My startup, HubSpot, has done a fair
amount of recruiting/hiring over the past year (the team has grown by over 100%,
despite the down-turn in the economy). Along the way, I’ve found some
“patterns” to the recruiting that we do and the kind of people that end up
joining us.
I’m going to stay away from the overly obvious stuff (mostly because I have
no idea what the obvious stuff actually is). I’m also going to assume that
you’re already smart and passionate and all the other trimmings of a star
candidate.
Tips For Landing That Startup Dream Job
1. Match the culture: Remember that advice about dressing
one level above the job you’re hiring into? Or the “it’s better to be
over-dressed” advice? Forget that. Dress so that you’ll fit in. Dress as if
you’re already on the team. Any startup you’d want to work for is not
going to hold it against you for not dressing up. They wouldn’t expect you to
wear something to an interview that they wouldn’t wear themselves into work.
2. Convey A Passion For Startups: If you’ve worked for
startups before — talk about them. Talk about what it was like.
Especially talk about the painful parts. They want to know that you
know what it’s like to be on a startup team. We want to know that you’ve got
that weird genetic flaw that causes you to want to take on that special kind of
pain that only entrepreneurial people understand. If you haven’t worked for a
startup before, come up with some really convincing reasons as to why
you want to start now. And it can’t just be because you got laid off from some
Fortune 500 company last week. Remember that startups are not in
the business of creating jobs, they’re in the business of creating value.
Help them understand how you’re going to be able to help them
create value that nobody else can.
3. Read, Read, Read: Many startups today have a pretty wide
footprint on the web. Does the CEO tweet? Does the CTO write a blog? Read
them. You don’t have to be able to write a graduate thesis on their work, but
you should be a wee bit familiar with their thoughts and leanings. Oh, and
most startups will have you meet the founder/CEO/CTO before you are
made an offer and they’re all human. They write for a reason — one of which is
to be read; and maybe even understood.
4. Join The Conversation: Find out where the startup team
is hanging out and chatting on the web. For HubSpot, for example, we have a
relatively active group of people on Twitter. (Just do a Twitter search on
“HubSpot” and you’ll see what I mean). Get to know some of the faces/names
and find out the tone of the conversations happening around the startup you’re
looking to join.
5. Connect Online: Chances are, whoever you talk to on the
startup team is going to do a quick scan for you online (LinkedIn, Facebook,
Twitter, blogosphere, etc.). Why not be more proactive, learn about them and
connect with them online first? Another advantage to this approach? You could
ask (without being too pushy or aggressive) some of the “insiders” you connect
to what it’s like to work there. The idea is to convey that you care, you’re
doing your homework and are savvy enough to make sure you want to work
there first. Startup recruiting is a two-way street (the company should bring a
lot to you, just like you’re going to be bringing a lot to them).
6. Emphasize That You “Get Stuff Done”: The single most
important attribute that many startups look for in recruits is that they get
stuff done. You can be the most brilliant engineer/marketer/whatever on the
planet, but if you don’t have a tendency to get a lot of stuff done,
you’re not an attractive recruit. The reason is obvious and simple — but I’ll
tell you anyways. Startups are a grand exercise in resource-deprivation.
There’s always too much work and not enough people. If the startup team hires
you, they want to know that you’re going to put a dent in their
workload — not just come up with great ideas for other people to work
on.
What do you think? If you’ve got your own startup, what would sway you? If
you’ve interviewed at startups, what’s worked and what hasn’t? Would love to
hear your thoughts in the comments.
By the way, if you’re a fan of this blog, please join us on Facebook. The LinkedIn group has 75,000+ members,
but the Facebook community is falling behind. Hope to see you there.
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As a tribute to the very funny VC
Non-Admissions and the follow-up Founder
Non-Admissions, I offer to you my own take on this — from an angel investor
perspective. Sorry that mine aren’t in a cool presentation form with pictures
and such. I don’t have that kind of talent. 
10 Things An Angel Investor Will Never Say
1. I really want to support entrepreneurs — but just those that are going to
make me money.
2. I dread having to explain your business idea to my spouse (who can veto
any deal).
3. I don’t really have enough stake in your company to spam my network on
your behalf.
4. I was lying when I said that some of my best friends were VCs. Even VCs
aren’t best friends with VCs.
5. I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about 50% of the time. What’s
a socially-semantic mobile platform for non-virtual currency mean? (Oh, it’s an
iPhone/Facebook payment app).
