startup idea and I won’t mince words on your next move – You need a lion’s heart to start a tech startup. Why? Because building a normal business can be daunting and it can be so much more with a tech startup. Project seen and unforeseen challenges even before you venture and have enough gusto to know you can surmount these challenges against all odds. An ever growing knowledge of how to create magic with your tech startup will in no small way boost your confidence. So keep learning, you will need this for the road.

• Be passionate about the Idea

Whatever the idea you decide to go with, be so passionate about it that you master it every teeny-weeny aspect of it. Get updates on everything happening within the idea’s industry as it happens. This passion will keep you going in the toughest of times.

• Find a market that needs your Idea

The next thing is to find the core market or demography for your idea. Why do they need this? What are their likes and dislikes? What is the age range of this target market? What is their earning power and how do they spend? Are they big on internet use? Do they use social media channels? How do they shop? Do they like subscription services or they buy when they only have to?

• Validate your Idea

After determining your target market, you need to validate it by testing it within this market. Go to where this market is and ask questions. You can start online by posting in forums where your target audience converges and pose conversational questions that will enable you weigh their thoughts on the issue. It is really cool if you can get 100 positive responses from people or potential customers but overall, the best validation is when a good number of these people are willing to make cash commitment for this service, and you are moving into tech startup mode already.

• Build a Virtual Community

As soon as you are able to validate your idea with paying customers, start building a community for it on the social spaces, such as Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin etc. Update this community on what they can expect from your service and provide a stipulated time in which they could be joining you for a testing of your first minimum viable product sample. This community will drive your product launch for you and you will learn to incentivise these referrals as well to make them feel like a part of the journey.

• Find a partner(s)

It is possible for you to be the sole founder of your tech startup but remember you do not have a hang of the basic technicalities to build a tech startup, so you need help. There is a lot of work when it comes to developing a tech startup and founders understand this and are willing to share the burden and the vision with other people. If you watched the movie, Social Network, you may have a glimpse of how that works. Your new partner will become your cofounder even if he or she was not there when the idea was created. As a non-techie, you want to consider a techie cofounder who will do the technical development (by this I mean programming) for the website or application you want to build. Your cofounder may also be a person who can support the idea with the cash it needs to build a minimum viable product for the startup if you do not have. You can have more than one cofounder in this regard to help you birth this baby and you can find this person(s) within tech communities, on forums, on social media or you can sign up to sites like Cofounderslab and Founders2be to get one who may be willing to go this journey with you. A cofounder with a good knowledge of programming is of great value to your startup as he or she will manage the technical part of your tech startup while you focus on strategy, operations and marketing.

• Design a mock up

During your research, you sampled a host of startups in your industry, what did you notice about those sites? You can do a copy design wireframe with a pencil and paper as mock up or choose to come up with something really creative and different to give you a unique advantage over your competition. You can get a graphic designer (UI/UX designer) to something professional for you to see what your site may look like but one thing for sure, know exactly what you want delivered in terms of the overall outlook of your product including the content within your platform which should be determined by you before discussing with a developer.

• Outsource your development

If you have the money, you can decide to outsource the development of your first website or application to professional coders, this is if you have not been able to secure a technical partner for a cofounder whose job is to get this first phase done for your market to test. The process of outsourcing your development can be very tricky. In Asian countries, programmers may be cost effective but you should ensure seamless communication is standardized between you and the company. Poor communication may cost you more money as you may need to repeat yourself over and over again. You should have a sample website for them to use or you may get burnt. In western countries like the US and Canada, programmers can easily innovate with you even if you are trying to achieve something without a sample but their ingenuity comes at a good price. Upwork, Guru and Freelancer are good places to start and you can find some of the best programmers within strictly code communities like Gigster. If you are going into ecommerce as a tech startup, you can lighten the startup process by going with a great CMS software like Shopify for starters before going ahead to build your own platform.

• Leverage your development

Let’s say you have not been able to find a programmer as a cofounder and you also have no money to build your application or app and your idea is in ecommerce. You could leverage on existing platforms such as Shopify, Bigcommerce etc. which offer unique templates for you to choose from to host your online store without delay. Also even with limited knowledge of programming skills, platforms like Salesforce, Project Spark and Windows App Studio enable entrepreneurs build and launch applications without writing any programs.

• Test your product

You will need to test your product within your community and target audience to know how they feel about it. These groups of people will help you refine it for the mass market before launch. Be open to the details they highlight and recommendations they make so you can make adjustments if necessary.

• Plan your startup

After you have tested and updated your minimum viable product, design definitive plans – a strategic action plan, showing a breakdown of steps to take for user acquisition or sales and craft a strategy document showing how you intend to top the market and subdue your competitors, if any.

• Launch your startup

When you launch your startup, you are sending the tested minimum viable product out into the marketplace for users to begin to use and enjoy its benefits. Some startup founders do this with a lot of pomp and pageantry, for you, you can only do this if you feel it is absolutely necessary. The most important thing here is trying to get it into the hands of as many of your target users as possible within a very short timeframe, with maybe, a limited amount of money. So your strategy to launch has to be good. You can get social media influencers to put in a word for you, a tech star to endorse your product or build an awesome referral base right from the start to give first users the opportunity to win big by earing an income or some form of benefit while spreading the news about your website or application.

• Bootstrap your startup

If you have money to help boost the development of your startup, please put it to great use. However, most tech startup founders find themselves cash strapped at the beginning of their journey and need capital. The secret here is to bootstrap. Bootstrapping as the name implies is getting oneself out of a situation using existing resources. So, tech startup founder, what do you have in your hand? There are many skills you possess which can come in really handy in building your tech startup. This could be management, marketing, writing, graphic design, social media marketing, internet marketing, search engine optimisation, editing, voiceovers, animation, copy writing etc. These skills and more are essential to any business and instead of you paying for them; you have to create time to do them in order to cut cost. You can also use what you have to get what you want – you have a great idea, get people to share it with you.

• Recruit people

As a founder, you are going to keep your eyes open to recruit people who can aid you in accomplishing a lot of skilled tasks, listed and not listed, and you may have no money to pay for their services. A form of bootstrapping too which has worked successful in the startup world is recruiting staff and making them foundational part of the company by sharing them on the equity of the startup. These staff will work judiciously as owners within this startup and do everything possible to ensure its success because they know what is at stake. Have a recruitment plan where you fill in the most essential jobs first and follow with other jobs as the opportunity arises.

• Acquaint yourself with code

No matter how little, you need to acquaint yourself with code. Why, you are not techie? While this is not very necessary it is important to have a little understanding of what your tech team is doing on a daily basis for your startup. Code in itself has many languages, you can start by understanding what is being used to write programs for your own startup. There are many online tutorials where you can start from or if you have the money and really wish to have a hang of code in general, you may wish to apply for a paid or tuition free boot camp. If you are not interested in doing this, that is fine. Alibaba founder, Jack Ma does not bother himself with learning how to code but he is the richest man in China. He has trusted programmers and he is glad to work hard to keep them happy.

• Build a tech network

A tech network is the single most important secondary entity in tech. Here, the phrase ‘your network determines your net worth’ holds true as this network will bring you a lot of good in the future. From cofounders, sound technical team to investors, the more formidable you can build your tech network into, the better for your startup in the long run.

