Wade Foster @wadef - Tumblr Blog

The Lost Art of the Soft Launch

In the past two years we've launched a lot of things at Zapier. Whether it was the product itself, big features, or separate products I've grown to love the soft launch.

The soft launch traditionally refers to launching a product to a limited audience in order to work out the kinks. But one thing many entrepreneurs fail to remember is that if you are launching your startup for the first time, the odds of you attracting anything but a limited audience are slim to none unless you have influential friends or a big following via an email list, Twitter, Facebook or some other soapbox.

So the first launch of a product is likely to be a soft launch whether you want it to be that way or not, because it's highly unlikely you'll get in front of a mass audience.

This might be discouraging, but in many ways a soft launch is to your advantage. This week's Startup Edition explores how to launch. And here's why and how I like to do soft launches.

#startups #launching #launch

How To Validate Your Startup Idea - Anti Tom Haverford Style

If you're anything like me or Tom Haverford from Parks and Recreation, you constantly have ideas for new products you'd like to build a company around someday (If you aren't good at finding ideas, check out this article on having good ideas).

Some of those are good ideas and some of those are terrible ideas. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be difficult to identify the good from the bad.

To adapt a quote from John Wanamaker:

"Half my ideas are good, the trouble is, I don't know which half." - Wade Foster, This Blog Post.

So what can you do to figure out what ideas are most likely to generate a viable company and not wind up like Entertainment 720? This week's Startup Edition tries to answer the question: "How do you validate your startup idea?"

#startups #business #ideas

How to Create Routines While Navigating the Maker/Manager Transition

This post is part of Startup Edition 21. Once you're done with this article, jump over to Startup Edition and hear how other entrepreneurs tackle building routines.

If you've been in the startup space long enough, you've likely read Paul Graham's essay on the Maker's vs. Manager's schedules. If not, go read it now.... I'll wait....

Ok, back now?

When you first start your company, you and your co-founders are on the maker's schedule. At some point, if your company grows large enough, you'll likely end up on the manager's schedule (if you've managed to avoid the manager's schedule at a big startup, please do share in the comments, but for now we'll assume the manager's schedule is inevitable).

I've found that building routines isn't too tough when you are on either the maker's schedule or the manager's schedule. Either you wake up each day and be a maker. Or you wake up each day and be a manager. Obviously that's simplifying things a bit, but for the sake of this post we'll go with it.

What is challenging is building routines and making the transition from maker to manager as your startup grows.

As a founder, once your team reaches a certain size, you'll no longer be able to exist solely on the maker's schedule. You'll likely have to devote some part of your week to manager tasks. The catch is, there aren't just three stages:

Maker's Schedule

Maker/Manager Mix Schedule

Manager's Schedule

Rather, the maker/manager schedule is a more of a continuum like this:

So really there is an infinite number of schedules you could be on. And depending on the growth of your company, you might find yourself moving along the maker/manager transition continuum for many months (and maybe longer).

So how can you build routines into your day when your role and the types of activities you perform are constantly changing?

Building Routines During the Maker/Manager Transition

When I first started making the transition from maker to manager I was pretty unsure of myself. I didn't wake up and instantly become a manager. Instead, I clearly had to change my routine some to account for a few managerial tasks, but I still needed to handle most of my maker duties. Over time I got better at it and here are a few things I have learned.

1. Be comfortable with ambiguity.

No one is going to wake up and tell you what to do. The important things will change often. Embrace the ambiguity and get comfortable with the ever-changing nature of your role.

2. Experiment. Try something new.

Don't be afraid to try new things with your schedule. Experimentation may not work, but often times you'll surprise yourself and find something that really works for you. Plus mixing things up keeps your schedule from getting stale.

3. If it's not working, change it.

You'll run into bottlenecks all the time. Every few weeks I realize I have to change something about the way I work because of new people on the team, existing people stepping up and filling old roles or simply slight internal priority changes that require me to achieve something different.

So if that means taking less meetings in the short term to build something or work on a marketing campaign, then I'll restructure my weeks to accommodate for that.

4. Find a way to feel productive.

For someone who has never been on the manager's schedule, it can be hard to recognize what productive is. So it's important to figure out a way for you to feel productive. Whether that's readjusting your expectations of what is possible for you to ship, or simply finding ways to feel good about your team's wins, it will be key to your sanity to recognize that productivity might start to look a little different for you than in the past.

5. Be yourself.

When you start transitioning to a manager's schedule you'll feel a bit lost. The temptation is to look at what other manager's might do and emulate them. Often times that won't be natural to you. Instead focus on finding routines and a schedule that works for you.

A Few Popular Routines

Fortunately, many entrepreneurs are very open about their schedules and routines. Here are some strategies I've tried with varying degrees of success.

1. Try chunking up your time spent making vs. managing.

In a similar post about the maker/manager transition, Buffer CEO, Joel Gascoigne, mentions segmenting his weeks up so that some days are maker days and some days are manager days.

I've found this approach to be particularly helpful for meetings. Lately I try to cram all my meetings in on Friday, though I will use Wednesday afternoons as overflow if necessary. By forcing certain activities into certain time slots it allows you to have days lined up more for meetings and huge amounts of time lined up for making.

2. Try theme days ala Jack Dorsey.

Jack Dorsey, famous for working two eight hours shifts in the same day for his companies Twitter and Square, liked to set up theme days for himself. Each day of the week would be dedicated to something different. Monday is for product, Tuesday is for marketing, Wednesday for team, etc.

I've tried this approach, but found that going a full week without working on a certain part of the product/company can cause bottlenecks for an early stage team. I do like this approach and might try it once we are bigger.

3. Try MITs ala Leo Babauta.

Productivity blogger, Leo Babauta, likes to focus on his Most Important Tasks (MITs) first thing in the morning. This ensures that no matter how hectic or chaotic the day gets, at least your MITs are knocked out first thing in the morning.

This is productivity trick I've had the most success with. Because I'm able to get the most important things done first thing in the morning, in frees up my day to let me move where the action is. It's also a nice way to ensure that I feel productive no matter what happens that day. If my 3 MITs are done. Things are good.

Take Time to Reflect

Lastly, make sure to take time to reflect on how your schedule is affecting your work. Often times it's easy to just keep charging on with what you have been doing. But if you take a step back you might find places where you can work smarter, not harder.

For a brief period of time I tried waking up early since many entrepreneurs tout this as their "secret to success." While I found that I certainly was productive early in the morning, after checking my daily iDoneThis logs it didn't seem like I was really that much more productive. And since waking up early doesn't come naturally to me, I went back to my more moderate schedule.

Ultimately, building routines is unique to you. There are certainly truths about the schedules of certain types of work (i.e. programmers do better with large chunks of time open and managers do better with lots of short meetings), but how you structure your day doesn't fall into a tidy one-size-fits-all mantra.

So I'd love to hear in the comments from the rest of you. How have you handled being a maker and a manager at the same time? What routines have you added to make yourself more productive?

#habits #productivity #startups #routines

How to Raise Money as a First Time Founder

This week’s Startup Edition question: How did you raise money for your startup? Here's everything I wish I knew the first time around.

In September of 2012, Zapier closed our seed investment round of $1.2MM. In May of 2012, I had no idea where to start when it came to raising money for a company or if I even wanted to raise money.

Raising money one time certainly doesn't make me an expert at raising money. But since I'm relatively fresh off of the experience I get asked by first-time founders how they should go about raising money for their startup.

Without further ado, here's my ultimate guide to raising money as a first-time founder - leaning heavily on the experience and advice I've learned from other smart people who understand raising money much better than me.

How to Convince Investors

The first place to start for anyone trying to raise money from angels or VCs is Paul Graham's essay on How to Convince Investors.

The first thing you'll notice about Graham's essay is that it isn't filled with tips or tricks for getting investor's money. Rather, the best way to convince an investor to give you money is to actually be investable. Usually that starts with having a product with some amount of traction, but some people are investable even if they have no product. Usually those aren't first-time founders though.

For the sake of this article, I'll focus on people who are more like me - first-time founders with few credentials to impress many standard tech investors.

When you're a first-time founder everything is new. You might not even recognize traction if you have it. If you aren't sure about the traction that you do have, that can lead to being timid about pitching big name investors who have backed the likes of Facebook or Google. How could you possibly be confident in pitching an investor who has had epic payouts from the biggest names in tech?

Therefore, it's pretty important for you to get comfortable with your own success, however small it might be at the time.

What Does Traction Look Like?

Traction is different for every product. When we went out to raise money, we raised with only a couple thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue. But we had a solid product, strong weekly revenue growth (10% week over week), and two distribution/marketing channels that were already paying dividends. Add a solid vision for the company being able to grow big and it made for a pretty compelling pitch to many investors.

Joel at Buffer was able to raise $400k with a very similar story to ours.

The key ingredient to traction is a launched product, a few months of solid growth (5-7% weekly growth is pretty good early on - growth can be users, revenue, or whatever is valuable for your company), some short term pieces in play for continuing that growth, and a long term story about growing the business into a company with IPO potential.

