Search Results for: mavenhut

One of the Romanian entrepreneurs that we look up to here, at MavenHut is our adviser, Radu Georgescu (Romanian blog). Serial entrepreneur (sold several companies to Microsoft, Naspers and, recently, to Francisco Partners), he’s been close to our company for the last year and a half, since we launched. He helped with advice and, most of all, with his experience of going through all the trials and tribulations of building a startup.

He’s been recently interviewed by inventures.eu (here is the full interview). Some things I found interesting:

On failure:

I have had my share of failures. Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for success. Being at the right place at the right time with the right product and the right team is an entrepreneur’s dream. I have always tried to learn from my failures and my mistakes and have had no hesitation in getting back on my feet to try yet again.

On people to work with:

I usually look for individuals who are very committed to the vision and have the ability to build, lead and work with high quality teams. I rarely get involved with the day to day of any business and self-starters are my favourite people.

On how to get him onboard:

Tell me the problem that you are trying to solve and how your product or service is going to do this. Talk about the people behind the startup and the skills that they bring to the table. Convince me that what you are going to do is going to make a difference. And: please do this in no more than 10 PowerPoint slides.

Again, read the full interview on inventures.

Photo from Facebook, via TVR Info

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

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