In this episode of Building Infinite Red, the owners are joined by Justin Huskey, Head of Design at Infinite Red. They discuss our Startup Package - what it is, how we built it, and who it’s for.
Episode Links
• Startup Package blog post.
• Interested in learning more about our Startup Package? Head over here!
Connect with the owners on Twitter!
• Todd Werth: @twerth
• Jamon Holmgren: @jamonholmgren
• Gant Laborde: @gantlaborde
Todd Werth: Welcome back to Building Infinite Red. This is Todd Werth, I'm CEO and founder of Infinite Red. Today we're going to be talking about a really interesting subject. Sometimes we have clients who really haven't got from zero to one yet in the businesses they're building as entrepreneurs. And often of course as we design and build applications or other types of software for them, we need them to be at one before we can build them. But we want to help these people. We do know how to get from zero to one, but we didn't offer a service for that. So we all put our heads together and we came up with a service for that and that's what we're going to be talking about today. First I want to introduce everyone on this episode, we have Jamon Holmgren.
Jamon Holmgren: Hey everybody.
Todd Werth: He is founder and CTO of Infinite Red, we have Gant Laborde.
Gant Laborde: Hello.
Todd Werth: He is one of the owners of the company and executive here. And then today, we have a new person that you all have not heard, Justin Huskey. He's actually our lead of design and he is the architect of what we're talking about today. Welcome Justin.
Justin Huskey: Thanks everyone. It's nice to be here.
Todd Werth: Cool, so let's start out and describe.... I did a quick tease there, but let's describe what the problem we saw with our clients coming in, and then we can go into the details on how we solved that.
Jamon Holmgren: Justin and I were talking one day and it was just this discussion about what do we do with all these leads that are coming in that don't have the money? Is there something we can provide to them? They would come to us pre-funding and that meant that they really only had a little bit of money, generally their own, or maybe a little tiny bit of seed money, but nothing big. We're talking somewhere in the range of 20 to $50,000, something like that, which isn't really enough to do an MVP. Generally you're going to be much more than that. You're going to be three to five times more than that to do any sort of an MVP, that includes the development portion of it.
Jamon Holmgren: What I thought was really interesting about this is we already had a huge chunk of stuff that was valuable to these early stage startups. We already had a bunch of stuff. And I'm going to let Justin talk more about that. But there was also a business need on top of that. And I'll talk about more of what we added for the business side of it. The founders were coming to us and a lot of times are first time founders. They didn't necessarily know all the different pieces. They didn't know what they didn't know.
Jamon Holmgren: They didn't know the pieces that they needed to learn. They were really interested in how do I learn how to do fundraising? Almost like they needed an incubator and a founder academy type of a thing all in one. And so, these discussions led to the idea of, well let's do a startup package. Let's do something that they can buy that is a package that brings to them a whole lot of value right up front, but more importantly, brings them a lot of education and puts them in a position to succeed.
Justin Huskey: Yeah, that's exactly right, Jamon. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that were coming to us and they saw a need in their market because they're out there working in it every day. Some need that sometimes we don't even see because we work in the tech industry. So we saw a lot of really great ideas but they needed some advice and some guidance on how to actually launch a startup and have it succeed in the tech space. That's how the startup package was born as we saw that and we wanted to be able to help them but definitely bring some of that startup advice to it where you test it before you go all in on it.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. We originally called it the pitch package because that was the thing that I brought to it. Justin had a really good plan for the design portion of it and validating a lot of the user needs and really coming up with an amazing design. But what I wanted to do was bring in the idea of the goal of this is to be able to pitch it effectively to investors. Whether it's friends and family, whether it's an actual angel investor or later on really going through all of the deeper investment rounds.
Jamon Holmgren: I think the key thing was that it wasn't just that they were going to get a design, and I would like to talk more about like what they actually get at some point here. But also with the goal that this isn't just us designing to maybe build it and show off, it was designing it in order to get investment.
Jamon Holmgren: Now, in some cases people want a bootstrap. They have the money internally and they want to be able to do that, and we can adjust what we do to not be so much focused on pitching. But there's still many validation steps that have to happen in between the initial idea and then actually starting to code. We call it the pitch package. We actually then renamed it later to the startup package, which is a little more general and fits more our broader goals for it.
