Get To Business.

To survive in the startup game you need partners and investors. You’ll come across many people who say they can help but somehow you (I?) always feel like they’re lacking in urgency.
They’ll always say “Lets schedule a meeting and talk about it”, and that meeting will always be a several weeks from now. And then it will require another meeting, and another meeting, and it will test your patience. You are thinking to yourself, “Man, this is a hot deal. Why are we moving so slow?”

Personally, I hate this stalling tactic. I understand people are busy, but so am I. If I can make time to meet you NOW, so can you.

I liked this strip from the classic comic TheVC. Why don’t you say no now?

I’ve being doing the ’startup thing’ for close to a year and a half. That might not sound like much, but I feel that I’ve learned a ton and gained much experience. Following a recent startup-oriented weekend adventure I took a part in and some introspection, I give you my version of the old ‘top ten common mistakes’ when starting up in the web environment:

1. Lack of focus

Keep it simple, stupid. This might sound obvious, but a lack of focus is a real killer for a young start up. Define your core business and avoid temptations to branch out in other directions as opportunities come along (Jim Collins calls it the hedgehog mentality). Know what you do best, and stick with it.

2. Lack of discipline

If you don’t have the discipline to pursue your goals with single-minded determination, you will fail. This doesn’t mean that your vision has to be set in stone (far from it, your vision should be constantly adapting), but you have to know what your core ideals are and believe they will take you where you want to get. You will encounter hardships and things will get much worse before they get better, so have the resolve to follow through (or save yourself the time and go work at some software company).

3. Overuse of buzz words

If the first two points were universally true, this one plagues web startups to a much greater degree. People throw around concepts such ‘viral’, ‘SAAS’, ’semantic web’,'web 2.0′, ’social community’ to describe how their brand spanking new start up is going to succeed. If one of those concepts happen to apply to your idea, people will understand it themselves. If you need to keep using them to convince others of your certain future success, you might be experiencing the buzz-word syndrome.

4. No balance amongst founders

This one is critical. Ultimately, its the team that determines the success of the startup and not the idea. A strong team can carry a mediocre idea to great success, while an average team will probably fail even with a very good idea. There are several factors that go into making a strong team besides collecting talented individuals - such as a diverse skill set (most common mistake - only technological founders), having not too many and not too few (three is the lucky number here) and strong team chemistry (you will have disagreement. Is your relationship strong enough to overcome?). Note that investors will look for those qualities as well, more so than an amazing idea or breakthrough technology (which are very rare).

5. Thinking you know anything when you start

You don’t. You will make tons of mistakes. Are you adaptive enough to grow and develop? Can you let go of your ego to admit that what you’ve been putting much effort into was a big mistake? (Some times called facing the brutal facts). Knowing when you are wrong and be willing to admit it is key to survival as a small start up.

6. Making money or making a difference

If you are in it just for the money, you might succeed. However, if you want to make a difference you are in a much better position. A difference maker will not just reach his target audience, he will make them his evangelists. His passion and his belief in the idea will come from a place that will sustain him for much longer and will be apparent in his actions. Go and watch this excellent presentation by Guy Kawasaki. Come back in 40 minutes.

7. Hiring people: Quantity over quality

Start ups start small and always feel they need to expand, sometimes very rapidly. However, it is imperative to hire the only the people you are absolutely sure about. If there is a doubt, there is no doubt. I’m not even talking about skill or experience, but the basic persona. One bad apple can ruin it for everyone and degrade performance across the board.
Also, hire people who are learners and passionate over experienced with a 9-to-5 mentality. I want every person at my start up to pick up many new skills as we move forward and also to be passionate about what he does. No amount of technical wizardry or marketing knowledge can cover up for that.

If you hire the best people, you will soon find out that the best ideas and solutions come from having active discussions with them. In hebrew we call that having a ‘good head’, which means someone has the right mental tools to be constantly successful and a good team player.

