Sebastian Brock

Co-founder at Chattoo • Entrepreneur • Former M&A Lawyer

[sebastianbrock]

How we found our Technical Co-Founder

Finding a technical co-founder for Chattoo was a mission that lasted several months. We have always known that we need our own tech team, and most of a body of experienced people in technology companies (and mobile apps in particular), will tell you that in-house tech is preferable to outsourcing. The reasons for this are obvious at first glance (quick iteration, expense and efficiency), but what is more important in many ways is how much more investable you are with a tech co-founder overseeing the product output.

In the early weeks of Chattoo, finding a tech co-founder came second to product discovery. However, once we began to feel comfortable with the product direction and grew confidence in its viability, we allocated greater energy to the search for an engineer. The process of finding a suitable co-founder – in the knowledge that you can’t get just anyone to be part of your team, no matter how desperate you may be – is incredibly time consuming and there is no magic formula.

How to find your Technical Co-Founder

Trawling the internet yields many stories of others’ success in this area, and advice is available from countless developers who are sick and tired of being offered sweat equity in exchange for the ‘next Facebook’. As a starting point, I would suggest that those of you looking for a tech co-founder save yourselves some time and read an article by Jason Freedman, the co-founder of FlightCaster. Jason argues that you don’t find a tech co-founder, you earn one. In my experience, which I am about to synopsize for you here, that description is completely accurate.

Our Search Process

The first couple of months of our search for a CTO were a trial and error program. Here is a short synopsis of the avenues we pursued, and the results yielded in each case: 

Searches on Elance and Guru - We didn’t want our co-founding developer to be working remotely out of another country, so this was not necessarily the best resource (most developers who responded to our ad placements on Elance and Guru  were based in Eastern Europe or Asia), but we did secure a meeting with a recent Computer Science graduate who lived locally to us in Reading. This guy met with us for around 45 minutes the first time, seemed incredibly keen, then failed to show for the second meeting, refusing to answer emails to boot. Never mind.

Joined CoFoundersLab (CFL) - CFL is where people interested in partnering with other entrepreneurs or start-up enthusiasts can set up profiles and match with other co-founders of appropriate skills and expertise. We had some success making contact with developers who were interested in sweat equity opportunities, but in the UK, the pool of talent on CFL is small. The few profiled engineers based near us were often slow to reply to messages, and no one we made contact with quite met our needs. However, there is a great deal of US-based talent on CoFoundersLab, and I would suggest that those seeking a partner of any kind (whether that be for business development or engineering), set up a profile and start networking on the platform.

Joined selected groups on Meetup – We joined several Meetup groups around London, including this Developers and Entrepreneurs Group, which has over 1,500 members at the time of writing. Among the several meeting groups run by Robert Fenton and his team, a Co-Founder Speed Dating group is available for those minded to take advantage. This is also worth attending for general localized networking. If you are not based in London, there will no doubt be other groups on the Meetups platform that will meet your needs, so the website provides co-founders with a wide (and valuable) networking resource. Nonetheless, we did not personally meet anybody through these groups who we chose to partner with.

Advertised on Work In Startups - Still in Beta phase, Work In Startups is actually a very useful resource. For free, a founder can advertise his or her work opportunity to potential co-founders, including engineers. For our first try at advertising on this site, we had no responses, despite having more than a hundred views. We felt that perhaps the job description was too long-winded, so we posted a much shorter ad, of no more than 2 paragraphs. This approach yielded us more success – we received around 30 applications, though none were suitable in the end.

Joined groups on LinkedIn – We joined several tech, entrepreneur, iPhone and development groups on LinkedIn and searched frequently for people with the requisite experience. We contacted a few of these. To be honest, initiating contact through LinkedIn must be one of the most intrusive ways to contact developers and would-be co-founders – I don’t know how many such messages they receive, but my guess would be quite a lot, so differentiating your opportunity in as few words as possible is difficult. If this is an option you want to try and utilize, make sure that your messages are short and punchy – no waffle.

Contact university students – We contacted some of the most renowned Computer Science departments in the country, including Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, to enquire about first contact with students and recent graduates. The interesting thing about this is that the universities are inundated with offers for their students, and in the case of those three institutions for instance, all the upcoming final year students had accepted jobs for the following year. Even if you are able to get in contact early enough, be aware that in the case of some universities (such as Cambridge), you will be required to provide a donation to the school in return for your introduction to the talent pool. For Cambridge, membership of the ‘Supporters Club’ is £300 for a small start up.