Surviving Until You Are Ready to Raise

If you aren't ready to get investors yet, then you have to find other ways to survive. The best way to survive is to have customers paying you. But since you don't have traction, we'll assume this isn't the case.

Here's some ways you might survive:

Save up enough money to fund the project full time for a while.

Have a full time job and work nights and weekends to get things going.

Consult/freelance to pay off your expenses and leave the rest of your time for working on your startup.

Cut expenses ruthlessly. You don't need to be in SF or NY to get your startup off the ground. Feel free to have a temporary layover somewhere that isn't so expensive to live.

It's fairly common for companies to have odd arrangements like this early on in their lifecycle.

At Wufoo, Chris kept his full time job to help Kevin and Ryan get Wufoo off the ground.

The StatusPage.io team funded their startup by working one week of consulting followed by three weeks on the startup.

At Zapier, we worked nights and weekends for three months until one-by-one we were able to shift the three of us over to full time Zapier work.

Keeping a startup alive in the early days is all about having a cockroach-like "don't die" attitude.

Using Incubators/Accelerators to Bridge the Gap

Incubators like Y Combinator are certainly a viable route to take to help you move from bootstrapped startup to seed round. The route to getting into an incubator is a bit more transparent and democratic than getting funded, so for a first timer you could have better luck here.

While there is no guarantee of success with an incubator, Y Combinator and a select few other incubators have a great track record of helping their companies secure funding.

For us, this was absolutely true. Had we tried to raise money as a bootstrapped startup in Missouri, I suspect we would have struggled. Additionally, Y Combinator spent one of the final weeks of our batch teaching us how to fundraise. Without that knowledge we likely would have made tons of amateur mistakes when trying to raise money.

You likely should stick to the top tier incubators, though. Few incubators outside of Y Combinator have much of a track record, although I have heard good things about TechStars, 500 Startups and AngelPad. Seed-db has some nice data on it.

Finding Your Investors

Once you're ready to raise money, you actually have to find investors. Many times, investors will come to you though - especially if you're in specific markets that they are monitoring.

Often times this surprises founders who are raising money for the first time. It certainly did me. The truth is, investors, especially VCs are in the business of investing. They have the opportunity to invest in any deal that they've heard about, but if they've never heard about you they'll miss out. Thus, it's their job to hear about every deal.

Seven of our eleven seed round investors had actually reached out to us or known about us in some form or fashion before Y Combinator. Only one of our eleven investors was directly tied to Y Combinator's demo day which is typically the point at which YC companies start fundraising.

That said, there's no need to fear if you aren't hearing from investors. After all, VCs are the most advanced at scouting, and many VCs don't do seed round investing. You'll likely need some angels in the round.

There's a couple places you can find other investors:

Your customers. Often times your customers/users have money to invest or have been running companies that have raised money. Send them a quick email and they might be willing to give intros for you. IDoneThis was able to raise an entire round using this strategy.

AngelList. AngelList is all the rage these days. There are entire posts dedicated to raising money on AngelList. We didn't use it at all to raise money so others are likely better to ask about this strategy.

Your Network. It might take some digging, but I'd bet you can work your way to accredited investors through your own network easier than you might think.

A Note About Introductions

Warm introductions are about the best thing you can get for meetings with potential investors. A warm introduction from a close confidant of an investor can be just the ticket to getting investment.

But be wary about the quality of introduction you are looking for. It's easy to push for an introduction from someone, but you don't want to ask for an introduction from someone who doesn't know you well or believe in the product much. That type of introduction likely isn't going to help, and could potentially sour your relationship with the person you are asking to make the introduction.

A Note About Terms and Terminology

Once you get everything else figured out (product, traction, intros to investors), you still have to figure out the terms at which you want to raise money. This is certainly most confusing part about raising money - at least it was for me. You'll hear terminology getting bandied about left and right about things like convertible notes, capped vs. uncapped, stock option pools, board observer rights, maturity dates, priced equity. Almost all of that was foreign to me.

I was lucky enough to have Y Combinator, the partners, and my batchmates walk me through a lot of this. But there are still some things you can pick up on your own. The best place to start is with Brad Feld's book, Venture Deals. It's a bit dense, but it's a great place to start to at least learn all the terminology.

From a pure numbers standpoint, the most talked about bits between founders when raising money are how much are you raising? And what is the convertible note cap?

It seems these days that most startups raise their seed round with convertible notes. A convertible note is actually a debt instrument that converts to equity upon certain events occurring (usually a series A financing event). The cap simply refers to the maximum valuation that the seed investor's money will convert at when the company reaches a series A financing event. There's a lot more information around the web on these topics, so Google around. You'll have to wade through all the VC jargon and contract legalese, but you'll come out on the other side with a better understanding of how the money aspect or raising capital works.

Lastly, it's probably smart to look over some standard documentation that a lot of startups use. I'd suggest reading through the standard Series AA Equity Financing Documents put together by Y Combinator and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. If you understand those docs, then you're in a good starting position.

Wrapping It Up

Raising money isn't something a startup does on a whim. It's usually the result of months of work to build the foundation of their company and to reach some level of traction - especially for first time founders.

If I had to sum up the entire fundraising process for a first time founder into a few bullet points they'd be:

Identify a problem

Launch a solution

Grow to get some traction

Figure out how much money you'll need

Get intros to investors

Expect some "Nos" - and maybe a lot

Close as fast as you can

Get back to work

The final thing I'd suggest is that when you go out to raise money, devote at least one co-founder's full attention to fundraising. If after one month of full time fundraising he/she hasn't been able to raise money, consider whether you've hit a product/market fit yet. It's probably best to get back to work on the product and try raising money again in a few more months.

#startups #fundraising #how to

The Customer Is Always Right... Except When They Aren't

A few months ago we implemented a fancy form on Zapier to help us collect better information from our customers about their requests of us. Over the course of nearly two years of operations we had a pretty good idea about the typical buckets that a customer's request will fall under.

One of the major buckets? Features requests.

In fact, over the last few months we've had almost 1,000 new feature requests that were explicitly marked by the customer as feature requests. That doesn't include requests that were actually feature requests, but marked under a different bucket by the customer.

So how does one go about balancing that many feature requests with the long-term vision of a product? This week's StartupEdition digs into that topic.

#startups #customer experience #customer service #product development

Building a Blue Collar Company in a White Collar Industry

A few weeks ago there was an excellent interview in the NY Times about all the data Google had crunched about their internal hiring process.

There were a few interesting insights, namely that test scores and GPA were fairly poor indicators of success at Google:

One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless.

So if all that is worthless, what actually works when hiring?

What Works For Hiring at Google?

What Google found to work well was behavioral interviews, where you ask a candidate a question about a time in their life when they did X. The example given is:

Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.

Google is searching for some details about how the person behaved in past situations to get a sense of how they operate and what they think is important.

But I think if you really boil it down, what Google found is that the people who tend to work best are those that can flat out get stuff done.

Knowing this, what can a startup learn from Google about finding and hiring strong employees and teammates?

Finding Blue Collar Work Ethic in White Collar Work

While there certainly are some more traditional blue collar startups these days, what usually comes to mind when you think of a startup is an early stage tech company solving problems in white collar industries.

In most white collar industries there tends to be a strong desire for people with high pedigrees. Think strong G.P.A. from elite ivy league schools and strong work background at the hottest companies out there.

While there certainly are a lot of highly skilled people who would be a great fit for your startup with this background, the truth is, these people are the hardest to recruit because the competition to hire them is so fierce.

And many times you'll end up hiring someone who isn't a great fit simply because their flashy resume is what catches you and miss out on the fact that most of what they have achieved is simply smoke and mirrors.

So rather than chase after these highly sought after candidates who traditionally seem like great fits, I've found early success with candidates who have more of a blue collar attitude towards work.

What Does Blue Collar Mean?

Blue collar work is traditionally associated with working class individuals who are involved with manufacturing, machine work and other manual or labor intensive tasks.

While your startup likely doesn't include manual labor, there are still traits typically associated with blue collar workers that work well in a startup.

1. A Tendency to Get Stuff Done

Blue collar work is typically associated with building something. At the end of the day your progress is measured by how much of X you've shipped.

In a startup, it's easy to get distracted by fanciful talks of strategy or market opportunities. All that is nice, but at the end of the day, you need people who are going to ship 500 lines of code or land 20 new customers.

2. No Fancy Pedigrees

Blue collar workers aren't known for what fancy certificates they have or what awards they've won. Instead it's about showing up to work every day, helping out your teammates, and making sure the job gets done.

In a startup, you'll want people who know their stuff. But good people come in all shapes and sizes. They might come from a state college instead of an ivy league school. Or they might be self-taught with a budding side project, rather than having years of experience in their domain. Don't mistake credentials with ability.

3. An Affection for the Work

Blue collar workers develop a love for the work. Consider any episode of the popular Discovery Channel show, Dirty Jobs, and you'll find people passionate about doing jobs that no one else wants to do. These people aren't looking for fame, fortune, or glory. They simply have pride in doing the best job possible.