6. The other 50% of the time, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Anti-dilution provisions in a termsheet are not about beer.
7. How the public market did last week does impact my decision
making.
8. I like to invest in cool startups because it helps make up for high
school.
9. I don’t understand what half the things in the funding agreement mean
either, but I’m betting that most of them are to protect me, not you.
10. I really didn’t put the check in the mail the day I said I did. I was
golfing that day. I sucked.
11. I’m in it to mostly have fun. If I wanted to do unpleasant work, I’d
have my own startup.
—-
Feel free to add your best ones in the comments section, or if you prefer, you can tweet me @dharmesh.
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Did this tickle your funny bone? Please tweet it.
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For those curious about the title, it’s a reference to “downward facing dog”
(one of the most widely reognized yoga poses). 
Is your startup practicing inward facing dog? That is, are you overly
focused on things going inside the company with too little attention on
what might be going on outside the company?
Signs That Your Startup Is Practicing Inward Facing Dog
1. More than a few days go by and you haven’t talked to a customer other
than to provide support or try to sell them something.
2. When people bring up things like “Did you hear about X (a direct
competitor) doing Y?” most of the time, you hadn’t heard the news and some of
the times, you didn’t even know who X was. Note: I don’t advocate being
obsessed about your competition — and I particularly don’t advise
following them (i.e. X did Y, so I have to do Y…). But, I think
there’s a lot that can be learned simply by observing your
competitors.
3. You haven’t located 5 people in your industry whose blogs you think are
worth reading regularly. I don’t care what industry you’re in, there are
bloggers out there writing things you should be reading. Even if you disagree
with them. Even if you think your industry is “broken” and you’re out to
transform it. In fact, especially if you think your industry is
broken. Read, read, read.
4. You haven’t been to an industry conference in a couple of years (or
ever). Yes, budgets are tight, and most of the content from these things makes
it onto the web anyways, but it’s not about the content. Yes, it’s unlikely
you’re going to get a lot of customer leads. But, it’s not about those those
things. It’s about learning. It’s about the real-time, in-person
conversations. (This coming from an introvert — who hates real-time
conversations).
5. You’re not watching the news about VC financings, acquisitions and IPOs
in your market (or adjacent markets). Even if you don’t plan on raising
funding. Even if your startup is going to crush everyone else, getting a sense
of how the money is flowing in your industry is important to know. What kinds
of companies are getting funded? Who is funding them? What other deals have
they done? Who is getting bought? You don’t need to get obsessed with this,
but just a quick scan once a week is well worth it.
6. You don’t meet with other startup founders that are at your stage — or
beyond. Though we founders like to believe that our situations are unique and
nobody else can possibly have the same kinds of challenges and problems
we do — it’s just not true. There are many, many patterns that continually
reoccur in startups. Even weird things that you think are too arcane to be
common.
What other signs do you think there are that a startup is too inward
focused? What do you do to make sure you stay in touch with what’s going on
outside your four walls?
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The attention economy has been all the rage for startups for a while.
Here’s the general line of reasoning with the attention economy:
1. Grab user’s attention.
2. Sell that attention to others.
Like many abstractions, this one is a tad over-simplified, but not so much as
to not be useful. A bunch of modern-day startups fall into the above pattern.
Get a mass of users to your shiny-new website then monetize that attention
through things like advertising (basically reselling that attention).
Why do so many web startups take this approach? I think it’s for two primary
reasons: 1) it’s easier and 2) it’s more fun. To understand
this better, let’s contrast the attention economy to that other
economy: the wallet economy. In the wallet economy, instead
of competing for a share of people’s attention, you’re competing for a share of
their wallet. 
The wallet economy presents one big problem for many entrepreneurs (including
me): It involes this unpleasant activity known as selling something.
If you’re a software entrepreneur, I’m going to bet that if you had to pick
amongst things like writing code, selling stuff and cleaning the office —
selling would likely be at the bottom of your list. So, entrepreneurs will
prefer doing (almost) anything other than selling. Enter AdSense,
stage left. “I’ll just put AdSense on my site”. If the entrepreneur is not
completely delusional, she’ll add statements like: “Yes, it’s only pennies, but
you have to start somewhere, and we’ll grow the traffic over time.”
