Startup Founder

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to meet a guy that’s been really successful in his line of work. Thing is, before meeting him I’ve heard about him lots of stories from different people. And they all said: “I wish I was as lucky as him”. Or “I want to do what he does”. I didn’t hear once someone telling me “man, that guy works his ass off”. No. He was always lucky.

Well, after talking to him, it was obvious to me that nothing he did was luck in any way. He is a brilliant guy with an uncanny eye for opportunity. The last thing is a combination of about 10 years of experience and the understanding that he needs to learn new tricks all the time.

I am just amazed how much people want to see just the visible side of things and ignore the hard work behind the success.

Photo: Blackboard with the text Success, It Depends On You from Shutterstock

I was never too much of a fan of meetings, but I often found myself part of long ones. Some were my fault, I have to say, because I like a good story and we got lost in funny or interesting things

MavenHut changed all this, though. Cristi, one of my co-founder, forced on us (yeah, he really did force it :D ) the time box meetings concept.

What this means is that you set a specific period of time for that meeting and NO MATTER WHAT, when the countdown stops, the meetings stops. If people didn’t say what they had to, well, tough luck.

All of it might seem rough, but what I saw is that, in time, peer pressure started to act: people will force themselves and force the other ones to fit in time and that, in turn, will make people focus on what they want to say and what they want to find out. This will increase the productivity of the team and your own productivity.

So, if I could give you a great tip for any kind of business meeting: try to time box it. Obviously, you can’t do it all the time (good luck time boxing an investor meeting). This doesn’t mean, though, that you shouldn’t try.

Photo from ShutterStock

I’ve been present to a Romanian event two days ago, in the panel on Online Entreprenurship in Romania. Along with me were people that are successful in the space (Alexis Bonte from eRepublik, Alexandru Lapusan from Zitec, Lucian Todea from Soft32). I was really honored by the invitation, since all these companies are companies that were started several years ago and they are examples that we looked up to (and still do).

One of the things that was talked in the panel started with the fact that the software companies relevant for Romania right now have hundreds of employees and if (or better when) are we gonna hire the same number of people.

The thing is that Eastern European countries (if not all) still see success in business as having lots of employees, big offices and that’s not true anymore, at least for most of the tech businesses that I know. Heck, I know at least 3 people that made more than $1 Million in the last 2-3 years all by themselves or with the help of 1-2 outsourced people.

Even more important, people that I know and talk to (especially investors) appreciate if you can grow a company by being lean, not getting into a hiring spree once you have a little bit of money, since that will make the company move a lot slower and you will lose the only competitive advantage you have: speed of execution.

MavenHut is a team of 12 people right now, and we really took our time with the hires. We are moving really, really fast and you can’t be part of the team if you can’t do that. I remember that once we interviewed someone from a big Romanian site and he couldn’t believe how fast we move(he really thought we were lying, he got into his head that we made fun of him and he left, basically thinking we were assholes).

And MavenHut is not the only case. Yes, we are small, but look at King or Supercell in gaming (King has an expected value of $5 Billion with just 400 or so employees, while Supercell just got valued at $3 Billion with a little bit over 100). And that’s not just in gaming, Instagram had 12 people when it was acquired for $1 Billion. Of course, different industries have different characteristics, but online product businesses should not have huge teams. At least in the initial stages, before having to hire hundreds for customer support. That is if you don’t outsource it.

I expect this perception will change in time. As someone in the panel said (I think Alexis Bonte), in the future you will not see one company with 1,000 employees, but 50 companies with 20 people employed. So your startup should hire slow. Really slow. :)

Photo taken by me, this is why I am not visible there :D

As a startup founder you always look to improve yourself. You read a lot, you try to get better at everything you do.

This means that you actually go through a lot of interesting articles, see great videos or listen to great podcasts. It happens the same for me. And the thing is I can’t really publish all those articles on my Facebook account (where I also write in Romanian totally mundane things like the life of my cat).

So I created a Facebook page for this blog where I will basically drop all the interesting articles, videos or anything else I find that I can’t really write a blogpost around. The page is called I Am A Startup Founder and you can find it here.

Though it’s basically the page for this blog. I named it like this because it’s not really about this blog, but more about what I think a startup founder should read.

