Musings

One Thing Every Founder Can Do

There’s been much written about the core roles of a successful startup team. Dave McClure talks about the H2D team, which consists of a hustler, hacker, and designer. Others have added a fourth role such as ops or analyst. It goes without saying that you need people who are experts and experienced in disciplines conducive to building a great tech company.

However there are certain skills that everyone on the team must have, no matter what their primary responsibility is.

Knowing how to work with potential customers is one.

If you’re the design or technical co-founder, it’d be nice if you could just leave it up to the hustler to “get us customers”. But the fact is there will be plenty of opportunities where you’ll need to know how to talk to potential customers; how to assess their potential, and how to move them along the path from interested to committed (whether committed is a money exchange, or some other activity).

Let’s visualize this. 

Imagine you’re at the airport. It’s a rat race. You struggle through security, get your belt and shoes back on, and after a brief memory lapse, find your ID and ticket in the bottom of your shoe. The flight has been delayed so you have extra time in the seating area. The gal next to you strikes up a conversation. Lo and behold you find out she matches one of your customer profile types. Upon hearing what you do she instantly wants to know more - she wants to dive deeper. 

Do you defer to your hustler co-founder? 

Hells no.

You need to seize this opportunity. It could be one of your first paying customers. 

But how do you do it? Do you start telling her about the feature bells and whistles? Do you start diving into designy talk about the human-centered approach you took? Hells no.

As an engineer who became a sales guy I can relate to what most technical people go through when talking to potential customers. Even if you’re super excited and knowledgable about your product, that doesn’t translate into the right conversation you want to have with a business person.

And this is applicable for any cross-role conversation - talking about what you’re interested in and they aren’t is a sure way to lose them.

The good news is that there are three easy rules that you can follow. Seasoned sales people follow many more. After thousands of hours preparing (and trust me, the good ones spend more time preparing than talking to customers) and meeting with customers, a seasoned pro is tuned into the subtle spoken and body language cues and can react to them in real-time.

You however don’t need to be at that skill level to achieve your immediate goal. Here are the rules you must follow.

1. Ask More than Talk

This is the golden rule. Repeat, golden rule. Unless you’re well prepared talking will often do more harm than good. So ask questions. Luckily most people like talking and will gladly answer, as long as it’s not confidential. 

This takes some preparation. You need to have your go-to questions. Here are the types of safe questions you can ask to get the other person talking. Take these and expand on them. Figure out different ways of asking them, and ways of asking them that are specific to the problems you solve. 

What is their role?

How are they solving problem x? (assumes you are solving a real problem, which you should be!)

Do they currently have a solution in place? (gives you a feeling of how important the problem/solution is internally)

What is the impact of the problem to the company’s most important metrics? (revenue, productivity, profit, etc)

If the problem is solved what does the company stand to gain in terms of their most important metrics?

(credit - this question structure is derived from the most-excellent SPIN Selling book)

2. Find Common Ground

Talking to someone who does the same thing as you is a walk in the park. Instant rapport it seems. But how do you connect with what can seem to be alien to what you do? Can a tech gal convince a business guy to commit resources to a product trial? Yes, but not by talking about Python super classes. 

You need to find common ground. In most situations common ground will be to talk about business problems.

I’ve found that it’s easier for a tech person to ask a business person about what their pain-points are, but it’s more difficult for a business person to talk to a tech person about their problems. Understanding business problems like “we’re spending too much time scheduling and rescheduling employee work shifts” is much easier to understand than “the database compaction process is preventing us from processing the TPS reports on time.”

To find common ground in the above scenario the hustler would ask “so when the TPS reports aren’t on time what happens to the business?” See what that does? It moves the conversation to common ground so that the person can relate their area of expertise to a mutual understanding of business problems.

3. Have an Objective

In Lean Startup vernacular we talk about having a funnel, moving from visitor to customer to evangelist. In person you execute a similar funnel, albeit a little differently. On your website you move people along by placing pictures, text, and buttons in the right places. How do you do it in a conversation? By asking questions, of course!

You ask questions not for questions sake, but because you want to move the person along in the funnel. At the end of the funnel is an objective. Here are some objectives you will likely want to move towards:

-Schedule a meeting with the right people from both sides

-Start a product trial, evaluation, or build a prototype

In this case just having an objective is half the battle. The other half is asking for it. Here’s how you might ask for these commitments.

“Based on our conversation I think we could really help you solve problem x. Could we schedule a meeting to discuss your needs and requirements in more depth?”

“Now that I understand your situation better I truly believe we can help you improve x (e.g. productivity). Can we setup some time to get a trial/evaluation started?”

You get the picture.

To wrap up, while the hustler founder probably has all of these skills, the tech and designer founders likely do not. However that shouldn’t prevent them from moving prospects through the initial steps of the funnel. By following a few simple rules and with some minor preparation they can do their part to fill the company’s customer pipeline.

