Your startup must solve a pressing problem before someone else does

Pioneera founder and CEO Danielle Owen Whitford prompted a mass lightbulb moment at the recent SmartCompany and AWS event with her insight about what it takes to create a successful venture. Pioneera is ground-breaking, AI-powered stress management tech.

“You need to be great at solving problems. You also need a narrative of inevitability,” she told the audience. Danielle was joined by a slew of startup and venture capital luminaries at Scale Up: Growing your startup beyond a seed. The speakers shared real talk, war stories and their success secrets.

Employment Hero co-founder Ben Thompson, who also addressed the packed room, has superior problem solving skills in spades. Ben started his company after realising small business owners right around the world face the same problem: the practical challenges of being an employer. Employment Hero lifts that weight off their shoulders with software that makes it easy to pay staff. 

The business is poised for a ground breaking pivot that perfectly demonstrates Danielle’s point about truly winning businesses needing to solve a pressing problem for their customers. 

Each month, 1.2 million employees are paid through the Employment Hero platform, representing $75 billion in wages. Ben has long grappled with a way to give these people more value. But first he had to bust open the entrenched parent child relationship between employers and employees 

“We kept getting pushback from employers. So we built the world’s first super app for candidates looking for work,” he said. Swag is a one-stop-shop for finding and managing work, getting paid, spending and saving. 

It’s also a step on the journey towards a new reality in which people will instantly get paid for the work they do. This is in contrast to having to wait days, weeks or even up to a month to be reimbursed for completed work. 

Ben’s philosophy is that coming up with the technology to facilitate real time payments to staff is a problem he may as well solve before someone else does. 

“If you can unlock better ways of doing things, you should just do it. Our big, hairy, audacious goals are to facilitate employment for 10 million monthly active users and create the world’s largest platform for employment,” he said.

Culture remains king

Aside from solving a problem before someone else does, culture is a key ingredient for a successful startup.

“It’s the secret sauce,” says Wayne Clarke AWS startup adviser. A passionate startup advocate, Wayne says the exciting thing about startups is their uniqueness. 

“They are special and do things in different ways, for example the fast speed at which they operate and make decisions. They are at the leading edge of their fields and technology is their differentiator. So they need to be supported by the best tech to get their products to market. Our programs help startups solve that problem.”

Aside from the tech support AWS provides startups, in the last two years alone, it has invested $2 billion globally in early stage ventures.

AWS research shows culture can help startups in numerous ways. According to the data, the vast majority (86 per cent) of startups agree culture contributes to organisational growth, while 85 per cent agree internal culture is important in attracting new talent. 

Culture is also a determining factor when it comes to attracting investment, which is the lifeblood of every new business. According to AWS’s research, 85 per cent of startups agree culture plays a role in securing investment. The speakers wholeheartedly agreed with this sentiment. Here are some of their insights. 

• Every VC has different goals and objectives. Don’t pitch to the biggest VC funds unless you are tackling the biggest global opportunity because the returns you need to get will be huge.
• Fail fast: fail ten times in a week to get to the right answer, rather than taking a year on one solution.
• Fundraising is a necessary evil to get to the next growth phase. It takes founders away from everything the businesses relies on to be successful, like winning customers. But without capital, the business closes.
• Make sure you’re solving a problem for which your customers are willing to pay.

This was all impeccable advice for the startups who attended the event, who are no doubt all working on their inevitability narrative and winning culture right now.