Joel Gascoigne

I recently received an email asking some advice about co-founders, specifically about whether a 50/50 ownership split makes sense for a startup.

This is certainly a topic which has had heated discussion many times previously. So why would I choose to add even more noise to this debate? Well, in the past few years I’ve had experiences of failed co-founder partnerships and with my latest startup Buffer I found a better solution for my own personality. This may resonate with others, so I want to share it.

The 50/50 co-founder model

When I talk about the 50/50 co-founder model, what I really mean is the equal stake model. Whether you have two, three, four co-founders or even more, I believe you should very rarely have equal ownership of a company across founders.

I have a few key reasons I believe that an equal split of equity can be a recipe for failure.

Fundamentals of problem discovery

I think more often than not, if you begin a startup with someone you believe will be a great business partner, you will sit down and “talk ideas”. You might have a long brainstorming session about what startup you could build together and how you can take over the world and become the next Larry and Sergey, or the next Chad and Steve.

I think it could easily happen that you might have this whole conversation for an hour or more without ever talking about a “problem”. The thing is, a “problem” is what matters for a startup. If you’re not solving a problem, you’re going to struggle to reach product/market fit and gain meaningful traction. Successful startups almost always come from problems, and problems are normally discovered when a single person personally suffers the problem for enough time to decide to search for a solution and then choose to solve it themselves.

If you delay finding a co-founder, I believe you have a much higher chance of building a solution to a problem worth solving. Pay attention to what you do each and every day, a little more than you do right now. Eventually you’ll come across problems which need to be solved. Find one and start solving it yourself. Then find a co-founder when you desperately need them to help you build upon the traction you have.

Validation of meaningful contribution

One of the hardest parts about finding a great co-founder is whether they will be worth the large equity stake you need to give them. Even with vesting (which I highly recommend), you are making a big commitment which will still be a hassle if it doesn’t work out.

The key thing about founders is that you need someone you can truly rely on to get their part of the work done. If you’re technical, you need a guy who can do serious hustling to get your product in front of masses of people. If you’re the hustler, you need someone you can count on to build a great product.

If you delay finding a co-founder until you’ve validated your startup with a first version and some meaningful traction, then they can see that you have validated the contribution you will make. Then, bring someone on board slowly and ask them to join you fully as a co-founder with a decent stake once they’ve proven their contribution.

A better approach

I believe that perhaps the best approach to finding a great co-founder for your next venture is to initially act as if you will never have a co-founder. I had no idea at the time, but looking back and connecting the dots I realise that this is what I did with Buffer, and it worked very well.

By taking the mindset that you will have to build the startup completely by yourself, it forces you to learn the parts which don’t come naturally. If you’re a coder, it means forgetting about beautiful code for a moment and thinking about what really matters. It means questioning whether you’re building something people want. If you’re not a coder, it means finding ways to build a very basic prototype to test and market to get enough traction.

The outcome? I think Andy Young puts it best:

“you’ve no idea how much more motivating it is to someone technical to look at the shitty prototype you had built for $500 on Rent-a-coder, or painfully clubbed together yourself, and say, “Obviously I can help you build that much better,” than it is for them to listen to a shitty pitch.”

Similarly, as a coder I put together a good first version of Buffer and got traction with minimal marketing skill and that’s when Leo came on board. For him, I think he could see massive potential to attract users to the product.

Mark Suster’s take on this topic is also worth a watch:

There will be exceptions

Of course there will be exceptions, and I’m sure there are countless startups out there formed on successful 50/50 partnerships. However, almost all startups I know which have failed (including one of my own) were formed on 50/50 partnerships.

I believe that experienced founders with a number of successful exits may be able to partner with another experienced founder and make it work. They will have experienced and observed enough failures to avoid building a solution to a nonexistant problem, and they have already proven they can make massive contributions and build something from nothing.

For the majority of us, however, we are first time founders and we have much more learning to do. This was the case for me, and when I validated the idea myself and took on a co-founder gradually to allow him to prove his value. He went far beyond my expectations in proving his value, and that’s when things really changed. I couldn’t have taken Buffer to that next stage without him, and he has a stake which reflects that.

What are your experiences of co-founders? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Photo credit: Helena Eriksson

It’s almost exactly a year since I started documenting my startup lessons learned through this blog, and since my first post last November, I’ve blogged 26 times. I’ve been lucky enough to have fantastic comments on many of my posts, and this has always extended my learning even further by hearing others’ experiences and insights.

