A conversation about startup

A: Hey, long time no see!

B: Yeah, it's been a long time.  How have you been?

A: Slogging through.  Still in the middle of startup phase.

B: Startup?  I thought you are well passed that stage.  I don't think anyone would consider your company as a startup.

A: Perhaps.  There are just lot going on, you know.  Hiring, getting new people up to speed, working out team dynamics, etc.

B: Sure, but that's not a startup-only challenge.  That is true for any growing company.

A: Yeah...  I am with you on that.  What would you call startup?  What makes a company startup?

B: For one thing, if it is a brand new, then obviously it's a startup.  Once someone told me that startup is a phase when money is invested for future revenue.  Basically, burning cash.  But that can't be it because my earlier startup we started making money about a month in.  It was small, but we were making money right away.

A: Positive cash flow right away.  That is the ideal model for self-funded bootstrapping.

B: Look, I have to run.  Have a meeting starting in a few minutes.

What does make a startup a startup?

Innovation comes from fuller understanding of the problem

I am still ruminating on sessions that I attended during Silicon Valley Product Camp 2013.  One remark someone made about innovation is circling around me.

Innovation comes from fuller understanding of the problem.

I don't recall who exactly said it.  Whether it was Steve Johnson or someone in the audience, I cannot quite remember.  Yet I think it captures the one aspect of how innovation happens.  That is, thinking about the problem and understanding the constraints under which a new solution needs to be proposed.

In its simplest sense, we have to understand the problem before we can come up with creative solutions that solves the problem.

Rob Walling: Lessons Learned by a Solo Entrepreneur

Rob Walling is a serial entrepreneur who advocates launching small startups and staying small.  He has launched several startups and has been sharing his experiences and lessons learned on his blog, Software by Rob.  He has launched several self-funded startups and also acquired technology to re-launch using variety of marketing techniques.

Here are some articles that I found interesting from his blog:

• Passion as a Competitive Advantage
• Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money
• Why Startup Founders Should Stop Reading Business Books
• The Software Product Myth

He also gave an interview outlining the steps that he took to acquire HitTail.com, long tail SEO site:

What's more important, great product or great team?

A couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to talk to a product manager at a partner company.  We were having a casual dinner and talking about different topics.  One of the topics was about launching a startup.  She had thought about launching her own startup and she mentioned that she didn't have a concrete product idea yet. She felt that identifying a worthwhile problem to solve and coming up with a solution was where startup got founded.  She wanted to find a problem that was socially responsible as well as personally interesting as studying impacts of global warming on ocean life.

That's great, I thought.  Finding meaning in one's work is important to persist through all the trials and tribulations.  It is also true that identifying a problem that is worth solving is an important step in creating a startup.  But there is more important piece.  That's putting together a right team.

Integrate perspectives to solve the entire problem

As a young boy, I remember reading a puzzle went something like this.

Q: There was a bus that only allowed 10x10x10 inch carry-on luggage.  A boy had a 15x1x1 inch stick and he wanted to get on the bus to get home before dinner time.  Somehow he was able to manage to bring the stick on the bus.  How did he do that? 

A: He put the stick in the 10x10x10 box diagonally and carried the box on board.  Because diagonal distance of 10x10x10 box was roughly 17.3 inches, 15-inch-long stick fit in the box.

When we get multiple descriptions of a problem from different perspectives, it is easy for us to think that the problem is not solvable.  But there could be ways to solve the problem while satisfying all or most of the constraints.  The trick is to think of the problem holistically without getting bogged down by any one of the constraints.

Daniel Tenner: Startup is not as scary as jumping off a plane

Daniel Tenner is a cofounder of GrantTree.  Before he started GrantTree, he had two other failed startup experience and worked at Accenture.

He keeps a blog site swombat.com where he shares his startup experience and perspective on running a startup.  Here are some sample articles that he wrote:

• Sales comes out of who you genuinely are
• How to get better at writing
• Side projects
• Doing more by doing less

He had also shared his learnings with other entrepreneurs.  Recently he gave a talk at Startup Academy at Belgrade about his take on launching a startup.

Product Management: What do I do to be a PM of my own idea? (Part 3)

This post is the continuation of my earlier post about how to start out as a product manager.  If you did not read the first two, I recommend you start from the first two articles which are available here and here.

I started out by laying out 7 steps to become a product manager for your own product idea.  Here were 7 steps:


1. Pick an expensive problem to solve in your life.
2. Come up with a product idea that you can use yourself.
3. Write down how you are solving the problem without the product today.
4. Spell out how you want to interact with your product.
5. Fake the product to your potential customer.
6. Remove an interaction one at a time until you cannot remove any more without becoming useless.
7. Write down your finding.

We were discussing Step #5 earlier.

Noah Kagan: Start with the market

Noah Kagan is a marketer/entrepreneur who had learned the art of marketing by learning from his mistakes.  His career included a stint at Intel, Facebook, Mint, KickFlip and AppSumo.  The last two companies were founded by Kagan.

Product Management: Practice lazy start

On occasions I get a question like this from developers.

Shouldn't we do this the right way the first time?  What do you say to writing purpose-built code instead of extending existing implementation?

My response to the question is almost always no.  That's because of two things are true when building a brand new feature:

1. No one knows whether feature will stick.
2. We are building the feature based on our best guesses.

Despite the best intention, no one knows whether the new feature will become popular.  There are a lot of factors that determine the feature success.  Some are within the product management and engineering team's control.  But as much as PMs hate to admit, there are a lot of luck involved in hitting the right market with the right feature at the right time.  Having the functionality alone is not enough.  The feature should be adopted by large enough user base to make the continued development economical.  And no one knows whether your feature has the magic combination at the right time.

Product Management: Make the loop faster

One thing that I learned as a coder was to shorten the feedback loop.  When I write code, I want to write a bit of code, test, fix, check and repeat.  One cycle is a loop.  I found that the faster I can make the loop more productive I became.

For instance, if I spend 10 mins writing code, 5 mins to compile, 5 mins to set up the test system and another 10 minutes to verify the change, I would figure out how to reduce compilation time, set up time and testing time.  Instead of waiting 20 minutes to test 10 minutes of code, I know I could just about double the productivity by reducing that 20 minutes down to 5 minutes, and packing in another 10 minutes of coding and 5 minutes for validation.

Programmers, don't let compiling interrupt the development cycle.
Product managers, don't wait for product feedback; get ready to go find them.
Source: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/compiling.png

Product Management: Admit that you don't know all facts and start there

When I was working as an engineer, I did what I was told to build.  Specs were handed to me by my engineering manager spelling out exactly what he needed and how it should behave.  When I had a question on expected behavior I could always ask someone else.  More often than not I got answers to my questions.

Life was simple.  As I gained more confidence with art of coding, I started to form my opinions about how to write faster and more efficient implementation.  No matter how complex the problem was, I knew that I could apply Keep-It-Simple-Stupid principle and will come out on the other end with the least amount of code.

If you find yourself having this conversation, you need to adopt Lean Startup.
Pick up Eric Ries' The Lean Startup.
Short answer is release now!

Entering New Market? Release Now (And Release Often)

Today I'm going to talk a bit about software development. This may seem like a off topic subject, but If you think about a little, you'll soon find a connection. After all most of social networks involve software of one kind or another, and they are all developed by a team of developers. Talking about social network without touching on how it is developed would be akin to talking about pastry without baking.