“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” - Mark Twain
When you’re building a startup, it’s very important to question assumptions. I think one of these assumptions which needs to be questioned is the initial few steps people normally take when they have an idea. One of these steps is the “coming soon” page.
The concept of a “coming soon” page before you have a product is something that has been on my mind for a while now. On first thought, it seems obvious what the purpose of these pages is: surely it is to collect interest from potential users of your product in order to let them know when you’re ready. I think that is probably a good reason for a “coming soon” page, but recently I have been questioning the purpose of “coming soon” pages and how startups can be much more effective with their first landing page.
Why we create “coming soon” pages
With the websites many of us startup founders check out regularly such as TechCrunch always reporting massive growth numbers for startups, it can be easy to assume that the primary aim for a “coming soon” page should be to collect as many emails as possible. It seems logical that when we launch that is the way we are most likely to succeed. I’ve done it myself countless times in the past.
At the same time, there’s a new idea gaining a lot of traction which I think could be sending startup founders down the wrong track. The idea of the “viral launch page” was popularised by Hipster, and the title of the article on TechCrunch makes me cringe: “How A Startup Named Hipster Got 10K Signups In Two Days, Without Revealing What It Does”. These launch pages are now available for any startup thanks to LaunchRock.
What is the goal of a “coming soon” page?
All of the current hype around “viral launch pages” combined with how ingrained the idea of a “coming soon” page seems to be in peoples minds made me question what the purpose of a “coming soon” page is.
I think in many cases, the goal in the mind of a startup founder is to gather as many emails as possible so they can have their big bang launch when the product is finally ready. There is a big flaw with this strategy, and it is that if we take this approach we are assuming that our idea is certain to take off when the product is ready. At the very least, we are putting more focus on the number of emails rather than on whether any of the people whose emails we’ve got will actually use our product. Do we really want to gather hundreds or thousands of emails, like Hipster, without people knowing what our product does? That sounds like a risky strategy to me.
Skip “coming soon”
Quite frequently I hear about other startup founders launching a new idea, and I often hear from them how many emails they’ve collected on their coming soon page. I rarely hear about conversations they’ve had with people. One piece of advice I’m encouraging new startup founders to take on more and more now is to skip the “coming soon” page completely.
By skipping the “coming soon” page, you can really focus on what matters. Instead of a “coming soon” page, put up a landing page for your product. Make it look like the product exists, and then when people try and sign up, show them a page letting them know that you’re not quite ready for them yet. The effort is the same, but this tiny change can give you massive rewards.
Instead, aim for conversations and validated learning
The key benefit of skipping the “coming soon” page is that you can gain validated learning about your startup. Validated learning is the measure of progress Eric Ries defines for the lean startup methodology. The concept here is that every change you make should help you learn more about your customers. By skipping the “coming soon” page, you gain validated learning about the emails you collect: they are people who thought your product existed and showed a real interest by trying to sign up. If you have people hitting the page and no one gives you their email, you know there’s a problem with your idea or the way you’re describing it.
Treat your idea as a hypothesis that needs rigorously testing, and treat the emails as people who are happy for you to get in touch with to discuss your product idea further in order to validate that it would solve a real problem for them and that they might actually pay. I don’t think the idea of having a conversation with the people who give you their email comes into the minds of new startup founders enough.
The benefit of this method is also that you can work on your product in parallel with learning about your customers and about how clearly your landing page is getting across the idea of your product. With a few tweaks, you’re very likely to be able to launch the actual product with the same landing page. Your first landing page can be very simple. This is also how I launched my latest startup, Buffer, and it worked pretty well.
Did you have a “coming soon” page for your startup? Do you have one now? Would you do things differently in the future? I’d really love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Photo credit: Jason Tester
I believe that when you’re building a startup, it is as much about developing yourself as it is about developing your startup. This week I’ve stepped up my gym routine and managed to go to the gym every morning at 6:30am, and I spoke at an event in Bulgaria to 160 people over Skype yesterday. Both these things made me uncomfortable, but I’ve realised that “feeling uncomfortable” was just what I needed.
Why is it a good thing to feel uncomfortable?
Seth Godin describes why we should feel uncomfortable using the following chart:
Godin argues that most people reach some comfortable “Local Max” and then stay there, because to jump to new heights almost always involves some discomfort:
“The problem is that to get to Big Max, you need to go through step C, which is a horrible and scary place to be.”
In The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, which I’ve mentioned before, the authors say that stress is a crucial part of growth:
“Any form of stress that prompts discomfort has the potential to expand capacity – physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually – so long as it is followed by adequate recovery”
I think the need to get out of your comfort zone is even more true when you’re building a startup. Ben Yoskovitz puts this well:
“Don’t start a company as a tech person if all you want to do is code. If all you want to do is code, then get a job coding. Starting a company means to do a lot of things you’ve never done, and a lot of things you won’t be comfortable doing. Get used to it. Make the uncomfortable comfortable.”
Shifting from uncomfortable to comfortable
I’ve found in the past that if I get excited about something and dive in too fast, I will often work for longer than I realise is productive and then burnout. This makes for a bad experience and makes it easy to avoid trying again.
I think a better approach is what Loehr and Schwartz propose: to go beyond our comfortable levels and then step away and renew. Repeating this process can build our capacity to do anything and make us comfortable with new things.
Of course, when something becomes more comfortable we should strive to get out of our comfort zones once again. The compounding effect can be very powerful.
Growth in one area can mean confidence in other areas
A great side effect I’ve found of stepping out of my comfort zone in one area such as speaking at events or stepping up my exercise routine is that growing my skill or capacity on one of these areas can give me a massive amount of confidence in almost every other area of my life. This is a good reason why we should have many areas where we stretch ourselves. Here is a great part of an interview Tim Ferriss had with Matt from 37signals:
“If your entire ego and identity is vested in your startup, where there are certainly factors outside of your control, you can get into a depressive funk that affects your ability to function. So, you should also, let’s say, join a rock climbing gym. Try to improve your time in the mile. Something like that. I recommend at least one physical activity. Then even if everything goes south — you have some horrible divorce agreement with your co-founder — if you had a good week and set a personal record in the gym or on the track or wherever, that can still be a good week.”
