Learn more about the startups coworking in our London office in our first Startup Spolight. Each month we will be giving you insight into the Startups based in the Rainmaking Loft. Our first month starts with Publicate.

Publicate is a fantastic new web app based in our coworking space. It takes the hassle off businesses and professionals to create and share better content online. With Publicate people can use content curation to easily create blog posts, newsletters and weekly round-ups which can be shared as web pages, embedded on websites, and sent by email.

Publicate, composes of Chris, the founder and product guy, and Caedmon, the brains behind the development. They have been part of our coworking community since August 2014. Since its creation Publicate has gone from strength to strength, with more than 400 startups & big brands using the service, including the Rainmaking Loft.

We managed to grab a few minutes of Chris’ time to get to know his story.

Publicate helps people to easily create and share engaging news letters and blog posts from content they find online.

R: What attracted you to become an entrepreneur?

C: I've always wanted to have my own business. That is why I did product design with engineering at University. It was quite an entrepreneurial degree, in the sense that you went through the full product cycle, such as exploring a concept, turning it into a product, and then taking it through to launch and marketing.

Alongside this, I also wanted to get some practical business experience before I started my own venture, so after my degree I went to work for a Taiwanese LCD manufacturer doing business development, where I worked with them for over five years in their Amsterdam & Taiwan office.

R: How did the idea of Publicate come about?

C: During my time in Taiwan, I wanted to build my online brand and presence. It was around the time when a lot of industry professionals were starting to use social media professionally and were placing greater importance on having a personal online brand. I too started building my online brand, but soon realised that sharing individual links and pieces of information through social media, was very time consuming and didn’t feel like it wholly represent me online the way I wanted to.

So I started to think about doing a blog, but I quickly found it difficult to maintain and provide regular content.

"The problem was; creating content is very time consuming."

I chatted to a few people, and found they also had similar problems, but what I noticed was that all professionals, including myself were spending at least thirty minutes a day keeping up to date with industry knowledge and news.

So I thought to myself, how could I use this effort that I was already making everyday, to better represent myself online and get more value out of the content I am already searching through and consuming? And that’s where the idea for Publicate came from.

R: What were the biggest struggles in your startup/entrepreneur journey?

C: The biggest mistake that I made was taking a huge feature list of what I wanted the product to be to an agency and asking if they could build it, obviously they were like “yeah, of course we can!”, where as what they should have done was ask what is the problem we are trying to solve and what is the simplest way of solving it. 

The other mistake I made was that I fell in love with the solution, which is a dangerous mistake, as it means that you don’t approach things with the correct product procedure and end up getting emotionally attached to how you think the product should be, rather than what it actually needs to be, so when it comes to cutting features and taking criticism it gets personal, rather than it just being a business decision.

So ultimately the agency spent 12 months trying to build a product, inevitably producing a very complex product that no-one wanted, and leaving me spending another 12 months trying to fix it, before having run out of money and having to call it a day and accept the first company as a failure.

"I, therefore, realised that my biggest error with the first business was the way that I had gone about the product management process."

Another mistake was definitely trying to market the product far too early.

One of the misconceptions with the lean startup concept, is that people think you need to “get it out as fast as possible and get as many people using it as fast as possible”. Get the product out as fast as possible I totally agree with, and the simplest solution to the problem as possible so that you can start learning about your users and move the product towards reaching product market fit, but you shouldn’t be worrying about marketing or spending money on marketing until you do reach product market fit, otherwise you get distracted and waste money.

So from these learnings since April 2014, we started to look at the concept again, as I still believed in the problem and to see if we could create a tool that people would really find valuable, so we started another company and have started again.

R: Do you have any advice for the other entrepreneurs to be?

C: I would say regardless of what type of founder you are; the most important thing about running a startup is the product process that you go through, so read Lean Analytics, it’s entrepreneur crack.

You also have to understand the customers in detail, so that the solution you create can provide value in solving a real problem for them, always start with a real problem, for real customers. I realise that’s where my biggest failing was so that’s why I did tons of research and specialised as much as I could in product management processes, which is now why I teach product management at General Assembly.

R: What are the next steps and the vision for Publicate?

C: The plan is to raise funding, expand the team, and get to product market fit before marketing starts.

The end vision for the product is to create a valuable tool that optimises peoples marketing efforts, by enabling them to create the most relevant content for their audience on the most relevant channel, getting them the best results. So to get to this point the exciting next step is to put analytics into the product, where customers can see what content is performing well on which channels and we can then utilise this data to start optimising efforts.

But right now we are still focused on usability and making a product, that people love, it’s important to have the big vision, but start simple.

R: How did coworking in the Rainmaking Loft help your business? 

C: I tried to avoid coming to a coworking space for as long as possible because I just saw the desk fee as a cost. So for the first two years of the previous company I worked from home and coffee shops, but I actually started to go a little bit crazy as you just have yourself for company and discussions.

What I particularly like at the Rainmaking Loft is that all the people are awesome, so the community and the coworking environment is massively helpful, not only does it keep you sane as you’re not on your own, but all the people at Rainmaking Loft are particularly sociable and everybody is willing to help. For example, when I have pressing issues or need some insights there are a lot of people within the Loft that have got a lot of experience with different things, and their insight is incredibly valuable.

It’s very easy to walk over to anyone and just say “hey I’m struggling with this what do you think?” and they are always more than happy to give advice, so it is almost like you have an extended team without having to pay for them.

 

Discover Publicate: publicate.it

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