Misc

If, by any chance, you are in Bucharest and you are interested in gaming or entrepreneurship, this is an interesting event to be at: TechHub Meetup: Developing Killer Games.

You can ask questions to and listen the experiences of:

– Mihai Sfrijan, Head of Studio at King. Mihai is a great guy, that we got to know better this year and is one of the great resources about gaming in the Romanian market, especially when you are talking about Facebook/mobile casual games (I mean, they develop Bubble Witch Saga in Romania and King is the studio behind the crazy successful Candy Crush Saga).

– George Lemnaru is, I think, a pioneer in the gaming entrepreneurship in Romania. He co-founded eRepublik and he is now starting another gaming company, Green Horse Games.

– Cristi Badea, my co-founder at MavenHut. He is the guy behind the mechanics of Solitaire Arena, the one that crunches numbers for breakfast in order to create the best games that we can create.

Of course, I will be there. I will be the host for this event, the one that will try to squeeze as much information as possible from the guests. I will appreciate any kind of questions you want to ask, so don’t be afraid to write them in the comments below.

If you can be in Bucharest, come to TechHub on Thursday at 6:30pm. You’re not gonna regret it.

When you think of advice for your business you are usually thinking of specific, detailed advice. Steps to take to make your business great. The truth is that nobody can give you this kind of advice: your business is your own, you know it better than anybody else, so most of the time you will get basic ideas, nothing world shaking.

I’ve written recently an article about the TV series I watch. One of the comments refers to the fact the host of Hotel Impossible, Anthony Melchiorri, offers only basic advice. And, frankly, the commentator is right: the advice is pretty basic.

The thing is, though, that most of the businesses in disarray need exactly this: basic advice. They need to be reminded to focus on what they know, to understand what hurts them and what is the general path to take to get back. They do not need specific tactics, because they lost their way.

I have to say that about 15-20 years, when I first started something on my own (selling computers from my parents home or repairing computers for friends), my parents gave me a lot of advice. And it was really basic: “before starting a company, get some customers!” was the one I got sick and tired of hearing. I thought I knew better: I need a company, otherwise nobody will trust me. Of course, first I need an incredible logo. Oh, and business cards, right? I finally got my first clients (my parents forced their friends into it, I am sure of this) and I started to understand business a lot better. And I never had a business card and I used a friend’s company to invoice the clients. And they never cared I was a 16 years old kid as long as I was coming to a bad computer and I was leaving from a working one.

Right now, when I talk to people and ask for advice I expect basic advice most of the time. The thing I need is a pair of eyes seeing my business from outside. And then, after getting the basic advice, I put it through my own filter and create the necessary tactics to get to where I want. But still, the advice I get doesn’t go too far from these kind of things: get revenues, get more users… basic, right? :)

Basic advice is great advice. It actually is the best advice. It is up to you how you understand it, what you ask about it and what you do with it.

Photos from Shutterstock

Yesterday MavenHut’s entire team went to the movies: Jobs. While the experience of a VIP cinema room just for ourselves made us feel a lot better, I have to say I really liked the movie. I was quite surprised, especially after reading all the bad reviews the movie got on IMDB and similar sites.

Ashton Kutcher, which I actually like, especially because of his business acumen, creates a believable Jobs, down to his behavior patterns, his walking and, especially, his eyes. Really, when the images of both Kutcher and Jobs appear at the end of the movie, look at their eyes.

Anyway, the movie is a series of short moments that take you from the launch of the company to the launch of the iPod, without respecting the timeline. At times it feels like a series of sketches, but, if you already know the timeline, the movie is quite enjoyable. And the acting, I have to say, is good. Including (or especially) Josh Gad as Wozniak.

Yes, the movie has some off beat moments, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

My advice: if you have the time, go see it, regardless of the bad reviews. I think you will really enjoy it. Especially if you read Isaacson’ biography on Jobs or Adam Lashinsky’s Inside Apple (which I actually think is the better read).

Finally, an interesting thing, the official site for the site is a collaborative effort on tumblr.

I am not a native English speaker. I’ve spoken the language (to the best of my abilities) since I was a kid. Thanks to my mother, I started to learn the language pretty early in life (6 years old), while games with lots of English text gave me the necessary push to actually go to the classes she paid for.

Unfortunately, I don’t speak English as good as I’d like to. Of course, I can make myself understood, I speak pretty fluently, but I often feel the wording I use is not the best or the terms I use have a different meaning in a specific context. Case in point: “I speak pretty fluent” or “I speak pretty fluently”? :D

Anyway, I don’t have an issue with people that don’t speak the language. I get it, it’s not easy for all of us (a German guy will have a hard time saying “v” as [vi] instead of [fi], I know), but you need to speak it. And, until today, I had no argument for pushing this other than the fact that everybody in our world (startups in tech) speak English: investors, co-workers, partners.