Some of the things I’m doing to feel uncomfortable
Working on a startup has given me many opportunities to feel uncomfortable and therefore gain skills in many areas I was never comfortable with. Here are some of my top ones:
Speaking: Believe it or not I’m actually an introvert. I squirm on a stage, but I get a kick out of sharing my story and helping others and that’s why I am always pushing myself in this area. I’ve now spoken at quite a few events of various sizes, and I usually say yes to speaking opportunities precisely because I know I find it uncomfortable. It’s definitely getting easier.
Sleep, health and exercise: I’ve always struggled with getting enough sleep and keeping up a gym routine. Over the last few months I’ve managed to put in place a sleep ritual which I’ve kept to almost religiously. I then created a morning gym routine, and for the last two weeks I’ve been to the gym every weekday morning at 6:30am. With the consistency handled, I’m now pushing myself out of my comfort zone further by making my weight training routine harder and keeping track of my progress.
There are many others too: even this blog is something I still find hard to keep up, and since I’m primarily a developer I’ve had to push myself to become a better designer and deal with server admin tasks for Buffer. I’m also about to get rid of my apartment and go travelling for several months with my co-founder Leo.
What are you doing to feel uncomfortable?
That brings me back to the title of the post. Have you thought about whether things are getting a little too comfortable? What are you doing to push yourself out of your comfort zone? I’d love to hear from you in the comments, I am sure there is much we could all learn about pushing ourselves further.
Photo credit: Capture Queen
Last time I wrote about how to start your startup in 4 steps, and the first step I mention is to “Have an idea”. This can mean becoming serious about an idea you’ve had in the back of your mind, or it could mean experimenting with ways to have more ideas. In this post I want to talk about two types of ideas: “social” and “tools”.
Why we all love social ideas
Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned serial entrepreneur, I think it is inevitable that we naturally get excited by the social ideas. Things like Twitter and Facebook have taken off big time, and occupy the media and our attention much more than other ideas. We also tend to spend a lot of our time on these kinds of social platforms, and our ideas are likely to come from places we are already familiar with. I think for that reason, it can be quite easy to have these platforms in mind and discover things we’d like to be able to do on them that we can’t already. Thus, a new social idea is born.
The problem with social ideas
The problem with social ideas is that often even though they may be solving a problem in a novel and useful way, they almost always have the following traits:
- take longer to validate that the problem is something people want
- product/service is not as useful when there are fewer users (network effect)
- revenue usually comes after some kind of “tipping point” which is hard to specify
I was recently reading some great new research with data gathered from 650 startups in the Startup Genome Report, and they have some data which seems to confirm these problems. In the following snippet, “The Social Transformer” is their phrase for social ideas, and “The Automizer” is how they describe “tools”:
Type 1N - The Social Transformer
- need 50% longer than Type 1 (The Automizer) and Type 2 (The Integrator) to reach scale stage
- need more capital than Type 1 (The Automizer) and Type 2 (The Integrator)
Why tools are often the better option
When you’re working on your first real startup venture, you’re often working part-time or even full-time whilst you build your idea on the side. When I had the idea for Buffer six months ago, I was working as a contract web developer for two different clients and as a result I was working five days per week. It is hard to move fast when you have little time, and one of your goals should be to reach a stage where you can work on your idea part-time or full-time.
As a first-time entrepreneur with no track record, if your experience is anything like mine you’re going to struggle to raise funding. Therefore, you’re going to need to bootstrap your idea on the side. Bootstrapping involves generating revenues early and building on top of them. This is where social ideas give you a real disadvantage. Spencer Fry put it very well:
To bootstrap you typically need a single user to be able to benefit from the service without having to connect with anyone else. That’s Carbonmade. A user can sign up and create their own online portfolio without needing other people in the system to benefit from it.
Avoid the “network effect”
I think that’s the key - an idea where a single user can benefit immediately when they sign up. Put simply, “tools”. This is the single biggest difference between the idea of OnePage, my previous startup, and the idea of Buffer. OnePage, with its network effects, constrained me to working part-time for a full year and a half whilst building (little) traction, whereas Buffer, which was useful for people and had payment options from day 1, allowed me to quit my contract work completely within 5 months.
Whilst I think social ideas can be great, my point here is that if you’re starting out and want to be working on your idea full-time in the near future, you are much more likely to achieve that goal by building a tool which people find immediately useful.
Do you have any experience of building “social” or “tool”-based ideas? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Photo credit: Kate Gardiner
Having started my latest venture just over 5 months ago, and having just reached ramen profitability, I want to share some of the elements which made this startup “work” compared to some of my previous attempts. The first and arguably hardest part of a startup is actually starting, and that’s what I’m going to focus on with this post. The Internet is literally littered with the remnants of my many failed attempts (not necessarily a bad thing), so there are things I’d avoid repeating.
If I was to create a new startup, here is what I would do:
1. Have an idea
This is undoubtedly a key part, but don’t give it too much focus. If you have an idea, that’s fantastic. If you don’t, try and raise your awareness of the daily activities you carry out. Particularly pay attention in the areas which you are passionate about, because it’s important that you work on something you love. Pay attention to anything which you think could be more efficient or less painful. The best ideas are ones you will use yourself every day, and would pay for if they existed already.
A side point about ideas is that you will learn far more by being in the process of working on a bad idea than you will by waiting for the perfect idea. Even if you have the tiniest idea in the back of your mind, you will probably benefit more by going for that, even if it doesn’t work out. I certainly attribute much of the success I’ve had with Buffer to my previous experience.
2. Cut it down
This is very important. If you have an idea, break it down until you think it’s too small to be of value. That’s what you should consider your first version, in fact that’s probably too big too.
