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How to increase user engagement

2012-05-19T05:16:27Z

Des Traynor runs one of the best blogs on User Experience around. If you're not subscribed, I highly recommend you do. He's consistently pushed out excellent, thoughtful, instructive, beautifully illustrated, useful articles about various aspects of designing a startup's product as well as the hidden bits like analysing user behaviour.

This particular article focuses on how to increase user engagement, and suggests several specific techniques:

Make a strong impression
Always show a welcome message (presented in such a way as to start a discussion)
Gradually expose the depth of your product
Define a message schedule
Announce features and improvements in-app
Talk with customers during trials

Great stuff. Read it.

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How to price seed, angel and VC rounds

2012-05-18T18:15:47Z

Great article by Charlie O'Donnell:

More simply, the better the team, the lower the risk, and the higher the expected outcome, the more you're going to be willing to give a team and the longer you'll let them go until their next fundraising.

(...) Usually, teams are asking for enough money, plus a cushion, to get to some milestone roughly 12-18 months out.

So, ask for more and you're get a higher price IF the investors think you can handle it and you need it.

Generally, each round is going to set you back between 15-30%.

The way that rounds always end up diluting by 15-30% seems mystifying to industry outsiders. How much will I get diluted if I raise $500k? 15-30%. What if I raise $1m? 15-30%! $10m? 15-30%!

This reflects a deep pragmatism of entrepreneurship and venture/angel investment, based on the fact that no one has any god damn idea what a startup is worth anyway, so the figure is instead chosen based on a balance of:

Not diluting the entrepreneur so much that they become demotivated
Leaving room for further funding rounds without demoralising the founders
Providing enough cash so that, if the founder was roughly in the right ballpark, they will get 12-18 to execute on their vision before needing to raise another round or become cash-flow positive.

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The bastards book of Ruby

2012-05-16T18:15:54Z

The best way, and reason, to learn a programming language is to do something with it. Here's a book that describes itself thus:

The Bastards Book of Ruby is an introduction to programming and its practical uses for journalists, researchers, scientists, analysts, and anyone else whose job is to seek out, make sense from, and show the hard-to-find data.

This does not require being "good at computers", having a background in programming, or the desire (yet) to be a full-fledged hacker/developer. It just takes an eagerness to be challenged.

This practical focus (also mentioned in comments on HN by people who have read/used the book), along with the fact that it's designed for people who don't know how to program, and also along with the fact that Ruby is a delightful language to program in (a completely non-controversial statement!), makes it a great starting point for people who are willing to shun Jeff Atwood's terrible advice and instead follow Sacha Greif's, Zed Shaw's, or even mine.

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How to generate startup ideas

2012-05-16T13:15:51Z

Wesley Tansey proposes a number of techniques for generating startup ideas. The techniques are useful tools to expand your repertoire of techniques, but the key point, in my opinion, is after the list:

One important thing to remember is that these are not meant to be options that you choose at the start. Rather, consider each of these strategies to be a background process that runs continuously in your mind. Every time you encounter a problem, if it may be solvable by one of these strategies, that’s a potential startup idea!

This echoes what I've pointed out before: the way to generate ideas for businesses begins with a continuous process of evaluating business opportunities, rather than business ideas, around you.

That said, once an opportunity has been flagged, Wesley's techniques can help to define what sort of opportunity it is.

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Cold calling versus AdWords

2012-05-14T07:15:45Z

Here's a great article by Robert Graham, where he explains how he developed a cold-calling approach to generate early leads and enable himself to figure out what his intended customers wanted.

Robert takes us through the evolution of his cold call pitch, culminating with a win-win approach that worked out for him:

Sure enough, each and every prospect, skeptical or not, I used this pitch on agreed to have me out. I booked a week of appointments in a handful of calls. I was so successful, I was forced to start telling people I would contact them the following month to set a date. I had too many appointments and too many blog posts to write. Making the pitch a true win for both of us was the magic that generated the 100% conversion to the next step, but each small piece of experience and learning contributed to that success. I learned a lot about my business from each visit. I didn’t close 100% to sales, but those relationships have yielded a lot more than a simple close. Many people have contacted me weeks or months after our first conversation and ask if I’m still solving the problems we talked about.

