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Tips for 1st Time Entrepreneurs

A bit of our pitch at the MIT Startup Demo was meant to be tips/lessons learned for other potential entrepreneurs.  While we are certainly continuing to learn more everyday, it was a good exercise to look back and find any advice I could give.  Some of our fellow presenters offered their 'additional' advice had they had more than 10 minutes, so I figured I'd do the same:

1.  Hire people smarter than yourself.  The initial thought is to hire your friends, or frat buddies, or coworkers or whatever.  Not giving into these desires has worked out extremely well for me, and by putting in the leg work to find some other entrepreneurial minded people is worth the effort.  I suppose if your friend is smarter than you knock yourself out, but I've heard far more stories about friendships hurting due to starting a business together rather than friendships strengthening.  Plus, my way, you'll make some friends in the process.

2.  Ask for help.  If you could met anyone in Seattle, who would it be?  Have a phone call with anyone in the states?  Go for it, find their email (or email someone at the company you know they're a part of) and ask.  Don't try and sell them, humble yourself, tell them the truth, and ask for advice.  You'll get a lot of non-responses, but the 1 or 2 yeses may just be worth it.

3. Launch.  Tomorrow.  Then base your feature set off of what your test users want.  It's a way we've fought feature creap, and, while we lost some users since not everything was functioning perfectly, it's certainly helped us define what to spend our time working on.  In many websites, I feel that 'stealth,' mode is overrated, especially if you don't have the money to hide out in stealth while building.

This doesn't work for everybody.  I'm glad we launched before we were ready.  Your product has to be usable, but I think it's better to get user feedback, even if it's bad, then to wait till you think it's ready.

4.  Meet your target market.  Offline.  Over coffee or beer.  Our end users are athletes (which I am and know very well) and coaches (which I kind of am but have many assumptions about that were proved wrong), and interviewing both before building features helps a lot.  I used to blog about this, but many social sites are launching at the youth/college demographic, and if you are no longer a part of that demographic make sure you learn their needs first.  Many of your assumptions may be quite wrong (hint, very, very few college students actually read any blogs).

5.  Smile, nod, move on.  You're going to have a lot of people doubt you, and a lot tell you 'no.'  Their opinions should be heard and you should definitely take them into account, but sometimes, people just aren't going to be in your corner.  And that's ok.  Have a thick skin, believe in yourself, and don't get bogged down with the negative, it'll just eat at you.

6. Do the networking thing.  Some people love it, some hate it, I hang out in the middle.  All these npost and MIT and NWEN events help you meet a lot of people, and give your elevator pitch over and over and over.  It helped us in our DEMO immensely that I'd given our little spiel a thousand times.  Plus, sometimes, you meet someone who can REALLY help you out, just randomly by shaking their hand and talking in the back room of some bar in Belltown at a networking thing.

7. Know your holes.  According to John Cook our answering of questions helped us at the MIT event.  You know what parts of your pitch aren't obvious, because people ask the questions a lot.  Know the answers.  It's just like a job interview, go in with an answer to 'explain a time when you've failed and what you learned from it.'

8. Stop for a second.  Thing about what you're doing.  A friend of mine was asked if she knew anyone who had their dream job, she said she knew only one.  It was me.  We don't get salaries, we work crazy hours and it's a continual rollercoaster.  But seriously, would you rather be doing anything else?  Take a minute to relish the moment.

Then get back at it.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far.  Have a great holiday.

Athleon Wins MIT Demo

Last Thursday, the MIT Enterprise Forum held a demo event which Athleon was lucky enough to be selected to pitch at.  We gave a five minute talk on our business plan, how we got started, and tips for other entrepreneurs in the audience, then gave a five minute demo.  It went well, we met a lot of great people, and we were lucky enough to be selected the winner of the event. 

From John Cook, venture writer for the Seattle PI:

"Dressed in his UW rugby jersey, Athleon co-founder Brent Lamphier gave a crisp and clear presentation on a new Web site that allows coaches to communicate with athletes about game schedules, work out routines and -- most interestingly -- game film. It was a good pitch, complete with humor. In explaining his reason for bringing on a co-founder, the rugby player noted he needed help because "I get hit in the head a lot." He later described the service as "virtual locker room, with everything but the showers."

Read the rest of the story here.

Do you know what text messaging is?

