Doing It Right, Not First

by Andrew Dumont

​There's a common misconception among first time entrepreneurs that the only way to win is to be the first. The first to attempt an idea, the first to enter a specific market. It's something I've been meaning to touch on for some time, then this came across my feed.

Elegantly said. Too many put an emphasis on being the first to think of an idea. So much so that they never actually create anything, they just keep trying to think of an idea that doesn't yet exist. The most iconic companies in the world weren't the first, they were simply the best. MySpace beat Facebook to the punch, HP hit the market before Apple, PicPlz existed before Instagram. 

It didn't matter.​ They succeeded because they did it right.

'Doing it right' can mean a lot of different things, but I think the most common theme these days is simplicity. Taking a poor user experience, over-zealous feature set or ​complex interface and dumbing it down is often a safe bet. We need simplicity. This is how Jack's Square is blowing dated cash registers out of the water, and it's how we're attempting to shake up the CRM market with Stride. If we were concerned about being first, we sure wouldn't have attempted to enter that space. We knew we could compete on user experience and simplicity, so we did. 

Ideas are a dime a dozen, and you'll likely never be the first person to think of them.​ Worry about executing, not being first.

Next time someone says, "doesn't so and so already do that?" to your fledgling startup idea. Tell them, "yeah, so what? I'll do it better."

Academia: The Times They Are A Changin'

by Andrew Dumont

Higher education has always been a hard topic for me. On one hand, I’m obsessed with learning. On the other, I’ve found that academia does a pretty poor job of equipping me with the right knowledge.

It’s the same dilemma that any entrepreneurial-minded person runs into. We get a taste of the speed at which learning can happen when you’re thrown into the fire, and the classroom setting becomes dull. Tedious. Uneventful. As a result, many of the best minds take matters into their own hands and walk away from higher education.

Academia is ripe for change.

My take on academia is similar to that of the music industry in the pre-Napster era. The record labels were change adverse, just as universities are. The intellectual property is what’s at stake. Consumers fought their way to music, just as they will with education. Academia will be forced to change, and we’re seeing the start of it. 

Khan Academy, Treehouse, Coursekit and Codecademy are only part of the picture. The true reality of this shift hit me with iTunes U. There I was, sitting on my couch, streaming a Harvard Statistics course from my iPad to my Apple TV. The same course, mind you, that students paid upwards of $50,000 per year for. The lectures, course materials, notes — everything in the palms of my hands. What an amazing feeling of empowerment.

The problem with all of this, of course, is accreditation. As we all know, the corporate ladder isn’t built with knowledge, it’s built with brands. Without that piece of paper, knowledge loses much of its value. Entrepreneurs, however, side-step this issue by starting a company of their own and proving their level of knowledge in the real world. If and when this route becomes prominent, traditional Universities begin to lose their value, the prestige goes away, and a higher education becomes greatly devalued. 

Like we’re seeing now.

It’s why the top Ivy League schools participate in iTunes U. It’s not because they want to, it’s because they have to. The opportunity cost of forgoing on the job experience and the potential to change the world far outweighs the value of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain a degree that’s earned through hypothetical coursework. They realize this. Higher Education is a business. And right now, that business is witnessing the beginning of a scary transition.

The majority of us can only hope that it falls in our favor, with education becoming a service. Something we can subscribe to on our own time, gain the knowledge we need, and earn the proper accreditation.

This is the way it should be. And if we’ve learned anything from the short history of the internet, it’s that people find a way to get what they want. Either by hacking the system, or providing a lower-cost, more accessible alternative. It’s hard to believe that higher education will avoid the same fate.

The Right Time to Talk to Users

by Andrew Dumont

Conventional wisdom tells us the customer is always right. 

At the inception of a company, customer feedback is the last thing you need.

Henry Ford was supposedly quoted saying, “If I would’ve asked customers what they wanted, they would’ve said faster horses.”

People don’t know what they want until they can see it, feel it, taste it.

Look at all the hot tech brands that exist today, imagine what they would be with customer feedback during their development phase. They probably wouldn’t have even made it to production. Would a customer ever say they needed Foursquare, Airbnb or Pinterest during the product development phase?

No way.

As an entrepreneur, your goal is to take an idea you believe in and execute on your vision to make that idea a reality. Not the vision of a poor sample set of “customer feedback” that was gathered. Before a product exists, there’s too much uncertainty to extract any valuable feedback, it only distracts from your vision.