If you don’t cut out features from your initial vision, you’re much less likely to ever launch it. I’ve been there many times myself. Try to develop a fear of not shipping your idea.
Another thing to note, is that the idea of a big splash launch is worth questioning. Firstly, to link the big splash with the software being ready is very dangerous, and secondly a mindset of a big splash is inevitably going to cause you to delay getting feedback on your idea, which is the next step:
3. Share the idea, get feedback
This is one of the most important steps, and often the one which is missed out almost entirely. A lot of the time, it’s the step that doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people, and that was certainly the case for me. Missing this step could easily kill your startup.
There are, of course, many smart people arguing how important sharing your idea and getting feedback is in order to succeed. I wholeheartedly agree with this, and I believe we should approach our idea as a hypothesis of something we think could work, and we should be striving to validate the hypothesis by rigorously testing it.
However, there is another crucial benefit to getting feedback, and that is motivation. I’ve found myself lose motivation on something when I’ve worked on the development for too long without getting feedback, and I’ve talked to many other people starting up and found that this is key.
Get feedback to validate your idea, but more importantly get feedback so you feel good about what you’re building. One or two people saying “I can’t wait to try this” will do wonders for your motivation.
I can’t stress this point enough. It’s not buggy technology or a faulty marketing plan which will kill your startup, it’s losing motivation. Remember, you can get feedback without the product existing.
4. Go with your gut
If you’ve got this far, then you’re doing very well. In my experience, going forward from here is a matter of going with your gut. In the early stages, it’s not wise to pay too much attention to split testing or other ways to try and be confident about your decisions. Learn to act without complete information. Just be sure to balance building with feedback.
How did you get your startup off the ground? Are you about to start something? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Also, if you want to bounce any questions off me privately, I’d love to help.
Photo credit: aartj
My first post on this blog was one where I pondered whether exercise is a requirement for sleep. The post was actually triggered by my inability to sleep, and I wrote it in the middle of the night. Since then, I have made a number of adjustments and I now sleep much better, so I’d like to share what I’ve changed.
Why create a sleep ritual?
As an early stage startup founder, I’ve found the emotional ups and downs to be incredible. In my experience so far in building my latest startup, there have been many different events which have caused a huge amount of joyful moments, and there are undeniably times when you wonder how you are going to progress and how you are going to handle the sheer chaos in which you’ve chosen to live. It is easy to work long hours, become very unproductive and find yourself enjoying the moments less.
In my experience, you have enough against you if you’re running a startup that feeling exhausted for the majority of every day is not a wise idea. I’ve realised over the last few months that balance, however elusive it might sound, is very important. A key example is how crucial feedback and communicating with users is at the beginning of a startup. For me, I find that the emails I write are much better, and the energy I can put into responding fast and positively to Tweets is higher when I am well rested.
What is a sleep ritual?
I learned about rituals from The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwarz. Whilst habits are often seen as activities you have to force yourself to do, rituals are instead activities which you are pulled towards. A good friend introduced me to the book, and also helped me craft a new ritual to help me get to sleep at a good hour and in a good state of mind each night. It takes some time to convert a habit into a ritual, but once you have it becomes something that does not require thought or energy, and instead can provide you with vast amounts of extra energy.
I’ve adjusted this ritual over time, and it can be simplified to two important parts:
Disengage: An activity to allow total disengagement from the day’s work. For me, this is going for a 20 minute walk every evening at 9:30pm. This is a wind down period, and allows me to evaluate the day’s work, think about the greater challenges, gradually stop thinking about work and reach a state of tiredness.
Avoid re-engaging: After the activity, go straight to bed. Be sure that all devices are in a separate room to the one you sleep (and slient). Once in bed, do not read books which are related to your work in any way. For me, this means reading fiction.
Adjusting and improving the ritual
It’s important to start with something simple, so that you can keep to it and allow it to convert from being a habit you struggle with to a ritual you are pulled towards doing. Once you are performing the ritual regularly, you can start to add more good habits and let those become rituals too.
Recently, I have combined early morning exercise with my sleep ritual. The sleep ritual helps me get a good night’s sleep, and allows me to get up very early. I like early mornings, and I like to start the day feeling refreshed and confident. I’ve also been trying to make going to the gym a regular part of my life, and I’ve often struggled to fit it into my day. I now go to the gym as soon as I wake up, and this is perfect since whatever chaos my day brings, I can almost always go to the gym before it starts.
Allow imperfection
Don’t worry if you miss days. It’s important to avoid guilt, and instead learn what is best for yourself and try again. It took some time, but I perform my ritual almost religiously now during the week. However, I don’t usually do it at the weekends. If I miss it one day, it is often due to being overwhelmed by everything that is going on. In those cases, I’ve found becoming consciously aware of the reason I’ve slipped out of my ritual, and then making a definite decision to start it again has allowed me to reduce the impact of stress.
I know that with the ritual, whatever chaos the day has brought, I can feel fresh the next day.
Do you have a ritual which helps you to sleep well and feel good each day? Do you think it is something you’d like to try? I’d love to hear from you.
Photo credit: Pedro Ribeiro Simões
When I look back on the times I’ve done the most productive work on my startup, it has always been when I’ve had a great balance of work and rest. It has also been at times when I have genuinely been enjoying the moment. Steve Jobs suggests that in order to do great work, we should love doing the work:
“Work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
By saying “the only way to do great work is to love what you do”, Jobs implies that how good we are at something is correlated with how much we enjoy doing it. I am sure you can agree this makes sense.
Loving what we do
This need to love what we do has had me thinking for a while about how to maximise the amount of time I’m truly enjoying what I’m doing. We all have parts of our lives which we don’t enjoy, and it is easy to assume that it is inevitable that there are elements of our days which we won’t enjoy. I think that whilst this is very easy to agree with, a lot of the time it may actually be a choice, whether we realise it or not.