It's worth noting that this specific approach won't necessarily work for all industries. For example, it would be disingenuous for GrantTree to start posting reviews of tech companies and use that as a bait to get companies talking to us. That being said, looking for a genuine win-win is a great idea.

Read the whole article here.

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How to scale a development team

2012-05-14T05:15:59Z

Here's an interesting article by Heroku founder Adam Wiggins on managing the expansion of a startup's development team through its life, using Heroku as an example.

Some thoughts:

The light touch approach early on feels right to me based on my management experience. More formal processes are more likely to hurt a small team than help it. That said, that depends on the team, and also on whether that team is distributed. If you don't get to be in the same room every day, even with just 3 people you probably need to put in place some kinds of processes to keep everyone in sync.
The split into functional streams in "stage 3" is just one option. Many other companies find that cross-functional teams focused around specific features or subprojects work better as an organisational approach. Being a very technical product with very heavy infrastructure demands, a functional split may have worked well for Heroku, but be sure to consider cross-functional teams too.

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The right kind of ambition

2012-05-11T18:15:35Z

A comment by Marcus Frödin pointed me to this excellent article by Ben Horowitz, that I somehow missed when it came out.

Ben offers some great advice on how to select the right kind of people to join your company, particularly when it comes to salespeople:

People who view the world through the me prism might describe a prior company’s failure in an interview as follows: “My last job was my e-commerce play. I felt that it was important to round out my resume.” Note the use of “my” to personalize the company in a way that it’s unlikely that anyone else at the company would agree with. In fact, the other employees in the company might even be offended by this usage. People with the right kind of ambition would not likely use the word “play” to describe their effort to work as a team to build something substantial. Finally, people who use the “me” prism find it natural and obvious to speak in terms of “building out my resume” while people who use the “team” prism find such phrases to be somewhat uncomfortable and awkward, because they clearly indicate an individual goal which is separate from the team goal.

(...)

Throughout our interview process, candidates would take sole credit for landing extremely large deals, achieving impressive goals, and generating company success. Invariably, the candidates who claimed the most credit for deals would have the most difficult time describing the details of how the deal was actually won and orchestrated. During reference checks, others involved in the deals would tell a much different story.

Read the full article here.

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What is a technology company?

2012-05-11T13:15:35Z

Here's a thoughtful article by Alex Payne trying to pin down what a technology company is, and what we should call businesses that rely heavily on technology but don't strictly sell technology.

As Alex points out:

...this mis-labeling results in the conflation of companies in totally different industries applying totally different business models, all being funded and staffed and reported on by the same pool of people. If we remove the label of “tech startup” – and with it the hypothetically stellar trajectory we like to imagine such businesses are on – we’re forced to confront the reality of a business’s model, independent of the reverberations of the echo chamber.

At the same time, it's interesting to note (as Alex does) that all businesses are converging towards being heavily technology-driven. Because of this, and because of the extent to which companies end up relying on technology, I don't think it's clear that a company is not a technology company just because they don't "sell technology".

For example, one of our R&D tax credit clients sells flowers. By Alex's definition, this wouldn't count as a technology company. And yet, scratch the surface, and you may find out that this company doesn't just leverage technology as a side-effect. It's part of their competitive advantage. What this specific company has done is custom-build a complex logistics backend that powers their sales and enables them to dynamically adjust and predict pricing and products offered based on the availability of flowers across Europe. Take away this technology, and the company probably wouldn't function.

How about another counter-example, in the other direction: a small shop that builds custom computers to order and ships them out is "selling technology" to their customers. Are they a "technology company"? Not really, because they don't invent any of the technology.

I'm tempted to take a more inclusive view than Alex, so I would argue that a company is a technology company when custom-built technology is critical to what they do. By this definition, large banks are indeed technology companies, since they do enormous amounts of in-house, custom software development and they cannot function at all without that technology.