• Prepare yourself for funding

To grow your tech startup, you need to be funded and to be funded you should be able to show prospective investors the traction your tech startup is receiving in user acquisition and sales without any reasonable doubt. This step may be the last but it is so important if you wish to build an enviable business. You may decide to leave your startup small and personal but be sure you are generating enough sales to keep you excited about starting a tech startup without being much of a techie.

Do we start?

So even though you know next to nothing about tech, you can start a tech startup by patiently and carefully following these steps to your success. You may also be asking, “Does this mean by following all these steps, I will make great success at any tech startup I start?” By sampling as many ideas as possible, researching and validating their need in the marketplace and doing all the above listed and even finding much more steps on your own, you can start a tech startup and truly succeed even if you know next to nothing about tech.

Do you find this article helpful? We would be pleased to hear it in the comments below.

So, please leave us a comment; I look forward to your addition on this conversation if you have any to add. I talk back to help you succeed in your journey to making money online or off.

Also, click on the icons and share on social media. Somebody somewhere may need this information to move to the next level in life and that person may just be you, receiving a shared content.

As always, its Business Love from me 😉

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Disclosure: This review, article or report was first posted on http://www.babeonideas.com blog in 2017. The http://www.babeonideas.com blog no longer exists. Some information may be outdated or a startup may no longer exist in the form or all of its form when it was first reviewed.

The Astonishing AI Unicorn Phenomenon: Breaking Speed and Revenue Barriers

AI startups are shattering the unicorn valuation ceiling of $1 billion in
record time according to data from CBinsights. On average, it is taking them 3.5 years to achieve this feat in comparison to US startups that do so in an estimated 7 years according to research from ZenBusiness.

OpenAI, creators of the world famous ChatGPT is currently valued at $29 billion and was able to achieve unicorn status in just 4 years.While Inflection, cofounded by Reid Hoffman of Linkedin fame raised $225 million in equity to leverage large language models to help humans talk to computers achieved $1.2 billion valuation in almost zero year.

Let us dive into these scatterplots I created on Tableau to really drive home the point of the phenomenal rise of AI startups.

Looking at this chart, you’ll notice a sharp downward trend, which reveals that the earlier the year of founding, the farther it took generative AI startups to achieve unicorn valuation. In essence, it will take these startups lesser time overall to become valued at over $1 billion.

• It took Photo editing apps maker, Lightricks 6 years to become a unicorn
• 4 years was what it took OpenAI to crush the $1 billion mark
• Hugging Face, the machine learning model for enterprise took 6 years to achieve the feat
• Cloud development platform and github copilot, Replit also took 6 years
• Adept which trains machine learning models to do tasks for us got valued at $1 billion in 5 years
• Large language learning model builders, Cohere took 4 years
• Enterprise AI search and knowledge discovery platform, Glean
• AI content writing platform, Jasper did this in 3 years
• Digital images AI tooling company, StabilityAI in 2 years
• 2021 was all the rave for AI startups as
• Large language learning model developers, Anthropic, conversational chatbot CharacterAI and animated AI images startup, Runway all launched in 2021 to speed through this barrier in just 2 years
• Inflection, leveraging AI to help humans talk to computers founded in 2022 emerged as a unicorn after its giant raise.

The fascinating bit of this insight is that they are doing this without having the requisite revenue to match these valuations.

If you look at this AI startup revenue scatterplots I created, openai valued at $29 billion generated just $30 million in 2022 while Jasper generated $45 million in the same period.

Glean AI has a $2.7 million revenue with a $1 billion valuation while Runway is averaging $1 million revenue at $1.5 billion valuation.

Comparing OpenAI and Youtube’s Valuations and Revenues

Let’s do a comparative analysis of OpenAI and Youtube as a brand:

Youtube generated $28.8 billion revenue in 2021, a 46% year over year increase with 2,5 billion unique visitors accessing the platform monthly according to Business of Apps. It currently has a brand value of $23.9 billion according to Statista.

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the fastest growing consumer technology product, gaining 100 million subscribers in the first two months of launch, it is valued at $29 billion with a $30 million revenue – talk about the huge disparity.

Comparing their valuations with their activities, you may be thinking, “will AI be the future of the world?” Probably, you’re not wrong.

Of course, we all know that the growth of generative AI platforms is as a result of the prospect of artificial intelligence changing the world as we know it and of course this has created an investor frenzy.

So as a startup founder, it is probable that Venture Capitalists will give you the “what is your AI strategy wink” while you’re trying to pitch them. So, get ready.

With the bullishness with anything artificial intelligence as investors move towards the light of what the future can be. So as a startup founder your first expectation should be knowing that VCs will likely wink at you to find out what is your AI strategy and you’ve got to be ready to deliver on that question.

Charting tool: Tableau

Link to interactive chart: The AI Unicorn Phenomenon | Tableau Public

Data Source: CBInsights, TechCrunch

HR Analytics Dashboard

Business Intelligence for Human Resource

The dashboard below shows key details from data of staff of a fictional company with a total of 1470 staff with a focus on attrition rate.

Tools: Excel, Pivot Tables

It contains information across business travel, age band, attrition, department, education field, employee number, job role, gender, marital status, age, over time, attrition count, attrition rate, current employees, daily rate, distance from home, employee count, education, environment satisfaction, hourly rate, job involvement, job level, job satisfaction, monthly income, monthly rate, total working years, work life balance, years in current role, stock options, performance rating, number of companies worked, percent salary hike, total working years, years at company, years in current role, years since last promotion, years with current manager

To design this dashboard, the following key points were focused on;

• Job Satisfaction Rating
• KPIs: Total Employees, Attrition Count, Average Age, Active Employees, Attrition Rate
• Total Employees by Gender
• Education wise Attrition
• Attrition by Job Role
• Department wise Attrition
• Attrition by Age Group
• Attrition by Marital Status

Leading from A Healthy Soul

It’s no news that great expectations trail leadership roles. Whether big or small, people expect a leader to lead effectively and deliver results no matter the capacity of the task. In the course of our lives, we will somehow fill one leadership role or another. These could be within social enhancing roles as parents and peers, or organization building roles as business owners and career professionals, or system building roles as political or religious leaders. 

Ever needed to catch your breath because you were thrust into a leadership role and didn’t seem to have a clue on how to go about it? Your uneasiness might have come from an unforeseen resignation from a leader directly above you, causing the urgent need for you to fill the vacuum. It may even be an expected promotion that leaves you feeling unworthy to lead a phenomenal team across multiple departments. The way you feel is understandable.

No two persons can lead in the same way. This is as a result of differences which could range from personality types to educational exposures, environmental and cultural influences, and a host of other subtle differences such as personal experiences and an individual’s appetite for self-development. A leader is expected to manage people in a way that is congenial and goal oriented. However, this isn’t always the case as problems created by poor leadership are rife within small units, as well as large systems.

In career settings, an individual’s rise to leadership as a result of brilliance may not necessarily translate to an ability to manage and lead people effectively. A guidance-based leadership role can spiral out of control if a leader fails to bridle excessive human impulses. No one wants to work in toxic communities or workplaces led by someone who harbors tendencies such as narcissism, manipulative tendencies, high-handedness, and the proliferation of unethical standards and attitudes.

