The 8 lessons I’ve learnt being CEO at a growing start-up

5 months ago we went public with ImageSEO on Producthunt. Thanks to Das Webworker Magazin, we have just reached 1000 users. Here is the 8 things that I have learnt so far from this beautiful adventure.

1. The first client is the hardest to get and you should celebrate it because it means that you were not totally wrong about your product idea.

2. Actually statement one is false, you were not close and you should never think that you will be close to the perfect market fit product. Try, get feedback, move forward, get feedback, get back, get feedback, move forward, etc. It’s very hard to understand what your customers really want when you create a product that doesn’t exist yet. ImageSEO V1 had too many features but was not understandable. imageSEO v2 had not enough features. imageSEO v3 was not performing but we didn’t understood why. One day, we got a brilliant feedback from Susanna Naldi. It has changed everything.

3) I can't keep track of the time I've spent on Slack with Clément Jacquelin and Thomas DENEULIN. You need to keep clearing the air with your associates if you want things to work. 

4) Diversity in your team is extremely important. Don’t do business with people that have the same profile and skills than you. With an excellent developer (@Thomas), an amazing designer (@Clement) and a bad story teller (@Me) you can do everything.

5) SEO is SO competitive and it's really hard to exist on the internet. It’s not like in the real life. Having energy is not enough. You need to set-up creative processes. Hopefully Neil Patel advices on communication, digital marketing and growth hacking are here. Thanks to Olivier Andrieu for its amazing book as well.

5) You have worked so hard on your project that you think that your users understand it. They don't. You have to keep things as simple as possible and always ask yourself : will my user will understand this feature ? If the answer is no then your feature is useless.

6) People are surprisingly kind and supportive. Even when you don't know them. Ask for feedbacks, again and again. Special thanks to people from Weglot & Imagify for their advices !

7) The most difficult is to choose a market. The Internet is endless, but if you target everybody, you target nobody. Being CEO means taking decision. Sometimes hard decisions. You might fail, you might success. But you have to decide and keep moving. Status quo was for the 19th century. Thanks to Julien Petit for this advice. Probably the most valuable one.

8) Good support is the key. It helps you to improve your product and connect with your users. Your clients should always be happy when they spend money to use your service. 

ImageSEO optimizes your image ALT texts and names for Search Engines using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Save a lot of time and gain traffic with our WordPress Plugin.

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Aurelio