I have often talked about startups as an engine for job growth, but I haven’t said much about where the people come from who fill those jobs. Although I think it’s healthy for people to take a shot at starting a business, it isn’t always for everyone, and some people have better ideas after a couple of years experiencing what it’s like to work for someone else. No matter what path people take, entrepreneurship and jobs are closely related.

Boulder entrepreneur, investor, and neighbor Brad Feld gets this:

In the short term, welcoming young college graduates into your entrepreneurial community has a huge impact on local economies. If young college grads start up new companies rather than take jobs at existing companies, they create obvious short term job growth. If any of these new companies grow, they create additional job growth. In addition, it keeps smart, well educated people (college graduates) in the local community.

Some people will start businesses, and some will work at them. Either way, it’s about expanding the size of the pie.

Related articles

• 5 Tips for My Career-Clueless College Self (wisebread.com)
• Startup America (avc.com)
• Looking for Jobs in All the Wrong Places: Memo to the President (blogs.hbr.org)

 

Image by gebl via Flickr

I’ve been cautiously optimistic about Timothy Ferriss for a while. He’s a hell of a self-promoter, and there’s some strong common sense in his books The 4-Hour Work Week and The 4-Hour Body. I’m not sure his advice is for everyone, and some people might be inclined to take it to unhealthy extremes, but this advice to startups applies equally well to going concerns (big business) and to individuals:

What advice does he give to the businesses he advises when it comes to studying data? “Dont measure too many things,” he says. “People often become overwhelmed with a deluge of data because they’re looking at 1,500 variables. And that can be paralyzing because you end up sitting there looking at your analytics program all day long as opposed to doing the more uncomfortable thing that you should be doing, like calling that big customer. And usually, the most uncomfortable thing to do is the one that people need to act on soonest.

I see this over and over. An executive team with 36 annual objectives and 58 sets of measures and targets is simply ineffective. When everything is important, nothing is important. Leadership is about making choices, and Ferriss nails it: you have to make a small set of priorities very important and ignore the noise around them. Good advice for anyone.

Related articles

• The 4 -Hour Body. An uncommon guide to rapid-fat-loss, incredible sex and becoming superhuman,Timothy Ferriss (regnordman.com)
• The Secrets of Super-Productive CEOs: An Interview with Timothy Ferriss, Author of The 4-Hour Workweek (inc.com)
• Book Pushes The Times Toward Unprecedented Exclamation Mark Usage (observer.com)

 

[Note: This is the second of the Solid Startups interviews. Today's interview with Seth Haber is the third of three parts. Part one is here. Part Two is here.]

JL: Despite being from Rhode Island, you seem very much like a Boulder guy. What makes Boulder special to you as a place to run a business and make a life?

SH: I’m actually more inclined to say that I connected with Boulder not despite being from Rhode Island but because of it. One of the great things that comes from growing up in the tiny state of Rhode Island is that the concept of community is there from the very start.  I didn’t realize it until I started getting older and leaving the state, but there is such a unique thing going on in such a small area that it creates a real common bond.  If I meet someone from Rhode Island outside of the state it quickly leads to playing the name game to see who we both know and there’s no shortage of inside jokes, references and things that we both miss that you can’t get anywhere else.  It’s not unique to Rhode Island by any means, but its size definitely concentrates that connectedness and just like Boulder there’s a shared feeling that it exists in a bit of a bubble with its own culture and ‘Only in Rhode Island’ type things.

All it took was one visit to Boulder and I knew I had to take a stab at living here.  I was 22 at the time so I wasn’t necessarily thinking long term, but I definitely knew it was the right fit for me to spend some time.  The scenery, the weather, the music scene and the people I met in Boulder had me hooked instantly.  I could tell that something special was happening here and there was an immediate sense that anyone who lived in Boulder was sharing in the same fun ride.  Nine years later, I’m still here, I started a business, I’ve got an amazing group of friends and all my initial fears that the Boulder was a college town that I would quickly outgrow have long since been put away.  I miss the ocean, the seafood and the beach life much more than I let on, but that makes my trips home even more special to me.

Happiness is something I think about a lot and it was really good to see that USA Today just named Boulder the ‘happiest city’ in the country.  Being happy in life is all about finding balance. You need to like your job and what you do for a living.  You need good family, friends and community.  You need to be happy with where you live and always feel like the future is wide open, not written in stone.  But in reality, no matter where you live, things won’t always go your way.  You won’t always love your job or you may have health issues or unfortunate events that keep you down.  But, where you are and who and what you’re surrounded with is going to have a huge impact on how those ups and downs affect your overall happiness.  When I first moved to Boulder I realized that I felt like I was on vacation on a regular basis.  Not the ‘I’ve got nothing to do and no responsibilities!’ vacation feeling, but the overall buzz that life is good, there’s lots to explore and the feeling that you see something every day that makes you want to take a photograph.  I started thinking about what it is about vacation that gives us that feeling and realized it’s almost always a combination of the following: beautiful scenery, beautiful weather, laid back, relaxed people and the opportunity to do an endless number of outdoor activities right out your back door.  So I believe that Boulder, and places like Boulder, attract happy people but they also create happy people.  When you add enough of those ‘life is good’ surroundings in your life, it makes it incredibly difficult to be unhappy.