Last year I watched a video entitled Tea & the Art of Life Management which is a great discussion featuring two of my favourite authors Tim Ferriss and Leo Babauta. The video is fantastic and I can highly recommend it. I’ve watched it a number of times myself, and I always keep remembering it for one particular thing which Tim Ferriss said. He calls it Gratitude Training:
Let’s say that you want to eat a peach for dessert one evening, but you decide to only allow yourself this luxury after washing the dishes. If, while washing the dishes, all you think of is eating the peach, what will you be thinking of when you eat the peach?
The clogged inbox, that difficult conversation you’ve been putting off, tomorrow’s to-do list?
The peach is eaten but not enjoyed, and so on we continue through life, victims of a progressively lopsided culture that values achievement over appreciation.
Ambition vs day to day happiness
The final sentence in the quote above from Tim Ferriss is something I find particularly interesting as a startup founder. As a founder, I read many articles, many videos and generally try to stay very up to date on the different techniques out there and try to learn from what has worked for others. This means that a lot of the time I am exposed to articles which show how much people have achieved such as how much a startup has been acquired for. With such a high concentration of this kind of information, it is easy to put a lot of value on ambition. We don’t start companies and aim to make no impact, do we?
However, going back to what Steve Jobs says, if we value ambition too much compared to day to day happiness, we are unlikely to ever achieve the things we are striving for. In a recent interview with David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals on Mixergy, Andrew Warner asked David a very interesting question:
When you launch something you say “we just wanted to launch something and see where it went” and on the other hand, “we’re going to build a hundred million dollar company”. How do you balance both those sides?
David responds by saying that the ambition is much less important than day to day happiness. He says that if you care more about the milestones and ambitions, you are much less likely to achieve them.
Choose to enjoy the moments
So next time we’re washing the dishes, why not actually find enjoyment in washing the dishes? It can be a very relaxing activity. When we’re trying to reach inbox zero, why not enjoy the great conversations we are having and have some gratitude for the amazing people we are in touch with and the fact we can communicate so easily. When a customer gets in touch with a question about our product, instead of seeing it as a necessary but unenjoyable task, why not be thankful that they care enough to get in touch, and look for something we can learn from them?
I certainly need to keep reminding myself that it’s a choice.
Photo credit: Dimitris Papazimouris
Something I’ve mentioned before at the start of a post is that I often look back on quotes, blogs and books I’ve read by some of the great minds of startups and don’t fully take on board what they meant until some time later. This week, there came a point where I felt like I understood what the following great 37signals quote means for me:
“Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service.”
What does it mean to have a point of view?
Gradually over the last four months of working on my latest venture, it has become apparent that the values I had in mind for it have now become a core part of the startup, and not only within the culture of the small two person team but also expressed by the many users who spread the word of the product.
For my startup, Buffer, we’re in the Twitter tool space and there are many other tools out there which offer some form of scheduling. We offer this, and we’re very aware that there is a fine line between a tool which helps you optimise, and a tool which encourages you to Tweet in non-genuine ways. So our point of view is “we encourage people to Tweet in a genuine way, because we believe that is the most effective way to make the most of Twitter”, and it flows throughout our team and our users. It means that all decisions are tied to the point of view, and we are very cautious about acting in ways which would not be in line with the point of view we have adopted which is to encourage people to use Twitter in a more effective but still genuine way. These actions can be simply the communication via email or on platforms like Twitter, or it could be the choice of features and changes to the product.
Why would you want to have a point of view?
I believe having a “point of view” means that you can build a much stronger position in the market, and you can more easily get others on board to help you grow through word of mouth. It can really differentiate you from other products in the market, especially if you are in a market which has “norms” and your values are different from those norms.
Another great thing about having a point of view is that it can really help you with your customer development. I see part of customer development as discovering and validating customers. Another part is listening to those users and deciding whether you should add or remove features based on their feedback. When you have a point of view, the decision of whether to add a feature is much easier, since you can ask yourself whether it is in line with the point of view and values you’re trying to stick to.
A third reason you might have a point of view is that it can reduce the risk from competitors. It is up to you as a startup to differentiate yourself and create a more compelling offering. The great part is that your offering also includes the message around the product. The point of view you adopt can truly affect whether people will choose you over someone else. If you can express the point of view in a way in which others are convinced to share the same point of view, then competitors not only need a stronger product offering but also need to show users that they have a better point of view.
What is the best way to express the point of view?
It is easy to read the 37signals quote above and assume that having a point of view is all about forcing your opinions on your users or audience. I’ve found that doing almost the opposite is the best way to get people on your side and spreading your point of view on your behalf. My thinking with this comes from the great Dale Carnegie and his book How to Win Friends and Influence People. If people ask for a feature which isn’t inline with our point of view, we use some of the techniques Carnegie proposes. Here are a couple:
Start by agreeing with the user - this shows that you are truly on their side. It is easy to agree with them, because in almost every case they have a great point.
Show you are open to them changing your mind - phrases such as “I could be wrong, as I often am, but I feel that perhaps” can really show that you are open to suggestions. Simply showing you are open to change, people often are much more likely to agree with you. It has to be done genuinely, of course.
I’ve been lucky to have a great co-founder who has not only adopted the point of view I tried to instill in my latest startup but has also taken it further and done some fantastic marketing in a way which has created a community of people who are not only spreading the word of our service but also spreading the point of view we have taken.
Do you have a point of view for your startup? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Update: This post has been cross-posted in Chinese on 36kr.com, you can read it here. A big thank-you to Abe Li.
Photo credit: Matt Katzenberger
I’m writing this from Javea, Spain. I arrived here a couple of days ago and I’ve been pondering the relationship between work and rest in a startup.
One reason I’m building a startup is to gain control over many aspects of my life. I like to hack my productivity, and I’ve found I don’t enjoy normal working hours or offices. If you’re working on a startup or have aspirations to create one, I’m guessing you can relate. By experimenting with these concepts, I’ve found I can get more done.
I find it particularly interesting to relate this to startups because there’s a lot of emphasis on crazy things like 18-hour days in startups.
Time, or energy?
