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This is an email I posted on the newsletter for The CEO Library, as part of a Startup Founder Reading plan. Here’s the entire 16 books list

One thing that was constant in my life as an early stage entrepreneur was pitching. If you put together private and public pitching, I think I pitched more than 100-150 times in the first 12 months of MavenHut’s life (MavenHut being the startup I co-founded in 2012 and I raised money for). Pitching is, therefore, one of the best tools in the toolbelt of the startup founder and, more importantly, the early stage startup CEO.

A book I read around the time I started pitching was “Pitch Anything”. While the book is weird sometimes, getting into the manipulation grey area, it contains some really good gems when it comes to improving yourself.

The thing I remember the book for, mostly, was how to grab attention and keep it for the duration of your pitch. While I still have issues in doing either of them, I became a lot better :) If you want to see a really nervous startup CEO pitching his company at a business accelerator Demo Day, watch my Startup Bootcamp Demo Day presentation here and judge for yourself if I was any good.

I feel I should try more to convince you that you should read “Pitch Anything” but, seriously, if you want to raise money and you don’t believe you need to improve your pitching skills, nothing I will say will change it.

Thanks,
Bobby

P.S.: As usual, if you read the book, here’s another option: Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good is a good history book on the evolution of web businesses during the early 2000s (up until around 2007-2008). You can read about the startup scene in Silicon Valley and not only, you can read about projects up to Facebook, you can read about PayPal Mafia and their investments. It is a more optimistic book than what we see now in those companies that survived.

This is an email I posted on the newsletter for The CEO Library, as part of a Startup Founder Reading plan. Here’s the entire 16 books list

So you kinda know what to expect from your entrepreneurial adventure. You also have a product, a team and you know how to pitch. You maybe got a small angel investment, as well.

Still, how do you get users? How do you tell people where to find you and why to use your product?

Well, this is what Ca$hvertising is for. Or its complete name, CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone by Drew Eric Whitman. Please, ignore the clickbaity title, which is actually not bad, once you think about it, and read the book anyway.

Reasons to read the book:

• It gives you guiding principles around creating and improving your ads
• It pushes you to see ads as a tool to be used, not as a creativity contest
• Gives you suggestions on influencing the potential users.

Look, I’m not telling you to lie about your product or anything like that. But you can say one thing in different ways, one way being the one that gets you the users.

Story time: when we started MavenHut, the best way to get users to your app, fast and effective, was to use Facebook Ads. Of course, that meant spending money, money we didn’t have. Well, we had about $5/day, but it certainly wasn’t enough to make an impact on our business. Or so I thought. I mean, it cost me around $1-$2/user, it really wasn’t enough.

Then someone recommended “Ca$hvertising” to me. And once I understood what I can do, I got to the point where I would bring 3 users in the app for every 2 cents I spent (yes, 2 users/$0.03). Yes, they were users from “cheaper” countries when it came to ads, like Argentina, Mexico or Colombia, but they were real users, that could give us feedback on our apps. This is how we got the first 15,000 users in Solitaire Arena. Then Facebook’s “virality” brought more. Eventually, we got users from the more “expensive” countries, as well, by reusing the ads that worked in the ones we targeted initially. By the time we sold Solitaire Arena we had more than 30 million installs across platforms. And it all began with Ca$hvertising and $5/day.

Of course, not everybody wants to buy ads. But the same principles that make good ads also make good copywriting and good content. So read the book anyway :)

If you want to see some of the processes we used to bring the first users (when we only bought ads for US users), here’s an article I wrote on my blog several years ago: MavenHut’s First Step, A Click and A Form: A Case Study on Starting Your Startup with Less than $200

Bobby

P.S.: Ah, you’re right, I almost forgot the book recommendation in case you already got through Ca$hvertising. Or if you read fast. How about Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t by Jim Collins. While it’s a bit too early to apply most of the principles in the book, I think it’s a good read to give you a blueprint for how you should run your company and how the company should be built.

P.P.S: One more thing: if you read any of the books, let me know through the contact page on the site or at getintouch@theceolibrary.com. Or reply to this email. I want to hear from you, to better understand what you want to read and if the books are interesting for you.