Obviously everyone won’t be able to feel that vacation feeling about where they live, so as it turns out my desire for people to be able to bring that feeling into their everyday life is exactly what the Trek Light Hammock represents.  A hammock embodies all of those things: a sense of vacation, relaxation and those times when life is calm, perfect and stress-free.  When you lie down in the hammock and close your eyes, you get the opportunity to surround yourself with those feelings and create that bubble regardless of where you are or what’s going on in your life.  I never really planned on starting a business, but I instantly realized that I had found a way to take some of my philosophy on what makes us happy and deliver it in a form that people can use to achieve that feeling wherever they are.  Now if only it was just as easy to package up Boulder and move it by the ocean….

 

JL: What were some of the harder lessons you learned as you built Trek Light Gear?

SH: As someone who never went to business school, everything I’ve done has been a crash course.   I’ve made plenty of ‘mistakes’ when it comes to retail basics like not anticipating my inventory needs well enough, sitting on inventory too long, etc. but the business has been growing positively since Day 1 so I’ll take that to mean that I haven’t screwed up anything major.  Luckily, I found that a lot of aspects of growing the business like marketing, making my customers happy, and seeing opportunities to reach new people came somewhat naturally to me or else I probably wouldn’t be here talking about it right now.  A huge part of what I love about being an entrepreneur is that it gives me the chance to prove to myself that I can do things that nobody would ever hire me for based on my resume.  I tended to be jealous of other people’s jobs and felt like I could do them but knew no one would have any reason to give me a chance.  If you believe you can do something, even if it’s for no reason other than what your gut tells you, you might as well try.

JL: You and I met at a conference where you were discussing social media, and you struck me then and now as a really strong mentor. What role has being mentored played in your growth, and what mentoring do you do these days?

SH: I’ve been lucky to have friends, family and a great network of people like yourself that I’ve met in Boulder who have been able to give me advice and help when I need it.  Being a solo entrepreneur can be extremely empowering because you’re able to follow your gut 100% of the time and you can only blame yourself when something doesn’t work.  But, we all need a sounding board at times, and I’m never afraid to reach out to people and ask for help when I need it.  I’m forever grateful to my Dad who has given me countless hours of advice and helped me get through some of the most challenging times just by keeping me grounded and playing a devil’s advocate role when I needed it.  Because of the community that’s formed around the brand, I’m also able to use my customers for feedback as much as possible.  If I’m doing something wrong I expect that I’ll hear about it pretty quickly and that’s a huge benefit.

As far as offering up my own advice, to be honest I’m still shocked when I realize that I have something to share when it comes to business advice, social media or marketing.  I get calls now from business students asking me for advice and mentoring and I’ve been really honored to have the opportunity to speak about social media on various panels.  I really love doing it and I realize that there are so many people out there that are thinking of starting their own business and just need to talk to someone they can relate to. Or, they’ve already got a business and aren’t sure where to begin to market themselves and grow their brand.  If a friend says to me “I’m thinking about starting a business and have some questions for you” I actually get really excited to help.  This past summer I hired a much-needed intern and instead of just dumping work on him it quickly turned into a two-way mentoring relationship at the same time.  It’s definitely something I’d love to continue doing.

JL: You have explored crowdsourcing as an approach to new product design. How do you plan to use crowdsourcing as Trek Light grows?

SH: The term crowdsourcing has taken on so many meanings and applications recently that it almost gets lost in the translation. To me, running a business is a lot like being a community organizer. A company can’t possibly exist without its customers and those customers deserve to be happy.  I know that I’ve put a lot of hard work into growing Trek Light Gear, but when it boils down to it I’m just one person and I realize I can’t take all the credit.  I knew from the very start that if I was going to grow a company from my living room with nothing but a few credit cards and almost zero advertising budget I was going to need help.  By connecting with my customers, being real and encouraging a community to form, things begin to happen that are much larger than the sum of its parts.  Suddenly a guy in his living room is shipping hammocks to over 19 countries and there’s a growing group of people that actually want me to be successful and won’t think twice about helping to spread the word.  Every time I post a question on my Facebook page, ask for help naming a new product or ask people to retweet something on Twitter, I’m asking the crowd to help me create something bigger than each of us is individually capable.  Unlike big businesses which can manage to exist for years with a huge amount of unhappy customers, the truth is that Trek Light Gear disappears the moment I lose that support.  Beyond its individual applications, crowdsourcing to me is about listening to those people, treating them like family instead of customers and acknowledging the fact that I need their help because we’re all in this together.

