No Snivelling - Home

Notes from the Startup front…

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I have an all new appreciation for everything that needs to get done to start a company. Going forward, I make the following public pledge:

1) Far fewer unsolicited opinions for friends with startup companies 🙂
2) Far more tolerance for slow email and phone replies from friends at startups
3) Much more understanding for people’s inability to stay current on all of the goings-on in the blogosphere/TechCrunch world
4) Strong appreciation for how impossible it is to stay up-to-date on Twitter 🙂

With that said, here’s some more unsolicited advice for people contemplating starting a company, who are still employed elsewhere:

a) Spend 10% of every week networking (with potential engineers, designers, marketers, fundraising sources, etc. — basically, anywhere you’d have a skillset need in your startup).  I did a B to C level job of this, before jumping in — if I had to do it over again, I’d have emphasized this much more during my tenure at Amazon, rather than just establishing relationships in work situations, I could have reached out beyond my direct groups/teams

b) Spend 5% of every week learning something new, to a point where you know enough to be dangerous (e.g. which email marketing tool is best for 80% purposes, and how to use it).  I did an B job at this — it’s paid off tremendously (SEO, email, blogging, accounting, Wikis, etc.)

c) Sleep… a lot… because you’re going to get a lot less of it when you make the plunge 🙂

Onward!

Thoughts on complacency / “it’s always like this”

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Seth Godin hit on a topic that I’ve thought about a lot over the last few months during my back-and-forth trips to Santa Monica — it’s complacency, lack of initiative, or downright zombie-ness.

He talks about the state of affairs at the Javits Center around conferences — that there are never enough seats, and the garbage cans are always overflowing. Now, if this happens once or twice around an unforeseen event, everyone is quite forgiving. The trouble is that Javits holds massive conferences EVERY DAY! So, that tells us not that they were caught off-guard but that no one gives a rat’s ass about fixing the problem!

Some other examples of this:

  • When airline security ramped up, and we were all required to take our shoes off, I was irked, but OK, with the fact that most airline TSA locations didn’t have a plethora of chairs for people to use to put their shoes back on — however, it’s now several YEARS after the fact, and it’s still very common (in Seattle, LAX, and many others) to have three chairs for the 1,000’s of customers streaming through
  • My web host (Globat… avoid them…) had some problems about eight weeks ago with keeping their stats updated — for some reason, the daily online metrics stopped refreshing. I submitted a trouble ticket the first time and received a polite email and prompt resolution. That was fantastic. What hasn’t been so great is now I need to submit a trouble ticket EVERY TIME I’d like my metrics updated, and I get a similar reply.

What this tells me is that these people don’t use their own products, which is fair, I guess, given the cost of them. But I don’t think you need to be a heavy product user to be aware of your customer’s pain and suffering or likely issues.

You just need to care.

Fruitful namestorming event!

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I admit that I wasn’t really liking ooGooRoo — it was pretty much a placeholder from the start, that I thought I could keep there for the foreseeable future. Try again, Mr. Smartypants.

I’ve quickly learned that for me, it was imperative to pick ‘the name’ early on because you:
a) want to create a logo, color palate, and landing page (to solicit interest, recruit from, etc.)
b) need to file for trademark protection for the name, logo, taglines, and such
c) can excite people about your business by evaluating the verbal description and business plan against the ‘Surname’
d) find whatever name you use becoming more permanent every day, despite your best efforts!

So, on Wednesday night, we pulled together the ‘company staffers’ and a few other creative folks who haven’t been in daily discussions — I wanted to gauge some excitement for our overall idea, and also try to go in different directions and avoid concepts that had begun to set in stone.

To prepare for the meeting, I sent out some pre-reading of favorite Naming Resources — I’ve presented them below to save my competitors some time 😉

If you’re interested in learning more about Company Naming, check these out:

The first three come from the Name Inspector blog, run by a Seattle-based blogger with a PhD in Linguistics):

1. 10 Tips for Naming Your Company, Product or Service
2. 10 Company Name Types
3. Visual Thesaurus
4. Seth Godin’s naming rules
5. Guy Kawasaki’s naming rules

The name must pass some simple ‘viral/passalong’ litmus tests:
a) “Is this a name you’d want to tell your friend when you’re out having drinks and you tell them about your experience with this website?”
b) Would one of your customers feel silly referring other customers to a company with this name?”

p.s. Thanks to Bruce and Vicki (for not only their help with the naming exercise, but also for the most excellent accommodations!), Michelle the GooRoo, Karen, and Katie!

I hired an awesome lawyer, Chris Hurley — Beacon Law Advisors — the train moves forward!

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Chris Hurley - Awesome Lawyer - Beacon Law Advisors

It’s a small thing in the bigger picture, but I’m excited to note that I hired a lawyer today — I’m particularly excited because:

a) he was referred by a friend who I really trust
b) we’ve had a number of extremely positive working sessions already, and
c) I think he’s going to teach me a lot about the startup/fundraising/business building process — I’m expecting that he’ll serve more of an advisor/mentor role vs. simply a legal resource

We closed the deal with a mixture of equity and fee smoothing, and it was sealed with a handshake — I’m happy with it, and I think he is as well.

FYI — his name is Chris Hurley — and he was awesome. Sadly, Chris died too early at age 54 on Jan 20, 2020. We lost a great one 🙁

Creating ‘Stoke’ around your product

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I had a great day today — caught up with Joel (one of my early mentors) and had a thought-provoking few hours, as usual. He’s an amazing guy — has worked with an amazing string of computing pioneers (Visicalc, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon) which doesn’t come by accident.

We talked about a wide range of topics, but one that stuck with me — he talked about the concept of getting users to ‘stoke your product’ — he compared two skiing sites Teton Gravity Research and Epic Ski. He frequents both of them, but TGR empowers users to Stoke their experiences — it encourages photos, videos and action content, whereas Epic Ski is more tuned to technical descriptions of skis and equipment.

TGR gets to the technical as well, but they take a more circuitous route — that is, they show you the 1,000 foot vertical the equipment carried you through alive, complete with radical photos… then they get to the mundane details about why the skis are killer. Epic focuses on the details from the get-go.

Of course, it only takes a 3-second glance at each homepage to see where their focus is — I think I’d prefer to spend some time at TGR… how about you?

So, which one’s a Mac… and which is a PC? 🙂