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Sample Newsletter: Christmas 2016

Hi, guys!
Hi, guys! Hi, guys! (for those of you who don’t understand why I’m repeating myself, check out the bloopers video I’ve made HERE)
I know most of you are thinking about all the Christmasy things, but here are some things to read over the short holiday:

  1. Can your startup generate venture-scale returns?

Do you want to know when a VC thinks a startup brings a meaningful revenue for them? What kind of exit is important enough for a fund? Here are some numbers and a good explanation of the process. It’s something it took me a little bit of time to understand.

  1. Y Combinator launches video series interviewing successful founders, starting with Mark Zuckerberg

Y! Combinator has access to the most important business people in the Tech world, so this is a series to follow.

  1. Why I Bought 100 Pairs of Sneakers for My Team

Mark Ghermezian, founder of Appboy, shares the motivation behind buying and customizing 100 sneakers for all his team members. I’ve actually had a pair of Converse shoes with the MavenHut logo at some point, so I can see the appeal.

  1. Ever Bought Art on a Cruise? Prepare to Be Seasick

Bisset and his wife, Sharyn Miller, later told me that his outfit—board shorts and a yellow tank top—was part of a savvy strategy. “You don’t want them to think you have money,” Miller said. “Prices can go up.”
Not the tech article I usually recommend, but it’s interesting to see how the market sets the price, no matter the valuation. Once you’re in a place with difficult access to information and people in a spending mood, you can ramp up the prices to values you never thought of before. How you use this is up to you, but I would at least test some outrageous prices just to see the reactions (and the numbers).

  1. Fuck You, Startup Yoda

An older article, but still true. Long story short, there are too many wanna-be entrepreneurs in the world. What’s sad is that they’re being rewarded for having the self-congratulatory social-media campaigns and for sharing life-changing business quotes when, in reality, they live off the buzz, without actually doing the hard work of the startup life.
In the end, I just wanna say that I’ll be on vacation till mid-January, but you can still check out my Facebook page as I’ll be sharing interesting startup articles. If you haven’t liked my page yet, you should. It’s likable: 

https://www.facebook.com/BobbyVoicucom/
Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas! And may your presents not suck :)

Experimenting

By Bobby Voicu

flash-113310_1280 (1)

I’ve always read a lot since I was about 5 and I learned how to read. The thing is, building MavenHut took a lot of time and I’ve stopped reading as much as I used to. So I decided recently to read more.

Reading books gives me a lot of ideas. And the worst thing I can do is not do anything with them. So I need to start experimenting those ideas somehow. I don’t know how, yet, so this is an issue. But now I understand my need. I suppose the solution will appear at the right time.

By the way, I am not talking about business books. While they do give me great ideas, some of the best ideas come from fiction. Especially SciFi.

In case you’re wondering, I am writing an article now on the books I’ve read recently. So you might want to come back in several days.

Missing curiosity

By Bobby Voicu

bobby-voicu-radiolynx

I’ve been a curious kid. As most children are, I’m sure. The thing is I managed to continue being curious throughout adulthood. And I don’t mean being curious about my job or my personal hobbies and interests. I was always genuinely curious about what other people considered interesting, how they overcame difficulties, how they built their success. I remember reading somewhere that everyone is interesting because they managed to survive this long. I’m not THAT curious to talk to everybody, but still, I think we all have something interesting to say, for the right person.

I think this is what made me start a radio show about IT entrepreneurship 10 years ago for what was the first online radio in Romania, RadioLynx. They took a chance on me and I need to thank them for it.

The radio shows, 6 years of them, about 20-30 per year, opened my eyes to a lot of things. From someone talking to us about internet related laws in Romania to a TV news anchor discovering the fun of writing on his own blog, from lifestyle business to VC-supported startups, from multi-million international companies to local ones, I’ve had a lot of guests on the show. And I learned so much from them and from our audience.

Back to the present, though :)

Right now I am on a much needed longer vacation, so I had a little bit of time to think about things while Cristi and Elvis work hard. Yeah, driving around Europe, as I am doing now, gives you a lot of time for reflection.

I understood that in the last 4-5 years I focused a lot on being curious about what I was doing, mainly building games and growing MavenHut. This meant that I wasn’t that curious about other people’s projects and ideas unless they were directly related to what I was doing. I feel that I am missing a lot because the best ideas I’ve ever had were interdisciplinary, coming from areas I wouldn’t expect. After all, one of the good ideas implemented at MavenHut, the Solitaire tournaments, came from me and Cristi’s playing poker online in Multi Table Tournaments.

I just found out that I miss talking to people that do different things than I do. If you didn’t listen to Tom Ferriss’s podcast, give it a try. He talks to guests from actors like Jamie Foxx to entrepreneurs like Matt Mullenweg or special forces people and the interviews are really insightful. These interviews are, probably, one of the reasons I realized I was missing being curious and asking questions about things I had no ideas, where I felt I could learn a lot.