Todd Werth: Some of you might be wondering, "Well, I've listened to this podcast, I'm familiar with the company. You guys seem to make design and make good software. That's fantastic. But what the heck? Why are you giving advice for startup? Why are you qualified?" The short answer is we're completely not; we're just BS-ing.
Todd Werth: No, I personally have started three companies. Second one was an investor backed company and the other two were bootstrapped by me. We also have other experience in our team, a similar experience. That's one thing, just our personal experience, but mostly we work for a lot of startups. We hear a lot of the same things and having pitched to investors myself, I know all of the questions that are going to get asked when they first pitch to investors. Very common, "What's your customer acquisition plan?" And if you're just staring at them wishing you could Google what a customer acquisition plan was, that's probably not going to go well.
Todd Werth: So there's a lot of things that we do already help our clients with in that regard. And we'd say, revenue plan, customer acquisition plan, these are the things they're going to ask you that kind of stuff. That's where we have some expertise and help out there. From our business perspective, why does this help us?
Jamon Holmgren: We were really broadening our reach with the design department. And what we found was that we had people who were willing to start, but the projects weren't funded enough to say, "Hey, here's a whole proposal for design and development." And then they could just say yes, because they didn't have the funding yet. They needed to get partway through, get the funding and then come back for the development side of it. The startup package fits in there perfectly because it allows them to get partway through. It's not as much of a commitment. Like I said, 20 to 50 K is generally the range. That's not always the range, but that is generally the range that we're operating within. And then a lot of these founders can afford that. And then once they hit that point, they go out, they raise money and they come back with a lot more money that allows them to actually build the app on the programming side of things.
Jamon Holmgren: So this allowed us as a business to bring in design projects that obviously keep our design team busy and doing some really cool work. But also feeding that back into our development team, which is a much larger team.
Gant Laborde: You know, we're speaking about this at a pretty high level. We're talking about people who know why they need this and we're talking about why it's good to us. But I think there's something that I'd like to put in here. Is the why is this needed? Because I still run into people who think that they just need to read one book on iOS programming, create their million dollar app idea, and be done with it. And the way they envision the way the market actually works today is a pretty outdated concept. So I think that when we were in this world, there's an app for that kind of mentality, I think we might want to come back and say a little bit on why you need to actually step really hard, have a good pitch package or start-up package, and make a big influence versus somebody who can do something on a shoestring budget.
Justin Huskey: Yeah, that's a great point, Gant. One of the reasons we put this together is because the dynamics of user expectations have actually shifted a lot in the last couple of years. So where it used to be enough to have an app on the app store and get it out there, It's very vanilla. It looks kind of like the MVP version of it. A lot of user expectations have now shifted to where they've gotten used to apps being more polished. They're used to apps having a lot of thought put into them. They're used to having a user experience that's different and very unique. And so in order for new people and new businesses to go in there and compete, they're competing against millions of dollars in funding.
Justin Huskey: And so what we do at the startup package is we identify, what's the secret sauce that they're bringing to the market? And when we boil that down, that's where we really just go all in on it so that they actually have a fighting chance against these companies that are raising millions of dollars in seed money.
Todd Werth: If you are a developer in San Francisco and you're in an Uber, you eventually will get pitched. Not eventually, probably every other ride you'll get pitched.
Todd Werth: This literally happened that Jamon and Gant when I was living, when I was living in San Francisco were in an Uber with me and it literally happened.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. He pitched the idea to us when he heard that we do apps. And I'm sure it just constantly, that's this world, right? But what's really interesting now is I have a new defense instead of saying, "Hey, I can't pay my mortgage with a percentage of your zero income company." Now actually the funny thing I've found is I'll Google for a little bit and I will find competitors and their ideas are sort of getting saturated and it's not first to the trough as much as it is best at the trough.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. And I've had that happen before where a friend will say, "I have this idea." And they explain it to me and then I just do a quick search on the app store and there's six apps that do that. And one of them even told me, I was afraid to search on the app store because I thought Apple might steal my idea. yeah. It's very different perception out there from reality on this stuff. I mean it's not that Apple never steals ideas, the term Sherlocking is there for a reason. They're not going to steal someone's random search on the app store. I think that it's more important to actually, these days I think the quality of it's certainly important but, what I've actually found for startup ideas, what's really interesting is to take two things and combine them. And that's a really good way to be unique.