In a startup, you don't want people who are "looking to do a startup." You want people passionate about the work being done. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't have ambition, but their ambition isn't ambition for ambitions sake (after all ambition can definitely be a good thing). Instead, it's coupled with a love of their craft and the desire to serve customers.

Real Life Examples

There are lots of examples of companies who work in more traditional white collar industries, but bring a blue collar attitude to work.

1. Veterans United

Back in Columbia, Missouri, a town not traditionally known for being a tech haven, Veterans United has built a mortgage powerhouse on the backs of savvy internet marketing and consistent effort day in and day out.

Founded in 2002, they've now grown to over 1800 employees without raising a single dime from investors. In addition, they've raised over $6MM for the Veterans United Foundation, which is their in-house charity serving veterans and their families.

A lot of their success stems from their passion for helping veterans and from their dedication to improve the company just one small bit every day.

2. Early 2000s Oakland A's

Switching gears to sports, the early 2000 Oakland A's used statistical methods to find players who were traditionally undervalued in order to compete with major market clubs who had as much as 4 times the salary budget to work with.

Their success sparked a book, a movie, and, more importantly, a revolution in how major league baseball teams are constructed.

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, there's a lot of talent, skill, hard work and determination if you look in places where others aren't traditionally looking. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to work with others who, based on traditional measures, would be an awesome employee, it simply means that if your back is up against the wall, consider finding an underdog who can fight up a weight class.

So next time you're looking to add someone to your team, consider skipping the silly puzzles and look more at the persons ability to get things done. A blue collar attitude goes a long way.

Photo Credit: vonderauvisuals

#startups #hiring #culture

How to "Pick the Brains" of Busy People Without Them Even Knowing It

Busy people often get requests from advice seekers for "coffee" or "to pick their brain" for just 15 minutes. It's a tough request for a busy person because often they really would like to help, but many times they are simply too busy to fulfill these request. Also, often times they've been burned by helping someone out, who then progresses to do nothing with that knowledge.

It's this type of request that drives awesome people like Dharmesh Shah to write posts like this basically turning down all advice seekers which is really unfortunate for when you are searching for advice on a topic that for whatever reason (confidential info, competitive reasons, personnel issues, etc) can't be summed up in a tidy blog post.

So if you genuinely need help about a topic, you can't find the answer somewhere online, and you know for certain that INSERT_BUSY_PERSON is the right person to answer the question, then how are you supposed to make it happen if the default answer is no?

Simple: Interview the person.

Why Interviewing Works

If you have a place to publish content (and who doesn't these days), send a short email to said person and offer to interview the person and offer to publish it and then promote it.

People will rarely say no to interview requests because it helps them promote them or the products and services they have to sell.

Even Neil Patel, who gets about 4 interview requests a week, never says no to an interview request. Also, Neil used this tactic early on when his blog wasn't popular and was able to spin it into lots of great content for his site.

This works because it shifts the purpose of the interaction. Instead of your trying to take knowledge from a busy person in the form of "picking their brain", you are offering something of value to the busy person in the form of promotion. The tables are completely turned.

Now during the interview you can simply ask the questions you were curious about knowing the answers to and you'll have successfully "picked their brain" without them ever realizing that's what happened.

Some Other Thoughts on Interviews

All this said, there's a few things to keep in mind when using this tactic.

You might have questions that the busy person won't be willing to disclose publicly. This is fine. Offer to keep that portion of the interview off the record so you still have an opportunity to learn from them.

Make sure to actually release an interview. The last thing a busy person wants is to get interviewed and then only find out this was a cheap hack to take up their time.

Make sure to promote like crazy when you release the interview. Make the busy person you interviewed feel loved and awesome. Believe it or not, even influential people have egos and love to hear other people talk about them. This will make it more likely that you can get more interviews in the future.

This creates good will. You are helping them, they are helping you. This creates a nice feeling of good will between all parties involved. The alternative is you owe the busy person some social debt for taking up their time.

Other Ways to Make This Work

If this sounds like work, that's because it is. Some other strategies you can use that might work, but may not be as successful.

Spray and pray: The standard strategy is to just cold email and hope someone is kind enough to offer their time. Sometimes you can get lucky and this will work.

Pay them: Many people can be hired if you offer them a sufficient enough wage. This can be really expensive depending on the person though. And many busy people already have something going on and aren't going to be hired away for even a short period of time.

Arrange a call: Dan Martell's new startup, Clarity.fm, lets you arrange a call with domain experts that charge by the minute. If the person you want to chat with is listed there, this is a pretty time/cost effective way to get advice.

Try It Out

Next time you're curious about "picking someone's brain" consider giving this a try. If you're nervous about doing an interview for the first time or feel uncomfortable making the request feel free to test it out on me (contact me using the form at the bottom of the page).

If you have other tricks you used to learn from busy people, I'd love to hear them. Drop a note in the comments so others can learn too.

Photo Credit: Bill Selak.

#startups #interview #advice #getting started #mind hacks #life hacks

The Founder's Dilemma: Personal Blog or Company Blog?

It's pretty common these days for founders to have a personal blog where they write about personal and professional experiences and lessons learned.

But as soon as you start a new company you now have two places to write: the company blog and your own personal blog.

And since most founders aren't oozing with spare time, it becomes a constant issue figuring out where to publish that next post you write.

Do you instantly drop all your writing on your personal site in order to jump start the company blog? Or do you not worry about your company blog at all in favor of keeping up a regular schedule with your personal site readers? Or do you split the middle somewhere?

This might seem like a trivial decision, but if you suspect that content marketing might be a major part of your marketing plan in the future it's worth thinking through the pros and cons.

So let's get started...

A Quick Note on Assumptions

This article mostly focuses on early stage startups composed of just the founders or the founders and a few key teammates.

Any team size bigger than that and you'll likely be able to execute a strategy that allows you to post routinely on both the company blog and your own personal blog.

A smaller team is much more constrained on time. Things like customer development and product development will eat up the lion's share of time and effort. Therefore, there are a lot more trade-offs that need to be made with marketing efforts, so we'll operate from the assumption that you may not have enough resources to pull off the perfect content strategy on day one.

Why Your Company Blog Should Win

The goal of a company blog can vary from company to company, but generally the purpose is to help generate leads for the company's core product.

Here are some reasons why you should consider publishing on the company blog over your own site:

1. The Company Comes First

You started a company so if you want the company succeed you should do your best to increase the likelihood that your company can generate leads. Generally having more content on your site can only help that.

Noah Kagan, founder of AppSumo, has a great post about how he was let go from Facebook because he put himself above the company.

2. Increases the Company's Value

Having a greater following for the company helps build value for the company no matter what happens to you. If the value of the company is completely tied up in yourself, then you're hurting the long term prospects of the company.

Rand Fishkin, from Moz, shares an article on the merits of his flashy yellow shoes with respect to the value of his company.

3. Jump start the Company's Site

A fresh site always needs some love. One of the fastest ways to get the Google juices flowing is with fresh content. A blog is one of the easiest ways to generate fresh content on a routine basis and start getting the some love from the search giant.

Why Your Personal Blog Should Win

The goal of a personal blog is much more broad and is generally up to you as the author. You could attempt to generate leads for the company, but you also have more freedom to expand out and touch on topics that are more interesting to you personally.

1. You Can Write About Anything

We'll maybe not quite anything, but a personal blog does provide much more flexibility on the content you can write about.

With a company site you have to stick to your niche most of the time or else your readers won't be as interested.

With a personal site you can write about what you had for lunch if you really want to do so. You don't have to worry as much about being controversial or putting your customers on the line if you say something not quite right.

Neil Patel, blogger at QuickSport, has a well-crafted guide on business blogging, but it also touches on the flexibility you have with personal blogging as well.

2. Personal Sites Resonate More Than Corporate Sites

Anecdotal evidence suggests that posts on my personal blog have done better than they would have on the company site. I suspect it's because it's much easier for readers to put a face to the writing than it is with a company blog.

Additionally a corporate blog comes with the silent, but understood fact that there is an agenda at play: to sell something. With a personal site that's less likely the case.

What Wins for Me

When I first started the Zapier blog it definitely felt more like an extension of three individuals (me and my two co-founders, Mike and Bryan). Pretty much any writing we had went up on the Zapier blog simply because we didn't have time to build the product, write on the Zapier blog and keep up with personal sites.

And since the three of us didn't have strong personal brands there wasn't much we could use our personal blogs for with respect to Zapier other than for a tiny bit of link building. So we simply choose to publish what little content we could generate on the Zapier blog rather than our personal sites.

Over time that philosophy has changed slightly. We've found that by narrowing the focus of the Zapier blog, it has become more successful. Now, we focus only on high quality, lengthy articles that teach people how to automate really frustrating parts of their job (i.e. how to handle resume overload when hiring). It also helps that we're twice the size, which leaves a bit more time for writing.

This new strategy allows us to save the more generic lessons-learned type posts for our personal sites.

This gives us more freedom when writing and allows us to focus on the things we really care about. Additionally, since there is such a clear cut definition about what a good post for the Zapier blog looks like, it's obvious where a post will be published when it's ready. No more "should we I post here or should I post there?" quandaries.