The State of the American Manager report revealed that one in two employees forfeit their jobs to avoid a terrible managerial leader. This is in spite of organizational leadership gulping $358 billion globally in 2020, with the United States accounting for $165 billion, according to data from Training Industry.

The importance of leaders in moving every sphere of the human existence forward, one decision, one direction, and one task at a time cannot be overstated. As each one of us will play leadership roles at various stages of our lives, understanding who a leader is is imperative. However, much more imperative is becoming a leader with great leadership qualities, with a goal to leading from a healthy soul.

While a person can possess stellar leadership qualities such as foresight, intelligence and focus, these skills don’t necessarily translate to one’s capacity to lead from a healthy soul. Leading from a healthy soul is uncommon leadership, one not articulated within school texts on leadership, but one delivered through the mastery of one’s deepest self. How do you then ensure you’re leading from a healthy soul as a leader? To encapsulate this concept, soaking in the essential words is critical.

FIRST, WHO IS A LEADER?

A leader is someone saddled with the responsibility of delivering on a mission or set of goals with the help of enlisted subordinates (these subordinates may or may not have been enlisted by the leader).

SECOND, WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HEALTHY?

To understand what it means to be healthy, we must first understand what health means; according to Merriam-Webster, it is “the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit especially freedom from physical disease or pain.” It could also mean “a condition in which someone or something is thriving or doing well.” By extension, being healthy can mean to continue in a good physical or mental condition, free from uneasiness or pain.

NEXT, WHAT IS A SOUL? 

According to Collins Dictionary, it is “the spirit or immaterial part of man, the seat of human personality, intellect, will, and emotions, regarded as an entity that survives the body after death.” It is the essential part or fundamental nature of anything. Your soul is the part of you that consists of your mind, character, thoughts, and feelings. 

WHAT THEN DOES IT MEAN TO LEAD FROM A HEALTHY SOUL?

It means guiding followers, a team or subordinates to deliver on a mission or set of goals from a place of personality, intellectual, mental, emotional and spiritual soundness or balance. However, when you consider that no one human is perfect, how then can a leader function from a place of well-rounded balance?

Research by The Healthy Leader® revealed that who you are determines your worldview and the values you place as priority. Your values unconsciously impact the actions you take, and these actions determine your leadership effectiveness and the overall performance of your organization, small business or family. 

As such, you can actualize the possibility of leading with a healthy soul in the following ways:

• Understand your value system isn’t perfect but a work in progress just like those of everyone else. Hence, you need to stay on the path of growth, refining it to create a better you every day.
• Be self-aware of your personality type, strengths and flaws to understand your leadership style and how to effectively utilize it to positively influence your followers or subordinates.

• Create a plan of action for consistent development of your inner self through timely separation for spiritual, emotional and mental programs such as retreats, study, meditation and communion to build a better you.
• Be in constant communication with yourself, by using mental and written assessments to track progress in different aspects of your life that contribute to the improvement of your total wellbeing and value system.

You will then blossom into a leader who leads from a healthy soul because the following values will begin to flow through you:

• Empathy: You are thoughtful and considerate about those you lead, constantly putting yourself in their shoes, if possible, to understand how they feel on the job or on specific issues that affect their effectiveness. A study by State of the Workplace Empathy showed that most employees are willing to work longer for a leader who embodies empathy.
• Selflessness: You are a selfless, people-first leader in the discharge of your obligations. One who is willing to share wins with the team.
• Humility: You are humble about your achievements, knowing there are greater accomplishments ahead.
• Endearing: You take care of everyone through timely check-ups, carry everyone along and are far removed from encumbrances such as malice, envy, jealousy, backbiting etc. that can affect team progress.
• Supportiveness: You give others room to thrive by creating and/or genuinely supporting opportunities for growth and trust others to deliver results.
• Peacefulness: You exude peace. This enables you to command unity among teammates even in times of conflict by fostering initiatives that build peace.
• Two-way communicator: You communicate clearly about goals and expectations without assumptions, while giving appreciation where necessary. However, you aren’t scared to communicate your most sincere thoughts, dishing out criticisms constructively.
• Feedback oriented: You’re open to feedback from anyone, receiving unbiased feedback in good faith and addressing areas that need clarity or immediate attention.
• Learning oriented: In a world facing a knowledge spiral, you know you can’t learn everything so you’re eager and unafraid to keep fresh, young minds around you to fast-track learning and enable the realization of goals.
• Inspirational: Your team members see you as one to be mirrored, drawing inspiration from your influence and leadership style, and learning to treat themselves the way you treat them.

Leading with a healthy soul takes grit and focus to achieve. It’s a lifelong commitment to spiritual, emotional and mental development, bringing yourself to a place of self-awareness, self-love, and inner peace that’s translated to the world around you. As the terminology goes, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO). You can only give what you have. If you don’t have a healthy soul, you can’t lead with a healthy soul. Hence, think about this: what will it cost you to do what it takes to become a better you, so you can lead from a healthy soul in whatever capacity of leadership you find yourself?

This article was first published on the Iridescent Women platform.

https://iridescentwomen.com/2022/10/31/leading-from-a-healthy-soul/

How 9 of the World’s Largest VC firms invest in Diversity (Women and Minority founders)

“As a woman, always keep a man in the room.”

In Africa, having a husband earns you more respect. It doesn’t matter if it’s a bad marriage. It grants more street credibility and make people believe you’re own some form of stability.

Unfortunately, it’s the same in the global venture capital funding space.

In 2022, US women collectively raised $4.5B in VC funding.

This would have sounded really good, but it was a paltry 1.9% of the $238B raised for the entire year.

So who got the rest?

Teams with more men and at least, one woman founder.

When the team is mixed, VC funding raise jumps to 17.2%. According to Crunchbase, this trend has remained consistent for the last 10 years.

To commemorate International Women’s Day, I decided to extract data from Crunchbase to creat this Sankey chart for us to have something to let this sink in as we draw insights from the data.

So let’s get busy!

This is how 9 of the world’s largest VC firms invest in diversity (women and minority founders)

I looked at the data for the following companies; a16z, Sequoia, Dragoneer, New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures, Founder’s Fund, Light Speed Ventures, and Accel

a16z: 1 diversity investment made for every 6.5 investments

Sequoia: 1 diversity investment made for every 8.7 investments

Dragoneer: 1 diversity investment made for every 10.35 investments

New Enterprise Associates: 1 diversity investment made for every 7 investments

Khosla Ventures: 1 diversity investment made for every 5.5 investments

Founders Fund: 1 diversity investment made for every 5.3 investments

Accel: 1 diversity investment made for every 12 investments

Light Speed Venture Partners: 1 diversity investment made for every 7.8 investments

💡 INSIGHTS

Funds earmarked for #diversity founders since the inception of these 9 VC firms;

💡 a16z: 15% since 2009

💡 Sequoia: 11%  since 1972

💡 Dragoneer: 9.6% since 2012

💡 New Enterprise Associates: 14% since 1977

💡 Deerfield Management: 100% since 1994

💡 Khosla Ventures: 18% since 2004

💡 Founders Fund: 19% since 2005

💡 Light Speed Venture Partners: 18% since 2000

💡 Accel: 8.3% since 1983

💎 Deerfield Management is an outlier, investing in few later stage projects on an enormous scale with a lot of women on board at this stage.

