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Curious about stuff

Going Offline When Doing Business Online

By Bobby Voicu

Going_Offline_while_doing_Business_Online

Today I’ve been invited to talk to “Zilele Biz”, an event about business and innovation. I talked about the importance of being present offline, as well as online.

Here is the presentation, below, with some advice, at the end, on how to prepare for events you go to outside of your country. Since I rarely use a lot of words in my public presentation, I’ve modified it a little bit, but it might still not make too much sense without the story :) Sorry for that :D

I would advise you, though, to look at least at the last 4-5 slides, on how to prepare an event. It might make all the difference.

Oh, and an image with me talking on the stage, taken from Roxana, below:

zilele-biz-bobbyvoicu

[To Read] Case Study on Going to $100K/month in SaaS

By Bobby Voicu

www.groovehq.com_blog

During the weekend I’ve found a really interesting case study on SaaS. The source: the guys at GrooveHQ. I’ve already put two of the articles on the Facebook page for this blog (I Am A Startup Founder, go and hit like to get links to great articles I find online), but I thought they deserve to be on the blog, also.

The list of articles is here (about 9 of them).

You should read all the articles, they are really well written and have a lot of learnings to extract. My favorites are:

– How We Got 1,000+ Subscribers from a Single Blog Post in 24 Hours
– 5 Early Wins That Got Our SaaS Startup 1,000 Beta Users
– 7 Lessons We Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in Under a Year

[Sunday Game] GOG.com – Home of Great Classic Games

By Bobby Voicu

GOG.com

I started to play games when I was 6, in 1984. Of course, the games were played on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum of one of my best friends. It was his father’s computer, brought with difficulty from UK into communist Romania. We’ve broken it from playing Match Day and Fist, so I don’t think his father ever really liked me :D

Anyway, during those times I got addicted to story driven games and this addiction continued through the 90s and PCs and it is still in place today.

Recently (as in 2-3 years ago) I’ve discovered GOG.com or Good Old Games on its full name: the site where classic games go to have a second life.

Among the games I have bought and wait to play are: Planescape: Torment, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Vampire: Masquerade Redemption, Alpha Centauri, Syndicate Plus, some great games that still have a lot of potential to replay over and over.

Since I have a Mac I thought that I couldn’t play the games, but there are some compatible Mac games. It doesn’t matter, though, since I play all the games in Parallels, on a Windows 7 install :D Because most of them are not graphics heavy, playing them in a virtual environment is actually possible without losing performance.

So, when you have a time and you feel melancholic towards the times you played games with your friends in the school’s lab, go to GOG.com. There are games for 2-3$ and most of them are up to $10.

P.S.: yes, it’s the second Sunday in a row when I don’t recommend a game. That’s because I am playing HOMM3 and I thought that it doesn’t need any presentation.

Time Zones

By Bobby Voicu

time-zones

This is just a rant. You’ve been warned!

The thing I hate most about not being in the States is the time difference.

Since MavenHut has a global target and most of the users we have are on the American continent, I need to talk to people there all the time. And that means that I have calls at 8pm, the earliest. Or, at 2am, sometimes.

This means I get home and all I want to do is get a hot bath and sleep.

Just a 11:44pm rant, on a Friday night :))

Photo: caucasian man stressed by jet lag with time zone clock background from Shutterstock

Be the Good Kind of Agressive

By Bobby Voicu

Be The Good Kind of Aggressive

Being aggressive doesn’t really sound good. After all, who wants to deal with an aggressive person?

Well, when it comes to connections and intros, be as aggressive as you can. One thing I’ve learned in the last two years is that nobody will talk to you unless you talk to them. Nobody will come to you to make you feel better when you stay alone, in the corner. You need to do that on your own.

When you go to events make a list of people you want to meet there and go and get introduced to them. If nobody is there to introduce you then just go to that person and say: Hi, I am, I do an interesting thing with my startup. I want to tell you more about it, is it ok if I send you an email? All of this should take you one minute the most.

Do not, I repeat, DO NOT try to take all that person’s time.

