New Blog Strategy: Just Link To Marc A

Lol. So come on. Really the rest of us should just go home. Mr. Smarty Pants (aka Marc Andreessen) has another great post today on why NOT to start a start-up: Part I.

His closing metaphor from Star Wars is great - but leaves two questions in my mind:

Who does Princess Leah represent? and
When Han goes into the hole for protection and that safe-haven ends up really being the throat of a big monster - whose the monster?

(For the record from now on when I am too busy or too stupid to think of anything smart to write, I am just linking to him)

And People Say Tech People Don't Trust The Biz People

So I asked for a change to something which made the guys all nervous. They hate exceptions to the rule because, well firstly, they love rules. Secondly all of them have worked with business people (yeah, ok, fine myself included) who promise it will be the ONLY exception ONLY to have a second and third (and forth and fifth).

lol. Eric (our very dry witted programmer/soon to be PhD in linguistics) said that he would only do what I asked IF he got it in writing that I wouldn't come back and ask for more.

Here is what i promised:

Leigh Himel hereby swears that this so called "exception" will be the only one. If she does what the usual business people do and goes back on her word then we only have to go to this message in our bug tracker software to mock her with, and then laugh as we refuse to execute any of her ridiculous requests.

(and the promise is now of course now immortalized forever on this blog post ;-)

What Would Tim Berners-Lee Say Now?

In 1996, Tim Berners-Lee said,

"what you actually see when you look at the Web is pretty much a corporate broadcast medium. The largest use of the Web is the Corporation making a broadcast message to the consumer."

Well, check this out - TorStar has launched a new site called ourfavs.com. It says its in Beta, it feels like a start-up but it is wholly owned and operated by TorStar (they neglect to mention this in the about us section - you have to go to the terms of use).

Looks like Web 2.0 is going the way of a corporate social media medium (say that 10X fast).

I dunno, maybe it's because I am an entrepreneur, but I like the idea of small companies starting and having users decide what is going to survive before it gets onto Yahoo or the TorStar website.

Having Corporations start their own start-ups? Something just doesn't feel right about that.

To Be A Sheep Or Not To Be A Sheep

Scott sent me a good article from wired (actually that’s the third good article from Wired this week)

Netvibes talks about their choice not to force a google ad style model for their 10M users. Co-founder Tariq Krim
states:

"We break all the rules," says Krim, his dark eyes smiling beneath abundant black curls. If advertisers -- attracted by Netvibes' 10 million users around the world -- want access to Netvibers, they need to create a service in the form of a Netvibes module. If the module -- such as eBay's auction-tracking module -- doesn't benefit the user, forget it. That's Krim's rule.

Two things that I find interesting: Firstly, the whole dark eyes and abundant curls part (Wired does Vanity Fair?) and secondly that a company so successful chooses to focus on building long term value for its users vs. short term monetary gain. Success stories like this go a long way to prove that following just makes you a sheep. Baaaaaaaaaaa.

Passionate Users Aren't Created, They're Discovered

Brad Feld had a post back in August where he talked what he called the golden segment. The 19% of your user base that creates the tipping point for your success and in his words

“If you can figure out how to engage these folks, you win.”

Through out the process of our closed alpha test I exchanged ideas and got feedback both positive and negative from a range of people. Through those discussions, it was easy to see what types of people were going to use oponia and why and what types likely weren’t. But it wasn’t until we shut it down that I had the big epiphany. Without even knowing it, I had a sub-segment of people who were using the product all the time and actually missed it once it was gone!

I even got a request from one person to get 6 accounts activated because our product solved a short-term problem that her and a group of co-workers are having.

Needless to say, we are getting her the 6 accounts.

But here is my point. Passionate users aren’t created - they're discovered. It’s making that discovery and subsequently what you choose to do with it that might in the end make all of the difference.

The Strength of Weak Ties

Bumped into sociologist MS Grovnetter's theory developed in 1973 about weak ties:

"The strength of weak ties is the concept that individuals tend to be more successful in acquiring information about job opportunities by contacting individuals that they did not see often—their weak ties"

His theory in a nutshell: Our inner circle has similar info, similar interests and similar contacts as we do. When we attempting to do something outside of what's typical for us, it's our weak ties that support and inform us. We don’t know what we don’t know, but maybe our weak ties do.

Interestingly enough, I have personally seen this now that I have made the move from being a marketer (in digital media) to being an entrepreneur (in digital media). While what's inside the brackets might be the same, nothing else is. And it's been my weak ties that have made introductions for me and given insights and support to me along the way.