Believe in launching, as quickly as you can. Once a product exists, you’ll be able to tell pretty quickly whether or not the product is viable. Then, work with your customers to iterate.

Lean methodologies preach customer development, mostly as a risk mitigation tool prior to launching. That’s flawed. If you’re building a product that solves a problem, you shouldn’t need risk mitigation. You’re fixing something that’s broken, that’s all the validation you need.

Sometimes you have to make a decision on what you think is best for the customer. Think about all of the many Facebook iterations that have resulted in backlash. It’s what has kept them on top, thriving. They placed their bets on what they thought was the best experience for their customer. They stood true to their vision. MySpace on the other hand, built what the customer wanted, in all its glitter text glory.

Build what you believe in. Don’t let your flawed sample set deter from your vision.

Related: some more great reading on the topic here and here.

Resumes and Irrelevance

by Andrew Dumont

We live in a digital world. Yet, most still evaluate people on a piece of paper.

Not Union Square Ventures, as the Journal notes:

Instead of asking for résumés, the New York venture-capital firm—which has invested in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and other technology companies—asked applicants to send links representing their “Web presence,” such as a Twitter account or Tumblr blog. Applicants also had to submit short videos demonstrating their interest in the position.

This is the way it should be. For any technology company, if you’re still evaluating potential candidates by looking at their beautifully irrelevant resume and failing to recognize the rest of the picture, you’re fishing with the wrong pole.

As professionals, we maintain all of that same information online via Linkedin or personal site. The idea of requiring applicants to relay that same info to a static piece of paper blows my mind. It’s short-sighted and does an extremely poor job of gauging a person’s competence and likelihood of succeeding. 

Resumes are a relic of a dated hiring process.

Is That Pinterest? Nope, No It's Not

by Andrew Dumont

So, I just ran across this awesome new site. It’s like Pinterest except… er, wait a minute, it’s exactly like Pinterest. Color, logo, layout, everything, and it’s called Pinspire. 

Original. 

For the founders (the Samwer brothers), it’s nothing new. They’ve launched clone after clone, all of which were acquired by their predecessor. They’re constantly on the scout for U.S. startups that get hot, then simply replicate them internationally. Groupon, eBay, eHarmony, Zappos, Zynga, Airbnb all made their list, and we can now add Pinterest to the bunch.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? Nah. These clones are costing the original creators big money and equity. The worst part, there’s nothing they can do about it. They aren’t legally doing anything wrong.

There’s a natural window when a startup begins to gain steam, before they take an international stake and file for patents. The “Samweri” (I’ve always wanted to say that) are masters of finding that window and executing the hell out of a clone. They’ve done so to the tune of over $300mm. The strategy clearly works, but you’ve got to check your conscience at the door.

Just sit back and watch them stack their German cheddar, I guess. 

Hot startups, beware.

Making Sense of a Heavy Workload

by Andrew Dumont

We’re all busy. We all have more on our plate than we should, it’s just the way it is. If we aren’t overwhelmed, we aren’t pushing hard enough. 

Some people handle it great. In fact, some people thrive on having too much to do. Many, don’t. You can spot the frantic moves of that overwhelmed someone from a mile away. Much of being able to handle a heavy workload comes with time and experience. Only as the shit hits the fan do you realize that the world doesn’t end if you don’t answer that email, everything keeps moving the way it was before.

Aside from the experience that will inevitably come, there’s a few additional things you can do to make sense of a heavy workload.

  • Aggregate by Importance - You can gauge importance of a task by the impact it will have if it doesn’t get done, or the impact it will have when completed. All the stuff that isn’t mission critical, just push it to the bottom. Do first things first, and second things not at all.
  • Lose the Interruptions - The number one thing that kills productivity is interruptions — a meeting, a tweet, an email. Close everything that isn’t related to the task at hand, put in some headphones and get after it.
  • Break it Into Smaller Pieces - 25 small tasks seems a lot more overwhelming than 5 projects with 5 tasks for each project. If you try to take on the the full 25 at once, you’ll get sucked in to an inefficient spiral. Chop your tasks into larger projects with small tasks assigned to each.
  • Show Progress - There’s nothing more demoralizing than working an entire day and not feeling like you made any progress. Write what you want to accomplish on a piece of paper, or a task list (my favorite is Wunderlist) and check it off as you go along. Productivity is more of a mental game than anything else, you’ve got to show your mind progression.