What about the nefarious effects of calling "tech startup" a company that isn't really a technology company? I'd argue that a company which develops its own technology tends to do so in order to scale better. A company which sells flowers via a dynamic logistics system is radically different (and scales in very different ways) than a company which does all their flower purchasing manually, so they should certainly be treated differently by investors.

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The salesman and the developer

2012-05-11T09:19:23Z

A salesman and a developer go on a bear hunting trip.

They arrive at the cabin in the woods and start unpacking the car, moving stuff into the cabin, getting things ready for a week of bear hunting in the wilderness. The salesman quickly gets bored of this and says:

"Tell you what, you continue unpacking and getting everything ready, and I'm going to go and find us a bear."

The developer sighs and nods (he's used to salesmen), and continues setting up while the salesman vanishes in the woods.

Half an hour later, as the developer is about three quarters done with getting things ready (the cabin is now all neat and tidy at last), he hears a very loud growl as he comes out of the cabin. Twenty metres away, the bushes start shaking. Out shoots the salesman. Right behind him, a huge, snarling, drooling, roaring monster of a bear. It's twice the size of a normal bear, and it's very, very angry.

As the developer hides behind a chair, the salesman runs right up to the cabin, with the bear on his heels, and just as he's about to go through the door he quickly leaps to the side. The bear crashes past him right into the cabin, and the salesman deftly closes the door right behind, locking the bear in. Loud noises can be heard as the bear begins trashing the inside of the cabin.

The developer emerges from behind the chair. The salesman cheers and says:

"Woohoo! That's the first one. Now, you kill him and skin him, I'll go find us another!"

Two perspectives

There are two ways to understand this story, and which way you favoured largely depends on whether you're a "builder" type or a "sales" type.

If you're a builder type, you see this as a great story that illustrates a common problem with salespeople: they don't seem to care about what happens after they make the sale. Actually delivering the project is hard work, but by then the sales guys have moved on to something else, so they don't care (and, as an additional problem, in some industries the salespeople will sell stuff that can't be realistically delivered).

However, if you're a sales type (like my cofounder, Paulina), you have a different perspective on this story. It's yet another story that makes fun of salespeople while completely discounting just how hard it is to not only find that damn bear, but bring it back and get it through the door.

Who's right, then? Both, of course. In business, you need both to find and sell clients, and the ability to then deliver what you sold them. One without the other is not a business.

Sales is not optional

Many people who "do startups" these days are from a technology background. In other words, they're builders rather than salespeople. And, like all builders, they tend to disregard sales as something that can happen later, something secondary that we'll solve when we get to it.

Well, sales isn't secondary. Speaking as a builder type myself, and having experienced businesses both with competent sales and without, I now believe that having someone whose job it is to go and find clients willing to give you money from day one is so important, that I would not start any company without such a person.

Sales don't happen without someone energetically pushing the product, service, or whatever it is you're intending to sell. Some may dream of products that sell themselves, like Dropbox or the original Apple II, but even awesome products like those took serious sales effort to get off the ground. Apple had Steve Jobs, one of the master salesmen of his generation, pushing the product everywhere he could and striking bold deals to get the company off the ground. Dropbox endlessly tweaked their referral scheme before they went viral.

Some few businesses like Google or Facebook or Instagram get to figure out the business model later. They can do without sales, perhaps. But this model only works in one place in the world, and unless you're starting up in the Silicon Valley bubble, your business is not a business without sales.

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Bootstrapping and knowing how to make things

2012-05-10T18:15:33Z

Rob Fitzpatrick makes a very valid suggestion to non-programmers:

If you want to get into startups and you don’t already know programmers who enjoy working with you, then I seriously suggest you start learning to program immediately. It’s not as bad as it sounds.

Too many people go around looking for a "technical cofounder" to build out their idea (which, usually, at that point, exists on the back of napkins and business plans - both more or less equally worthless media).

One of my best friends, who used to be one of those "non-technical" people (i.e. he didn't know how to program), taught himself how to build a simple site with ASP back in 1998. He made a few hundred pounds from it. He then built a more complex site and made a few thousand pounds from it. After that, he built an even more complex site that made him hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Recently, he's taught himself Rails, server administration, has learned to manage a team of developers (outsourcing to Russia works if you're a competent programmer yourself). He's now building out site after site, trying out many different ideas until he finds one that really takes off. Those are not trivial sites - they're the kind of applications where most people would say "you need a technical cofounder".

