Want to learn how to build a successful startup? Don’t miss this.
In this episode of Reality Makers, learn from Joel Gascoigne, CEO and founder of Buffer, as he reveals insights from his past experiences and own failed startups that have allowed him to persevere and enabled him and his startup Buffer to achieve traction, amazing growth and revenues. Joel has an experienced and unique perspective on lean startup methodologies and product and customer development that all startup founders should heed.
An incredibly insightful guy, I had a blast with Joel and he is no doubt on his way to continue creating great products for us all. Be sure not miss this and share with others!
Check out the highlights below! Enjoy it? Share it with others.
This episode is brought to you by Startup Edition.
Episode 5 Highlights
2:15 - Q: Who is Joel and what is he working on these days at buffer?
4:40 - Q: Why are you so transparent about the numbers and experiences with Buffer?
5:43 - Q: Why do you think you became an entrepreneur?
8:00 - Q: How did you go about getting your first customer?
10:13 - Q: How do you deal with startups launching similar products when you’re developing your own?
12:09 - Q: How do you make the leap to become fully invested in your idea?
14:13 - “The key mistake we made with One Page was that we kept building feature after feature, building things I thought would be useful for me and not really talking to enough people and figuring out if it was a problem people really had…it didn’t really go beyond solving that pain that would get me that traction One Page would need. This was a key learning experience.”
17:14 - Q: How important is a bootstrapping approach to building a startup vs. a free fast growing idea?
17:50 - “The free, fast growing idea is a lot more risky. It could work. It could go really well. …but…”
19:22 - Q: How did you decide what you were going to charge for Buffer?
20:20 - “The thing that helps to get that first customer…when building that minimum viable product is to really focus on that minimum part.”
22:19 - Q: How do you decide on what to focus on when building out your product?
23:26 - “The interesting things is I think a lot of times this almost goes against human nature, against common sense of what we think we should be doing. To be a successful founder and apply lean startup methodologies, we almost have to forget our mind, our intuition and forget your common sense of things and assume nothing will work and test everything.”
26:00 - Q: How do you get people to check out your MVP, your landing page, etc.?
27:07 - “I don’t think you need that much traffic…it’s about qualitative feedback. Not metrics early on.”
30:20 - Q: How do you build great teams?
31:40 - Q: Why did you decide to start coaching within the Buffer team?
35:45 - Q: Are there any ideas you wish you had time to execute on?
37:45 - Q: What advice would you give someone who wants to make their idea a reality?
Reality Makers 4: Adii Pienaar of PublicBeta & WooThemes
In this episode, I have an incredibly inspiring chat with Adii Pienaar, an author of several amazing books on entrepreneurship, co-founder of the incredibly successful web company WooThemes and founder of the recently launched PublicBeta, an amazing new learning community and resource for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs.
Check out the highlights below!
Enjoy it? Share it with others.
This episode is brought to you by Startup Edition.
Episode 4 Highlights
2:15 - Q: Why was entrepreneurship something you wanted to do?
2:57 - “There was almost a fear of working for a boss and that fear drove a notion that I wanted to do something on my own.”
7:04 - “I’m very much a hacker in terms of my coding ability—and a hacker in a bad sense. I can throw a bunch of shit together and hope it actually works.”
9:14 - Q: Wordpress was and still is a very competitive market. What allowed WooThemes to come out ahead in this market?
9:18 - “We had a little bit of a first mover advantage. A critical part though was my own reputation and branding.”
10:05 - “Due to the audience I’d built up [on my personal blog] when I released my very first product, I had revenue on day one.”
12:14 - Q: What is the importance of growing an audience? Do you have any advice on how to get started growing an audience?
12:20 - “I totally believe in the ‘Done is better than perfect’ mentality but I do think you can be perfect at one thing and that’s being perfect at being yourself.”
12:35 - “I think so many individuals are just so fucking generic. People aren’t willing to stick to their guns. I think that’s the most important thing when writing. It’s not about being perfect or a perfect writer, but the most important thing is just being the absolute truest representation of who you are. To me, the trick is just to communicate that.”