 

Seth Haber is the founder of Trek Light Gear, purveyor of really cool ultralight hammocks and other outdoor gear. Based in Boulder CO, Seth is a master of promoting work-life balance for himself and as a brand. Seth is a great friend and an excellent example of how an idea can become a company and a way of life.

JL: Seth, you and I have talked a lot about your business being a little different from many of the companies around us, specifically because yours sells a tangible thing. What are some of the perks and challenges you face that a tech company might not?

SH: So many great things have been written lately in the press about the entrepreneur and startup community in Boulder and it’s all 100% true.  There’s a large number of companies being started, there’s a lot of young, passionate people involved and there’s a tremendous network of support and experience in the community encouraging everyone to be successful.  I graduated with a Computer Science degree and my background is in tech, so it’s almost a little surprising that I ended up outside of the tech world.  If I were involved with a tech startup, I could probably find 50 other people I could talk to that have already gone through the exact same challenges and steps to building a business and being successful.  But, there’s definitely a number of differences between the path that I’ve been on and what most of my tech entrepreneur friends are doing.  Most of the differences are fairly obvious: I’m selling something that literally needs to be packaged and shipped to every person that buys it and instead of bugs and coding problems I’ve got concerns like manufacturing delays, material shortages & raw cost increases.  I’m running an extremely bootstrapped operation on my own vs. most tech startups that are usually funded in some way or another and usually begin with a team.  I also make products that are designed to be extremely durable and last a long time, which is great but in this town it’s hard not to get jealous of things like monthly subscription models, advertising sales and the always looming possibility of Google stepping in and buying me.

That being said there’s also a ton of great companies in the outdoor industry here in Boulder, so I’m definitely not alone.  I really love the fact that I’ve got something tangible to sell and I love that every time I put a hammock in a box and send it off I know that I’m adding something positive to that person’s life.  There’s really nothing better than opening my email and seeing pictures from someone who used a Trek Light hammock to travel around the world and wanted to say thanks.  There’s something to that physical connection between what I’m producing and how I can see it being used that I would definitely miss on the tech side of things.

JL: What was it like when you first took the leap? What were your biggest priorities and concerns?

SH: I started the business while still working at a full time job and worked on growing it on the side for a number of years before taking the plunge into full self-employment.  In 2007, I opened up our kiosk on Pearl St. and suddenly was faced with hiring employees and being someone’s boss while sitting in a cube as someone else’s employee.  Business didn’t boom necessarily, but life got crazy fast. I was coming home from work every night and feeling like I was just getting started with the really important things on my plate and while at work I was having to sneak out to return phone calls and deal with employee issues.  A certain point came where I realized that even though the business was growing and overwhelming me it was still just moving in baby steps and I was locked in a huge Catch-22:  I wasn’t bringing in anywhere near enough revenue to pay myself if I quit my job, but the business was clearly never going to grow big enough to support me if I didn’t work on it full-time.   Luckily, in 2008, I received a sign from above in the form of my company announcing that they were laying off my entire department.  A severance package is a would-be entrepreneur’s best friend.   Along with my savings I had just enough to get through about half the year without taking any money from the business and I knew that it was sink or swim from the moment I took the plunge.  It was ridiculously stressful and scary at times and still is, but I was so excited about the transition and what I wanted to accomplish that the fear and stress for the most part took a backseat.

Related articles

• New Amazing Deal – Trek Light Gear (feld.com)
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I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should do. I think we’ve articulated some elements of it, and I think this idea of a proprietary SDK and unnecessary apps — though there’s a huge role for apps — I think is going to shift in the market, and I think it’s going to shift very, very quickly. And I think there’s going to be a strong appetite for web fidelity and tool familiarity. And I think there’s going to be a rapid desire for high performance. And I think we’re way ahead on that. And I think CIO friendliness, we’re way ahead on that.

I agree that they are way ahead on CIO friendliness, mostly due to the popularity of the BlackBerry in business contexts. This is something I wish more tech companies understood: while the people with the money are often in sales, marketing, product development, and the like, the CIO is an important ally. The CIO’s organization is a trusted gatekeeper in many organizations, and keeping them happy is often just the price of admission.

 

As you work on fixing those mistakes, you realize you got it all wrong. It wasn’t the competition landscape, it wasn’t the lack of features, it wasn’t SEO, and it wasn’t even the funding needs that caused your startup to fail. You got all those things right in the first place. You’ve built a good product, you figure out how to navigate the competition, you ranked pretty well on Google for the keywords that matter to your business, but not matter how hard you pushed, you didn’t get the break into the success room.

