The Humanization of Business.

Paul Hontz

Published: Apr 22, 2011

Gary Vaynerchuk started with nothing and turned himself into a celebrity. Gary has a loyal following and has already written two New York Times best sellers. He has done this by engaging with his customers around the clock and hustle.

I caught up with Gary while he was on tour promoting his latest book The Thank You Economy. I asked Gary to talk to TSF readers about how they could connect with their customers in meaningful ways. In this interview Gary gives some fantastic tips for founders on how to build meaningful relationships with clients and engage their user base. You don’t want to miss this interview.

How can a startup strapped for cash connect with customers?

• Use search.twitter.com. Actively seek out your customers.
• If your site doesn’t have traction yet, search for things that your audience would be talking about and join the conversation. Just don’t spam it.

You have just under a million followers on Twitter. How do you stay engaged when your startup starts gaining that much traction?

• Intent. Gary wants to be connected with his audience so he makes it a priority.
• What is the end goal for the user? Make your product be all about solving your user problems. Don’t lose tract of this.
• Spam doesn’t work. Consumers have strong BS radars and it undermines their trust. Don’t play games with them.
• Do you care about people giving you the shootouts? Let them know you care.
• Hard work matters. That can separate you from your competitors. It’s all about hustle.

How do you have transparency with your users?

• Act human. Treat every engagement as if it’s happening face to face. You are a person, not a machine.
• We are living through the humanization of business.

What’s one piece of advice you can give to startups?

• You’re living through a bubble. Build for the long haul and make money.

“Once the color pallet matches our business cards, we’ll ship”

Paul Hontz

Published: Apr 20, 2011

“Once we tweak the UI color pallet to match our business cards, we’ll ship.” said the self-titled CEO. It was an unusually warm autumn day as Startup Employee X couldn’t believe the words coming out of the CEO’s mouth. This was the fourth delay on a project that was over budget, behind schedule, and they were losing market share to their competitors.

Startup Employee X began to notice a pattern. Every time the product was ready to go the CEO got cold feet and found an arbitrary problem. Employee X worked tirelessly to convince the CEO they were ready to ship, but he refused to listen. The Employee could see the writing on the wall and decided to resign his position.

By the time spring rolled around, the company still hadn’t shipped their product and their bank account was quickly dwindling. The company laid off the majority of it’s staff. The CEO still refused to ship. Three months after that, the company shut down. They never shipped anything.

You could (rightfully) blame the ineptitude of the CEO for the companies failure but I believe the heart of the problem lies in the CEO’s fear of shipping. Unfortunately I’ve seen many founders exhibit some of these same characteristics (thankfully not to the same degree). Things change substantially when you have some skin in the game. It’s far worse to never ship anything then to ship and fail.

Be brave, focus on what’s important, and get some skin in the game. Ship.

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The anatomy of a viral landing page

Paul Hontz

Published: Apr 17, 2011

Last month I built the Startup Death Clock as a mini promo piece for The Startup Foundry. Six hours after launch, the startup death clock received over 10,000 unique hits, hundreds of tweets, and significantly increased traffic to TSF. In this article I’m going to break down things that I learned while building death clock and I will also share a few mistakes I made along the way that you should avoid.

Simple, simple, simple

Design is an exercise in restraint. Make things as simple as possible. Your goal is to have your users share the site with their friends. You’re going to want to make sharing the page as simple as possible. It’s better for a viral page to gain traction than to be absolutely perfect at launch. Iterate quickly and capture eyeballs.

Pick a time to strike (and get lucky)

Color, the photo sharing company that raised $41 million, launched on March 23rd. I released The Death Clock on March 24. Topical events are a fantastic way to learn about your users. Leverage well known events in your community to your advantage.

Things that I screwed up: (abridged version)

• I should have made an option to Tweet out your score. I believe more people would have shared the link if it was personalized.
• It would have been fun to incorporate different levels of success (Ramen profitable, Quit your day job, etc. instead of just “37signals”).
• Don’t take things too seriously. After I launched the death clock I had one user absolutely pissed at me (perhaps he didn’t like to know ). I let one user out of 10,000 spoil my mood for a few hours. This was incredibly stupid of me. Grow thick skin and don’t take things too seriously.

What have you learned?

I’m very interested to hear about what you’ve learned with your experiences. Feel free to share what you’ve learned in the comments!

Could an Online Startup Incubator Succeed?

Paul Hontz

Published: Apr 15, 2011

The Idea:

Build a startup incubator that runs online. This incubator could leverage expert mentors all over the world while lowering the barrier of entry for founders and entrepreneurs (who would no longer need to move). Your talent pool wouldn’t be constrained geographically. Theoretically this gives you a huge talent advantage.

What makes an incubator great?