So, if you think it might be interesting for you, go there and hit like. I promise I read interesting things most of the time :)

In the past two years, the ones that are closely connected to MavenHut, I’ve applied to different competitions and accelerators (ok, one accelerator) and I’ve got accepted to almost all of them (I think I’ve only missed Web Summit in London in 2012, when the company was still young and I didn’t have too much to say about it).

Among the ones that accepted us were Startup Bootcamp Dublin, Enterprise Ireland Competitive Startup Fund, Venture Connect (Bucharest), How to Web Startup Spotlight (Bucharest), Global Technology Symposium (Silicon Valley), Best Startup in Romania, Best Co-founder in Romania. There are some more, but these are the most important ones.

As you can see above, I’ve set myself as quite the expert :)) There are some competitions there. But it could’ve been so many more, since there are so many startup competitions right now (in Europe, at least).

First tip: choose your battles.

I never try to compete somewhere unless I have a really good reason: become more visible in a target market, get investors, start the product. This means I analyze every competition there is, who comes there, what is the impact in the areas of interest for me and then I decide. Most of the times against participating, because it takes a lot of time to fill in everything.

Second tip: Take your time filling in the forms

This is by far the best tip I could think of. It takes me (even now) 2-3 days at least to complete a form. I write the informations again and again, in a note in Evernote, until I get the best form possible. I use as few words as possible, put the exact information requested, nothing more, and I really emphasize what makes us different. I talk to people, I let them read what I wrote, see if they understand what I try to say…

While the information that you put in is important, the form might actually be more important. The jurors have to go through tens or hundreds of applications, so make their job as easy as possible.

That’s it! I got the idea to write about this from a friend of mine that asked me about 2 months ago how I’ve done it and I remembered to write because I saw that Startup Spotlight is closing its doors at the end of this week. MavenHut won Best Pitch last year at Startup Spotlight and it was a good experience for us (talked to a lot of like-minded people, met a lot of investors). So take 2 days and fill in their form. And do it well :)

P.S.: the photo above is our “Proud Corner”, with the prizes we took and the t-shirts worn during different important moments in our company’s life :) Later update: Yes, we know it should be “Corner of Pride”, but our corner is really proud of us, ok? :))

I got a question in the email yesterday related to the article about next steps after the idea he asked where could he get financing for a first prototype.

The thing is, if you do not have a great background nobody will finance you just because you had an idea. Having an idea is not that difficult, putting it into practice and executing is what differentiates winners from losers.

So, what do you do, though? Well, the best option is family, friends and fools, or the 3F’s, as they are called.

The reasoning behind it? If you are not capable of selling an idea to people that know and trust you, you have a big problem: either the idea is bad or you are incapable of selling it. Usually it’s the second case, because an idea is not inherently bad (well, within reason), it’s the execution that sucks.

There is a silver lining in all of this: you can get better if it’s your fault. You can talk to as many people as possible, understand your own plan better (do you really need money or resources?). If you need resources, maybe you can get a developer and a graphic designer to believe in the same idea and, all of a sudden, you have several thousand dollars worth of resources available every month.

Another option is to self fund. We’ve done this at MavenHut for the first 9 months (yes, we got €12,000 from Startup Bootcamp, but we spent all of it in those months of staying in Dublin). It wasn’t easy, but we thought it was worth it. The thing is, though, that we assumed that if it doesn’t work we will lose the money, so see if you are prepared for such a commitment.

What you can do, then, is to get a job and work on your idea in the evenings. It makes for a difficult period of time, your social life might suffer, but hey, it’s your idea and your dream!

You have to take into consideration something, though: things do not happen fast. No matter what, it will probably take years to see your first prototype. If you are not willing to put the effort in, it might not be for you.

And, on the bombshell, to quote Top Gear, what are you waiting for? Go build that prototype. It’s not gonna be easy and it’s not gonna happen on its own :)

P.S.: I actually know of a case where a guy learned to program enough on his own that he was capable to create a prototype (ugly and bad), but it was enough to get an angel investment. So, there are options you can consider.

Photo by Jimmy Smith

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, pitched with this specific deck to raise money from Greylock.

He explains in depth the context and he gives great advice on each slide of the deck.