What’s really nice about the whole attention economy is that you can become a
revenue-generating company today (revenue-generating is becoming
fashionable again). And, because there are advertising networks out there like
AdSense, you’re not dependent on all that selling muckiness. You get to avoid
that whole “convincing customers to pay business”.
But, I have a few issuese with the attention economy, from a software
perspective (I’ve written about this before, but I’m going to be a bit crisper
this time):
1. Attention Is A Scarce Resource: Attention is a bit
limited and fragmented. I’d ague that it’s getting increasingly harder to get
people’s attention. The level of attention I can devote to stuff has stayed
pretty much the same throughout the years. I might make more money now than I
did 10 years ago, but the level of attention I can spend hasn’t gone up much —
certainly not proportionally to income.
2. Battle of User and Advertiser: There’s a conflict
between getting monetizable attention and solving the user’s problem. Let me
explain: Back in the good old days of software, users had a problem, you wrote
software that solved that problem, and they paid you for it. Nice and simple.
All your incentives were to solve the problem as well as you could for as many
people as possible. Now, contrast this with a web application that is
monetizing attention. Now, not only do you need to make the user happy (so
they’ll visit in the first place), you have to make the advertiser happy as well
(because they’re buying that user’s attention). In fact, to make any
real money you have to get better and better at interrupting the user
well enough so that they pay attention to the ads. Basically,
you have to balance the needs of your users and the needs of your advertisers.
That’s hard.
3. Advertisers Make Lousy Customers: Even with all the
fancy content-matching algorithms that pair up a given ad to a given context, I
still don’t like advertising. I really don’t. I can see why it’s
important in a lot of industries — but I don’t know that software is one of
them. Given the choice between solving a user’s problem (which I understand,
and hopefully care about) and an advertiser’s problem — I’d choose solving the
user’s problem. There’s more creativity involved. It’s more focused. I can
control it better. There’s only so much multi-variant testing you can do to get
that CTR from 1.2% to 1.4%.
I’ve never had a business that focused on the attention economy (however, I
have built tools like twitter grader
that generate lots of traffic), so I may be missing something here. On the
other hand, I have built startups that focus on the wallet economy, and
I must say, my simple-minded nature likes the notion of solving problems and
getting people to pay me to do so. Call me old-fashioned.
What do you think? Have you succeeded with the attention economy (succeeded,
as in, you have a decent chance of making in your lifetime?) Has the
monetization model changed at all that would make the attention economy more
viable? Would love to read your thoughts in the comments.
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There’s a non-zero chance that you’re reading this because you were
thinking: “What the heck is he talking about? Shouldn't startups be hiring the best people possible? What's this about comprimising?”
And, if you were thinking that, you’d be right. Startups should
hire the best people possible. But, if you re-read the title, you’ll notice
that I’m saying you should always compromise. Why? Because there’s no
such thing as the absolutely perfect hire along every possible dimension. If
you recruit people that you think were a “no-compromise” hire, you’re deluding
yourself with unrealistic expectations. Nobody’s perfect (and if they are, you
probably couldn’t recruit or afford them anyways).
Everyone you bring on is a compromise. The trick is to compromise on
the right things.
Let me explain. Here are several different attributes or “dimensions of
awesomeness” you might seek for your startup recruit:
1. Passion: Are they fired-up?
2. Experience: Have they done this particular job
before? Did they succeed at it?
3. Intelligence: Are they smart?
4. Academics: Do they have the right degree? From the
right place?
5. Hunger: Are they motivated? Are they ambitious?
6. Risk-Tolerance: Can they share the risk? Or, are they
looking to make fair market value?
7. Scrappiness: Can they get by with little? Are they
resourceful?
8. Loyalty: Can you get them to commit to your cause?
Will they be fiercely loyal?
Those are just a few I thought of off the top of my head. It’s by no means a
complete list. I intentionally left out things like “integrity”, because it’s
hard to argue in favor of compromising on integrity. That’s just plain
stupid.
But just about all of the attributes listed above could be compromised a
little in exchange for something else. For example, if you were
somehow able to grade a recruit along all these dimensions, you might find that
someone scores “average” in the academics dimension — but is off-the-charts
smart (happens all the time). So, you might decide that it’s OK for them not to
have an ivy league degree. Or, someone might be so smart, passionate and
entrepreneurial — but lacking in experience. Perhaps that’s OK too. Or, maybe
you really do have to have the absolutely perfect person along every
possible dimension, but they’re so good, you’re just not sure you’re going to be
able to keep them engaged. Perhaps you’ll have to compromise on the loyalty
front.
