StartupCafe

First of all, thank you. Seriously. I understand that you’re some of the busiest people around, and everyone on the StartupCafe team wants to say a big thanks for taking the time out to give us feedback. In return, we listened and held a mammoth three-hour feedback session about what we’re going to be doing in the next few months.

In the end, we had 57 responses. Here are the responses and we’ll also walk you through what we’re doing as a direct result.

Do you want us?

Good start. We nicked this question straight from Sean Ellis startup metrics. Sean recommends that if less than 25% of your users say tick ‘very disappointed’, then its time to do something else. Looks like we’re above that threshold. Good start, but room for improvement 😉

How do we tailor our content to cater for your needs?

Unsurprisingly, posts about individual startups will stay.

Job Postings – It’s clear enough to us that the Job Postings aren’t something that is top of people’s reading lists. We’re going to be creating a separate page for job postings.

Opinion and 60 second interviews – even split. The overall sentiment seems to be that good, well-conceived content is always welcomed. We’ll focus more on local issues than generic ones.

Weekly events list – in a separate question, we asked whether you wanted us to kill the weekly events list. Opinion seems pretty divided. 13 people suggested killing it. 14 suggested using iCal, 12 using email, and 18 to keep it as it is. A few people had no idea it existed. We’re going to keep writing the events list with a few important changes, but as I will explain in the final section (getting the content to you), we’re also going to promote it more actively.

Additional content – We had a bunch of requests for potential topics, including but not limited to:

• resources for startups
• companies listing page
• people’s experiences working for a startup
• general updates on who’s doing what
• feedback on events
• experiences from entrepreneurs (e.g. pitfalls to avoid)
• investors’ perspective on things

We’re going to look at all of these. But we can’t do everything at once, so we’re going to prioritise the list. We’re going to start a companies listing/directory in the upcoming months, as well as a list of resources for startups, including a reading list. Live blogging will also be high on the cards for feedback on events – so please don’t get annoyed with us when we turn up with a laptop at the next startup event! If you’re going to a cool event and are willing to guest blog, by all means drop us an email—that’d be awesome too.

How often should we post?

The general feedback was that an average of 3-4 posts a week sounds about right. No big complaints there.

Getting the right content to you at the right time

Overall, the clear feedback here was that we need to get better at pushing out new content to you.

From our own stats, its very clear that most people reach us through RSS readers and Twitter. Our regular readers seem to be reading us through RSS and we seem to be picking up casual readers through tweets. A few people specifically requested email notifications too.

As a result, we’re making some big changes to the way we communicate:

1. Previously, we’ve restricted the RSS feed to partial rather than full. This is now changed. Each post in the RSS feed will be available in full.
2. Each post will be tweeted 2-3 times throughout the day so that you can hear about new posts.
3. We will be retiring our Facebook Group and starting a Facebook Page. What this means is that if you “like” the page, new posts will appear in your facebook feed.
4. As well as this, we’re looking into creating an email digest for our event listings (which may include some of our top posts).

You can sign up to as much or as little as you want. We want to make it easy for you to find us in a convenient way.

Final Notes …

As you imagine, there is plenty of work here to be getting on with, alongside a few more things that we’re not going to cover here for simplicity’s sake. Please be patient as we get on with working our way through this list.

Also, if you do enjoy what we do, please feel free to spread the word or send more coffees our way. It’s the words of encouragement when we’ve made a difference to you and the sparks created along the way that have kept us going for the last 20 months. StartupCafe is a labour of love and is a side project/hobby that we end up putting far too much time into. Sometimes, a simple thanks goes a long way (and we really appreciate it).

Last thing (I promise) … we’re on the look out for someone to join the team. If you (or anyone you know) is interested, then please drop us an email at hello@startupcafe.co.uk. If you don’t want to devote a lot of time, but see something here which you would like to help with, do let us know too.

Remember, we’re here to help you become more awesome, but we can only be as awesome as you can make us. Every little helps.