If you’ve read more than a couple of my blog posts, you’ll find that I spend just as much time focusing on more touchy-feely subjects as I do on more tactical learnings. There’s a reason for that, as the psychological state of you and your team has a tremendous effect on your ability to execute, and therefore, the success of your venture. Flashback to late 2011/early 2012. I was...
From the school of interesting ways we’ve failed… There is a vast chasm separating the ability to collect metrics and use metrics. The lean startup canon pushes for being data driven, so you’ll find that every startup has a plethora of people using a plethora of tools to “be metrics driven.” Lots of data. A/B Testing. Multivariate testing. All of this lingo circles around...
As our company grows from three guys on a door desk to something more substantial, we’ve invested a lot of time not just to running the company but about **how** we run the company. That is particularly relevant for the CEO role. In talking to many CEOs and a fair amount of research – it’s clear there is no “right” way to run a company – it all comes down to...
Beyond the commonplace tools (Google Spreadsheets, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Apps, etc) and the obvious (Contactually!) – I’ve listed out some tools that I use daily, if not multiple times daily, to assist me. Trello – We use Trello to organize anything we’re working on – from product feedback to ideas to my personal to-do list. Join.me – This is our go-to...
There’s a scene in How I Met Your Mother where Marshall imagines dropping in right at the point where his teenage self starts smoking, and slugs him. I’ve adopted a mentality that, if at any point I’m able to traverse time a year, even six months, back…. I’d kick my own ass. It has nothing to do with age or maturity – but the cycle of learning is so rapid that...
The typical startup journey involves a lot of failure, which has luckily been embraced by the entrepreneurial community as a positive experience. Beyond the obvious aspect of innovating in a way that, statistically, won’t work, the act of barn-raising a new company is fraught with it’s own issues. The product has bugs. Support times are too slow. Our metrics aren’t adding up...
Most people won’t. Which means those that do change everything. – Bryce Roberts I credit much of Contactually’s success not to having some secret sauce (at the outset), being right, hiring the smartest people in the room, or anything else that would qualify as a competitive advantage. That’s important for other reasons. We’re successful because we show up every day, and do...
After a meteoric rise, LivingSocial has had a tough go recently. Between layoffs, lowered valuations, competitor out-maneuvering, and one of the longest downtimes I’ve ever seen in a consumer site, it’s pretty hard to imagine them fully recovering from this to the grandeur that they used to be. For better or for worse, online forums have been watching, and in some cases even cheering...
In 2010, I started working on a startup called Struc.to. It’s dead now, not even worth the hosting costs or domain registration. All that’s physically left is ~300 stickers I never distributed, a standing banner I haven’t gotten around to throwing out, and a dog bowl my wife had made for me (or Astro) as a gift. Struc.to had the chance to be one of the first BaaS (backend-as-a...
I wanted to be a DJ. In college, I had put together a little bit of money from internships to buy a basic CD setup. I was terrible. I sold my equipment. When freelancing, I was making enough money to buy a proper rig – Technics SL1200MK2s, Rane mixer, Scratch Live, coffin case, etc. I took months of classes. All I needed to do, in my mind, was put in my 10,000 hours and I’d get to...