Startup Tour Profile: Birdbox

by Nicole Relyea
May 23, 2013

For our Startup Tour of Birdbox, we sat down with Co-Founder and CEO Ben Nunez. Now on his fifth company, Ben had great insights both about his current venture and past experiences to share. 

 

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Birdbox is the easiest way to collect photos with lots of people. Through shared photo albums that collect from social networks and photo services you already use, Birdbox makes it easy for a group to contribute to a unified photo experience around vacations, events, families & interests.
 

 

How did the idea for Birdbox come about?

My last company was a media asset management platform for big media companies. They would have assets all over the place: things that were produced in-house, those developed by a third party, user-generated content ... Our tools let them classify, search, and organize everything. After we sold that company and the more I looked at what we were doing there, the more I realized this sort of thing was a problem for consumers as well. 

We all have pictures and videos on our phones, multiple computers, on social networks, and we wanted to create a similar sort of solution for consumers. The idea was to create one place where people could backup, search, and share everything. But, that actually turned out to be a much bigger problem than a small startup could solve, so we've pared it down to just photo sharing and collecting within groups. 

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The current version of the product came out of one of the features we built as an alpha version during TechStars - the "nest." Nests actually came about due to a bug in our software. We had created a feature that would allow users to share photos and organize them via a tag. The bug was that any Birdbox user who used the same tag, like "Colorado," would find photos from other users in the same nest. But people didn’t know it was a bug; they just thought it was a cool feature, so we went with it. 

People started tagging photos with various things that were general - nights out downtown or Rockies games - so we had these groups of people sharing photos collectively. The more research and development we did, we found that one of the biggest problems for consumers is getting groups of photos together from lots of people. This is particularly true for things that aren't time-boxed, like families, topics of interest, a sports league - things that have a life to them. So that's what we're working with now. 

 

It's always interesting how many companies set out to solve one problem, but their end product is entirely different from what they set out to create. What would you say have been the milestones or moments of success for Birdbox so far?  

Probably landing the funding that allowed my co-founder (Kevin Cawley, CTO) to leave his job. That was critical, because it meant we could both work on it full-time. 

Of course, doing TechStars was big.

I think that discovering the nests feature was a big turning point. We had spent months building something, running through an alpha period. We had validated that our original hypothesis was indeed a valid problem, but realized that it was very difficult to solve and had virtually no network effect or virality to it. Nests have this inherent viral network effect, so that really shifted our focus and gave us something more viable to work with. 

 

[ibimage==22092==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-left]This is your fifth company. Surely you've had some failures or mistakes (either with Birdbox or a previous company) that you've learned good lessons from. Could you share some of those experiences? 

At my last company we focused on building a solution for a certain set of customers too early in the process. By doing so, we ended up with a product that wasn’t scalable. We had spent too little time evaluating whether what we were building was something that thousands of companies could use, rather than just a dozen of the biggest media companies. As a result, we ended up with a company that was half consulting, half product. If I could do it again, I would have spent a lot more time validating that the features that we were building were ones that could be used by a wider audience and not just the companies we were working with.

Another big thing I learned early on is how to build a team. You have to look at what the key pieces of a company are in its early stages, and that really influences the types of people you look for to help establish a culture and get a product to market.

 

What do you look for when you're starting to build a team? 

Certainly it can be really helpful to bring in people who have been in startups before, and who have done the things that you need them to do. If you’re a service company, you need to find people who are oriented that way. It’s hard to take product people and turn them into service people, and vice versa. First and foremost, your team has to be made up of motivated self-starters who don’t need a ton of direction or to be told what to do on a regular basis. I think the best people to bring in are the ones who can take small bits of information and run with it. That's what creates your company. 

Obviously things like honesty, transparency, the ability to communicate well and interact in a team environment is important. When you’re a small group of people, if you can’t communicate well, that it makes it a much harder road. You also really have to be able to respect each other. We have a lot of fun at work, and I could go hang out with any of these people outside of the office. At the end of the day you need to respect one another, and be able to get on the same page and march to the same drum.