8. Avoiding responsibility

Sometimes bottlenecks appears and progress slows to a crawl. When that happens you have to take action, and find out who needs motivating or what needs solving. Don’t assume someone else will take care of it since it’s not your responsibility. If you aren’t doing anything you are a part of the problem and not the solution.

9. Planning too far or not at all

There are two main types of thinkers - pragmatics who focus on the what needs to be done now, and visionaries who focus on the greater picture. Losing track of your objectives and higher level goals and planning for the next step is a sure way to steer off course, and planning too much will get nothing done. You have to balance those two activities constantly, never neglecting either.

10. Suffering for the cause

This is your startup, your idea, your passion. If you aren’t having fun you will run out of motivation and energy, ultimately failing after much anguish and anxiety. Find out why and if it can be fixed or return to the drawing board and start over.

The new layout went online today. This might sound ridiculus, but the previous design was supposed to be a temporary placeholder for a couple of weeks (and stayed for over 5 months…). Either way, we are very happy with the new concept and hope you will like it too.

I’ll just leave a teaser and say that this facelift extends much further into the platform (though its not on the public server yet). Stay tuned!

Yesterday was the last day of Startup Weekend Israel, an event in which a large groups of would be entrepreneurs try to take an idea from concept to product over a single weekend.

As expected, the last day was the most chaotic. Business dev guys were still coming with new features and far-reaching ideas in the afternoon, user experience guys were constantly changing the interface requirements, marketing guys forced design changes and pushed minor features into the front and dev guys kept smiling and nodding as if everything is going to be alright.

The thing that struck me the most was how segregated all those groups seemed to be. During the last year and a half in which I’ve considered myself a full-time entrepreneur, I’ve worked very tightly with all aspects of the concept to product process. I’ve done business development, pitched marketing ideas, gained a lot of experience to complement intuition for user experience and of course increased my development expertise. This gave me a very balanced vantage point when considering how to proceed with development of a product and the business as I was seeing the big picture.

In the Startup Weekend (SUW for short from now) I came to realize how much of an advantage that approach gives in comparison to expertise phased development - A development cycle that goes through groups of people with homogeneous skill set. In such an approach, at each phase all product and business aspects are never considered.
How can a business development guy with no experience in user experience or design can make interface and layout related decisions? how can a designer make far-reaching implementation decisions with no knowledge on how it will implemented? how can a marketing guy decide to sacrifice user experience for improving seo efforts? how can the developers be implementors only and not be interested in making top-level decisions?

This kind of process takes place in large companies regularly, and is opposite to the startup ideals. A startup is molding a non-focused idea and identity into something tangible. It should be dynamic and adapting. Everybody should know everybody and have input when developing the idea. What I saw in the SUW is that a lot of people have entrepreneurship aspirations, but since they come from a larger company background they ultimate resort to what they are most familiar with.
Edit - After hearing some insights from people who worked in large companies, this kind of process doesn’t happen there either (I confess to not being familiar with the large company process). In a normal development process, representatives from all departments are involved in the decision making process.

Back to the last day, as we were nearing the end it was becoming clear to anyone that we weren’t going to put out a working product with minimal functionality, never mind all the fantastic (in theory) features business development and marketing kept coming up with, features were starting getting cut until we reached the core again at around 10pm. Obviously that was too late, and a non-working version with just a main page and some content pages were uploaded (http://www.tribiu.com).

So you’d understand how good ideas get off track easily in such an environment, take a look at the following concept design and compare it to the actual site -
This design was produced by my partner Adam in three hours last night at my request. I came back at the end of the second day and told him development was stuck at the design stage as they only finalized the logo at 9pm and there was no time left for actual product concept (by the way, this is no knock on the design guys. The entire decision making process was not productive to this environment and time table).

In my opinion this design has real tangibles (and is a tribute to my partner’s outstanding understanding of the web environment). It’s simple, very focused and visually attractive. Bear in mind its just a concept layout and not a polished final. I believed this design had a very good chance of becoming a working product during the one day left for development. However, marketing said you must have this and this in the homepage, and SEO said you must have content and design said we like the concept but not shapes or colors. Hello guys, do you realize you have just one day to finish this thing?