The fact is, you're not going to get to that level instantly, or within a few weeks. But once you start the process of learning how to program, several things will happen:

You will have started a lifelong process that may well get you to the point where you don't need any technical cofounders.
You will know a lot more about what "technical people" do, so you can both recognise the good ones and "talk the talk" (which makes you a better person to work with).
You will be able to build simple things to test your ideas without any outside assistance! This dramatically lowers the bar to testing ideas.

It's worth finishing with a note that "programming" is a subset of "making things", one of the key skills in the startup skill set. Programming happens to be an insanely useful skill these days, but there are other ways to make things. With sites like Kickstarter, we're seeing a resurgence of people being able to build companies based on their ability to make physical things, for example.

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Eleven compelling startup pitch archetypes

2012-05-10T13:15:32Z

Reinventing the wheel is often the worst choice. When choosing how to present your startup pitch, this list is extremely useful to get some ideas of how to present your startup, depending on its stage, type, market, and so on.

Each archetype is broken down into a description, an example of what it sounds like, known companies that might have used it, and a brief section on how and when to use it.

The pitch archetypes listed are:

Traction
X for Y
Personal Story
Pivot/offshoot
Evolution next
Painting the future
Service at scale
Wouldn't it be cool if
Insane tech
The dream team
Consumerification of enterprise

Great stuff, be sure to read it and bookmark it.

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Advisors: stop screwing startups

2012-04-30T18:15:29Z

Micah Baldwin:

The last couple of years, I have become amazed at the emails I get from first time entrepreneurs or long-time employees (“entrepreneurs by proxy”) telling me about the latest startup they are advising. That the founder of said startup gave them real equity in return for…well, hell if I know.

(...)

Advisors, stop hurting startups by adding minimal value. Just because you can spell Andreessen Horowitz doesn't mean you are adding any value.

(...)

Founders: 1) You don't need advisors. 2) Stop picking advisors based on the perceived value of their name. 3) Focus. Focus. And if you have time, focus.

Collecting advisors just for the sake of having them in your pitch deck may seem rather pointless, although, to play devil's advocate, if the said advisors are indeed well known, respected industry figures, there is certainly a "namedropping effect" at work that can help achieve certain results. Grant funding, for example.

That said, first of all you don't need to give equity to get advice, and secondly, you don't need people to be deeply involved in your business to be able to drop their name in your slide deck (though you should of course get their approval for it first).

As I've argued before, experienced entrepreneurs preserve equity at all costs. Leave the task of giving away small slices of their business to the newbies. You know better. You only give X% of shares to people who have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will increase the size of the business by several times that factor.

On the advisor side, I have given countless bits of advice to numerous startups (hopefully most of it good). However, none of it was to the level that would justify calling myself an advisor, nor would I want or expect any payment for this advice. If you're an "advisor" and you're asking for payment for your advice, and you're not Richard Branson or some other Tony Hsieh type of character, you should really take a look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself who's really benefiting from your so-called advice.

Most of the "serious" advisors who do work that's worth charging for do a specific piece of work. They tend to be called consultants, though they also often appear on slide decks as part of the "advisory team". Oh, and they're usually paid in cash, not shares.

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The Startup resume

2012-04-30T13:15:27Z

If you're applying to work at a startup, particularly if you're applying for a junior or internship position, you'd do well to read Justin Kan's article about what to put on your CV:

Overall, startups are looking for employees who are exceptional in the one key thing that they will be doing, whether it is scaling the backend system or doing the visual design. In your resume you need to 1) demonstrate that you are exceptional at the thing you do, and 2) not be disqualified by seeming crazy or imbalanced. A simple rule: if something on your resume isn't achieving one of the aforementioned two things, leave it off.

