96. Incubating a Startup

Becky Jaimes is a product manager at Salesforce. She's interviewing Wesley Magness, the founder of ElectricSMS, and Melanie Plaza, the Head of Technology at AE Studio. ElectricSMS is a service to help consumers manage their various subscriptions, whether that's recurring orders of dog food or monthly boxes of snacks.

ElectricSMS started as a project within AE Studio's incubator program, fitting in with their ethos to empower people through technology. AE Studio is a bootstrapped company that works with clients by offering development, data science, and design help to enable startups and enterprises to build technology products that helps humans, not profits. Their philosophy is to build products that treat their users well, so that the business can grow much more healthily than if you trick users into purchasing something they didn't mean to, or otherwise making it difficult for them to cancel. ElectricSMS is an example of how those principles came together in a collaborative partnership.

For listeners interested in starting their own business, Wesley suggests finding a customer before working on something. You don't need an actual user to work with, but rather, a customer or industry who you know would benefit from what you built. With services like Heroku and Stripe it can be very easy to build an MVP from the ground up. Melanie concurs, and suggests talking to people who might want what you're making, and what their problems and needs are. Research what other solutions have and haven't worked. Startups can also reach out to AE Studio for direct consultation on taking their product to the next level, and potentially join their incubator program as well.

Links from this episode

• ElectricSMS helps users manage their subscriptions through their phone
• Effective altruism movement advocates using evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others

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