Hello Alfred Interview On Successful Startups

It’s the American dream: take an idea and make it into a multi-million dollar business. That’s exactly what Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck did with Hello Alfred. They’re the geniuses behind the app/service, which allows you to hire a butler to come by each week to do your errands — laundry, tidy up, mail — at an affordable rate. Everyone knows that decreased chore time has a direct link to increased fun time.

These two creative co-founders are on the cutting edge and crushing it. That’s why it’s no surprise that they’ve landed on our #CrushList nominations this year (go vote!).

Given their incredible success as influential tech entrepreneurs, we decided to catch up with them to get their advice on starting up. Follow these eight tips to successfully kickstart your startup:

Get Over That Fear Of Starting Your Startup

Marcela Sapone: Just think about it as follows: how do you mitigate as much risk as possible? Can you — before you decide to quit your job — figure out what are the key questions you’re trying to answer with your idea? That will validate your hypothesis more than just having an idea. You shouldn’t quit your job for an idea. Quit your job because you have conviction that is based off of qualitative and quantitative feedback from the market and from your potential customers.

And remember that being an entrepreneur is a full-body exercise. It’s a complete lifestyle. If you’re not able to give your entire week to working, it might be a good signal that being an entrepreneur is not the right path for you.

Vet The Idea… Before You Quit Your Job

MS: The first thing we thought was: what are the different ways we can achieve this same goal in different formats, then go out there and test it? That way you’re not jumping off a cliff with an idea. We actually got real customers and built a version of the product to get feedback, and we did that for an entire year before we took the plunge to start a business.

Don’t Be Scared To Share Your Unique Idea With Others

Jessica Beck: It’s a fear that many first-time entrepreneurs have: if they share their idea, someone is going to take it. My advice is think about how hard it is to quit your job, build a team and start a business. Beyond that, why would someone — who isn’t you — be as passionate about this potential idea that you have? The probability that they go and take your idea is — in my book — null. Maybe 1%. However, the valuable insight you get from sharing your idea — the reflexive feedback, having people probe you and ask you questions — is 10 times more valuable than the small risk of someone copying your idea.

Also, if the barriers of entry are so low that someone can just take that idea, it’s probably not a really good one.

Ask For Help

MS: One of the things that you have to realize is that as you go through this journey, you have to learn to ask for help. And you’ll have to do that more times than you ever expected. If you’re so guarded in the beginning that you don’t seek out expertise or people that have a different point of view, and share enough to get them to help, then the odds of you getting to a place where you can actually execute something and have it be successful are quite small.

Where To Find The Right Help

JB: You start with one person you trust and then you ask for an introduction to somebody in their network that they trust. You ask questions that don’t necessarily have to do with your business but ask them to teach you. We all approach stuff with a beginner’s mindset. Somebody should be able to provide an overarching explanation of how it works. If they can’t, that’s probably someone you don’t want to work with. No black boxes.

Learn The Other Aspects Of The Business

JB: The best example I can give you is if you play basketball, you can be a great point guard but it doesn’t mean that you have the skills or height to be a center. However, you know enough about the skills and strategy of the game that you know how to work with a center. At a certain point, you don’t need to be good at everything. You just need to understand things and know how to ask for help on the things that you’re not good at.

In the beginning, all of the major functions of the business we began doing ourselves. Marcela and I were the first Alfreds of the business: we were the first customers, we set up the first books, and much more. We had some formal training before we started the company and — this is a good example of what you were asking before — this was where we asked for help. Had we raised venture capital before? No, but we knew other founders who had, so we asked them to introduce us.

Embrace Failure

JB: We fail every day. Early on, we had talks of shutting it all down. We even told our customers that we were winding things down before they came back to us and asked us not to do that. That reinforced that our business was in fact heading down the right path.

Just remember that this is more like baseball, where being great is having a .200 or .300 batting average.

Deal With The Doubters

JB: You encounter that everywhere you go, whether it’s family or friends. If you have only people that doubt, then it becomes very, very hard. But I look at it from another perspective too: it also doesn’t help to have people around you who only believe. If you’re only surrounded by supporters, then you might miss an important question. There has to be a balance.

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