I thought it would be a useful reminder for myself to pick out the top 10 lessons I’ve learned. I hope it might be useful and interesting for some of you, too.

Let’s get started:

1. Getting regular exercise can improve your sleep

Over the last year, I’ve consistently had times when I’ve felt mentally drained but not physically tired. The single most important change I’ve made in the last year is to become disciplined about going to the gym, and to realise the value of exercise. I now go to the gym most mornings. It gives me a great start to the day and helps me sleep much better overall.
Read the full article →

2. Bootstrapping on the side is a great way to start

We’ve now built up Buffer to almost 80,000 users. We’ve been through the AngelPad incubator in San Francisco, raised a little funding, expanded the team to 3 and have great monthly revenue. Interestingly, however, it all started with me working on the side whilst working full-time. There are many benefits of working on something on the side.
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3. Achieve scale by doing things that don’t scale

One of the biggest influences on my attitude to building startups is Eric Ries’ Lean Startup Methodology. It’s all about reducing waste, and many of the concepts are easy to grasp but very hard to implement. One such concept is to do things initially in a way which is unscalable. One example: to begin with, personally email people instead of setting up an automated system. This is a key technique which, looking back has served me well, and looking forward will be important to keep reminding myself of.
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4. Embrace feeling uncomfortable

This post clearly resonated with a lot of people, as hundreds went on to share it with their friends and followers. It’s all about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, and gathers my learnings from people I admire such as Seth Godin, Ben Yoskovitz and Tim Ferriss. The key takeaways are that there is no growth to be made in staying comfortable, but there are ways to grow without being uncomfortable all the time. My key question to you: “What are you doing to feel uncomfortable?”
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5. Learn to fear not shipping

Seth Godin attributes much of his success not to producing better than others, but to shipping more than others. I’ve learned that the main reason we don’t ship as much as they could or should, is that we fear shipping for so many reasons. In this post I attempt to turn the fear on its head and highlight why we should really fear not shipping instead of shipping.
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6. Enjoying every moment is a choice we all have

Perhaps the most profound lesson in the last year for me, and one that I consistently struggle with, is that enjoying every moment is a choice we all have. This is all related to living in the present and valuing day-to-day happiness over ambition. There is enjoyment to be found in doing customer support, and there is enjoyment to be found in washing the dishes. When you’re in this place, you have so much energy for everything and can achieve anything you want.
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7. First time founder? Beware of the social ideas

This particular lesson is one of the ones which took me almost two full years to learn. My premise with this is that if you’re a first time founder, you’ll struggle to raise funding for your startup, especially if you are at the idea stage with no traction. With that situation, you’ll struggle to build a startup which requires a long pre-revenue runway period. The conclusion is that you are far better off working on building a “tool” with immediate value you can charge for and no difficult network effects.
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8. Think carefully about your “coming soon” page

All startups begin somewhere, and more often than not it is with a “coming soon” page. I think it’s a very intuitive action to take when you’re building your startup, but with this article I question the idea of the “coming soon” page. My thoughts revolve around the lessons I’ve learned from Eric Ries’ lean startup concept and how I launched Buffer. I believe that in many cases, the “coming soon” page is a lost opportunity to validate your idea and avoid wasted time building something people may not want.
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9. Consider the different ways to bootstrap your startup

With some luck along the way and many mistakes made, I’ve managed to take Buffer from an idea to a cashflow-positive business with over 80,000 users, great investors and inspiring co-workers. To reach this point, I bootstrapped Buffer for 9 months until hit ramen profitability. I’ve learned a lot about bootstrapping, and in this post I share my experiences.
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10. 4 key steps to kickstart your startup

I’ve found that often the hardest part of creating a startup is actually starting. In this post, I try to distill what I’ve learned from many not so successful ventures and one somewhat successful one into 4 simple steps which to get onto the right path. It’s not that easy, of course, but I truly believe these steps are the key ones. The challenge is in having discipline and executing the steps. I include links in the article to help with that aspect.
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It has been an amazing journey so far, and I’m really thankful to all of you who have supported me over the last year. I’ve been lucky to be in touch with so many of you and I’ve had some incredibly useful comments here on the blog. I’m planning many more posts in 2012 about more of the lessons I’m learning and experiences I’m having, and I look forward to your company.

Which of these lessons resonates with you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Photo credit: scott_48074

A couple of things have happened this week that made me think a little about what failure means for startup founders.

Firstly, one of my favorite startups Sprouter has announced that it is closing its doors. I’ve been closely following Sprouter for at least a year, and I’ve also been lucky enough to be featured in their weekly newsletter a couple of times. It is sad to see it close, especially since I have seen how much effort Sarah and Erin have put in amongst others. That said, I can see that this will be a launchpad for future success.