There’s no conclusion to this article.

Just that, if you get an email from me to meet and you think we have nothing to talk about, you might be right. On the other hand, I have some stories to tell, as well…

Don’t Waste My Time!

By Bobby Voicu

Know Your Stuff

Due to MavenHut’s success, there are people that think I know stuff and they want to meet me to talk about their business. And, time permitting, since I travel a lot these days, I actually love to meet the entrepreneurs.

And why shouldn’t I? I love talking to smart people (who doesn’t?), I am interested in how they see what they do and it helps me broaden my horizons. And, of course, it sometimes helps me see solutions for my problems just because I am forced into looking at the issues from a different angle.

One thing I have a difficult time explaining, though, without sounding rude, is that before meeting with someone, that person needs to do something about their idea/project. I will never meet with someone just because they have an idea and want to pick my brain on it. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have time for MavenHut anymore from all the meetings with people “with ideas of an online project” (that usually will change the world). Investors might take these type of meetings sometimes, since they need to be in contact with entrepreneurs for the deal flow, but I am not an investor.

In order to trim the number of meetings and understand who exactly can use my help, I use 2 elements.

First one: I ask in an email for 2 paragraphs about the idea and the stage it’s in. If the person I am writing to is unable to express their idea in 2 paragraphs, I don’t really think they actually understand what they’re doing just yet. Their focus should be on understanding what they do before meeting me (if YOU don’t know what you want to do, how the hell should I know or be able to help you?)

The other thing I want to see is an MVP. If you don’t have any type of Minimum Viable Product (a site, an app, a distribution channel, some users/customers), any advice I would give would be so general that it would make no sense for a meeting.

If these two conditions come together then I am more than happy to meet people (of course, based on my schedule, as well). After all, a lot of people helped and still help us in building MavenHut. But I never went to them with “you know, I have an idea for a Solitaire game”. I went with something on the lines of “I am looking for an investment for my company that does a Solitaire multiplayer game. We already have 1000 users that spend about 35 minutes per day in the game, on Facebook, I don’t know, though, how to put these things in an investment pitch. I know you’ve gone through this process already, do you have one hour to meet and explain these to me?”

The line above explains what I’m doing, what I need and shows why I contacted this specific person.

So, how’s your MVP doing? :)

P.S.: I also don’t drink coffee, just so you know :D

Photo credit: Know Your Stuff

Book Review: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

By Bobby Voicu

Amazon is one of the most interesting companies I’ve read about. Not especially Jeff Bezos, but Amazon. Obviously, you can’t really separate the two, but I’ve been always interested in how Amazon, a company that started on the internet by selling books, then became a retailer, then became again a technology company, single handedly starting the “cloud” revolution.

the-everything-store-jeff-bezos

The latest book I’ve read about the company (I just finished it about 20 minutes ago) is The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone. I’ve heard about it some time ago, but only recently had the time to read it. More, I’ve become even more interested when I’ve heard about the review that MacKenzie Bezos (the wife of Jeff) wrote on Amazon (you can read it here), awarding one star to the book for the fact that it underlines the sensationalist aspects of Amazon’s evolution, while also having big factual errors.

The thing is, though, I found the book really interesting. Obviously, I do not know about the factual errors (especially strictly related to the founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos) and I don’t care about it, anyway, but it’s a good read if you want to follow and understand the evolution of Amazon starting almost 20 years ago. From what I know about the company and what I’ve read in the last 10 years about it, I think that those aspects are pretty accurate.

Amazon is, in my opinion, one of the companies that wasn’t afraid to test things, to go outside their default area of expertise, and try (and succeed) in reinventing itself. I mean, 10 years ago, the biggest issue they faced was the chaos in the deposits, now it’s the fact the their phone, the Fire phone, was a flop. How do you go from getting packages to customers in overnight delivery to starting the startup/cloud revolution?

You need to read the book to find out more, but I will add some quotes I found interesting.

“It is far better to cannibalise yourself than have someone else do it,”. I totally agree with this.

I didn’t know that Kodak actually had the digital cameras technology available since the ’70s and didn’t want to use it so that they do not lose on the profits from normal cameras. The quote above also was related to this: “The reference was to the century-old photography giant whose engineers had invented digital cameras in the 1970s but whose profit margins were so healthy that its executives couldn’t bear to risk it all on an unproven venture in a less profitable frontier.“

Another interesting quote about focus: “If you are running both businesses you will never go after the digital opportunity with tenacity,” he said. It regards the move of the person responsible with the books at Amazon (one of the most influential positions in the company) to Kindle only books. The reason Bezos didn’t want to let that guy handle both businesses was the aforementioned quote.