💎 The largest VC funds earmark an average of 8 – 18% of funds to diversity since their inception.

💎 Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has enabled more diversity funding at 19% followed by Khosla Ventures and Light Speed Ventures at 18% each since their 2000s founding. Leveraging the strength of diversity founders beyond foundational industry players like Sequoia and NEA.

Isn’t it alarming that in 2023, a woman needs to keep a man in the room to make the major cut of the funding chunk?

Happy International Women’s Day to all the #women #founders in the world and women VC introducing more diversity opportunities.

How A16Z invested in the Web3 Ecosystem through Crypto’s 2021 Summer and 2022 Winter

As one of the world’s most successful venture capital firms, hosting and having hosted some of the most successful unicorns and decacorns in its portfolio, a16z has harboured no fears in venturing into the rough waters of Web3 investing, AKA the Crypto/Blockchain market.

A16Z Crypto made strong showing through July 2021 to June 2022, investing across a diverse range of subsectors in the cryptoverse. Within this duration, Bitcoin, the major cryptocurrency, tanked heavily in June, made it’s all time high (ATH) above $68,000 in September and has stayed bearish as of this writing. As you may already know, the Bitcoin crash set off a domino effect across all altcoins and tokens bringing the entire market to the much talked about crypto winter.

Pink horizontal line showing BTC ATH and red vertical lines showing BTC performance from July 2021 to June 2022.

A16Z Crypto is the Web3 fund of the global venture capital giant, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While Web3 has become an all encompassing word, habouring a long lineup of sectors, this fund is aimed at startups launching or that have launched their services or products on the blockchain. The blockchain being the underlying technology, or for simpler understanding, the manufacturing plant for cryptocurrencies. The fund is also focused on core crypto related projects such as exchanges.

A16z Crypto’s Investment Strategy
The fund is structured like a hedge fund and not a traditional VC fund, with a goal to hold crypto investments beyond the normal 10 year venture capital cycle, according to Yahoo Finance.
It shoots to maintain aggressive investing in both bull and bear markets, consolidating on its long term view of the market.
Also, it will look towards investing at all stages. Think: Preseed to late stage, and you will be on track.

A16Z Crypto Stats and Analytics
A16Z began investing in crypto in 2013 with a first investment in cryptocurrency exchange platform, Coinbase. A16Z has raised a total of $7.6 billion under its crypto fund, a16z Crypto from 2018 to 2022.

A16Z has invested in a total of 113 companies since inception, with 75 of these being crypto/blockchain startups according to data from blockdata. There has been 4 major fails off these investments including Diem, OpenBazaar, Basis and B17 Clout.

Pie chart highlighting the number of successful and failed crypto investments

Investments from July 2021 to June 2022
During this period, a16z has made investments in 56 startups in the following subsectors: blockchain, gaming, custodial/wallets, staking and trading exchanges, analytics, tokenised carbon credits, NFT, metaverse assets, IOT and hardware.

Of these investments, blockchain startups have swooped up the majority of the cash, trailed by gaming. With each having an equal investment total of 10. Investments in both segments exceeded the $1 billion mark, as blockchain shoots past gaming by over a $100 million.

Comparison between number of investments per sector with cash allocation to each segment

Investments by Country

A16Z invested in crypto startups across 4 major continents. Investment count includes 44 in the US, 2 each in Canada, Vietnam, United Kingdom and Switzerland. It made single investments in India, Phillipines, Australia, France and Singapore.

Relevance of a Venture fund’s strategy
As a Web3 startup founder or a prospective one, it is important to know how crypto focused VC firms invest their funds to be strategically stand a chance to be captured into their nets.

As a venture capital firm, understanding and tracking investment trends of the big players could be the the thin line between a sub par outing and a stellar performance.

Visualisations created with Tableau, Data Wrapper, Excel

5 Things to Know Before Investing

It’s completely unbelievable the tons of things you can invest in today compared to a couple of decades ago, and let’s not forget how unbelievably easy it is to actually start investing, now more than ever. As a result, there has been an overload of messaging on how to invest and what to invest in. This rush of knowledge may leave you feeling flustered, as you wonder which way to go if you’re a potential newcomer still contemplating how to get started in the world of investing.

This is because the 21st century has produced an ocean of investment opportunities for anyone willing to participate, from stocks, bonds, derivatives, commodities, certificate of deposits, money market accounts, forex trading, mutual funds, crowdfunds, venture funds, peer-to-peer lending, angel investing, cryptocurrencies, tokens, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), initial coin offerings (ICOs), initial public offerings (IPOs), real estate, pyramid schemes, and scams. Yes, you read that right! Scams! The list is endless.

The basis for investing is to multiply wealth, not to lose money you’ve already made through your job or business venture. Hence, it is common sense to keep your money instead of throwing it away at the wrong projects, which makes knowing the right things to do before taking a giant leap into investing important for you and the future of your hard-earned cash.

At the back of your mind may be questions about investing. Some questions may have a straightforward answer, such as: Am I too old to start investing? No, you can begin investing at any age. Do I need a lot of capital to start investing? No, you just need a plan – the right plan for you. Also, you may have questions that don’t have clear-cut answers, such as: Will I lose money if I invest?

Probably, but if you do your homework, you’ll be fine. Such questions, whether straightforward or hazy to answer, need not inundate you. To make you feel confident, providing the right safeguards to help you make the most of this journey is of the essence.

Here are five things to know before investing:

Investing is risky.
This is the first and most important thing you need to know before getting started, and it can’t be overemphasized. Investing in anything has a risk factor to it, be it business or the stock market. In business, you take stock of the SWOT analysis before making your decision because you want to know if taking that step will be worthwhile. Understanding the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats will help you gauge the risk involved if you put your money in the business. You then determine how to mitigate the risks involved in order to be profitable. It is exactly the same with investing. A soaring stock this year may be a tanking stock the next year. Putting your money in an investment may bring you higher returns, lower-than-expected returns, or even no returns, eroding your initial capital.

Every professional investment firm is mandated by licensing authorities and regulatory bodies to issue this warning to all aspiring investors prior to their making an investing decision, as part of their service provision. Despite this, being knowledgeable about what you want to invest in is a start to assuaging potential risks. You will then be looking to start investing based on your risk appetite.

A few questions you will need to ask yourself could include: How risk tolerant am I? Will I feel terrible and stop investing if I lose my capital? Can I survive comfortably without this capital I’m about to invest? How much returns can I make from this investment? What do I plan to do with the returns I make? With this backdrop, it is good that you take note that investing is business, and should be approached as so in order to make success of it.

Investing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme.
The second thing you need to know before investing is that real-time investing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. Investing is a process. However, you have the opportunity to decide what you want your own investment process to look like. Do you want long-term investments that will provide an egg nest for you in retirement or do you want short-term investments that you can earn from on a rolling basis, quarterly or annually or even weekly? This is your choice, and your goal will be to seek knowledge of opportunities that give you exactly what you want out of investing. A good place to start learning is the Security and Exchange Commission’s office of investment education and advocacy. You may decide to have a mix of both long- and short-term investments across different portfolios or investment vehicles – the choice will be absolutely up to you. Examples of investing you can do for the long term could include stocks, bonds, real estate, cash, etc., while short-term investments like high-yield savings, treasury bills, and bonds can be traded for cash between 3-12 months, with maximum holding capacity of five years.

