This Justyn

A Note For VC's On Engaging With Founders

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:21:00 -0600

Venture Capitalists collectively are much more versed in their craft than I will ever be and I suspect know well what works and what doesn’t. However as a founder, I wanted to share some feedback on the process of engaging with us as entrepreneurs.

“We wanted to learn a little more about your business and form a relationship now, should a need arise in the future”

This sums up 90% of the calls we field from your associates. It almost always includes some discussion about your investment thesis, the size of rounds you do (always with the disclaimer that this isn’t set in stone), the names of a few of your portfolio companies, some standard questions about our business/competition - closes asking about our venture plans and promises to follow up in a few months.

Since you don’t have visibility into how every other VC firm handles their calls, just know that they are borderline boilerplate and add little value.

The ones I remember - the ones who will get the first appointments when raising capital are the ones that demonstrate a deep understanding of my space, business model, unit economics and can rap intelligently about where the space is headed, developing trends, etc.

This typically only happens when I meet with partners. Certainly your partners don’t have time to speak with everyone, but we also don’t have time for the same calls with associates from hundreds of VC firms.

When I have meetings like this, they stay top of mind. I think “these guys get our business, it’s worth another call/meeting”. The ones that fall into the previous category get put into an email folder so I can keep track of who I’ve already talked to next time an associate calls.

To be clear, this is not a knock on the Associate position in any sense - I’ve had great conversation with plenty, but the experience that comes from board membership, building companies and long relationships with founders is what drives the most meaningful conversations (for me).

Hope this feedback is somewhat useful.

"Work hard. Cry less. And realize you’re part of history."

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 01:35:59 -0600

“Work hard. Cry less. And realize you’re part of history.”

- Mike Arrington (via adaugelli)

Facebook hasn't "won" social, it's done a brilliant job at 1/2 of it.

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 21:18:09 -0500

I’ve read a few posts recently proposing that Facebook has “won” at social. They’ve certainly done an amazing job with much of what we call social networking.

What’s missing, and why Twitter and Google+ will continue to do very well, is the discovery aspect. For 95% of us, Facebook is a place where we connect with people we already know, work with, or have some other loose connection to. We haven’t embraced it as a place to discover new interesting people. Partly because that wasn’t the intended purpose, and partly because that’s not how the UI works.

I’ve said many times that the value of Twitter (for me) has been the ability to connect with and learn from very interesting people that I wouldn’t have a true social connection to in the real world. It’s an opportunity to stand over the shoulder of the smartest minds in a given field and learn from them, read what they are reading, and often to make a meaningful connection that turns into something more.

A social network based on real life connections is needed, without question, but that’s only part of the true value of social networking. Twitter allows us to mix the two, though not interact differently with different audiences. Google+ is the first network IMO that captures both sides in a compelling way.

In the real world, we interact with different groups of people differently, the premise behind Google+ and it’s ‘circles’. In an ideal world, we connect with and learn from people as disconnected from us as Kevin Bacon, and progress gets a whole lot more interesting.

Can you spot the Irony here? A few problems with this; a) You...

Wed, 11 May 2011 01:48:00 -0500

Can you spot the Irony here?

A few problems with this;

a) You can’t say social media marketing doesn’t work, and plaster the article with social media sharing buttons. Which is it?

b) The article states that already ubiquitious brands (Starbucks and Subway) are ONLY seeing a 2% revenue increase. Starbucks did $9.8B in the latest (2009) annual report. That would reflect an increase of $192M. Where are you getting your definition of “doesn’t work”?

c) The content of this article is 100% about Location Based Services (Foursquare, Gowalla, etc.), NOT Social Media Marketing as a strategy. Even if the content had any merit (it doesn’t), the title is shit. It’s irresponsible to mislead readers for the sake of a catchy headline.

How many small business owners were dreading getting started with social media in the first place, saw this article and said “phew, I didn’t want to learn that stuff anyway”. Luckily I don’t think many of them read SAI, but page-view driven opinion presented as fact to the less seasoned reader frustrates me greatly.

Where the best ideas come from

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 20:29:40 -0600

Your mileage may vary, but I’ve found that the best business ideas come disproportionately from two activities; reading (long form) and on your way into, and out of sleep.