People always feel the need to understand the context a CEO/manager takes decisions. But what do you do if the context is not that easy to understand? This is what Bezos told the designers of Kindle when he told them to include space for the cellular/wifi module in the first device so that anybody could download the books instantly, free of charge. The designers fought back saying that this wasn’t possible, that it would cost too much. The answer? “I’ll figure this out and it is not going to be a business model you understand. You are the designers, I want you to design this and I’ll think about the business model.”

One of the companies I enjoyed reading about and visiting while in Las Vegas was Zappos. The thing is I always thought of the company being a fast mover, achieving success and growing fast. Well. apparently it wasn’t like this and this is the reason they sold to Amazon. Here is what Mike Moritz, investor and board member at Zappos, had to say about it: “We just didn’t move quickly enough,” Moritz says. “You could sense it was going to be much harder to achieve, and we were squandering the opportunity. The hiring was too slow, the engineering department was not good enough, and the software was inferior to Amazon’s. It was very frustrating, and the Las Vegas location, plus an unwillingness to pay competitively, made it even harder to recruit talented people. We were starting to compete with the very best in the business and they had a lot of arrows in their quiver to make life painful. The last thing we wanted to do was to sell. It was mortifying.”. It’s interesting for me because we always thought MavenHut is moving really fast. Well, we might need to move a lot faster, or else Amazon might buy us :)

And, finally, I didn’t know, but Bezos may not get ferried to work in a black sedan, but Amazon still spends $1.6 million per year on personal security for him and his family, according to the company’s financial reports. It’s not that simple being a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company.

I’ve highlighted a lot more content, but I think you need to read the book to make sense of it :)

Finally, go buy it (or borrow it from a friend). By the way, all these links are affiliate links, just so you know.

Oh and, finally, if you are interested, you can see the interview Bezos gave to the Business Insider recently (or read the main ideas):

The Power of Not Specialising (sort of)

By Bobby Voicu

“I suppose I can justify the variety of my readings and entertainment this way. Every week I read The Economist and New Scientist cover to cover, which I complement with Forbes, Time, Fortune, Business Week, but also Entertainment Weekly and Premiere. I love movies of all genres, be they artsy foreign movies or the latest blockbuster, books of all genres from Ron Chernow biographies to the latest Dan Brown thriller and love playing video games.”

Exactly my thoughts :)) Especially the love for video games, be it Solitaire or Max Payne

From here

When Will Your Startup Be Pronounced Dead?

By Bobby Voicu

startup-pronounced-dead

We started MavenHut in February 2012. Right from the beginning we decided to not bootstrap the company, but raise investment and grow as fast as possible.

This also meant one more thing: if we didn’t raise money by December 31st, 2012, we would close the company. What this did was to focus our efforts and energy into the most important things for the company: generate users, generate engagement, focus on delivering on our promises to the would-be investors. And it worked: SOSventures invested in us in November 2012.

The thing is, though, that I see a lot of people not setting up a “company deadline”: if we don’t reach “this” by the “then”, we will close the company.

Why you should do this?

Because then you will focus on the things that will move you ahead faster, because you just don’t have the time anymore and you need to choose what to do next in a much more efficient way, especially in relationship to the resources at your disposal (money, people, whatever).

Last time I’ve seen this, somebody has been dragging away the company’s product, putting in new and new features, without actually adding the most important one: allowing potential customers to pay for the product. And the founders were complaining of not generating revenues… It might seem obvious, but this is a mistake I see often: “we will implement monetization/whatever, but before that I will add a more pinkish color to the sidebar/a new logo/redesign the product”.

So, what is your startup’s deadline?

Photo: Grim Reaper on the Road, from ShutterStock

2013 Young Entrepreneur from Wall-Street.ro

By Bobby Voicu

wall-street-elvis

I’m away from Bucharest for business along with one of my co-founders, Cristi, so it was only fitting that Elvis (the 3rd cofounder of MavenHut) went on and picked up a prize I won at Wall-Street.ro Gala for The Entrepreneur of 2013 (Younger Generation). It was great that Elvis picked it up because it’s a team effort (really, we are 3 co-founders, MavenHut exists because we all got together and created something great).

Even better was that one of the people I really admire, Radu Georgescu, was picked as the Entrepreneur for 2013 (Older Generation :D ).

Here is the article with all the winners, in Romanian.

Photo from the article on Wall-Street.ro

Speaking at How To Web

By Bobby Voicu

Me and one of my co-founders are speaking at How To Web on Wednesday :) We are gonna talk about the lessons we learned taking MavenHut from 0 to 5 million users in one year.

If you are around, let me know :)

Ah, we speak from 3pm on Wednesday, ok? >:)