Network warm introductions – This is by far the best way to meet a potential co-founder, and whether by luck or by design, networking on any level can bring about a warm introduction. As it happens, this is how James and I managed to secure the services of Chattoo's new co-founder and CTO.

How we met our Tech Co-Founder and CTO

In our case, we were introduced to our co-founder, Glen Ashley Peterson (also known as GAP), by a mutual friend. At that time, GAP was one of the lead engineers for Zeebox, a well funded social television app. He was informed generally about Chattoo (and us) through our mutual contact, and we were asked to email him our 2-page summary.

GAP’s interest was piqued by the 2-pager, and our first meeting with him was over Skype – we then met in person twice before he committed to Chattoo, by which time we had also shown him the prototype that we had been testing with students (more on this later).  To incentivize such a talent, we offered an equity + payment package which represents a significant reduction in his current pay, but as he explained, there is an excitement about being involved in an early stage start-up that can be particularly attractive. As 'excitement' is a subjective emotion, I suppose one thing that we should have mentioned is that, like everything in business, an ability to sell yourself and your vision is another pre-requisite to obtaining your dream co-founding partner.

GAP begins working with us in January 2014, and it goes without saying that we are very excited to welcome him to the full-time team.

Other Points

There are two things that we did (which I also highly recommend) that are alluded to in the previous paragraph. They are the creation of: 

a 2-page summary that can be sent to your potential co-founder upon receiving a request for further information; and

a prototype, no matter how shoddy, which can adequately demonstrate your product vision. For our prototype, we used Proto.io. 

Our 2-page summary was put together in a very structured way using InDesign - InDesign is a piece of software available at vast expense (for a start-up), but we were fortunate that James has been using it for years by virtue of his graphic design background. If you do not have access to InDesign, this can be put together in Word relatively easily (though less decoratively).

An example of our 2-pager is attached below, for your reference as to structure.

When searching for your own tech co-founder or CTO, the best takeaway is the first one delivered by Jason Freedman at the top of this piece – you have to earn one. My advice is to leave no stone unturned. Work hard, stay patient, and network as much as you can. With hard work, the winning hand will fall your way eventually – a microcosm of entrepreneurialism in general.

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[sebastianbrock]

Marketing Your Product Launch - Recommended Article

One of the most important tasks for a tech business is to identify suitable distribution, sales and promotion channels to help funnel products to end users. Chattoo will (of course) be no different, and I have been looking for viable ideas that will help us to successfully launch and market Chattoo at minimal cost in the future.

Marketing your Startup Launch

Some of the most helpful advice on this topic can be found in this great article by Jeremy Olson, which chronicles how he successfully marketed a Top 10 mobile app called Languages. I found it interesting to learn how Jeremy networked from a position of relative financial and communal weakness to build relationships with the journalists, developers and Apple employees whose influence he felt could contribute to Languages' ongoing download traffic.

I cannot recommend Jeremy's article enough - it will give you some great ideas for your product marketing and inspire you to leverage your interpersonal skills. Sometimes we forget that, like anything, business is about people after all.

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[sebastianbrock]

An update on Chattoo - Product Discovery

Things are starting to sparkle. We have now spent three months talking to students at the University of Reading on a weekly basis, and we have identified two key “energy points” in student nightlife. Those are in:

meeting new people; and

students’ use of SnapChat (in 90% of cases), which was the most commonly used app by students in nightclubs.

Next Steps - High Fidelity Prototypes

We have two ideas arising out of these lessons, and we are now going to devise a fresh set of (just 4) questions that will focus on whether we are on the right track with those thoughts. Our next step after that is to build high-fidelity prototypes to test on students.

Watch this space.

[sebastianbrock]

“A Good Entrepreneur Finds A Way”

Back when I was sourcing funding for MonkeyFind, I had a meeting with an investor and his business partner in London. At the time, inexperienced and slightly naïve, I had been trying to secure funding for MF without a tech team – in fact, much of the funding WAS for a tech team.

