The easiest way for me to articulate the importance of building a results-driven company it is thinking back to my days when I regularly played basketball. I hooped at both the suburban YMCA and the city courts. These two experiences were totally different. One experience did not motivate me to work harder and achieve greater results, and the other experience taught me how important it is to surround yourself with motivated people who are concerned more about their results than they do their efforts. I might even say it’s the #1 reason so many professional basketball players are from the rough courts of the inner-city.
Category Archives: Startups
When Raising Money, Never “Give Up”
Originally published for American Express OPEN Forum
I have been offered some pretty bad deals for equity in my company. The worst one offered monthly advice for 10 percent of my company. Then there was $100,000 for 25 percent of my company, but paid as services. And who can forget the 51 percent I was offered to leave my CEO role at The Resumator, but still essentially do all the day-to-day work. The sad truth is I actually considered every single one of these deals because I had no clue how to identify them as bad early. Only by luck and a last minute voice in my head did I walk away from these deals years ago.
I don’t want to paint the impression that deals for equity in your company are always bad deals, but many are horrible for new, inexperienced entrepreneurs. We get excited because someone wants to invest in us, or a seasoned employee wants to join our team. Some of these folks have good deals to offer, and others are trying to get the whole kit and kaboodle. New entrepreneurs don’t know how to discern between the two, so we use defensive posturing during negotiations as a disguise for our insecurity. We’re determined to not give up too much of our company, even though we don’t really know what “too much” is.
What Furnishing an Empty Apartment Teaches Us About Feature Requests
I’ve had the privilege for two years of being part of an AlphaLab alumni panel that takes questions from the newly selected class. One of the questions I hear over and over again is about product features. First-time entrepreneurs and “I can build basically anything” hackers both struggle with identifying and prioritizing features in order to deliver something substantial within the small pocket of time between now and Demo Day. The answer has always been the same: Listen to your users. But entrepreneurs often cite Henry Ford as saying, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
Well, let’s come back to Earth and realize that we’re building online software and not the future of transportation. Most of us have a practical problem we are trying to solve, full of just enough innovation to potentially be a success (a lucky few are creating something truly amazing). Innovation does come from individual thinking (the “aha” moment), but listening to customers is the only way you can understand what they need in the first place. We’ll never know, but perhaps if Ford never heard someone complain about the inefficiency of buying horses, watching them get old and slow, and then dying, we’d be trotting to the grocery store today.
While I’ve written about this subject in the past, the focus of that article was more on prioritizing features, and not how to use customer feedback to drive early product development. This article focuses on uncovering essential product features by leveraging the intelligence of your customers. So, when you have no product, and just a dream of the solution, how do you pull back from that dream and leverage your early users to help you identify what’s essential?
My answer is you treat early feature requests as if you’re furnishing an empty apartment.
7 Lessons from My AlphaLab Experience
From Black Web 2.0
I thought I’d share a few things that I learned during my time at AlphaLab to hopefully encourage you to apply to participate in one these programs. The experience is incredible, and the knowledge you gain will be invaluable.
The Official Curriculum for Your Degree in Startups
If you’re like me, and you did not end up going to a college like Babson to learn how to be an entrepreneur, you basically winged it to get to where you are. Along the way, you probably learned how to become an entrepreneur through reading an interesting blog post, watching an inspiring video, or listening to a though-provoking podcast. I decided to create my own list of useful articles, videos, podcasts and books that I think are essential to starting your first Web startup on the right foot. I will arrogantly title this post The Official Curriculum for a Degree in Startups. No tuition fees required.
Is That New Feature a Deal Breaker, Deal Maker, Or No Big Deal?
Recently I’ve been working on reporting tools for The Resumator. I’ve learned non-profits that receive government funds above a certain amount must collect voluntary sex, race and disability data from applicants, and report this to the government. This told me that collecting equal employment opportunity (EEO) data would basically be a deal maker or deal breaker for many .orgs looking for an resume management system. Five months later, it’s just now about to be released. There’s a lesson here.
A Crystal Ball and a Time Machine
Late yesterday evening I completed my financial projections for today’s noon meeting with potential investor [REDACTED]. It took me a long time to learn to appreciate the importance of financial projections because in my first month I had paying customers and what looked to be a potential hit on my hands. If there’s three things an entrepreneur wants, it’s revenue right now, a crystal ball to see the future, and a time machine to change the past.
