Products that users love?

Hi there, welcome back! This time the blog post will be all about the story behind a startup called Bungalo. We will also discuss how to create great products in general. So on last week's lecture we had the founder and CEO of bungalo.com, Haukur Gudjonsson, as our guest lecturer. He shared his story as an entrepreneur and provided us with great tips concering startups.

The man behind Bungalo, Haukur Gudjonsson. Source.

Haukur has founded 5 companies himself, latest one being the successful Bungalo, a cabin rental service. In total he has over 12 years of experience with working with startups. He has a preference of starting companies without much money and growing them organically as the below quote illustrates.

"I am a big advocate of bootstrapping your business or essentially starting your business for little or no money and building and growing it naturally. A lot of entrepreneurs feel like they need to get investors to be able to create a successful business but the truth is that they only should approach investors when they need money to grow and know exactly what that money should be used for. "

 - Haukur Gudjonsson

Haukur also gave us tips on what to focus early on in a startup. 

While designing your startup company, you should be aware of every aspect of your idea. You need to inspect your idea from multiple perspectives and play devil's advocate a lot.  If you do not do this, you will notice that you will waste company's resources later on researching matters which you could have done yourself. This will leave the company with extra unnecessary costs.

Once you have finished your design, it's vital to get the product out to the market as soon as possible. Entering the market will enable you to get feedback from customers and you will gain a great insight on your product.

Lastly Haukur mentioned one of his mistakes with Bungalo. The mistake was spending too much time on the logo of the company. He summarized his tip as do not waste money on things that aren't vital for your company to flourish. A company can do well without spending much money on a logo.

After Haukur's lecture Bala held a lecture about how to create products which users love. Bala summarized two key points in this topic.

1. Empathize with the user: You have to understand exactly what is the user's problem you are solving, and what the problem is about. 

2. Design matters: Bala stressed that even the simple details such as phrases, fonts and paragraph spacing matter when creating a great product. The devil is indeed in the details  

This quote really fits here perfectly! Source

Bala continued to describe what is a good design. In his mind it is something that is simple and timeless, while also being daring and something innovative. However, the most important part of a good design is that it provides the solution to the right problem!

 

This is all for now. Until next time!