13:46 - “I might not always be right and my opinion may not always be the best but I have a certain way of thinking and if you find value in that then we should connect. If you don’t find value in that, then there’s thousands of other people that I can connect with and thousands of other people that you should connect with.”
15:09 - “With writing and broadcasting yourself you shouldn’t be about that, initially. Initially it’s just about starting to have your say. Find those first 5-10 people that like what you say and are writing about.”
16:05 - Q: What inspired you to write your books in the first place then?
16:05 - “To be seen as an expert. I think if you can publish a book about anything then people immediately respect you more. It’s a weird kind of thing…People see you post a book and then they think ‘Wow! That guy most know his shit.’…The old cliche of ‘Real artists ship.’ is what it comes down to. I may ship a really average book but by the very nature of shipping that book I’m seen as an artist.”
19:13 - “I think it’s totally worth it. I think having a book, at least the revenues directly attached to it, has that kind of long tail effect. The book is there now. It has no time frame. It’s not going to expire in six months time. In a year or two’s worth of time it should still be valuable to somebody, right?
19:51 - Q: What is inspiring PublicBeta? “Pure passion. That’s the simple answer.”
26:51 - “PublicBeta is going to be done to find those 1,000 customers, community members that really share that passion for entrepreneurship and people who have the same kind of issues…whether I have a business that worth a $1 million and you have one that’s doing $5,000 that doesn’t matter, because at the very core we’re entrepreneurs with shit. That’s what it’s about.”
29:32 - “Most things we can do as entrepreneurs there is no right or wrong…you just won’t know until you actually do it.”
30:47 - Q: What skills do you need or is it a mind set to be somebody like yourself, to take life by the reins and make ideas a reality?
31:10 - “Come hell or high water…it just becomes a case of doing…You just have to have that ‘Just do it’ kind of attitude about life.”
Hobby, Science Experiment or Suicide: Where Does Your Startup Idea Lie?
This essay is in response to this week’s Startup Edition topic, “How do you turn your idea into a startup?”
While there are many startup methodologies and tools to help you validate your idea and give it structure (e.g. The Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas, etc.), there aren’t many tools that help entrepreneurs understand if their startup idea is actually worth pursuing in the first place. Lean Startup helps us validate our ideas quickly through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop, for example, but even creating a meaningful minimum viable product can require quite a bit of work.
Perhaps we can save ourselves some effort if first we decide if our idea is something worth pursuing in the first place.
Three Qualities of a Startup Idea Worth Pursuing
Before pursuing your startup idea ask yourself if it has these three significant qualities:
Does my idea have market potential?
Does my idea have unique value?
Am I passionate for my idea or the space where my idea will exist?
If you answer "yes" to all three of these questions, you're in the startup idea sweet spot and should start putting in the effort required for validating your startup idea.
Let's take a look at each of these qualities to see why they are significant in making this decision.
1. Market Potential
Understanding your startup idea’s market potential is about ensuring you will have customers who will use and/or pay for your product. This is just a rough idea. You will later validate this idea but at the very least you need to have an idea of who your customers are, how many there can potentially be, and if your startup can monetize those customers in any meaningful way.
I recently went to a Tech Crunch Meet Up event here in San Diego and at the event they had a pitch off. The very first point any of these founders should have made should have been on the size of their market and/or the revenue potential of their startup idea. Otherwise, the audience was left guessing, “Do people actually want this?” There was only one startup who did this out of a dozen or more pitches and you know who won the pitch off? That startup.
2. Unique Value
Understanding your startup idea’s unique value is about knowing what makes it valuable and what differentiates it from similar products. It’s about understanding what your idea offers, what problem it solves, and in what way you will provide it to your customers. Perhaps the idea itself is not unique, but the way in which you offer it will be. This is what you need to understand.
It's important to realize that the unique value of your startup idea is its differentiator. It is what makes people want your product and make it stand out from others. Some of us can really get carried away with creating unique value so it’s important to balance it with the other two qualities of an idea worth pursuing, passion and market potential.
