Daniel’s Random Startup Tips, Part 1
Recently, I found myself sharing some of my ideas about successful startups with a former colleague I met downtown. He’s seriously considering going for a startup and I felt that a chat over a nice cup of Cappuccino was the perfect opportunity to bore him with my “insights”. He didn’t seem to mind. Here then, in no logical order, are a couple of the points. Maybe I can get some feedback and you can help me come up with more points to add to the list? Or maybe you disagree with me and let me know where I’m wrong, which is also good.
Don’t Do It On Your Own
I know there are several successful startup founders who set off on their own and managed to build a successful startups. I admire those people. Hats off to them! In my opinion, starting a business on your own is a lot harder than doing it together with at least one other Pig (see above). In order to start a successful business on your own, you need to be really focussed, driven and determined.
Starting a business is an uphill battle. You will run into problems and obstacles. If you’re going for it on your own, there’s a danger you will get bogged down in details, become overwhelmed by some problem and totally lose your way. You need someone to discuss with. You need people to bounce your ideas off of. Often, just explaining to someone else what it is you’re doing (or planning on doing) can get you to think about your plan and maybe show you a better way of solving a problem.
Similar Levels Of Commitment
If you’re not going for it on your own (which you shouldn’t — see above) then it’s a good idea to make sure everybody has the same level of committment. If the business startup is a part-time, moonlighting effort for you, it’s OK if it is for the others as well. But if your ass is on the line, theirs should be, too!
Having different levels of commitment — you going for it full-time, the other guy only putting in part-time effort in the evenings or the weekends — can (any will) lead to stress and discussions along the way. You will hit rough spots. You will face tough decisions and problems. If you’re stuck in a quagmire of issues, up to your neck in administrative or technical problems, and then your co-founder saunters in, fresh and relaxed from a day at the office, then bad blood will come from it. It’s only natural. If one of you has a comfortable fall-back position while the other hasn’t, it takes a truly great person to ignore that issue when the shit hits the fan (which it will).
This is very well illustrated by the parable of the chicken and the pig, which Ken Schwaber uses in the Agile methodology SCRUM to explain the roles of project participants. In this story, a Chicken suggests to his buddy the Pig to open a new restaurant. “What would we call it?” asks the Pig. “Ham and Eggs”. “No thanks - I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”
The very least you should do is make your levels of commitment totally clear. Everybody needs to know what level of input he can expect from the other person. This includes availability for overtime or on the weekends. In crunch time, when a project is wrapping up and there’s a lot of work to be done, everybody needs to know how much effort the others are able to put in.
Marketing Can Be Outsourced
When you’re putting out a press release, it is really important to get your point across. There is a certain elegance and clarity to press releases written by people who know what they’re doing, which stuff written by tech people such as you and me most probably will not have. If you want your press release to be picked up, it has to be written in a way that it instantly appeals to the editors and tech writers. They get thousands of press releases through the various distribution channels every day. Why should they pick up yours and use it?
I consider myself to be pretty good with words. But still, the first time I read a professionally rewritten press release for which I had provided the draft, it was a true eye-opener.
This is one of those things you can waste endless hours on if you don’t know what you’re doing. And as someone starting a business, you really have better things to do with your time. Get a professional to do it.
Get a good designer
It may not be one of the very first things you tackle, but hiring a designer should be one of the things on your radar screen. Yes — we’re all techies and we all want our product to shine and succeed on its technical merit. But as soon as you have your first live sales presentation or go to your first trade fair, having a consistent and pleasing design running through everything is really important.
The value of the input you can get from a designer cannot be overstated. Especially, if you’re as anywhere near as design-challenged as I am. I couldn’t come up with a half-decent logo or typographical design for a product leaflet if my life depended on it.
Having a designer put together clear visual guidelines for all presentations and marketing material you put out (this includes your Web site) is an excellent way to make sure everything you show to other people is consistent. In my startup, I hired a graphic designer to put together a whole package (often referred to as a CD — corporate design, or CI — corporate identity; think of it as your company’s look-and-feel), consisting of business cards, stationery, a fixed colour palette, some iconic design elements which can be used in a wide variety of media and a PowerPoint presentation template. Yes — working together with the designer involves some effort on your part (such as answering the question “What is your favourite colour?”) but it pays off almost immediately. Having a clear and concise design guidebook for your CD can save you endless hours of head-scratching when you’re developing something such as a product leaflet, the cover for a manual, a splash screen, etc.
Honestly — I’m crap at design. But after the designer came up with the “design language”, I could apply this to everything I was doing and could be pretty sure it would all fit together. Need a colour for a bullet highlight in a leaflet? Get out the colour palette guidelines you got and take the colour suggested there. Want to emphasize the headlines? Get out the guidebook and use the suggested typeface. Preparing a manual cover for printing? No - I don’t know what Pantone-straight-to-process is. But I know I can get out my CI folder and tell you the exact Pantone code for the blue I have on my business card and on my Web site and on everything else. So I know what to tell the printer when he asks which blue he should use for the manual.
Obviously, your graphic designer should be able to work together with the Web designer in order to communicate the design guidelines and translate them for the Web presentation.
To be continued…
Tags: founders; entrepreneurs; startups;business.
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