Jamon Holmgren: So instead of just trying to be the one like Craigslist, there's already one out there. There's many of them out there. There's tons of them. And they all have more attraction than you. Instead of doing that, you can become the Craigslist used windows or something. And you can find some niche like that where you take two things, especially if it's two things that you have exposure in. This kind of overlap of two different things. I've worked in the construction industry and I work in the tech industry now. I'm finding something construction tech related would make sense for me if I were to build an app.
Gant Laborde: I think that's a really good avenue, especially if it fits something that you're passionate about, is taking things that you care about and connecting them. And that's what electronics and apps and websites are so fantastic at. What I think that really is a big key thing is that we used to have people who are passionate about something, pitching to developers. And we're in a world today where I think we need to arm people to pitch effectively towards investors.
Todd Werth: So there's lots of fun stories there. But what I'd like to get into, so we've explained the startup package and all that. I would like to get into what we came up with. Like how we saw the problem, we identified it'd be useful for us, and then we had to make it make it an actual product or productized service. So let's start off, what do we do? Just start general. And then we can get more specific. Generally speaking, what do we provide our clients when they buy the startup package?
Justin Huskey: That's a great question, Todd. Our clients at the end of a startup package, they get a couple of things. One is they have a complete designed prototype that they can actually put on their phone. And what that means is we have stitched together the designs for the app in a way that replicates what a developed product could look like. And then two, what we actually do is we give them a presentation that they can take with them as they're pitching this to investors and people who are interested in getting involved in the app. And it not only shows the features of the app, but it also tells the story of the app and why it's there and the market that it's moving into.
Todd Werth: Interesting, Justin. Jamon, as the person who is often in sales calls and stuff, you presented similar to perspective clients that Justin just described, or is there anything else that you do?
Jamon Holmgren: I think he nailed it. I do focus on the business part of it because a lot of times, I think one of the points make is when you're creating an app, you're not just creating an app, you're creating a business. You really need to be thinking about the fact that you are making a business. You need to have customer support, you need to have, all these different things. You need to have plans for the future, how you're going to handle all this stuff. And it's a little daunting actually. But there are founders out there who are willing to dive headfirst into it. We put a great case study about Deby Aho’s app on our blog recently. Justin wrote that up. And so it's an app called Sellebrate I think.
Todd Werth: Sellebrate.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. And it's S E L L. And it's about basically, well read the article, we'll link to it in the show notes. So the big thing there is that it was a lot of stuff that she had to learn, not just on the technical side of things, not just on the design side of things, but about the business side of things. So we had to provide a lot of value right up front. And by being able to tell her that, "yes, we have a package that is designed for your exact situation, it's going to get you to the point where now you can go pitch to investors." And she did. And she got money. And so she came back to us for the development side of it and we're working on that right now. That's the sort of thing that is a great tool to have in the toolbox when I'm talking to prospective early stage founders.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. One of the interesting things that I think that kind of comes out of this is that a person has to almost pitch to us first.
Todd Werth: They for sure have to pitch to us. Otherwise we can’t understand how to help them pitch to other people.
Gant Laborde: And that's a key because that identifies gaps. It's really hard to find a spot if you're just pitching to investors. They're not going to directly tell you what you did right or wrong. The really key aspect here is that they have to pitch us first and we're their first audience in a certain degree. And this helps you identify unknown unknowns. For instance, let's say you do know what your market audience is. Well the key aspect of when you're trying to get funded on something like that is that you're going to have to be to identify and say that to investors. And we help humanize that a bit. And then even when people don't know who their market is and they don't know their user personas, this is a great opportunity because building an app for people who are truck drivers is going to be significantly different from one that would be styled for hair designers.
Gant Laborde: There's architectural and user experience differences that Justin and our team has seen time and time again and you get to win by that experience a bit.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about what this means to Infinite Red and us as owners too, because I think that identifying this sort of a problem, identifying this sort of a niche where we kept hearing this over and over. People with these early stage founders who didn't have an Avenue. We couldn't serve them because they didn't have $200,000. They couldn't come to us and build the app out. And so, us listening to that and then secondly devising a productized service, as Todd said, to fit in neatly and be able to tell them, "we have a solution for that." It's kind of pre pre-packaged. Now that doesn't mean that we don't customize it. It's not totally off the shelf. It's totally custom. Everything Infinite Red does, has some level of our knowledge baked into it and based on the particulars of that situation.
