Announcing Kindling Loves Startups

Announcing Kindling Loves Startups

We’re announcing a new program today, Kindling Loves Startups, where we’re giving away 50 seats of Kindling to any startup for free. This post gives some of the background for the program, why we’re doing this and how Kindling solves a real need for every startup.

I love startups. Everything’s ahead of them, they’re like an NFL team in preseason — all hope. We’re gonna win the Super Bowl this year.

Through the course of my work, I often get to meet startup founders. I always enjoy these conversations. If you ever are feeling tired or demotivated, have a coffee with someone involved in starting a company — their energy and optimism is contagious.

Navigating a startup from creation to success can be viewed as an exercise in expert decision-making. Choosing the right things to focus on — and the things to not focus on — might be the most important skill for startup founders and early employees. And I know from my own experiences starting companies that there is no shortage of things to do, and no lack of opportunity.

Kindling is a product of this thinking, of directly dealing with the challenges of scaling a startup. The product was originally created as an internal project of the NYC-based web design & development firm Arc90, to help the early employees share, discuss and prioritize the most important ideas among the multitude of possibilities. From potential lab projects to marketing efforts to client services, ideas were continually discussed and vetted in Kindling. Only those ideas that showed the most promise and had the best fitness for their goals were given additional attention, and ultimately realized.

Deciding which ideas to pursue is crucial for the startup. At Kindling, we use our product to engage in a conversation with our employees, friends, investors and a group of selected customers about which product features to invest time into next. Shared ideas are tested at every step along the way from conception to decision to implementation. We are always are asking, “Are we moving forward on this idea with adequate evidence that this is the right thing to do?” Kindling gives us a place to provide some rigor and transparency around these decisions as they are being made.

How can Kindling be useful for your startup? It can’t be overstated how critical it is for a resource-constrained startup to focus on the right things. It can be deadly to invest scarce time on something customers ultimately will not respond to. Ideas are hypotheses, and as such, they should be tested before being given additional resource. Also, in the culture of the start-up, it’s important that everyone’s voices are heard. This is one of the main reasons people choose to work at start-ups — to impact and shape the product / service / company as a whole. Kindling gives you a place to listen to ideas from your entire community, gather evidence, test your hypotheses, and ultimately invest in those validated ideas that show the strongest likelihood of success.

This is why Kindling is perfect for startups. And we know this because we live it every day.

We Love Startups
I’m very happy to announce a new program, Kindling Loves Startups. Effective today, we’re giving away access to Kindling forever, for free, for 50 users at any startup (we’re defining startup as any company founded in the last 4 years, and this is the only requirement to gain entry to the program.)

Move all of the conversations around ideas that you’re currently having in email into Kindling. Once there, you’ll have a central, canonical, searchable, historical archive of potential and realized ideas, as well as a vibrant place to have conversations with your employees. Down the line, you may want to engage investors, customers or partners as well. This is no problem in Kindling, just invite them in and give them access to the areas you want them to see.

Close the loop on open ideas in your organization, engage your employees and make decisions.

We hope you like it.