I know I'm not the only one who struggles with the personal vs. company publishing dilemma so let us know how you handle this in the comments or via Twitter.

#startups #founders #blogging #content

4 Shortsighted Startup Legal, HR and Accounting Mistakes

When you start a company it's usually just you or just you and a/some co-cofounders. Because you're the only person working for the company, it's pretty easy to play it fast and loose with some things like accounting, payroll and health insurance. After all, you aren't making money and you aren't spending money. It's just you with a laptop, putting in the hours to build a product.

But once you start to get some traction that all changes. You'll start making money, spending money, hiring employees and contractors and maybe raising some money. It's an exciting time because you've got a real business on your hand.

But the transition comes with its fair share of landmines to watch out for. Here are some of the ones I've personally maneuvered through - some successfully and some less successfully.

1. Not Getting a Good Lawyer

Lawyers are expensive. All of them. Good or bad, a lawyer is going to cost you money. But finding one you can trust and that will take the time to understand your business is going to save you a lot of time, hassle, and money in the long run. A great one will even be a trusted business partner, help you grow your business and take care of issues you didn't even know about before they hit your desk.

So try not to get sticker shock when you start seeing $400/hr or $700/hr price tags. Instead spend some time interviewing a few lawyers and find one that fits the way you work and understands your business. This will take time and feel like a waste of valuable hours you could have used building or selling your product, but if you don't take the time to do it right, it'll end up costing you a lot more later.

2. Doing the Books Yourself

Unless you were an accountant in a previously life (and even then this is still probably good advice) you shouldn't be doing your books. There are loads of great accountants in the United States and it won't cost too much money for a part time or outsourced bookkeeper. Like a good lawyer, they'll take care of the boring, mundane and routine tasks of keeping the books and making sure you're all square with the government so that you can focus on building the business.

3. Outsource Your Benefits/Payroll to a Startup

There are a lot of startups trying to disrupt the traditional benefits, payroll and hr functions of a business. Usually through different business models, cheaper offerings or better software. Plus as a startup, it feels great to support a fellow startup.

Resist the temptation.

Often times these startups don't have enough experience to understand all the rules, regulations and circumstances that a company might experience. This often leads to late penalties and fines. I personally caught a $3000 dollar mistake and then spent 15 hours fixing it.

If your situation is standard, then this might work out ok, but if there's anything at all you might be doing that's slightly different it's better to go with the bigger company that's got most everything figured out already. Like a good lawyer, an experienced benefits/payroll provider will know the ins-and-outs of all the state and federal rules and regulations and will take care of problems you didn't know even existed.

4. Ignoring This

You're good at building product. You're good at marketing. You hate the obnoxious paperwork and bureaucracy involved with having a "proper company". It's easy to just ignore all this stuff and stay huddled in your code cave and keep shipping product.

95% of the time that's exactly what you should be doing. But there is a certain cost of doing business and lawyers, accountants, and other service providers that help you stay in line with government regulations and protect your business from unknown risks are just a fixed part of that cost. Don't try to skimp here and don't ignore it.

Plan for the 5% of your time you'll need to spend managing your company affairs once you reach this stage in your company. Ignoring this will create a "business debt" (not debt in the sense of owing money, but in the sense that things haven't been kept in order) that will just get bigger the longer you put it off. Like code debt, it's understood that you can and likely will have some business debt, you just don't want too much or you'll never get out of it.

Wrapping It Up

Each of the above mistakes I made happened because of a couple circumstances.

These are areas I'm not super experienced with.

These areas aren't cheap to support from a pure dollars standpoint.

These are areas of the business I'm not excited to work on.

Those three items combined, created a situation where I wanted to spend as minimal time and money as possible so I can get back to work, which in hindsight is a recipe for disaster.

I suspect many founders are similar to me in this respect, so learn from my mistakes. Think about supporting the business for the long term. Once you've got the company to a certain size where you are making money, spending money, and employing people it's best to spend a little bit of extra time and money to preserve what you've already built.

Photo Credit: John-Morgan

#startups #hr #legal #accounting #mistakes #learning

The Anatomy of a 1,000 Page View Blog Post

At the beginning of the year I started writing on this site and have managed to publish 21 posts. Of the 21 posts, 7 have been viewed over 1,000 times so I thought it would be fun to do a deep dive and see if we could dissect what exactly makes a 1,000 page view blog post.

Why 1,000? Because a 1,000 page view post is achievable by anyone, but still large enough that it could be seen as a challenge. Plus it's a nice round number.

So lets jump right in...

Who am I?

First lets dig into me and my following online. The quantity and engagement levels of your following will play a big role in how often your site gets visited, so it's important to know what you're starting with.

Twitter

Currently I have just over 1,000 Twitter followers. Using Followerwonk, by the fine folks over at Moz, we see some interesting things about my followers.

For instance, we can see that my followers have a median follower count of 439 followers, but an mean follower count of 5,583. So any retweet from a follower could reach probably around 500 people. But if the right person retweets my post, it could potentially reach thousands more people.

Facebook

I tend to be much more private on Facebook. I have 405 friends, many of which are from high school and college and are not very engaged with startups and other topics that I choose to write about.

That said, I do have a subset of startup founders that I am friends with that could be a potential audience for my writing.

Like Facebook, I don't spend a ton of time on LinkedIn. Unlike Facebook, my LinkedIn connections can be a good target for my writing. I currently have 632 connections on LinkedIn. Most of which come from a few select communities I've been involved in.

Using InMaps from LinkedIn we can see the main followers come from these groups:

College (Dark Blue)

Email Marketing World (Dark Orange)

Startup People in my home town - Columbia, MO. (Green)

Veterans United - an old job (Pink)

A Private Founders Group (Light Orange)

Y Combinator (Light Blue)

Silicon Prairie (Maroon)

Random (Gray)

A few of those groups are well engaged on LinkedIn (Startup Columbia people and YC) while the others aren't.

Google Plus

I spend the least amount of time here and usually just repost articles. As a result I'm only in 98 people's circles. Definitely a week spot in terms of audiences I can tap into.

Random

I also have a decently successful startup, Zapier, and went through Y Combinator, which gives me a little bit of clout, but not as much as you might think.

I also have several hundred subscribers to this blog now, but two months ago had nothing. Reader subscribers via RSS or Email is definitely an effective way to distribute content.

Summary

So as you can see, I'm not starting from completely nothing, but there are also many people who have a much larger and more engaged following than me. If you don't think your online following plays a role in the quantity of visitors coming to your site, then you're deluding yourself.

The Analysis

With a look at my online following out of the way, let's dig into the analysis. Here are the seven posts that generated 1,000+ visits an their visit count as of the published date.

How My Co-founder’s Dog Boosted My Productivity - 12,469 visitors

Are You Really Sure You’re Ready to Start a Startup? - 6,917 visitors

Full Stack Marketing - 4,410 visitors

How to Say Thanks And Improve Your Launch Day Success - 2,483 visitors

Startups: You Should Value Software More - 1,955 visitors

Focus, Cadence and Shipping - 1,421 visitors

How to Get a Job at an Early Stage Startup - Non-Technical Version - 1,334 visitors

Top Referrers

A quick analysis of these posts shows one thing: Hacker News plays a big role in all of these posts.

Hacker News is also often the spark that lights the fire for later traffic. For instance, the post about my co-founders dog got picked up by Lifehacker only after the post spent significant time on the HN home page. Same goes for the post about starting a startup that was picked up by the Startup Digest Reading List.

So what happens to posts that don't get traffic from Hacker News? Ironically, the posts do get less non-Hacker News traffic, but it's not that much less.

For instance, compare the non-HN traffic for an average HN Post vs. an average non-HN post. Let's choose Startups: You Should Value Software More vs. 23 Things That Don’t Matter When Starting a Startup and 2 Things That Do.

The difference between the non-HN traffic for these two posts is only about 200 visitors. But the HN traffic drives a huge disparity in total visitor count.

[Editor's Note: I tried to come up with chart here, but ran out of time.]

Social Shares

While HN is definitely the strongest indicator of a 1,000-visit post, social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn play a sizable role as well, so let's take a look at the social shares on the 4 major social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus) to see what they look like for each of the posts.

As you can see Twitter generates the lion's share of social sharing. The interesting thing is that when you run correlations for traffic, it looks like this:

Facebook: 0.83

Twitter: 0.57

Google Plus: 0.33

LinkedIn: 0.05

Facebook has a much higher correlation with traffic, which seems to indicate that a single Facebook Like will drive more traffic than a share from other social outlets. Obviously, this may be different for you since there isn't any statistical significance and there is no proof that your social profile will match mine.

Content Length vs. Traffic

Another interesting bit to check is the content length vs. traffic. A quick look shows that all posts we're at least 500 words long and most are longer than 1000 words.

Long form content has been preached by many internet and content marketers as more effective at gaining readership and in my experience that has played out to be true.

Also, I should write more posts that are exactly 510 words long.

Content Length vs. Social Shares

Similar to the correlation numbers I ran for traffic vs. social shares, I ran correlations for content length vs. social shares.