So my advice if you are thinking about changing careers or even considering doing something that might be radically different from what you currently know, cultivate your weak ties. It's their strength that might make the difference.

Lessons From Ning

The day you start to do product development based on what the last potential investor said to you is the day you need to take a step back and remember why you created your invention in the first place.

What a great post from Gina Bianchini of Ning about their lessons learned in the past two years.

Great insight and some lessons I have bumped into most recently. If you are an entrepreneur or thinking about starting a technology company, go read the post and print it out and post it above your desk. You won't believe how easy the simple rules are to forget.

Men Vs. Women Entrepreneurs: The Men Apparently Are More *co*&gh* *gag* Emotional

Accroding to Bat Batjargal (hat tip to Ben Casnocha via Jenny Slade), a lecturer at Harvard, men are more emotional than women entreprenuers. He says:

“Women have larger social networks for advice and resources. But men, surprisingly, have larger "emotional" networks - the complex of associations that provide warmth, praise, and encouragement. And men apparently profit more from these emotional attachments than women do.

"This is probably the most surprising, counterintuitive finding of this research," said Batjargal. "Men can be very emotional, and they use these emotional ties better than women do."

Now lets think about this for a minute. You are a female entrepreneur. Let's say in Tech. There are how many of you out there? And it's a pretty male dominated world. Most of the VCs are male. Haven't connected with one Angel female to speak of yet. The one woman who I did connect with early on for funding opportunities was a dismissive, 'i got five seconds for you to tell me why i should care even though I am on panels all the time talking about women supporting each other in business'.

Our biggest challenge is to been seen as smart, as driven and to be taken seriously. We don’t want to be perceived as weak, as needy and too emotional to make the difficult business trek that is being an entrepreneur.

Ironically, Batjargal speculated that "women network for the sake of relationships, and men for utility."

Maybe as women we do need to rethink our networks, how we build them, how we develop them and how we use them. But I think it’s less as one person concluded that "women need to learn how to network like men" and more that women need to learn how to network like women.

*update: i blog cheated (is that allowed?) and re-edited the post. See, I am such a chick!

Save Like Scrooge & Give Like Santa

Mark Evans has a post that talks about the then (doc com boom) vs now (2.0). While I agree with some comments that it's not all about the furniture (which i don't think is what he was trying to say) I do think that the mentality of most start-ups these days have changed on both the save and spend side. Some of the insights we have garnered over the last year are found below.

On the "SAVE LIKE SCROOGE" side:

1. Find as much "Free Money" as you can
Gov't grants like IRAP and tax programs like SR & ED will garner us in total about 100K, which are crucial monies for a start up our size.

2. Get a high interest savings account
We have the bulk of our investor money in a high interest account and only move money into our operating account the day before payday. It might not be huge money, but it’s the kind of cash that allows you to hire the extra help when needed or give a little holiday bonus money to your staff

3. Find programs that are there to help entrepreneurs
We have our offices at the TBDC which saves us rent, gives us access to services we couldn't afford on our own and puts us in an environment that is full of like minded start-ups

4. Choose your law firms wisely
Our greatest expense after labour is law fees. I actually think this one is so important, I am going to write a posting on the weekend about it. So I'll leave it simple for the moment.

5. If you can DIY, then DIY
Mark talked about the Aeon chairs of the .bomb era. I had to laugh because we actually built our workstations at our office ourselves with 2 by 4s and industrial opaque plastic glued on as dividers. Total cost $400.00 for 6 workstations (not including chairs) and they look pretty great if we do say so ourselves.

6. Define criteria for yourselves for "must have" vs. "nice to have"
This might seem obvious, but it gets really blurry really fast. Ask yourself this question on an on-going basis but remember, if it impacts the product or your deadline, it's a must to have.

That segways nicely into my "GIVE LIKE SANTA" Side:

1. I repeat, define criteria for yourselves for "must have" vs. "nice to have"
As the keeper of the purse strings I am probably the worst for scrimping when I should be spending. Our first Alpha release was late and shouldn't have been but I was more concerned about dollars than sense. Lesson learned.

2. Some furniture shouldn't be DIY
I laughed at the comments in Mark's post about programmers and chairs. This was the one area we didn't DIY. If you don't want the staff at home on Robaxacet, buy them decent chairs.

3. Ahead of your burn rate? Bonus, bonus, bonus
Large companies don't usually do this so why should we? Everyone who works with us has taken massive pay cuts to be here. They believe in what we are doing and what we are trying to accomplish. If you managed to save money on your burn, you probably did so because your team did some jobs that were beneath their skill sets and worked their asses off during the year. They should be rewarded.