Getting your first enterprise sales (or investors)
Posted: February 3, 2013 Filed under: Chapter 3 - Business Leave a comment »I read a great article on KissMetrics today: “Sales for Startups“
It had been sitting in my inbox for a while (published in early January). But, the basic lessons are timeless: set a goal, build a plan in support of that goal (e.g., a set of prospects in a Google Doc), and then work the plan. Each of these steps is important. If you do not set clear goals, you will end up doing a bunch of non-essential activity (and your customers will be taken by a competitor who is clearly focused on adding them the value that you should be providing). If you do not have a clear plan, then you will be unable to transition from dream state to action, and suffer through the rejections that will invariably come as you push your plan in place.
Whether you are selling a product to customers, or your business to investors, each of these steps are key. Goals, plans, and execution. Take a minute to think about your goal. And then take a minute to think about the plans you have in support of your goal. This is the scary part: look back at your last week, and think about how much of your time was invested cleanly in executing the plans that are in direct support of your key goals? If you are a normal person, it is probably less than 50% of your time (and if it is more than 50% of your time, congrats…now get back to work!).
What do you think? Is there more to startups (or life) than goals>plans>execution? Leave a comment!
Thanks.
Matt
A couple more great posts from KISSMetrics
Posted: March 3, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »How to Create Your Own Promo Video for Under $100
Before building you product, why not build your promo video. Odds are, if you cannot build a compelling video (a video that OTHER people find compelling), there is little likelihood that you can build a compelling product. So start making videos: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/create-your-promo-video.
The Top 50 Posts from KISSmetrics of 2011
OK, perhaps this is cheating to call this the second post, because it includes 50 gems of marketing/analytics insight from the experts. http://blog.kissmetrics.com/kissmetrics-2011.
Landing Pages by the Numbers
Posted: March 3, 2012 Filed under: Chapter 2 - Customer Leave a comment »The folks at KissMetrics have done it again, this time providing a clear and simple guide to building a great landing page.
Click Image to Enlarge
Source: The Blueprint for a Perfectly Testable Landing Page Infographic
You Need to Start Out Testing. And Stay Testing.
Posted: February 18, 2012 Filed under: Chapter 4 - Technology Leave a comment »I spent a couple of hours (or more) working on an annoying problem. I had been slacking on my tests for a while, and built a bunch of code without any testing. It was Friday night, so I decided it was time to pay down a bit of my technical debt, and now it is Saturday morning. Alas, test early, test always, and I would have caught this mistake way earlier.
Now on to the details. I have a test setup modeled after Ryan Bates, which involves Capybara, Factory Girl, and Rspec. The error I was getting was across a number of my tests:
Failure/Error: click_button 'Log in'
ActionView::Template::Error:
comparison of Fixnum with nil failed
# ./app/views/contacts/index.html.erb:30:in `<'
...
# ./spec/requests/authentications_spec.rb:24:in `block (3 levels) in '
Literally, there is nothing across all of the Internets that gave me any clues, and I was thinking that it had something to do with Capybara. I was able to interactively log in, even when I fired up Rails in an interactive test environment (rails server -e test).
It turns out that I had not set some variables in Factory Girl, so their values were nil, and when I tried to call a comparison against the nil I got the “comparison of Fixnum with nil failed.” Makes sense, and way easier than some of the stuff that I had considered. But, a couple of hours forever lost because I did not keep up with my testing. Lesson learned. Again:)
If you have better ways to test or debug, I would love to hear them.
Matt
Posting code in WordPress.com
Posted: February 12, 2012 Filed under: Chapter 7 - Tell the World Leave a comment »OK, this is very easy, and this not is pretty much just for me. Here is how you do it:
1) Switch to HTML view (not Visual view) on New Post
2) Add your code with
1
You will end up with something like this:
1
Which WordPress then formats to something like this:
var me = User.first me.middle_name = awesome
More information is available from the WordPress “Posting Source Code” page.
Happy blogging (and coding).