3. Your Passion
Your passion for your startup idea is perhaps the most important quality. You must ask yourself, “Is this idea something I want to work on everyday for the next few years of my life?” Perhaps the best startup ideas are those ideas that solve problems you yourself want solved. Perhaps you have passion for building a business and making money or passion for solving problems. Whatever it is, you need to care about your idea enough to not give up on it.
Startups are roller coasters with and highs and lows where the odds stacked against you. It takes a lot of hard work before one sees success. Having passion for seeing the success of your idea will make it far easier when facing troubling times.
Your passion will also guide your vision. Your idea will likely undergo many iterations before it sees success. Having passion will help guide you with which directions to take your idea.
Hobby, Science Experiment, or Suicide
If your startup idea does not have all three qualities it is likely positioned as one of the following (and the funny part is, all startups end up being a little bit of all three of these things):
A hobby is an idea with your passion and market potential but no unique value. This likely means there are already existing products that have cornered the market. You’re essentially copying an existing idea so bringing it to market and succeeding with it will likely be very competitive and difficult if it’s not unique. Such efforts are generally futile and just for fun or learning. I'd consider this a hobby.
A science experiment is an idea with your passion and unique value but no market potential. You’re intending to build out an idea that no one will want but does something you think is really cool or technically impressive. These ideas may be ahead of their time and aren’t necessarily not worth pursuing (e.g. Glass), but their success will be far harder to achieve without considerable marketing, positioning and timing.
Suicide is an idea with market potential and unique value but you have no passion for. While you may see success with such ideas, you will hate every minute of it on your way there—that is if you get there before burning yourself out. Don’t pursue suicidal startup ideas!
Is My Idea Worth Pursuing?
Taking time to answer this question on a personal level is crucial. I think many wantrepreneurs blow past a step like this either because (a) they believe they’re on to some hot idea and think they need to beat others to it by being the first one to bring it to market or (b) they just want to hurry up to success by creating a product from an idea they think is unique enough to make them successful. These motives are foul.
Take the time to zoom out on your idea's validity before blindly attempting to build something that no one will want or you have no passion for. Hopefully considering whether your idea has market potential, unique value and your passion before pursuing it will make seeing your startup idea succeed far easier.
Do you have a startup idea you’re considering? Let me know on Twitter (@corey_gwin) and subscribe to my email list for other tips on product and startups.
Visit Startup Edition to read more on this topic from other entrepreneurs, hackers, and designers.
In this third episode of Reality Makers, I talk with Y Combinator alum Wade Foster, the incredibly inspiring CEO and co-founder of the quickly growing Zapier. Check out the highlights below!
Episode 3 Highlights
0:54 - Q: Who is Wade Foster?
1:40 - Q: What spurred your interest into entrepreneurship?
2:33 - "My first foray into entrepreneurship was through music."
4:31 - "At my first internship at 'Big Corp'...I did spreadsheets. I hated it. I'd spend 15-30 minutes doing actual work and my bosses loved it. I couldn't imagine doing this for 40 more years."
6:06 - "They didn't know anything about marketing either. I didn't know anything about marketing. So they couldn't call me out on stuff. I'd suggest all kinds of things! I learned a ton."
6:50 - "I finally decided that I really do want to own my own business. I want to do this for myself because it was so much fun being able to control your own destiny. I finally realized that I could turn entrepreneurship into something I can do."
8:50 - Q: Why did you decide to team with your co-founders?
9:30 - "Even if we weren't doing Zapier together. We'd still be friends. I think that's how some of the best co-founder relationships work--when there's something more that connects the two of you than just your startup."
10:24 - Q: How do you and your co-founders balance each other out?
11:15 - Q: Where did the idea for Zapier come from?
12:35 - "Customers were always asking for integrations with other products...Between the three of us we thought, 'Man there should be a product that exists that lets people do this stuff.'"