Nobody runs an incubator better than Paul Graham. Paul launched YCombinator in 2005, and many (myself included) would consider YC to be the best incubator worldwide. They aren’t perfect, but they get a lot of things right. After interviewing several YC alum I can confidently say YC’s biggest strength is their people network. Anyone can offer money to a startup but the connections that Paul Graham and company provide are simply unrivaled.

I asked Paul Graham (Founder of YCombinator) about an online incubator and he said:
“It would not work, at least not with current technology
for doing things remotely.  The kind of interactions the
startups have with us and with the other startups need
to happen face to face.”

Fair enough. Paul doesn’t think you could put a YC style incubator online and maintain the same quality experience. I would agree with his initial assessment, but I believe an online incubator that challenged our preconceived notions of how an incubator functions could flourish online.

Barriers to entry:

I asked Sanjay Parekh (from Shotput Ventures) his thoughts on an online incubator and he said:
“Personally I have a hard time seeing how this works – successfully. There
are just some aspects to early stage startup formation that you lose when
doing things online.

I think that a lot can be said about the real world
interaction. I know the startups that we (Shotput Ventures) have funded
have generally done a great job communicating over email but I also see
them regularly at either meetings they setup or randomly at events in town.
When that happens, I feel like I can brainstorm and help them a lot
faster than if I’m limited by the bandwidth between my brain, my hands, the
keyboard, and the Internet. The bandwidth between my brain, eyes, ears,
and mouth is tremendously more capable for these interactions.”

Conclusion:

I’m stuck on the fence if an online incubator would work. I can’t shake the feeling that with the right people it could be wildly successful. I’m very interested in this concept and have been thinking about it for a long time. I’m eager to hear what you think in the comments.

Does anyone feel like blowing $20k on an experiment?

Your MVP is a Ford Pinto but it’s better than a Ferrari without wheels.

Paul Hontz

Published: Apr 13, 2011

Recently on TSF we’ve been talking a lot about “Minimum Viable Products” (MVP) and I’ve had several readers write in asking me why I was so high on the concept. My reasoning behind it is threefold. If I missed anything I would appreciate you sharing your experiences in the comments. 

Gain traction:

The point of your MVP is to act as your “beater” vehicle. Remember that Ford Pinto you flipped burgers in high school to pay for? It’s purpose was to take you from point “A” to point “B”. You wouldn’t want to pick up a prom date in it, but it took care of your daily commute.  You MVP is the same concept. It’s not your dream car, but it can still take you places.

It allows you to learn what features you should actually spend your time on.

Don’t try to build everything at once. Focus on a few  features and see how the community responds. Never create in a vacuum.

It doesn’t matter how fast a Ferrari can go if it doesn’t  have wheels

Theoretical performance means nothing if the rubber can’t meet the road. It’s much better to have something launched (even if it just has the core features) than something that is perpetually “just a few weeks away from launch”. As King said Let your community grow alongside you: Ship unfinished apps.

A Ford Pinto will take you much farther then a Ferrari without wheels.

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Let your community grow alongside you: Ship unfinished apps.

Paul Hontz

Published: Apr 12, 2011

[editors note: This was a guest post written by: King Sidharth. King Sidharth is a young entrepreneur and designer. He works at Besperk while helping startups any way he can find. You can read more of his stuff at 64 Notes or say hi: king@kingsidharth.com]

Do you remember Google Wave? It was a social app that shipped in (nearly) complete form. It had all sorts of bells and whistles. It also was very confusing and much of the UI focused on solving problems that real life users weren’t experiencing. After a year or so Google canned the project for lack of user adoption.

Contrast that with Gmail. Gmail started as a barebones application that slowly grew with the communities needs. Take, for example, Priority Inbox. Priority Inbox came from users complaining that they were overwhelmed with emails. Features that grow organically from user requests make much more sense then features added because of a board meeting.

Another example of an application that grew with the community is Twitter. When Twitter first launched it was extremely simplistic. Users complained that there wasn’t a way to reply to users, so they started to use the “@” symbol to signify a response to a specific person. Twitter then adopted this practice for their official clients and made it a feature.

It’s not about adding every feature users ask for, it’s about solving problems, creating a better experience, and improving the little things. This is why the concept of MVP works so well. MVP allows you to ship the bare minimum and find out where the users pain points are located.

You cannot build a social startup in the dark corners of your room.

You need to ship it- raw, unfinished, and let your users have a taste. Then key in on finding their problems and fix them quickly.

Sitting in a dark room developing your social startup alone (or worse – having someone else work on every aspect of it while you’re the idea guy) makes it so easy to say, “add this – they might need it.” Doing that will keep you a step removed from your actual users.

Startups, like poetry, are never finished. They are always being abandoned or always growing.

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