Real-time investing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. Investing is a process.

Investing is in grades.
Every veritable opportunity to grow your capital may be termed an investment, but not all investments are born equal. So, what you need to understand is that there are different levels to investing. The question is how much can you allot to investments after saving money to sustain your current lifestyle? What investment opportunities can this amount of money get you into? In his ground-breaking book on investing, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki described his inability to make certain types of investments because of cash limitations. For example, you may need to hold cash assets of up to $250,000 with a licensed broker to stand a chance to invest in an IPO according to Bankrate, and you may need as little as $10 to start investing in currencies with an online forex broker. Investing in mutual funds may require between $1,000 to $5,000 according to Investopedia. The question is, which grade of investing can your money start you off with?

Investing support pillars are important.
You can start investing on your own after gathering enough information that fits your needs. Notwithstanding, having investing support pillars may prove to be the thin line between success and failure. These pillars can include fund managers and investment advisors. A good advisor will provide guidance on the selection of the right options for you, or create a diversified portfolio to enable proper risk management. Professional support will steer you away from pitfalls, and keep you within the limits of the law in terms of rules guiding investing in your country like tax remittances, restrictions on retail investing, etc. Other investing support pillars can include experienced friends and family members who are willing to furnish you with mentoring and advice.

A good advisor will provide guidance on the selection of the right options for you, or create a diversified portfolio to enable proper risk management.

Investing opportunities will expand.
The fifth and final thing you need to know is that opportunities for investing will continue to expand with new knowledge and the introduction of nascent technologies. This will give rise to avenues for all kinds of fads. While some will stand the test of time, a lot will fizzle out or cause losses to investors. A common acronym in investing circles is FOMO (fear of missing out), meaning the frenzy caused by the herd mentality of a large number of people chasing an investing opportunity. The bottom line is, with proper investing advice, you can better navigate such scenarios even if it captures your entire community positively or negatively. Expanding your knowledge of investing will help you have the right mindset to approach new opportunities, seek professional advice, and take advantage of opportunities in the best way possible.

Embracing these five tips can go a long way towards giving you the needed edge to succeed as an investor.

To wrap this up, here are the five takeaways of things you need to know before investing:

• Investing is risky; it’s a business. Treat it like one by evaluating your risks.
• Investing isn’t a get-rich quick scheme. Investing is a process – enjoy the journey.
• Investing is in grades. Investing is zeroed down to what you have and finding what is suitable to invest in with that amount.
• Investing support pillars are important. Investing with professionals and mentors will provide a safety net for you.
• Investing opportunities will expand. Investing avenues will always abound, so keep gaining knowledge, and don’t FOMO.

With these 5 things you now know, how ready are you to start investing?

Did I leave anything out? Leave a comment below.

This article was first published on http://www.iridescentwomen.com

How Top Brands Lose Market Share: LinkedIn Social Saturday Analytics as Case Study for Real-World Markets

Case study brief: I conducted analysis on Social Saturday party to try to ascertain why a once bustling community was tanking in attendance and deduce avenues to remedy the drop. Hence, data mining and exploration were done to understand the historical performance of the community to draw insights from the data.

This report therefore provides:

• The observations from the analysis
• A possible explanation for the decline in performance
• Recommendations to improve the community
• The report could also serve as a platform-agnostic template for community builders who intend to build long lasting communities

1.0 BACKGROUND

The LinkedIn Social Saturday was created by a gentleman. Let’s call him, Dugal. He envisioned a meeting place for professionals which allows them have personal encounters with real people beyond what LinkedIn as a platform was willing to offer, and as you might guess, it was a major hit right from the word, GO. This is because LinkedIn encourages its users to connect with those they know, not those they don’t know, and follow influencers in categories or industries of interest. It made complete sense until people began realising vast amount of benefits by extending random connection requests. These benefits ranged from partnerships to new job or project opportunities, friendships, corporate growth and exposure etc.

Of course, as the saying goes, success breeds success. This Social Saturday success was picked up by a lady. Let’s call her Diana. Diana is a witty, smart creative that had just begun her journey as a LinkedIn creator and was ready to take her space to the next level. She latched on to the idea and was able to start her own version of the Social Saturday gathering, going as far as creating a corporate LinkedIn page for her own community of networking connections. By this time, the Social Saturday gathering was tagged Social Saturday party by its users.

Basically, members come together under a post to network and basically follow each other, thereby helping one another grow their networks. And did these networks actually grow or what? Off the roof numbers in a couple of months were starting to emerge, something which was previously unheard of on Linkedin.

I stumbled upon the hashtag, #SocialSaturday when the event was about 6 months on Diana’s page and about 9 months in on Dugal’s.

Out of curiosity, I decided to join the Social Saturday event on the next party day. I put in the hashtag and got to see a host of posts which were all parties with people tagged within those posts. I joined one of the parties by following a couple of people. I dropped a comment telling the party host that I was new and not feeling very comfortable asking to make connections. He told me what to do and how to go about having a successful experience as a participant of the Social Saturday networking events. He also mentioned that there was a main party at a specific time where more people will gather, and I could connect to even more people.

On my first day I was able to garner an average of 50 new connections. It was pretty interesting to me because I’ve been on LinkedIn for the past 10 years and within this timeframe, I had only been able to connect with about 1,000 people with whom I was not doing much personalized interactions with, and with most being individuals from my corporate and social life. However, the moment I joined Social Saturday, I made a decision to have real time interactions with the people I was connecting with. By my 5th week of attendance, my connections had increased by 100%.

Fig. 1 Screenshot of 100% growth in 5 weeks

2.0 DATA ANALYSIS PHASES

To achieve the purpose of this project, the following data analysis approaches were used;

1. 2.1 ASKING QUESTIONS

As a Data analyst, it didn’t take long for my eyes to spot a pattern after attending the first two Social Saturdays. I noticed a huge difference in engagement between the first Social Saturday event I attended and the second, on the main party. So, I decided to watch it on the third Saturday of my attendance, and also on the fourth. A particular pattern had begun to emerge on the main party, there was definitely a decrease in the number of engagements weekly. From these observation, I was able to ask and answer three questions.

Question 1: Is there a steady decline of party attendees?

Answer: Yes

I also noticed that the same people attending the Social Saturday event were the same people coming back every other week.

Question 2: How often is do the people attending the party come back?

Answer: Most people that attend the party have most likely attended previously.

Hence, I could see a high probability of participants coming to parties meeting the same people that they met in the past weeks, which in my opinion negated the whole idea of Social Saturday. I would like to mention the fact that all participating members of the Social Saturday were expected to always invite new participants. This could have been to checkmate a scenario where more past attendees were in attendance than fresh attendees from playing out.

Question 3: Are the usual party goers more than new attendees?

Answer: Yes

I decided to do my own analysis to find out what was causing Social Saturday on the main party to take such a gruesome nosedive in such a short time. To achieve this I moved into the second data analysis phase.

Before that, I tried to find out what other stakeholders thought about the decline in attendance of the party. In this case, regular party attendees are deemed stakeholders.