15:57 - "Even our beta customers paid us some amount of money to use the product."
16:20 - Q: Why $100? "$100 is significant. It's not chump change but not so much a business couldn't pay for it."
17:15 - Q: Why Y Combinator? Why do you think you were able to get in?
19:24 - "Whether they [partners] liked it or not, they would judge you based on the seriousness of the company. Three random guys from Missouri just didn't sound as serious as Silicon Valley, Y Combinator funded company."
22:16 - "10 times out of 10 we would go through YC again...It'd be hard to replicate that by yourself."
23:05 - Q: What's the most troubling experiences you've had?
25:42 - "It wasn't just the three of us deciding if this was the right move. There were also three fantastic women in our lives we had to convince this was the right move."
27:00 - Q: What are you guys most excited for in the coming future?
28:30 - Q: Any tools that you use that help Zapier achieve success?
32:00 - Q: What was the experience like hiring your first employee?
34:25 - Q: What advice would you give someone to get to where you're at today? "Just start doing something."
34:35 - "People spend too much time thinking about things that aren't really that important."
34:55 - "If you've got an idea for something, go find someone that would be a customer and go sell them that thing."
35:20 - "Day one, get customers."
36:20 - "5 years from today, Zapier will be bigger than it is today."
36:54 - "The goal is to keep building a customer we enjoy showing up to everyday."
In this amazing second episode of Reality Makers, I talk with Joshua Davidson, an incredibly inspiring 20-year-old startup founder who already has two companies under his belt, Chop Dawg and Subtle. Check out the highlights below!
Episode 2 Highlights
2:13 - Q: What is Chop Dawg?
8:07 - Q: How big is your team? Where are you all located?
10:00 - "We don't have set hours because if someone is going to wake up at 2AM with that great idea, let them work then."
11:00 - Q: Hiring?
11:50 - "Our product isn't our product. Our product is our people."
13:17 - Q: Why the hell did you decide to become an entrepreneur in the first place?
19:45 - "We didn't want to create some new market that didn't exist. We wanted to solve problems in a market where we saw plenty of business."
20:03 - Q: Why do you think you've been able to have success? A: "Quality work and referrals."
20:05 - "We want to run a business the way we want to be treated."
22:16 - "There's two things you need to have to be successful: 1. You have to recognize opportunities that people wouldn't recognize. [...] 2. Be naively optimistic. [...]"
28:46 - "I think the best thing in the world is: you believe in your idea and you get paid to do it."
29:23 - Q: What is Subtle?
33:38 - "How can we make this complex functionality serve so much purpose and be easy for the user? The answer is pretty simple: they don't have to do anything!"
35:30 - "Last year more small businesses were registering in the US than in the last 10 years combined and 81% of those had an average founder age between 20-30."
36:57 - "We built a product that is probably still 5 years away from being something...but that's okay."
39:25 - Q: What's your role amongst the team?
42:17 - Q: What advice would you give people who have ideas they want to make a reality? A: "Do it."
43:00 - "If you're going to live once you might as well do something that you're passionate about. In my case I'm passionate about helping others and making things people use."
45:14 - "Can you be a [Foursquare] mayor when getting takeout or do you have to actually be there?"
The Infinite Success Spectrum: Why Failure Is Not the Opposite of Success
Realize this: Failure is the absence of success, not the opposite of success.
Just as darkness is the absence of light and cold is the absence of heat, failure is the absence of success. Light and dark. Hot and cold. They’re not opposites, they’re just the result of a lack of energy.
And just as light and heat are forms of energy, success is an energy that you generate from progress. Sure we designate certain units of these energies on the scale as more or less than the other and call them opposites but in reality these units are arbitrary since the scales on which we measure these properties are unfathomable if not theoretically infinite. Our human senses and history of experiences only allow us to comprehend some small fraction of their scales.