Secondly, Nick Barker who’s a great friend of mine and a fellow british startup founder reached out to me to ask if I will go back to Nottingham some time to speak about overcoming failure. We had a brief conversation about how “celebrating failures” is a slightly alien concept in the UK and how the difficult subject must be talked about.

Failure comes with the territory

In the recent TNW Sessions featuring Sarah Prevette of Sprouter, Sarah said that failure comes with the territory. Similarly, Dan Martell said:

“No one I know ever came out of the gate with a win. It usually always got preceded with a failure, or two.”

When I graduated from University in 2009, I knew I wanted to create a startup. I had an idea, so I got building straight away and I specifically found work which would allow me to spend a significant amount of time building the startup.

I had a co-founder and over the course of 1.5 years I had 4 other people involved. These are all people who in one way or another I feel I have let down, but we all knew that potential failure came with the territory.

I am not sure whether it helps for people to know that failure is part of the journey, but with hindsight I can see that it is definitely the case.

Learning from failure

Dan Martell recently wrote a post on Maple Butter about the end of Sprouter and the following words really stood out for me:

“we sometimes need to learn those lessons the hard way to lay the foundation for the next venture”

As someone who has a previous startup which didn’t go as well as I had hoped, I can relate to this on many levels.

The startup did not meet expectations, but it was the best 1.5 years of learning I have ever had. I learned the importance of building something people really want, about relationships and about not holding back with shipping a product and charging for it.

Sarah Prevette opened up about things she has learned from running Sprouter. She said that Sprouter was a great example of being a “victim of free”. Some of the things Sarah has taken away from her experience are great learning points:

“I would advise anybody to monetize right from the get-go. Don’t be afraid to charge. It is a much more difficult thing to discover a business model than it is to sell your product.”

Failure puts you in a better position to succeed

I can absolutely say that if I hadn’t spent 1.5 years working on a startup which did not succeed, there is no way I could have had some early success with Buffer as quickly as I did.

This is the mindset which Nick and I agreed was severely lacking in the UK. It seems that in the UK and perhaps other places failure is seen as a sign that you will never succeed. A “well done for trying, now quit the band and get a proper job” response doesn’t seem far from the norm. I honestly think the attitude is shifting, but now that I am in Silicon Valley I can see this particular aspect is one of the key differences. This is a reason location could matter for your startup.

Overall, I do not regret trying with my first startup, and I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today with Buffer if I hadn’t gone through that learning. Reading about the experiences of other startup founders I think there is great reason to celebrate failures.

Have you had an experience of failure? Do you think failures should be celebrated? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Photo credit: hobvias sudoneighm

Some of you may know that I just left everything behind in the UK and together with my co-founder Leo arrived in San Francisco to base ourselves and Buffer here for the next two and a half months.

I’ve been immersing myself in startup articles and trying to learn from others more experienced than myself for some time now, and out of anywhere the biggest portion of the articles I read are emerging from San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

One of the things I’ve always wondered since I’ve been working on startups is how much of a difference location can make. In the UK, moving from Sheffield to Birmingham certainly helped due to more startup-minded people and easy proximity to London. We’re now in the startup capital of the world and whilst we haven’t visited the true Silicon Valley in terms of Palo Alto and Mountain View yet, I’ve started to form some thoughts about the benefits of being here and more generally the importance of location for startups.

It is much easier to meet like-minded and useful people

Since we arrived in San Francisco, my expectations of how easy it is to meet people and how helpful people are have been surpassed. In pretty much every coffee shop there are plenty of people coding away and who are obviously working on or interested in startups.

There are some fantastic spots such as The Summit in Mission which is a coffee shop crossed with a startup incubator. I’ve never seen so many Macs in a coffee shop in my life, and I’ve met lots of new interesting people there.

In addition, we’ve also had the chance to meet some fantastic startups in our space such as Twylah, and it has been fascinating to learn from Eric and Kelly who are doing a great job. It is much easier for these things to happen since many startups are based out here.

We’ve not even been along to one of the many events happening in SF yet and I’m sure that will emphasise this feeling even more.

People actually “get” what we’re doing

I think this point is actually pretty key for me. In the UK I found that most people didn’t “get” what I was doing or why I was doing it.

In San Francisco, you can skip right over a lot of the initial chit-chat because people “get” startups. The conversation can jump right on to what your startup is about.