What a Levitating Monk Taught Me About Entrepreneurship

We sat there, the four of us, dressed in all white, weary from a night’s sleep on the hard floor. The monk asked us “have you ever been hungry, looked in the fridge, saw left-overs, and exclaimed there was nothing to eat!” We all shook our heads. Of course we had.

We were at a buddhist temple near Seattle. We slept there overnight while living the eight precepts for 24 hours. When you do this you meditate for hours on end and participate in the daily monk rituals.

It was my first time through the experience. My wife is buddhist; I am not. However I was intrigued by it. It sounded challenging - a change of pace from what was then endless days of coding. 

So what about the levitating monk?

Of course monks can’t physically rise off the ground, but they do claim to levitate. After meditating for 90 minutes or more, they feel weightless. Special things happen when you can meditate for this long. You can feel certain parts of your body grow larger (hulk hands anyone?). You can imagine yourself vividly in a different time and place. And of course you can calm your mind and reach inner peace. It’s a cool state to get to, but you need mucho practice. Anyways, the monk talking to us had been one since age 15. Trust me, he can levitate. 

During that 24 hours at the temple I had plenty of time to talk with the monks and think about things. The following are some thoughts about entrepreneurship I had as a result. 

Love Thy Leftovers - This really is about using resources fully. Every entrepreneur has a set of resources available. They could be certain skills, relationships, money or other valuable goods; whatever they are, you have at least some. Don’t sell yourself short in this department. Just living in a country like the US you have tremendous free resources available. Need information? Free internet at the public library. Short on experience? Free coaching resources are abound. 

Are you the type of entrepreneur that looks at your resources and claims it isn’t enough? Do you look at the success of other entrepreneurs and exclaim “if only I had what he had!”? Don’t be. Be the person who looks in the fridge, finds scraps, and makes a feast.

Purpose Does Matter - Like an idiot I’ve tried to get rich quick several times. I’ve got into multi-level marketing selling health care products. I was going to strike gold with a printing business. I’ve imported women’s clothes and jewelry from Thailand. And most recently I built a content curation app. In hindsight the problem was never the type of business. People can be wildly successful with those businesses. So why couldn’t I?

The problem was I didn’t care about them enough. Those businesses weren’t going to have the type of impact for my customers that I needed them to.

I remember laying on the floor at the temple thinking about this. Every business I’ve had has always been a path to the business I really wanted to create, something that really mattered to me. I am 0 for 5 with businesses like that.

If you’re like me the only way you’re going to be successful is by working on things that have meaning. I loved working at AWS, and love working at Twilio currently, because both make disruptive technology. At both companies we created awesome technology, a game changing business model, built the right supporting systems around it, and hired the right people. Both are changing the landscape of their industry in a huge way for the benefit of their customers. Deep down that means something to me. So my personal takeaway is to never work on my own business, or any other, that isn’t having an impact like that. I will never sell a freakin widget again unless it happens to provide endless energy through thermonuclear gadgetry.

Get Away - If there’s one thing I can identify with in every entrepreneur, be it someone famous or the lemonade hawker down the street, it is a bottomless determination. I see it in all successful entrepreneurs I meet. There’s an internal motor inside them that drives differently than others. Some of my friends have the ‘family man’ motor and are raising beautiful families. They get a day job working for a company and are happy with it. Entrepreneurs raise families, too, they just have this drive to create something awesome and new on their own. But sometimes it can be too much drive.

It is healthy on so many levels emotionally and physically to get your ass out of the chair and do something else. I say that as much for myself as I do for you. The two things I recommend most are meditation and exercise. Both aren’t easy to start doing, but once you start, they become addictive. If these aren’t your cup of tea, then find what is. Experiment. Try something new. Whatever you do, make it a habit to get away from your desk several times a day, and even longer on the weekends.

In Summary - So what’s the morale of the story? You don’t need to spend 24 hours living like a monk to come to these same realizations. Or maybe you’re like me and you do need something like that, because you are so focused on building the next great thing that you can’t see who you really are, what really works for you, and how to not burn out. Either way the important thing is to know where you stand and take bold action.

Executing a Reality Check

Yesterday my brother asked me how my business was doing. It’s a hard question to answer. On the one hand I haven’t built the run-away success that I was dreaming of when I left my day job. But, I have come a long way. I’m on the second iteration of my product. Without any coding experience I learned how to build the a pretty cool Django/jQuery app. And I went from a non-existent product dev/management process to one led by Lean Startup principles.

All I could tell my brother was that it’s been uncertain and ambiguous, and I it’s exactly what I signed up for. 

Today I’ve been on-boarding alpha users. After I got through that I sat down with a piece of paper for a reality check. I thought I’d share the questions I asked myself.

• Where Am I (in regards to attaining product/market fit, my #1 priority)?
• What do I need most right now?
• How can I get that?
• Who can help me get it and how can I help them in the process?
• Am I still having fun?

