Launching any new initiative calls for building credibility in your ideas and in your ability to execute them. Here's what that looked like for SaaS company, Turtl. **By Nick Mason, CEO and Founder, Turtl**
Lots of people want to start a business nowadays but, while it might sound crazy, with Turtl, that wasn’t really my intention at the outset. My initial drive was purely one of curiosity and interest when I started learning about the psychology behind how we read while working as a software and product consultant at the University of Oxford. Some of my friends worked in digital marketing, so I knew a bit about that already, and I thought it would be fascinating to see what happens when you combine the two disciplines.
So, I started tinkering with concepts in my bedroom (literally) in my spare time - and I basically haven’t stopped tinkering since! Five years on, Turtl is now a thriving business with clients including Nestlé, The Economist, and Cisco and a team of 45 behind us. Not a bad result when you consider our humble beginnings. So, you might be wondering how we managed to get where we are?
It certainly hasn’t been plain sailing. As someone with no experience of starting a business, I began by trying to book meetings with anybody I could in the marketing industry to show them a very early Turtl prototype and see the reaction. I’m not ashamed to say that in those early meetings there was some pretty direct criticism – people saying it was no good, a bad fit for their business, or would never work. Yet despite the rejections, I felt compelled to keep plugging away. Everything else seemed boring in comparison and I couldn’t shake the conviction that there was something special in what I was working on.
That has been one of the big lessons for me; that there will always be people who will try to put you down and who won’t see things from your perspective (believe me, it still happens today). But, even though it’s difficult at the time, those rejections are all part of the process, because putting your idea out there is the only way to get the feedback you need to improve and refine it. I didn’t realize at the time, but all that rejection was vital to developing a product that people actually wanted - or to use the startup terminology, finding our ‘product-market fit’.
Needless to say, after numerous meetings and intros, we made our first sale and took a crucial step towards the validation we were looking for. Although, when I think back to that early version, it still surprises me a bit that they went for it! But they obviously saw the value in what we were building and I’m happy to say they’re still a client today.
It was a similar story when we met our now COO Mark and Sales Director Ben, who were working at PayPoint. We originally went to try to sell them Turtl, but they liked the idea so much that they decided to invest, leaving their jobs to come to work for us. They’ve both now been with us for four years, and their skills were just what we needed, bringing the commercial and operational expertise that I lack and which the business needs to grow.
Mark and Ben are also perfect examples of why it’s important to surround yourself with people who are 100% bought into what you do – and every hire we’ve made since has been the same. I believe that if you start employing people who just want a job, then you’re in dangerous territory - in a young business, your team has to be united behind a shared belief that they’re doing the right thing. And, as an entrepreneur, that means you have to maintain that clarity of vision and direction at all times as otherwise it’s hard for people to really buy in fully.
Because despite the long and challenging road towards product and business validation, I always believed deep down that we were onto something and simply didn’t believe anyone who told me otherwise. As an entrepreneur, you will hear ‘no’ a million times, but when you’re convinced by what you’re doing, all that rejection doesn’t dent your resolve. And if you stick with it, that clarity of vision is infectious and other people pick up on it too… and then there’s no stopping you!
Nick Mason is the founder and CEO of Turtl, a SaaS company that empowers teams to create interactive content without the need for graphic design or coding skills.