I specify long-form reading because it gives your brain a chance to shake loose the relatively narrow focus of your daily activities. Reading blogs, tweets, articles, etc. is great for education, but to really get the creative wheels turning, they don’t offer enough of a departure from whatever else is going on.

Even if the topic is only loosely related to my business goals, I find I almost walk away with a page or two of good (fresh) ideas after reading through a full book. I also find that the good ideas really start forming after a few chapters - I’ll often go back and re-read the first few once I’m in the right mindset.

I think this is mostly because you’ve spent enough time in the material to become separated from whatever else is going on - a reset of sorts - and real innovation comes from forgetting constraints.

The same goes for sleep. As you drift off or begin to wake up, your subconscious is still primarily in charge, and it doesn’t know about all of the boundaries that we typically operate within.

Have you found the same? Give it a try. Eventually I’ll add a comments section to this blog so you can tell me :)

Scrappy is good. Efficient is better!

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 09:08:00 -0600

Everyone knows you need the right tools to do the job well. You can demolish a wall with a spoon but unless you’re trying to kill time, get a sledge hammer. Or, if your time is worth more than $25/hr, hire someone else to do it and get it off your plate completely.

This can be applied to nearly all facets of your startup - some you are probably overlooking. Being scrappy is great. It’s an admirable trait in general and you can learn a lot along the way. But, as soon as you can afford it, you should favor efficiency.

Using just Google Analytics and an FTP client we can test different variations of landing pages. Using Website Optimizer we can do it more efficiently. Using a dedicated landing page CMS, while not cheap, allows us to do it more efficiently still.

For a long time I did mockups and wireframes using Snagit Beta for Mac (free). I found I could do them 10x more efficiently using Balsamiq which was designed for that task. Interestingly enough I now use Keynote (a slide presentation tool) which allows me to be another 3x as efficient - and more detailed so there’s less time lost on back and forth with my designer and developers.

I can get by with basic accounting, but it’s not what I’m great at and not what my business needs me to be doing. We don’t need someone doing that full time yet, so instead I hire out to people who are experts, have lots of other customers, and will charge me accordingly.

Sometimes we hang on to ‘Scrappy’ out of pride, because we think frugality is a sign of good execution, or we simply overlook opportunities to optimize. There are things in your business today that could be exponentially more efficient if you and your team had the right tools.

Sometimes they won’t make economic or logistical sense, but take a close look. When you compare the cost of the ideal tool with the opportunity cost of lost time or efficiency, you might be surprised. After all, these tools and services weren’t priced in a vacuum.

If your engineers spend 15% of their time doing QA, but you can you can spend 5% of your payroll to have someone do it full time, you’re ahead (and you can ship 15% more product). Spending is hard, especially in a startup, but sometimes it’s the right move.

I set a reminder each weekend to look for ways I can improve my efficiencies. I’d love to hear some ways you’ve done the same.

Re: Biz School

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 01:49:00 -0500

“If you send an idiot to a motivational seminar, you get a highly motivated idiot”

I don’t remember the source of the quote, but it’s stuck.

The same goes for technical schools, undergrad, biz school, etc.

Greatness is in the composition of the person and is only augmented by education. I have brilliant employees who didn’t finish college, and brilliant employees with Graduate degrees. I believe the latter would have been brilliant (at something) regardless.

We’ve also all met highly educated people who suck.

In some cases education changes the course of what people excel at. In others it helps round out their tool set. In many cases the greatness was a course set in action independent of outside influence.

Hire and pay well for brilliant people, don’t get hung up on how it was nurtured.

How to get truly useful customer feedback

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 22:17:09 -0500

Something that worked well for us, may work for you.

After our public launch (post private beta), I sent our first 500 users a personal email asking for their thoughts, was the software meeting expectations, things they liked, didn’t like, were confused by, etc.

These were personal emails from me, to them (only). They weren’t automated in any fashion.

The results were amazing. I received over 100 thoughtful responses, some of them pages long. People took the time to provide really useful feedback and it was tremendously more valuable to our business than anything a survey or feedback forum could have provided.

