Hi, this is Morgan
Before beginning to build your startup, you may believe that you are fully prepared for the expenses that will be incurred; however, once you begin to build your product, things may spiral out of control due to some unexpected costs incurred during the process of building products, marketing, or providing customer support…
5 Unexpected Costs of My Startup
Today, I’d like to share five of my unexpected costs with you so that you can get a preview or learn from them, and be better prepared.
Paid Avatars Being Displayed on Websites
Since we’re building products related to screen recording for the first time, we made the decision to use genuine avatars on our websites before they were ever built, coupled with cosmetics to make them more entertaining and humorous.
However, our teammates were unwilling to post their faces on the website, so we decided to purchase some avatars to demonstrate real screen recording scenarios, particularly when exhibiting the functions of screen recordings. This will also lighten the workload of our web designers, so they have more time for other web designs.
We currently use static avatars; if you want to display some video clips of genuine avatars, the cost would be significantly more. Don’t forget to add money to your budget for these probable and required website costs.
A Real Person’s Avatar Shown on Gemoo’s Website
Tools for Enhancing Teamwork Productivity
When you work in a small team, you won’t have as much time left over for repetitive tasks like looking up potential customers’ emails or sending a lot of emails. Because these tasks take time and yield little in return.
We discovered this early on and decided to subscribe to some automated tools to assist us, upgraded some of our accounts to the pro version in order to experience how awesome productivity tools are. We used email tools like Sendinblue, QuickMail, and so on.
We also used Notion, Airtable, Clickup, and other similar ones for other tasks related to the team wiki, marketing strategy, product alignment, etc. These tools improved our team’s workflow and helped us realize that productivity improvement is unquestionably a trend in the technology sector. This insight offered us some assurance while we worked on Gemoo.
Research Expenses
The survey budget spent is mainly in two stages
The first stage was when we were conducting market research. Even if our team included market experts, when entering a field for the first time, we still needed to hire consultants or purchase professional research from outside organizations to help us get a handle on the SaaS and productivity tool markets. The experience wasn’t always reliable; instead, data and research would show you the way.
The second phase involved finding niche markets. For instance, we wanted to discover if Gemoo Recorder was truly useful for online tutoring, so we purchased a few courses on Udemy to fully experience online learning. Even though it ultimately came out that Gemoo might not be all that helpful for Udemy learners, we still thought it was worthwhile to assess the product’s value, so we kept doing it on other niche markets. You won’t know the actual situations potential consumers may encounter unless you try it yourself.
Team Expansion
While the majority of people would consider it a risk to grow your team in the first few months as a startup, I would say that when you start with a small group of people and then discover that everyone is too exhausted to work, that may be the time to relieve your team members’ pressure to forge a stronger bond with them.
In comparison to other products, Gemoo is somewhat large and takes a lot more time and effort to hold every part, whether it’s developing the online website, acquiring the first group of users, gathering user feedback, conducting user interviews, using social media marketing, or working with other staff members. In order to release the burden of my entire team, we hurriedly increased our team size from a few to about a dozen employees, which of course resulted in high hiring and salary costs.
Video Creation
If you’re an expert in social media marketing, making videos can seem like a straightforward chore, but for our team, it’s not because none of us is good at editing or creating videos.
It was imperative that we strived to promote Gemoo using videos in order to demonstrate how it could benefit more individuals from other industries and possibly spread like a virus on social media platforms at a time when video would garner more attention and leave a stronger impact than photographs.
But, we lacked the necessary expertise to produce videos on our own, so we decided to look for video specialists on Fiverr and Upwork to assist us in producing additional videos to post on our YouTube channel, official website, and other platforms.
In Conclusion
It won’t be easy for entrepreneurs to build products and acquire paying customers, especially for those like us who are entering a particular field for the first time.
We may face many obstacles, both physical and psychological, but we are moving forward bravely. If you would like to connect with me on Twitter and share your startup stories, please do so.