The point is, like with just about everything related to startups (and lots
of things in life), there are tradeoffs. You need to figure out which
dimensions are absolutely critical (where you will not give), and which ones
you’re willing to compromise a little on. There’s no right answer — it depends
on your business, your culture, your values and your instincts.
What do you think? Which attributes of people do you value the
most? What would you be willing to compromise on, if you could get almost
everything else? What things do you hold inviolate — that you would never
compromise on? Please leave a comment.
Or, if you'd prefer, you can take the conversation to twitter. You can find me @dharmesh on twitter.
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I’m speaking at the Inbound
Marketing Summit later this month in San Francisco. There are some really
great speakers lined up (David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan, Charlene Li, Paul
Gillin and others). If you’re looking to learn more about inbound marketing and
how to get found in Google, social media and blogs, this should be a great event. If
you decide to attend, use the code HUB200 for a special $200 discount. Drop me
a note if you’re going to be there, would love to meet-up.
My session’s going to be called “Startup Marketing: Tips From The
Trenches”. As I get my thoughts together for this, I started making a list of
all of the things I’d advise a new startup to do to get things kicked
off with a limited budget. As it turns out, there are a lot of tactical steps
that individually don’t do much, but in aggregate start laying the foundation
for much bigger things. So, I thought I’d share some of these things with you.
This list is not intended to be a comprehensive “here are all the things you should
do”, but more of a “if I were starting a company today, here’s what I would
do in the first 10 days…” It’s written in a short, punchy style. I’ll likely revise it in the
future as I add more things, but I wanted to get “Version 1.0” out there for you
and see what you think.
Tactical Tips for Startup Marketing
1. Pick a name that works. Needs to be simple, memorable and unambiguous.
The “.com” domain should be available without playing tricks with the name (like
dropping vowels or adding dashes). Also, just because there’s no website on a
domain doesn’t mean it’s “available”. Available means something you can
register immediately, or that has a price that you’re willing to pay attached to
it. Don’t wander down the rabbit hole of finding the perfect name if you have
no indication that it’s for sale. This will waste a bunch of your time.
2. Put a simple website up. Doesn’t have to be fancy. The goal is to put
enough content on the site to start the Google sandbox clock. Don’t worry about
the site not saying much (nobody’s going to be looking at it anyways). Make
sure to use a decent content management system (CMS) and not Dreamweaver or
(shudder) FrontPage. Just because you can hand-craft HTML doesn’t mean you
should for your startup website. The structure and features of a CMS are going
to be important someday. Trust me.
3. Get some links into the new startup website. If you have a personal
website, link to it from there. If you have friends/associates/family with
websites, cash in some favor chips and get them to link to it. The goal is to
get the Google crawler to start indexing your site. You only need one decent
link to get things going. To check whether your site is being indexed by
Google, do a search like site:yoursite.com (not perfect, but good enough).
4. Setup a twitter account. Name of the account should match your
company/domain name. Link to your twitter account from your main site and to
your main site from your twitter account. (Note: If you have a natural
skepticism of the value of twitter, you are welcome to this skepticism. But, go
ahead and grab your twitter account anyways. You can resume your skepticism
after you do that).
5. Add e-mail subscription. Let people sign-up to get an email when you’re ready to show them the
product. A simple email signup form is sufficient.
6. Get a nice logo. Run a quick contest on CrowdSpring or 99Designs and you’ll wind up with something
decent enough. Make sure you get the vector file (Illustrator or EPS file) as
part of the final deliverable. If you've got design skills yourself, or know somebody really good that can do it, even better.
7. Setup a Facebook business page (known as a “fan” page) for your
startup. You’re not going to get many fans in the early days. That’s OK. Just
get something out there. Add a simple description of your startup, link back to
your main website. The usual stuff.
8. Create a clean Facebook URL. Facebook doesn’t allow simple/vanity URLs (unless you're big and established). So, to make things easier on
yourself (and your users), setup a sub-domain and redirect it to your Facebook
page. For example, here’s what I did: facebook.hubspot.com (notice that when
you visit this link, it takes you automatically to the ugly Facebook URL).
Setting up this sub-domain is free and usually pretty easy (it’s done through
whoever your registrar is for your domain).