LinkedIn: 0.55

Google Plus: 0.38

Twitter: 0.04

Facebook: -0.20

Interestingly enough, the results are the exact opposite for content length as they are for traffic when correlated with social shares. Facebook even has an inverse correlation.

That said, the low volume of shares and traffic make the LinkedIn and Google Plus results tough to trust.

Looking at this, I'm not so sure content length has much correlation with social shares, but if there is, there's still likely other parameters that play a bigger part in generating social shares than the length of the content.

How to Generate Posts With 1,000 Visits

So knowing all this, here's how I'd go about generating a post to get 1,000 visits.

Link Aggregate Sites

Sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Stumble Upon are all known for generating huge amounts of traffic. In my case that still holds true.

It's worth finding a couple of these types of sites for your niche and becoming familiar with the audience and how they work.

That said, these sites are all difficult to get featured on. Usually the crowd needs to vote up your article until it reaches the home page or until it will be featured. While it's certainly possible to game the sites so you can get featured, it likely isn't worth the short term reward for one post. Better to spend time on the sites as a thoughtful contributor, then, over time, your posts will get more love.

Build Up a Social Presence

Do your best to generate a larger presence on Twitter, Facebook, etc. so that when you have new articles to share, you'll have a bigger audience to share to.

Also, make sure the audience you are sharing with can help amplify your content. Sheer numbers doesn't guarantee success. You need followers that have audiences of their own, too.

This single tweet from Rand Fishkin single-handedly ensured that the Full Stack Marketing post found a wider spread audience.

The 21 Skills of a "Full Stack" Marketer: wadefoster.net/post/428021766… solid list

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) February 13, 2013

Retain an Audience

While this didn't show up in the numbers when looking at individual posts, one thing I have noticed is a steady uptick in traffic via my email list and RSS feeds. This is likely due to consistent blogging over time.

I would do my best to make sure that each post tries to convert a reader into a potentially longer-term reader via email, but if not email then through RSS, Twitter or some other format.

This makes it a lot easier to generate 1,000 visit posts over time since you already have a built-in audience to promote to.

A Word About Sample Size and Statistical Significance

This was a short analysis of just 7 posts on my site. While some interesting trends are starting to emerge, it is by no means statistically significant.

If a larger site with years of data were to do a similar type analysis, it would be much easier for them to demonstrate some level of statistical significance. Unfortunately I would expect many larger sites that have been around longer are capable of generating 1,000 visits with every single post simply by pressing publish so that analysis would likely be less useful for the beginner writer.

Conclusion

At the end of the day there's probably many ways to get to 1,000 visits on a post, but there definitely seems to be a few patterns amongst the posts that consistently hit the mark.

Any tips or tricks you've found to hit the magic 1,000 mark?

#startups #blogging #content #analytics

How to Pick the Right Tool for the Job

This post is part of this week's Startup Edition to answer the question: What tools do you use at your startup?

Over the last two years I've personally tried hundreds of web and mobile applications. On a weekly basis I'm working with and supporting over 200 web services.

As a result I know that what Salesforce calls "custom objects", Sugar CRM calls "modules", Zoho CRM calls "modules" and Podio calls "items." I can name obscure features of popular and not-so-popular web applications. And I can do a lot of it from memory.

Bottom line is if you want to play Web Application Trivial Pursuit with me, you better bring your "A" game.

You're probably wondering what good this could possibly do me?

Well, as the founder of a integrations company I get asked on a daily basis "what is the best X?" where X could be CRM, project management tool, invoicing app, organization app, you name it.

Essentially, it's my job to know this stuff (though I also have a weird affixation with trying out web software...).

So this is my definitive guide for how I go about choosing what web software to work with.

So without further ado here are the 11 questions you should ask when trying to solve a problem with software.

Question 1: What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

The problem you are trying to solve is NOT "I don't have a CRM."

Not having a CRM isn't a problem. It's entirely possible you have no reason to have a CRM. So first, identify what your real problem is.

A real problem could be having too many resumes to sort through or needing to develop a repeatable sales process.

Those are real problems. Good software is part of the solution. The absence of software is not a problem in and of itself. If not having software feels like a problem, there is likely another root problem you are trying to solve.

Question 2: If the Problem is Solved, What Value Do You Get?

In a perfect world, what happens to your life when the problem is completely solved.

Does revenue go up 20%? Do you get to spend more time with a spouse and kids?

If you know what the results of a good solution are, then you'll know when you've solved the problem. You can then work backwards to make sure that whatever solution you put in place will cause you to get the value you want to get.

Question 3: How Important is it to Solve the Problem?

Similar to question two, it's important to know how important it is. If it's not all that important, then you shouldn't spend much time trying to find a solution (or maybe you should abandon finding a solution completely).

Question 4: What Ways Can I Solve the Problem?

There are likely many ways to solve any potential problem. Software is just one potential way.

Often times the best solutions may not involve software at all. A good solution could simply involve a behavioral change. Ryan Hoover outlines on the iDoneThis blog how simply changing the location of his vitamins caused him to actually start taking them. No fancy, vitamin, scheduling taking software required.

If you have to solve the problem with software, I always try to solve it with software I already have. If I can work it into my current tool set the odds that I continue to use it will go way up. The more tools you use the less likely a new one is to stick.

A good example is over the last few months our head of support, Micah, noticed that Twitter support questions had gone up substantial. Rather than find a dedicated Twitter help desk, he wanted to funnel Twitter support into our current helpdesk, Help Scout. That way support could stay in one place.

So he setup a single Zap that pulls in mentions of Zapier from Twitter. Then with one click he can respond in Twitter. Simple, fast, easy solution to what could have been a more troublesome problem.

Question 5: If You Need a New Tool, What Are Your Options?

Sometimes a new tool is exactly what you need. There just simply won't be something in your existing tool set and the external options will be so good that a new tool is exactly what you need.

So how can you find good tools for the job? Here are some of my favorite resources:

Google: Many times a quick search will turn up what I need.

Quora: Quora has tons of threads where people are already asking questions about web applications and tools to solve certain problems.

Web Apps Stack Exchange: Similar to Quora, but the answers are much more solution driven which is helpful when you need an answer to something specific.

Best Vendor: Best Vendor has list of web applications for anything and everything. It's a great way to uncover cools apps you may have never heard of.

Your Network: Simply asking around on Twitter, Facebook, and to specific experts via email can uncover tools you may not have known existed.

Once you have a list of a few applications that might solve your problem it's time to test them out. It's always helpful to test them all at the same time if possible. If it isn't possible, you might try one for a short time and then another for a short time.

The rest of the questions cover how you evaluate specific software.

Question 6: How Fast Does the Tool Solve Your Problem?

Most of us want problems solved quickly. An argument can be made that sometimes slower leads to higher quality, but all things equal I'd rather have something today than in one month.

Products that let you sign up for free trials without having to contact a sales team have a huge leg up since they let you at least try a tool on day one.

If a product requires teammates to be useful, then getting teammates onboard fast is a plus.

If a product requires external data sources, then being able to pull in external data is a plus.

Look for tools that let you solve your problem rather than just promise to solve your problem...just right after this quick demo.

Question 7: How Flexible is the Tool?

Can you bend the tool to your will? Does it have integrations with other key products that you use? Is it going slide neatly into your current workflow? Does it have browser extensions or a mobile view that helps you access what you need and when you need it?

A flexible tool that fits nicely in your workflow is more likely to solve your problem than one that isn't.

Question 8: Is it Under Active Development?

Some tools are feature complete and likely won't be getting any better. This is fine if the tool solves your problem out of the box. If it doesn't, it's worth knowing whether active development is happening.

Many services have an active change log that shows new features. Or check in a vendors customer support forums to see if new stuff is coming. At Zapier we keep an active updates blog that logs all our new services, triggers and actions so that users can easily find new stuff. Most companies under active development do the same.

Question 9: What is the Status of the Company Behind the Software?

If this is a major problem for you, then you should know the likelihood that the vendor will stick around. If the product is completely free with no business model in sight, then that can be a red flag for the companies long-term sustainability.

Is the company providing strong support? If this the type of product that could be mission critical, you'll likely want a support line to reach out to if an issue arises.

Question 10: How Much Fun is it to Use?

If you have fun using a tool, it can set itself apart. People like to work with tools that get them excited. Tools that don't get them excited are likely to fall by the wayside.

A great example is a tool like Sqwiggle vs. Skype or Google Hangouts. At Zapier, we are a distributed team. Sqwiggle is plain fun because we can replicate the water cooler effect. Skype and Google Hangouts are functional, but not particularly fun to use.

Question 11: How Much Does it Cost?

There's a reason that cost is last. Many companies undervalue software. A piece of software that solves a problem is likely going to more than make up for it's cost.

Rather figure out if the tool solves your problem. If the answer is yes, then figure out if the cost of solving that problem is worth it. Many times the answer is a definitive "yes" or "no". If it's a maybe, then you can test most software for a month or two and you'll likely have a definitive "yes" or "no" by the end of the next few months.

Wrapping Up

Remember, not having software isn't a problem. Software is a solution to an existing problem. So when you think you need some new software, dig in and figure out what problem you are really trying to solve and then go out and find a tool, a process, or a system to solve that problem.