For my startup this is even more apparent. In the UK I’d have to actually explain Twitter sometimes when describing what Buffer is about. Whilst even in San Francisco some people don’t use Twitter, pretty much everyone I’ve chatted to understands it and knows how powerful it is.

You don’t magically become productive in the “right” location

However, with all the positive things said, there is one thing which hit me pretty hard when I first arrived. Adjusting to a new environment and finding our way around certainly took up some of my time, but when we found a good spot and got down to work, I realised that location didn’t matter all that much.

We’ve been in bustling coffee shops packed with people working away, and we’ve been in quieter more relaxed places. Whatever the environment, it is still easy to procrastinate. Making meaningful progress is more about self-discipline and knowing what you want than anything else.

Location shouldn’t hold you back

In a recent blog post aimed at those who didn’t get into TechStars, Joe Heitzeberg, a successful serial Internet entrepreneur and TechStars mentor said his response to “what should I do now” is the following:

“programs like TechStars are great, but they shouldn’t be the single enabler. Keep on moving forward on your company.”

I feel the same about location. Sure, you might not be in Silicon Valley and you might not be able to just pack your bags and hop on a flight over here for many reasons, but not being in the “right” location shouldn’t stop you making progress with your startup from your current location.

Get into the startup mentality wherever you are

Overall, I believe that for myself, the most important thing has been to get into the startup mentality whilst I was in Sheffield and Birmingham working away on my startups. With the advantage of hindsight, I had a fairly good balance of reading lots about startups in blogs and books in order to learn from the experiences of others, and actually building and marketing my own startups in order to have experiences first-hand.

I think diving in and starting is the most important thing, and to wait for any “perfect” environment, be it location, experience, funds or otherwise, is a mistake to be avoided.

What are your thoughts and experiences on the difference being in the right location can make for your startup? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Photo credit: Ron Reiring

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about when the right time is to start marketing a startup. In my previous startup, we were hesitant to attempt to get press early. We were always waiting until our product was ‘ready’. I think this is probably quite a common thought process.

With the aim to dispel some of the fears and highlight benefits of marketing early, I want to share some of my reflections on early stage marketing based on what I’m doing with my current startup, Buffer.

Why we hesitate to market at an early stage

As with anything, it is easy to think about reasons not to start marketing a startup.

We think the product isn’t ready for marketing

At an early stage, you know for sure that things such as your signup funnel and onboarding process can be improved a lot. On top of that natural fact, with the lean startup movement so widespread now we’re all encouraged to release our products even earlier. It is easy to think that marketing should come when our product is perfect, but I believe we put ourselves at a disadvantage by waiting.

We think we only get one chance

I think a very valid fear when starting to consider marketing a startup is that you only get one chance with people you reach. The idea that someone will make their final decision based on their first impression is very believable. We’ve found out this is far from the case.

We think we’ll ‘run out’ of people

I’ve found with Buffer that sometimes we reach a kind of plateaux with our rate of signups, and whilst the real solution is to try new ways to market our idea, or to try taking our existing methods to new levels, it is quite easy to feel like we’ve hit some kind of saturation point and won’t be able to reach more people. As you’ll find out below, we now know we’ll never reach a point where we can’t sign up more people.

Why we should market even when it feels too early

I’ve realised over time, that even whilst releasing our products earlier, we should still aim to market our startup very early. I believe that what feels like “too early” is in fact a great time to start marketing. Most people have probably delayed much longer than they should.

The best way to improve the product is to have usage

Matt Mullenweg, the Founder of Wordpress, put it better than I ever will:

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.

What we’ve found with Buffer is that by treating the marketing more as a way to trigger conversations than a “broadcast” channel, marketing has been by far the best way to hone our pitch and improve the product too. We had to experiment a lot with our pitch and we had many things to fix in the product, It was much easier to improve quickly due to the fact my co-founder Leo was writing several articles per week about Buffer for a variety of blogs.

People don’t always sign up the first time they hear about your product

Once we started to succeed in getting Buffer featured in quite a number of blogs, we found through the conversations in the comments many people had already come across Buffer. What was happening was that whilst some people would sign up the first time they heard about Buffer, others would wait until they had heard about Buffer a few times.

I now think that quite a large number of people don’t sign up to services the first time they hear about them. For that reason, we should aim to be getting our products mentioned widely and frequently. People have a kind of tipping point where they decide “now I’ll give it a go”. You have to work to get there.

You won’t ‘run out’ of people

I recently realised we will never reach a point where we can’t sign up more people to Buffer. Since we are currently primarily a tool for Twitter users, you just have to consider how fast Twitter is growing to realise we will never have the saturation problem.