Today, though, I read this interview with Paul Graham from Y Combinator, and this is what he says when he is being asked about signs of a potential bad team while selecting them for YC:

One quality that’s a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent. I’m not sure why. It could be that there are a bunch of subtle things entrepreneurs have to communicate and can’t if you have a strong accent. Or, it could be that anyone with half a brain would realize you’re going to be more successful if you speak idiomatic English, so they must just be clueless if they haven’t gotten rid of their strong accent. I just know it’s a strong pattern we’ve seen.

I know, life’s not fair. Not everybody was born in an English speaking country. Does it really matter?

P.S.: this is my Demo Day presentation. The tremble you hear in my voice is stage fright. After all these years…

Later updates: People reacted to Paul Graham comments and he answered here. More reactions from Mark Suster and Om Malik.

I am not the biggest fan of TV, but I enjoy some TV series a lot. Some of those I watch are TV shows that are worth the time for a business person, especially for the negotiating skills you can learn from them.

I would recommend, in no particular order: Pawn Stars, Counting Cars, Shark Tank.

Shark Tank is a show presenting startup founders that need investment (or, in some cases, just visibility) in front of a jury of investors including Mark Cuban of Broadcast.com and Dallas Mavericks (see more details here). The most interesting part about this show is the explanation of decisions by the jurors. Really worth the time.

Pawn Stars is an interesting show for men interested in the weirdness of the human beings. As well as people interested in history :) YOu can see here people bringing Elephant Poo in a can or really historic artifacts like books signed by old US presidents and similar things. I enjoy the show for the way they negotiate: the first time I saw the show and someone asked for $10,000 for something and the guys fired back with $2,500 I was in awe. I would’ve never thought of negotiating 75% of the price!

FInally, Counting Cars is a TV series around flipping old cars, after restoring them. Again, you see the owner of the car shop buying old, destitute cars and repairing them for a profit. Again, from the school of Pawn Stars, they really negotiate by dropping the price down to 60 percent on the initial offer> and sometimes they actually get away with it.

As a bonus, an interesting show I only saw some episodes on Travel Channel is Hotel Impossible: a series about bringing bad service hotels back in business.

One thing you start to value a lot once you become an adult is sleep. Being a startup founder is like becoming an adult over again: it adds even more pressure. I’m sure there are other activities where you don’t get much sleep, also, but I am talking about what I know, so don’t be too mad about it.

Anyway, while a startup founder goes without sleep for long periods of time (no sleep or less, a lot less sleep), you realize, at some point, that you need to sleep better to get more productive.

This is something I rediscover these days, when I’m, again, starting to wake up at 6-7am. The problem is that you do not go to sleep as early as you should and, as a consequence, today I am little bit off. I still get done everything I started to do today, but I wish I would’ve slept more last night (and the previous, for that matter).

Even writing this article didn’t come easy.I have an interesting case study almost finished since Sunday and I wanted to publish it today, but in no way I could. I need all the energy I can gather for some number crunching that I’m doing for the company. Which is, frankly, more important >:)

Sleep tight!

P.S.: yes, that’s our cat :D

Yeah, it sounds like this is a post about religion. It isn’t.

Actually, this idea came to me after reading an article on Medium where a woman says that she finished a 24 hours running competition by believing that 90% of the women that started the specific race finished it. It said so in a book she read (Born to Run, I also enjoyed the book a lot).

The truth was, though, that only 45% of the women that started the race actually finished it. The information in the book was incorrect, from the lack of documentation (which makes you wonder how much of the book is incorrect, also). The thing is, though, that it didn’t matter. She finished the race because she believed she should and she could.

And I find a lot of similarities between this and business (especially startups): you rarely have enough numbers and facts to go on, but you hold on to the ones that give you the energy to keep going.

