Ally Fekaiki is the founder of Juno, a startup which is completely redefining employee benefits - leading with flexibility and choice. I used to work with Ally and I’ve loved following his journey from idea to reality. And of course, Juno is now our platform of choice for employee benefits at The Scale Up Collective. (And, there’s a special offer from Juno for our subscribers at the bottom of this newsletter 👀).

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Ally worked as a photographer, filmmaker, and in a variety of creative roles in the startup world - which is how we met. He felt disenchanted by the traditional employment model, especially by the employee perks on offer, which led him to develop Juno in 2019.

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Juno has raised more than $5m since its inception and they have over 200 clients in almost 70 countries, so there’s certainly a lot we can learn from their story. Check out the full conversation here, and read on for our top takeaways:

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⚡Road-test your idea - but on a budget

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Don’t even think about creating a product until you have built your community, generated demand and created connection.

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At The Scale Up Collective we talk a lot about testing out your ideas. This is exactly what Ally did with Juno, however, he emphasises doing this in a way which doesn’t blow your whole budget.

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Looking at the brand today, you would never know that Ally’s first iteration of Juno was a landing page using an off-the-shelf WordPress eCommerce template that he bought for £60 and built using YouTube tutorials. He worked part-time in a restaurant during his first year in business, even after raising £650,000 pre-seed funding.

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With this landing page, he scoped out his idea with the community in the co-working space he used. He built up demand and excitement around his idea and lined up a handful of potential clients so that when he was ready to launch, the customer base was ready and waiting.

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⚡Choose the right customers

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It’s better to walk away from a customer that isn’t the right fit than to keep them and disappoint them. 👈 This is a hard truth for a lot of startups.

It’s tempting to believe that your product is relevant for a huge audience, but starting small and finding a niche is what worked for Juno. In the beginning, Ally wore a lot of hats, doing order fulfilment, customer service and finances. So, he targeted businesses that were just like Juno and could relate to what he was building, using Glassdoor and LinkedIn to identify modern, progressive startups.

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And this approach really worked; Juno retains 98.5% of their clients, which Ally credits to a relentless focus on finding the right customers that he knows Juno will really work for. Even if that did mean turning down a big corporate client.

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⚡Stay true to your vision

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When Ally quit his job to start Juno, he had a strong vision of what he wanted to achieve. He has exactly the same vision and focus today.

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However, there’s one thing he would do differently. As a commercially minded leader, Ally was really focused on sales and marketing in the early days. But if he could go back, he would focus more of his time on working with product and engineering earlier on.

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We would all do things differently in hindsight, but I’m curious: would you put your focus on product or marketing?

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PS: Ally is offering friends of The Scale Up Collective £300 credit to use on the platform so you can give your team the chance to choose something meaningful to them. Simply quote ‘scale up’ to their team when you’re signing up - check it out here: https://www.withjuno.com/

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