By scrolling through Diana’s LinkedIn page, where the main party is hosted, I was able to have a snapshot of the engagement trend prior to when I joined the events.

With all the buzz around it, I needed to understand why Social Saturday engagement was taking a downtown. Surprisingly, a brand-new acquaintance of mine, whom I just connected with on his personal Social Saturday post, felt that the tanking of Social Saturday engagement on the main party was as a result of the handlers of LinkedIn purposely utilizing the algorithm to throw a spook into the wheel of the main party since they were not so impressed about how the event caused glitches on the blue app on Saturdays.

I didn’t feel the way he did about the tanking of the main party’s engagement. I could say this because in trying to analyze the reason for such constantly reducing engagement on the main party, I had done a survey to see the level of engagement on other Social Saturday parties (more on that later). So I mentioned it to him that I didn’t think LinkedIn was trying in any way to hamper the growth of Social Saturday on the main party using their algorithm. He asked to see my dataset and I said I’ll think about sharing it.

Fig. 2 Capturing of stakeholder complaint

ThIs was what I needed; an active stakeholder complaining about the party’s decline.

2.2 PREPARING AND PROCESSING THE DATA

I went to work on my findings after extrapolating the data from the host’s page where the engagement is developed. Though open source, data credit was accorded to the host of the main party.

This I achieved by manually scrolling through months of LinkedIn content on Diana’s page to write down figures and transferring this data to an Excel sheet.

I focused on the following metrics (posts, likes, comments, shares) and collected relevant and accurate data;

Number of Social Saturday parties hosted in the last six months

Number of Comments

Number of Likes

Number of Shares

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While becoming an active participant on Social Saturday for the first four weeks, I noticed another trend: a lot of Social Saturday parties were also ongoing before the main networking event. These Social Saturday parties were happening simultaneously and across global timelines in their hundreds. Content creators on the Australian continent will generally lead the initiation of these events. They will be followed by Asians, then Europeans and Africans, and lastly, the Americas (North and South).

LinkedIn content creators were actively coming up with their own Social Saturday parties and inviting their own circle of friends. Some of these parties were thematically designed to meet various subjects or made need-specific for LinkedIn professionals. Most of them focused on networking and connections, some focused on job opportunities for job seekers etc. Party hosts tended to tag their friends so they could come to their parties with their own friends, thereby increasing engagement.

In trying to decipher the problem, I began to take this angle into consideration. Hence, I proceeded to collect and collate data on the number of Social Saturday parties that may be held on a Saturday.

The hashtag #SocialSaturday

#SocialSaturdaySquad #SocialSaturdayParty were mostly used by the community members on their posts.

The next phase of my analysis was to try to understand what was behind the Social Saturday hashtags. I realized that as a result of the popularity and growth of the Social Saturday events, there was a proliferation in the use of the hashtag by all sorts of posts unrelated to the Social Saturday party. I decided to do something with this information.

In addition to the first data set, I decided to do a LinkedIn search to find out the number of Social Saturday parties being hosted on Saturdays. On search, I was able to generate a maximum of 300 posts with Social Saturday hashtags which were strictly focused on Social Saturday after jettisoning any unrelated posts. Results beyond Saturday such as Social Sunday posts with Social Saturday hashtags were also thrown out of the collected data.

2.2 ANALYSING THE DATA

At this stage, I tried to understand the story my data was telling me and how the data may help me show stakeholders that LinkedIn was not undoing the Social Saturday party by tweaking its algorithm.

While studying the data, I realised that when this particular party began 6 months earlier, there were only two parties of its kind on LinkedIn. At the moment, a minimum of 300 parties could be hosted around the world on a Saturday.

I also realised that because community members sort new connections to grow their personal networks, they drifted into other parties where they could find these people. While the main party was still the largest and still hosted a huge number of attendees, these members got very familiar with themselves after the third week of attendance.

Also, it was common practice for new members to introduce themselves as coming to the party for the first time. Such new members showed up in minimal numbers.

2.3 SHARING THE DATA

To share the data, visualization tools were used; Tableau and Data wrapper.

This is how the data was presented, inclusive of recommendations to help recover engagement on the main party;

DATA MINING & COLLATION

• Date of data gathering: 5th October, 2022
• 25 Saturdays across 6 months (3rd Saturday in April – 1st Saturday in October) were accounted for
• Comparisons were made over 25 weeks across engagements: comments, likes and shares
• Comparisons were made between the main party and other parties on 9th October.

DATA LIMITATIONS

• Search on #SocialSaturday produced an estimated 300 parties, after throwing out proliferated posts which just had the hashtag but were not directly related to the event. These parties consisted of 3 categories; group parties, individual posts and polls.
• Sunday parties with #SocialSaturday were excluded from the data.
• The search didn’t deliver a complete list as parties I attended were missing. Hence, this data isn’t exhaustive but useful to provide fair analysis.

DATA SUMMARY

Engagement metrics from the first week to weeks 10 and 25 are highlighted below;

• Week 1: 356 Likes, 535 Comments, 8 Shares
• Week 10: 2533 Likes, 34,097 Comments, 136 Shares (Party attendance peaked in June)
• Week 25: 1258 Likes, 8,601 Comments, 31 Shares (day data was taken)

Fig. 3 Likes metrics

Likes peaked in week 8 and has continued on a downward trend

Fig. 4 Comments metrics

Comments peaked at week 10 and has reduced to a third of that number

Fig. 5 Shares metrics

Shares peaked to 200 in Week 11 and stayed remained within the 30s range

Fig. 6 Bar Chart showing Combined metrics of Comments, Likes, Shares

Comparing the three types of engagements (likes, comments, shares) using bar charts

Fig. 7 Line Chart comparison of social metrics

Comparing the three types of engagements (likes, comments, shares) using line charts

3.0 ANALYSIS EXPLANATION

• Fewer people are coming to the main party
• Everyone that comes may post their introductory profiles multiple times but may not like the main post
• Shares are the least used form of engagement

As at the time the data was taken in Week 25, the engagement had dropped from its peak to 1258 Likes, 8,601 Comments, 31 Shares. This represented a 53 % drop from its peak Likes, a 75% drop from its peak comments and a 85% drop from its peak Shares.

The decline can be explained from two perspectives;

• Growth of other parties against the main party
• The law of diminishing marginal utility

1. 1. Growth of other parties against the main party

There was growth of other parties against the main parties by 29,900% within the same timeframe, the data shows that fewer people were visiting the main party.

Fig. 8 Line Chart showing growth of other parties over the main party with the main party at zero

Other Parties: Other parties were exploding in their own circles across LinkedIn and global time zones, in turn affecting attendance and participation of the main party.

The implications of this had its pros and cons;

Pros

1. There is a collective growth of the #SocialSaturday community with the distributed effect of other parties.

Other parties rock hard. Party goers were getting more value from attending them than attending the main party, as they were able to meet and connect with different people every week as opposed to the main party.

• Metrics from 3 Other parties, on October 9.
• Bob’s party metrics: 499 Likes, 898 Comments
• Dija’s party metrics: 120 Likes, 244 Comments, 1 Share
• Blessing’s party metrics: 253 Likes, 518 Comments, 4 Shares

Cons

1. As party goers created their own Social Saturday parties, a reduction in main party engagement and attendance increased.

