Before You Get Into Tech Business, Do This

Before You Get Into Tech Business, Do This

Sean: All right. Welcome back, guys. It’s a Thursday night, 8:00 p.m. And what can I say? Tonight we have a special guest, his name is Edwin Frondozo and we had him on the show on YouTube, and he is in the Spotify podcast. If you haven’t heard that episode where I interview him and ask him questions and I pick his brain, and I did learn a lot personally, you should check that out. Go over to Spotify and search Edwin Frondozo, and you’ll be able to find his episode with me on the Leadership Stack podcast.

Sean: If you want to check out the show notes links to his LinkedIn, the Facebook website. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Slingshot VOIP, and he’s all the way from the other side of the world, it is actually mourning and his side of the world right now, and I really appreciate him being here today. Without further ado, Edwin, welcome to the show.

Edwin: Sean, good to see you. Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon.

Sean: It’s good evening here and it’s good morning to you there, and I’m sure you smell like coffee right now. And are you ready?

Edwin: Yes.

Sean: All right. So the first question is, what are the advantages of management softwares?

Sean: I have a lot of management software that I’m using for project management and we tried a couple, especially during the pandemic. But I want to hear from you, what do you guys use over there?

Edwin: Yeah, I mean, on the sales side, just real quickly. We use Salesforce primarily just because of how integrated it is. The reporting features, you know, the ability to do your forecasting, understand the lead qualities. It’s not an easy feat. I don’t fully understand how to do that, but that’s what we use on the sell side. But when it comes to operation, something that we move to build more of a custom one is we are utilizing Air Tables to build our custom onboarding customer success, project management. Before that, we were using a number of tools that we were using, just basic Trello even.

Sean: I love Trello.

Edwin: But what we found, Sean. Once you start onboarding multiple clients a day, Trello gets really confusing, because there’s no database attached to it, right? I mean, you could start building the rules, you could start doing that. And then we started going along the journey of looking for project management specific software, right? Like looking at Hello and Monday. So my point is that we started looking at all the different project management, all the agile software. But everything ends up being customizable in the sense that you want to map it to your process first.

Edwin: Yeah. So you know what, when I talk to a lot of new entrepreneurs, they start looking for solutions to help them, right? But I ask them, and you probably know this too, Sean. It’s like, what are your processes? Build out your processes first and then map out the software that you need. There’s a million out there and they all look great. They all know their marketing message and you get shiny object syndrome. So you got to look internally first, just like personal development, you got to look internally in the business and understand what helps you and what’s your end goal for each process? And then you can map out and find the solution. All of them will work. It’s just whatever you want and fits into your business operations.

Sean: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, with SEO-Hacker, some of the tools that you mentioned earlier, except for Salesforce, we’ve gone through them. I mean, when you’re a startup, growing your business, Trello or Airtable, those are fantastic tools, you can use them for free. Right now, Monday.com, that’s one software that we’re trying to explore. We’re not yet fully integrated. We haven’t paid for it yet, but we’re exploring that one in terms of project management as well as CRM, because they have a template for it.

Sean: If you’re serious about your sales, CRM, pipeline, everything, there’s so many sales software out there. Salesforce could be, you know, at the top of the list, but it’s also one of the most expensive ones. I’ve tried Pipedrive. I love Pipedrive. It’s just that with the client onboarding, it has some, some things to be desired. So when you finish off a closed deal, and you move a client to onboarding and all the way to your operations, it’s just disconnected. So that’s where the problem ensues when it comes to Pipedrive. Unlike with Salesforce, you got everything in one ecosystem, so we completely agree with what Edwin mentioned.

Sean: First, look at your processes, look at your team, what are they used to, what’s going to make them more efficient and then shop around for software. The more integrations there are, the better. It’s always that way. The more integrations a software has, the better the software. Often, the more costly as well. It’s all basic numbers, it’s all basic math, it boils down to that if it’s saving your team like 100 hours a week and you do the math, what are you paying for in terms of 100 hours a week and you’re going to be able to save that in terms of software. So no matter how expensive that software is, if at the end – bottom line, you’re saving a lot more money because your team’s a lot more efficient than it’s worth the cost.

Sean: Otherwise, if you’re just going to shop around for software like a kid in a candy store, then it’s not going to work for you. So I hope that helps. One of the software that I do highly recommend with work from home and we integrated it in her management process is Hubstaff. So Hubstaff, for us, is super important. I cannot recommend it enough. Dave Nevogt, is a good acquaintance of mine. I’ve written about Hubstaff in my book CEO at 22, I wrote about how we integrated that in our processes, and we use that to measure a lot of things. And it has been a blessing for me and my team, so hope that helps.

Sean: And the next question is from Pam, what are important things to consider if you are planning to start your own tech business?