The rest will come with time.

Commenting on Comments

by Andrew Dumont

Comments are stirring up quite the discussion these days, pun intended.

The general gist is that some choice blogs have chosen to completely rid their blogs of comments. The majority of folks disagree with the move, citing the loss of dialogue, community and knowledge that can result from having commenting available. In some rare cases (AVC, cdixon.org, Both Sides of the Table), comments actually provide value.

In the majority of cases, they don’t. To avoid being overly repetitive, I’ll relay MG’s blurb on why that is.

Here’s the thing: while some try to paint comments as a form of democracy, that’s bullshit. 99.9% of comments are bile. I welcome feedback. Just do it on your own site or on Twitter, Facebook, etc. That small barrier alone removes most of the idiots.

Let’s be totally honest here: anyone worthwhile leaving a comment should do so on their own blog. Very few read blog comments anyway. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Commenting is a facade. It makes you think you have a voice. You don’t. Get your own blog and write how you really feel on your own site.

I too had comments on my blog for years, then chose to remove them when I switched to Tumblr. Since the change, I haven’t seen a drop in interaction with the content I post, it’s just happening elsewhere — through re-blogs, tweets, facebook comments or HN discussions. It hasn’t turned my blog into a soapbox. Instead, removing comments have allowed me to focus on producing content, and in turn directed my interactions to places that are built for discussion like, uh, social networks. Not my site.

Many have comments just because they assume that’s the right thing to do when you start a blog. It’s the norm. 

All sites are different, what works for some may not work for all. There’s two sides to the commenting coin, but it’s worth taking a look at both.

Not All Decisions Can Be Quantitative

by Andrew Dumont

I love data, and I love nothing more than making decisions on what the data supports. It’s the safe bet, the closest you can get to sure thing. But, it’s not the end all be all.

Like most, I’ve been trudging through the massive Steve Jobs biography, and ran across a gem on the subject — in reference to the creation of the very first iMac. It reads:

The cost of each case was more than $60 per unit, three times that of a regular computer case. Other companies would have demanded presentations and studies to show whether the translucent case would increase sales enough to justify the extra cost. Jobs asked for no such analysis.

We’re hard wired to make decisions strictly on data. It’s what managers ask for and executives yearn for, because it’s safe. When a decision is made without data, it inherently brings in another level of risk. It’s one of the main reasons why startups move so much faster than corporations, big businesses are risk adverse. Startups are different. They move fast. They think quick. They do.

Sometimes the best decision you can make is the one that your gut supports, not what the data indicates. It’s why few leaders will ever match Steve Jobs. He created what he believed in, and wasn’t afraid to lead with his gut.

Go Daddy Is Starting To Make Netflix Look Good

by Andrew Dumont

In case you missed it, Go Daddy is fucking up. Big time. So much so, that they’re starting to make the Netflix PR team look good in comparison.

We all remember Netflix’s PR collapse from earlier this year, and I never thought I’d say it, but someone is very close to one-upping them. That someone is Go Daddy. Here’s a rough timeline of events, if you’ve saved yourself from the mind-numbing action over the holiday.

The latest comes today, where Go Daddy claims that they not only removed their SOPA support, but they now OPPOSE IT all together. Caps lock and all. Here’s the official statement.

“We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to Go Daddy’s prior support for SOPA, which was reversed,” said Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman. “Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.”

Let’s ignore their SOPA stance for a moment, and look only at this from a PR perspective. Here’s my problem — the whole thing has been disingenuous. If we’ve learned anything from the Netflix mess, it’s that transparency is the only way to get out of a hole this deep.

There was a reason why Go Daddy supported SOPA in the first place. Whatever it was, they need to make that very clear. What did they hope SOPA would achieve?  We get why they flipped to extreme opposition of SOPA. I would do that same if I cannibalized my own business.

They’re giving all of us the finger by throwing out bullshit about a “consensus among stake-holders” and “repairing relationships.” The only thing Go Daddy cares about is that money. That’s it.

Shoot us straight. That’s the only thing that’s going to pull you out of this mess. Or, don’t. Maybe Danica Patrick will save you.