Want to learn about the tools other people use at their startups? Check it out in this week's Startup Edition.

#software #tools #SaaS #automation

Are You Really Sure You're Ready to Start a Startup?

In early 2013 I found myself shopping for a lawyer yet again. At the time, it was the fourth lawyer I'd hired in the last year. This time it was to help settle my mom's estate.

I've come to appreciate the work that good lawyers do, but I still don't particularly enjoy very many interactions with one. Perhaps it's the price tag or perhaps it's the verbose language and lack of clarity in their writing and the law, but working with lawyers has a way of wearing on you.

In October 2011 if you'd have asked me if I was ready to start a startup the answer would have been a definitive: Heck Yeah!

In May of 2013 the answer is still a definitive "Yes!", but I'd be lying if I said there wasn't any doubt.

Stuff Happens

Before starting Zapier, my personal life had been pretty cushy. Good health for me and my family. Enough money to let me do whatever I needed to do.

Turns out past occurrence isn't predictive of the future.

Since Bryan, Mike and I started Zapier here's timeline of non-Zapier related, but very difficult situations to deal with.

Note: I don't tell you this stuff to make you feel sorry for me/us. I certainly don't feel sorry for myself. I merely want to illustrate that life does happen while working on a startup.

Mike and close family member's cancer scare

My dad passing away

Dealing with multiple lawsuits from my dad's businesses

Bryan's father in-law passing away

Each of those bullet points aren't singular events that can be dismissed with a phone call and a nice Hallmark card. They take time and effort to deal with. They weigh on you emotionally. They divide your attention between your startup and your life.

And for an early stage startup, as my co-founder Bryan likes to say, there isn't much slack in the system.

I'm Not Unique - This Will Likely Happen to You

The truth is disruptions like this aren't unique to me. Since my dad passed away, I've had founders come out of the woodwork expressing sympathy and sharing their own similar situations.

So if you don't think any of this will happen to you, then you're probably wrong. After all, a successful startup is likely going to be 7 to 10 years of your life minimum. And a lot of life happens in 7 to 10 years.

Look back at any 7 year period in your life? You can probably count several major life events in any 7 year period.

So when you begin a startup, make sure to think long term. Will you still want to do this if a family member gets sick? Will you want to do this if you have kids? Will you want to do this when _____ happens?

If the answer is "no", then you've saved yourself a lot of unnecessary heartache. You should seriously think twice before starting your own startup.

If the answer is "yes", then you're probably just crazy enough to do a startup.

#startups #focus #preperation

How to Find an Idea for Your Startup, Even If You Don't Know Where to Start

This post is part of a collaborative blogging effort at Startup Edition. This week's edition is about what inspired you to start your startup.

If you’re like me, the startup Gods didn’t bless you with a magical idea that was “love at first site." Maybe you came up with an idea or two in the shower. Or maybe a buddy had a decent idea that you modified to make your own.

In fact, I didn't have any aspirations of becoming an entrepreneur until a fateful internship my junior year of college with a megacorp. So I never even thought once about what kind of startup or company I'd like to run someday.

It was only after that internship that I learned corporate America wasn't for me and I started exploring non-traditional career paths. I started developing real ideas about what I wanted to do with my life's energy. Ideas I could build a team around.

If you don't have ideas on what startup you'd like to build or the type of company you'd want to create, I definitely get it.

And if ideas don’t come naturally for you but you know you do want to start something someday what do you do? Here's how I learned how to develop and analyze ideas, a process that eventually lead to starting Zapier.

Building Your Idea Muscle

Coming up with good ideas is a skill. It’s not something you’ll be good at if you’ve never practiced coming up with good ideas. Just like you won't be good at playing the piano the first time you sit down at one. And just like you need to practice to get good at the piano, the best way to get good at coming up with ideas is to come up with a lot of ideas.

Here's a few ways to practice coming up with ideas:

Generate 10 ideas every morning: Fellow blogger, James Altucher, does this by coming up with a list of 10 ideas every morning. In 30 days you’ll have 300 ideas. Most will be terrible. Some will be decent. Even fewer will be really good. But it’s a starting point.

Hang out with people who have lots of ideas: Both my co-founders Bryan and Mike generate an insane amount of ideas. Before we started Zapier, Bryan and I would have lunch many days at our day gig. Nearly every conversation was about startup ideas. Some big. Some small. Some easy. Some hard.

Practice being observant: Every time you do something (anything at all) pay attention to what sucks. But also pay attention to good things too. Over time you’ll start to identify things that you really like in one industry, but really suck in another. You’ll start to find ideas that could make great companies.

Go search for them: Go visit online forums. Google anything under the sun. Explore other products sites. What are people complaining about for those products? How can you build a business out of other people's problems?

The idea for Zapier was a combination of all these methods. Bryan, Mike and I use a lot of web products and had built a few ourselves before starting Zapier. One thing we independently noticed was that people complain about integrations on almost every SaaS forum [tips 3 & 4]. Because we generated ideas with each other, we realized this was a common problem all of us had independently noticed [2]. And because we generated a ton of ideas, we had a hint that this was one of the better ones that we had.

Identifying Good Ideas

Just because you can generate ideas, doesn’t mean you can differentiate the good ones from the bad. In fact, that problem is why Eric Ries has been able to generate a million dollar publishing opportunity for teaching people how to identify good ideas and bad ideas. [Sidenote: checkout The Lean Startup. It's an excellent book on this topic by Eric].

So how exactly can you figure out which ideas you've uncovered are actually good ideas?

Be curious: Ask a lot of questions. Figure out how things work. Understand what people like and what they don’t like.

Try things: Experiment with everything. You’ll find things you like and things you don’t like.

Read a lot: Plenty of entrepreneurs have come before us. A lot of them have been kind enough to share their experiences in books, interviews, blog posts, biographies and more. Learn from them.

Spend time with successful people from all walks of life. Spend time with other great entrepreneurs. But don’t limit yourself to just entrepreneurs. Also spend time with good operators, marketers, musicians, athletes, artists, mechanics, etc. Just make sure they are successful. They’ve all learned a thing or two about a specific area of expertise. Each will have a slightly different way of thinking about things. You can use this to identify good ideas from bad.

These four things will give you a leg up on figuring out ideas that are good. As soon as I realized that working in corporate America wasn't going to be the right thing for me, I had a mild crisis.

Everything I had been planning for in life might have been leading me in the wrong direction. What the heck should I do now?

These are the four things I did. I started talking to a lot of people who were doing odd career paths. I started working in marketing at a small startup in Columbia, MO. I loaded up my Google Reader with blogs from all areas of life. I started attending local meetups for startups, developers, design, everything under the sun. I started learning to code with the help of my now co-founder, Bryan, and I even picked up my saxophone after a few months off and started playing jazz again.

By doing all those things I got exposed to a ton of different ideas, opinions, people, and ways of life. As a result, I still can't identify a good idea right off the bat, but I'm much better at identifying the ones that stink.

Are You The Right Person?

Just because you've found what could be a good idea doesn’t mean you’re the right person for the job. I’d love to be doing what Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX. I read every book in my elementary school library about space growing up, but I don’t know the slightest thing about the challenges it takes to grow and build a company like SpaceX.

If you come up with a good idea, it still has to be something you can execute on for it to be a good idea. For an idea to be a good fit for you, you'll need to have a pretty good starting point for:

How to market the idea

Who the end customers are

How to build it

How to scale it

You don’t have to have all the answers today. But you need to know where to start or where to find someone who can help you with these things.

With Zapier, we’d all built SaaS services before and we knew how to sell long tail products. Not only did we know Zapier was a good idea, but we knew it was something we could build and sell. The exact implementation details were pretty murky, but we didn't spend years mucking around trying to figure this stuff out.

Do You Like The Idea?

You have a good idea and you might have the skillset to build a company around that idea. But if you don’t like the idea and if you aren’t excited about it, the company still won’t go anywhere.

You need to be excited about the idea. You need to want to work on it almost every day. You need to be certain that ten years from now you’ll still want to get up and work on building whatever widget or product you chose to build.

My co-founders and I all get excited about SaaS. I am particularly jazzed about building systems and processes to get things done more efficiently (that's part of the reason I majored in Industrial Engineering in college in the first place, even though I haven't done much with the degree to date). What better thing for me to work on than a SaaS product that does exactly those two things?

Nailing the Trifecta

If you are able to find a good idea, make sure it fits your skill set and that it's something you get excited about, you'll have found something worth spending time on.

It's likely not something you'll find overnight. I knew I wanted to start a real company (not my piddly freelancing LLCs) two years before I started Zapier.

But once you find a good idea, don't be afraid to go for it. You'll learn so much along the way. For me, even if Zapier fails (which seems unlikely at this point), I'll have accomplished something most people never do: starting.

Thanks to StartupEdition for including me in this collaborative blogging experiment. Check out everyone's answers to What inspired you to startup your startup?

P.S for Help

Need some extra motivation to start generating ideas? These Zaps can help.