This is an email I posted on the newsletter for The CEO Library, as part of a Startup Founder Reading plan. Here’s the entire 16 books list

When you read about starting your own company nobody tells you anything about the board. OK, maybe someone told you, but nobody told me. So imagine my surprise when, while raising money, I needed to understand who should be on our board. Or, even more important, what the hell is the board’s purpose. And is it really, really necessary?

One of the things you really need to understand as a founder as, especially, as a CEO of a company is that the board is there to hold you accountable. By “you” I mean the CEO and the team.

Of course, that’s not the only purpose of the board. A good board provides advice, insight, ideas, and connections. It means that you need to pay attention to who is part of the board, how many people are on the board and similar things.

The book I’m recommending today, “Startup Boards” by Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani, is the best book I read on the subject. This is a primer in everything a board should be, how it should help you, as a company (and its CEO) and how it should function.

Of course, when you think of boards, you usually think of board meetings. That’s where the drama happens, where CEOs are fired (Uber, anyone?), where changes in strategy happen, where new CEOs are hired. Well, most of the board meetings are nothing like that. The book also explains what a board meeting should be like and how it should happen so that it’s not something that horrifies you every 3 months, but actually something that helps push your company forward.

You might have also heard of “advisory boards”. While not exactly necessary for a company to function, it can be a good added value if you know how to do it. Brad Feld mentions these as well and it helps.

The book is not as difficult to read as it might sound. Maybe because I was right in the middle of raising money for MavenHut, it made a lot of sense for me, so I went through it in 1-2 days. If you find that you are not interested, maybe it’s not the time for you and your company. Just know that “Startup Boards” exists so that you can come back to it when it happens.

Thanks for reading the email,
Bobby

P.S.: as usual, here’s another option, in case you already read this book or it’s something that’s not interesting for you: Shoe Dog, a Memoir by the Creator of Nike, by Phil Knight. The reason I recommend this is so that you understand how relevant and important cash flow is for a company. Nike had cashflow issues long in the company’s life. Even when they were one of the biggest sport shoes companies in the world, they were still close to closing up because of an unpaid invoice.

I’ve had video calls for 71 hours this year. A friend had 900+ hours.
And I’ve talked to 28 people. My friend talked to 800+.
My longest call was 1 hour (that’s actually not bad!).

And I only had family calls during the weekends. At least this is what my Google Calendar is telling me.

I used YourCalendarLife.com to put together the stats (a site my team built, that doesn’t save your personal data, does everything in browser, so your privacy is protected).

My friend that tried the site had 900+ hours of calls. 900!!!. With 800+ people!!!

Of course, my numbers above are not the full picture, since some calls (with my sister, with my mom and my father, for example), were not on the calendar. But still, that’s a lot of calls.

This year was weird for me. As I’m sure it was for everybody. One of the things that happened was that I started to use video calls a lot more than I used to. Especially in the last few months of the year, as I started to look more into starting a new business. When I started MavenHut, a lot of the people that you wanted to talk to (potential partners, investor, whatever), would want to see you in person. Not in 2020, of course.

And, if in my MavenHut years, the most common call was 45-60 minutes, my most common call in 2020 was 30 minutes. It seems that people realized that you can say in 30 minutes what you used to say in 1h.

But the biggest change was using more video calls for personal connections. Friends, family. We used to see each other so much, but all of a sudden they were too far away. I live in a different country now and travel was not really an option, as you probably now. So when I had a VIDEO call with my mom, who doesn’t care about technology, I could confidently say: something’s different in 2020.

How was my year, then? Well, I can see that I genuinely started to have a lot more calls in October of 2020. Not because I necessarily had more calls, but because I put more in my calendar. I actually expected December to have more calls the October, but I forgot how everything stops after the 20th of December. Even in a year where people are not really meeting and traveling.

Finally, I now know who I talked to the most. In group calls and 1on1, as well. A good friend is on the top, since he’s been helping me with starting the business, as well. But the most interesting for me is the people I stopped communicating with: people that kinda fell through the cracks. People I would’ve loved to keep in touch, but life happens. At least this way I will remember to tell them “Happy New Year!” :)

If you want to check out how your year looks like, go here: YourCalendarLife.com. Again, we don’t save your personal data. We don’t see your emails. You’re safe from us.