Matt
RailsCast 258 Token Fields bug with Rails 3.1
Posted: February 12, 2012 Filed under: Chapter 4 - Technology Leave a comment »Ryan Bates does a great RailsCast (as usual) of the jQuery TokenInput plugin from loopj. I had been able to get this plugin working in earlier versions of Rails/jQuery, but when I tried to integrate the plugin into my Rails 3.1 app I kept getting this error:
Uncaught TypeError: Object function (a,b){return new c.fn.init(a,b)} has no method ‘type’
I am not really sure what caused this error, and I could not find any information about the error on the web. I spent a couple of hours (ok, more like 6) fiddling with different things and comparing the working version to the non-working version. I was getting ready to throw it all out and try to proceed with Chosen from Harvest, but I decided instead to try the old “just delete the offending code” trick. So, I replaced this code online 139:
if($.type(url_or_data) === “string” || $.type(url_or_data) === “function”) {
With this code:
if(true) {//$.type(url_or_data) === “string” || $.type(url_or_data) === “function”
I am sure that this will blow something up at some point, but for now this works like a charm. If anybody has the proper way to do this, please post it in the comments (and I will update the post accordingly).
Thanks.
Matt
Audio Post
Posted: February 12, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Post by Voice Leave a comment »
There Are 2 Types of Startups in the World, and You Better Know Which You Are
Posted: February 11, 2012 Filed under: Chapter 3 - Business Leave a comment »I am a big fan of Lean Startup. It provides a set of tools that startups can use to eliminate waste. One of the shortcomings of the approach, however, is that it deals with all startups as the same type of beast. Now every startup is different, so this is not an attempt to categorize startups in every way imaginable, but I think the fundamental difference described below is so fundamental, that it not only affects the path that a startup should take, but whether a particular founder or founder team is even capable of achieving success in this type of endeavor.
So, without further ado, here are the 2 types of startups: startup ventures and startup businesses.
I emailed with a friend of mine about this distinction yesterday, and here is what I said:
A startup venture is focused on achieving massive scale and then generating massive profits once 100 thousand (million?) users are actively using the service. There is a long gap between the start and the first dollar earned, but the amount of upside is almost unlimited (think Facebook, Google, YouTube). The key metric is engagement.
A startup business is focused on achieving profitability as soon as possible, and then scaling that profitability through technology. A startup business will not attract investment, but it also does not need investment. If it is being run properly, customer revenues should fuel development (think Basecamp, Github, and Flightaware…). The key metric is profit.
There are a couple of ways that this distinction can be important. The first distinction is whether you are even eligible to try a given type of startup:
If you want to build a startup venture, you must be (less than 30 and capable of building massive systems) or a serial entrepreneur.
If you want to build a startup business, you must understand your business model, cash flow, profit and loss, and balance sheet, and focus on a clear customer pain point.
The second distinction is what activities you perform when you start:
The first step for a startup venture is to build a product that users absolutely love and instrument the product to help understand and experiment with user engagement. The system must be built for scale, because no money will be made until the user base is large.
The first step for a startup business is to build a service that customers will pay for and instrument the service to help understand and experiment with profitability. The most effective way to build a profitable business is to experiment with a variety of business models in a given space of interest before writing any code, and then apply technology to optimize the best business model of the bunch.
I plan to go into more depth on this analysis over time, but I wanted to get the idea out and gather your feedback on whether the distinction makes sense.
Thanks for any feedback.
Matt
Have One Idea and Many Business Models
Posted: January 22, 2012 Filed under: Chapter 2 - Customer 3 Comments »Early stage founders must have a sharp focus. When there is everything to do, including finding a set of customers who care about your offering, there is no time to even consider shiny new apps and services. For people who love ideas, this is a hard pill to swallow.
You Only Get 1 Idea
Many early stage founders shift from idea to idea as they try to find something that resonates with a meaningful customer set and is addressable by the founder(s). This can be called “exploring,” and although it is really fun, it primarily results in churn. You are not building expertise or relationships within a particular space. At best, you are learning some interesting general principals about marketing or technology. I can speak from experience, as I have built prototypes for professional networking (Dyor.com, Skypresso.com), real-time social networking (RallyWire.com), social mapping (BigMapper.com), a patent marketplace, a location brokerage, and a host of others.
I am still actively working on Dyor.com (go check it out), but for each of the other sites I got to a point where I lacked confidence that I was on the right path. Simultaneously, I would have some other great idea that would be growing in my brain that was more intriguing. So, I would abandon my initial effort, and pick up a new one.