9. Kick off a blog. You can use one of the free hosting tools (like
WordPress.com), but don’t use their domain name. Put your blog on
blog.yourcompany.com — or if you’re proficient and can install WP locally, make
it yourcompany.com/blog. Do NOT make it yourcompany.wordpress.com. The reason
is that you want to control all the SEO authority for your blog and channel it
towards your main website. And, chances are, WordPress.com doesn’t need your
help on the SEO front.
10. Write a blog article that describes how you got to this point. What
problem you’re hoping to solve. Why you picked this problem. It
should feel a little uncomfortable revealing what you’re revealing. If
you have tendencies towards being in “Stealth Mode”, read “Stealth
Mode, Schmealth Mode”. With inbound marketing, you’re going to need to get
used to revealing things that might be uncomfortable. Get over it.
11. Setup Google Alerts for at least
the following: Your company name, link:yourdomain.com and “industry term”. Try
to find a good balance for your industry term so you don’t get flooded with
alerts that you simply will start ignoring. This may take some iteration and
refining. (Oh, and use the “As It Happens” option in Google Alerts so you’re
not waiting around for new alerts to show up).
12. Find three closest competitors. Pretend like someone
is paying you $10,000 for locating each competitor. Really try hard.
Barely managed to find three? Take a lot of effort? Great. Now find 3 more.
Of these 6, pick the two that you think are the most marketing savvy. They
should have a Website Grade > 90, a
blog with some readers, a website that you can envision people using, a twitter
account that they actually post to, etc. These are the competitors that you’re
going to start “tracking”. Add their names and websites to your Google
Alerts.
13. Update your LinkedIn profile (you do have a LinkedIn profile, right)?
Mention your new startup, and add a link to your startup website to one of the
three slots for this purpose. Make sure you specify the anchor text. Don’t go
with the default of “My Website”. The anchor text should be your startup name and
maybe a couple of words of what it does. You can look at my profile to get a sense: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dharmesh (note: I don't accept LinkedIn invites from people I don't know. If you're looking to get to know me, follow me on twitter @dharmesh).
14. Get business cards printed. Don’t go overboard, but don’t use a “free”
option (because it’s not really free, it’s just subsidized). I don’t believe
much in business cards, but you need them to simply avoid the 30 seconds of
discussion as to why you don’t have a card when people ask you for one at
conferences and meetings and such. They’re worth the price to avoid that
uncomfortableness.
15. Use the Twitter Grader
search feature to find high-impact twitter users in your industry. Start
following them. You want to start forging relationships. Start building your
twitter network. Resist the temptation to mass-follow a bunch of random people
or play other games just to get your follower count up. That’s not going to
matter. Get some high quality relationships going. If you’re really serious,
start using an app like TweetDeck so you can more easily monitor the needed
conversations.
16. Create a StumbleUpon account.
Specify your areas of interest (part of registration). Spend 10 minutes a day
(no more!) stumbling and voting things up/down. Start befriending those that
are submitting sites that are relevant and interesting for your startup. Don’t
submit your own stuff — just start contributing.
17. Subscribe to the LinkedIn Answers category that best fits your area of
interest. Answer one question a day that you feel like you’ve got some
expertise in. Don’t self-promote. You’re seeking to build credibility and
trust — not sell anything.
18. Find the bloggers that are writing about your topic area. Subscribe to
their feed, and read their stuff regularly. Leave valuable comments and
participate in the conversation. (Do not spam them or write “fluff” comments.
If you don’t have something useful to add to the conversation, don’t
comment).
19. Start building some contacts on Facebook. Organize
your users into groups (one for your business and another for friends/family).
This will come in handy later. Don’t spam people and ask them to visit your
website. At this point, your website is still probably not worth visiting.
20. Grade your website on Website
Grader. Fix the basic things. You should be able to get a 50+ just by
doing the simple things it suggests. [Disclaimer: I wrote Website Grader].
21. Get Some Analytics: Install some web analytics software and start watching your traffic. Where is it coming from? How is it growing? What keywors are people using to find you? What content are they looking at? It's ok to get a bit maniacal and obssessed about it at first. Many of us do that (and some of us never get over it).
Stay tuned for a revised edition in a few weeks as I think about this more
(and watch my actual behavior). Also, if you’re interested in startups, you can
follow me on twitter @dharmesh.
