How great service-based companies get built

Although our service is software, I’m always struck by the similarity between the challenges we face at Pike13 and those faced by Pike13’s customers who provide personal services like tutoring or coaching. Our whole reason for being at Pike13 is to build a great service-based company by helping our customers do the same.

Yesterday we were fortunate enough to have one of our investors, Boris Wertz of version one ventures, join us for a brown bag talk. Before becoming an investor, Boris was the Chief Operating Officer of AbeBooks.com, the world’s largest marketplace for new, used, and rare and out-of-print books. AbeBooks.com was acquired by Amazon in 2008.

Boris shared insights from his experience as both an investor and an entrepreneur. I took away four key points about how great software-as-a-service companies get built:

1. Set out with a crazy, ambitious goal to build something great. And after you succeed, set another crazy ambitious goal. Great service-based businesses are hard to build, and building them doesn’t happen overnight.

2. Be great at product and at sales and marketing. In the beginning, most of your customers may come from word of mouth—providing great service will be enough to help you grow. At a certain scale, you also need to become great at promoting the terrific service you provide. Few entrepreneurs are great at both.

3. Be really good at hiring. So many companies are great at hiring when they have fewer than ten employees but lose their focus as they grow to twenty, fifty, a hundred. The culture changes or employees lose the drive and passion that fueled the company in the beginning.

4. Have an insane focus on metrics. Whoever is constantly testing and learning wins. In Boris’s words: “Be a testing machine.” Whether your business is software or a personal service, there are always opportunities to experiment and methodically learn how to get better at what you do.

Now that we’ve met our initial crazy, ambitious goal of convincing investors like Boris to join us in pursuing our dreams, our next crazy, ambitious goal is to help hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs build great personal services businesses.

photo credit: twiga269 ॐ FEMEN via photopin cc