I attribute the responses to the fact that these were personal emails, and the open nature of the questions asked.

This clearly isn’t scalable - I spent hours a day for a few weeks responding, but the insights were so much more useful than anything we get from other channels. If you can fit it in, I highly recommend it.

The Danger Of "Lean"

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:52:00 -0500

“Half of these opinions won’t apply to a majority of you.”

If every lecture, self help book and Lean startup talk began with the statement above, I wouldn’t be writing this post. But they don’t.

Like any sales or self-help book, lecture or op-ed piece - the Lean Startup mindset has a lot of valuable lessons; when assessed against your situation and applied where it makes sense. The thing that troubles me is the typical presentation of “this is the way to do things” and “what worked for me will work for you”.

If you’re like me, at some point you’ve worked for a manager who changed your entire process after reading some book on this or that. They get all excited and has an entire team spinning their wheels until, god forbid, they read another book.

Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week was a runaway success. How many of you who read it are working any less than you were before?

No way in hell you’re going to outsource dietary supplement manufacturing overseas, let a virtual assistant manage your business and go win a Jui-Jitsu competition while vacationing 6-months out of the year. But, there were a lot of valuable lessons.

My current beef isn’t with Tim’s book, it’s with some of the teachings of “Lean”. Or more directly, that they don’t all include a disclaimer.

One of the most shared practices of Lean is the idea of releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) and letting the users take over. That’s not how it’s presented, but that’s what it boils down to.

If you asked Facebook users what they wanted in the product early on, they would have said custom profiles and a music player. That’s what users knew. Myspace set the expectations. Luckily Mark Zuckerberg had a vision that he wouldn’t compromise on, knew when to ignore the masses and built a massively successful business.

If Mark Pincus of Zynga asked users what they wanted, do you think they would have said “we want to pay real money, to plant fake corn”?

In 2005, the most commonly requested features for cellular phones were MMS and longer battery life. The iPhone didn’t support MMS for years, and the battery life still sucks.

The most successful entrepreneurs have a gift for seeing what users need, before anyone else. The most successful businesses change our expectations.

If all we do is build what customers ask for, we’re all going to end up with the same damn products. VC’s would just hire focus groups and an army of engineers and build it themselves.

Own your roadmap. Solve problems that require vision we don’t possess - we’re relying on you to do exactly that.

Do right by your users, always. Without fail. But know that often we don’t know what to ask for. And if you build what we ask for, based on our current world-view, know that you’re going to end up building what we already have - and I’m not paying you for something I already have.

Erase “MVP” off your white board and don’t release something until it’s ready. You’re the only one who knows.

Absolutely test your hypothesis, make sure there’s a market fit, and get feedback along the way. But don’t be timid and second-guess yourself out of building something extraordinary or worse, let beta users talk you out of your roadmap.

Half of these opinions won’t apply to the majority of you.

"For many new businesses, forgoing profitability in favor of growth is the right strategy. The goal..."

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 00:16:56 -0500

“For many new businesses, forgoing profitability in favor of growth is the right strategy. The goal should be the option of profitability in short order.”

Top 35 UX Blogs (via @Marshallk)

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 22:30:44 -0500

Top 35 UX Blogs (via @Marshallk)

"For every hour you spend building new features, expect to spend 2 hours simplifying your product."

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 01:47:07 -0500

“For every hour you spend building new features, expect to spend 2 hours simplifying your product.”

- Me

Just a brilliant talk by Malcolm Gladwell re: Choice

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:21:40 -0500

Just a brilliant talk by Malcolm Gladwell re: Choice

If I were an investor...

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:45:00 -0500

(I’m not), here’s what I would look for in a startup:

Must Haves;

BOTH Technical and Business-minded founders/team. By technical I mean the person who’s building it. By business-minded I mean someone who can sell it, drum up strategic deals and has a phenomenal sense of product.
A prototype (at least). If you couldn’t find anyone to help you get the idea off the ground without money, I wouldn’t be convinced of a) the idea b) the leadership.
A business model that a) exists b) isn’t ad based.
A large, underserved market with money.
Lots and lots of innovation. A significantly better mouse-trap.

