The past 30 days
Always be raising
You’ve just closed your Series A!
Great!
Before that afterglow fades, literally, within days, write your Series B pitch deck.
And when you close your Series B?
Within a day or two, write your Series C pitch deck.
It puts you in the mindset that you are always raising, and you are prepared at any time to raise.
Tenacity
Your dogged perseverance is what will set you apart from all the other entrepreneurs who never made it.
Success as an entrepreneur isn’t based on where you went to school.
The subject you studied.
Who you shared a house with.
Who you got an internship with.
It’s based on one thing, and one thing only.
How persistent are you?
Patent Pirate!
Those who do not learn from history are destined to try and patent it.
Half-and-half
In every business I have found that persistence is the least common resource to be found.
And half-arsedness to be the most abundant.
Great ideas should ship. And so should poor ones
To be good at something isn’t a singular act.
It’s a habit.
To be good, is to be habitual about the thing we want to be good at.
The one thing I see entrepreneurs fail at all the time, is that they are terrible at shipping.
They cling to their idea – whatever the idea may be – until they smother all the life out of it.
They show it off to everyone that will pay attention, but they never set it free, they never let their creation run wild for others to interact with, play with, experience, become delighted with and then tell other people about.
When you get habitual about letting your product, service or creation get out there in to the hands, and more importantly, the minds, of other people, you get better, and then you get good, and then you get great, at shipping your ideas.
Advice you can patent
Before you try and patent it, ask an engineer if it already exists.
It will save you a lot of time, trouble and money.
Also, “plugging something in” is not patentable.
Throwing my rule book at myself
Entrepreneurial habits
I have always loved this quote by Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do.”
Paraphrased of course.
The point is, of course, that if we do something repeatedly, if we make a habit out of it, we get better at whatever it is we do; write code, draw art, raise funds, network with people, ship product.
That last point, shipping product, getting the ideas out of your head, releasing it in to the wild as a product or service, and then in to the hands of people, is what we need to do as entrepreneurs.
Co-located co-working
As a procurer of services have you ever retained the services of a mid-sized or larger company to work on an aspect of a project?
I am very specifically talking about a project that doesn’t require the vendor to be co-located with you, e.g. they aren’t painting your office or laying new carpet or assembling new desks.
Can you imagine what the CEO of the company would say if you demanded that his entire staff show up at your office each day and work 9-to-5 at your premises?
Let’s take your 120 person company and integrate them with our 2,000 person company, for six months, and have them work at our office Monday through Friday.
Sounds ridiculous?
Why then do we adhere so vociferously to the notion that other individual contributors must be co-located to perform tasks that have no requirement to be in the same location as everyone else?
Integral qualities
Your integrity as a leader will last you longer than all the money you make from your start-up.
Passion market fit
I meet many an entrepreneur with a false epiphany about how amazing their start-up is going to do.
Passion is good and will get you through the days when everything appears to be falling apart.
But passion makes for lousy product-market fit.
Proprietary lock-in of the wrong thing
If you attempt to lock up proprietary items, e.g. a well-known brand of clothing, by becoming a middleman to supply that proprietary item, when you don’t have exclusive distribution rights, you will lack what is commonly known as a “sourcing advantage.”
Your sourcing advantage is that you can get more of the product than anyone else, even if there is a supply shortfall across the vertical, and sell it cheaper than anyone else all the time.
Amazon is an extreme example where they either don’t care because they are big enough (now) or they can artificially induce a sourcing advantage (because they are big enough (now)).
Pets.com is the prime example of lacking a sourcing advantage.
Freely Given!
Oooh! An idea! And you’re giving it to me for free!
Critiqued mass
Companies that reach critical mass make money in spite of themselves.
Count on me
The reason that good software developers from graduated good schools aren’t interested in working for below market rate and 0.0025% equity in a pre-revenue, seed stage start-up is that they aren’t bad at math.
The only way to get someone with such terrible compensation is to find someone who *IS* bad at math – perhaps an English major from an 8-week coding boot camp.
Service disconnected
Your products (and your services) should never be sold by the same people who create them.
I estimate that is a wrong answer
You will ask your (inexperienced) technical co-founder for a time estimate and they will lie to you too make you happy.
And that’s okay, because we all need to learn that time estimates with immediate answers and no due diligence are worth precisely the amount of time they took to estimate.
Mobile university
I do a lot of travelling each year, talking to investors, pitching to customers, and just general meetings and I view all of that travel time as hugely productive to develop “me.”
Audio books that I can listen to on my Archos MP3 player are absolutely essential to maintain my sanity.
I can carry a dozen audio books with me where ever I go so long as I have a few spare batteries or a wall socket to charge up the player.
Sales, marketing, psychology, history, biographies of great leaders, business methodologies, science.
It’s like carrying a university lecture hall in your pocket that you can listen to when driving out to visit a customer.
Naive entrepreneurs
Jerking off
Brilliant jerks, they say, are toxic. Toxic in that they alienate the other employees, cause impediment to a wholesome and healthy working environment, and just generally drag everyone down. But like all things sometimes, a little toxicity can be tolerated (for a time) if the brilliance outweighs the downsides. The problem with brilliant jerks is that they rarely reveal their true selves during the honey moon period of working together.
Trails be blazed!
It’s okay to blaze our own trail.
But in the realm of entrepreneurship, somedays it’s nice to see the trail that others have blazed ahead of us, even if that trail ultimately went nowhere.
Retention filters
Candidate recruiting and employee retention, especially in a field fighting for diversity, must be aligned with each other.
Otherwise, you might be interviewing a lot of candidates with diverse backgrounds, and possibly even hiring some of them, but you won’t be retaining them for very long.
Enlightenment comes through not understanding
Your technical co-founder will tell you things you don’t understand because they are difficult to understand but you think you understand them.
And that’s okay, because you need to be exposed to things you don’t understand.
Minimalist fit
How do you determine ideal product-market fit?
Identify problems.
Apply the most minimal, and most focused solution you can to each one.
Repeat.
Practical practice
They say that practice makes perfect.
Your day job is not practice.
Your day job is the performance.
What you do outside of your day job is practice.
Make sure you do a lot of it.
And make sure it is deliberate practice.
Good joke / Bad joke
A user interface should be like a really good joke.
You shouldn’t have to explain it.
Repeat customers
Treat each new customer like a guest that has traveled far to see you.
And treat each returning customer with the exact same respect.
They returned for a reason, make sure you repeat that reason for them.
Vertically inclined
If you are building an e-commerce application or website, look for the fat in the product vertical before you jump in with both feet.
How do you do that?
Go talk to the people selling the product directly to the customer.
Are they making a profit?
And how much of a percentage of the cost of the overall price is profit?
“Enter title here”
You don’t want a co-founder in name only.
Every day of the lifecycle of the business, the co-founders must re-earn the right to have that moniker.
When they aren’t earning it, they no longer deserve it.
Business planning
The best business plan is when you close your first sale.