Jamon Holmgren: But, it's something that we had the structure of it built out and we've done it before and we can continue to iterate on and make it better. And I think that was something that to me I would like to do more of at Infinite Red. I want to continue to do more of this. I want to have more productized services, more things that have specific names, that have specific parameters on what they are, that fit specific client leads in who have a particular circumstance or a situation that we know that we can help with.
Todd Werth: Yeah. Thank you Jamon. That'd be awesome. What's cool about it, it's not just having these productize services for our own revenue, our stuff, but it allows us to sit down and think of ahead of time something that a cohort of our clients need. And then when we see them describing that need to us, we can articulate in a way that hopefully makes them have an aha moment. Like okay. Because truthfully getting from zero to one in anything is often the most difficult part for entrepreneurs. It can be overwhelmingly difficult. So that's very exciting.
Todd Werth: Justin, I would like to ask you, we had a client, I don't remember exactly who they were and probably shouldn't say who they were, but this gentleman came in and he had a good idea. It was a very interesting idea. We were pretty sure that there's no way in heck that Apple would allow this in the store. It just violated many, many terms of agreement. But we helped him go from that great idea and find what he was trying to solve, and come out of the other end with a totally different but cool idea. And I don't know if you recall that Justin, but could you talk a little about that please?
Justin Huskey: Yeah, absolutely. So I think that one of the things that happens with this startup package is that starting a business is very creative. And one thing with creativity is that you sometimes have to kind of start with a little bit of loose ends and a little bit of a mess that you have to go in and clean up and make it something. Your ideas are going in different directions. And so what we did with this one app in particular is that when he came to us, it was like you said, we weren't thinking it was going to be accepted into the app store. And so what we did is we did some market research, we looked at what was already out there, looked at what was possible and brought that back to him and asked him, "okay, let's go over the main goal here. The main goal is to do X. Let's see how we can still do that, but do it in a way that, it still fits within the rules and we can launch it and it, and it'll be successful for him."
Justin Huskey: So we took all of that, the primary goal of his app, and we tweaked the inner workings of it. So that it still accomplished that, but it did it in a different way that was still easy to use, but also would be accepted by Apple in the end as well.
Jamon Holmgren: I want to kind of lay out in more concrete terms what you get. And I'm actually going to ask for Justin's help in a bit here on the specifics of the design phase of it. But just talking about the business side of it. There's going to be a design phase. And, it's not just design, you're also going to be exploring product. So in a lot of ways we're going to actually be acting as a product team for you in those early stages. And constraints like the app store breed creativity and we're going to be a part of that. And the design process which has specific deliverables, actual hard deliverables that you're going to get, play into the next part, which is we actually deliver a pitch deck as well. And assuming you're going to be going for investment, you're actually going to get a PowerPoint presentation or whatever your pitch deck software of choice is, we'll provide that to you.
Jamon Holmgren: And because we've gone through this design phase and this market research and product phase with you, we understand the value of your product really well and we can communicate it with our awesome designers, and our ability to communicate on screen to your investors. We can hit the points that you want to be able to hit because think about sitting down in front of a PowerPoint and trying to come up with a pitch deck. That's kind of a daunting task for a lot of people. You're hiring a pro to do it. We're going to do something really amazing. Not only that, but you're actually going to have something that you're going to allow the investors to download onto their phone and tap through. Justin's going to talk more about that as well. And these things really give you the confidence that you need that we've done the research, we know that this product is viable, we know that there's a path forward with it.
Jamon Holmgren: Not only that, but you also know the costs for the development part of it, because we deliver that as well. That's another deliverable. You get a breakdown. We do architecture from an engineering side, there's an engineer involved in the process all the way through. And we actually make sure that everything is estimated and you have a pretty good sense for what this is going to cost at the end of it. And so, that's essentially kind of in broad strokes, the part of it that I want to explain. I also want to go back to Justin for the design part.