If we wish to succeed we need to know that the feeling of failure is inevitable, but the good news is is that failure only occurs when we stop progressing. As Paul Graham reveals about startups from his interviews with successful startup founders, persistence is key to succeeding (see #5 and #6). Most all of us are not going to strike it rich overnight with our product with what we think is a brilliant idea. We’re going to stumble with our ideas but we can learn from what doesn’t work, pivot and continue on. While all these tribulations may feel like failures, truly they are successes--so long as you're still moving forward, you haven't yet failed.
What we should be more concerned with is the direction we are heading along the infinite success spectrum. Are we moving towards or away from more success? Are we learning? Growing? Gaining experience? Progressing?
In this inaugural episode of Reality Makers, I talk with with the inspiring Ryan Hoover, a PandoDaily contributor, Director of Product at PlayHaven and the brains behind the quickly growing newsletter Startup Edition. Ryan shares with us his journey in to startups from Oregon to the Silicon Valley as a product manager, why he believes writing plays such an important role in the startup community, and how it was he was able to meet Phil of Philz Coffee.
Reality Makers came about out of my interest in asking people on Twitter if I could pick their brain for 30-45 min via a Google Hangout. I quickly realized that the conversations I was having were so incredibly insightful that I had to share the experience with others. These individuals are the future Musks, possible Vaynerchuks, Roses or Zuck's. It's been exciting and intriguing to hear from these inspiring entrepreneurs and thinkers currently in the thick of it and I'm excited for others to learn from them too.
I am completely winging it (interviewing, video editing, audio, etc.). I would love to hear your feedback, suggestions, interest of being a guest yourself, or sponsoring the show.
Jack of All Trades: The Fearless Entrepreneurial Pyramid Builder
Together, these three dimensions define your entrepreneurial pyramid. A what? Let me elaborate.
Constructing Your Entrepreneurial Pyramid
Breadth and depth of knowledge make up your entrepreneurial base and experience provides a vantage point from which your entrepreneurial perspectives are drawn.
Knowing about a lot of things is breadth of knowledge. Breadth contains all the topics you should know: design, engineering, coding languages, marketing, business, law, maintaining relationships, networking, employees, leadership, and on and on, whatever comes your way.
Depth contains the details of each of these topics you should know. The greater depth of knowledge you gain in any topic, the more versatile you become amongst topics.
I say should know because without experience, a higher vantage point, you sometimes aren't able to see or know all the things you should know and what details you should know about those things that you should know. :)
But there's hope for the inexperienced! Just because you aren't experienced doesn't mean you aren't capable. Be fearless at applying your knowledge as soon as you gain it. The sooner you learn, no matter how bad the failure, the sooner you gain experience to aid in multiplying your entrepreneurial mastery.
And you can't learn everything, you can't know it all, and you certainly can't do it all on your own. Co-founders and employees help build your pyramid too. Trust in these people, hire those you can trust and find those that have strength in your weaknesses. Learn from them and build your pyramid wider, deeper and taller.
Don't be afraid to be "Jack". Don't be worried about not being an expert. Build your pyramid. Learn. Apply immediately. Gain experience. And as you gain experience, ascending to a higher vantage point, you'll learn to learn (whoa!) making it easier to see what's beyond the horizon.
We all learn how to write. Unfortunately no one ever tells us why we should. Many hate writing. You know why? Because it’s hard but that’s exactly why we should do it.
Here’s four reasons why you, especially as an entrepreneur, should be writing publicly.
1. Writing Makes You Understand
Writing begins as a conversation with yourself. You form sentences, paragraphs, and sections to logically structure your understanding. You use punctuation and style to glue it all together. As you write, you glean what your mind understands then you reflect on that realization, revise, share intimately with others and revise drafts. The more you iterate like this, the deeper your understanding becomes and the stronger the argument you form for your product, your vision, and your customers.
2. Writing Demonstrates You Understand
If you write well and deliver clear well accepted arguments, stories or knowledge, it demonstrates your understanding of the topics you write about. You demonstrate that you have value and are therefore someone likely capable of creating a valuable product.