What have I missed? What ideas do you have on tactical things for startup marketing? What do you do?
Also, to find more conversation about startups, request access to the OnStartups LinkedIn Group (60,000+ members). Just mention that you read the blog, and I'll approve you quickly.
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Entrepreneurs (particularly bootstrapped ones) have a tough life. In the
early days, things can get lonely. So many decisions, so many challenges, so
much to do — and very little by way of clear answers.
This is a somewhat light-hearted episode in perhaps a series of articles that
I’m calling “Conversations With Myself”. I’d like to think that I’m not alone
in my strangeness in that I actually have these kinds of debates going on inside
my head (often after 3:00 a.m.). My guess is that some of you have variations
of these kinds of conversations yourself. If not, then I guess I’m just
weird.
Conversations With Myself: What Should I Work On?
Me: Self, I’ve been thinking a bit about things.
My Self: Are you you sure you’re not just procrastinating? Don’t you have
bugs to fix in the product or some other real work to do? Thinking is
for smart people. Get back to work.
Me: That’s just it, there’s just way too much work, and the
list of things to get done seems to get bigger every day — even though
I’m staying up later and working harder.
My Self: So, what’s your point? It’s a startup, that’s the way it’s
supposed to be. If you don’t have 10X as many ideas as you have time
to do them, you don’t have enough ideas. Quit being a whiny-assed pansy.
Nobody said it would be easy.
Me: Yes, yes, I get that. I know startups are hard with
the 80–hour weeks and all that. What I’m saying is that there are several items
in the backlog that must get done. And, as the product gets bigger and
more users come on board, more and more time is taken up keeping the system
running, responding to user issues and a bunch of other stuff. When will the
new stuff ever get done?
My Self: Ok, so define “MUST get done”. What happens if you don’t do some
of those things? The planet stops spinning? You lose some users? Your ego
gets bruised? You watch one more episode of “The Office”?
Me: Ok, fair point. I guess not all of those things are
technically “must-dos”.
My Self: Well, it actually goes beyond that. Not only are most of the
things on your list not “must-dos”, a lot of them are probably “shouldn’t dos”
.
Me: So, how do I go about figuring out what I should get
done?
My Self: That’s a great question. Unfortunately, we share the same brain,
so I don’t have a great answer. But, here are some things to consider.
Simple Tips For Deciding What To Work On
1. Are you tracking all of the bugs and enhancement ideas (however crazy)
somewhere? If not, that’s step 1. You need a central list. Not this list and
that list, but THE list The One True List.
2. Decide on a simple and semi-objective approach to classifying each item
on the list. Scales of 1–10 work reasonably well. Some high level dimensions
could be:
a) This will help make customers happy (0–10)
b) This will help me sell more customers (0–10)
c) This will reduce costs of keeping customers happy (0–10)
d) This will give me and my team joy and happiness (0–10)
e) How much effort will this take (0=Several lifetimes. 10=Hardly any work at all.)
Of course you don’t need to have those specific attributes, but you get the
idea. Here’s why this is more useful than simply trying to assign a “priority”
to an item. First off, many items in the backlog often have more or less the
same priority. It’s hard to decide between them. Second, priorities change as
things happen. You might wake up one month and need to focus as much as
possible on getting new customers. Another month the priority might be to take
your existing customers and make them happier (so they stay customers). By
assigning the above attributes to each backlog item, you can “sub-sort”. The
key is to remain flexible, while remaining mindful of the costs of
task-switching when you change your mind. Maintain a steady velocity and keep
cranking away at the items that are important.
Item (d) above is interesting. Why should you care whether a given task on
the backlog will create internal joy and happiness. Shouldn’t we all be
maniacally focused on customers and make money? Sure. But, startups are hard
work and trying to continuously perfectly optimize is sub-optimal. Every now
and then, you need to do some things that might not make sense, but might
delight users or delight yourself or just plain allow you to sleep better at
night. It’s worth the investment simply to keep spirits and energy up.
3. Try to build a rhythm for getting stuff done. It’s a great feeling when
you can “feel” the forward progress (however small). If you get stuck on some
project, put it aside and crank some of the other ones out. Don’t go too far
down the rabbit hole for any particular project or task.
4. You should try to balance the kinds of tasks and projects that you
select. Don’t work just on new features that will help sell the product. Or
just work on things that make the UI/UX better. Or just work on system
optimizations that make your costs lower. It’s important to pick a variety of
tasks (with emphasis on whatever seems to be the bottleneck in the business
right now).