#startups #ideas #brainstorming #learning

Startups: You Should Value Software More

Building a company is expensive. Software, especially a SaaS subscription, is not.

I was recently going over our profit and loss statement and checking out some of the expenses at Zapier and realized how minuscule software expenses really are.

In fact, payroll expenses easily blow software expenses out of the water. At Zapier it's easily 10X, and I'm sure at companies with more employees the ratio gets even bigger.

Software is Undervalued

What that tells me is that good software is undervalued.

If your average startup engineer in Silicon Valley makes $100,000 (less elsewhere, but $100,000 makes for easy math), then finding a way to make that engineer more efficient is worth a lot of money.

A piece of software could easily make a team of software engineers 10% more efficient across the board (GitHub, for example).

For example, a full-time software engineer conservatively works 160 hours a month. If a piece of software improves their productivity by 10%, that means your engineer can spend the 10% of their time saved by the software (16 hours a month) working on something that is more important.

For a team of five engineers with a piece of software that improves efficiency by 10%, that software is worth $50,000 per year to a company ($4,166/month).

The Math: That's 5 engineers making $100,000 each per year ($500,000 for all 5). If they are 10% more efficient because of the software, the software is worth 10% of their salary. $500,000 x 10% = $50,000/year or $4,166/month.

So in a perfect economy you'd pay any amount up to $4,166/month to use that piece of software.

Say a piece of software is only able to make your engineer 0.1% more efficient. Across a team of five engineers that's still just north of $40/month. And all the software has to do is save your engineers 10 measly minutes per month (0.1% x 160 hours x 60 minutes).

It's Not a Perfect Economy

Ok. So this analysis is a bit flawed because, after all, we don't live in a perfect economy and it's almost impossible to quantify exactly how much time software saves. And the time it would take to do these ROI calculations for each piece of software is a bit absurd.

The great thing about most SaaS products on the market is that many of them don't even come close to being that expensive.

I could buy $50/mo software all day long that saves me and my teammates hours of work every month and the ROI is huge! I don't have to do fancy math to figure out that I'm coming out way ahead in this transaction. That $50/mo I spend on a piece of software is so trivial compared to the time and money saved by using that product.

What About Disruption?

One of the magical things about the pace of innovation in technology is that we as consumers (in the work or personal setting) get to benefit from constantly improving products that are cheaper and cheaper in price.

Software that would have cost thousands of dollars a decade ago is now being sold with the freemium business model, but the value it provides is still in the thousands of dollars!

If you are trying to grow a business, you benefit from the sheer amount of good software and the competition to build good software and provide it to you at a competitive price.

Stop Being Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

All this leads up to this point:

Stop being penny wise and pound foolish.

In the last week alone, I've chatted with founders at a half dozen funded startups complaining about the cost of some $50/mo piece of software that they love and is moving the needle at their companies.

That makes no sense. Especially if you have money in the bank. A more appropriate reaction would should be "Shut up and take my money!"

As a startup you have more pressing decisions to make than the $50/mo subscription to a software company that is helping your business grow. Quit worrying about a measly $50/mo and worry about those other, bigger decisions.

[Note: If you're a Bootstrapped startup and cash poor, you'll have to be a little bit more judicious, but I still think even bootstrapped startups should pay for good software.].

Software We Pay For - aka Dogfood

At Zapier we spend a fair amount of money on software. Here are some of the services we pay for on a monthly basis that I can't imagine living without. These services improve our efficiency by 100+%, yet they account for just 10% of our costs compared to payroll.

Any one of these services could raise their prices by 10% and I'd keep paying them because they provide a service that I value and helps Zapier grow. If you make pricing decisions at any of the below companies please ignore this paragraph. I like money as much as the next guy. :)

Buffer

Campfire

Ducksboard

FullContact

GitHub

Google Apps

Help Scout

IDoneThis

Indinero

KISSMetrics

Mailgun

New Relic

Olark

Pingdom

Stripe

Twilio

Webscript.io

Wufoo

This list only includes the software we pay for on a monthly basis. There are many other software products we pay for on a one-off basis.

The Flipside

I'll continue to pay good money for good software. The key word, though, is good.

Just because software is relatively inexpensive to other business costs doesn't mean you should stick to something that isn't working.

If an employee isn't working out you'd cut them loose. Do the same with software you don't like or isn't helping.

The awesome part about software is that you can take a $50/mo piece of software for a two month trial for only $100 and usually longer since free trials are epically long these days. You can't do that with a person.

So don't worry about the price tag. If a piece of software sounds good, give it try. If it turns out bad, turn it loose.

I'd be curious to hear what software you use in your business that is worth 10X or more what you pay. Let us know in the comments so that we can buy that software too. :)

#startups #software #value #pricing

How Writing For Yourself Keeps You Writing

Through college and the beginning of my professional life I've made many attempts at writing on a regular basis. Judging by the number of abandoned blogs on the internet, it's pretty obvious I'm not the only one.

All of my previous attempts have been short lived and ultimately I quit writing like many others.

Why did my previous blogging attempts fail?

There are a lot of reasons, but the number one reason I quit writing was because I was blogging for traffic. And when the traffic never came I felt like a failure and quit writing.

There was no other reason or purpose behind what I was doing. I had no reason to put any more effort in and quit writing when my sole reason for writing (traffic) sucked me into a gold rush where the gold was merely fools gold.

It's still early, but what's different this time? How have I managed to write and publish 17 posts in a row every week since the beginning of the year?

This time I'm not writing for traffic. Instead, I'm writing as a journal to myself.

Blogging as a Journal

What do I mean by writing as journaling?

Basically, every post I write is a post to my future self. They are lessons I've learned and sometimes they are lessons I've learned the hard way. Each post is something that I want to remember so that if I find myself in a similar scenario in the future, I have data based on my past experiences logged on this site and I can use them to help make decisions.

The result is that in each post I'm able to flesh out my line of thinking on a particular topic and particular point in time. Instead of convincing myself in my head that I understand a topic, I take the time to write it down.

Sometimes I realize errors in what I was thinking. Sometimes I realize concepts are more complex than what I thought. Other times I realize concepts are much easier and my line of thinking was simply muddying the waters.

But with with each post I realize that writing thoughts down gives thoughts clarity and focus.

How is it Working?

So far, so good. I've written posts on a number of topics and a few of the posts have encouraged me to behave a certain way after the posts were written.

Want specifics?

After coming back from my sister's graduation in May, my wife and I are planning to get a dog.

Immediately after our move to California it took a while to build a routine with my wife. This past week we ate dinner together every night

When we brought on our first few teammates at Zapier we had problems continuing to ship at the same pace as just three founders. We fixed those and now I'm adopting a similar method outlined in the post for our new content marketing strategy.

I'm looking for help with marketing at Zapier and these are just a few of the traits I want to see in the person we eventually bring on.

Those are just a few examples where having my past thoughts documented have helped my future self out.

Benefiting from Unintended Consequences

Writing this way has other consequences, but they are just cherries on top.

Some posts get a lot of traffic (this post on improving your launch day did well on HN and this post on improving productivity with a dog got picked up by Lifehacker) and other times you'll wind up with interesting conversations happening over email even if the post doesn't generate a ton of traffic like this one on work/life balance.

But all these extra benefits are just that - extras. And this post is a reminder to my future self, should traffic not increase.

I'll continue to write about my own lessons. I'll continue to learn. And I'll continue to enjoy writing. And if others find value in my writing then that's just a bonus, but I'm not going to fall into old habits and write just to impress someone or in hopes that I'll make it to the top of the HN leaderboard.

I've Heard This Before

If this sounds familiar, it's because it probably is.

There's an old post from Nathan Marz about blogging even if you don't have any readers and an old post from Rob Fitzpatrick on blogging being valuable for your business even if you don't have traffic. Those are just two examples of others using a similar tactic.

The fact that it has worked for others is good news. If no one else has ever had success with a technique like this I'd be worried that my brain is tricking me.

Instead I'm confident that I'll keep writing even if there aren't a ton of readers.

If you happen to wonder across this post, I'm curious. Have you had success with writing? If so what are you doing? If not, why do you think that is?

#blogging #writing #startups #cadence #focus

Enjoying Your Friends, Your Family and Your Startup at the Same Time

My father-in-law has been visiting this past week and I've been thinking a lot about work/life balance as a result.

Work life balance is a pretty nuanced topic. For some people work/life balance means creating family and friends out of everyone involved in their startup and abandoning all else. For others work/life balance means separating work and life completely. For a lot of us work/life balance is something in between.

For most of us, there will always be family and friends that won't be part of our startup other than as encouraging supporters. These are parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, high school and college buddies, and aunts and uncles.

These are people who were around before your startup began and odds are they will be around after your startup finishes. They've supported you during the good times and the bad times. But because they don't offer anything immediately valuable for a startup founder sometimes it can be easy to ignore them in the short term in favor of writing one more line of code, posting another blog post, or doing something with more tangible short term benefits.

There might be a few rare circumstances where that makes sense, but the majority of times it won't. A SaaS startup means at minimum of 7 years of your life and I imagine most other startups are a long term commitment too.