Justin Huskey: So when an entrepreneur comes to us, they've been thinking about this app or this idea for several, several months. Sometimes we've seen a couple of years even. And they need some help identifying and putting everything else out on paper that they've been thinking about. So one of the very first things we do is actually to go through an entire product discovery with them where we're talking through what the need in the market they're seeing is, who they anticipate these users being, and also what their main goals are for it.
Justin Huskey: And a lot of times it's totally okay if they don't know the answers to those questions. That's actually what the discovery part is all about, is trying to get answers to those questions. And we found that a lot of the research that comes out of that phase actually guides the project all the way through to completion to when they're pitching, because when the tough questions come in at their investor presentation, they have solid answers to it as to who these people are that will be targeted and who'll be using it. They know the path to revenue that they want to take. They know the goals that are going to be set up in acquisition and all of that. And so they're very well prepared for their presentation.
Justin Huskey: As far as the actual deliverables, Jamon's, exactly right. There are different deliverables. We're not just thought leaders. There are deliverables in the beginning with all the research and everything and we tighten that up into a really nice packet that they can review and it'll guide our decision. And we actually have four total phases.
Justin Huskey: So we have the strategy, which I already just talked about. We have the user experience and wire frame portion, which is where we actually gray box the entire app and we start linking it together. We believe in prototyping actually right away for user experience design because once we get the app in our hands, it's very obvious to us where things are breaking down and need to be re-linked up. And so one of our biggest philosophies is to prototype early, get it into people's hands and allow them to start interacting with it.
Justin Huskey: The third phase is to go through visual design. Like I said earlier, there are shifting expectations in the market about what apps look like and function like. And so, visual design is really important these days actually, is becoming more increasingly more important. And so, we actually identify how the app should look, how it should feel, and make it look like an actual finished product.
Justin Huskey: And then the final phase is to come up with a pitch deck, which is a presentation template for them that they can use to share the story of their app with potential investors. One thing that's really cool about it though is sometimes the story of an entrepreneur changes over time. And as they start pitching to investors, they start realizing what's working and what's not working. We actually not only collaborate with them a little bit afterwards sometimes, but we also give them a template that they can create on the fly and be able to change it as they need to. But that also still looks and feels just like their brand as well.
Jamon Holmgren: And part of that visual design phase is that we will actually put it into InVision. InVision is a product that allows people to click through it on their laptop or desktop, or bring it up on their phone and see the phone aspect of it. So it's not that it's just static images. You actually get to tap through it, all of your screens and show people on your phone what it's going to look like.
Gant Laborde: This is something I wish I had a time machine for. There's so many meetings where people, this pitch idea where people are looking like, "how the hell do you get funded?". As a developer, a lot of people asked me that question, and I had no idea. And there's an entire institution set around that and we have one here in New Orleans where it's a startup incubator. And you have to pitch just to get in the incubator. Just to get training on how to do some of this stuff, you have to already have a lot of that ready. And it's a new world that we live in. And I think it's really nice because this is something we see quite often. We see lots of large companies, but we also see people with great ideas and ambition.
Gant Laborde: And so I think what's really cool here is, I might sound very praisey, but our design and our UX, and honestly a lot of the things that Justin, who's the Head of Design here at Infinite Red, have brought to the table, it's really good. It's really opened my eyes up because as a person who was developing in the early two thousands, I was your designer, I was your marketer, I was your SEO, I was everything. And now each of those are its own sort of profession. And that's the natural growth as this turns into a real thing.
Justin Huskey: Yeah, definitely. One thing that Jamon and I saw too, early on, was that there's a lot of money in tech right now. And so, there's a lot of avenues for entrepreneurs to invest to get their app created. And it was a common story for us to hear people who had already spent money on trying to get an app designed, and got the exact opposite of what they were asking for.
Justin Huskey: And so we saw a need there where there was actually people who had the money to invest in in designing their idea. And were getting taken for a ride because it's just easy money in tech right now to advertise it. You don't really know what kind of quality you're getting out of it.
Gant Laborde: Right. And this is why there's a stigma for people sending work overseas. People are saying, oh, I can get you something for that price. And I forget, I don't know if it's Jamon or Todd who says it, but the most expensive app is the one that you don't need and you didn't ask for, you didn't want in the first place.