Edwin: I mean, that’s a great question, Pam. I mean, I would have to – that’s a whole can of worms. I’d be asking you, Pam, like, what’s the tech business? Do you know? Are you a tech founder or are you looking to partner with a tech founder? I guess depending on those answers, you know, understanding where you’re fitting this technology in, you know what the pain points are, how did you find those pain points? Where were you connecting with?

Edwin: At the end of the day, whether it’s a tech business, a service business, you got to know that there’s a need for it and you’re filling a gap, because all of us have a billion ideas and whether it’s technology or service or whatnot. And we got to make sure that it works well. The challenge, if you’re not tech, is finding a partner or someone to help you develop your MVP. Having said that is, if you want to build out an MVP, you don’t need to know code anymore.

Edwin: There are platforms like Bubble.io – if you are a product developer, a product owner, solutions specialist, look at Bubble.io, you could build out an MVP without writing code, and then you could prove out your MVP a lot quicker and almost at zero dollars than traditionally where you’d have to build up the software. Find a founder, takes three years, four years later, and then you try to find it out, but I would recommend building out your MVP. Real quickly, the one simple feature that you want, you could use a platform like Bubble.io and really get the confidence said what you’re going to build or sell has a need or a niche in the marketplace.

Sean: Really good stuff. Like Edwin, it has to boil down to what kind of tech business you are planning to start. It’s hard to answer this question with just an open-ended, vague assumption that is any tech business because there are just so many tech businesses that you can start today. So many problems you can solve.

Sean: It’s going to have to be number one, can you be the best in something in that tech startup that you’re going to try to get into? So for example, if you’re going to go ahead and start a sales software like something like Salesforce or Pipedrive, there are a lot of features that all of these sales software are trying to hit. Like what I mentioned about Pipedrive earlier, there is a lot to be desired when you close the deal and you’re trying to onboard the client, there’s a lot to be desired there.

Sean: So they’re really good in the entire process right before the client onboarding, like the sales funnel, everything, the integrations with other apps, they’re really good at that. So what is going to be your number one-shot or number one feature if you want to try and go head to head with these other startups because it is a global business, when you start a tech startup, if it’s a software as a service business, it is on a global scale and platform, and you’re going to have to compete on a global scale.

Sean: And competing globally is very, very tough. A lot of players don’t play fair, they don’t play nice. I’ve had the experience of starting a SAS business – Qeryz. It’s still up, it’s still running. We still use it and a lot of our clients use it as well. And my experience in running that, there’s just so many dirty players that you’re going to have to go up against. And I’m sure Edwin you’ve experienced your fair share of that with Slingshot VOIP. So that’s something that I would strongly consider. Like, what can be the best?

Sean: Right? So Click Up was mentioned earlier, and right now they’re pushing that they’re free. They’re like a one-stop-shop and free. I’m sure that when you delve into it, there are some things that you’re going to be discovering that, oh, it’s not great at this, or it’s not so great at that, and I’m used to having this feature I’m used to having – we need that feature in our team because our team does things this way, so it’s going to be the product-market fit that you want to figure out. Like who’s your target market? Are they startups? Are they scale ups? Or are they at the big enterprise level? And what will these features fit very well with them?

Sean: So there’s so many factors we could go on and on, and Edwin mentioned is a can of worms that you’re going to be opening. Yeah, that’s true. So qualifying the question further would help a lot. If you’re still in discord, you might want to qualify it further so we can help you out better. But otherwise, for me, it’s going to be like, what’s that one thing you can be the best at when you’re starting your tech startup?

Sean: Okay, SAS is pure insanity right now. Too many? Yeah, I agree. It’s a pretty insane market.

Edwin: I mean, and I’ll just say it again in terms of pure insanity. People tell me, “Oh Ed, when you’re in the telecommunications business, that’s super competitive,” I’ll say, “Well, how many graphic designers do you know?”

Sean: Yeah.

Edwin: It’s funny because people already disqualify going into SAS business because it seems scary or seems like there’s many. But they won’t question people who become a graphic designer or a web designer.

Sean: True that.

Edwin: Because it’s easy to get to, that’s actually even more – the market is actually more saturated there. And then how do you distinguish yourself as a web designer, now web developer or a graphic designer or a VA? I know I am talking to many people in the Philippines. I’m Filipino too. So yeah, I know a lot of people in that market, right? So yeah, it’s just my point again, right? Yeah, it is. But it’s recurring revenue, right? You know maybe you don’t need to always look for a customer. Maybe all you need is 100 customers and you build a, you know, a lifestyle business like that. I know Time doctors started to like that. I interviewed the founder of Time Doctor. He’s right, he’s from Canada. So it’s just something to think about when you make statements like that.

Sean: Yeah, for sure. I mean, when you see it that way, there are just so many things like digital marketing businesses, even there’s just so many today. And yeah, you know, SAS business, even if people say there’s so many, it’s still a very, very good business because it’s recurring revenue and a lot of people, when they like you, they stay for a long time.