hedgehoglab

A year ago, on 21 May 2007, Mark Forster and I co-founded hedgehog lab. After years of frustration working in full-time jobs that never seemed to fulfil our expectations, we decided that there was a great opportunity to build a developer-friendly company in the North East of England.

In retrospect, it was both the toughest and most fulfilling decision we ever made. Toughest because both of us hardly fit into the popular profile of software start-up founders of our time. When we started hedgehog lab, both of us were well past 25 and had considerable financial risk. Yet, nothing was more clearer in our minds than the single minded determination to create a company that lived up both to it's values and delivered the financial results to be sustainable.

In this series of posts on our anniversary, I wanted to talk about some of the key issues that affected both the founding of hedgehog lab and the journey through the past year. This one covers founding principles.

In an age when most start-ups are founded with the single-minded goal of "making lots of money", often at the expense of both employees and customers, we had a very value and principle focused approach to how we wanted to run hedgehog lab.

In no particular order, the following were the founding principles of hedgehog lab,

• Treat your employees right. In turn, they will treat your customers better.

  This is so obvious and simple, that it amazes me to see so many companies not follow it. It is blindingly obvious to me that if you want great customer service (in the all-encompassing meaning of the term), you have to start by treating your employees right.

  Why is it that "employee loyalty" is much taunted in HR circles, but "employer loyalty" is a rarely used word? An employer-employee relationship is a 2-way relationship, much like a customer-supplier relationship. Yet, companies pay far less attention and effort to maintaining the latter. Given the current supply and demand in the software market, it is high time employers started listening to their people. I understand the irony in my criticism, as I am an employer and an employee. My point still stands!

• Have conversations with your customers.

  Most companies have only 2 types of interactions with their customers, sales and support. There is nothing wrong with that, but to be a genuinely customer-focused company, you need to engage with them everyday. Listening to your customers is not enough. Talking to your customers is not enough.

  We try to reach out to our customers in everything we do. Whether it be a new company policy, the re-design of our website, or ideas for a new product, we engage with customers to gain their feedback and if necessary, make the changes that aligns us better with their needs.

• Turn your customers into fans.

  Having customers is not enough for us. We want to turn them into fans by appealing to not just their needs but their perceptions of what a great company should be like.

  You might think that this is a bit lofty for a company that produces business software. After all, only consumer companies with cool products can turn customers into raving fans. You might just be wrong.

• Eat your own dog food

  This is mostly used as a promotional strategy by product companies to prove that their product is "good enough". However, at hedgehog lab, this is our primary strategy when developing a new product and is the overarching principle around both product and feature design. We would never develop anything that we would not use as a company or endorse otherwise.

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