Having reviewed numerous CVs in the past, I can't agree more. Another point I'd add is that, if you're applying for a junior position and do not have significant work experience (summer jobs in fields that are completely orthogonal, e.g. retail, do not count), then make sure you mention those hobby projects which can actually give your CV some value. All too often, I see CVs where, for example, the applicant will mention that they are highly proficient in PHP or Ruby but there'll be no mention of what they actually did to become proficient. "I built an stargazing GPS-enabled app in my spare time" should definitely appear on your CV, no matter how rudimentary the app may be or whether it is "serious".

Large companies may not care about such "icebergs" of experience, but startups definitely will.

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Entrepreneurship's dirty little secret?

2012-04-17T18:15:25Z

Alan Gleeson, writing on the (he claims) unhealthy focus the government has on encouraging people to become entrepreneurs:

There is one major problem with all of this, and it’s a dirty little secret that very few want to talk about: the odds of success remain spectacularly remote. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Start-up, puts it best: ‘The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most products are not successful. Most new ventures do not live up to their potential. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius and hard work persists.”

I strongly disagree with this point. Most startups fail, yes, perhaps... but most entrepreneurs succeed if they stick at it. How many people do you know who have been running their own businesses for 10+ years and aren't "successful" by some measure of the word? There are some, for sure - but they are definitely the exception rather than the rule.

By and large, running a business is a matter of skill more than anything else, and it's not a skill that's beyond the reach of most people. Alan, in fact, agrees later:

Instead, we should be encouraging young people to learn the skills they need to build and sell the next generation of products and services that we will consume, rather than encouraging them to jump straight into starting their own business. We also need to revisit traditional university courses and recognise that, in many instances, we are training them for jobs that no longer exist. We should be teaching them more about entrepreneurship including a strong emphasis on cash-flow management and financial literacy.

Entrepreneurship is a phenomenal career choice, but we need to better equip our youth for its challenges rather than blindly encouraging them. Collectively, we need to do better.

I've argued for this before. There's a far cry between this positive statement and the beginning of the article, which, perhaps to fan some flames, seems to claim that people should not be encouraged to start businesses.

Perhaps the best way to phrase this is:

People should not be encouraged to blindly start businesses, and instead should be encouraged to first learn some basics of running a business so they can decrease the chances their business will fail in a boring, predictable and avoidable way.

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Advice for dealing with journalists

2012-04-16T18:15:29Z

Great article by SEOMoz's Rand Fishkin that both provides examples of risks of dealing with journalists, and key principles for how to avoid getting yourself in trouble. I'll skip over the stories (read them in the article), but here are the key principles:

Know what you want out of the press (no press, or any press)
Have a clear and compelling story so that the journalist doesn't make up a less-than-ideal one for you
Ask about the journalist's motivations so you don't inadvertently support a story that will naturally paint you in a negative way
Study your interviewer beforehand
Be very careful with your phrasing to make it harder to misquote you
Prefer email interviews to verbal ones, as you can be more careful with phrasing more easily
Everything is "on the record"
Beware later questions and off-the-cuff "follow-up" questions
Don't be afraid to call out journalists publicly

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Building a viable business in 4 months

2012-04-16T13:15:32Z

This anonymous reddit poster built a viable business turning over $150k/year and making $1k/week of profit, in 4 months.

Then he decided to post an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit.

Worth a good read, and worth noting once again that building a profitable business and building a hot new startup can be completely orthogonal activities. Maids In Black applies a lot of the tools of the startup world (glossy design, cool attitude, differentiated service, etc) to a domain that many hackers would consider beneath them. The result for the entrepreneur is not beneath most hackers, though: he's doubled his salary and is planning to quit his job in 4 months, once he has paid up his debt.

Have a read for yourself.

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Why I won't sign your NDA

2012-04-16T07:15:30Z

John Larson gives several good reasons why he won't sign NDAs:

Between a first-time web entrepreneur and one who’s been for years working on many ventures, there is a huge gap in perspective regarding the importance, rarity, and uniqueness of ideas.

(...)

... if you’ve ever tried to bring even one venture to market, you know perhaps all too well that ideas are just the starting point, and take by far the least work, time, and capital.

(...)

If you prize your idea so much (in relation to everything else it will take in order to make it succeed) that you feel the need to put in legal protections from me, it’s a tell that you don’t have much going for you in this endeavor.