Over the last year, I’ve realised that whilst time is limited and in some ways determines how much I can get done, what really determines my productivity is what I do and how I feel in the time I have. Energy plays a large factor in how we feel and how productive we are. I realised how important energy is in a book I read a short while ago called The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwarz. The overall message of the book is:
“managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal”
In a similar way to the fact that you need renewal in order to grow muscles, we also need renewal in order to grow our capacity of mental energy. Here is how Loehr and Schwarz put it:
“Any form of stress that prompts discomfort has the potential to expand capacity – physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually – so long as it is followed by adequate recovery”
This idea that if we shift from trying to manage time to managing our energy we can achieve more and feel better while we do it has lead to me doing quite a lot of experiments with my work and rest.
Experimenting with work and rest
I’ve tried many techniques to squeeze maximum productivity out of myself. When I embarked upon my first venture I was working very long hours, far beyond the point where my productivity dipped. This was a habit I carried over from university as a result of deadlines imposed at university.
One of my weaknesses is that I over-estimate how much I can get done in a period of time, so it is easy for me to go far beyond my optimal levels of energy. I came across a comment in an article on How To Stay Healthy While Hustlin’ A Startup, and it really rings true for me:
“Skipping sleep for a few extra hours of work destroyed my morale, creativity and attitude.”
A startup is chaotic enough, so does it make sense to put ourselves in such a state? Recently I’ve been experimenting with getting a good amount of sleep and regularly going to the gym. I stop working when I feel I’ve gone just beyond the point of my high productivity period. This idea of stopping or “disengaging” is something I’ve found to be very important.
Disengaging from your startup
Disengaging is probably one of the most challenging aspects of running a startup. Whatever I’m doing, I often find myself thinking about my startup. The thoughts can really affect productivity because you don’t get the renewal you need from the startup in order to return to the work with high levels of energy. I can’t put it better than Loehr and Schwarz:
“The richest, happiest and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also to disengage periodically and seek renewal”
The suggested way to improve our ability to “fully disengage” is by creating rituals. I have a ritual in the evening of going for a short walk and upon returning going straight to bed and reading a fiction book. It helps me disengage from the work I’ve done in the day and get the sleep I need to wake up refreshed and ready for the next exciting day.
Being here in Javea is fantastic because I can experiment with spending a little less time working and intersperse the work with going to the beach, playing some table tennis or taking a swim. Many find it odd that I would do any work at all from here, but I’ve realised over time that I feel the best when I have a balance of work and rest.
Have you thought about how your energy levels affect your productivity? Do you experiment with work and rest? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Photo credit: rikstill
One of the most important differences for me personally in how I’ve run my current startup compared to the last one I founded has been how I treat the product at each stage of the process. With ideas such as the Lean Startup, there is a huge amount of pressure for us to ship very early, and rightly so - the sooner we can validate our assumptions and gain more understanding about how our users react to our product the better. However, quotes such as the following can make us feel like we should believe our product is “unfinished”:
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” - Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn
“Build half a product, not a half-ass product” - from Getting Real by 37signals
The problem with “unfinished”
As much as I love the quotes and believe there is a huge amount of truth in both of them, I feel like these ideas can make us focus on having an “unfinished” product for a long time. The issue I see is that there is no mention of when we should stop being embarrassed by our product, or when we should treat it as a “whole product”.
The problem is that if we have in our minds that our product is “unfinished”, it will directly affect how we communicate our product to potential users or customers as well as press. I’ve realised over time that this can have a huge impact on the initial traction you build, and this is a vital aspect of an early stage startup.
Why might we be afraid of treating it as finished?
If you’ve tried to get a startup off the ground or have tried to follow some of the lean startup principles I am sure you will be able to relate to some of my experiences. When you’re just getting started, you have a big vision which has only partly been translated into product, and even the product you have probably has bugs here and there which you know about. Maybe you’re measuring Dave McClure’s Startup Metrics for Pirates and see there is a strong indication that your retention could be much higher. Perhaps you know people are slipping through your activation funnel. You probably haven’t built in any form of referral into your product. Things could be so much better.
If you let these thoughts take over too much, it will show in the way you talk about your product to people. As soon as that happens I believe you’re putting yourself at a big disadvantage. I did this with the startup I founded previously. We kept telling ourselves “we don’t want to get the big traffic now, because we won’t retain the users we gain” or “if we get users now, we don’t have our referral options in place so the traffic spike will just fall straight away”.
By waiting to have a better product before you tell anyone or try and get any press you’re severely impacting the traction you could build.
Why we should always treat our products as finished
I’ve taken a different approach with my latest startup. Even in the first week it launched I treated it as a finished product. Whilst it didn’t do much and there were a few bugs, I was very happy with it and wanted people to try the product. I even had a way for people to pay for it from day 1. I’ve realised over time that there are many benefits to taking this approach.
If you can shift your thinking and genuinely believe your product is fantastic at every stage, you’ll immediately see the benefits. You will naturally be better at driving that essential early traction. For example, there really is no limit to the amount of blogs you can reach out to. Tap into the long tail of blogs and you have an endless number of places you can try to get your product into. Even the features of your startup in small blogs will build up layer upon layer of traffic to your startup. Believe me, you won’t run out of blogs.
I’m not saying we should deny that our product needs to improve, or that we should not build any additional useful features. The sooner you can get a steady stream of traffic to your startup, the easier it is to continually improve things and get fast feedback on the changes you make. However, we should be communicating in a way which implies that the product is ready for real use and solves a problem well in its current state.
Do you believe your product is finished? If not, do you think you’d benefit from shifting your mindset? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Photo credit: kkirugi
As a fledgling entrepreneur in the midst of a growing startup, I try to read quite a lot around the subject. I’ve been deeply involved in startup culture for around two years now and I often find myself reflecting on my learning and relating it back to articles I have previously read. Recently this happened again for me in the topic of making decisions based on incomplete information.