Do not pitch that person then and there, since he/she will probably forget almost everything about you in the next 5 minutes. I see so many times people that just forget to leave and let that person breathe or meet other people, I am always amazed at how clueless some are. Don’t be that person.

Also, be aggressive with getting introduced via email. If you want to get to know someone, use your network (physical or on Linkedin) and find out who can introduce you to the person you want. Then ask for an introduction. And so on.

It’s better to be known as the annoying one than not being known at all.

Photo source: Beautiful sport karate kids from Shutterstock

Use Your Network to Get Investment

By Bobby Voicu

Collage of a large group of people faces

While we were in Startup Bootcamp one of the things we heard was to get introduced to investors, not to cold call them or cold email or anything similar.

One of the reasons this should happen is because a lot of investors consider that a good, committed entrepreneur should find a way to get introduced to them. Even more, getting an introduction means that you already convinced someone, hopefully a good connection to your target investor, that you are worth his time.

What all of this means is that you need to grow your network: talk to people around you, get introduced, find people that have similar interests with you aso.

One thing I found to help a great deal with network is to speak in public if you have the chance. Find subjects that you are really good at and talk about them: programming, business, it doesn’t matter. Even if you think that people already know what you know, even if you think it is really basic, you would be really surprised to find out how many people don’t actually know what you do or don’t see things as you do.

Getting an investment is not easy, as I always said on this blog and as people that’ve done it also say. Take any shortcut possible.

Photo: Collage of a large group of people faces from Shutterstock

[Slides] 10 Secrets I Wish I Knew While Raising Money

By Bobby Voicu

10_secrets_I_wish_I_knew_before_I_starting_raising_capital

My co-founder, Cristi, had a great presentation today at Venture Connect on things he learned while raising money. Since the list is quite similar to what I would say (we raised together, after all), albeit with different spots for specific things, I thought it would be interesting to put it on my blog and present each point during the next 2-3 weeks :)

#10 Time – it takes longer than expected
#9 Network – use your network (or grow one if you don’t have it)
#8 Aggressive – be agressive in contacting people
#7 Numbers – investors know numbers, so be prepared to explain yours
#6 Explain – explain what you do
#5 Follow-up – always follow up
#4 Diplomacy – pointing mistakes to investors is not really smart
#3 Angels – get ex-executives in VC backed businesses as angels
#2 ABC – always be careful: do your Due Dilligence on the people you meet
#1 Love – avoid investors that fall in love with your strategy, plans aso.

Getting an Investment Takes More Time Than Expected

By Bobby Voicu

businessman hand pointing to investment concept

Talking to a lot of my entrepreneur friends I came to a conclusion: no matter how much you want, raising money is gonna take a lot more time than you initially expect.

When we first raised money, last year, we expected to have the money in the bank in the first 3 months. It took about 9, actually and, looking back and better understanding the entire process I can say that we were quite lucky.

Can you do anything to fasten things up? Yeah, up to a point: you can have all the financial and legal documents of the company place and this makes everything go faster. Other than that, though, it really isn’t up to you. Sometimes, not even up to the investors, but to the lawyers. So breathe deep and have patience :)

I know that most of the people say the same thing and that most of the people actually looking for investment think it’s a lot of BS. Well, it’s not.

Photo source: businessman hand pointing to investment concept on Shutterstock

[Sunday Game] Masters of Doom (book)

By Bobby Voicu

masters-of-doom-covers

This weekend I didn’t play anything. Didn’t really want and wasn’t in the mood. But the main reason was that I got lost in a book that anybody involved in gaming should read: Masters of Doom.

It’s not, obviously, a horror book, it’s about about the two Johnes: John Romero and John Carmack, the creators of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. They invented the First Person Shooter style of gaming, they brought deathmatch to millions of players and made the world of gaming much more visceral.

The book goes over a period of about 20 years, since the two guys met, until the launch of Daikatana and Quake 3 Arena, the titles that weren’t as successful as any previous work they’ve done.

One quote I found interesting is about gamers’ behavior when it comes to paying:

Gamers, he realized, might be a different breed from those consumers who actually paid for utility shareware. They were more apt simply to take what they could get for free.

Go, have a read. It’s a good way to understand the things happening inside a small team once it grows.