Each time that I shifted from one idea to the next, I lost (almost) everything that I had built previously. I lost the understanding of the competitive space. I lost the marketing material that I had generated. I lost the deeper understanding of the domain-specific technical challenges and opportunities. Perhaps worst of all, I lost the initial customer set.
1 Idea Can Have 100 Business Model Variants
If you look ahead, and see that the path you are on does not lead you to where you want to be, do not wholesale shift ideas. Instead, try fundamentally shifting the business model. A great way to shift business models is to answer the question “who has the biggest (in terms of money) problem that could directly or indirectly be addressed if I continue working this idea.”
Applying this concept to the professional networking space, I originally expected that individuals would pay to have a “professional networking coach and virtual assistant” – somebody to help them build a plan, to find top-flight contacts to help them achieve big business goals, and handle some of the administrative work that building a professional network entails.
My original interactions with prospective customers, however, has led me to believe that people will NOT pay for such a service. Most people believe: 1) that it is very important for OTHER people to invest more time and money into building their professional network; and 2) that such a service will not work for them (either because they already have a system that works well enough, or because they do not have time to invest in their professional network). What I have come to understand is that helping people with professional networking is a lot like helping people eat their vegetable, and you cannot build a business telling people to do something that they know they should do but don’t.
So this is where I started looking at other business models. Perhaps I have focused on the wrong customer. Who could I approach as a customer that could help (or make) another group of people improve their professional networking. Who is already actively coaching professional networkers? There are actually a number of different opportunities here:
- Companies: companies should be able to hold their key employees accountable for strategic corporate professional networking in support of core business objectives.
- Universities: graduating students need to be intentionally building their professional networks to ensure that they get a job with a great company, and placement services could offer professional network services.
- VCs/Incubators: potfolio companies need to connect with prospective customers, distribution partners, key advisors, key prospective hires, etc, on an ongoing basis, and providing them a tool to create and manage professional networking plans will make this activity measurable.
- Professional Communities: professional communities could help their members achieve big business goals by offering a professional networking service as part of their membership.
Each of these customer segments would have a different set of expectations of a professional networking service offering, but it is still the same idea: helping people achieve big business goals. Instead of shifting ideas, I am evaluating different business models. Please share your feedback on these other business models related to professional networking below.
We will see if this approach (1 Idea, 100 Business Models) sticks, or if tomorrow I will be super-focused on building a startup incubator 
.
Matt
Just Say No…to Make Progress
Posted: August 1, 2011 Filed under: LeanFounder Leave a comment »http://melissadinwiddie.com/2011/07/06/say-no-good-favor-of-great/
This is a theme I have been focused on lately. Making progress is not about being smarter (it is hard to become smarter) and it is not about being more disciplined or focused (it is, but it is hard to just tell yourself to “become more disciplined”). The thing that you can do, that is actually pretty fun to do once you get started, is to just say no.
Most of us are involved in dozens of activities that we do not really enjoy and that do not contribute meaningfully to our core goals. These are the easy ones. Just stop doing them. Typically, you are doing these because you think someone else wants you to, whether it is your employer, your family, your community. The reality is, if you are not enjoying yourself, you are probably not contributing that much either. Try eliminating one of them and see what happens. Odds are, nobody will even notice that you have stopped doing it.
Once you have cut out all of these annoying things, the next step is to cut out the things that you mildly enjoy, but that are not awesome. Stopping activities like watching sports can be a great opportunity to reclaim your time. I used to watch a couple of NFL games on Sunday, thinking it was a fun way to relax. Another way to think of this is that I was taking a 3-5 hour chunk of my life, and saying “the best way to spend this time is watching TV.” Put in that perspective, there is no way that I thought that was the best way to spend my time. It was better than doing yard work, but that is a false dilemma–since you have already decided NOT to work with this block of time, just go do the most fun thing that you can imagine for 3-5 hours.
The goal is to look for big chunks of repeating time. If you watch the Grammy’s each year, you will gain little by decided to reclaim that time. If you watch an hour of Netflix each night, you may want to ask yourself if that is the best way you can spend that time (and if it is, really enjoy it:).
All right, I hate proof reading blog posts, so I am just going to hit publish…I bet the world will not even notice that I stopped doing this activity that I really do not enjoy!
Matt