Like the fact that when you start your own business, you think you will have more time for yourself because, let’s face it, now you’re your own boss. But this is not true, you actually work a lot more, on worse hours, on a much smaller wage than you could get if you got hired. But the fact that you KNOW it’s gonna get better (even if it doesn’t, most of the time), makes you go through with it. And, yes, at some point, it MIGHT get better. So you keep hoping :D

Or the fact that businesses fail a lot in the first year (they say 95%). But, well, you find different numbers, that say a different story. Even if they are not suited for you (Y! Combinator ot TechStars companies aren’t a good example, because of the ecosystem around them), you still prefer to believe those numbers. After all, only 22% and 10%, respectively, of the companies failed. Which is a lot better than 95%, right? :)

In the end it doesn’t really matter. As long as you are getting closer to your dreams, who cares what leads you there and what kept you going? It’s only about what you believe…

Photo from Shutterstock

This month MavenHut is hitting some awesome fine round numbers and I am taking a break from the regular posting to revel on it:

1. We’ve hit 1 million Monthly Active Users for Solitaire Arena (we’re actually closing on 1.5 million)

For Facebook games, this is a really important milestone, since this means we are going to the 1-5 million tier, with the “Big Boys” :)

2. Since we’ve improved a lot on retention and acquisition, we keep growing really well and, as a consequence, we’ve hit, for the first time, top 100 Facebook Games. Which is awesome!

We’ve posted on our company’s site a little bit more numbers, but for the moment I am extremely, truly happy that the company is doing well. So bear with me for not writing something else and just enjoying the moment. In a startup, happiness rarely truly lasts, so I am taking as much as I can now :D

People often asked how MavenHut, with three co-founders that nobody knew anything about in Ireland, managed to get a seed round so quick and so big (especially in terms of European investment levels). And I was having a hard time explaining it in short words, until I’ve found this: Be Investable.

The first thing you’ll notice about Graham’s essay is that it isn’t filled with tips or tricks for getting investor’s money. Rather, the best way to convince an investor to give you money is to actually be investable. Usually that starts with having a product with some amount of traction, but some people are investable even if they have no product. Usually those aren’t first-time founders though.

Basically, MavenHut was an easy sell (as far as looking for investment could be called easy). And that was because of one thing: we had traction. We had a product that was up and running, that was acquiring users, that told us (and the investors) things like demographics, buying intent, session length aso.

This means that before going to investors with “I have a great idea”, find a way to make it happen. Yes, I believe you can get investment with just an idea, but not the first time you try.

There are, obviously, other elements that help the investment process (the team, the industry, the type of investor targeted), but I think the most important thing you need to do is to Be Investable: make their decision as easy as possible.

P.S.: You would be surprised how many startup founders (or wanna be founders) don’t really grasp the concept of having something to show investors, other than “And I have this idea…”.

Photo from ShutterStock

“If you create a great site, people will find you anyway, you don’t need promotion, SEO or anything similar!”. In my 5-6 years of doing online promotion, SEO, online PR and similar, I’ve heard something along these lines from a lot of people. And I thought it was completely wrong.

Last week I wrote a post about pitching (actually, it is about a book about pitching, but nevertheless). I mention that I think you should be, or better, you ARE always pitching. I’ve got some people telling me, though, that they don’t need to pitch if the product is great. And this, I think, is a mistake.

The are two situations I encountered related to this: the startup crowd understanding of “pitching” and the English as a second language understanding of “pitching”.

First, the startup crowd. Because of the buzz with VC backed businesses in the last 10 years or so, especially in the last 5, since lots of accelerators, incubators and whatnot where created, people think of pitching as just the pitches you do for investors (the pitches you do in order to get financed). The thing is, though, that in the last 2 years, I’ve hardly talked to more than 60 investors. But in the years before MavenHut, I think I’ve talked to more than 300-400 people, one on one, to get support, to get involvement, to get financing of other projects. Not to mention the events I’ve been speaking to, where I would be pitching my projects in front of bigger audiences.

Moreover, while I was managing the blogger’s forum in Romania (no longer active), I think I’ve talked, in 2-3 years, to about 1000, if not more, people, to convince them to use the forum.

The conclusion is that yes, you are always pitching. Just not to investors. You are always pitching to the stakeholders in your project. And no matter how brilliant your idea, your implementation, if nobody hears about your work, nobody will use what you are creating.

The second misunderstanding of “pitching” comes from people using English as a second language. Pitching means, to them, just investors. Or, in case of Media Agencies, calls to pitching mean meeting the potential clients in a competition-like environment. It’s the same mistake as to the startup crowd, but for different reasons. Well, it’s true, when the two of them combine, though, and you get a startup crowd that’s using English as a second language… well, things get really confusing :))

So, start pitching today. Pitch to your family, your friends, your users. You will be better for it. And, yes, always be pitching!

P.S.: in the photo at the top, you can see Mike Butcher, from TechCrunch UK. And if you would want to be featured in TechCrunch, you would need to pitch him, in some way. He actually has a great presentation on how to pitch the press here.

Photo source