Over the past 6 months we’ve seen and worked with a lot of startups and interestingly the same issues crop up again and again. So, as it’s Christmas we’ve decide to share a few of them.

User needs can not be retrospectively fitted to your idea
Understand who you have as your target audience and then figure out what their real needs are - without trying to match either to your precious vision.

Don’t solve the wrong problem really well
This follows on nicely from the first point; until your proposition has been broken down into user needs - even sociological needs - it’s very easy to go way off the mark and create a product that no-one wants.

For more read on

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“It is said that about entrepreneurs that they are so focused on their daily startup work that they can no longer see the forest from the leafs. It was our case and I think the case of every web entrepreneur out there. What Swede managed to do so elegantly was to help us extract all the things we knew about our business, mix them with our goals and aspirations and sketch a clear path for our company and us as entrepreneurs. Don’t think of them as consultants as they will not push ideas at you, but as trainers who will help you crystallize what you already knew and felt. Working with them was extremely rewarding for us, useful and fun.”
Vladimir Oane - CEO uberVU

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Finding a user base that would benefit from Basekits promise to let you develop 80% of the needed functionality of 2.0 web apps in one hundredth of the time is easy - creating a proposition that let’s web savvy but perhaps not tech savvy small business owners, bloggers etc take their websites from web 1.0 to 2.0 is definitely harder.

It’s clear these guys have an extremely strong product on their hands, and gauging from the new interface changes we saw it’s getting closer to be a tool worth your attention. Check out the brief summary inside.

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This Tuesday was Soup.io’s turn to go through an in-depth examination and exploration of their product, users and potential future.

We knew Soup had a great product already, making it really easy to blog anything, pull in your feeds from around the place - and make it all look great with very little effort. But what we didn’t know was that if you take the core foundation - the needs that have motivated soup to create their product - a really exciting future picture emerges…

Pictures and more conclusions inside

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Last Friday we took UberVU through our product exploration workshop in the boardroom of Scottish Equity Partners. These workshops are meant to dissect the current product into it’s individual building blocks, analyze each component and then build up a new, stronger product proposition.

Check out this brief summary of the conclusions as well as more photos from the session.

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Borro set out to not only be the world’s first online pawnbroker but also to change the perception of pawning as a whole. We worked with Paul Aitken, founder of www.borro.com, to rapidly launch a new version of the site. We share a belief with Paul that by rapidly going to market we can iteratively develop the brand and the site based on consumer feedback so it would be great to get your comments.

Have a look at what Channel 4 news had to say in August.

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