(...)

Any agreement that I sign to not disclose or use information shared with me in a casual engagement opens up a whole world of potentially contentious confusion about what is or isn’t okay for me to do in the future.

John mentions that he will sign an NDA if there is at least a 10-page business plan being disclosed. That's one possible cutoff, but I feel this is still being too generous.

At GrantTree, we are often asked to sign NDAs by companies that are looking for grants. We very rarely do. The principle is simple: we only sign an NDA when there is a very high likelihood that we'll be working together.

Put it in other words, we will happily sign NDAs with clients - but not with prospective clients. If a company can't disclose enough to us for us to make a decision about whether to take them on as a client, then we simply all have to accept that we won't be working together.

On the other hand, when we work with a client, we often get a lot of internal info from that company, including their accounts, financial position, investment documents, and even some of their strategic plans. This, rather than "the idea", is what's being protected by an NDA - and rightly so.

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Startup Skill Set #6: The Startup Manager

2012-03-19T07:47:17Z

Startups are often founded by engineers, designers, and other "doers". Often, they have spent most, or even all of their career working with incompetent managers who were over-controlling or over-lax, ignorant or too technical, domineering or distant, micro-managing or not paying any attention to the project, etc. Bad managers abound and they have rightly earned themselves a poor reputation in the technology world.

The result of that is often that startup founders feel that no management is needed, or indeed desired, and that the startup should go ahead without any management whatsoever for as long as possible... "until there are too many people" is a common milestone to start thinking about management.

However, that is not only a mistake, but quite simply a misunderstanding of what management is, what it's meant to look like in a small, expert team, how it adapts to different contexts, and so on.

What is management, anyway?

The effect of all these bad managers is that people end up assuming that "management" means having a boss who tells you what to do and stops you from doing the right thing. They are naturally irritated at such nonsense and avoid reproducing it in their own company.

There are as many definitions of management as there are people thinking about management, but rather than create my own, I'll pick one of the existing ones and use that. This one is quite good:

Management is the creative and systematic pursuit of practical results, (including the result of more knowledge), by identifying and using available human and knowledge resources in a concerted and reinforcing way.

Management is not about having a boss, it's about creating a system to enable you to pursue whatever results you intend to achieve in a more effective way. That seems universally desirable, but even with this definition, many will chafe. "There's only two of us, we don't need management, we just need to get things done". Again, this comes from a misunderstanding of the way management should be applied.

One of the most important things I learned about management in my time in Accenture was the idea that management processes should always be tailored to the situation at hand, that there was no dogmatic, "perfect" management methodology that was "right" in all cases, that each situation required its own unique management processes. Accenture had a vast library of management processes, which at the time they called the "Accenture Delivery Methods", and an important part of the role of the project manager was to be aware of ADM and select which bits to apply to their project, which bits to change, and which bits to ignore completely.

Good management is like water. It flows around the situation, adapts to it, and fills the gaps exactly to enable a more efficient "pursuit of practical results".

Asking the right questions

In a small startup team context, being a manager means asking the right question. Do we need a process to keep track of bugs? Do we need a process to plan out in what order to build out the features? It means being aware that you need to figure out what those questions are, raise them appropriately with your team (even if that's just two of you), find solutions to them and put them in place.

Being a manager also means having some awareness of the possible solution-space. Most engineers will be aware of kanban boards and bug tracking tools, but how many know about retrospective meetings, five-whys analysis, functional point estimation, critical path analysis, etc? Being aware is not even enough. A lot of management tools are such that they can be hard to put into action until you've seen someone else do it. If you've never had a good manager, being a good manager yourself is pretty damn hard.

One of the observations I've made from a year and a half of running GrantTree, and looking into our clients' businesses, is the difference between those who are great at execution and those who are not. Great executers seem to have a deliberate energy, like a tidal wave pushing everything in the same direction at once. One of the skills that they almost always seem to possess is management. They address process problems quickly and skillfully. The result is a company that (once it's achieved product-market fit) grows fast, effectively, inexorably, with few major mis-steps. Even in a two-people team, they identify and resolve management issues quickly and effectively.

