Camilla Ley Valentin (Denmark) is founder of the SaaS company Queue-it, which supplies an online queuing system designed to manage overload situations on websites in connection with massive end-user peaks. She also serves as the board chairman and board member of a number of IT/internet companies.
At Queue-it, we’re often asked how we came up with the idea of inventing the world’s first online queuing system—who invented it, when, why, and so on. I wish that the story of the invention had an exotic origin and character, but it doesn’t.
The truth is that we started the team without having a concrete product idea.
In the beginning, my co-founders, Niels Henrik Sodemann and Martin Pronk, and I met in our spare time over a period of several months before we started the business. Many other companies have started in this way, so there is nothing unusual about that. Our history differs in that we actually started the process of establishing our own company without having any specific ideas outside of developing software-based cloud computing, the most important megatrend in technology we saw at the time.
So we started two parallel processes in order to move forward with ideation. One was to bind ourselves legally to ensure mutual commitment, and the other was to provide the necessary basis for agreeing on our collaboration. In concrete terms, this process comprised of three important milestones:
1. A nondisclosure agreement (NDA) in which we promised each other not to tell anyone that we were having these discussions, nor what we were discussing. As a result, all of the ideas that arose during the process are still secret, including those that we did not select.
2. A letter of intent (LOI), stating that it was our intention to start a joint company with the purpose of developing and selling a queuing system.
3. A shareholder agreement and employment agreements, which regulate our ownership structure and the agreements among us, and the agreed conditions of employment.
When setting up a company where there are several partners, it is incredibly important to get these factors sorted out before the start, and it doesn’t take much to get the documents themselves finalized. The discussions that are the foundation of the final agreements do, however, take time and a fair amount of mental energy.
The other process focused on the product itself, the idea, the invention.
As mentioned, we developed the idea on the background of a set of simple but broad criteria:
• Cloud computing (software-as-a-service)
• International market potential
• New invention
With these agreements and corner flags in place, we started a relatively classical innovation process. This process is outlined in the following illustration:
Idea Screening
In the first stage there is room for all suggestions and more‑or‑less crazy ideas. The team reviews the ideas and reaches an agreement about which will go on to the next step. The output is a “go or no go” in order to advance a selected set of ideas for further study.
Preliminary Investigation
The selected ideas are studied further here, in particular with regard to market potential, the competitive situation, and other viability factors. The output is go/no go for a chosen idea before it goes to final business case validation.
Business Case Validation
This step results in a detailed analysis of the idea that the team is leaning toward within a set of parameters that follow the criteria that Sequoia Capital recommends for use in a business plan (see: https://www.sequoiacap.com/grove/posts/6bzx/writing-a-business-plan). The output is final validation and a business plan for the product.
Prototyping
The architecture and first version of the product are developed and validated. It is important that this takes place in collaboration with potential customers and/or users.
Launch
The product is presented to the world. In practice, this can also be done before a beta version is launched. For example, by using a teaser‑site, for those who are interested in being notified when the product is available live and perhaps where they can some parts of the system.
It is necessary that the process from start to finish is approached in an iterative way, which in this situation means that an idea, after each step, can go further or start over if the findings from the step suggest. In other words, you should be ready to reject a chosen idea at any time throughout the process.
It is my personal experience, both from the businesses I am involved with and from the other startups I have observed, that the idea is rarely the most important factor in achieving success. There are many good ideas out there, and a great many of them never become a viable business.
There can be several reasons for this.
I meet plenty of budding entrepreneurs who tell me that they’re working on the world’s best idea, which they naturally can’t tell me about unless I sign an NDA or the like. It’s difficult for me to understand why this “keep the idea secret” concept is still so widespread. A product that nobody knows about will have difficulty in getting distribution and support—support that, in the start, will most likely come from the entrepreneur’s personal network. There is, of course, the theoretical possibility that a person you’ve shared your idea with steals it and makes billions from it right before your eyes; but that is a very theoretical possibility!
You should not be totally naive, of course, but I would consider talking about your idea to people who do not seem to be involved in directly competitive businesses to be an advantage rather than a risk.
Putting the right team together—a team that is capable of turning the idea into a successful business—will be much more critical to building your business. If you have the right co-founding team in place, you’ll experience that you can go far no matter whether you choose the 100% correct idea from day one.
The secret of getting aheadis getting started. The secretof getting started isbreaking your complexoverwhelming tasks intosmaller manageable tasks,and then starting onthe first one.
Mark Twain