I think a lot of that comes down to defining early on what kind of culture you want. Is it going to be a top-down dictatorship with the founder leading, or a more collaborative, flat organization where everyone participates? You always need leaders in a company, but being true to yourself about the kind of entrepreneur you are as a founder and how you work best is really important at the beginning; that's going to determine whom you hire. 
 

How would you define the culture at Birdbox?

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It's pretty flat. We want everyone to have a voice, and we listen to everyone's opinion. That's part of the respect thing - nobody’s really telling each other what to do. We all know our role and we just go do it. When hard decisions need to be made, we know who needs to make them. Otherwise, it's a very open and communicative environment.

 

Any big goals or benchmarks coming up this year?

Definitely - we'll be launching this year. We find ourselves back in alpha again, having scrapped and rebuilt the product over the past year. We are now testing it with users again, we're in a second alpha production. But we're focused much more on the data this time, and will slowly be releasing a beta version over the coming months. 

 

As an experienced entrepreneur, what advice would you give to a company that is just getting started?  

Make sure you’re doing something that is a passion for you, something that excites you every day. It can't just be the idea of doing a startup; the actual product or service you're offering has to be something that you personally are passionate about. 

A lot of founders have some idea they think is going to be good, they want to do a startup, but they're not passionate about the problem they're trying to solve. Ideally, it should come from a place of personal interest or experience - that’s what going to drive you the most, make you committed to solving whatever problem you’ve identified. 

Another thing is that before you start development, you need to talk to people and validate whatever hypothesis you’ve come up with – you can't know if your idea is good until you tell people about it. Make sketches, prototypes, a video, whatever. But validate that it’s actually a problem worth solving first. 

In that process, you also have to validate the problem with data. It’s very easy to get people to say "I love your idea." Most people don't want to tell you that your idea sucks. You need to be disciplined about going through a process to ask the right questions from people you're trying to validate the process with, rather than trying to sell them on your idea.

Find mentors. Look for people who have done it before, who are in a similar space, who have relevant experience to what you’re doing. Use your network to get to them or even just blindly reach out. I’ve actually heard a lot of successes with that – there's no magic formula; it’s a deliberate and diligent process. Find someone who can coach you on how to build a team, the challenges you’re going to come across, how to flesh out your business model, how to raise money. When I was starting companies back in the late 90’s, there were no mentors. We didn’t have the resources we do today. You were just flying by the seat of your pants. As accelerators and mentor networks have developed, I’ve had to teach myself how to ask for help, but it's always worth it. You need an outsider with a fresh perspective.

 

Are there any resources you often refer to or would recommend?

Keep a steady stream of blog posts that you can stay on top of - follow the tech press and the Seth Godin's of the world. There are the standard startup books, but my advice is to read books outside of the startup world. There's one called "The Art of Habit" that teaches you about how people form habits and what people have done in their business life cycles to trigger a habit and thus obsessive use of a product they’ve built. That's a great one. Read those startup books too, but think outside of that box.

 

What do you think are the greatest needs of the Front Range startup communities?

Probably everyone will tell you that we need more money, more investors, more VC firms … but how does a community get those things coming in? You can’t just ask for it. We need something in order to get that money coming here. 

We’re all on the right path, with the volume of startups we’re creating here. That increases our chance of bigger successes coming out of Colorado. We haven’t had that many billion-dollar companies that started from nothing and emerged as successful companies. The more we have of those type of successes, the more attention we’ll deserve, and more money will flow into the state.

 

Learn more about Birdbox via their company profilewebsite, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter @Birdbox

 

This week we also visited with Jim Franklin of SendGrid and Avi Stopper of CaptainU. Learn more about Built In Denver's Startup Tour and read previous weeks' posts here

 

 

 

 

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