Another thing worth noting is that the Lean methodology, very popular lately with (almost) everyone in the entrepreneurial world, is all about management. Eric Ries explicitly defines entrepreneurship as a management science, and rightly so. There's management in finding the ways to achieve product-market fit, there's management in getting the right features built to get those initial sales, there's management in getting the sales, and there's management in growing the business once there is a business to speak of.

Management is certainly not the only skill required for entrepreneurs, but it is essential, and one of the hardest to learn.

What you can do

If you're still working in the corporate world, you have a chance to observe good and bad managers at work. Unfortunately, unless you know the difference, you won't be able to see what they do that's good or bad. My recommendation to "learn" management is to do two things. First, pick up some good books on management and read them. Here are a couple to get you started: Behind closed doors, Manage it!.

Then, open your eyes and look around. No doubt there are good manager operating in your company. Find them, and observe them. See what they do that bad managers don't, and, even more importantly, what they don't do, that bad managers do. If you can move to work closer to a good manager, do so, and show interest and support in what they do. Most good managers that I met in my time in Accenture were happy to offer advice and mentorship. You can learn a lot from great managers by simply showing interest and asking questions.

If you've already hit the eject button and jumped into the startup world, the task is much harder. The reading list above is still worthwhile, but you'll have to learn management without seeing it in action first, which is a bit like learning horse-riding from a book. It can be done, but you can expect a few falls. What you can do, however, is compensate for this gap in your skill set by being aware of it and seeking out advice from more experienced people on management issues. If you have friends who are competent managers in or out of the startup world, or mentors who have built successful businesses before (most of them will have developed management skills along the way), then make sure you ask for their advice on management issues, rather than plodding on blindly.

If you do get advice from manager friends, be aware of the context of their management experience, and take anything they say with a grain of salt. Unless their experience is in an entrepreneurial context, they may give you advice that's complete overkill for your context. It's also possible that, despite being your friends, they are bad managers. You can't abdicate responsibility for deciding which processes to apply and which to ignore (but you can always give their suggestions a temporary try).

The most important change, perhaps, is to simply be aware of all this. You do need management in your startup, it doesn't mean putting lots of restrictive processes in place or having a boss, and it's worth spending time and talking to people to learn to manage properly.

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I'm hiring

2012-03-14T17:56:02Z

I'm allowing a very brief departure from the normal content of these posts to mention that my company, GrantTree, is hiring for a junior position.

I believe that this is a great job for someone looking to learn a whole lot more about the tech industry, to get an inside look into how many other companies operate, what makes them tick, how they make their profits, how they think about their products, etc. Moreover, it'll involve working with me and my cofounder, Paulina, on a business that is fast-growing and ambitious.

One of the key advantages of this role is that it can grow in three directions: sales, delivery (writing grants/etc), or management (operations, basically), depending on the person's preferences. Very few roles give you so much latitude to evolve. Paulina and I both believe that people should have the opportunity to develop personally through their work, and the role is crafted to deliver on this.

If you know (or are) someone junior, London-based or willing to move, who can work within an £18-22k starting salary (that will be revised upwards significantly every 6 months), this is a really great opportunity, much better, in my humble opinion, than the Accenture job I started with many years ago. More information here.

If you have any questions about the role, feel free to email me, of course.

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From miserable launch to decent success, thanks to HN

2012-03-12T14:15:29Z

@stangeek launched on HN, got no success, but a lot of advice:

As readers came and went (15k+ in total!), I started to notice an interesting side-effect of having hackers with brains read your prose: a number of comments were posted both on my blog and on HN, which were making concrete suggestions to improve our product and strategy.

And we started to feel accountable for these suggestions: after all, if people were taking the time to comment and suggest, it meant they cared (even a little bit), and they deserved to see their suggestions implemented. We spent a month working on this feedback, and there you go: we jumped from 27 downloads to... 57,523 downloads a week after we released our v1.1!

This is the same reason why you want to go to networking events and tell fellow entrepreneurs about your startup - the advice can be invaluable. HN is a good substitute if there are no decent entrepreneur meetups near you though.

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