Bawte – John Jackovin
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About the Episode
How do you pivot and iterate on your initial mobile app idea? Well today’s guests shares how he collects user feedback through old fashion phone calls and emails and the one question that you should ask that will yield useful answers. Also, listen to why you as the founder and brains behind your idea should do the “grunt work”.
John Jackovin is the CEO and co-founder of Bawte.
Show Notes
After taking newly-purchased appliances back home, I always find myself making a decision whether to hold on the box or simply refrain from adding to the trash knowing I will never find that box anyways once I need it. By the time I will need the warranty details, I will then scold myself for choosing that option.
That’s why I love the app that we will be featuring todaybecause it speaks to my own personal need. We have John Jackovin, CEO and co-founder of Bawte, to tell us about how their product helps consumers deal with post-purchase experiences.
Here are the highlights of my discussion with John:
- About Bawte, how they started, their pre-versions and how they moved to focus on their aspects as a result of feedback from their users,
- The product’s core functionalities and how they looked at ways to break boundaries and develop additional features,
- Email, phone, one-on-one conversation and the old school methods that worked from them in getting user feedback,
- How John came up with his questions during feedback interview, his challenges in talking to people and the alternativeshe had considered,
- His philosophy of having leaders doing as much leg as possible on the onset and how this affected their decision not to outsource or hire people,
- Bootstrapping their business and juggling different companies with his business partner,Tom,and how they go about coming up with ideas, checking the market and planning the tactical parts,
- Using Twitter handles and LinkedIn in connecting to people versus sending cold emails,
- Honesty, transparency and the business ethics he values the most,
John also shares about the lowest point they had in their business which came during the time that they had already grown their staff and were starting to make profits. They got hit by a restraining order and within that timeframe,completely went out of business which prompted him to take additional jobs to make ends meet.Despite this, he took it as a learning experience, as this gave him more insight on the business processes and the legal side of entrepreneurship.
We should take John’s take away from this: nothing is as bad as it seems at the moment.
Show Mentions
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