Incomplete information
I first came across the phrase “acting with incomplete information” in a blog post Mark Suster wrote over a year ago titled “What makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI”. In the article he writes about the importance of moving forward when you don’t have complete information:
Entrepreneurs make fast decisions and move forward knowing that at best 70% of their decisions are going to be right. They move the ball forward every day. They are quick to spot their mistakes and correct.
I’ve only recently realised the true importance of this concept, and what it actually means in reality. It is one of those things which I’ve read and thought I understood, but I’ve realised how different it can be when you’re actually experiencing it.
What about the lean startup?
I’m scientifically minded, so when I first heard about the lean startup concepts pioneered by Eric Ries, I was completely hooked on the idea. The concepts are fantastic, and the way Eric Ries has distilled them is hugely beneficial for anyone trying to build a startup. I’ve used them myself to great effect. However, with descriptions of lean startup such as the one below, it can be easy to assume that you should make decisions only based on facts and never based on opinion or incomplete information.
Build a company-wide culture of decision-making based on real facts, not opinions.
What I have realised over time is that some of the aspects of the lean startup are more useful at certain times than others. For example, when you are just getting started and have only a trickle of traffic, you really can’t gain the volume of data you need for A/B testing. In the early days, talking to customers and gaining validated learning is one of the most useful things to do, but even if you gain a huge amount of feedback you cannot be 100% sure of anything. In the end, you have to take the leap.
Mark Suster is right: almost all of the time you have to make decisions without knowing what the outcome will be. I’ve mentioned that my mind is wired to think about things in logical ways, so “acting without complete information” is one of the things about doing a startup which I have struggled with the most.
Stop fearing acting without complete information
Over time, I have realised there are some ideas which really help me to be better at acting without complete information. Here are a few of the things which have worked well for me:
Create a fear of not shipping
When you think too much about the fact that you have to take the leap and act without complete information, you can start to fear what the consequences might be when you ship. There are all sorts of things that could go wrong, after all. I the past I have really feared shipping, but gradually over time I have started to question what the worst thing to happen could be, and I’ve actually developed a fear of not shipping.
Realise that everyone has to act without complete information
One useful thing to do is remind yourself that whilst history has some rhythms, it never repeats itself. Even the most experienced entrepreneurs have to assess things with a fresh mind when they embark on a new venture. It could even be argued that having less experience is sometimes a good thing. Whatever your experience is, remember that everything you do is new to a certain extent, and your situation is different to any other situation that has ever occurred.
Remember that failure is the best way to learn
In some cultures failure is more accepted than others. I live in the UK, and especially in business it is often seen that if you fail once you should just give up. I have realised over time that failure is not really a binary thing, so it is never as bad as you might think. I have also realised that “failure” or “something not working out as imagined” is one of the best ways to learn something.
“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” - Abraham Lincoln
Are you acting without complete information? Do you think you need to do it more? I’d love to hear about your thoughts and experiences.
Photo credit: espressoDOM
I often like to look back on when I was just getting into startups. I think there is a myth in entrepreneurship which not only do many newcomers believe, but could also be a key reason why many don’t even “try”. The myth is that you need to know how to do everything, and you need to do everything perfectly. It’s not surprising when you look at successful startups: it is easy to think that they’ve done all the right things. I believe the reality is far from that, and I am starting to think that it is in fact very healthy to have a good dose of naivety whilst building a startup.
The scale anticipation fallacy
One prime example of something which I think falls into this notion of healthy naivety is avoiding what I have come to call the “scale anticipation fallacy”. The fallacy is that in order to build something which can scale to millions of users you need to build it in a way which can handle that scale right from the start. The idea is that if you don’t get it right at the start, you will never succeed.
When I started my latest venture, I had sub-optimal tables in my database, I was doing multiple queries to get data and I was looping through data and doing extra queries to get everything I needed. I had no idea what a database index was. I basically did all the wrong things. However, at the start, this didn’t matter. I didn’t have any users! As time has gone on, I have encountered some “nice problems to have”, and the server has struggled a little. It has been no problem to improve things as I needed to. I believe the fact I didn’t think about scalability has certainly helped me reach a point where scalability matters. Conversely, I wonder whether if I focused on scalability when it didn’t matter, would I have ever reached the point where it did matter?
You don’t know what you don’t know
When you’re building a startup, one of the most challenging things is that you are in a world full of unknowns and uncertainty. You literally do not know what you do not yet know. This is something I’ve talked about before, and I think the only way to really cope in this kind of environment is to strive for knowledge, information and validated learning through feedback. However, I think that looking back on my startup attempts to date, I would say that one of the reasons I am currently having some success is that I didn’t quite realise just how much I still had to learn in order to succeed. It is this kind of naivety which I think is a good thing. In fact, I may even go as far as to say I fear the fact that in the future I might know how hard something is going to be.
Steve Blank wrote about this in his article “Too Young to Know It Can’t be Done”. I particularly like this sentence:
“if they’re really strategic older founders hire engineers in their 20′s and 30′s who don’t know what they’ve been asked to do is impossible”
Be proud of your naivety, and fear knowing too much
The scale anticipation fallacy is just one example of where I have been naive and I think it has turned out to be an advantage. The thing about startups is, it doesn’t matter how bad your code or anything else is. All that matters is that you create something people want.
I chose to attempt to create a startup immediately after graduating from University rather than spending some time in industry. It was a tough two years whilst I made lots of mistakes, and I am finally starting to have a little success now. However, the main thing I have learned is not “how to do everything perfectly”. The main thing I have learned is that a balance is required where you do everything “good enough” for the point in time you are at. Some might call this the 80/20 or Pareto principle. I believe that if I had spent some time in industry, I may have brought the skills I had learned to my attempt at a startup some years from now and I may have aimed to do everything perfectly. I think that would have been a big mistake.
I think clinging onto a beginner’s mind is very important. As Steve Jobs said:
“Stay hungry, stay foolish”
What do you think about the effect of naivety in startups?
