Get onboard, online

Hang on for your life – you’re building a website!

Have you ever tried to get a group of people to chip in for a gift and sign the card? Our business, Grouptogether.com, does it all for you online – the reminders, collecting the money, organising the card and even arranging flowers or a hamper.

We built GroupTogether.com from zero customers to 500,000 in five years. It’s been a roller-coaster. So how do you hang on and how can you learn from our road bumps? Here are our top tips to get you started in transforming your business for the digital space.

How do you choose the right name?

Ali: A long name takes up space in a social handle, it’s harder for people to spell. Remember that people will see it as a website without gaps. Check that it’s available in all your likely social channels. We’re happy with GroupTogether. It has a nice feel, tells people a little about us. Lastly, think about whether you want to be .com or .com.au. 

How do you automate?

Julie: Being beginners at building a website, we went old school at first and did our first wireframe of the website with blue and white cue cards spread over Ali’s dining room floor. It helped us in a big picture way visualise what we wanted to do, but it kept getting blown away every time one of the kids walked in the room – which was a lot. We quickly moved online with very basic PowerPoint diagrams. This is a critical step and we can’t stress how much this will affect the build of the system. If you have the funds, invest in a great UI/UX designer or a free online system. No shortcuts on this one. Measure twice, cut once.

WordPress, Squarespace, Wix or build from scratch?

Ali: Our concept meant that we needed to build from scratch. That said, we wish we had built the marketing pages (homepage, FAQ, contact us) with a CMS (content management system) so we could change elements ourselves, without a techie touching it. It would have been faster and given us more agility. We did it further down the track but we would have liked it at the start.

“If you have the funds, invest in a great UI/UX designer or a free online system.”

Julie: It’s not easy or smooth using an overseas team, especially if you are not travelling (due to COVID-19) to keep track of what is happening. So, our advice on this is that the people were more important than the platform. Spend time finding the right team rather than casting your lot with the first salesman who woos you.

Because we believed in the team, we needed to build using their strengths. They were .net developers, not the newest or coolest language on the block, but certainly one of the biggest. Don’t discount old school. The beauty of having Microsoft at our back is that, well, they’re huge. They have resources, secure servers and tons of support. What others may perceive as a lack of sexiness we celebrate in the security and scalability of our system. It’s really a pay-to-play platform. As a start-up you can have Microsoft servers on a shoestring budget. As you scale you pay more, but with the knowledge that they are deploying their vast resources towards reliability, security and scalability.

What are the pros and cons of building the tech overseas?

Ali: Every “start-upper” weighs this up heavily. On the one hand, it’d be so much easier having someone you could sit with right here, who’s a native English speaker. But it’s cheaper overseas. So, what wins? Clearly if you’re a techie, it’s easier to have someone offshore. But if you’re not … well. We spoke to a few offshore companies and had meetings remotely and realised very quickly it’d be too hard. We finally found a team who spoke perfect English and were recommended. After a year, we realised who in the team was writing the best code (not buggy) and we culled to just him and then built a team around him. 

What coding language do you use?

Ali: We chose Microsoft .net with Microsoft Azure’s servers because we figured they must know what they’re doing, could scale and have the highest security. To this day, people suggest rewriting the whole platform in another language.

How do you cope with scaling for exponential growth?

Ali: So, here’s the secret. Start-ups look kind of slick on the surface, but often have all sorts of manual mess underneath. Every start-up does, so don’t feel bad. Listen to some podcasts – everyone does it. It’s a good thing. If you spend the time and money to make everything perfect before you take it to market, you’ll be cemented into that spot and not have the agility to change to suit your customers’ response. That said, we always make sure that we have capacity for massive increases at our peaks. Gifting is seasonal.

How do you support customers at scale?

Ali: We’re big on customer service. People think it’s a pain. We think it’s vital … for a few reasons. First, it’s the best market research ever. Our customers tell us what they need and then we keep track of which needs are most important and most common. We innovate to that insight. We were nervous in the early days that this wasn’t sustainable at scale and clearly having the founders on the help desk till 11 pm won’t happen forever. But when we heard that Red Balloon does its help desk in Sydney too with its own staff, we felt better.

Which new functionality do you incorporate?

Ali: We have a list of “customers would love …” new product developments as long as your arm, but we’ve always subscribed to the Lean Start-up and MVP (minimum viable product) philosophy. Build the basics first, get real customer experience and feedback, then enhance it. We still do it today.

Julie: Because Ali and I are the customer, we have a deep understanding of what they want because it’s what we want. Believe it or not, we are still rolling out new functionality that we thought up at the very beginning but didn’t have the resources to develop or the technology to execute. It’s all there and more. We have so many ideas and not enough time to execute. So we hold monthly meetings (that might be a stretch) of what we want to accomplish and work intimately with the development team to see what’s doable and the timeline to do it. Our advice here: because you are operating a business and developing in a vacuum, take the time and cost estimate and multiply by three.

Nine tech tools to help you on your online journey

These are the tools we recommend to help you on your way:

  1. Slack to keep conversations by topic. It avoids searching email trails forever. 
  2. And / or Basecamp for keeping dialogues about projects .
  3. Bugherd for tracking bugs (stuff that’s not working) – keeps a log of the problem, what’s to do, to be tested and feedback.
  4. Confluence (Atlassian) for a knowledge bank.
  5. Dropbox for keeping images that the group can access.
  6. Google Drive for keeping documents that the group can access.
  7. Unsplash for free images.
  8. Creative Market for beautiful artwork, fonts, creative elements.
  9. Canva for creating marketing content.

Julie Tylman and Ali Linz, co-founders, GroupTogether

This story first appeared in issue 31 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine