When artist Paul Carpenter painted this piece for an art show run by a company I owned in 2008, neither he nor I had any idea what the lean startup process was.  And for the past three years I have stared at this piece. enjoying its design, style, and challenging content. A few weeks ago however, as I reflected on some of the recent activities of my own startup I saw it in a different light.  The painting hasn’t changed.  The lens through which I am viewing it has.

A/B Testing

Data is King

Customer Development

Social Media

The Fun of Being a Startup

Take a Fresh Look

I am an admitted pack rat when it comes to ideas, frameworks and business books.  Many times I come across items which I have no application for at the time.  I simply store them away.  Often when I find myself in need of some new stimulus, I go back to my old files and books and lo and behold there is the spark I am looking for.  It was there before.  I just needed the right eyes to see it.

Over the past 8 weeks I have been participating, with a team of volunteers, on a project designed to jump-start the use of location-based services by businesses in downtown Wilmington, Delaware.  Over a year ago, I wrote that location-based services could, and should, be used for economic development and incentivizing community behavior (post here).  The #BeHere experiment is being done in conjunction with Downtown Visions, the management company that oversees the business improvement district (BID).  The BID consists of approximately 70 square blocks and over 300 street level businesses including a number of large arts and entertainment venues.  You can find out more about the project here. My kick off speech at Ignite Wilmington aka “five minutes of fear” can be seen here.

This upcoming weekend features the #BeHere events and so I started thinking about all that it took to get to this point and all the people involved.  Downtown Visions is part of the Mainstreet Program a national program supported by The National Trust for Historic Preservation that, “provides leadership, education, advocacy, and resources to save America’s diverse historic places and revitalize our communities.”  I hope that our team’s learnings help other communities to conduct similar experiments or inspire others to step up and participate in other “experiments”.  Today’s location-based services are quickly evolving and are becoming powerful tools for supporting the goals of the Mainstreet program of

“Helping people protect, enhance and enjoy the places that matter to them.”

Since I live, work and play in the world of startups, I can’t help but put my experience with the #BeHere experiment in a broader entrepreneurial frame.  One of the reasons I think this experiment was able to gain so much traction was that the team that formed consisted of people who have started a business, not those that hadn’t.  If you want to now why this is valuable see Chris Dixon’s post on it here.  So, in the spirit of “people like lists”, here are 3 reminders from the #BeHere experiment (I am sure these will be added to after this weekend). Here is the “talk” I gave at CoinLoft, a local co-working space and clubhouse for entrepreneurs, that sparked this post

Ideas Are Worthless

This meme makes its rounds every couple of  weeks in the startup world and has generated a ton of blog posts and commentary (here is a classic post from Paul Graham).  It’s a good thing it does comes around so often because it’s an important reminder.  While this opinion is easy to objectively agree with, when you are in the grips of that huge “A Ha!” moment you suddenly turn into Gollum with his little precious ring. I wrote my post on using LBS for economic development over a year ago and had a number of ideas around it.  But it wasn’t until I started to talk to everyone and anyone about it that it found a home.  Ideas aren’t babies to be coddled and protected they are strands of spaghetti meant to be tossed at the wall.  And the best part is that the idea I was talking to everyone about was a concept called “Beta Town” not #BeHere.  I won’t bore you with the details of my idea because it brings me to my second story.

You Are Not That Smart

Eric Ries says that startups are entities built for learning.  The process of fast to market and quick iterations embodies and accelerates the action/reflection cycle that is the heart of all learning.  As I talked to more people, and the circle grew, the idea that had started the discussion was quickly replaced with a new one.  This new idea had more focus, a clear execution path and growing support.  And this lesson was further brought home as #BeHere found support from people I had not thought to engage or had not expected.  I will come away from this effort with friends, connections and knowledge that I didn’t have going into it.  So for me it is already a success.

Don’t Be Afraid to Talk to Anybody/Everybody You Need To

If you need feedback or support from someone, anyone, then go and get it.  You can’t be limited by a fear of looking foolish or the fact that you don’t know or have access to that person.  Pick up the phone or drop them an email.  And if you don’t hear back, follow up.  In old-school sales a mailer was often just an opening line excuse for your phone call, “I am calling to see if you have had a chance to review the materials we sent last week.”  I knew guys that never sent anything and still used that line.  Do whatever it takes but get to the people you need.  You will be surprised where your advice support and evangelists come from.

When we decided to use FourSquare as one of the platforms for #BeHere I was tasked with finding the right person there to talk to.  A review of the website left me with no answers so I did what any entrepreneur would have done… I tweeted.

Yo @dens @foursquare you have contacts for brands and businesses what about an ENTIRE CITY? #BeHere We got big things cooking in Wilmo

And you know what? Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, got right back to me!

I was talking to a friend of mine who is the executive chef and a local restaurant and he was saying that there are times he wished we all got a “fast forward”. He was specifically talking about his desire to speed through a crazy dinner rush and arrive at the end, exhausted and beat-up, but done.

For those of you who have never had the privilege of working in the hospitality, industry a quick education. Restaurants are orderly systems with defined roles and process.  Until a horde of diners descend upon you in a short period of time all demanding your absolute best simultaneously.  In the biz this is known as being, “in the weeds”.  In this city, where restaurant traffic is often driven by plays or concerts with everyone wanting to eat before the show, I call this, “the fastest 100 minutes in restauranting.”   While my logical mind says a fast forward would be great my romantic mind says that then you would miss the most exciting part of the game.  [if you really want to see what its like in a restaurant watch this]

Start-up Bistro

Start-ups and restaurants have a lot in common; hard to please customers, impossible deadlines, team play, experimentation and most of all hustle. And nothing brings it all out more than a good flash mob.  One minute you are sitting with your team making plans, reviewing process and preparing.  The next is an all out sh*t show with people screaming, running and doing everything in their power to make customers happy.  It is this time that shows teams and individuals what they are capable of and creates ties that bind.  When it goes well and you are in the zone it is as if “the basket is 3-feet wide.”  When it doesn’t, you try and remember the saying about what doesn’t kill you making you stronger.  The interesting part is that if you are an addict, like I am, both leave you wanting to go again.

Veroha FTW

As my team races toward the launch of our product, I know that these are times I will look back through a pair of rose colored glasses.  These are the stories I and my team will talk about.  Like the college all-nighters (you never tell the story of the paper you finished early) these are memory making days.  I didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur and there are days when if I could kick this habit and get a “real job” I would.  But I know I would be back.  So I don’t think I would want a fast forward button (a rewind one would be nice).

Besides, thanks to our team, the basket is looking pretty big right now.  JFDI

Last week, we moved our start-up into its next phase.  The formal re-launch has begun, we even have a name for our NewCo: Veroha. We also got some amazing press from our partners at the State and Microsoft.  But my favorite part of the week was our investor meeting.  As I looked around the table at our investors I realized that we had done a great job of building the group.  Why do I say that?  Here is why.

Multiple Perspectives

Veroha is lucky to have investors with a wide range of industry experience.  From money management, banking, industrial, healthcare, marketing and others.  Each of these industries has paradigms, approaches and models.  So when we look at different elements of our business everyone has a slightly different basis on which to evaluate or provide advice from.  My job is to formulate the right questions, propose a suggested path and sit back and listen.  When they agree I know that I have done a good job at looking at it from a bunch of angles. When they don’t I get a variety of feedback from which to synthesize our next move.

Experienced at Angel Investing

All of our investors have done this before.  As an entrepreneur you may not think about this when an enthusiastic potential investor approaches you but it matters.  Early stage investment is as different from investing as day trading is from investing in your 401K.  There are a unique set of expectations regarding, everything from style (less formal more hustle) to volatility (less certain more learning).  Walking is nothing more than a controlled fall forward and you have to be willing to lose your balance in order to move at all.  Our investors know the drill and are pushing us forward not trying to get their balance.

Networked like a Mutha

Unlike starting a small business, seed funding for a start-up is not the last money you will need to raise.  Our investors have networks.  Some are angels in other start-ups that have recognizable names and have attracted additional capital.  Some have networks in other start-up hubs like Silicon Valley, Boston and DC. All have personal networks that will help our company by providing advisors and introductions.  Being located in Wilmington, Delaware is tough enough.  Having these networks gives us all a great sense of confidence that, as we grow, someone will know someone who can help us to [fill in the blank].

I am humbled by the confidence this group has in us to execute and excited to show them that it is not misplaced.  I know that our investors are an asset and they know that I will be mining that asset in order to accelerate, optimize, and guide our company.  Our team is committed to making this opportunity a win for them and also a win for Wilmington.  Based on the recent press, a lot of eyes our on us (is your Governor tracking your start-up? Billion dollar company saying you are “blazing the innovation trail”).  Guess its time to JFDI !!!

Related Articles

• Business Angels Predicted To Spread Their Wings in 2011 (prweb.com)
• Beginners Guide: How To Approach An Angel Investor (urbanhorizon.wordpress.com)

90 days ago I got a call
About 6 months ago I was asked to take a look at a start-up. It had been plugging along for a few years but had not yet launched anything and the company’s partners and investors were wondering what was up.  After a bunch of meetings and some other homework it was obvious that the company was suffering from a serious case of founders syndrome. Really smart people sometimes outsmart themselves and it was here in spades. Amazing advisors, great development partners, a privileged position in market all a result of the founder. Yet no product, no revenue.

So in September some angels I work with decide to buy into the company and asked me to lead the charge towards launch. Remember how I said learning was a two part process. I have been all about the action since that call in September. I have been rapidly applying the lean startup process, an open technology development plan, and everything else I have been able to read and remember.

I have been at this game for over a decade and getting back into the actual doing after years if advising has been fun/frightening/exhausting/amazing. But in all this doing I have lost the reflection part. Over the next few weeks I hope to take a quick peek over my shoulder. There is so much to do but for me JFDI needs to be balanced with JFBI (just f*&king blog it). Eric Ries says that a start up is an entity built to learn. I couldn’t agree more .

Related Articles

• Mark Suster Lays It Down At Columbia (markpeterdavis.com)

A week ago I got sick. Some flu bug that was going around.  I mention this because it put me in bed for 48 hours straight during which time I finally broke down and added Angry Birds from Rovio to my iPhone.  Now I had seen it on other people’s phones and you can hardly ignore the buzz but I really didn’t ever feel the urge to play.  But I was on a lot of cold medication and had nothing but time so the Halloween edition it was.

Now I am not going to tell you how Rovio creates compelling games or how their marketing is top-notch.  Nope I actually think that there are 4 real world lessons for start-ups in the game itself.

1. Know What Birds You Have

Look around your team, look at your product.  Be critical.  Be honest.  If you don’t have a business developer that can fly through stone walls don’t slingshot him/her at one.  There are often more than one way to achieve your goal make sure that you are using your birds in the way best suited to their skills.

2. Look for Weaknesses, Tipping Points and Interdependency

Markets are often not uniform.  Look for the areas that easy to penetrate then branch out from there.  Look for key early adopters or influencers that will tip others your way.  Think about going to market as a multi-step process where each moves build momentum or makes it easier for your product’s next move.

3. Know the Difference between Execution Fails and Strategy Fails

Start ups live and die based on the speed with which they can learn.  Simple frameworks like the age-old “5 Whys” can help you to diagnose the root cause of a fail.  Many times because of the push to quickly iterate it is easy to stop questioning when you come to the FIRST right answer.  While undoubtedly part of the cause, the  right answers that come further down are often more powerful.  Strategy fails often require you to pivot some part of your business model.  Execution fails often require nothing more than picking yourself up and trying it again.

4. The Fast Fail

Finally I like the quick iterations of Angry Birds’ levels.  And if I have an assumption of how things are supposed to go I don’t wait until the last bird I hit replay right then.  Iterate, pivot, adjust, modify, whatever you want to call it, just start with assumptions and pay attention.

Related Articles

• Homemade Angry Birds costumes take flight (tuaw.com)
• Halloween fun on your phone with Angry Birds wallpapers (thenextweb.com)

As I looked back over my schedule for last week I realized that perhaps the best way to describe what I do is to provide a glimpse into a “typical” day (no such thing in startup land). The following schedule is fairly representative of almost any day last week.

6:30 AM – 7:15 AM

Breakfast while skimming bookmarked blog posts and articles from previous night.

7:15 AM – 7:30 AM

Walk to work (love my commute!) and grab coffee

7:30 AM – 8:00 AM

E-mail: flag, file, and forward. If I am not the bottleneck then you will likely get my response later in the day.

8:00 AM – 9:00 AM

Call with investor regarding subscription amount (he wants us to make room for another angel) and milestones. Love the vote of confidence and promise to get back to him on the over subscription. He is not the only that asked. Send quick note to team to let them know about the enthusiasm.

9:00 AM – 9:30 AM

Call with lawyer to confirm proposed revision to operating agreement and 2 other deal points. Our lawyers are awesome and all about JFDI, not billing us for long chats.

9:30 AM – 10:00 AM

Get screamed at by vendor who is owed a payment (this money was supposed to be in a bit earlier). Remind him that we are going to be HUGE and that he really wants to work with us (Jedi Mind Trick). And that he will get a check next week. He buys it (so do I BTW otherwise I wouldn’t be here) and we laugh about how bad my baseball team is (Chicago Cubs) and set a time to talk next week.

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Beta planning session. Discuss user orientation, learning capture plans, support and documentation needs. Lots to do.

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Lunch at desk while flagging links for later reading and following up on e-mails from this morning that I could not do while in Beta session.

1:00 PM – 2:30 PM

Talk with marketing about product and pricing. Need to do homework on API pricing. We need a new name for the product. We need some demo videos made. Quick assignments and EOD reconvene scheduled.

2:30 PM – 3:00 PM

Call with channel partner. Excited by progress. Offer to help with demo videos (they know a guy who knows a guy).

3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Budget review. Burn rate discussion. Review report to investors for next week.

4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Email, create draft presentation for product, review cap table and comp plans, more email.

6:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Call with West coast investor about this company, another company he invested in, convertible notes with caps and how Diet Coke’s causes memory loss (I am powered by Diet Coke and almonds most days).

7:00 PM – ???

Dinner with friends and then home to read saved links, various blogs and make notes for tomorrow.

Growth Hacking = Parkour

Moving through the day, overcoming obstacles, shifting gears, making progress where none seems possible, that is growth hacking. Whatever needs to be done to move forward on the fastest path to cash (FP2C) gets done. Some people may look at the above agenda and think, “That looks crazy!” They have never been in or launched a startup. I look at it and think, “I can’t wait for tomorrow!” JFDI !

Growth Hacking: Good Day

Growth Hacking: Fail Day

I will post on each. Starting with…

Racing around to catch up with sun but its sinking…

I know that man invented it, but no matter what you do there are only so many hours in the day and so many days until you launch. I remember listening (too busy to watch) to the Google launch of Instant and thinking, “they saved how many milliseconds? WTF?” But the hard reality is that once you waste them they never come back no matter how small. In my role I am overseeing everything so my time is spent with product, business development, finance and angels almost everyday. Lots has been written about the number of ways to make meetings better and faster. Based on some of the meetings I attend, meeting management is a lost art. Trust me. It is worth taking the 15 minutes it takes to learn some of the tricks. Here is just one from my old bosses at The Forum Corporation.

Start EVERY meeting with a PBC. Purpose. Benefit. Check.
Purpose: Why have we all stopped the highly productive work we were doing to be in this meeting?
Benefit: What will we gain from participating?
Check: Is this the meeting everybody thought they were coming to?

Then make sure the agenda delivers the benefits. Anything else that is brought up that doesn’t match the purpose or deliver the benefit? Write it down to be discussed in a meeting where it fits. Be militant about this and you will get 50% of your meeting time back. People will think you are an asshole at first but they will thank you for the time they get back.

Why am I here?

But making meetings better is only “local optimization”. I have focused further upstream on optimizing how I choose to participate in meetings and how those meetings get scheduled. I participate in meetings where my authority is required, my knowledge is needed or my support is an accelerant. If one or more of these are true, I am there. Sometimes this is not the whole meeting, in which case I am there only for a portion. Our team is capable and empowered. When they feel I am additive great but my ego doesn’t get hurt when I am not.

How about Tuesday at 3? No. How about….