Looking back, I don’t think I have ever been so well prepared heading into an investor meeting. We had a detailed plan and analysis for everything; a solid product roadmap, pre-agreed strategic partnerships, a comprehensive revenue model with detailed projections, and a well prepared presentation. I was excited when I sat down in the corner of the investor's open plan office, waiting for him to arrive.

The Meeting

Shortly after being seated, I was told that this (where I was sitting) would be the location for the meeting. There was a couch and two arm chairs, and a fish tank if I recall – but there was nowhere to show my slides. Because the office was open plan, I was so close to other people that I could hold a whispered conversation with several engineers working to my left. It goes to show that in presenting your business, you must be prepared (mentally) to give your pitch anywhere.

The investor then arrives, but shortly after I engage them with the preliminaries, the meeting is cut short. So short, it lasts barely 5 minutes. In a flash, the investor is out of his chair and out of the room. It’s over. Despite all my impenetrable detail, the investor focused on just one thing before exploring any of it: our lack of a technical co-founder. We had partnered with a well-known third party development company, but in his view, that represented poor value for his investment. So out he went.

“A good entrepreneur finds a way"

I remember the business partner stayed around to show me out. I was a little taken aback but asked him why the in-house team (and the technical co-founder) is so important to this investor. After all, I had been told (and you will read in places) that outsourcing your tech is not a massive obstacle to obtaining investment. Given that we had no money, no real connections and no experience of having done this before, I was willing to try anything he might recommend. But the business partner said simply “A good entrepreneur finds a way.” I was then promptly (though politely) shown the door.

I recall this story because now, with Chattoo moving forward in Product Discovery, it is time to bring in a technical co-founder. But he needs to be excellent.

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[sebastianbrock]

Validating our Assumptions - Product Discovery

Ok, we worked hard, conferred with Mike, and came up with a set of questions to ask students that will hopefully validate (or disprove) the market opportunity for Chattoo in its current form.

Product Discovery

The product discovery process can be discouraging. As Mike explained to us (and as Marty Cagan is at pains to point out in his book, Inspired), we can't be married to the idea of Chattoo in its present form. Before our fist session with the students, we resolved not to be disheartened if it became clear there was no market for our idea - this is the purpose of product discovery in the first place. Better to find out now than to waste time building something no one will use.

In the end, it was fortunate that we took this attitude - the students gave answers that made it clear our present vision of Chattoo would not achieve sustainable traction. However, their answers began to give us the clues as to what we SHOULD be building instead.

Approaching People

Armed with our questions (which are detailed at the end of this entry), James and I went to speak to Reading University students for the first time this week.

Positioning ourselves in the two main cafes, I would approach the students and ask if they had time to answer a few questions. I then entered into a dialogue around the questions while James took notes. At first we were recording answers on our phones, but soon this became awkward and was met with scepticism - we continued by hand, conferring afterwards.

It was obvious that the more comfortable students were, the more honest they would be. Some groups gave showy answers that were compromised by self-promotion, but everyone we met was refreshingly open to taking questions (probably in part because the questions were focused on their nights out and having a good time), and this is one of the reasons why a student market is such a good one to cater for. They are open, vibrant, and usually very willing to contribute.

The Art of Asking

Two key points need to be added here. First, it is worth pointing out that our questions were painstakingly analysed before our excursion so they would ‘flow’ from one to the other. However, in real time, written questions don’t always flow naturally – in a conversation with someone (especially in a group of 2 or 3), there are all sorts of thoughts and opinions that lead the conversation to unforeseen areas, but which are often illuminating. What’s more, those apparent tangents may answer questions further down the list, so the questioner must possess good interpersonal skills with a combination  of high concentration and social awareness. Equally, the questioner must make sure not to lead the customer if they are reluctant to engage openly. It's a skill that I am still developing!

The second key point is one impressed upon us by Mike’s brother (who is also a consumer products expert). Always, always, always ask ‘Why?” after each question, so much so that you will need to apologise in advance for having to ask it so much. The point of this is simple – a student may answer “SnapChat” to the question “What app do you use the most on a night out?” but the answer is useless without understanding WHY they use SnapChat so often. A pattern of similar reasons should emerge, helping to paint a picture of what is truly important to students in their use of mobile apps (such as speed, randomness, and connection with people). Equally, you want to know WHY they don’t use certain apps, to get the most useful insight.

Where is the Energy?

