Building a startup as a student (Part 1)

Hello, ladies and gents 👋

In this first article I will introduce you to a project that I want to expand in the following months. I will walk you through my journey in steps and tell you about the thought process in my head.

The idea
The plan
- Initial market research
- Landing page and emails
- Google analytics and My Business
Conclusion

The idea 💡

I have been an Android user all my life, until this October, when I decided to buy an iPhone 12. On Android I used this app called PushBullet. With it I could send messages, images, files from my phone to my browser and vice-versa. It was a pretty solid extension, however when I searched the App Store for it I realized that the devs have taken it down and will not support iOS from now on. After I didn't manage to find a suitable alternative I decided to build my own extension and app and market it as a product.

The plan 🧠

I was pretty eager to start just coding, but I had read enough reddit posts and comments to know that the best approach is to "sell it and then create it". The reasoning behind this is because if nobody is interested in your product, there's no sense to pursue building it. A few good reads include "The Lean Startup" and "Building a Story Brand".

Initial Market Research

So the idea that I had was not really revolutionary, in fact it was the exact same concept of PushBullet but with a few added features and support for iOS. Initially, when searching for alternatives to PushBullet, I stumbled upon a few competitors. This was not a bad thing - this meant that there was a market for my idea and that I could get confirmation on what already works.
On top of that, I decided to create a survey and send it out to friends, who I thought may be interested. My next goal was building a landing page for my users to visit. ⏭️

Landing page and emails

I consider myself to have pretty good coding skills, however I did not want to waste time with designing a whole landing page. That's why I used Theme Forest to search for a cool theme for WordPress. WordPress is by far the most popular CMS (Content Management System) and it would make a great fit. I picked one (paid about 9$) and started customizing it.

After that, I created an account for MailChimp and set up their embedded sign up form link. Now when somebody signs up for the waitlist, I can keep track of that in the MailChimp dashboard. One other thing, that I set up was aliases in Gmail. (example: alexander@pushkeep.com) This way I don't have to pay for GSuite. You can find a tutorial here.

Google analytics and Google My Business

The last things that I will talk about in this part are analytics and registering your business to be known to Google. For the analytics I used Google analytics and their script tag that I just put in the HTML. You can find more information about it here. As for registering your business, if you go to the Google Dashboard and select My Business, a popup will appear where you can fill the questions and submit review. In order to verify your business, Google will send a letter to you that will arrive in 1-2 weeks, once arrived you can enter the code and officially be a business on Google!