So, what are your clever little tips and tricks to make sure you’re working
on the right things? Do you struggle with trying to decide what to do?
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Are you building a profitable business? I’m not asking whether or not your
business is profitable now, but whether it will ever be
profitable? More importantly, does future profitability enter into your current
decision-making? If not, you’re doing your business and yourself a disservice.
Leave the “no profits” model to the not-for-profits — they’re much
better at it.
For some reason, many startups treat profit as a 4 letter word. The common
argument goes something like this: “We’re going to create something so
fantastically wonderful that millions of people are going to flock to our site,
and then we’re going to be fantastically successful. Just like YouTube. Or
Facebook. Or Twitter”
This reminds me of one of my favorite Southpark episode about the Underpants
Gnomes.
Watch this clip if you haven’t seen it yet (or haven’t seen it recently).
The following is a guest article by Jason Cohen, founder of Smart
Bear Software. He blogs about startups and
marketing at http://blog.ASmartBear.com.
I don't know about you, but I'm tired of getting lectured about how my
business should be more like
Toyota, and like Zappos, how my blog should be more like Joel Spolsky and like
Copyblogger, and how my software should be more like 37signals and like Apple.
OK,
not "lectured." It's my own fault for reading too many blogs about how to run
my company and how to blog and how to write software. But still!
Just because someone has success with a product or strategy doesn't mean you
should copy it.
Will my blog be unsuccessful because I don't follow the Copyblogger rules
that I should write like a third-grader with titles that look like they came from the
cover of Cosmo?
I don't think so.
My discouragement begins with incompatible advice. For
example, we're regaled with how Zappos uses Twitter as part of their phenomenal customer
service which they cite as the reason for their success. Their embrace of Twitter is so complete, Zappos CEO
Tony Hsieh even wrote his own Twitter beginner's tutorial.
All hail Twitter. But wait! Seth Godin, the 12th most popular blogger in the galaxy, says
that social networking sites like Twitter are saturated with garbage to the point of uselessness. In fact,
Seth doesn't use Twitter at all. Huh.
So which is it? Transformative or useless? Key business strategy or waste of time?
Same with blogging. The top 10 most popular blogs post more than once per day; some
have used this as evidence that frequent posting is how to get popular. But when I look at my
own list of favorite bloggers, most post once or twice a week at most, and some
successful bloggers insist popularity increases when you post less often.
I've gone link-crazy here to illustrate a point -- that this
isn't just a few people chatting about pros and cons, these are armies of
bloggers, writers, and CEOs vehemently blasting away at each other. What's a
little startup owner to do with all this? Who has the free time to study and
research all this?
Surely the conclusion is that Twitter won't make or break your
business and posting
frequency won't make or break your blog.
The root problem is that the so-called "examples" we're supposed to
learn from are outliers. An "outlier" is a data point well outside the
normal range -- a statistical anomaly.
Malcolm Gladwell, winner of my award for Smartest Carrot-Top Lookalike, just
wrote a book about outliers.
Like his other works, it's well-written, entertaining, and often
incorrect.
Still, he presents evidence that at very high levels of achievement, no
factor can be used to predict the success. For example, Nobel laureates are just
as likely to come from unknown schools as from the Ivy Leagues.
I've noticed this in professional sports too. Kids learn the "right way" to
throw a baseball, but watch major league pitchers and you'll notice they all do
it differently. On a bicycle there's a correct seat height and
top tube length to maximize power and prevent injury, but Jan Ulrich won the
Tour de France with a short seat.
Because outliers are so far outside the norm, standard rules don't
apply.
This "outlier principle" -- that extreme success is not due to simple,
controllable factors -- explains the contradictions above. Zappos made over a
billion dollars last year because of fantastic customer service while Amazon is
the largest online retailer and doesn't even publish a phone number.
Both work because even something as fundamental as how you deal with customer
service doesn't explain runaway success.
In fact, if I could pick something that all these companies have in common
it's that they aren't afraid to buck conventional wisdom if
they think it would be contradictory to their culture.
These companies have redefined "conventional wisdom." Is it your turn to buck
the trend?
How much can we learn from outliers? Surely they have something to teach
us, but when should we blaze our own trail? Leave a comment and join the
conversation!
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