Writing isn’t easy. Writing well is even more difficult. It takes time and effort to share your thoughts, but this is also why it’s so valuable to others. If you do write well, writing can ironically demonstrate you’re not just all talk. All talk is voicing an opinion with 140 characters. Try forming an argument with 300 words, 1,000 words, or a book’s worth of words! You’ll need research, examples, data, guest writers, graphics or charts, a thesis. You’ll need structure, clarity, and style. Great writing is a crystal clear timeless demonstration that you are someone with a mind and voice worth listening to. Demonstrate this and it will ultimately help grow your audience.
3. Writing Makes You Honest
By writing your thoughts and making them public, you’re instantly attempting to demonstrate your capacity to understand a topic and engage or entertain an audience. Writing is very much sink or swim. People either understand what you have to say or they yawn and disappear with a click.
Taking your intimate thoughts, your actual understanding of the arguments you form, knowledge you share, and making it a public and timeless representation of you is incredibly revealing but this is what makes it an incredible opportunity. Sometimes we live off in our own world with our ideas, strategies and plans. We treat them as ideal. By writing and sharing, however, you can challenge yourself to test the validity and strength of your ideas, beliefs and vision. You will hear from critics who challenge what you say or fans who find value. You will either be full of shit or a genius. Either way you can learn something about your true value as an individual. What a great way to test, learn and pivot your own life.
Hopefully this realization forces you to care about what you write. If people know you are honest they will put their trust and faith in you. Your audience will grow as a result and those individuals will be more willing to listen to what you have to say.
4. Writing Connects You
Your words give you something meaningful to share with others. They give people ideas to discover, to mull over, to love or to hate. And your words hold you accountable to the people who discover, accept them and decide to agree with you, your vision and insight.
The fact that writing is so revealing of ones character is what makes it so intimate. Your words can allow others to get to know you without ever having met you. They can give people something to relate to, to remember, to believe in, to think and talk about. As others are impacted by your writing, they will reach out to you and your network will grow, doors will open that you never knew existed, and you too as an individual will grow to have new insight and strength as a result.
Why limit your self to just exist where you physically reside? Put something out publicly, share it, share it with me ([email protected]), and share it with others. Test yourself and your ideas. Learn and grow. Connect with others. See where writing takes you.
Your product should be a fork in the river, not a dam. Don’t force people to pay attention to your product as they pass by in the swift current of life; don’t expect them to marvel at the engineering feat or exceptional design of your product; don’t offer a tour of your facility and expect them to pay attention; don’t slow them down, confuse them, or shut them off.
The more effort it takes for me to understand the solution you offer to solve my problem, to understand why you’re the best, the less likely I am to engage with or discover it because the current is pulling me elsewhere. Too often I see products trying to use slick designs, clever product names, or conceited marketing to garner attention. To think that these feats alone guarantee their app or product idea success is a significant misconception.
Don’t get me wrong. Does impeccable design, impressive engineering or smart marketing matter to your product? Without a doubt! You need these feats to quickly iterate, learn and grow, but truly in the end, none of these things matter at the core of why someone will pay (or endure advertising) to use your product. People use your product because they believe you created it to solve their specific problem. So build a product along a big river, one you know that solves real problems, and start carving a path (hopefully not too far) for customers to flow in.
I have always been one of those people who believe that the best ideas are the most innovative ones; however, I’ve come to realize that there’s a price to pay when being innovative: the world doesn’t know about you, they don’t understand you. This is why instead of using marketing to talk about yourself and how innovative your product may be, its important to use marketing to tell your customers the story of why you exist to quell their woes. It’s not just because you’re cheaper, or faster, or whatever, but because you exist to make your customer’s life better. Innovative products are built along small rivers or far away from big rivers so you need as many people as possible to understand your story you carve for them to ensure they flow your way.
Is your product idea clever, elaborate, flashy, difficult to master or technically impressive? These may all be red flags your product is a dam, not fork. Want to start a successful startup or have a successful product? Start solving real problems. Carve a path by telling a story. Watch the customers flow in. See where your river takes you.
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