2. Diminishing Marginal Returns

The law of diminishing marginal returns states: After some optimal level of capacity utilization, the addition of any larger amounts of a factor of production will inevitably yield decreased per-unit incremental returns. (Investopedia)

With respect to the reduction in engagement, this can also be viewed from various angles: The more the same people visit the party, the more familiar everyone becomes and the less valuable the party is with regards to the main objective of meeting new people. All second and third connections eventually become first connections, and there are no new people left. This can be explained with the tree diagram below;

4.0 RECOMMENDATIONS

After analysing this data, my recommendations for better engagement on the main party were as follows;

1. All party host should tag the host of the main party. Data showed that of the 300 posts only three tagged the main party.

2. All participants should engage with the main party post by at least dropping a LIKE to increase post visibility.

3. All party attendees of the main party should invite their circle of friends to the main party, encouraging p more people to look forward to attending. If not, we will all be attending parties where everyone knows everyone making for a boring experience.

4. All participants should follow the main party hashtag and page.

5. All participants should share thoughts in the comments section of the presentation.

5.0 DATA SHARING AND FEEDBACK

Data was shared openly via a 10 page report on LinkedIn to participants of the Social Saturday soiree. Participants responses varied based on their perceptions on the Social Saturday party;

Some promised to take action, a few felt others should quit hosting their own parties, some said attending the parties felt monotonous as they hardly met new people, others shared their thoughts on the main party: a major concern was the non-communication of the party host with participants which made other parties with actively communicating hosts more attractive and engaging.

Fig. 8 Report Sharing

The post generated a total of 126 reactions, 156 comments and 2 reposts (shares).

5.1 ACT PHASE

In this phase, stakeholders aired their views with majority of them agreeing that it was not LinkedIn algorithm causing the downhill of the Social Saturday party but a proliferation of the party itself by many community members.

THOUGHTS

Relationship between Social Saturday and a real-life business or market scenario where a big player loses market share as a market gets saturated?

1. Ease of entry: With ease of entry into a lucrative market, competitors come in to capture market share from the first entrant. While Dugal created the first business in the market, Diana came in and captured a larger market share with her own business model, causing her to experience major growth in user base. In this case, she experienced major growth in connections and followers within a very short period of time. Other participants realizing they could easily duplicate this success, created their own parties, impacting the engagement of what had become the main party. Service based industries such as fashion and beauty, experienced such a shakeup in the 2010s. The growth of prominent makeup artistes in a country like Nigeria where people seek opportunities for better livelihoods saw new entrants flooding the market and watering down the star power of the major players and disintegrating market share. The Operating System market has been monopolised by technology players who possess the wherewithal to create a variety of hardware to sustain the sales of their product e.g. Apple and its iOS.

2. Lack of a proprietary vehicle: With no proprietary instrument needed to be created to get into a business, nothing stops new entrants from coming in to participate in a market that has high growth potential. Other industries that experienced the fate of the makeup industry is the party and events planning and the cake craft sectors. Everyone was invited to the party,thereby causing huge market fragmentation with minimal number of market leaders.

3. Impact of today’s cheap money: Today’s cheap money has ramifications on tomorrow’s revenue. To generate revenue and look lucrative, service-based businesses flooded the markets with training products. These services have eroded their customer base in the long run as customers don’t need to go so far to get a service provider. In the 2000s, a makeup artiste was viewed with so much star power, by the close of 2020, there’s a makeup shop on every street.

4. Complacency: Market leaders may rest on their oars and forget to do simple things that got them to where they are in the first place. This is may be as simple as engaging with the market or consumers that they serve. Or taking out time to feel the pulse of the market and go with the flow. Imagine being thematic with business introductions on a timely basis. Every social media platform had its own theme and has been able to release new angles to stay relevant to their market. Instagram and Youtube are products we can relate to in this regard.

5. Innovation: New innovations can blow the ball right out of the park for market leaders, leaving them confused and almost playing catchup. Will we say this is a state Google finds itself with the introduction of search AI, ChatGPT?

For markets or products to stay relevant, they need to look at their data and ask relevant questions to enable data-driven decision-making. As was seen with this case study, the entire data analysis process which involves – ASK. PREPARE. PROCESS. ANALYZE. SHARE. ACT – was implemented to decide on the best recommendations to keep the main party relevant. The same is true for all markets, no matter the industry or proprietary technology which makes for tougher entries, staying on their toes should be priority for all market leaders.

EXTENDING PRODUCT LIFECYCLE

The product life cycle is made up of 4 stages: – The introduction stage where the community kicks off.- The growth stage is where the community comes to the knowledge of the public and starts to gain increasing adoption.- The maturity stage where the community peaks and reaches optimal engagement.- Decline stage where the party starts to decline.

Disclosure: While the events are largely true, all names have been changed to focus on the analysis.

Tools used for this analysis: Excel, Tableau, Data Wrapper

How do you know if this new drug will heal you? This tech startup idea, Evidation Health can prove drug efficacy

Strategist. Analyst. Creative. Engineer

Koko Ombu

If there is anything we all crave more than being wealthy is being healthy.

Health is the most lucrative state any human being can attain and we all desire it.

In the instance of any form of disease, we all fight to get it back by taking medications, engaging health programs and products etc.

Of course, the people creating these products know that as long as their products perfect your ill health, you will patronise them again.

So they have to make sure every product or service is as perfect as it gets but how can they know this?

By conducting real life trials on people of course, but the more people they can conduct these trials on, the more accurate their results can become when sampling the various reactions from each of these patient data.

And Evidation helps get more and more people to get these product outcomes to the best possible level for use in the real world.

What is Evidation Health?

Evidation Health enables healthcare companies quantify outcomes in the digital era by connecting patients to healthcare products to ascertain its efficacy. By enrolling patients for research trials faster than conventional methods, Evidation Health can provide a digital health enabled future for all.

Evidation Health is a tech startup idea with the ability to keep the world’s data safe, including yours.

Startup: Evidation Health

Founded:  2014

Founders

Luca Foschini, Mikki Nasch, Christine Lemke, Alessio Signorini

 

Founders’ Inspiration

The shared vision between GE Ventures and Stanford Health for a digital health enabled future was the inspiration behind Evidation Health.

Headquarters: San Mateo, Carlifornia

Vision: To build a digital health enabled future. (imagined by them).

Website: http://www.evidation.com

The Pitch (The idea in 20 words)

Evidation Health is a digital healthcare platform using real life data from connected patients to quantify healthcare product outcomes.

Industry

Health tech, Software, Data Analytics

Strategy

Evidation Health hosts a technology platform that connects healthcare companies with patients.

The startup has heavy hitting backers in General Electric Ventures and Stanford Healthcare that believe in the future of healthcare and patient collaborations to improve patient outcomes.

It developed a real life study solution and enrolls participants ten times faster than conventional methods, conducting research through trials.

It congregates real life patient data from hundreds of applications and devices to evaluate multiple angles to a singular technique to rate or prove efficacy.

The startup works with healthcare system, pharmaceutical companies, digital health solution vendors and payers to measure patient behavior driven outcomes to enable these clients understand and increase their product’s impact.

Evidation Health provides software to analyse large datasets on behalf of clients.

Revenue Model

Evidation revenue is generated from the following;

·         Healthcare companies pay to understand patient behavior on outcomes and cost of care.