Photo credit: Trey Ratcliff
“I’ve had many many many products, the vast majority of the things I’ve written, or created, the organisations I built fail, but the reason I’ve managed a modicum of success is because I just keep shipping.” - Seth Godin
“Finishing” or “shipping” things is essential to success. For the longest time, I’ve been very afraid of “shipping” things. There are so many reasons to hesitate to ship something. All sorts of things could go wrong which could have negative consequences.
However, over time I feel I have gradually shifted from not only not fearing shipping, but actually fearing not shipping. I think this is a healthy fear for anyone doing startups and can be applied elsewhere too.
Fear of not shipping my blog posts
Every two weeks, on a Sunday, I wake up and I sit down and write my blog post. As I reach around 700 words, I start to make sure it flows well, and that each section is in the right order and that there are no typos. Then, after I’ve finished, I spend a little time reading it through and wondering whether I have missed anything or whether it could be better.
That is when the fear hits me. I know that if I aim for perfection, I will delay shipping greatly. So I quickly read it through, and then hit publish. This is how I’ve kept blogging consistently, and it’s also how good discussion arises. If it’s perfect, where is the room for discussion. More importantly, is perfect even possible?
The great thing about this is that my blog posts so far have triggered off some absolutely fantastic discussions and I’ve been delighted to have received some fascinating comments which I’ve learned a huge amount from. Therefore, since I am shipping consistently and benefiting from it, it becomes something I want to do more and I feel I could realistically do more.
Fear of not shipping my startups
Another area I have found this “fear of not shipping” really applies for me, is with my startups. I’m passionate about creating my own scalable startup, but a startup is something you can feel very attached to. You don’t want people to see it rough around the edges. You want it to be perfect before you let the world see it.
Over time, I’ve realised that waiting for it to be perfect does not achieve the most success for me. The 80/20 rule really applies here, and I’ve found time and time again that the final 20% of the benefits of working on a product or a feature in a product genuinely can take 80% of the time you work on it if you are not careful. This is very much in line with the lean startup techniques which I’m a huge fan of.
With my previous startup, I took 4 months to launch it before I received any real feedback from users. With my current startup, I was very keen to launch it swiftly. I questioned everything I was building into the first version in order to keep it very minimal. I even sent an email to people saying it would take 1 week, and it eventually took 7. As I approached the end of the 7th week, a fear hit me that I had been working on it for too long without getting feedback. So I “shipped”. It was buggy, and it even let people pay without an automatic upgrade process and without some of the paid features even working. You know what? It worked out very well. I even had my first paying customer 4 days later.
I think getting into this mentality of fearing not shipping more than fearing shipping is a very important mental shift with huge benefits. For me, it has turned out very well.
Creating a fear of not shipping
How can you change your mindset into a fear of not shipping rather than a fear of shipping? I doubt it can happen just by reading a post. I suggest you try shipping a few things before you think they are ready. I am confident you will be pleasantly surprised, and when it happens, keep doing it. Soon you will fear spending too long on things.
I find this topic fascinating. I’d love your thoughts in the comments.
Photo credit: Pete Snelling
I’ve been pondering recently about how my latest venture has very much felt like cycling between creating order from chaos and then ending up with chaos again. I wanted to share my experiences and I hope to hear your thoughts.
Chaos in a startup
Since launching my latest venture around 3 months ago, I’ve had some incredible highs and some low points too. It’s been said many times that creating a startup feels like this, and I can now fully understand why - it is not possible to have full confidence about everything you are doing. I had experienced it with my previous startup, but this time it is even more apparent.
So what contributes to the chaotic nature of a startup? I believe there are two fundamental aspects which create a lot of the chaos in startups.
Understanding people
The first is the various activities which users are carrying out on the apps or platforms we have created. How do we make sense of what people are doing? How can we know how useful they are finding our product? How do we know whether they are having problems? There are many unanswered questions, and at times it feels like a huge struggle to make sense of what is going on.
The lizard brain
I believe that the second main contributor to chaos in startups is what Seth Godin calls the Lizard Brain. He sums it up nicely:
“The list of excuses is long and getting longer all the time.”
The lizard brain is the part of us which makes us think about everything that could possibly go wrong, and makes us over-analyse everything. It can be overwhelming, and it is a real challenge to quieten it and to ship things without paying much attention to all the factors which could affect the outcome.
Creating order
So how do we create order out of all the chaos going on? How do we understand what users are experiencing and how they feel towards our product? How do we quieten our lizard brain and stop it halting our progress? How do we reach a state of calm and reach a position where we can be confident we are doing the right things?
Feedback
I doubt many of us are asking for feedback as much as we could. In my latest venture, I have done much more customer development than in any of my previous ventures. It is amazing what an email or phone call with a customer can reveal.
Early on, qualitative feedback is potentially more useful than many forms of quantitative feedback. You most likely have collected email addresses, so just get in touch with people - they will be glad to hear from you.
I’ve also found that extracting data from my database and presenting it in different ways can create order from the chaos. Cohort analysis can reveal how many of your users are coming back on a regular basis - something you might have had no idea about.
Ship
The second thing, is to know when to stop getting feedback and when to produce and ship results. We can always think of so many reasons something might not work out, and often the reasons are contradictory. The same can happen with feedback, too - one person will want one thing and someone else will want the opposite. The interesting thing is that shipping when things feel chaotic can actually create order.
Are you more comfortable with chaos or order?
People like Mark Suster who invest in us as entrepreneurs tell us that one of the key traits they look for in us is to be able to act without complete information. I see this as acting when things are still somewhat chaotic. We reveal just enough order and then we must act in order to move forward fast. In doing this, we create yet more chaos.
Some of us may naturally thrive on acting when things are chaotic. However, perhaps we act while things are too chaotic and we would have more success if we created more order from the chaos before we introduce further chaos.
Others of us may tend more towards the order and wait too long, in the hope that we can eliminate the chaos completely. We then have a danger of losing a huge amount of time to analysis paralysis. Perhaps we should act more while things are still chaotic?