The most interesting feedback from students was the prevalence of speed (ease of accessibility) in their favourite apps, and their predilection for random information, fun or interaction. None of the students we spoke to used Facebook or Twitter on a night out, and it became clear that media sharing is the current storming trend - epitomised by SnapChat. This meant that our initial trial concept for Chattoo (a hyper-local Twitter) would not be popular for students in nightclubs, so we have resolved to return to campus each week until a new opportunity comes to light.

For us, there is no doubting the value of this product discovery exercise. We failed to validate the key assumptions of our initial vision, so is there a need for Chattoo in its current form? On balance, from our visits to campus so far, we would think not. However, we are closer to identifying the true emotional hooks that make students do what they do, and we will continue to probe away until a new product opportunity becomes clear.

The Questions

Assumptions we need to prove and the questions we asked

Male or Female/Age/Relationship Status/How often do you go out per week?

Assumption 1:   Students will use an app to talk to new people on a night out

Do you talk to people you don’t know on a night out? [Why?]What makes you talk to people you don’t know? [Why?]

What are your intentions when talking to them? [Why?]

Is there anything that ever holds you back from talking to new people? [Why?]

What circumstances make it easier to talk to new people? [Why?]

On a scale of 1-10, how important is meeting new people on a night out?

Assumption 2:  Students will connect with people they don't know via social media to relay their activities when they're on a night out.

How often do you post or share something on mobile apps while on a night out? (Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp). [Why?]

How often do you check or browse these apps while on a night out? [Why?]

Which apps do you use the most during a night out? [Why?]

What do you post, usually? (Photos, status updates, observations?) [Why?]

How does it make you feel when you post?

What is your intended audience when you post? [Why?]

On a scale of 1-10, how important are your interactions through mobile apps on a night out?

Assumption 3:  Students will use an app to interact with venues when they're on a night out – promotions, competitions, news etc.

Do you ever need (or want) to speak to the promoters or the bar manager? [Why?]

Do you engage with club promoters or bar managers on social media (Twitter, Facebook)? If so, why? And when?

Does the promotion of an event at a club on Twitter or Facebook influence whether you go to that club?

How do you find out about offers or promotions at clubs the moment?

On a scale of 1-10, how important is it that you are aware of all the events that are currently available to you during your night out?

Assumption 4:   The problem of not knowing who is in a venue and how full it is, is a big enough problem to warrant a new service to solve it.

Do you ever wonder who else is going to be out before you go? [Why?]

At the moment, do you do anything to check who is going out tonight? If so, what?

What would drive you not to go somewhere, or to go somewhere else?

On a scale of 1-10, how important is the presence of people you know in determining whether you go or stay there.

On a scale of 1-10, how important is the liveliness of the bar in deciding whether to go in or not?

[sebastianbrock]

Identifying our Assumptions - Product Discovery

You might recall that in my last post, I explained how we had a new short term mission for Chattoo – to find a product guy. 

Mike

Earlier this month we talked to Stuart Lawrence, the former CTO at Lastminute.com, who has been advising us in recent weeks. He believes that we would benefit from talking to one of his associates, Mike*, who was formerly the global head of consumer product at a large multinational. Two weeks ago we went to see Mike in London, and I have to say that it was an eye opener. Chattoo was pulled apart.

Validate Your Assumptions

After explaining the concept to him, Mike was polite in saying that the concept was interesting, but that he could see obstacles in the way that we were asking people (and businesses) to moderately change their behaviour. Notably, he explained that we hadn’t validated our key assumptions - in fact, we hadn't really identified what those key assumptions were. Mike sent us on our way to fill out a start-up canvas which would help to answer the key viability questions relating to Chattoo’s product and business model. The canvas (below, which is a common tool used by start-ups everywhere and is covered in The Lean Startup by Eric Ries), is something we were familiar with and which we were able to complete in a few days.

Our Four Key Assumptions

At a follow-up meeting this week, Mike liked what we came up with. It was clear from the canvas that the expression of Chattoo that would be easiest to test would be the student nightclub version.

Based on the canvas content, Mike helped us to identify the four key assumptions for that expression. The assumptions we settled on were as follows:

Students will use an app to talk to new people on a night out.

Students will connect with people they don't know via social media to relay their here and now activities when they're on a night out.