Ideally;

Cheap keywords
CEO owns the product roadmap
User Experience Fanatics
5+ years experience doing whichever function they intend to do with the company. CTO = coding. CEO = selling, leading, managing products. CEO could fall under the coding side too I suppose.

I’m totally biased on all of these things, and as I said I’m not an investor - but based on my current world-view, this is what I would look for.

"You can dedicate resources to social media and engage conversation, or you can dedicate 10x the..."

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 23:29:10 -0500

“You can dedicate resources to social media and engage conversation, or you can dedicate 10x the resources to try to manipulate the conversation through traditional media.”

- Me

Segmented Social Graphs (Why Google could win)

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:29:00 -0500

Just read a great article/presentation related to the challenges of unsegmented social graphs (linked/embedded below)

The case used in the presentation to illustrate the problem was a swim teacher with young students who was also connected to gay friends and often commented on their pictures on Facebook - unknowingly exposing her students to photos from wild nights out from her friends.

The more common case is just that we normally behave differently with different groups of people (family vs. co-workers for example). Mark Zuckerberg would probably say that people with nothing to hide wouldn’t need any segmenting. That’s just not realistic. We interact with people differently.

The problem is, that as methods to segment social graphs emerge, it’s entirely too tedious to go *back* and put everyone into buckets. FB lists or groups (not sure what they’re called) are just too much work.

And that is why, in my opinion, Google’s social site (Google Me?) could win. People loved the blank canvas that moving from MySpace to Facebook provided. “OK, this is my REAL network”.

As Facebook has increased in popularity, people have started making much looser connections. What was once family and friends is now friends, family, industry connections, coworkers, etc.

More than that, adding people to ‘buckets’ of contact types at the time of connection is 1000x easier than going back and trying to do it now (think about your Twitter following, would you actually go back and group them all? You’d get about 1/10th of the way through and give up).

That’s why on Sprout Social, we have people add contacts to lists/groups as they connect. The same approach could make Google Me a very likable web property for the overwhelmed, OCD like me, and just people who want some walls between groups of online connections.

Users have different social graphs on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for that very reason. If Google Me offers a way to have that same distinction in one place, they will do amazingly well.

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams.

Ways in which Apple wins...

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:49:00 -0500

When a company can claim the following, I will bet on their stock hitting $500

Hottest phone on the planet
Hottest laptops on the planet
Hottest tablet computer on the planet
Slickest consumer OS available
People lined up for blocks rather than waiting for the UPS truck
Stranglehold on digital music
The most visionary product team our industry has seen

Apple has become a juggernaut we’ve never seen the likes of before. Their dominance is different than MSFT dominance 10 years ago - because it was put at the top of the pedestal by users, not necessity.

Spotted: iPhone 4 reception patch [Exclusive via /...

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:20:06 -0500

Spotted: iPhone 4 reception patch [Exclusive via / @SproutSocial]

Here are all the details for our next release. Aren’t you...

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:50:00 -0500

Here are all the details for our next release. Aren’t you glad you asked? :)

1/2 of the Sprout Social Team

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:58:00 -0500

1/2 of the Sprout Social Team

This Justyn

A Note For VC's On Engaging With Founders

"Work hard. Cry less. And realize you’re part of history."

Facebook hasn't "won" social, it's done a brilliant job at 1/2 of it.

Can you spot the Irony here? A few problems with this; a) You...

Where the best ideas come from

Scrappy is good. Efficient is better!

Re: Biz School

How to get truly useful customer feedback

The Danger Of "Lean"

"For many new businesses, forgoing profitability in favor of growth is the right strategy. The goal..."

Top 35 UX Blogs (via @Marshallk)

"For every hour you spend building new features, expect to spend 2 hours simplifying your product."

Just a brilliant talk by Malcolm Gladwell re: Choice

If I were an investor...

"You can dedicate resources to social media and engage conversation, or you can dedicate 10x the..."

Segmented Social Graphs (Why Google *could* win)

Ways in which Apple wins...

Spotted: iPhone 4 reception patch [Exclusive via /...

Here are all the details for our next release. Aren’t you...

1/2 of the Sprout Social Team

Segmented Social Graphs (Why Google could win)