To illustrate this further, take a look at the following chart which shows Evernote’s signups stats six months ago:

Six months ago Evernote were signing up around 2000 new users every hour. They’ve also recently announced that it has gone from six million registered users at the time of this chart to over ten million registered users today. I predict Evernote could be signing up around 100,000 new users per day. You only get that kind of growth by continually working at your marketing.

I now believe that when building a startup as much focus should be put on marketing and customer development as on product development.

Are you marketing your startup yet? If you’re not, why are you delaying it? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Photo credit: John Wardell

If you are a first time startup founder, or have done a few projects but are still working either full-time or freelancing part-time, you are likely to struggle to find investment for your startup idea. For this reason, you will probably to need to bootstrap your idea. This has been my experience, and with what I know now I would have done things differently.

How it all started

Since graduating in June 2009 I’ve had the great opportunity to experience both working as a contract developer and jumping in the deep end of creating startups and all that comes both. In fact, I’ve kind of been juggling paid work and startups for around two years now. I want to share some of the experiences I’ve had with the various ways I’ve chosen to handle “surviving” whilst trying to get a startup off the ground.

I finished university having worked on a dissertation that felt very much like a startup (a story for another post), and I was definitely ready to jump in at the deep end and do whatever I needed to do in order to work on a startup and make it succeed. So that’s what I did. In order to be able to keep working on the startup, I had to try a few different things:

The first way: on the side

I spent the first 8 months after university working 3 days a week as a web developer and spending most of my other 4 days working on my first real startup. This worked well to a certain extent - the startup was built and launched within 2-3 months, and it got a certain amount of traction throughout that period.

Bootstrapping your startup on the side can be a massive challenge, but there are a number of often overlooked advantages to this method. Read my thoughts.

The second way: work in waves

After 8 months of working on the startup “on the side” and building up a certain amount of funds, my contract work dried up and rather than finding more I decided to use the funds as runway and give the startup a real push by working on it full-time. I see this as a feasible way to bootstrap a startup, and whilst this could be done multiple times whereby you work to build up funds and then have a boost of productivity, I see a number of issues with this way too.

Having tried working in waves, I would not recommend it as a long term strategy. Read my thoughts.

A third way: ramen profitability

There is only so long you can go on working in waves or working on the side. With OnePage, I had tried both of those methods, and I kept the product completely free. I was aiming for the “grow big fast” approach, and I had tried to get onto a few startup accelerator programs and spoken to a few investors without success. I didn’t have enough traction or a good enough track record.

I realised that the only way to be able to work full-time on a startup was to build a product which generated revenue early. I had the option to try and generate revenue from OnePage, or to apply what I’d learned to a new product. I had a small idea in my mind, and I decided I liked the idea of a blank canvas. With Buffer, I was completely focused on hitting “ramen profitability”. I sensed that if I could get there, it would change everything.

“Ramen profitable” is a term which is used a lot in the startup scene, and one you should get acquainted with if you haven’t already. I think Paul Graham does a good job of describing it, and he may have even invented the phrase:

At YC we use the phrase “ramen profitable” to describe the situation where you’re making just enough to pay your living expenses. Once you cross into ramen profitable, everything changes. You may still need investment to make it big, but you don’t need it this month.

We reached ramen profitability a couple of months ago and I can’t emphasise enough the impact it can have. I gradually dropped the number of days of contract development work I was doing as the revenue grew, and now I get to spend all my days on Buffer. We certainly have many new challenges ahead of us, but it is a very nice place to be.

How I would start, if I could go back

I now believe that anyone can reach ramen profitability, as long as there is real focus on the goal. Once you are focused on generating revenue, it is a good idea to consider how the type of idea you choose can affect how easy it is to bootstrap and reach ramen profitability. If I was just starting out now with the knowledge I now have, I would completely focus on reaching ramen profitability, and I would work on the side on a “tool” with paid plans rather than a “social” idea. This is the approach I took with Buffer and it worked surprisingly well.

I feel it is also a much more doable first step than aiming for the million dollar idea from the outset. Avoiding those world-changing thoughts can make you very productive. As Jason Cohen described very succinctly:

Prevailing wisdom is that “small is risky.” It’s just the opposite. When you just need to be Ramen-profitable, you can do so even in a recession.

Are you trying to get a startup off the ground? Are you bootstrapping? I’d love to hear how you are approaching your startup or how you plan to.

Photo by NoHoDamon

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

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