A buddy of mine had a conversation this past thanksgiving with his grandmother. During the conversation, she asked him "Do you know what text messaging is?" Not, do you text? or do you know how to text? But what is it?

What that simple conversation taught me: despite the rise of technology, and the social web, and blogging, and twittering and facebooking and googling and mobile, folksonomy, enterprise web solutions:

A lot of people, are getting along JUST FINE, without it.

Case and point: can you see your grandmother on facebook (link found via Seth's Blog, originally posted here)?

0 For 2, You're Open, Do You Pass or Shoot?

I coach a 5th grade select basketball team.  Many of my players (much like myself when I played) are often head cases, unable to shake off the missed calls and missed shots and turnovers throughout the game.  They'd just lost a game by 20, a game against a more physical team with few foul calls and lots of errant shots on our part. 

We had another game an hour later...what do you say to a group of guys who need a fresh attitude before next game?  You make up a story.

I told them Michael Jordan, throughout his career, made only 1/3rd of his shots (turns out he had a lifetime .515 field goal percentage).  That meant that he took 3 shots to get 1 score (we differentiate crappy fade away shots for our 11 year olds from high percentage 'scoring' shots that actually go in).

Even though I was wrong on the percentage...it fits quite well.  Alex Rodriguez is arguably the best hitter in baseball, and in his career he's hit successfully slightly LESS than 1 out of every 3 teams he bats (.305).  Athletes gets used to failure, but we as people still are terrified of it. 

Seth Godin wrote today that New York City cops only hit what they're aiming for when they fire their guns 34% of the time.  1 out of 3.  Text link ads on a site are only clicked on 1% of the time.  99 failures for every success. 

CPM based marketing is the same way, you pay for 1000 impressions on a site that is loosely targeted to your demographic, and only pay $.50 CPM since you're hedging on the fact that only 15 of those 1000 impressions are noticed (if you're looking to target athletes...talk to me about how you can beat those odds).

In entrepreneurship though (or as Seth says in Sales), it's tough because the failures are personal.  I'm not even talking about company failures, I'm talking about the little misses that add up when you're building your business.  A lead says no.  A potential partnership doesn't even respond (much less say no) to you offer.  Potential employees take up a month of time only to end up not working for you.  Investors (or investment groups now) say 'thanks, but unfortunately you weren't select this month.'  Miss.  Miss.  Miss.

Michael Jordan always believed that the next shot he took, no matter how many in a row he missed, was going to go in (and that's a true story).  One of my players, our biggest head case (and best athlete), in our second game, missed his first two shots....badly.  The game before, had he done that, he'd be useless, completely off his game.

This game he was our leading scorer.  He hit his next 6 shots in a row before missing again.

In basketball making a shot is only worth two points....in entrepreneurship...one make might just be the difference in the game.

"You'll always miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

Best Leadership Quote...Ever

This may be the best quote I've ever heard when it comes to leading/managing a group of people.

It comes from Bear Bryant, the famous former Alabama and Texas A&M football coach

"If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That's all it takes to get people to win."

What The Kindle Should Be

Amazon.com has always been a game changer, and at first glance Kindle is the next big thing.

A lot of people don't seem to like it much (Scoble doesn't give a very kind review, but as always he should be hired for Kindle design 2.0), and at first glance it doesn't do much for me.  I love books, but to me, reading a book is a lot more than just about the words... my favorite store is Barnes & Noble, and not because I like looking at the text.  For me there's something about the words, the covers, the feel of turning a page, dog-earing pages I want to remember text from (I've never been a big highlighter though it's growing on me).  So, even though i love books and love traveling...I'm probably not the target market.

Then it hit me, that the most entrenched industry that I and basically every college student in the country can't stand are those wonderful publishers who charge us $155 for the 7th edition of a huge book (where the only difference from the 6th edition is a picture of a new iPod instead of an old one), something we only read selections of anyway and then sell back for $60, only for the 8th edition to come out later that year for the next crop of suckers.

Textbooks.

I want (well wanted...will want come MBA time) a Kindle for textbooks.  Textbooks are huge, they're a pain, they're ridiculously expensive, you have to know what selections to read (obvious benefit to download required sections wherever you are), many turn into paperweights when new editions come out...etc etc etc.  It would SHOCK the industry if one big publisher signed with Kindle...heck bring on a small one (get HBS case-studies and you automatically have 75% of the undergrad business schools on your side)... that could be exciting.

More on this thought later.