It’s great resource and a great f#@$ing idea, which I would love to be done by more entrepreneurs. ANy startup founder should read this article. I know startup founders rarely raise B rounds, but this doesn’t make the process less relevant.

I normally write one article per day, but this is one resource I want to be able to find when I need it.

I always have brilliant ideas. We all do. Those ideas that “if I would do it, if I had the time” would change the world. Or those ideas that someone else put in practice that I had before they did. I used to have these ideas and felt cheated by fate every time someone else did something similar. Because “I knew!” that it’s gonna work.

There are lots of reasons this way of thinking is wrong, but I am gonna focus on the more palpable things: what do you do to put your idea into reality?

I am often talking to students, people that want to be entrepreneurs, and it seems like going from idea to project is really difficult. And it’s not because they don’t do something about it, it’s just they’re going at it completely randomly and it’s like playing a lottery: you might get lucky.

In IT especially, the cost of having an idea and starting something is not that big: you think that a site about butterflies would be great, right? I mean, who doesn’t like butterflies? And it costs you $10 bucks for a domain name, about $10 for first month’s hosting, about a week of your time to write some articles and here it is, your site about butterflies is up and running, waiting for people to come read it. But of course, they don’t. Because people don’t really care about butterflies.

Next, you look around you and you see a need: you see that people’s life would be better if they had something. What do you do? You start building the solution to it. As you KNOW it should be done. It doesn’t matter that someone else does it better: you are gonna build a better Facebook. Because “people hate that blue f@#$ing color, and my site will be red, the color of passion”. And it still doesn’t work, because people still go to Facebook, since that’s where their friends are.

THe thing is, most of us never take the time to find out what people have to say. What the intended target really needs.

And this is the next step after having the idea:

Before doing anything to put it into practice, find out who needs what you offer, talk to them in person. Find 200 people that would use your site and, if possible, make them pay just for the idea. Get somebody to pay you for something you want to build.

The thing is, most of the time what you find out is completely different. You will see a lot of new opportunities in the same field. You will understand that people don’t care about butterflies, but that farmers hate bugs eating their crops. And find a solution for that.

Next time you have a brilliant idea, then, do these steps:

– go back to sleep
– if, when you wake up, the idea is still sound, understand who your users are
– spend time finding those users in real life and talk to them: ask them what they need and how can your solution be better (your users aren’t your friends, your parents and your co-workers, usually, so do not fool yourself)
– when you have enough interest, go for it.

You will go out of your comfort zone calling people out of the blue to ask them what they need. You’ll get over it.

Later edit: I actually wrote an article about how we’ve done this testing at Mavenhut. You can read it here.

Photo from Shutterstock

P.S.: If you think you can be Steve Jobs and just show people what they need, you don’t need this article. Sorry for wasting 5 minutes of your life. Now the next iPhone will never be invented, and I’m the one to blame.

We all have blind spots. Things that we think we know and we actually don’t, moments when we just miss some opportunities.

As an entrepreneur, you are really prone to blind spots. You need to move fast, juggle a lot of balls, you have an attention span of a pup. So what should you do about it?

Well, get a co-founder and use him/her. Send them the emails for investors that you are working on, the blog posts you are writing or the interviews you are answering to. Ask them for help when you get stuck, even if they have completely different skills. A fresh pair of eyes is always great.

We do this at MavenHut. And it works. So get a co-founder :) Or more.

Photo from Forbes.ro, by Mihai Barbu/Photoliu

While reading some stuff recently I’ve found an article by Steve Blank (the author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany), a huge list of tools that are helpful for any entrepreneur. Obviously, not all of them, but you will surely find out one tool that is interesting for you.

The categories are: Startup Tools, Founding/Running a Startup Advice, Market Research, China Market. Or, subcategories: Getting Started, Tools from Others, Groups, Find a Co-Founder, Business Model Canvas/Customer Development Tools, Business Models, Customer Development, Customer Discovery Checklist, Founder Stories, Website Domain Names… and about 30 more.

Finally, here is the link, stop complaining :) It’s one big list, just know this. And, more important, it’s written in 2009 (base on the comments), so if some tools are not available, do not kill the messenger.

Photo from Shutterstock