Todd Werth: Sounds like something Jamon would say.
Gant Laborde: Oh.
Gant Laborde: Sounds like something Ken would say.
Todd Werth: That's true. It does sound like something Ken would say.
Todd Werth: So this is all super interesting. And I've been super pleased. I have not been involved in developing this product at all. Obviously Justin and Jamon spend a lot of time. Mostly Justin. I don't know if that's true, but Justin, Jamon for sure. But, obviously we want to talk about our story just to give you all an example of how you could do something similar in your company. Of course we're sharing what we do and if you're interested in that service, great. Come to us. But it's really just an example from start to finish, how something goes like that.
Todd Werth: So I'd like to ask the panel here, is there any other advice you could give to someone? Someone's out there, they're either an entrepreneur or in their existing business, and they want to identify something that their customers need that they're not providing right now. And then they want to develop a productized service. I don't know if anyone has any advice, but I'd love to hear that.
Jamon Holmgren: I think one way to to do it is to note every time you say, "shoot, I wish we could do that for them." Because, that's exactly what happened with Justin and me when we were looking at this. We kept saying, this is a really interesting idea. They just don't have the money. I wish we could help them. And so, that's where coming up with the package made sense. But we also had to make sure that it made sense for us as well. It couldn't just be something that only served them. We had to also make it financially viable. We had to make sure that it would meet the goals of the overall business.
Todd Werth: Jamon, so I imagine someone sitting around having coffee discussing what you just said, but they come up something that they think their customers need or know that a customer's need, but it doesn't fit them exactly. The first reaction might be, "Yeah, that's great, but that's not what we do." How do you address that kind of situation?
Jamon Holmgren: I mean you do have to listen to your gut and for some of that stuff, for sure. But there's nothing wrong with running an experiment. "This doesn't really feel like us, but hey, let's try it for two months. And, at the end at the end of the month, let's literally schedule a meeting right now. In two months were going to go back and see how it went." And we're going to look at it and say, why didn't it go well? What were the surprising parts that did go well? I'm a big fan of running experiments and your gut might be right, but at the end of the experiment that will bear out if that's the case.
Todd Werth: Yeah, those are good points. Now I think of it, if Jamon and Justin you came in and said, "look, we need to do this startup package," but we don't actually have the skills to do what we think they need. We don't have the ability to give them advice on their pitch deck. We don't have that. We could've still did something. We could have said, "look, we don't have those skills." But I know from experience, if they go to pitch to investors and they have their selected developers and designers, they say, "look, we need to develop and design this." And the investor will say, "okay, but I looked at your team. Your team doesn't have any abilities to do this. How are you going to handle this?" "Oh, well we have Infinite Red and they're in the zoom call with us right now. And they can explain. They have tons of experience and we've developed this relationship with them."
Todd Werth: We could have said, "we'll just help you with that one particular piece because we can do that." So I'm not saying we would do that, we'd have to evaluate. But the point is, if you can't do the whole thing, you can try to find where you can add value to that thing.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah, and as you do that, that's an awesome point. As you do that, you're going to also find other peripheral things that you are totally qualified to do. It just kind of grows organically from there.
Todd Werth: Cool. That's been tons of great info. Any other advice for anyone out there trying to do this or anything else you'd like to mention before we wrap this up today?
Justin Huskey: There's one thing I think that if businesses want to identify where they might try to make improvements or where they want to take their next step, I would say one is a great place to go is the customer service department. Realize that they have a lot of the answers you're looking for in terms of what problems need solved first. And actually that's how the startup package came up for us. And two, is to reach out to us.
Todd Werth: I like that. That was shameless. I love it. We're inviting Justin back.
Todd Werth: So basically, if you have business problems, send us money. You'll now have more problems.
Jamon Holmgren: And less money.
Todd Werth: And less money.
Gant Laborde: Yeah, it was way better than my advice. I was going to say doge coin, but go his way instead.
Todd Werth: Well thanks everyone for another, hopefully interesting episode of Building Infinite Red. Thank you Justin, for joining us. I hope you join us more in the future. And thank you everyone out there who's listening to our little podcast. We do appreciate it. We'll see you next episode.