Reality is good. Hope this helps you find it.

The Art of Beta - Finding Users to Learn From

I was inspired to write this after reading Pick Your Beta Customers Very Carefully. In that post the author points out that letting the wrong users into a beta program can cause more harm than good. Why is that?

A beta program is a learning tool. You create the program because there is something specific you want to learn. You want to learn if what you built is valuable to your target customers. Will they use that wiz bang feature? Is it easy to use the product?

If you let in people who aren’t your target market what happens to the results? That’s right, they’re tainted. You wanted to see how corporate users responded to a security feature and instead some punk kid is clicking around and skewing metrics.

So how do you find the right users to learn from? The very first step is to write a hypothesis. A good hypothesis identifies a customer and an action they will take. It has to be testable - it has to be able to be either proved or refuted. 

Once you have a hypothesis the rest falls into place quite nicely. If your hypothesis is “Sales managers will use our forecasting tools because they need to know if their current strategy is working” then you know right away you need to talk with sales managers.

The next thing you need to do is find people to test with. It’s easier to find users in an industry you’re familiar with, so pick your target market properly! If you’re unfamiliar with the target market you are making it that much harder to succeed. Case in point - I launched a content curation tool called journiy.com targeted toward the general web consuming public. It was a really vague target market. I didn’t know how to generate traffic for it because it was too vague and I had no experience to draw on. My next product (the one I’m working on now) is for salespeople in the tech industry, something I’m super familiar with. 

Regardless of your familiarity with the target market, here are some suggestions for finding users.

Pre-Product/Feature Development: Think local, as in, who do you know personally in the target market? Pick people who are colleagues and not friends. Friends tend to honor friendship over honesty. You have a better chance at getting real feedback from colleagues, who will also respond to your emails and phones calls more than complete strangers.

If you really don’t have any colleagues in the target market then you need to get referrals. Send out some emails telling colleagues what you’re doing and asking if they know anyone who can help. The key here is to make sure your colleagues know that you’re not selling anything - you’re simply conducting some research. You’re asking a lot from your colleagues at this point, so it’s important that you’re organized and professional. 

This is also why you should always work on expanding your network. When I started working at Amazon I had over 100 connections on Linkedin. I added the Oulook Social Connector and in a short period I had over 500. That tool is awesome because you can add people to Linkedin as you’re reading/writing email.

Should you put up a landing page and drive traffic to it by ads or media (blog posts, etc)? This method of learning is well talked about in the Lean Startup world. But take caution. You could easily spend a lot of time and money learning that your product is interesting enough for a user to give you an email address, but still not know if they would actually purchase your product.

Should you cold call people? NO! This will kill your motivation and waste your time. If you’re not skilled at cold calling people stay away from this method. It takes time to get good at this. Instead get referrals from people you know. 

During Product Development & Alpha/Betas: While you’re developing the product you should continue to work with the same people, and ask them who else they know that would find the product valuable. If you’re going in the right direction with the product you should be creating evangelists with early users (especially if you’re implementing their suggestions). If their lives are getting better then they’ll probably be glad to recommend you to their friends and colleagues. Branch out from there, adding users as you see fit. 

Another option is to use sites like www.aytm.com (Ask Your Target Market). Assuming you have something to show, you can get it in front of people who match your ideal target market. I don’t have any first hand experience with this, but I have heard some good reports from people who have used it.

In summary, beta programs are an awesome learning tool. Just make sure you know what you want to learn, and that you’re learning from the right people. 

On Being Creative, Great Friendships, and AMP

Five or six years ago I bought a 42” HP DesignJet printer. It was sexy, capable of printing beautiful posters of original work. It could print on canvas, vinyl, and what seemed like hundreds of different kinds of paper. I bought it with the plan of working with select artists to reprint and sell their work.

At the time I was working at Microsoft. Printing would be a moonlit job.

I got into the business because I was surrounded by artists. My father, brother, and several close friends all made things that people would buy copies of. It made sense. Forget that I didn’t know anything about the printing business.

I installed the printer in my room (which was spacious) and began learning how to print.

As friends learned what I was doing, one of them introduced me to Jose Torres (aka Tony Taj). Jose was, and is, an amazing artist. His work speaks to people. And he has the rare quality to promote and sell his own work.

Jose and I started working together creating limited edition runs of his work. It was the start of a great friendship.

Through the years Jose and I collaborated on various projects. We’ve built jewelry display cases, created short-story videos, designed web apps and sites. It’s been a great run and I look forward to more projects in the future.

This year however we’ve worked together on our best project yet, Ambient Media Portal. I can’t take any claim for the creative genius behind it - that’s all Jose. I merely helped with promotion and moving the marker down the field.

I wanted to take this time to congratulate Jose on a job well done and thank him for a great friendship. Working on creative projects like this makes me happy and gives me a better perspective on life, and I probably wouldn’t be working on any creative projects if Jose wasn’t around.