Not to spoil the ending, but the three reasons are indifference, noise, and inertia. In all three scenarios, the common thread is lack of attention to the customers you need to survive. Might seem a little obvious, but if it were, we wouldn’t need to keep coming back to this. I’ll be sharing this one with entrepreneurs for a long time to come.

 

Image via Wikipedia

A colleague recently forwarded me a brilliant overview of the good and bad in hiring consultants written by John Halamka, Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Chief Information Officer at Harvard Medical School, Chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network (NEHEN), Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP)/Co-Chair of the HIT Standards Committee, and a practicing Emergency Physician (this guy stays busy). The whole thing’s solid, and this in particular caught my attention:

3.  Organizational Dynamics
Good – They build bridges among internal teams, enhancing communication through formal techniques that add processes to complement existing organizational project management approaches.   Adding modest amounts of work to the organization is expected because extra project management rigor can enhance communication and eliminate tensions or misunderstandings among stakeholders.

Bad  - They identify organizational schisms they can exploit, become responsible for discord and cause teams to work against each other as a way to foster organizational dependency on the consultants.

That’s exactly right. As a former IT head and a current consultant, I’ve played both sides of this. The Ready in 8 Weeks package I recently debuted is aimed toward doing more of the good and dissolving the bad. I’ll be sharing Halamka’s post with colleagues and clients, especially if it helps them hold myself and other consultants accountable for better practices.

What does that mean for startups, though? In my view, startups find themselves in a middle ground of being both providers and consumers of consulting services. Startups don’t generally spend a lot on consultants, but as they grow, there are increasing needs ranging from staff augmentation to high-level executive support and marketing strategy. It’s a good idea for entrepreneurs to learn early on how to manage these relationships to achieve best value for money.

Fledgling startups, though, find themselves much more in the position of consultants even as they work to promote a product or service. Most of Halamka’s advice is transferrable to the tech firm trying to reach larger companies. Knowing what the client needs in term of project scope, knowledge transfer, balancing priorities, setting fees, etc. sets a standard and a reputation for the entrepreneur. Take a look at Halamka’s post and you’ll have a much better grasp on what motivates a decision maker to buy from you.

 

So far as I know, only one of my clients has used Groupon to promote their product or service. This is primarily because most of my clients and partners are in B2B rather than consumer markets. As someone who has taken advantage of a couple of Groupon deals, I’m cautious but intrigued by the model it uses. So are the readers and writers at the New York Times:

I have never seen anything that is both so celebrated and demonized at the same time. There has been talk that Groupon might be worth as much as $3 billion, and yet here are some blog comments from retailers who’ve tried the service:

• “It is for desperate businesses.”

• “The financials just can’t work out.”

• “Groupon is the worst marketing ever.”

• “We did Groupon. It was O.K. It brought in new customers — we kept most of them. But the margins are a killer.”

As a retailer who has used Groupon — as well as traditional advertising — to build my business, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Is Groupon the worst marketing ever? Or is it the best marketing ever? Probably both. One thing is for sure: Groupon is a beast.

The article goes on to dissect what a small business might want to know about eke out a profit with Groupon. My mind began to wander, though, to whether there is a possibility for a B2B service in the manner of Groupon. Here’s my thinking.

Most of the startup companies I know who want to do business with large companies have a really tough time getting in the door. They lack the right contacts, they have trouble making a compelling case for value to the client, and they are less established than big players. It takes remarkable effort and connections for a young company to get in the door.

Meanwhile, the people in large companies who could benefit from the startup’s offering usually never hear from them. Life inside the bigs is different from the scrappy culture of the startup. There’s politics, many competing priorities, and the frustrating truth that it is often safer to do nothing than to try something new. That’s why big companies so often hire other big companies, and usually the same ones.

My experience inside the large corporation was a little different, though. I like pilots. They’re a low-risk way to try something out without breaking the bank or betting one’s political fortunes. A few weeks, a few thousand dollars–when it pays off, you learn something new and come off looking like a genius.

That’s where my mind went as I read the NYT article. How cool would it be if executives could make highly discounted investments in something new with little risk? How much would it change the B2B startup landscape if startups got an audition with people they would otherwise never meet?

I don’t know if this would work or not, but having sat on both sides of that barrier, I’d be enthusiastic about the service in either direction.

 

T.A. McCann of Gist, one of my favorite companies, is also thinking about app stores. I wasn’t present for his talk yesterday and don’t have context for it, but there’s some good stuff in here:

McCann appears to be addressing the public consumer market, but the consumerization of IT within companies makes a lot of his points relevant to the enterprise. The opportunity for large organizations is clear: a lot of people inside companies want more and better apps, and a lot of developers would like to be selling those apps. Bringing down the wall between them opens up a huge new world of opportunity and growth.

Related articles

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