Students will use an app to interact with venues when they're on a night out – promotions, competitions, news etc.

The problem of not knowing who is in a venue and how full it is, is a big enough problem to warrant a new service to solve it.

Next Steps

Now, we need to devise questions to ask students that will validate (or disprove the validity of) these assumptions. That’s our task this week.

*Mike is a name used in temporary substitute.

[sebastianbrock]

Partner Well

At some point on the mazy road to launch, an entrepreneur will read or be told that she should "partner well" when looking to distribute her product. However, I feel strongly that this advice also applies to business partners – the people you choose to work with can make or break your company.

I partnered with James Harper some time ago, and together we founded Chattoo earlier this year. I have known James for 12 or 13 years, during which time he attended the University of Nottingham to study Physics and became a partner at graphic advertising firm The Harper Partnership. We also travelled the world together in 2008/09, road tripping across America and travelling through Fiji, Australia and Thailand.

James is a designer by trade, which is incredibly helpful to our promotional and product work. However, I don't ever fail to notice that James's mind is capable of things that mine is not.

I am meant to be using this post to give advice, so here it is: You should always partner with people who are unstoppable, hungry and ambitious. But if possible, partner with people who are also smarter than you.

You won't regret it.

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[sebastianbrock]

Get Inspired - We need a Product Guy

Just read Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love, by Marty Cagan, and I am a massive fan.  I am not sure I can recommend this book enough. Cagan, much more than Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, coveys a ‘how to’ work out what to build for customers before spending vasts sums of money and time building v1.0. Cagan’s book describes the art of product management in fantastic detail, and I am sure it will be hugely influential to our product and business development as tech entrepreneurs.

The key takeaways are many, and all carry equal weight with me because much of it is new information to add to my already steep learning curve. I feel that not only do we need to put these lessons into practice, but we need to find a product guy who has the experience to answer the complex questions relating to it.

So, a new mission for Chattoo: Find a product guy.

[sebastianbrock]

Our New Mobile App Idea

We have a new idea for a mobile app, which has evolved from the feedback gleaned from MonkeyFind. It’s called Chattoo, and we’re excited.

In a nutshell, we want to build a mobile application that gives any venue its own social network – we want to focus on sports venues, public events, and nightclubs, which is where the students responding to us on MonkeyFind seem to be suggesting there is a market opportunity. It is interesting that despite the enormous common social interest uniting attendees at such venues, there remains no credible way of connecting with other people in situ to share instance-relevant content.

The Vision

At this early stage, our vision is to solve the information vacuum with dedicated hyper-local social networks that will connect attendees of large social venues to the people, activity and information that make up their here and now. Perhaps we will link users with venue management, giving them access to real time discounts and to content participation that will also enable businesses to build real time relationships with customers. We are going to source some feedback from the business clients we know through MonkeyFind.

And revenue - if there is one thing we learned with the continuing struggles of MonkeyFind, it is that revenue is what pricks up the ears of London-based investors. Rightly, they won't take a risk on something that has no (or unproven) marketable value. For Chattoo, as what we are suggesting is a hyper-local Twitter (of sorts), a good alterntiave is to acknowledge Twitter’s 4% CTR on Promoted Tweets and create an in-stream advertising platform that targets users according to Chattoo-tracked interest and activity graphs. This should deliver true ROI to advertisers - but again, we will need to speak to advertising agencies to see if this is something they would recommend to clients. If so, we will aim to secure letters of intent in due course. 

Great Ideas do not make Great Apps

Questions abound before sourcing funding for this project. What problem does it solve? Will people use it? Are we asking people to change their behaviour? Who are the competitors? What alternative expression of this concept will work in the market (if the concept has legs)? Which demographic is our true target market?

We made the mistake of assuming that great ideas = great apps before. In fact, great problem solvers (or fillers of social needs) make great apps, provided you also have great people executing the strategy behind it.

So our next step is to understand if this concept has legs before we allocate money and time to its development.

[sebastianbrock]

Changing Careers

Right now, I am the CEO of MonkeyFind, a mobile app that enables businesses to create real time discounts to drive local sales. MonkeyFind is moving forward, but more than anything it has been a valuable learning curve that will give us the experience to launch successful products in the future. I will be honest - MonkeyFind has had a slow start, mostly because I am hugely naïve about running a tech business and about launching tech products (which oviously includes mobile apps!). And part of the reason for that naivety is that I wasn’t always an entrepreneur.