Have you experienced the chaos? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Photo credit: Juan Manuel Garcia
Whilst building my latest startup, which I’m glad to say is picking up nicely, there have been times when things have started to go a little crazy. It might be being featured in a big blog, lots of tweets about us in a short space of time, a big influx of signups or a few consecutive people upgrading to a paid plan. When this happens, it is very easy for your thoughts to drift off and to start thinking of the bigger picture possibilities for the startup long into the future. I’ve realised that part of the process of an early stage startup is to steady yourself when those occasions arise, and to stay focused on the immediate tasks such as making sure customers are happy, improving the user experience or working on upcoming features.
Why do we start to “think big”?
I’ve been trying to think about why it is that these thoughts emerge especially at times when some “minor successes” occur. It seems that most of the time, it is a result of a chain of thoughts, each a step further than the previous. Before you know it, you’re thinking about how your startup is going to change the way something is done in a profound way. It often happens when you’re with someone else and neither of you stop the chain of thoughts. It may be healthy to be ambitious, but often these thoughts occupy more time than they should and stop us doing the real work we need to do to get anywhere near to those thoughts becoming reality.
Before conquering the world…
It is easy to look at the success stories of the world and think they started at the top. Let’s try and question that and think how all successful ventures or entrepreneurs started with something small. Facebook started just at Harvard. Google started as something used by just a few at Stanford.
Richard Branson may be trying to bring space travel to the masses with Virgin Galactic, but he started out with a magazine called Student. The spiral of success is what you should focus on - trust that with each achievement you will be more informed and better positioned to tackle the next, slightly bigger challenge. Don’t go for space travel right away. It took Branson 38 years.
My thinking here is reflected by Mark Suster who conveys a similar message very eloquently in his recent post titled Why Entrepreneurs & VCs Should Focus on Basecamp, Not the Summit.
Is it so bad to have ambitious thoughts?
I personally love to think big. It’s something I almost pride myself for - there is a lot I want to do, and I truly believe I will achieve it. I think it can be argued that it is healthy to have ambitious thoughts. Perhaps depending on the type of person you are, you either think big too much or you don’t think big enough. It is those of us who think big too much who need to pay attention to this the most. A certain amount is definitely healthy, but beyond a point it becomes a huge time sink, and could actually stop you reaching your goals.
How to steady yourself and keep moving forward
In the recent months, being able to become aware of when I have these world-changing thoughts and being able to stop them in their tracks before they stop me moving forward has been something I’ve found myself needing to do time and time again. This applies to everything, too - keeping your initial product minimal, going for smaller press before you’ve built up momentum, or even realising you can get started without waiting for perfect conditions.
Working with others can help a lot. I’ve been delighted to have a great pro-active friend join me with my latest venture. However, it is worth noting that if you’re working with someone else, one of you needs to stop those thoughts before they take up a lot of time. Inevitably the discussions start, and they’re fun, but then comes the time to get working again.
In the end though, no one else is going to do it for you - you need to stop thinking about changing the world, and do the nitty-gritty to get one step further. I’ll certainly need to come back to this article to remind myself.
Have you experienced a similar thing? How do you handle it? Is it really a bad thing? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Photo credit: Adrian Boliston
A short while ago I wrote about one of the ways I think people could bootstrap a startup from zero funds. I called it “working in waves”. Of course, there are more ways than one to get a startup off the ground with no funds. Today I want to share with you my thoughts on building a startup “on the side” and I’d love to hear what you think or any experiences you’ve had.
On the side?
One of the issues with working on a startup is that you are very often moving from a world where you are rewarded immediately for your work to a world where the reward is delayed. The problem, therefore, is having funds in order to get by while you build something up.
One way to have enough funds to get by while you build up your startup is to build your startup “on the side”, in other words whilst you are doing other work. I am currently experiencing this first hand and I have realised that doing things in this way also brings about some other benefits, and of course there are a few challenges if you try doing things this way too.
Great reasons to build your startup “on the side”
Constraints make you focus
When you’re doing 40 hours a week of paid work, you really have to make sure that the few hours you spend moving your startup forward that week count. In my experience this is a very good thing. Now that I am working “on the side” I am much more effective per hour than when I had stretches of multiple full days to work on my startup whilst using the “working in waves” method.
Forced patience
Patience is not often a word which is used to describe what is needed in a startup. However, I have come to the realisation that at the early stages of a startup you need to be obsessively working on getting customer feedback. What has worked for me is adjusting something, and then reaching out for more feedback and then analysing the current situation. Working full-time means that without realising it you are forced to wait long enough to get some feedback before you pivot your idea again too soon.
Questioning what’s necessary for version 1
When you have a long runway of full days and weeks to build your startup, it’s easy to think “we need to launch with that” or “it won’t work without this”. When you’re working on your startup full-time, this might add a few weeks onto how quickly you can get your MVP out. Do the same when you’re working “on the side” and it’ll take you months longer. Working “on the side” really forces you to question what needs to be included in that first version.
Challenges when building your startup “on the side”
Potential burnout
In my experience, your todo list for your startup never ends and even when you think up an idea that you think is so small that it can be done in a week, it takes 7 and after you get it out there you have a flood of other thoughts for what to add to it. It’s easy to work long hours and sleep can really suffer. It’s a constant battle.
Am I going too slow?
When you’re working on paid work you’re often thinking about your startup, and you’re often thinking that you need to be working non-stop. Most of the advice out there says we should be. On top of that, let yourself succumb to the myth that you can be killed by your competition and you’re in for a tough ride. In the early days of my latest venture I got around this by making sure I did at least one thing to move my startup forward a little, no matter how small.
What do you think?
I am now happier working on my startup “on the side” than I was when “working in waves”. I certainly don’t doubt the advantages of an accelerator program such as YCombinator but when you’ve made your decision to bootstrap without funding and you don’t yet have a business making you money in a scalable way, I think the best way is to attempt to build up something to ramen profitability as your first venture. That’s what I’m doing, and then maybe after that I will go for the home run.
Do you have an experience of building something on the side, or are you considering doing it? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Photo credit: Marlon Bunday