What I saw at SUW reminded me a lot of the lessons taught in the book ‘Good To Great’ (on which I wrote a post), which put much emphasis on developing the hedgehog mentality - focusing on your core business and ideas. Those ideals don’t just sound nice on paper, they provide much insight on how a good decision process should take place.

I did get a good deal of networking done over the weekend, and overall it was a very interesting experience. My partner Adam and I are considering organizing a similar event in a much smaller format with different guidelines that are more suited to a startup environment. More on that in the coming weeks.

So another day of intensive startup experience. Yesterday we chose our idea - to make time-bartering service. A person can chose to give some of his time for another with his expertise, and then later receive a service from another member with the time credits he accumulated (By the way I voted for another idea which I thought was better, but thats irrelevant now).

So today we split up into teams. Dev team chose their development language, and unfurtunately it was asp.net. There was only one other PHP dev there besides me, so I guess it was not meant to be. I decided to move to GUI stuff (javascript, css, html) where no one claimed any particular mastery, and rode the wave from there to join the user experience team (a group of people discussing UI concepts and working on interface mockups). The UE sessions were very interesting and I felt like I had a lot to five there. This in contrast to the dev group, where they had like 30+ people… the chaos was staggering.

Near the end of the day the development funneled to basic bottleneck in web, the graphic design. Somehow, we have only 2 designers compared to 30+ devs… how is that possible? someone told me that some of the devs got in with designers tickets… thats pretty incredible. Design was further delayed by all sorts of non graphic professionals trying to have to much input (they call themselves marketing ), and logo was finalized only around 9pm … actual page design wasn’t even started before we separated to our homes, Which tomorrow will be an impossible race to the finish.

Today was the first day of Startup Weekend Israel which a very interesting to attend. For those who are not familiar with the concept, a quick recap: Startup Weekend is a gathering / conference for entrepreneurs from all walks of life (technological, business, marketing, etc..) for 3 days of concentrated brain-dump and hard core development on one chosen startup idea, at the end of which a finished (or at least, working) product emerges. All the participants are then given shares for a company that is formed to drive this product to whatever future it is destined for.

The odds (in my opinion) of something really great coming from this are slim, but the process itself is very interesting and there is much networking to be had. It was very interesting to see the different types of entrepreneurs and attitudes, and plenty of good ideas for a potential startup were shown. Tomorrows is the first day of active development, and its going to be messy (think 60 developers, designers, marketers and even some project managers). But it will be a worthwhile experience I’m sure.

In other news, I am starting my own blog! (You are very shocked, I can tell. You, our only reader.) It will be called TechFounder and there I will focus on the my experiences as a technological entrepreneur and developer in the web world. Posts there will be much more technical, with plenty of PHP, MySQL, Javascript and CSS goodness.

In case you were wondering whats up with Octabox …

We are currently in the middle of a major upgrade and redesign. Based on feedbacks we have received from our private beta and ideas from internal brainstorming and review, we are building a completely new user interface. Simpler interactions, increased responsiveness (and more eye-candy ) and overall tightening up of the user experience.

In addition we will be adding two new work-modes to complement the basic data management tools.

One is a ‘planning stage’ (we like to call it a ‘Thinking’ stage), in which a user can create contextual information - by stating a goal and then planning the steps to completion with the goal as motivation. A goal can be anything from completing a work project, buying a new car, doing your homework or any context in which you might want to manage information.

After thinking of the steps for goal completion, a user will be using Octabox management tools to manage information related to the goal (this is the second stage, ‘Manage’).

This will be similar to the previous management tools supplied by the platform, however we are reworking and improving everything.

The third stage is a review stage we like to call ‘Learn’, in which expectations are compared to results and lessons are learned - and implemented for better planning for future goals.

We have no set deadline for the completion of this transition, however, based on current progress we expect to have a public beta version in a couple of months. Hope to see you there.