Corporate Law

I am a qualified corporate lawyer. In fact, I worked my ass off trying to become one. But the truth is that when I started making my way up the law-career mountain, I was quick to realise the insane monotony and relentless sterility of it all. Maybe it was the 2 weeks of going to the office with the flu, the 9 week stretch spent doing 18 hour days, or maybe it was the weekends spent working on drafting tasks that frankly weren’t that urgent.

I worked at two of London’s Magic Circle firms, and in that time I learnt something: Corporate law is not for creative, independent or efficient people. These are not my words. These are the words of clients; it is how bankers, large corporates and commercial enterprises see lawyers. Because, you see, lawyers are slaves to the clock. And therein lies the problem.

If lawyers actually were uncreative, lacking independence or were short on efficiency, they would never have got where they are. But the view of the client makes it a fact. Because the client, and your work for them, is your life 16 hours a day. And so being treated as a modern slave gives you the complex of one. It makes you follow process, it makes you dull. It (eventually) blunts your creativity and your independence, and your world slowly starts to reward inefficiency.

By way of example, in trying to squeeze a life out of the miserable remains of my social proclivities, I was once given a piece of work late in the afternoon at 5pm, which was simple and easy - I remember this was the first day in weeks that I could possibly leave before 10pm. Knowing the work took an hour to do meant someone might give me more work at 6-6.30, because frankly, who goes home at 6? My desk would be full of stuff the next morning (the boring stuff no one wants to do) if they saw me leave at 6pm. So my brain can't help but think “If I get this done in 4 hours rather than 1, I will probably go home at 9.30pm without interference." I didn't take the inefficient route in the end - I wanted to go out with my friends, and more work was (mercifully) not dumped on me at 6 o'clock. But perhaps you can see the spiralling listlessness, supported by a bravado that is enshrined in the culture – a culture that rewards face time and durability over productivity.

What's so great about being an Entrepreneur?

I could write 100,000 words on why I chose to leave the legal profession and become a tech entrepreneur. But the short of it is that I am a creative person. I had, and continue to have, ideas. The thought of building a concept into a sustainable commercial business invigorates me, like it does other entrepreneurs. That invigoration makes each day something to look forward to – another day when you are able to ambitiously progress something in your ownership.

This is why, when you spend time with entrepreneurs, there is a free-flowing, uninhibited air to them. They are more full of stories and experience, even though at some points that experience might have been a bitter pill to swallow – entrepreneurs are forever beating against the current, trying something different, and with that comes disappointment at times. The prospect of cash rewards will pale in importance to the overall objective, which is to get the thing (whatever it is) off the ground and growing relentlessly, unstoppably. There is no doubt that the satisfaction of being an entrepreneur is in the means, not the ends, and so a sense of fulfilment comes from going through ‘the struggle’. Mostly, we know that you have to strive very, very hard.

It was in July 2011 that I came up with MonkeyFind. By January 2012 I had saved £17,000, secured start-up funding for my new venture, and had let the firm know that I would be gone by the end of February. Workmates called me when they heard the news (“wow, I wish I had the guts to do that” and “I wish I had something else I could do”). Lawyers are an unhappy bunch. But I’m not unhappy any more.

[sebastianbrock]

This New Blog

I am reliably informed that starting a blog with some introspection and explanation is a good thing for my public profile.

I hear the audible sighs and applause filtering from…nowhere. There are no sighs, no applause. No one is reading this.

But I am still going to blog here, and from now on. One day, when we actually accomplish something, perhaps this blog can act as a blueprint of sorts – a blueprint of how to change careers, become a tech entrepreneur, build your own mobile app business, become successful, and teach the rest how you did it. Maybe it will be a source of information for someone. Maybe it can be a comfort to another. Or maybe my friends will just have another reason to laugh at my expense.

All I know is that right now and in the short term, this blog is going to be a reflective blueprint of how to FAIL to create a successful tech business, because right now that’s what’s happening. Maybe hard lessons are needed to focus the mind. Maybe, if I write this now, the pattern will start to shift, as lessons become principles, and principles become a path to success.  

Or maybe I just like talking, even if nobody is listening.