How meetings get scheduled is where a new tool has come in. Tungle is a great online calendaring service that synchs perfectly with my Gmail calendar and allows me to send available windows of time to people I need to meet with. This allows me to avoid the daisy chain email hell of trying to set up a call with 6 people. It also allows me to make my schedule availability viewable by others so they can schedule with me without having to talk to me directly. The iPhone app is good as well. The only thing I wish it had are alerts so that I didn’t have to keep looking at my watch/phone.

Speed=distance over time…and you can’t change the distance.

Add your comments and suggestions below. I need all the help I can get.

Related Articles

• Tungle Integrates with Rapportive to Schedule Meetings without Leaving Your Gmail Inbox (prweb.com)

Your Company is a Product

The concept, as I saw it, was to treat the business model as a product with each of the components offering features to the user (company). Make assumptions about the features the company wants (partners, revenue streams, customer segments), test them as the product launches and optimize or pivot. Rinse and repeat until the market (in this case the company and current & future investors) gets what it wants (product market fit).

The first release of a business model for a particular company I am working with has 26 features (the presentation below contains them all). To generate this first feature set we used a simple sentence to determine the desired features of the business model.

“The company should be able to…”

…define potential partner universe (Partner Network)
…identify shelf-life of key skill sets (Key Resources)
…define a referral plan (Customer Relationship)
…define rationale for direct or partner approach (Distribution Channels)
…define target market eco-system(s) (Customer Segments)

After assembling a list of desired features for each element of the model a selection of the critical ones relevant to an early stage venture was made. Recognition must be mad, for example, that a company may not know certain specifics but should be able to define criteria of what it thinks it would want. We know that with a product release the goals was to have an initial point-of-view then quickly get out and learn not to nail the answer out of the box. The same is true in a business model release.

The Bonus

In addition to providing the company with a clear focus the process has the potential to provide some great by-products as well.
• Awareness – the entire organization (small but not for long hopefully) is now more aware of the implications of changes in one element to others. Pivots on the product may lead to re-evaluation of needed skills sets, partners or distribution channels.
• Confidence – current investors can now have more visibility into not just the product development process but also the customer development side of the business model. This visibility can allow for focused outreach and some key feedback from advisors and investors.
• Language and tracking – with the company being treated as a product the entire organization is can now speak in terms of features, releases and pivots. Also, project tracking tools (I am using Pivotal Tracker for my business model development project) can be consistent. This may not seem like a lot but any reduction in the split between product and business development means less friction, higher speed and faster path to cash.

I look forward to seeing how this approach plays out in the coming month. Add your thoughts below.

Related Articles

• Business models for dummies (holykaw.alltop.com)
• A Value Capture Pivot?? (sophisticatedfinance.typepad.com)

Rick’s post was in part triggered by a rant that I shared with him and then in a post of my own. Rick’s post (and mine) asked entrepreneurs to take a short survey describing what they looked for in an angel investor turned mentor. I hoped, that with Rick’s help, we could inject some data into the discussion around the importance of mentorship being championed by the likes of Brad Feld, Mark Suster and any of the multitude of accelerators/incubators/combinators out there.

Boy Scouts and Bat Shit?

Early returns from the survey seem to promise some provocative results. For example, what if the mentor wants to provide help and guidance in an area of little interest to the entrepreneur? Remember the old joke about the Boy Scout helping the old lady across the street…but it was the wrong street? Clearly this mentoring thing is more than just showing up.

Here are some highlights (in my words) of what Rick has shared with me so far:

1. Too many angel investors are like the proverbial Boy Scout dragging that poor old lady the wrong way across the street.

2. Given a choice, entrepreneurs will gravitate toward mentors who can guide them through the funding process, as opposed to mentors with deep domain knowledge of the business (money over brains).

3. Providing input is valued by some and drives others bat shit crazy (this is a technical term I am teaching to Rick).

Start-ups Add Your Voice

I am intrigued by the results so far and want to help Rick in his quest to define the MVM. Take a second to tell me what you think is the most important contribution that a mentor can make to an entrepreneur by clicking on the poll below. If you want to give Rick some more help, take Rick’s full 12 question survey It only takes 3 minutes and may save an entrepreneur a funding cycle of pain and suffering.

Thanks for adding your vote.