The shear amount of time it takes to build a startup means figuring out work/life balance is an important issue and one that you as a founder should figure out for yourself rather than defaulting to working all the time.

My Tragic Realization

Work/life balance has never been something I cared too much about. Whenever I'm into something I'll throw myself at that thing wholeheartedly.

When I was in elementary school that was swimming. In high school that was jazz and saxophone. Now it's Zapier.

Zapier has been an absolute thrill to work on. It's what I live and breath for right now. In fact, my wife and I picked up and moved from Columbia, MO to Silicon Valley because of the opportunities we had there.

After our move to the valley in August of 2012, my parents came on vacation to visit my wife and I for a few days. I had dinner with them, but while they were off visiting Muir Woods and Alcatraz I was busy planning the launch of the Zapier developer platform and subsequent TechCrunch article.

In September of 2012 I was back home for a week and planned to go fishing with my dad and a friend. I waited too long to set the date because I might have had a call come up with a potential new partner and my dad had to miss out because I couldn't give him a date.

On October 27th, 2012 I got the call from my mom that my dad had passed away suddenly from a heart attack.

The last two opportunities I had to spend with my dad I didn't take advantage of because I might miss something important with Zapier.

Finding Balance

I've come to terms with missing those last few opportunities with my dad, but I also realized I don't want to miss out simply because I feel the need to be always on for Zapier.

That means work/life balance has been more of a priority. How can I schedule my days and nights and my weekdays and weekends so that Zapier can run smoothly?

Because ultimately it's important for me to enjoy life even if I really enjoy work too. :)

For me that means having dinner with my wife most nights of the week and taking Saturdays off.

It means when a close friend or family member comes to visit that I shut work off (as in no phone/email) for a bit and really spend some time with them.

It means when my sister graduates from college in May I'm flying home to see her and catching up with the best man from my wedding while I'm there.

For you it could be something else. As I mentioned, work/life balance is nuanced and different for everyone.

But I guarantee that if you put some thought into it you'll be happier and more productive.

As for me, I'll be at the Giants game tonight with my wife and father-in-law enjoying things a little more on the life side of the spectrum

Any interesting challenges or revelations with work/life balances? I'd love to hear them. Lets chat in the comments.

#startups #work #life #balance

23 Things That Don't Matter When Starting a Startup and 2 Things That Do

When you are just getting your startup off the ground there seems to be an infinite amount of tasks you have to do to be successful. But the truth of the matter is very few things actually matter on day one of starting a company.

Here's a list of things that after starting Zapier I realized didn't matter on day one of the company.

If you're persistant and continue to grow your company, some of these tasks might eventually matter, but when you're getting started there are usually more pressing things to attend to than these tasks.

23 Things That Don't Matter

1. Your Business Name

Names matter, but not that much. When we initially started we came up with the name Snapier in about 5 minutes, bought the domain and went back to work.

Two months later we changed our name to Zapier for competitive reasons. Both names are good names (short, memorable, available dot com), but not great (confusion on how to pronounce it. FYI, Zapier makes you happier if you're wondering. :).

Could there be a better name? Probably. Is it worth spending time on? Not right now.

2. The Perfect Domain

Like every entrepreneur over the last few years, you probably can't get the perfect domain. Maybe the dot com isn't available. Or you have to settle on some weird spelling.

Welcome to the internet.

Just grab a good domain and start working on your business. Once you have enough revenue coming in the door you can make a run at buying the domain you actually want.

3. Your Business Logo

A Logo is an important part of a companies brand. But on day one your company doesn't have a brand. The only people that will look at your logo are you, your co-founders and your collective mothers.

Once you have a modicum of success it probably makes sense to go back and revisit the logo, unless of course one of your co-founders is a designer and nailed it with a few minutes of work the first time around.

4. Your Business Colors

Mike spewed a random hex code out to create the classic Zapier orange. It's changed a few shades here or there, but the color has worked out well for us and we like it.

Now you don't necessarily need to pull hex codes out of a hat to choose a color, but you could easily just find something you like on COLOURLovers and move on.

5. Company Structure

When you start a company there will be plenty of people worried about how the company is set up. It doesn't matter.

We initially formed as a Missouri LLC and operated that way for 9 months. Later we realized that for most investors we needed to be structured as a Delaware C corp. So a few hours of work and a few days later we were a Delaware C corp.

Anything you do can be amended pretty easily so don't worry about it too much.

6. Your Ownership Cut

Ownership matters. But for a company with zero value, if you have 1% or 99% it doesn't matter. You still have zero value in shares.

Instead, come up with something agreeable between you and your co-founders and get back to work.

7. A Bank Account

When we made our first sale we didn't have a bank account. I had to scramble and figure out how we were going to get paid and eventually just decided to have the customer send $100 to my personal PayPal account.

The world kept turning, the government didn't yell at me, and our accountant (when we got one) eventually fixed it.

8. NDAs

Your idea isn't unique. At any given time there are probably a half a dozen other people working on it. Don't ask people to sign NDAs; it's plain silly. Especially since you want customers and you'll have to tell your customers about your idea. Why keep hiding it?

9. Office Space

Unless your company lives and dies by walk in customers then office space is pretty inconsequential. Office space is one of the highest expenditures your company will have on day one so ask yourself if you really need an office or if you can get by with a home office, coffee shops and libraries.

10. Furniture

Furniture just piles on more expenses for a company with zero revenue. Ask yourself if you really need this.

11. Ping Pong and Foosball Tables

See numbers nine and ten above.

12. Butts in the Seat

Remote working or co-location? It's all the buzz these days with the Yahoo! decision to cut remote workers. For your startup ask yourself if it's really important that you, your co-founders or your employees have to be working in the same place at the same time every day.

Unfortunately, most startups don't have any slack in the system and the hit by bus factor is very high. If a random life event causes someone on your team to have to leave your office for a week or for a month make sure to give your teammates the tools to work from where ever they happen to be. Requiring butts in the seat doesn't help when teammates aren't able to have their butts in the seat.

13. Where You Are Located

There have been successful startups created all over the United States and all over the world. Where your company starts doesn't matter. I'd just start working where you are and worry about if it's the best place to be later when the company actually has some value.

14. Getting Famous

Running a company isn't about being the next poster boy for the startup world. There's only one Mark Zuckerberg.

Get over being famous and work on making your startup famous for your target customers.

15. A Quick Coffee Meeting

Once you start a company there will be plenty of opportunities for the "quick coffee meeting" or "short Skype call." It could be someone trying to sell something to you, someone mildly interested in what you are doing, or an associate at a VC firm interested in "hearing your story."

Feel free to take the meeting if you want to, but unless these meetings are with a potential customer, realize that 99% of these meetings aren't going anywhere.

16. What the Experts Say

When you start a company there will be plenty of people willing to give you advice. Some will have good advice, but most will probably be bad. Realize that you are the expert when it comes to your company. Keep an open mind, but don't blindly follow what every person says.

17. Investors

Some companies by necessity will need investors. Not every company can be bootstrapped and nor should it. But when you start a company, take some time to validate the idea and figure out who the ideal customer is before running around to nab the quickest and easiest check.

18. Mimicking Other Startups

It's common for early companies to worry about competitors or to try and mimic other companies you might like. The problem is those tactics are likely based on how that company is setup and that company might not even be happy about it.

The right marketing tactics for your company may not be what the other guy is doing. Make sure what you do, is based on what your customers want.

19. Optimization

A some point in your startups lifetime it will be important to optimize what you are doing. On day one, it's impossible to optimize anything because you have no baseline for anything.

Just start doing something and see what works. If you make it far enough optimization will make sense, but on day one don't worry about crappy code or the perfect headline. Just get something good enough out the door and iterate.

20. A/B Testing Your Site

Unless you are magically bringing in a statistically significant amount of traffic to your site on day one, A/B testing a site with a few hundred visitors a month is a waste of time.

Focus on growing the number of leads you get through quality traffic. Optimize later.

21. Design

Design is an important piece for every company. It might even be the make or break component for yours. But on day one, like anything else, it doesn't have to be perfect.

Check out the Zapier MVP. It was terrible. Our first users literally required Skype demos to setup their Zaps it was so bad. And that was the design we had for our first 500 customers.

You can validate that your company can be successful with bad design. Like all these items you'll need to fix your design eventually so iterate on design as you grow.

22. Cool New Tech Stack

Most engineers love working on the coolest new tech. Avoid the temptation. You have enough risk in your startup. Don't add support for a new open source framework as part of the risk.

Instead build with what you know. At Zapier, Bryan had been building django/python apps for years, so naturally Zaiper is built on django/python.

23. Reading This Post

Odds are reading this post isn't helping your startup. Instead, work on making something people want and find a way to get those people to be customers.

2 Things That Do Matter

So if none of those things actually matter when starting a company, what does? In my experience, very little matters on day one other than these two things.

1. Making Something People Want

If you can't make something that somebody in the world wants then everything else is pointless.

2. Acquiring Customers

If you can't find a way to turn those people into customers then you're in trouble too.

TL;DR

Very little matters on day one

Focus on building something people want

And focus on turning those people into customers

#startups #customer development #focus

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