In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about add-ons, extensions, and apps. One way to launch a saas application is by creating a chrome add-on or extension that users can use as a gateway to your main product. While this is a great strategy for launching a saas application, it also has some downsides as well. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on the right way to launch a saas application using this strategy, the benefits of doing this and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About the topic of today’s episode 00:47 Why this topic was chosen. 01:59 The benefits of using this strategy. 02:23 Why you should start with the product first. 03:10 How FYI was launched using this strategy. 03:30 What Hiten and his team learn about user behavior before launching FYI. 04:20 A fallacy about building a chrome extension. 04:54 Why you need to be in your user’s workflow to be successful. 06:19 The right way to approach this strategy. 07:03 The benefit of building on someone’s platform. 3 Key Points: What we learned was that people are looking for these documents on their browser. Where is the behavior happening that you are looking to get into? If you’re not in their workflow in one way or another, you’re not gonna achieve any level of success. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:05] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:07] Steli Efti: And in today’s episode of the Startup Chat, we want to talk about add-ons, extensions and apps. Right? So we’re talking a lot about how to start a startup, how to do or how to build a SAS business. We’ve talked about building services and consulting businesses in the past. What we haven’t digged into a lot I want to just touch on a few of your experiences particularly on this, [inaudible] is kind of the downsized version of a full fledged SAS application, which is the typical let’s take the Chrome extension or the WordPress plugin or add-on or a Facebook app or whatever else. Just building a smaller sized applications that sits on top of somebody else’s platform, right? The do’s and the don’ts. Is this still a Bible strategy today? Why should somebody considered it, I’d love to dissect this. And you have recently launched a Chrome extension. So you have a lot of really recent experience in this. My last experience with building an add-on, or an extension, we did a Chrome extension a long time ago, when we first launched like, five, six years ago for Close.io. But we really didn’t pour a lot of thought or love into that. And it’s before that, when Facebook, the Facebook platform was a big thing. And everybody was building apps on Facebook. I build a bunch of apps on Facebook, but my experience is not as recent. So let’s jump into the first and main question which is what you know, why should you do that anyways? Like what’s the main benefit? And what’s the main downside? And then we can break it down to, how to approach this and how to win on any of these platforms or how to win when you do this and do it right.   [0:01:49] Hiten Shah: Yeah, so I think it has a lot to do with your service and your product and how you need to be thinking about that product. And a lot of that has to do with when are people going to use your product and Where are they? What places are they in? So for me, it doesn’t start with, oh, we need to go build something or anything like that. It starts with the product you’re building, the category you’re in, and what you believe about it. So in our case, are the way we think about it is the product called FYI, it’s usefyi.com. And we did launch a Chrome extension a few months ago at the end of May. And then a couple months after that, we launched a desktop app. And so we have a Chrome extension, a desktop app, we actually also have a web version of the product. So for us, it’s a product that helps you find all your documents across all the cloud services used and now because of our desktop app, also your computer. And so you could do all that in the browser. And so we started with a Chrome extension. We didn’t even have the web easily accessible by people. Now, it is though because we wanted to make sure that when people were looking for their documents, they could find our product to be honest, and they would see it. And what we learned about behavior is that people are looking for these documents in their browser. They’re looking, they’re going to drop boxes website, or the Google Docs website or all these websites. So for us having a Chrome extension and putting it in the new tab and making it so that it’s super easy to access. And it shows up every time that you’re in your browser and opening a new tab is really valuable. And it really gets in people’s workflow, and they wanted there and so that was the insight that led us to wanting to build a Chrome extension first. I think that, you know, there is a little bit of a fallacy that if you build a Chrome extension it’s not like a full fledged product or you don’t have to do all these work on the back end. I think that really depends on whether your product is really heavy like that or not. Our part it’s pretty heavy like we do all bunch of heavy lifting and hopefully most make it feel simple on their end unless there’s a bug or something like that. And so the way I think about it is like, Where are the people? Where is the behavior happening that you are looking to get into, or get to be part of. And this is especially important on the B2B side, because if you’re not in their workflow, or in their sort of daily routine, or weekly routine, with your product in one way or another, then you’re actually not going to be able to achieve any level of growth or success, because you’re just not there. You’re not available to them when they need you. Making people just log into a website and think about your website and log into when they feel like it is not like what most people do with products like, you know, you need to be where they are. And I think that’s the way I think about it. So for us, we wanted a Chrome extension. We also needed a desktop app but here’s the thing We didn’t just need a desktop app, because we wanted people to use us on the desktop. If we have a desktop app, and people install it, we’re able to find, help them find their files from their desktop while they’re in the browser, or while they’re in our app anywhere. And so we have this idea of our product being accessible when people need it. And that’s really how you want to think about this. There are all these great platforms out there, like Chrome extension, there’s other extension stores as well. There’s obviously mobile, there’s also desktop stores. Both Windows and Mac have basically the equivalent of app stores for the desktop. There’s obviously the Chrome extension stuff so that there’s like a ton of things in places and as I keep talking, I can think of more right? Facebook ads aren’t that big of a deal anymore, but like you could say that like, that’s another venue if you have a type of product and maybe a consumer product or something like that, where you want to be their workflow and people are logging to Facebook all the time. Text Messages also another platform.   [0:05:59] Steli Efti: Yeah Messenger. The thing that I love that I want to highlight is your whole point of like, you know, it’s not about an add-on, or an extension or something like that. That’s another way you start, I want to build an extension, that’s not a good place to start. But how do I want to serve? What solving problem do I want to help them? Do I want to solve for these users or these customers and people. And where are they? Where would be the most valuable place, the most natural place for our app or product to appear to help them accomplish what they want, versus always assuming that they will be willing to come to a separate website, sign up to a separate web app, or SAS app and then solve the problem there. I love that because, you know, there was a long time and I think still to the state of some degree, there was this idea that if we built on top of somebody else’s platform, the main benefit is going to be that we’re going to get built in distribution, right? The idea was we’ll launch on this thing and we’re going to get all their users. All their customers auto magically, right? Where a Chrome extension, there’s a page that shows people all these Chrome extensions. So people will just start adding our extension. And we don’t have to do that much marketing. Facebook was a crazy example of that. But Shopify, their extension or add-on store, whatever it’s called, is a big example of that, that I hear eCommerce startups all the time, say, we’re going to launch this thing on Shopify, because they have massive distribution and being on their store is going to make us really, really popular. I mean, the app store with iOS and all that, right. And Google’s it, App Store. So I think, a big appeal in the early days. And still, I think today for a lot of founders to even consider that is to think both. This is going to be simple and cheap. And it’s going to automatically give me a lot of users. Now, let me ask you, Chrome extension might not be as big of that distribution play for people I’m not sure what the assumptions are from users. But how do you think about the distribution part of doing add-ons, extensions, apps. Is that still a big opportunity or does it depend. What do you think about that?   [0:08:14] Hiten Shah: It depends and all this stuff takes work. So I would say that the thing that’s changed is like, most of the platforms are a little more mature. There’s already like so many apps on them. And people have a hard time finding what they need. So when you think about it, like that, this app stuff is not like, whether it’s an app marketplace of any kind, Chrome extensions or desktop apps or whatever, it’s not a … It’s not a magic bullet. It’s not like what it used to be where it was a little bit easier because it’s less crowded and people are really excited as consumers to download these things. It’s just not like that. That’s not reality. Reality is more like … It’s like you have a website you need to market, so you have a Chrome extension you need to market it, you have a desktop app, you need to market it. So I think you have to make sure you’re getting that stuff out there. And it’s not, it’s not like you get distribution right off the bat. Also, like most of these, most of these services, or app stores and marketplaces, they don’t have a system of getting your distribution. Unless you pay, they don’t have notifications. They don’t have all that kind of stuff. So what they do have is like, featuring you. That it’s about having a really great experience, great product, something that should be featured, right? Then it also has to do with your relationship with the people that run those stores and things like that. So this is the reality of it. We’re back to like a relationship game. If nothing else, if you really want to be reliant on the App Store for distribution directly, otherwise, you’re doing all the work.   [0:09:40] Steli Efti: What about the risk, right? I remember back in the day, there were companies that thought about just being a player on top of a pre-existing platform and there was always [invest] from an investor’s perspective, the question of risk, what if that platform changes something about the algorithm? What if the App Store is not as popular anymore? Like you’re on this platform or even simpler, I am using or I used to use a bunch of popular Gmail extensions that, anytime Google would change something it would mess with their design. It would mess with the app or at some point Google, it changed something significantly. I remember talking to a startup that I was using their app in Gmail natively. And they would tell me how all of some other thing was broke. And they told me how Google doesn’t like what they do anymore, because they want to do this natively. So they’re like, basically killed what they were doing. So …   [0:10:41] Hiten Shah: That’s the rule of platforms, right? You’re beholden to them, period, like whatever they want to do, they can do and so you just have to be smart about making sure you’re either on multiple platforms, but over time, you’re reducing your reliance on any single platform.   [0:10:57] Steli Efti: So I think the long term, especially the way that you approach this, building an add-on, an extension and app might be the right thing to serve your user, your customer in the best way possible. Might be the right way to launch and enter the market. But it’s probably in most cases today with today’s knowledge there’s very rare examples. I can’t think of a company that will rely just on being an app and add-on or an extension and never want to expand to multiple platforms. Or have also a standalone or a desktop or some kind of another version that people can go and use. That whole strategy that used to exist doesn’t exist anymore, right?   [0:11:37] Hiten Shah: Nope, does not exist. Can’t rely on that.   [0:11:40] Steli Efti: To wrap up this episode was there anything unexpected, new or interesting that you learned launching a Chrome extension versus launching a standalone app or was it the exact same experience there’s nothing really was different in any way imaginable from you doing so?   [0:11:59] Hiten Shah: I think it’s really important to focus on your listing and that marketing page that they give you and all the components of it. Like, I think that’s probably the most critical thing about these marketplaces which is, if people happen to find you there, or you need to send people there to download your product, there’s a ton of value that you can get. If you really think through the experience almost like it’s your own website on those listing pages. Because you’re you’re looking to convince people to sign up or install or whatever it is your extension or your app or whatever from that page. And I don’t see enough companies spending time on those pages and thinking through what is the experience like and how how do we convince people to sign up.   [0:12:46] Steli Efti: Beautiful all right that’s it for us for this episode. By the way, this podcast is on a pretty big platform with iTunes. So if you listen to the podcast, if you enjoy it, please just a favor go to the iTunes store and give us a four star or five star rating. Whatever the max is give us a little review. That would be highly appreciated and other than that until next time.   [0:13:12] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:13:13] The post 339: How to Build Add-Ons, Extensions, or Apps appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how founders can stay humble once they’ve made it. After years of grinding and building your startup, it’s common for some founders to become arrogant once they’ve “made it”. Unfortunately, this can cut short all the payoff or success that you’ve worked so hard to attain. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts staying humble once you’ve made it, how they react to their own success, tip on how to stay humble and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:37 Why this topic was chosen. 01:18 Why this is all about personality types. 02:31 Why feeling successful has never been a thing for Steli. 03:23 Why staying humble is important. 03:37 One thing Steli does at events he speaks at. 04:27 Why making fun of yourself is a good thing. 05:11 Why you should remind yourself to stay humble. 05:25 Steli on getting an insane amount of praise in his inbox. 06:29 What to do to help you stay humble. 08:05 What being humble is all about. 3 Key Points: For me, I don’t think I ever will make it. What drives me is that there are still problems to solve. What matters is that I’m doing my best. [0:00:01] Steli: Hey everybody this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:04] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah and I think today, on The Startup Chat, we’re gonna talk about something we consider fun, although we have fun doing this so I think it’s all fun. That being said, I think this is important in a topic that is kinda fun, and the reason it’s fun is because we’re talking about people’s personalities at the end of the day. So Steli, you started it by saying, let’s talk about how to be humble once you’ve, I guess made it, right?   [0:00:36] Steli: Yeah, stay humble as your succeeding, that’s the way I phrased it.   [0:00:39] Hiten: Ah succeeding, okay so, this is why it’s about personalities right. For me, I’m never succeeding, other people might think that, but I don’t. For me, I don’t think I’ve ever made it. I don’t think I ever will make it. And so that already, makes me feel like crap every day, I’m kidding, I’m really kidding but at the end of the day, if you feel like you’ve made it, if you feel like you’re a success, for my personality type, that would make me retire. And so, I can’t do that to myself. I can’t feel successful in the way other people might need to, it doesn’t drive me. What drives me is the fact that there’s still problems to solve, whether it’s in my life, in my work, in the world, whatever. And if there’s problems, great, but if I think I’m successful that means I’ve solved all the problems I wanna solve, and then I’m done, I’m good, I’ll chill out. So, this is why I’m saying it’s personality based because to me, what keeps me humble, if I were to just look at myself and self reflect is the fact that I think there is an infinite amount of self improvement I would like to achieve for myself. There is an infinite amount of problems in the world, in my life, with the people I know, and really it’s problems for me, this is what drives me. That I feel like I can have a more than marginal impact on, I can have a tremendous impact on. That’s what drives me and that’s what keeps me honest with myself, that’s what keeps reminding me that I suck. But not in a way that’s unproductive or demotivating, in a way where I’m like, crap I can do so much more, I can solve so many more problems, I can help so many more people, I can help myself so much more. And that’s what drives me, just to give you a personal anecdote. I am sure it’s a little different for you, if not a lot different so I’d love to hear your take and then I’m sure we can get into some deeper stuff.   [0:02:28] Steli: Yeah so, everything you said makes perfect sense to me right. And I don’t disagree with it, I feel like yeah, feeling successful is something that I’m not sure I ever felt. I might have had moments, very fleeting moments, but I’ve never felt successful in the sense of it’s a destination that I’ve arrived at, here’s where I live my home is now feeling successful. I don’t have that. I think, the thing that I really wanted to zero in on, that I think is interesting, I wanted to dissect a little but with you is, maybe it’s not even staying humble as you’re succeeding. Although that’s one part of it, the other part of it is maybe, staying humble as your ego is being targeted or as you’re getting public recognition or praise. I posted this recently where, one thing I do before every keynote that I give is I always ask people to raise their hand if they have no fucking idea who I am. And it usually is the majority of the room that raises their hand, even in rooms or conferences or places where I’m … Some people will tell me I’m quite well known and before I get on stage, I have to take selfies with people and people want me to sign a book and people tell me how amazing I am. I’m being showered all day long with how famous I am and I get on stage and I ask this question and they’re like, 70% of the room raises their hand and they’re like, we don’t fucking know who you are. And I always make this joke that, I always thank the audience and look a little defeated and go, this is really important for my ego so thank you for raising your hand. But to me it’s a good reminder … A, it’s a little bit of a joke to make people. B, if you make fun of yourself that’s typically a good intro to make people feel like, all right maybe this dude is all right. But it’s also a good reminder for myself of like, yeah nobody fucking knows who you are, nobody cares and that’s totally cool. And I’ve been in some rooms sometimes where I’ll also do this with you right, so I’ll show a screen with a startup chat I’ll be like, talk a little bit about and I’m like, I also have a podcast with Hiten Shah and da, da, da. And then sometimes if it’s in a room where I’m like convinced more people should know you than know me I go, who knows this handsome fella, just raise your hand, if you don’t know him and then I’ll make some fun around that. I posted that, that that’s the way I started my keynote and one of the reasons is to stay humble, keep your ego in check, and I really like this quote or this saying of like “You’re never as good as people say you are, you’re never as bad as people say you are.” And I know-   [0:05:03] Hiten: Me too.   [0:05:03] Steli: I know I get an insane amount of praise every day in my inbox. People send my really nice things daily and if I’m out and about, once in a while, I’ll get a lot of praise in person as well, so I’m being quite frequently showered with compliments. I know it’s the same thing for you. I know I don’t feel a thing when I read these things. I really appreciate that people feel like they learned something, I really try to take time to answer, be helpful and useful. But I don’t feel a dopamine rush, I don’t feel great about myself. I literally feel pretty numb reading these things, It’s like, oh Steli, you’re the greatest person ever. Like I feel zero, I just keep reading try to understand what to respond or how to help here and how to move on. And I know that a lot of people, as they are getting more successful or as they get more public recognition and praise, that the targeting of their ego, maybe their defense mechanism is not as good as ours so their egos grow, and that then leads to a lot of I think, negative effects. So I really wanted to just talk about would you and I, I mean maybe we’re not even humble but, what we do to try to practice staying humble, I try to be humble, I try to practice it, I don’t really think about it too much. But it’s just an interesting topic to me of like, some people as they succeed they become this huge head, they’re really full of themselves, and many people don’t and what’s the difference?   [0:06:35] Hiten: So I think staying humble, when I hear that it always reminds me of stay humble, stay foolish.   [0:06:42] Steli: Foolish, yeah.   [0:06:43] Hiten: Yeah from Steve Jobs. And I couldn’t agree more, he had another thing that I heard from a friend of mine who worked with him where, he would say what’s next. And really emphasize like whatever we’re doing today, there’s more we can do, there’s more we will do, what’s the next thing we’re gonna do? So I’m sure after the iPhone launch he’s like what’s next, right? After the iPad launch, what’s next? And that drive, that insistence, that ability, that motivation comes from being humble. Being able to be humbled, being able to look at the world in such a way where like yeah, it doesn’t matter if I’m the best today or not, what matters is I’m doing my best, what matters is that I can learn from everybody and everything around me. So I think the whole idea of why we in startup land or in the business world, really worry about being humble and all that, it isn’t about like, all of a sudden you have money and you buy 10 cars, no it’s not about that. Fine, if you’re into cars, go buy 10 cars, have fun just don’t speed like me. But it’s not about that, it’s not about even honestly, it’s truly not even about people changing when they make money or get successful or anything. Although sometimes it’s a shame to see that if your friend changes for the worst in your opinion, when they make money or get successful or whatever because that can happen, it actually just brings out their personality more, to be honest. It’s really about this idea of like, if you’re humble, then you will be willing to learn. If you stop being humble, or feel like you’re a success or whatever, your ability to learn is completely hampered because you think you know it all. So I guess for me, when I think about this, it’s really about making sure that I don’t have that mentality of being a know it all. I don’t shut down myself from learning from others, or learning from my mistakes, or being open to looking at something great someone else did and learning from it, instead of ignoring it, or thinking they’re wrong, or having this allergic reaction to it like, oh I didn’t come up with it so it must be wrong. Those are the kind of things that I think about when I think about this topic of being humble and what it means to me.   [0:08:53] Steli: Yeah, I love that. I think this is one of the topics, that’s why we said … That’s why we had a funny and funky intro. It’s not a resolution, there’s not like a 10 step tip program, or template, or strategy. It’s just interesting to me, to see how I respond to some of those things, and some friends of mine, certainly you, and to see then other people that seem to respond or react very differently to success or praise or public recognition and I count what’s the difference here and why? And I completely agree with you on the, if you’re not humble it’s very hard to learn and grow right? Because you feel like you are a finished product or you have arrived somewhere, or even if you feel super successful and like you’re amazing, that feels like a state of attachment. That’s something I assume you would want to hold on to or you wouldn’t want anything to change anymore. And then if you can change or if you don’t want things to change, now again you’re in a troubled place, because the world is changing, you are changing, things will be changing, you can’t hold on to anything. So I don’t know, for me, I’m not even sure if it comes from this place of like I always wanna keep learning, although that’s definitely true. I think for me it just comes from a place of like, I don’t know, I think I’ve eaten too much shit, I’ve had too much failure and success. I had success very early and then a lot of failure right after, I think that was a very healthy thing for my ego and my mind and spirit. So, it’s very hard for me to be full of myself and I’m just like, no matter who it is, we’re all full of shit, and we all should be trying to do better every day than we did the last one. And it’s like this, success or fame or any of the stuff, all this stuff can be fun but it’s fundamentally, it doesn’t have substance. I don’t know, I don’t believe that those words about myself because I know who I am, so it’s hard for me to take them seriously or attach to them and feel any way of getting a big head around that, at least that’s what I think. Yeah, stay humble, it’s an interesting topic, I think we’ll gonna wrap that up and we’ll just gonna tag this episode as a ramble on humbleness. But I’d love to hear people’s opinion on it as well so, we always love to hear from you. I’ve noticed a little bit of an increase lately and I think we both appreciate it and are excited about it. So please, if you have a question, a story, an anecdote, a tip, a thought to share-   [0:11:28] Hiten: Anything.   [0:11:30] Steli: Anything, send us an e-mail steli@close.io, hnshah@gmail.com. We always love to listen hear from our listeners, and I think that’s it from us for this episode, we’ll wrap it up and hear you very soon.   [0:11:42] Hiten: See ya. [0:11:42] The post 338: Staying Humble with Success appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to deal with a hyper-competitive market if you’re in one. Today’s startup world is super competitive. It is not uncommon for there to be hundreds, if not thousands of competitors in the market you operate. So how do you differentiate your brand from the rest and get the attention of those you want to do business with? Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts about how competitive the market is, what you can do to differentiate and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:22 About today’s topic. 01:25 Why this topic was chosen. 02:00 Why all markets are going to be hyper-competitive in future. 03:39 Steli’s two cents on the issue. 05:40 Why it’s important to stand for something. 06:21 The reason why Close.io became successful in the CRM space. 07:49 One way to differentiate in a hyper-competitive market. 09:40 A second way to approach differentiation in a super competitive market. 11:26 One last tip from Steli. 12:19 Why competition is a good thing. 3 Key Points: There’s always a niche that’s underserved or overlooked. In today’s world, it’s probably going to be hard to compete on features. We built a product that was very differentiated for a customer that was very undervalued and we marketed it in a very different voice. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah, and I’m going to talk about something today with Steli on this web chat that is near and dear to his heart. I think that’s why he wanted to talk about it, so Steli you’re going to have to take the lead on this, but basically the topic is how to deal with hyper-competitive market if you’re in one and Steli’s company, Close.io, happens to be in one of the most hyper-competitive, or competitive I guess, hyper-competitive software markets out there, CRM. So they build a CRM solution, a Customer Relationship Management Service, I guess. Dude, sucks to be you.   [0:00:48] Steli Efti: I would agree with you if I wasn’t me. I would think the same thing. You know, I always tell people, if somebody would have told me, I don’t know, six years ago, that I would be running, or seven years ago, that I would be running a CRM business, I would have punched them in the face. Nothing inside of me was like, “Yes! CRM-“   [0:01:11] Hiten Shah: Let’s do that.   [0:01:12] Steli Efti: ” … That’s what I want to do. Let’s go into that market.” Nothing really inside of me wanted that. So the reason why I wanted to talk to you about this is that I’ve given a few talks on this subject because people have been asking me to speak about it and I’ve increasingly noticed this notion of people describing the space they’re in, or founders describing the space they’re in as, “The most competitive space,” or, “One of the most competitive spaces.” Or, “Hyper-competitive.” I’m starting to think that this is going to be new reality where it doesn’t fucking matter what you do, it’s going to be a hyper-competitive space eventually. Because of the way the world works, because of the way … Especially in software, where a single developer, somewhere in a random location around the world can compete with a venture tech start up in the Valley with tens of millions in venture funding and so there’s this explosion of software products in many, many categories and people feel overwhelmed by that. Yeah, I have a personal story, because I launched a company in an insanely competitive space but I also feel like this is a trend. I don’t know if you agree with me but it feels to me like a trend. I look at this company that does this once a year, the Marketing Tech Space report or something, I just know or remember there’s like a graphic of all the little logos. They have this grid of categorizing all the different SaaS products in all the different marketing tech space categories and it’s like, that fucking chart every year is doubling for the last three years that I’ve been looking at it. I think last year, it went from 4,000 to almost 8,000 and I’m like, “Is it going to go from 8,000 to 16,000 SaaS apps in the marketing tech space?” So I think this is an interesting subject. I’ll throw in my first two cents and then I’m dying to hear your views on how to compete successfully today in the hyper-competitive spaces. For me, it really goes back to a very simple rule which is you need to find a customer that you understand better than most other companies in the space, that you care about more than most other competitors in your space, and that you can service in some kind of a better way, a more valuable way. So it’s all about a, understanding the customer that you want to cater to, there’s always a niche that’s underserved, or a niche that’s misunderstood, or a niche that’s overlooked that offers an opportunity. Then it’s looking at yourself and understanding that in today’s world, it’s probably going to be hard to compete on features, which is something that you were able to be competitive with at some point in the past. You had some special feature that took your competition maybe a year to copy, to one and a half years to copy, where today it might just take them two weeks and they have it then also. So features are not going to be the way to compete. Design, UI/UX is something that today more so than ever, it feels like it’s easier to do really excellent in the way that companies design products in UI/UX rules and best practices and innovations are being adopted really, really quickly. So just purely competing on a product that has lots of features, or that looks a little nicer than other products, that’s becoming harder and harder to do. So it becomes more important to be very introspective and ask yourself who are we as a company? What do we stand for? What do we stand against and how can we build this business and this product and the way we communicate with the world in a way that creates a very distinct brand? Which then means that your reputation … It’s the way people feel about you, your company, your product, versus just the way they think about it. I think that most companies and most teams, they don’t feel comfortable standing for and against many things. They don’t feel comfortable having a very strong distinct voice. They’d rather be very kind of middle of the road and if you build a middle of the road brand that’s hard to differentiate and now you’re in a hyper-competitive space where whatever feature you’re building, your competitor has a week later, then this becomes I feel, like a very hard battle to win and to even fight and that’s why I think a lot of companies are struggling. A company tells me they’re struggling because it’s such a hyper-competitive space, it’s not a good reason to me. So circling all that back to us, to just give a very concrete example, the reason why we became very successful in this space was that we had built a very different product than all the competition for a very specific customer. Even within that customer, we hyper-focused on a stakeholder that everybody else was ignoring, or didn’t value as much, so we built a product that was very differentiated for a user and customer that was very undervalued and we marketed it very differently, with a very different voice. We decided to mainly market the product through content marketing, through teaching and we decided that we would put my ugly face out there, screaming at people all day long so people could really humanize the brand and feel a certain way about us. Those two things, having a strong brand, strong marketing and strong voice and point of view and building a product for a under-valued stakeholder and under-valued customer in a very differentiated way, those two things were the things I believe in hindsight allowed us to really succeed and gain traction and become a big business in a market that was so over-saturated with solutions already.   [0:07:19] Hiten Shah: Your face isn’t ugly but you can say that.   [0:07:24] Steli Efti: I can say that.   [0:07:25] Hiten Shah: Yes. Oh man, I think you guys really found a differentiated opportunity and you found it early. So I think there’s two approaches and they converge at some point in a hyper-competitive market. The first approach … And you can start either way. So one approach is you find an opportunity and you build something that’s re-segmenting the market. So basically creating a new norm in the market. I think you guys did that but you didn’t have a full featured CRM at the time. Then now, you are evolving into what I would call a much more full-featured CRM, that’s what you’ve been doing for the last few years. So one way to start if you find something, differentiate it, so that it’s easier to build than building the whole thing first and copying everybody, which is what I call parity. So in a competitive market, your product needs parity. Parity means basically, it does all the things people expect of a CRM. Now if you have one innovative as fuck feature and you figure out how to front-load a lot of research, or a lot of intuition or whatever, you get lucky, I don’t know, there’s many ways to go about that and you figure out the opportunity, I think for you guys, you were in the market. You guys were in the market, being sales people, running a massive sales team for many different companies and you learned a ton about what is required and you found an opportunity to build something. That’s the way I look at it. What you built is what’s differentiated in the market for a very long time. Even three months is a long time, but six months, a year, maybe even longer, differentiated in the sense that people thought of you when they thought of wanting that. That was what helped a lot. Now, there’s two things that are happening for you guys. One, you’re doubling down on that thing and creating the next generation of it, that’s what I see in the new feature launch you’re going to do soon, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in future. Then, you’re … Also have built a much more full-featured CRM in the process. So that’s how you approached it. A second way to approach it, which I would say is more like Zoom, which is the web conferencing service is that they created a web conferencing, like a whatever … A web conferencing software that was really, really good and had parity with the products in the market, meaning it had all the features that other products had but in a bunch of areas, it was just 20, 30% better, maybe more. One of the areas was they had a free plan and it was very generous, but it was very smart about how you can only do 45 minute calls with that free plan. Webinars and all that stuff, they’re one hour long at least, at least. So wow, that was so brilliant, right? Then they had a limited number of participants you could have and all these things that made it so I would use it, but if I really wanted to use it, I would have to pay, but I could keep using it for free and be relatively happy with some constraints. So that created this urgency and this need to upgrade at many different points of using the product. So that was a brilliant innovation, I would say in that market, of giving the product for free, making it easy for someone to try that product in a competitive market. So to me, those are two ways. One is you build all those features first and you basically are like Zoom, and you figure out things you need to do a little bit better, or a lot better, whether it’s for the business model, the strategy, or the product itself. Or two, you innovate and you start with innovation. Then you realize eventually you have to get to a place where that innovation, you’re constantly improving but at the same time, you’re also building out the full-featured version, like everybody else has. So that’s my take on how you do it-   [0:11:07] Steli Efti: I love it.   [0:11:07] Hiten Shah: … And how you compete.   [0:11:09] Steli Efti: I love it. I couldn’t agree more. Let’s end the episode with this last tip from me, because everything you said is absolutely right and brilliant. The last thing I’ll say on top of it, this addresses a certain type of person that’s thinking about, or complaining about, the competition. If you complain about the competition and if you blame the competition for your lack of traction and success, then you deserve that lack of success. Nobody gives a shit. It doesn’t matter, you don’t deserve a seat at the table, it’s not a birthright, you don’t deserve to have access to these customers and serve them. You need to earn that right and there’s lot of competitors that do similar things than you, then that’s not a reason to complain, or if one of your competitors copies something novel, unique or valuable that you had discovered and innovated on, then you can sit there and cry but nobody cares. Competition should be, and is, a good thing and you should focus on your customers and finding ways to drive value for them and to earn their business. Sitting around and blaming that you are just in too much of a competitive space to be succeeding, that’s not doing anybody good and that’s not going to help your company, it’s not going to help your customers. So the last thing on this is, if you feel the heat from competition increasingly, if you feel there’s more and more competitors entering the space, if you feel like the big incumbents are copying you, or taking over certain things from you, if you feel the heat, that’s a good thing so step up your game, become a better competitor and create more value versus seeing that as a reason to whine and to attribute your lack of traction and success in any way to anybody else because that’s not really going to help anything. So yeah, become a better competitor, I think that that’s something we all need to become, is just better and better competitors to earn our right to have customers and have thriving businesses.   [0:13:10] Hiten Shah: Couldn’t agree more.   [0:13:12] Steli Efti: All right, that’s it from us for this episode, we’ll hear you very soon.   [0:13:15] Hiten Shah: Later. [0:13:15] The post 337: How to Compete in a Hyper Competitive Space appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to define your company values as a startup. All companies have core values. They are the rules of for how your startup is going to achieve your mission and vision. A startup’s core values set expectations for the company and tells your employees how to behave appropriately in every situation. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on what core values mean, the importance of having them, how to define your core values and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:43 Why this topic was chosen. 01:53 Why it’s important to define what your company’s values are. 02:43 How to define your company values. 03:00 Why you should hire people that value the same things as you. 03:32 What happens when you hire people with different values. 04:15 Why self-awareness is important. 05:30 Why your core values need to be defined. 05:39 How to approach this the very first time. 08:50 The most important value at Close. 3 Key Points: If you’re a founder or a CEO of a company, there are values that exist. The values of an organization are the beliefs employees have about work and in working at the company for the customer that you’re working for. Your behavior is communicating to everybody what you value. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:02] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:04] Steli Efti: And in today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about how to define your company values as a start up and we’re going to do that in a very short period of time, because one of the core values of this podcast is that we don’t like wasting time, right?   [0:00:20] Hiten Shah: Yeah, brevity . I like that.   [0:00:23] Steli Efti: So we’ve been emailed a few times this week from different people on this specific topic, the one on like, “How do I write down the values? How do I define them? How do I communicate them? How do we do this in the best way possible?” So we thought it would be fun to quickly chat about this and give people a little bit of guidance.   [0:00:41] Hiten Shah: Absolutely. This one’s a really important one and I’m going to start by saying a problem that happens is when you don’t define your values. If you’re a founder, CEO, or even a manager of a company, or you started it and you have more than you involved, even if it’s just a co-founder, there are values that exist already. Even as an individual, values exist, but in an organization, the values are essentially the beliefs that people have about work and working at the company, for the customer that you’re working for. What I see commonly is this one thing that really resonates with me and I bug people about when I hear it, “These people on my team are not doing what would do. These people on my team are not doing the right thing.” Well, have you defined what the right thing is? “No, but they should know.” What do mean they should know? How are they going to be in your head and know what you should do? Basically, most of the time, 99% of the time, those people have not defined values and essentially made the company understand them, had people involved in the creation of those values, and those values permeate once they’re created. That’s all it takes, but if they don’t exist, then they’re all implicit, they’re all sitting there in everyone’s heads and people probably don’t have the exact words to think about them. I’ll say one more thing before … I’m sure you’ve got a lot of thoughts on this, is you know the values are working when people are repeating them inside the company.   [0:02:14] Steli Efti: I love it. Yes. See one of the reasons why … I think the question that was sent to us was phrased in, “How do we create our company values?” And the reason why I didn’t use the word “create” when I introduced the topic, but I used “defining it,” is because you have company values if you’ve defined them or not. If you spelled them out or not. Your behavior is communicating to everybody what you value and if you are the founder or if you are the co-founders, then people will orient and try to observe what is truly valued in this team, in this company, and that’s how they’re going to try to make their decisions. If you now hire people that value personally completely different things than you valued as a team, one of the big reasons why you would ever hire somebody like that is that you’re lacking the team or organizational self-awareness to know what your values are so that when you interview a candidate that has conflicting values, you would not even bother hiring this person because you know this person is going to be unhappy here, we’re going to be unhappy with this person. So I think that self-awareness is really the key and foundational step to being able to define your values and I think that people are uncomfortable with that level of self-awareness and self-reflection and that we all have problems with being self-accepting with the reality of who we are, or who we are as a team and what we truly value. So it’s a topic that a lot of times is uncomfortable for people to look at, because it’s a very introspective topic. But doesn’t matter if you want to avoid it or not, your company core values and if they are fuzzy and if they’re not well-defined, if they’re not agreed on, it will lead to problems, it will only lead to misalignments and you will not know why because you’ve never really designed those values and defined them. So let’s talk about defining them. So let’s say I hear this and I go, “Shit, we don’t have our core values written down anywhere, or defined anywhere, as a team we’re five, six, seven people, we’re small team.” How do I do this? Do I just write down the things I’d like us to do? Or do I sit down and have everybody suggest what our values are and we vote on them? How do I create the version one of this? How do I approach this the very first time around?   [0:04:48] Hiten Shah: Yeah, there’s so many ways to approach this. I literally will like to get either … And even remote companies do this, but on a retreat or something, or in an office if everyone’s in an office. I like to get everyone in front of white board and literally just jam through it and do an exercise of what do we believe as a company? What do our customers need to believe? What embodies our business? Some of the times, it’s just about stories, sometimes. If you get stuck, all you have to do is tell stories about how you interacted with each other as a company during hardship, or during some traumatic moment or what people’s expectations are. So to me, it’s like this meandering conversation at first where it’s like, “What do we believe?” And coming up with stories of how the company behaves. Whether it’s with a customer, with each other internally, with investors, whatever it may be and that can start making people really have strong opinions about what they believe. Because what you’re looking for is not what you believe as a founder. It’s what you collectively are creating as a company in terms of the ethos and value system, the way other people are going to feel about you and the company, and that’s really important. So I think values being defined based on behaviors and interactions is really the key because otherwise they’re disingenuous and they’re just made up. So I don’t like looking at other company’s values.   [0:06:17] Steli Efti: I fully agree. I also don’t think that … Values is not a wishlist, it’s not like, “I’d like to be really much taller, I’d like to be blonde. I’d like to be really rich, I’d like to be an athlete and …” it’s not a wishlist of everything you think would be cool if your company would have these attributes, or your teams, it is quite literally asking the question, what do we value? Usually the implied question is what do we value over other things? So what is the most important for thing for us? Or what is more important to us than something else? So as an example, I think for a long time, people would compare back in the day, Google and Facebook’s engineering cultures and one valued speed over quality, over making mistakes and over being buggy at time and the other culture valued quality over speed. I think it’s … In most company values around the world, what you see is you see a compony that writes down, “The most important for us is speed.” Or, “Speed over everything.” Then the next little value is, “Always highest quality standards,” or something. It’s like these two things don’t go really well together. If you want to be always the fastest but never make any mistake, that will paralyze everybody, because they can’t follow both of these things. You have to value one thing over the other thing. We really value speed that means that sometimes we’ll take a hit on quality and we believe that through speed of iteration, improvement will get to even better excellence in quality eventually, but we’re okay with failing or breaking things on the way there. Or, quality’s the most important thing and we’re totally okay being a little slower than others because our stuff will always be hyper-polished and perfect, but you can’t just want everything. “We want to be the fastest, the biggest, the most nimble … ” You can’t want everything and I think the important thing is really to ask what do we value most and do we have examples how we make a decision as a team in terms of how to treat a customer? Or how we prioritize what we build and how we build things? Where are the examples in terms of our behaviors and our decision making when it was a tough spot? When we had to decide between one death or the other, or one negative versus the other? How did we choose and why? I think that that’s a good line of questioning to really figure out what do you value as a company and as a team and are there stories and are there examples that demonstrate that you’re living those values? That those values are not a wishlist of what you wish you be’ed like, but are a reflection of the reality of what you’re living today and how you are making decision today in the company. As I said before, if your values are really well-defined, and if you have great alignment with the company on values, then people know how to make decisions when they have to choose between speed and quality, if it’s clearly defined. They know how to make their choices and so everybody in the company knows how to make choices, because they’re all aligned on and in agreement and in awareness of what the company values are and how we make decisions in this company and what we value in this company more than other things, because you can’t value everything, because then you value nothing.   [0:09:51] Hiten Shah: I love that, I think that’s really key. It’s not aspirational stuff. This is stuff that’s like, at your best, the company operates like this. I think it’s that simple and really figuring out what that looks like. I got to say one thing, this thing is actually about people and there’s a quick story here from me. We were doing values at KISSmetrics when we were about 12 or 13 people, probably like a year too late or a little bit longer, but that’s fine. We were in a room, we were 95% done, the values were there but then somebody had a problem with one specific value and it was a couple of somebodies but it was really one person who was really vocal about it. So then what we had to do is, we literally created a culture committee, we had three people on it and none of the founders. We told them to really spend the time to talk to people and figure out how to get the values so that everyone’s happy with those values. So sometimes, values can get really touchy, especially because these are words that you’re going to put in places. These are sometimes posters you’re going to put on the wall if you have an office. Or these the things you might put on your website. So I just want to be clear that it’s not about everyone agreeing in the moment on the first shot. This is very personal to people because this is also about their personal values and they want to work in a company that actually they believe has values like they do. That’s super important and there’s no 100% of my values, even as a founder, are not going to be the same as the company values 100%. It’s a collective thing, it’s something that’s about a organization and how it treats customers, how it treats partners, how it treats investors, how people treat each other inside a company, it’s all of that. So I can’t stress the point that if there’s disagreement, find a solution, but sometimes you might need to go to something more extreme like that, in case there’s some things you just can’t get past then you make it more of a democratic thing. Only if you have to. It is honestly a democratic thing, based on the people that are in the company right now, doesn’t matter who they are.   [0:11:52] Steli Efti: I love that. The last thing I’ll say to wrap up the episode in terms of tips, again this goes with almost everything that we say, don’t overthink this, don’t try to be perfect in version one. Think of this as versions, the company might grow just as you are growing as a human being and the values that you had when you were 12, or 16, or 20 years old might not be the same that you have in your 40s, or 50s, or 60s. Some might, some might have changed. The same things happens as a company grows, so think of this as a living, breathing thing and if you don’t have any company values written down, just set up a meeting, sit down with the team, do a version one. If you can’t write it or say it as perfectly … If some things don’t feel like perfect, that’s fine. Just say, “Hey, this is going to be version one.” We still have a few values that we have written down and for years we’re looking at it and we know this is close to capturing what we really mean but we still don’t feel it’s set in the perfect way and we’re still tinkering around the wording around some of these things. Then, some values we realized … Because we do a value meeting, session with the entire company, every six months at every team retreat and sometimes we realize we’ve outgrown this value, this needs to die, or we need to completely change how we think about this. Don’t try to be perfect, don’t try to spend a week or a month on something like this. Have one meeting, have a version one and then maybe frequently, once a month, once a quarter, once a year, whatever it is, sit down and just look at it again, talk about it and reword, change, adopt and create new versions of this. But if you try for perfection, it’s going to be way too hard, and it’s impossible to do anyway. So just start small.   [0:13:39] Hiten Shah: Start small, just like everything else.   [0:13:42] Steli Efti: All right, that’s it from us for this episode.   [0:13:46] Hiten Shah: Bye. [0:13:46] The post 336: How to Define Your Company Values appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what Steli calls a beta program and Hiten calls an early access program. Before you launch a product or a new feature, it is important to test things out to catch bugs and product issues prior to launch. But how do you go about doing this in a way that provides value to you and the user who test it out for you? Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on what an early access program is, why it’s so important, how to do it properly and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:46 Why Hiten calls it an early access program. 01:53 Steli’s point of view on what to call it. 02:40 Hiten gives an inside look at how his company handles their early access program. 03:53 How an early access program can be beneficial to your startup. 04:22 The 3 kinds of releases you can aspire for. 06:53 The right time to go from internal release to early access. 07:56 How to ramp up an early access program. 09:10 Why it’s important to give your customers something worth their while. 09:52 How to do an early access program properly. 3 Key Points: You don’t wanna call it a beta, because that implies it’s buggy. Never call your customer an early adopter. The early access program is designed for you to learn so that you can figure out what that full release looks like. [0:00:00] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah, and today on the Startup Chat, we’re gonna talk about what Steli calls a beta program and what I call a early access-   [0:00:11] Steli Efti: Access program.   [0:00:13] Hiten Shah: … Program. And that’s okay. This is one of my pet peeves. I don’t like calling it beta, so I’m gonna jump right in and talk about how to do this correctly.   [0:00:21] Steli Efti: Boom.   [0:00:22] Hiten Shah: I like talking about and framing it as an early access program because we have to grown to think of beta as buggy. So when you want to bring people into your product early, or a new feature, it doesn’t matter, you don’t wanna call it a beta ’cause that implies it’s buggy. Also, I don’t think the general population out there knows that a beta really is. It is a very techy type term.   [0:00:49] Steli Efti: Fair.   [0:00:49] Hiten Shah: So for me, I like calling it an early access program. I like framing it like that because that feels more exclusive. It really pulls in people that we would consider early adopters. Also, by the way, never call your customer an early adapter to their faces. That doesn’t help you. They are just a human being, they’re a person, and they’re eager to use your product early because they really want this problem solved, or they’re really just excited. So that’s what I’m gonna start with, Steli. It’s called early access and it’s meant to make people feel special, not make people feel like robots.   [0:01:23] Steli Efti: Boom. All right, Hiten’s on fire. I can already attest. You’re right. You’re very right. You know, when I talk about it in a sales context, whenever I talk to start ups about how to get the first few customers, I learned this phrasing from you a long time ago and I always talk about early access. But when I talk about, when we talk about it internally about giving a certain subset of our customers access to a new feature, we still call it beta. So I’m gonna work on changing that because I really like your reasoning and we both deeply care about words and communication, the impact it can have on things.   [0:02:09] Hiten Shah: I’m gonna go a little deeper. So what we’re doing and my company is basically aspiring towards, and I say it’s aspiring because it’s just something that I think takes time and process to get right, but we actually have a three phase release now. We do a internal release. I saw someone on Twitter talk about how drift.com does this and they call it a tracer bullet. I don’t know what that it is.   [0:02:35] Steli Efti: I have no idea either.   [0:02:36] Hiten Shah: And I know that, but they have all kinds of cool stuff going on internally with crazy names, so that’s cool. But basically, I think what they’re implying is that this is an internal release, this is what I like to call it, an internal release that is for the team internally. It could be what we call feature flag, which just means turned on for the internal team or put on some URL that no one can else see, whatever. And your playing with it really fast internally. It’s not full-featured, it might be really janky, but you can start seeing it. Whatever the user experience in, whatever the engineering problems are, you start seeing them to the surface and you design your product development like that. Then, after you’re relatively happy with an internal release, at the first time when you’re like, “Oh, this is good enough for a customer”, you call it early access release. This is what we’re really talking about on this podcast, we’re talking about the early access release. But what I think is important is what comes before and what comes after because that can help people understand why an early access program is so important. Well, the internal release makes you ship really fast and not feel so critical of what you’re shipping ’cause a customer might not see it, or probably won’t see it until later. So that’s really important ’cause that gets the rubber to meet the road on the product, or the feature, or whatever it may be. Then you have an early access program, which you know we’ve talked about a little bit, we’ll talk about it a little bit more. And then you have what I call basically the full release. Full release is a marketable release. Drift calls these marketable moment, I just call it a full release, Product Hunt launch if you use Product Hunt a lot for your product, or a PR release where it’s a full release and it goes in market. Anyone can sign up for it and use it, that’s what that is. Early access, not anyone can use. You are bringing in people in order to get feedback on the product. The whole idea is to get to that full release, that’s awesome. One that has maximum impact. That’s the key. So the early access programs are designed for you to learn so that you can figure out what that full release looks like. If your product is new and you’re still working on it, that early access release, you might release it, 50 people use it, 10 people, 20 people, and you might throw it all away and start over with another internal release ’cause you learned a bunch of stuff, and then early access release, and then you keep going between the internal and early access release, even throwing away all the code, whatever, until you get to a point where you’re like, “This will work.” Whether it’s you’re looking for high retention or you’re looking for high growth or you’re looking for high MPS, whatever you’re metric is in the early access program that you’re trying to get past, then would go forward and have the full release. So that’s what you would do for a new product. If we need to talk about new features, we can talk about that too but early access programs for new features is super important. That’s why I was saying, at my companies, we aspire for three releases for any feature, any new product, anything. That way we can really sequence what we’re looking for in each release and exactly get to that full release, that “Dang it, great. Polished and ready to ship.”   [0:05:39] Steli Efti: I love it. It’s funny enough, the sooner we release, we don’t really release new products, but we do release new features.   [0:05:47] Hiten Shah: You’re about to though. You’re about to.   [0:05:49] Steli Efti: Yes.   [0:05:50] Hiten Shah: Fess up. There’s a new feature, but it feels like a product.   [0:05:52] Steli Efti: Yes.   [0:05:53] Hiten Shah: Just saying.   [0:05:53] Steli Efti: It’s a big one. It’s a big one. But it’s always like, internal first, then we do early access,-   [0:05:59] Hiten Shah: Yep.   [0:05:59] Steli Efti: … And then you do a full release. Let’s talk a little bit about two things. One, when is the right time to go from internal to early access? When do you know when you’ve accomplished whatever the internal release is trying to accomplish and you’re ready to invite some early access customers or users to test, to play around, to give feedback? And then how do you run that early access program, from inviting people, to using it, to eliciting feedback, to acting on the feedback, to then deciding whether you’re ready to rock and roll? Let’s talk about those two things.   [0:06:37] Hiten Shah: I think internal releases are designed so that that internal team can play with it and see it for real and get real, tangible feedback so you can write tickets or whatever you do, and product manage properly. What I mean by that is, you get an internal release so that you can figure out what’s wrong with it. You get an internal release, you can figure out what’s wrong with it before you’re willing to let customers see it. So for me, internal releases are quick, they’re dirty, and they might require a lot of work to get to an early access release, or they might require a little bit. But, I feel like if you don’t have an internal release and you just aim for early access release, there’s gonna be some process that’s still an internal release, which is like the equivalent of internal release helps you do QA. It helps you really understand whether it’s gonna hit the mark or not, or whether it’s polished or not. Another reason for internal release is ’cause you just wanna build it fast, ’cause the estimates you’re getting back from engineers and product people and the whole team are pretty high. So then you’re like, “Okay, what can we quickly build?” And I think it’s really about quickly building and not thinking too much about the customer or anything like that. You’re obviously thinking about a customer ’cause you’re gonna build a feature and they’re gonna see it, but you’re really thinking about, “How can I get this right? How do I make sure it’s polished? How do I find all the things I need to fix versus find them during the early access program?” ‘Cause early access program is about your customers and learning what they think. The internal release is learning what you internally think and what you still need to do, which is a lot different than the early access feedback, which is really about customer sentiment, right? Internal release is about basically, is it good enough? Is it good enough for a customer to see it and what’s it gonna take to make it good enough?   [0:08:11] Steli Efti: I love that. Yeah, and the other thing is there’s always one thing, conceptualizing something, or planning it is a very different thing when you actually see it live. Even if it’s a janky, buggy version of something, there’s a magic to a functional feature. If it’s poorly functional, to give you a real sense of experience and to give the team a sense of what’s lacking or what’s already good or what needs to be done. The other thing is, you get to figure out a bunch of really obvious problems with the new product or new feature by just having a few team members play around with it. So it’s kind of a waste of your customer’s time. It’s a way to be respectful of your customer’s or your user’s time. Do not give them something that seems that you have been completely thoughtless and you don’t value their time. It’s like somebody sending an email asking me for feedback and I can tell they never spent 10 minutes really thinking about this careful. They’re just shoveling shit my way, right, mindlessly. So there’s a bunch of obvious mistakes or bugs that I think a modern customer would expect you have figured that out before you send it over to them. You can figure these things out pretty easily when you an internal release. Now, when it comes to rolling out the early access and running it, real quick, let’s run through two or three tips in terms of how to do this well. How many people or companies or customers should get invited typically, how do you invite them, how do elicit and ask for their feedback, how do you make sure that you get the most of out it?   [0:09:53] Hiten Shah: I like opting people into that. And I like doing it in batches usually. It also depends on how much feedback you need or how polished that early access release is. If there’s still a lot of questions you have about what people are gonna think at that early access release, whether because there’s more research you wanna do or it’s a bigger feature or it might have some bugs ’cause there’s things like people on Windows, people on Mac, people on different browsers might have issue with it for whatever reason, then I like to do it in batches so that I can fix in batches. I also like to get people to actually tell us, “Hey, I want this and I’m gonna give you feedback.” So it’s a request for feedback. Really, an early access release is a request for feedback on something early. You want to find those people that want that feature so badly that they will deal with giving you feedback. They want to give you the feedback. So you’re really committing people to it. You’re not just saying, “Hey, here’s a new tab or a new part of the product”, people can randomly click it and all of a sudden they have it. That’s not the purpose of this. The purpose of this is to be very deliberate and tell people, “Hey, we’re gonna ask you for feedback. We’re gonna ask you for feedback at least once a week. Is that cool?” Or at most once a week, whatever it is you want to do. And then you encourage it and you actually email them and tell them, “Hey, you’ve been using the product”, or “You haven’t been using this feature”, or whatever. “Tell us why. Hey, this is that feedback opportunity I told you I wanted, right?” So to me, it’s all about feedback and people opting in to the early access with the idea that they’re gonna need to give you feedback. Then feedback becomes easy.   [0:11:24] Steli Efti: I love it. I think the way that you then communicate with those customers during the early access, the way that you respond to their feedback, the way you follow up with them, it really can either strengthen the relationship or not. In our case, we’ve seen a lot of times that the customers that we invite to early access, they are so pumped and psyched to have access, they are so pumped and psyched to be able to give feedback and have influence. A big reason for that is that they feel heard and they feel that we care and they feel like their time is valued. So when they send feedback, it’s not like quiet for four days and they don’t get a response from us or when something doesn’t work and they ask for us to fix it, it’s not quiet time. A lot of times companies get all excited about inviting people to their early access, but they don’t have somebody manage that process or the founders realizing that they’re gonna have to manage and share in that process and really dedicate time and energy to these customers that they’re inviting to use the product or try the product and get feedback. In our case, a lot of times we also will tell people, “Hey, we’re gonna want a lot of feedback. We’re gonna work really closely with you and if this is truly creating the value for you that we both think it is, you’re really happy with it, we’d love to take all those conversations and all that feedback and potentially publish it and use that in our marketing in the future, obviously with your permission.” So we typically turn those early access times also to create content and material and testimonials and case studies so we’re ready for the big launch, or the public launch. We have a ton of firepower to go behind it. All right, I think that that’s everything that people need to know to get started with it, and running it. It’s really not that complicated, but doing it well, I think, has all to do with the intention and the energy that you give it. Instead of just sending an email to a few hundred people and saying, “Now you have access to this”, you need to think about that time of running the early access program as something where you’re gonna have to follow up, and send emails, and have screen shares, and really be high responsive, and really prioritize these people, and make them the most important users or customers that you have to make this really worthwhile.   [0:13:51] Hiten Shah: Yep. You’re making champions.   [0:13:54] Steli Efti: There you go. All right, I think that’s it for us for this episode. We’ll hear you very soon.   [0:13:58] Hiten Shah: See yeah. [0:13:58] The post 335: How to Run an Early Access Program appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what founders should do when they are just starting out on their journey. Choosing an idea for a business is one of the most exciting and fundamental parts of starting a business. However, it can be one of the most difficult things to do as most founders have many ideas and struggle to choose the best one to go with. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on how founders can choose an idea for a business when they are just starting out, why having many ideas is a blessing, and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:43 Why this topic was chosen. 01:19 How choosing what to do can be a challenge sometimes. 01:47 How to choose an idea for your business. 02:40 The first thing to do when you’re trying to decide on an idea for a business. 02:47 Why it’s important to figure out the next action you’re going to take. 04:11 What you should do after figuring out what your next action is. 05:39 Why it’s important to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish. 06:15 How your motivation and circumstances can inform what you do next. 06:45 Why this isn’t a problem. 08:14 Why you need to cultivate the skills to turn your ideas into a business. 3 Key Points: Everyone has lots of ideas. Everyone! Your motivation and circumstances matter because they inform what you do next. Figure out which idea is most likely to succeed when you take that action. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: All right, everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah, and today, on the Start Up Chat, we’re gonna talk about something that you’re gonna think only applies to you, if you’re just starting out. It’s just not true, but the topic is, I’m Just Starting Out, I Have So Many Ideas of What To Do, What Should I Do?   [0:00:22] Steli Efti: Yeah, too many ideas, right?   [0:00:24] Hiten Shah: Too many ideas.   [0:00:26] Steli Efti: Too many ideas, and the reason I wanted to talk to you, one, I mean there’s many reasons. I know that you’re brilliant, you’re gonna have a lot of experience with this, but also, you’re the master of too many ideas. You have a shit ton of ideas all the time. And has helped so many early founders, kind of picked one and get the ground running, hit the ground running. But, the reason why this came up just recently and I wanted to talk today about it is, that somebody that I just became really good friends with a few weeks ago, who’s working in a really, really kind of high level executive position, a billion dollar business, has had a tremendous career, has told me just recently he’s thinking about leaving. He wants to become an entrepreneur and his biggest challenge, the thing that’s stopping him from starting a company right away is, he has just too many ideas and he doesn’t know how to pick one. So I thought, well let’s break this down for people who have this problem, and give them some solutions.   [0:01:24] Hiten Shah: Awesome, I love it.   [0:01:26] Steli Efti: So what do you say to somebody that comes to you, Hiten, and says, “I have just too many ideas, I don’t know which one to work on.”   [0:01:37] Hiten Shah: This happens a lot, especially people who are really early staged, and this is what I meant, about to say what I meant, by like, it’s not just early stage. Everyone has lots of ideas. Everyone. I could ask you right now, “Hey Steli, for your business, what are your ideas of what you do next?” And you’d give me a lot of them. You just would. It’s on your mind all the time, you’re thinking about this stuff all the time, right? So I think the first step is to really think through, like, “I have a lot of ideas, but what is the next step I’m looking to do?” So I’m starting backwards with like, “Oh, you already have a business, you have a lot of …” just on purpose, because it’s the same thing to me. In your business, you have a lot of ideas. You have a lot of influence to change the direction of your company, and what features you’re gonna build, or what products you might launch, or what marketing you’re gonna do. I really start with, “Well, what’s the next thing you’re looking to do, Steli?” What’s the next action, not the next thing, the item, but the next action. So there’s a difference between items and action, I think we confuse the two. So items are ideas. Actions are like, “I want to build something people will pay for.” That’s an action. So I wanna know what’s the next action. So in your case it might be like, “Hey Hiten,” and I don’t know if this is true or not, it doesn’t matter but, “There is a bunch of people who have come into our market and they have a lot of, you know, they’ve copied our features, right? And I wanna make sure that we keep our core what it is and always get better at it. And I have these five ideas on how to do that.” And I’m like, “Okay, great.” Now you have an action. Your action is, keep up with the market. Actually, lead the market. And so, if you’re gonna lead the market, then those five ideas, you just bet way on which ones are most likely to help you lead the market. And then you get into all these cool things like, well how do we know that? How can I go find out? Blah, blah, blah, right? So when someone comes to me with a new idea, I’m like, “What’s your goal? Are you looking to make money? Are you just looking to not be bored?” Because there’s some people with ideas who have money, and they can sit on their couch all day, you know, it’s not rare actually these days. It’s possible, because they have some other income stream, or somebody else works in their family, or whatever, right? And it’s like, “Well, what’s your goal?” And the best goal when you have ideas is, “I want to see my ideas come to reality, and see other people sort of benefit from those ideas.” Okay, so you have all these ideas. You have some kind of heuristic or action that you wanna take. So now you can weigh, well which one is more likely to succeed when you take that action. That’s it. And I think people don’t think about it like that. They just think about, “I have an idea. I wanna work on something.” Well, why do you wanna work on something? What is that next action? What is that thing that you’re aiming for? What’s your goal? You could consider that a goal if you want. I like action, just because early on, people don’t like having goals. So what’s that next action? Launch something, get some customers, something like that. So then you can just think through the steps. And really, what you’re trying to do is, out of those ideas, where are the ones that are most likely to help me succeed? And all kinds of things come out of that. Some people, they just really wanna work on something they’re really passionate about, or they have like, it’s a hobby for them or something like that, because they feel like if they work on something like that, they’re more likely to see it through and it to succeed. And I respect that, and that’s great, so then you would narrow down your ideas to which ones are you most passionate about? Which ones do you have the most draw towards. Which ones could you, you know I love this answer, or this cool, this way to think about it. Which one would you work on if you weren’t getting paid to work on it?   [0:05:11] Steli Efti: I love that. So, to recap, one of the things I really love about the answer here is, A, it’s the attitude that you have, which is like, this isn’t a problem, right? Just relax. Let’s just ask ourselves some simple questions. What are you trying to accomplish? What are the actions and the goals that you have? And do you think that, in this particular case with someone who hasn’t started the company yet, you know they might say, “Well, I wanna start a business.” Cool, but what kind of a business? Do you wanna make a ton of money really quickly? Do you just wanna have the freedom to leave your corporate job, and you don’t care about becoming wealthy necessarily. You just wanna maintain your lifestyle within a given timeframe that you have? Is it that you wanna build something that will have a tremendous impact, independently of how that enriches you? You’re like, what are your financial restrictions or not, what are the drivers? What other experiences do you wanna have, what are the things you wanna learn? Is it about learning and growing, more than it is about making a ton of money, or is it all about making a lot more money than you make right now, and you don’t really care about what it is or how much you learn. Motivations and your circumstances matter, because they inform what to do first and what to do next, but the other thing that I really wanna highlight is that, this isn’t a problem. Because my friend that brought this to me, and I’ve heard this many times before from other people as well, the mind frame to have, the frame work to have is, “I have too many ideas and that’s a huge burden, that’s a problem that stops me from getting what I want, is all these ideas in front of me are making my life harder.” And it’s like, if you step away from your own little bubble far enough, you realize that it’s a ridiculous thing to say. That basically you’re saying, “I’m too creative, I’ve too many amazing things that I could work on or that I’ve thought of.” That’s not a problem, that’s a beautiful thing. And more likely or not, if you stay and cultivate that creativity as you go along and start a business or multiple businesses, that will never stop. You will always have more, and more, and more ideas. It’s not a problem, it’s not a burden. It’s a blessing. And now, what you have to do is build the skills, the entrepreneurial skills, the thinking skills, to organize all these ideas and to attack them. And some of them you’re gonna work on, some of them you might pass on to other people, and many of them you’ll discover, are not as brilliant as you thought. Or, you’re not as excited about them as you thought, once you started digging a little deeper, doing a bit of research, or working on it a little bit, and that’s totally fine as well. Not all ideas that feel brilliant end up being brilliant, or the right ideas for you. But learning, cultivating that skill of, “What do I do with all these ideas that I have?” That’s an incredibly useful skill and one you’re gonna need your entire life. And if you’re not at a point where you’re ready to leave your corporate job in this instance, and start tackling some of these many ideas you have, awesome. The first skill that you’re gonna have to cultivate, is gonna be the skill to pick and choose, organize, prioritize, and attack. And attack means, you’re gonna have to stop being in your head, thinking of more and more ideas, or thinking about all these ideas and how brilliant they are, and you’re gonna have to step into action, which is why I love that you were like, “What are the actions we need to take?” Because the moment that you step into the real world, and you take action, you try things, and you research, and you do things, prioritization takes care of itself. Things that seem mystical or hard to decide on, will become very easy and obvious to decide on. If you take action of some of these ideas, things will happen. Some of them will gain natural momentum, and some of them won’t, and then it’s gonna become easy in a few months. It’s gonna crystallize very easily what you’re gonna work on and why, versus now where everything that’s happening up in your head, and it’s just mental and visualizing and thinking things through on your own, it becomes overwhelming or it can feel crowded or hard to choose from. You just have to step into action, and then things will clarify very, very quickly, usually.   [0:09:29] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I love that. I think it’s a skill. That’s why I don’t want people to think this is something you’re burdened with early on. This is something you have to deal with all the time. It’s a matter of figuring out, what you should be doing, when you should be doing it, and it’s not just about lots of ideas. You’re always gonna have lots of ideas. If you’re any good at running a business, any good at starting, or any good at even working, you’re gonna have lots of ideas. It’s just the way it works. If you’re out of ideas, it’s usually because you’re burnt out and tired. Otherwise, as humans, we have lots of ideas. I can sit here and be like, “Oh,” and I know you said this about me. “Oh, can I think of ideas? Yeah, that’s easy. Are these ideas important right now? Well, that’s a different story. How do I figure out which idea to pursue? Well, that’s also a different story.” But if you don’t know where you’re trying to get to as a next step, you’re not gonna be able to do anything.   [0:10:21] Steli Efti: I love it. All right, I think that’s really everything we need to share, to get somebody from a place of, “I’m overwhelmed with ideas,” to what needs to happen next. I’m sure that some of you that listened to this will have some objections in your mind. “Well, but you didn’t cover this problem.” Well, it doesn’t fucking matter. No matter what you would say at this point, typically in the discussion, Hiten and I would probably go back to what we said earlier. We’d just ask you again about, what are your goals, what are we trying to accomplish, how can we take some actions right now. Today, tomorrow, get going. Create some results, create some insights, and then everything else will clarify itself over time. So, go at it and do that, and then come back and let us know how it goes. Steli@close.io, hni@gmail.com. We always love, love, love hearing from you. Just had an email an hour ago, of one of you listeners sending some praise our way, and telling us how much he learned from listening. We love to hear from you guys, so if you take some action and you attack some of those many ideas in your head, please let us know. We always love to hear from you. Until next time, we’ll hear you soon.   [0:11:28] Hiten Shah: See ya. [0:11:28] The post 334: Too Many Ideas – How to Chose What to Work On appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how founders can deal with fraud in their startups. Running a  startup difficult enough when everything is going smoothly. But when you’re a founder, sometimes things happen that if not managed properly can disrupt the flow of your business or worse. One of these situations is fraud. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on what fraud is, things that every founder should know about it, preventative measures you can take, what to do when fraud happens and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:45 Why this topic was chosen. 01:01 How Close dealt with fraud at the early stages of the business. 02:20 Why taking preventative measures are important. 03:45 How to identify potential problems that you could run into with your product. 04:00 An example of a fraudulent situation at Close. 05:27 Measures and tools you could use to prevent fraud. 06:46 Why fraud is not exclusive to big companies. 07:43 Why you should always take an alert seriously. 08:13 Why you should invest continuously in fraud prevention. 08:19 Why you shouldn’t stop when you detect one fraudulent user. 3 Key Points: Know where your risk is in your business. When an alert comes up, take it seriously. If there’s one fraudulent user, there are going to be more. [0:00:02] Steli Efti: Hey everybody this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:04] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:07] Steli Efti: And in today’s episode of the Startup Chat we wanna tackle a little challenging topic and that is the topic of how do you deal with fraud, how do you handle fraud in your startup, right, and this is you know obviously a tough subject and it depends on what the situation is but the reason I wanted to talk to you about this Hiten is that you know the history of course we’ve always had to deal with some level of fraud, people trying now using some credit cards to sign up propriate accounts or even worse people doing some really with our software and so from a very early time we always had to like invest in fraud prevention and protection and had to like deal with this and just recently last few weeks we had some really big attacks going on, some really crazy shit and thankfully we have an amazing team and we are like tackling these things and stopping them further on, you know but it’s a huge pain in the ass and it has caused us probably over the years a lot of money to deal with this. So I thought because it’s a top of mind for me, I thought it might make sense for the two of us to talk about this from a very fundamental point of view because I think most Startup founders they don’t think about fraud, what could be done with their app, how somebody could take advantage of their app to cost them money, to make money to do some suspicious or just illegal stuff with it and so they might catch this when it’s way too late and it might cause some real trouble down the line so I thought we just cover some like basics, things that every founder should know, think through, how to deal with it preventitively in the beginning but also what do you do once shit happens, you get a DDoS attack or some other crazy shit is happening to your app, you are totally surprised, how do you deal with this, maybe cover some of the basics and hopefully help some founders prevent getting into trouble at some point.   [0:02:02] Hiten Shah: Yeah I think the first step preventitively real quick is like, know where your risk is in your business, so if you are collecting credit cards, one risk is that people will try to run fake credit cards through your system. If you are using a service like Stride, there are a lot of protection built in, right, but it’s very similar to like, well you better make sure you have SSL certificate on your site, on those pages inside, you need that now for every site as per what Grooval says. So you know back then it’s like, you wouldn’t have, not every site would have a secure certificate back then means back in the day and they collect credit cards and no users would really trust it or they would be like insecurity there, right, so to me a lot of this has to do with knowing what business you are in and where the risk actually is, of fraud. A lot of people don’t think about that early, like in your case, like you guys are powering a whole bunch of stuff for your customers and if a customer is malicious they could use that and spam people, simple put right?   [0:03:06] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:03:08] Hiten Shah: Well, that’s a risk, you should know of that risk and you should be able to monitor it and understand whether that’s gonna happen at least to some basic level in the beginning.   [0:03:18] Steli Efti: Yeah I think that this is really key is like just sitting down and just making a list and thinking through, what are potential problems that we could run into or what are ways that somebody creative could use the app or the product we built to cause harm or issues right so in our case the people using fake credit cards and use the service, that was something we thought about was not a massive concern. One thing that we didn’t think of although it seems so obvious in hindsight, right, today I would think about this stuff but back then we were so inexperienced that we didn’t think about this was that our app offered you telephony so you could make calls and receive calls in the app and for trial users we offered free telephony. Some hackers found our app and they would use the app to call pay lines that they owned to incur costs on our end, it’s crazy so and the first time that we picked up on that was very lucky because we didn’t have an alert system in place to prevent this from happening, we just had one human being which is one of my co-founders being especially paranoid at all times which is something you could share with him, but he is especially paranoid to always checking you know the IP’s of people that would sign up and always checking kind of the telephony stuff people were doing with the App and he just picked or found this. I think at that point they had created like an insane amount of cost I don’t even wanna say within like 24 hours and then we kicked them off the platform but then we started really. That was the real kick off for us that was going Holy Shit! We offered telephony, people could do all kinds of shenanigans with that to create a lot of costs on our end and for others. We need to really invest in this and there is obviously internal tools that you can build, alert systems, things that you can do to prevent people from using your software in some way that causes problems for you and others, but there is also tools you can use, right, there’s applications and software out there that is really good at you know having a massive database and having a lot of data to flag the likelihood of a new sign up or account being fraudulent or being an account that could get you in trouble. So there is software that you can use to help you identify a potential fraudulent accounts, but there’s also just internal tools that you can build. But I think the most important exercise is just the basic exercise of sitting down and thinking through creatively. A bunch of hackers saw our product and they wanted to do each evil things with this or make money with this, what could they do, what could they possibly come up with, right and then just thinking through some ways to prevent these from happening. It’s so surprising and I remember when it happened I thought we’re such a tiny … And this was like four, five months into launching the product, I’m like, how do people even know we exist, we are such a tiny, tiny little startup somewhere and all of a sudden there is these hacker attacks and all these fraudulent accounts being created and all these telephony shenanigans, like how the fuck does everybody even know we exist? I thought that these problems would only happen to really massive companies like the Facebooks, the Twitters, the Googles, would have to deal with hackers and fraudulent accounts. But in today’s world, even if you are small you could run into that trouble so it’s really good to just before you launch think through some of the basic things you need to keep in mind and in the beginning obviously you could … Security itself is such a massive topic, you could have a massive team work on it every day for years and never be done with it but its important to just keep your eye on obvious things or at least put in some signaling things so you get alerted when weird behavior is happening on your app because if you found out too late it could be really a problem. We were lucky if my co-founder didn’t randomly look into an account and see this, and if it had gone on for like a week versus just 24 hours, it could have bankrupted us easily, right, so this shit is … We have to take this serious and come up with a list and put some things in place to make sure that you are on top of stuff, that you don’t get into real, real trouble.   [0:07:41] Hiten Shah: That’s really where it’s at and I think another thing is just when it comes up take it seriously which is what you guys basically did. I see a lot of people just assuming, it’s fine like you know it will go away. Fraud doesn’t go away unless you do something about it, stop it, have preventive measures, it just never goes away.   [0:08:02] Steli Efti: Yeah, it’s one of those things that in the beginning you gonna probably spend little time, little effort, little money on. As your business grows you gonna have to continue investing in it and once that one fraudulent, weird user… If there is one fraudulent user, they are going to be more so just by kicking off that one fraudulent user, your work is not done, you are not like we got rid of this weird entity of person, now we can go back to doing growth and PR like do the cool shit that’s fun and not worry about this. The moment that one person has found a loophole in your system or has found a way to abuse your system in some malicious way, there’s gonna be another person, there’s gonna be many more, it’s not gonna stop. So once it’s happening you have to take it really seriously, you have to address it appropriately. Don’t overreact in a way that, now we are not gonna let any user sign up for app unless they call us in a video call with their passport next to their face, right, ‘coz sending us their home address, like you can go crazy over board obviously, that’s probably not a good idea but you have to take appropriate measures and the worst thing that you can do is to ignore it or take it lightly and think it was just an outlier, it was just one weird user, we fixed it, we kicked this person off, we don’t have to think or worry at all about this. This is not the fancy, shiny cool stuff about running a business or growing a tech company, but it’s the stuff that really matters as you grow, as you succeed so you gonna have to start small but probably continuously invest in the security of your platform and in preventing fraud from happening on your system.   [0:09:48] Hiten Shah: Yap, I can’t agree more.   [0:09:50] Steli Efti: All right, that’s it. It’s very basic stuff but even like I don’t remember ever reading any blog posts, any piece of or listening to any podcast episode that I was consuming. It’s insane amount of this stuff but like what it takes to run a SaaS business, how to start and all that and never heard any word, anything about fraud so I thought-   [0:10:09] Hiten Shah: It’s all right.   [0:10:10] Steli Efti: … Will be the change we wanna see in the world and I just wanna bring this up not to scare people but just to put it in their minds so people are more consciously aware of it, more cautious and do the few little things that can really put them in a strong and safe position with their business instead of just you know being too thoughtless when it comes to security and safety and all that and then running into massive problems down the line.   [0:10:38] Hiten Shah: Yap quick note we had people checking credit cards using our system, so they get through and basically putting credit card numbers to see if they were real or not, because we are one of the few SaaS products that has a credit card upfront.   [0:10:55] Steli Efti: I mean, it’s insane people will find all kinds if ways to abuse your system.   [0:11:01] Hiten Shah: Yeah so all of a sudden we were getting like hundreds of more sign ups unusual everyday, sometimes thousands and we’re like what the heck is going on, so we had to deal with that. So anyways we dealt with the similar kind of issue, like just similar in the sense of fraud, that we just didn’t see coming so basically if you are watching your metrics and something is just wild, go look into that because usually that’s a key indicator so I wanted to add that last tip there.   [0:11:26] Steli Efti: I love it, now that’s it from us, if you have any questions, if you ever run into any problems we are not like the world’s experts when it comes to fraud and security but we experience founders and we’d like to be able to point you to some other people that are smarter. If there is anything we could ever do to help practically just let us know, hopefully you will never need us or anybody else on this but just be careful, mindful and thoughtful when it comes to fraud and security on your platform, that’s it from us for this episode until next time   [0:11:52] Hiten Shah: See yah. [0:11:52] The post 333: How to Deal with Fraud in Your Startup appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about their reading habits and they read books. Reading is one of the most fundamental skills an entrepreneur needs to succeed in the startup world. It’s common for a lot of successful people to credit reading in some way as a factor to their success. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten talk about their own reading habits, what kind of books they read and they share tips that can help you develop a healthy reading habit. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:22 Why this topic was chosen. 01:19 A look at Steli’s reading habit. 02:20 How a book is not really a constant experience. 02:31 One thing Steli does when he reads. 02:42 Why you should give a book a second try. 05:06 Hiten’s thoughts on how the book doesn’t change but you do. 05:40 The importance of reading books purposefully. 06:23 The different types of books that Hiten reads. 07:28 A really good book on culture. 07:49 How reading purposefully makes your reading experience enjoyable. 3 Key Points: A book is not really a constant experience in most cases. Go back and re-read a book that you read a long time ago, that you really didn’t like. Reading a book is an experience in time that can’t be replicated. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody. This is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: This is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:05] Steli Efti: In today’s episode of The Startup Chat I want to talk … This is going to be a mini episode about our reading habits. How we read and how especially we read books. People ask us this all the time. I know you are a massive lover of content and reading is a real main skill that you are honing a bit, that is adding quality to your life, everything else you do, same thing for me. So I thought, let’s attack this from a little bit of a different angle of just sharing, maybe some hacks, maybe some unique learnings, or habits, or ways that we attack like reading a lot of stuff. Maybe that’s going to give one or the other person out there an idea, an insider spark of their love for reading again. Given that we both absolutely love books and absolutely love reading, I’m just going to throw out some things that I do when it comes to my reading habits that I found to be unusual, at least when I share these things with people, they always seem to be surprised and then it seems to be valuable. I’ll throw out one weird thing I do about reading books and then we can ping pong back and forth and see if we can people some really cool new ideas on how to attack the topic of reading.   [0:01:24] Hiten Shah: Rock and roll.   [0:01:26] Steli Efti: One thing that I do, that I find incredibly valuable when it comes to reading books is … There is one thing that I get all the time which is, people as you for reading recommendations. It’s like, what’s your favorite book on sales, what’s your favorite books on business, what’s your favorite book of all types, what’s the book that’s changed your life most. I really hate that question to a certain degree because I always feel like what’s been impactful for me is constantly changing and the book that changed my life most is a book that’s totally useless to most people today, right? And would be a useless book to me today, but when I was 14 or 16, it was an incredible book to read, right? With my mindset and my knowledge back then. One thing that I found is that a book is not really a constant experience. It’s not a common experience in most cases. One thing I really love to do is … And the book recommendation I give most often is telling people, go back and read a book … Try to reread a book that you tried reading a long time ago and you really didn’t like. Just give a book a second try basically. Additionally, go back to a book you’ve read a long time ago that you really fucking loved and give that book a try again. My experience has been that reading a book is an experience in time that can’t be replicated because the book might be constant, but I am changing and I am a big part of the reading experience. The way I consume the book, the way I read the book, the way I understand, the book will change as I am changing and as my environment is changing. When reading a book somewhere on vacation it’s going to be a different experience than reading the same at the office or reading in the morning can be a very different experience from reading the same book at night, right? I pick up on totally different things … I might feel totally different reading through the book and so I love going back and rereading certain books and I found that I’m amazed … There’s books that I’ve read 3 or 4 times and every time I’m like, there’s no fucking way this was in the book the last time I read it. As I read it, a few pages and I’ll be, I could swear these pages didn’t exist before because I can’t believe that I’ve never picked up on this, right? That these pages, this strategy, this story, I can’t remember at all, right? That they didn’t stand out to me at all. What happened between the last time reading it and this time reading is I changed so much so now reading the book, something else stands out to me. Something else impacts me, something else is relevant to me right now. The biggest tip that I have to give … One of the weird things that I do is reading books again, books I love and books I could not read. Sometimes I’ll start a book and I’m like I just can’t do this right now. This is too hard, I’m not inspired, this is not fun, fuck this. Then, if it’s a book that a lot of people really love, maybe a year, maybe 2 years later, I’ll give it another try. Again, sometimes I’ve had the same experience but many times I’m like, holy shit this is an incredible book, I’m having so much fun. I can’t even relate to the person that was struggling reading this. A book is not an experience you can only have once, it’s not a constant experience, you can go back and read books again and again and again. Read them differently in different contexts in your life and they are going to give you different insights and a very different experience.   [0:04:42] Hiten Shah: Wow. I didn’t get a statement in there, something like the book doesn’t change but you do?   [0:04:49] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:04:51] Hiten Shah: That is so powerful. I have never had anyone say it that crisply or say it at all really about reading books. That really made me think of something really powerful that I have gotten much better at which is picking the right book at the right time. To me I went from reading just books, whatever someone recommended or just whatever I fancy just based on a recommendation or something I have on my shelf or something like that to reading books really purposefully. Purposefully meaning, it could be as simple as I need some entertainment. I’m going to read a fiction book, right? I just need something entertaining, I don’t want to watch TV or a movie. I actually don’t do that very often anymore, I really don’t at all. I want to be entertained, so I’m going to read a story and go read the story. It’s mainly because it’s purposeful, I need to get out of my head or I don’t want to read yet another business book, I’ll do that. That’s very purposeful. When it comes to business books these days, for me it’s really, really purposeful. It could be reading an old book that I hadn’t before … Then there’s different types of books too. There’s books like many of the Eric Reese books a new one, The High growth Handbook, I believe it’s what it’s called, by Elad Gil, that you’ll pick up and find a chapter and section and be like, “Oh yeah, I need that right now.” You’ll read it and you are like, “Cool, I got it.” Moving on. Then you’ll pick it up again so it’s more of a referenceable book, a book you can keep referencing over and over again, you don’t read it cover to cover, that’s not the purpose of it. Many of these books are like that. I actually think Eric Reese’s books are more like that than less like that. I think there is a book by Steve Plank and I’m talking about very startupy books specifically on customer development, Four Steps To The Epiphany and then he had another one on customer development. Those are great books but those are books where I don’t read it cover to cover, I don’t want to. I want to read it when I have a purposeful thing, something that I’m going through in my business, something I’m going through in my mind and I read the book. The best book on the topic of hiring, right? If I were hiring a lot and wanted to level up on it and wanted to have a book help me, give me a different perspective, I’d go find one. Or the best book on culture. Honestly still, the best book on culture I’ve ever read is tribal leadership and I’d go pick it up again. If I’m scaling my business from the size it is right now and I know I’m going to have to 10x the team size, then, I’d go read that book. Right now I don’t need to, I’m good. A lot of the ideas are in my head but I’d go read it again. I think this whole idea of reading purposefully, and I just don’t mean tactically like business stuff but even personal, is really what I think makes it so that your reading experience is good. It’s enjoyable. You don’t have that, fuck this book moment like you described, you know. It might be to say you read an irrelevant book more so right now more so than a bad book. I never start reading … I’m like you I don’t start reading and then just could be committed to finishing it. I don’t want everyone to feel bad that I started and didn’t finish. I commit starting and then seeing if I want to continue. My commitment is to starting, my commitment is not to finishing a book which I know sounds weird because a lot of people like to finish books but for me books are references. Even books that you should be reading cover to cover supposedly, they are references. I like flipping through the book. I want to look at the chapter titles, I want to read the first paragraph of a bunch of chapters, I rally want to understand what this book is going to mean to me right now or in the future because to me I might take it up later and not right now even though I’m looking at it right now. Right now it is not purposeful even though I might have thought it is. That’s I think a ref on what you’re saying, which is, how do you make reading a proactive activity where you’re able to actually get value out of these books that you read.   [0:08:49] Steli Efti: I think one of the biggest thing that we are both hinting on and I want to highlight is that most of us have learned reading through school, through the school system and there is a very strong kind of ingrained way of thinking of what reading a book is and what it isn’t. I think most humans, they learn to read the book sequentially from cover to cover, beginning to end. If you didn’t finish the book, if you read like 95%, you just didn’t finish the last chapter, the feeling is incomplete, as if you’ve never read the fucking thing. People have very strong habits when it comes to reading and they are very inflexible. I find people, if you tell them, “Just don’t read the first 3 chapters, just read chapter 4, that’s all you need from the book.” It blows their mind, they are like, “No. No. I read the whole book just to be safe.” “You didn’t need to.” “I know but I just had to.” We are so rational people-   [0:09:46] Hiten Shah: Like why? It’s like why? Like why? Don’t waste your time.   [0:09:50] Steli Efti: I think our programming when it comes to reading is so strong that most of us have kind of become a prisoner to that, “I have to read this way. I can’t read any other way.”   [0:10:00] Hiten Shah: I love that. Then they feel bad if they don’t finish the book or start 5 then stop. I don’t feel bad, I feel great. I’m like, “Great. I read some shit. Great. I read some of it and then I didn’t need more of it, I’m good. I saved myself the trouble, right?”   [0:10:14] Steli Efti: Yeah. I think-   [0:10:14] Hiten Shah: I like that.   [0:10:15] Steli Efti: Breaking through that prison and realizing that you read one chapter, you read the book. Not the whole book that you read was relevant. You started and you’ve decided this is not for you right now. That’s cool. You read it cover to cover, that’s awesome, you read half of it and stopped … There is no right way or wrong way to read. You just have to get out of … It’s and experience and the question is, “What kind of an experience you need right now, and what do you not need?” There’s speed reading techniques, there’s techniques of reading a book and taking very specific notes in certain areas. There’s all kinds of techniques or reading and I think all of them are fair game including the one of not reading the fucking thing, right? If you’re done with it in the beginning, or just reading one chapter or a few pages. If you get one idea out of it, it’s really amazing, if you can’t get anything out of it, deciding to let go and go use that energy and attempt another book or something else and maybe come back to it later, is a much healthier approach than going, which most people will do, “Shit, I’ve started so I feel the urge to finish this, to suffer through all the pages.” You know how many times you talk to people who are like, “I read it, but I really hated it.” “In the beginning or or just the last few chapters?” “No. From the first page. I hated this book.” “Why did you read it then?” “Well, I don’t know. I felt like I need to read like-” I think we have this very strong programming and I think the main message that we both have is, there’s many ways to read a book, there’s many ways to go back to books, don’t feel constrained to whatever your habit of reading is. You are going to get a ton more of value to enjoy out of the experience of reading books if you approach it with a more light hearted, more flexible way than if you feel like, “If I don’t start to finish, that cover to that cover, if I don’t do that, I failed in reading a book.”   [0:12:11] Hiten Shah: Yeah. I’d say you failed in managing your time. You didn’t fail in reading a book. You failed in managing your time. It’s time management. Don’t waste your fucking time. Don’t read the book if it’s not good for you. Don’t read the book if you read the first few pages and you are like, “I’m not into this.” Right? If you feel like you could get into it then read one chapter. If you’re still not into it, stop. Please. For the love of God as they say. Stop. Because, I think we are trying to … Look we read books to relax or level up. Just two reasons. There’s no other reason to read a book, right. Relax or level up. You first pick, am I relaxing here to read this? Some people relax by reading business books, sometimes I do. That’s totally cool. No judgment because I’m one of those people. Are you doing it for that or are you trying to level up? If you are trying to level up, don’t waste your time. If you’re trying to relax, don’t waste your time, right? I think people don’t talk about books in this way. They talk about books like, recommended books. Okay. Great. I know I gave some recommendations earlier because I just had to but that’s not what books are about. Books are not … You are not just looking at recommendations and things like that. You are trying to get value from these books . That has everything to do with how you manage your time. I have a whole on managing time that we are going to save for some other time for sure. I think that’s what it’s about. It’s about really figuring out how not to waste your time and not resisting that conditioning that we all have from school. That’s so big.   [0:13:45] Steli Efti: I love it. All right. That’s it from us on this episode on reading books. We’d love to hear from you if you’ve some interesting, funny experiences, unique point of views when it comes to reading books, just shoot us an email, steli@close.io, hnshah@gmail.com, always love to hear from you. If you’ve not done it yet, go give us a 5 star rating, I think 5 are the maximum stars you can give, if you can give more give us more. Give us a little review on iTunes, we’ll always appreciate it and until then, let’s go and get them. [0:14:13] The post 332: How We Read Books appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to manage your managers. Managing your manager isn’t just good for you, it’s also good for them as well. Your manager has difficult decisions to make, deadlines to meet and the objectives of their own they have to fulfill. Helping your manager manage their own workload goes a long way towards supporting them. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on why you should manage your manager, how to do it the right way, and they share tips that can help you manage them more effectively. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:32 Why this topic was chosen. 02:15 A good example of how to manage your boss. 04:00 Why communication and following up is important. 05:29 Why everybody, regardless of seniority, should be managed. 05:45 Why every team member should develop the ability to manage. 06:22 The importance of being held accountable. 06:42 Why it’s important to focus on the outcome. 07:47 The importance of understanding the difference between good and bad. 09:39 Why having a sense of ownership and responsibility is important 10:50 The right mindset to have and develop. 3 Key Points: Ryan is good at using me as a resource when needed. I think there is tremendous value in understanding that everybody can be managed The ability to manage is such an amazing skill that everybody should develop. Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah.   [0:00:05] Steli Efti: In today’s episode we want to talk about how to manage your managers. Here’s what the topic’s all about and why I care about this, and why I wanted to talk to you about this, Hiten. There’s two things that are happening a lot that I see. One is that, oftentimes when we talk about leadership development within the company; taking somebody that’s junior, that’s an individual contributor, and then because they’re so good at what they do, helping them grow out of an individual contributor role and becoming somebody that is in a leadership role and maybe have people management responsibilities. There is a lot of books and literature and content out there in terms of how to help somebody become a good leader and become a good manager and tools, techniques, all that good stuff. But, that’s always happening kind of after the fact, that you’re being put in a position like this. You’re an individual contributor, nobody really cares about developing you as a leader, and then the moment you are put in that position, now you have this challenge; you have zero skills when it comes to leadership, or very little skills when it comes to management. That’s a problem that I think can be addressed with what I want to talk about, which is cultivating a culture of managing up and teaching people to manage upwards, not just downwards in the org chart. The other thing is that we recently had somebody join the team, big shout out to Ryan Robinson, who some of you might already know, who-   [0:01:40] Ryan Robinson: What up!   [0:01:41] Steli Efti: What up Ryan? …who, one of my favorite things about him, and he’s not the only one that’s doing this well, and has done this well in the past, but it’s kind of a recent example that prompted this topic top of mind for me. It’s that Ryan, although he is one of the newest members of the company, and although he does not have yet any kind of management title or management expectations in terms of managing people within the organization, and although I am one of the founders of the business and the CEO, and definitely you could consider me his boss (I hired him); he, from day one, from day one, was incredibly good at managing me. What do I mean by managing me? At times, Ryan would need things from me or I would be involved in projects where I would act as an individual contributor and had to give a piece of content, give a piece of advice, get something done, make in introduction, check in on something; he needed something from me to get done within the greater scope of a project that he was responsible for. Ryan, from day one, was just incredible about not living in the framework of thinking, “Well shit, that’s Steli, he’s the fucking founder and CEO of my boss. If he says he’s going to do something, I’m just going to let him do it, I’m not going to check in. If it’s not done by the date, I’m not going to ask about it because I don’t want to create any kind of problems. He’s so senior, he’s so up the ladder, that when he says ‘yes, I’m going to take care of something, Ryan’, I’m just going to be mute and wait and see what happens.” No, what Ryan did was, “Well, Steli is a fucking busy man and he’s responsible for a million fucking things; this is the project I’m responsible for so I’m going to make sure I help Steli deliver the things that he said he would.” He would check in with me, “Hey Steli, how’s the timeline, is everything good? Can I help you with anything?” I would reply, “All good, thanks for checking in, I’m going to get this done by Monday.” On a Monday, he’d be like, “Steli, it’s Monday, woo I’m so excited. Everything is done, you’re the last to do that I’m waiting for. Let me know if anything changed. If you’re too busy today, no problem.” He would constantly communicate. He would follow up with me. If I had to check in with somebody, if I was like, “Yeah, I’ll make an intro,” and that person wouldn’t respond, he would always PING me and go, “Hey, have you followed up yet? Maybe it’s time to follow up, let’s push this, let’s get this home.” He would not let go of the responsibility because I was involved, or anybody else was involved that was quote unquote ‘more senior than him’. He would manage me and other people, and even today he picked me out and said, “Hey, we have a big webinar next week. Steli, do you have time this weekend to do a quick video and do this, and this, and this to promote it?” He would just use me as a resource when needed, explain to me why, and be very mindful about checking in, following up, and helping me accomplish the task or encourage me to get it done in time. I love this, I can’t tell you how much I fucking love it. I honestly believe that if you’re good at managing people, you are somebody that likes to be managed well as well. You’re not difficult to manage, if you’re difficult to manage then you’re probably going to be bad at managing other people as well. I think that there is tremendous value in people realizing that they cannot just manage people that are under them in their org chart, or that they are personally responsible for; everybody is fair game and you shouldn’t think, “This person is so senior, I’ll feel too timid or afraid to check in, to follow up, to follow through, and to manage them for this project.” I wanted to bring this topic up and hear your thoughts on it because I thought it would benefit our listeners.   [0:05:34] Hiten Shah: Managing up is such an amazing skill for a team member to have. I think everybody needs to have this. Even as a founder, if you raise money, you have a Board and you’re managing up to them. In the ways that you manage up to them, is literally you have asks of them in the email updates you send them, or in a board meeting, or anything like that. Managing up is a process that people are just not used to. You said it best: you’re the CEO, you hired the person, and yet the person is willing to tell you what they need from you and what you need to do for them, and hold you accountable to it in a way that you might not be able to do for yourself for whatever reason. There’s a really nice way to do that, that it seems like Ryan has really figured it out and is doing, and I think one thing that is really brilliant about it is when you focus on the outcome and the work, and not the people, you have this attitude where, “We’re just going to all work together, it doesn’t matter what your title is and it doesn’t matter who is managing who.” That’s a beautiful team, when you’re focused on the outcome. I believe Ryan is so focused on the outcome that if Steli is responsible for pieces of it and Ryan feels the ownership or whatever over it or it’s his thing, then he will make sure Steli, the human being, is accountable and does it; not Steli, his manager; not Steli, the CEO of the company. I think that’s really important because we tend to put people who are our bosses or our managers or in some kind of authority role, on a pedestal. Then we’re like, “They’re infallible, or they don’t need my help, or I’ll let their slip-ups go.” But, at the end of the day, that’s not acceptable if there are outcomes and there are business requirements and things we’re looking to achieve. I’m always impressed by people that are good at that. I have people on my teams where people are really good at that or people are really bad at that and I’ve always found it challenging to help people understand the difference between good and bad. Bad is constantly asking you questions that they should answer themselves, right?   [0:07:42] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:07:42] Hiten Shah: Or, they should bring to you not the question, but the options. If you’re managing up, don’t bring people the questions when you can think through the options. Bring the people who you are managing up to, options. It’s better to say, “Hey Hiten, what should we do about this feature? There’s some difficulties associated with it, here they are.” I’d rather have, “Hey Hiten, here are the three option to solve the difficulties. Which one would you like to do?” Right?   [0:08:15] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:08:16] Hiten Shah: Or, help me decide which one is the best. Every single person that has managed up to be, that does that, I have an amazing relationship with. Every single person that makes me think about it when they should have, I don’t have that amazing relationship with. It’s not that I think they’re lazy, it’s that I think they’re stupid, it’s not any of that. It’s that I think they’re not respecting themselves. They’re not thinking for themselves. They’re not spending an extra five minutes to make it easy for me to help them make a decision. That’s it. Takes the five minutes and come up with options, otherwise we’re going to do that together. Do you know how much time we’re going to waste doing that together on something you could have just done yourself? Right? Again, that has to do with how you communicate with me and want to manage up to me. Other people might like to discuss it and all that stuff, but I’ve never found this not to work with any manager because a manager appreciates it. They’re like, “Oh, you thought through it and there’s a bunch of options and I just need to help you pick one, two, or three, or whatever. I don’t need to discuss this with you.”   [0:09:19] Steli Efti: I love that. I think it comes all back to having a sense of ownership and responsibility, right? Especially even when you talk to people that seem very senior. Instead of saying, “Well, this is Hiten. He surely will know the best answer so let me not even think about an answer, let me just go and ask him,” and basically have him do all the work instead of just doing the appropriate work or the most useful work, you say, “Hey, it’s my job to get to a decision. I think Hiten’s input is going to be important, let me do the research, the homework; let me lay out the options, the pros and cons.” Check in with him and say, “Hey Hiten, here’s something we are working on, here are the four options that we have. I would go with one but I wanted to double check with you and see if you have a different opinion or something to add.” I even teach the bottleneck hack, where there’s an expiration date to this. You know, “Hey Steli, here’s the four options. I would go with one, I could see other ones being good as well. I wanted to check in with you. If I don’t hear back because you’re busy over the next 48 hours, I’ll just go with one.” That way, even if I’m too busy doing other things, I can just glance at it and go, “Alright, I’m cool with option one, I don’t even have to weigh in here.” Or, I can just go, “Yeah, go ahead.” Or if I don’t get to look at it, still decisions are being made and things are being moved forward. I really think the most important thing is the mindset shift; not thinking, “I can only manage and I can only be responsible for people that are directly reporting to me and are under me in the org chart,” versus taking ownership and responsibility for the outcome of the project or the thing that you’re working on, and seeing everybody in the company as a potential resource. You have to be mindful in how you use these resources and thoughtful about it, but everybody is fair game; a resource to help that outcome be as successful as possible. You can be the CEO of that project, of that outcome. You can tap into people above you, on the same level, or more junior in all ways, if you are mindful, if you are respectful, to accomplish the outcome. If you do that, A) the entire company is going to be moving much faster forward and you’ll create a lot more value, but also you develop these management skills that Ryan obviously already developed for a long time running his own business, being a consulting business, and having clients and all that. Once you officially maybe grow into more of an official management or leadership role, you’re going to have all of these skills already established on how to communicate effective, how to lead, how to manage. I think once an organization or a team realizes that management is not something that just happens top-down, it happens bottom-up as well, I think an incredible amount more of success can be accomplished. I love people that do that naturally, obviously. I’m trying to encourage this and teach this more to people that don’t already have that mindset. I think sharing this with the audience, with the people that are listening to us is hopefully going to encourage a lot of people to think a bit differently, act a bit differently, and learn how to manage up, not just down. I think that’s going to benefit a lot of companies out there.   [0:12:29] Hiten Shah: Yeah, find your best way to manage up. I think I really loved what you said, which was, “If you learn how to manage up, you’ll learn how to be a manager.” It’s just that simple. It’s the same skill set. That’s pretty awesome.   [0:12:45] Steli Efti: Love it. That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you soon.   [0:12:48] Hiten Shah: Cheers. [0:12:49] The post 331: Managing up – How to Manage Your Managers appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about Startup babies. These are certain life moments that happen to people on your team, moments like when team members have babies, get married or less joyous moments like a death in the family. Moments like these impact everyone on the team and how you manage it is crucial. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear Steli and Hiten thoughts on how to manage life-changing moments when they occur in a team and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 01:00 Hiten gives examples of life moments that can affect a team. 0:30 Why this topic was chosen. 02:20 Why teams are not one dimensional. 02:33 Why being mindful when you manage these kinds of situation is crucial. 03:15 The emotional support you can give to team members when they have a life-changing event. 03:36 Why it’s important to communicate openly and freely. 05:50 Why your company should be supportive and help team members manage these situations. 06:48 The importance of out of office messages. 10:37 Why planning ahead is super important when managing these kinds of situations. 3 Key Points: We’re not just launching products and features. We’re launching babies like there’s no tomorrow. Teams are not one dimensional. Being mindful as a company is super crucial when it comes to how you approach these events. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. Today we’re going to talk about startup babies. Not your baby as a startup, so don’t get it twisted.   [0:00:12] Steli Efti: Don’t get it twisted.   [0:00:12] Hiten Shah: We’re not talking about treating your baby, or your startup as your baby, we’re actually talking about something, I think, really important, which is, there are certain life moments. We’re going to call it startup babies, because I think that’s a good way to think about it. But there’s certain life moments that happen to people on your team, when you’re on a team. I think babies are one, when people start having babies, and I know Stanley, you have some stories around this. Another one is when people get married, right? And, there’s a number of other ones that happen that are even less joyous, and more about, like, when there’s a death in the family, or there’s some news of something more negative. These are the things that we want to talk about because as an organization, as a team, as a company, that stuff impacts everybody one way or another, especially when it happens to somebody, a positive, negative, whatever. And so we wanted to dig into that and give our thoughts on.   [0:01:08] Steli Efti: Yeah, absolutely. One of the reasons why this episode or this topic prompted up is that in our team, it seems like it’s baby season, right? We’re not just launching features and new products, we’re launching babies like there’s no tomorrow, I think. We literally just this morning had somebody on the team have their firstborn son being launched. But this year, I think we already had, I don’t know, like, I’m losing track. Four kids that were born? And we have another two or three coming up? It seems like everybody is launching a baby at . This is a topic that’s really top of mind for me, and I think it’s an important topic as you said, because it shines a light on like, people are not one dimensional, teams are not one dimensional. There’s a lot of growth and challenges that we all work together as a team in the company and in the startup, but people have personal lives, private lives, and there’s big changing events happening in their personal lives. These events impact their life, and therefore also their work. I think being mindful, as an organization, as a team, as a company … Excuse me, is super crucial when it comes to how you as a company approach these events, and how do you support your people when it comes to this. I don’t really want to get into the policy making of like, do you have maternity and paternity leaves? And what is your policy? How long should they be? Are they paid or unpaid, all that. I leave all that up to people to make up their own minds on that. I don’t really want to … I personally don’t want to talk about that as much, but I want to talk about the emotional support, the personal human support that you need to give people, I think, once they have an event like having a baby. For us, I’ll rattle through a few things that’s done out there. We’ve gone through that, that seemed to work well, and then we can just bounce back ideas back and forth. But to us, I think open communication, communicating openly early and frequently, “Hey, I am pregnant,” “My wife is pregnant,” “My partner is pregnant,” “We’re expecting a kid,” let’s talk about planning this time off, let’s plan let’s talk about how this impacts my team and my work. I think starting the dialogue really early on is super important, and realizing as a business in my mind that you have to in certain situations, you have to prioritize the human a little bit above the business, and people feel that, I think it’s really crucial zone. When we talk to people in those situations, I hope, and that’s the feedback I’ve gotten from a number of people. I think one thing that stands out to our team members is that when we talk to them about this, they can feel that our priority is their happiness, they’re the health of their family, and that this is going to be a good experience for them. And then also, we try to consider how this impacts our team, and the business, and everything, and our customers. But they can feel like we’re putting them first, and it makes a huge difference in the way they feel about the whole experience, the amount of stress they have, and the amount of connection and commitment and loyalty they feel then towards the team in the company. Because they feel like, “Wow, in this situation where this big thing is happening in my life, the company is trying to support me and put me first, and it’s not a selfish conversation where they try to squeeze out as much as possible from me, and they’re annoyed, quote unquote, or inconvenient. “Oh, my god, you’re getting a baby.” Well, that we have this big launches. I mean, you’re going to work, right?” Because that in that situation, when you approach people that way, I think you can lose their trust forever, you can sour the relationship forever, and rightfully so. And it can create a situation where their baby launch is not just going to be like a part of the shared journey, but their baby launch becomes the event that makes them think, “I need to leave this company.”   [0:05:20] Hiten Shah: Yeah, that sucks. That person’s … Great. These life changes are definitely something you’re not just managing on your own as a person, your company should be able to be supportive and help you manage it. Because these things happen to everybody. The way I treat these, and I know this is going to be interesting, potentially, as a way to say it, but the way I treat them as I treat them like a vacation. Because when someone goes on vacation, and they’re a critical part of organization, which is everybody, they make sure their shit gets done before, right?   [0:05:58] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:05:58] Hiten Shah: They’re prepared, the team is prepared. And then the person goes, and then the person comes back, and is back to work, right? There’s for lack of a better way to say it, there’s an out of office message. Whether it’s a message on slack of your dates that you’re out of office, which I think is appropriate, one of those status messages there, which I found to be really useful, actually. And there’s potentially auto reply. Auto replies are a little, I don’t know, but the slack stuff is super important. If the person is receiving a lot of email from outside the company people, it’s important to have an out of office message and say who that person can reach if they actually need help. You can make it fun and cute, like, show a picture of your baby or whatever, right? But I think that there’s some tactical stuff, and my opinion, is treat it like a vacation. Because we know what to do when someone’s on vacation. We might not know what to do when someone has a baby, we might not want to know what to do when there’s a death in the family, but we do know what to do when someone’s on vacation. Right Stanley?   [0:07:01] Steli Efti: Right.   [0:07:03] Hiten Shah: I feel like this is very, very complicated when you think of it like, “Oh, they’re having a baby,” or “Oh, this happened, or that happened, or they need to be out for this amount of time.” But honestly, it’s a vacation. We know what to do when someone goes on vacation. Why don’t we just treat it the same way. Because in effect, they are out of pocket, they’re out of the office, they are not working, right? They are completely not working. And if that’s the case, it’s the same as what you would expect when someone’s on vacation. You want them to have a good vacation. If you are taking a vacation, do not work unless you re a culture where that is what’s required. I will throw that caveat out. We had an interesting experience where at Kissmetrics many years ago, we hired a product manager. She was, I think, six months pregnant when we hired her. We knew that, she knew that, and we hired her. And it was a startup at the time, like, less than 12 people or something. She had an important role. She’s a product manager. We all dealt with it very gracefully. I mean, the whole thing was like, she came in, did some work, helped us with a bunch of stuff, and we knew she was gonna be gone. She was someone who just got back to work pretty fast, but we weren’t expecting that. We told her, “Just let us know how much time you need, we’re going to consider you not able to work during that time.” Just give people space. I think a lot of this has to do with giving people space and knowing … One of the issues that comes, and I will say this where just … I’ve had one issue with this, which is pretty important to talk about. What if the person doesn’t know how long? That is not a vacation, right?   [0:08:43] Steli Efti: That’s the thing I wanted to bring up, actually. Because I love the vacation, quote unquote metaphor or framework, because it makes it a much simpler thing, something you can refer to, “Well, I’ve done this before. It’s easy.” It’s not just like new thing that nobody knows how to deal with, so I love that. The one difference, I mean, there’s a bunch of differences, but the one major difference that I would highlight is that timeframes, dates, are not as clear, but I think there’s a simple way to deal with this. I think, and this is definitely going to be my tip for this episode, is that you need to realize that most people, especially like super ambitious, super caring people that work at your startup, they will try to do right by the company, and the start up, and the business, and sometimes they will over commit, right? They’ll try to be like, “Well, the birth is scheduled officially by this date, so I’m working exactly till that date. This problem is probably going to take this amount …” Or, “I’m planning to take this amount of time off, but I might be able to do a little less.” They’ll estimate too aggressively on when they’re going to be off from work, and how quickly they’re going to be back, oftentimes. Not always, but oftentimes, they’re very aggressive on those things, and my experience has been to coach people and team members to say, listen, I’d rather you plan on being out of pockets a week or two before the date that you were planning to, so that by that time, the entire team knows that you’re not around anymore and you have finished all the important and crucial work and everything is prepared. And if you’re willing, and able, and excited, and happy to work a little longer, that’s a plus. Nobody expects you to, you don’t have to, if you want to you’re capable of, you can, that’s a bonus. Same thing with the amount of time you’re gone. I’d rather have people be giving themselves a bit more of a buffer versus being super conservative and taking the least amount of days off as possible. Take a bit more. And if you don’t need it, and you don’t want it, you can come back a little earlier, everybody’s going to be excited. But if you estimate too aggressively on the amount of time off, and when you’re going to be off, it just creates so much more stress for you and for the team if you just miss it by a few days, or by a week, or have to leave earlier or later. It’s just going to create a lot more stress personally for the person that’s leaving and also for the team they’re leaving behind. Giving themselves some buffer and getting the explicit permission from the company, “Hey, you should take some more time off, you should think about ramping down a little bit earlier,” I think can create a really good setup. I’ve seen this time and time again that we’ve done it, where people were amazed by the suggestion, took up that offer, and then either didn’t need it by felt really, really great how well prepared they were, and how this was all a bonus. On one case somebody needed that, and then they were really grateful that they had that time, and that they didn’t stick with their original suggestion of time off and on timelines. I would just say because there’s a certain level of unpredictability in terms of when the launch of the baby will happen, right? Baby launches can be as unpredictable as engineering feature estimate launches, right? It’s the best-   [0:12:27] Hiten Shah: You went there?   [0:12:28] Steli Efti: Yeah, I did. We had some internal joke about this, I didn’t remember it anymore what we were saying, but since the baby has a say in all of this, you can’t really predict it perfectly. Being a bit lenient and giving people a bit more time and then saying, “If you can come back earlier, if it takes less time, that’s awesome. But if it doesn’t, you’re still in a good place,” I think it’s a much better way to go. Because if you just lean on what people will tell you that are leaving, my experience is that these people will estimate too aggressively because they want to do right by the company, and then they just create a lot of personal stress and also team stress. They’re just not … They have to leave three weeks before their original plan of the baby launch because the baby came early, and now the entire team is unprepared that there’s still a bunch of things to finish, and it just creates issues. That will be my big tip on the transition out in transition back in.   [0:13:22] Hiten Shah: I love that. I’m gonna give my tip based on an experience I recently had. Basically, there’s someone on our team, and they want to basically leave for a week, maybe let’s say, go on a vacation, right? It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the simple way to say it. They have the authority to come up with how long they do it. I am essentially forcing them to do it for two weeks. That’s mainly because I think two weeks is better than one for this person. There’s a whole bunch of several reasons, but my tip there is if you’re helping someone decide and have that opportunity of work, and they should take more time and just stick to that, you can encourage that. Because our tendency is to encourage this person to take as little time as possible, kind of riffing on what you’re saying, right? I think our tendency should be to encourage them to take as much time as makes sense, and as much time as possible, not as little time as possible when it comes to those life event. Because the thing is, again, riffing on some of the stuff you’re saying, you wouldn’t want someone to ever have regret about not being able to take the time for a life event.   [0:14:38] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think that’s such a beautiful way of putting it, like take the amount of time that makes sense, and not the least amount of time possible. It pays such dividends, like the loyalty that people will feel towards the company, and also the work they’re going to do. They’re going to come back refreshed it was not as stressful as an experience as they thought, so now they’re coming back so enthusiastic and excited to get back to work versus feeling like it was way too little time, they’re now having all these personal challenges and problems because they have to leave much earlier, they had way too little time off work, and now work will suffer. Nobody really benefits when you’re trying to optimize for as little time as possible, irregardless of what we’re talking about. The topic that we picked, the example we pick with a baby is a really, really big fucking life changing event, right?   [0:15:30] Hiten Shah: The biggest, yeah.   [0:15:30] Steli Efti: That makes perfect sense, and I think that oftentimes most people think of founders and leadership and management and ownership of a business, always trying to squeeze as much out of every person as possible. That’s such a short sighted way of thinking about it versus trying to get … You want to get the best work possible in the longest term possible from everybody, and give them an amazing experience to work with you and for you and your company, and do the best work they’ve ever done, versus just getting them to commit to as many hours and be gone as little hours as possible. That’s a very short sighted way of thinking about it, and that can lead to great results. I think that’s it from us for this episode.   [0:16:14] Hiten Shah: Later.   [0:16:15] Steli Efti: Later. [0:16:15] The post 330: Startup Babies – How to Manage the Other Side of Growth in Your Team appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.