·         Healthcare companies pay for the development evidence base for their solutions.

 

Growth and Market prospects

Evidation Health is experiencing growth through patronage from pharmaceutical companies and digital healthcare providers.

Funding

Evidation Health is largely funded by investors;

Venture: Undisclosed – August 2012

Seed: Undisclosed – June 2013

Series A: $6 million – December 2014

Series B: $11.6 – June 2016
Series B: $3.4 million – October 2016

Venture: $10 million – April 2017

Total Funding: $31 million

Investors

Evidation Health has successfully raised investment funding from some of the best niche health focused venture capital institutions. Some of these investors include;

• Sanofi Ventures
• GE Ventures
• Rock Health
• AMV Holding

Future Strategy

The future strategy of Evidation Health is to enhance the development of its large scale behavioural analytics, health outcome measurements and digital biomarkers capabilities.

Industry Insights

Clinical trials are the gold standard for drug approvals. Does it work or does it not work? What are the side effects and can they be managed? Can this drug be used on a certain group of people and not on others? All these questions are asked to determine safety of drug performance with different age groups. And these questions can only be understood when real people participate in these trials to validate the products outcome. Hence, this data is critical in improving the quality and delivery of healthcare and the best ways to integrate new therapies and technologies into real world clinical practice.

Disrupts

Evidation Health disrupts traditional clinical trial setting by using virtualised pragmatic trials at scale to accelerate outcomes.

Opportunity for Idea Creators

This is an opportunity for idea creators, albeit a very enormous task. From the initiation to the development of a system like Cockroachdb, it takes much more than just guts to pull this one off.

On the look out to create more value within this industry sector way should be;

• Developers
• Healthcare practitioners
• Data Analysts
• Medical Professionals
• Healthcare institutions
• And any other crazy head who thinks and can, can make things happen

Evidation Health is providing accelerated measures to guarantee the safety of healthcare products and services in the real world.

What can you make of this idea?

And before you go, please do all or one of these three things;

• Please leave us a comment. I will like to share in your thoughts and have a good conversation with you on this startup idea.

• Click on the icons and share on social media. Somebody somewhere may need this information to move to the next level in life and that person may just be you, receiving a shared content.

• Leave your email above. I will take you through my free starter course so you learn how to strategise for start-ups and get paid.

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Disclosure: This review, article or report was first posted on http://www.babeonideas.com blog in 2017. The http://www.babeonideas.com blog no longer exists. Some information may be outdated or a startup may no longer exist in the form or all of its form when it was first reviewed.

Koko Ombu

Big Brother for investors? Oddup spots which tech startup will make you money and which won’t

Strategist. Analyst. Creative. Engineer

Koko Ombu

Picture courtesy; babeonideas.wordpress.com

As an investor what is your biggest fear?

Every right thinking investor knows that their biggest fear is not investing money in the right company or product and not realising anticipated returns on their investments.

Is this fear normal to you? Most likely it is.

However, it does not stop investors from worrying over what can become of their capital in the event of non-performance.

Does this sound familiar?

Interesting tech startups have popped up all over the place.

All touting big time promise of applications that will change the way we are used to doing things, swooping up venture capital, angel and institutional funding at every turn.

But can all of these tech startup promises come true?

Definitely not!

So how can you as an investor, make the most informed decisions before staking with a brand new tech startup?

Betting on Oddup’s monitoring and mapping model could enable you make the best investment decisions.

Oddup

Tech startup, Oddup says it can spot startups with the most potential to make you the most money off your investments by showing you which to invest in and which to shun.

Is Oddup the Big Brother of Investors?

Having the ability to see what others cannot is Big Brother-ish in nature and Oddup as a rating tool believes it has what it takes to show investors which startups are most likely to succeed by providing trusted and transparent information on early stage startups.

Oddup is doing this, all in a bid to give you the best odd guess on startups to invest in.

Startup: Oddup

Founded: March 2014

 

Founders

James Giancotti, Jackie Lam

Founding team are former investment professionals having experience in investment banking and capital markets.

Founders’ inspiration

Oddup founders spotted the gap in trusted data on early stage startups needed for investors to make informed decisions before investments.

Headquarters: Sheung Wan, Hong Kong Island

Vision: To become the go-to rating tool for startup validation by providing a due diligence snapshot to potential investors.

Website: http://www.oddup.com

The Pitch (The idea in 20 words)

Oddup is empowering smart investment decisions with rating scores, valuations, analyst commentary on startups.

 

Industry

Investments, Data Analysis, Technology

 

Strategy

Using its analytics software, Oddup uses criteria such as product, location, competitors, team, growth potential etc., to generate an Oddup score from 0 to 100, which shows startup viability.

It offers guides to investors by attaching buy, sell or hold rating matched with commentaries inclusive of prospective valuation on what each startup could be worth.

Oddup runs an analyst network strategy of first class professionals with research experience from some of the world’s biggest financial data institutions spread across Taiwan, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing, Singapore, Sydney and Melbourne.

Oddup is in partnership with Thomas Reuters through data sharing, utilising its information on publicly listed companies which are probable competitors to start-ups. This strategic move granted it integration to the Eikon platform which realises over 150,000 users across the globe.

Another key strategy of Oddup is to provide optimum validation and exposure to start-ups needing future funding from investors.

Growth and Market prospects

Since inception, Oddup has grown to host about 15,000 startups in its database, rating 2000 investment worthy startups.

Oddup boasts fortune 500 companies including Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan as part of its clientele base among over 1000 paying clients and recurring revenue of $2.9 million annually.

Revenue model

Oddup business model is simple;

• All users access free basic information on startups  on sign up
• Users pay subscription fee to access startup analysis and commentaries
• Users access reports on a single startup on Oddup for $99 or full reports for $499 monthly

 

Funding

Oddup as a tech startup idea has been funded from seed stage by VCs;

Seed: $1,225 million – 2015 – 2016

Series A: $6 million – April 2017
Total Funding: $7,225 million

Investors

Oddup has received nods from seed to early stage investors such as;

• Click Ventures
• Kima Ventures
• Big Colors
• 500 Startups

Future Strategy

• Not stated

Industry Insights

Oddup is joining forces with likes of Thomson Reuters through the use of the Eikon platform to provide timely analysis on start-ups. This is innovative for the industry as Thomson Reuters data served institutionalised and quoted companies.

Opportunity for Idea Creators

Oddup is positioning itself as the go to source on real time information on startups before investors can bet on them with their capital.

This loophole spotted in the startup world by Oddup founders is real and has a massive market and serves up still viable opportunities for innovators to add value to this existing model.

On the look out to create more value within this industry sector in a technology driven way should be;

• Investment analysts
• Strategists
• Researchers
• Financial analysts
• Data analysts
• Business management firms
• And any other crazy head who thinks and can, can make things happen

Can you make a better startup  big brother platform than Oddup?

The world awaits!

And before you go, please do all or one of these three things;

• Please leave us a comment. I will like to share in your thoughts and have a good conversation with you on this startup idea.

• Click on the icons and share on social media. Somebody somewhere may need this information to move to the next level in life and that person may just be you, receiving a shared content.

• Leave your email above. I will take you through my free starter course so you learn how to strategise for start-ups and get paid.

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