Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the Virtual Summit that was organized by Steli and his team at Close.io, which you can check at InsideSalesSummit.com. Virtual summits are a trend that’s becoming very popular in the startup world. They are typically video interviews of 20 or more experts on a given topic, which viewers opt-in to watch. Most of the time, they are free for a limited time, however, organizers can add the option for subscribers to pay for unlimited viewing later. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what virtual summits are, lessons they learned from organizing the inside sales summit, pros and cons of organizing one and what you should consider before organizing your own virtual summit. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:37 – About Close’s virtual summit and Hiten’s interview. 01:49 – Steli talks about the Inside Sales Summit 03:51 – Lessons Steli learned from the summit. 05:59 – Why a lot of people were disappointed by Steli and his team. 07:45 – Steli’s shares how he was able to partner with influencers for the summit. 09:17 – The beautiful thing about organizing a virtual summit. 10:48 – About Close.io next virtual summit. 12:10 – Cons of a virtual summit. 13:46 – Hiten gives suggestions for Close’s next summit. 15:49 – Steli shares some tips for people thinking about organizing a virtual summit. Quotes Partner with people who share the same goals as your company. Make sure your summit has a platform for networking and social interactions. Don’t stop even if your first try failed. [0:00:00] Steli: Everybody this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten Shah And this is Heaton Shaw. I’m really motivate to talk about this today because of many reasons. Some I will share in future episodes but, basically, Steli and his team at Closed Out IO did a virtual summit. There’s about to be a car that drives by, a bus, but anyways, they did a virtual summit and it happened recently. You had to put in your email and then, you got access to these videos about sales. I was one of the people that was interviewed. I had a blast on my interview and I think some people liked it but, there was a whole bunch of other people that were interviewed as well. The reason I’m really interested in this is, I see a trend. I think this can be a very rapid fire episode like we like to do to give you a lot of value in very little time. The trend I see is instead of companies doing conferences, and events, they are starting to do virtual summits because they are, I’m assuming and you could probably debate me on this really fast, but they’re less logistically complicated. They can be seen by many more people and they’re probably one of the best ways to do lead generation today. They’re very emerging. I haven’t seen enough companies do virtual summits. I don’t think they’re going to go out of style. I think they’re only going to get more popular and that’s my two minute preamble for me to interview you about your virtual summit because I have never done one. Participated in a few and don’t understand what you do about it.   [0:01:29] Steli: Awesome. Yeah, let’s do it. So, we … You’re right. We just did the inside sales summit and for people who are curious about it, we published your interview on the start up chat just recently but, if you want to get access to the entire thing you can go to the InsideSalesSummit.com, no the. Put in your email and check out all the interviews that we’ve done with over 50 people. For us, this was a big experiment. We’re going to publish a blog post very soon. We cover all our learnings and the templates we used to invite these speakers into and all these things. So, happy to talk about it. Share some of the learnings and some of the things we want to do next time because we’ve already decided we’re going to do another, hopefully bigger and better. So, yes, this trend is emerging. I’ve been invited to a number of these virtual summits as well. The idea is, instead of doing a physical conference where you invite all these speakers and you have all the people psychically having to go to a certain place to go and watch these talks and participate in these sessions, you do it virtually. You record, prerecord, these sessions. Then, you release them over time. What we did is we did Monday through Friday and every day we would release 10 interviews, 10 videos. So, this is brand new content, brand new interviews just for the summit. Ryan Robinson did this on our team and he did a brilliant job interviewing all the people. So, people all around the world can just put in their email and participate and get the content. Right? For us, the reason why we did this, A is we wanted to expand over to a format but B, we’re a remote company. We love doing things that have global appeal and impact and access. So, we wanted to experiment with this format and figure it out. So, I’ll start with … How should I start here? I’ll start with some should be obvious but, was still surprising learning. The biggest most surprising learning here was that are two fold. One, people are fairly … It’s fairly easy to get people to agree to participate in a virtual summit as a speaker, right? It’s kind of a great way to build your network as a brand to reach out to people that are thought leaders, they’re very admired, they work for companies you think are awesome and associate yourself with their brand. Also, they gain some knowledge from them and expose them to your audience. Hopefully get some exposure to their audience for yourself as well. So, it’s not that hard to get people to agree to speak. We did this with 50 people. That’s a lot of people. The list of people we didn’t invite is even much larger. There were people that wanted to speak or people that we thought, “Oh, they have good audiences and they’re kind of well known but,” if we felt like this is not somebody we want to expose to our audience because we don’t truly believe in their philosophy, so their ethics or, we don’t really love their teachings, we shied away. Not to say that we didn’t invite some speakers that we love some of the things they do but not everything, right? So, it was interesting to select the speakers but it’s fairly easy to get these people to agree to speak. So, that’s one thing. But, the other thing is that what we did is we wanted to make sure the speakers, and even more importantly, some of the speakers that were more partners, that they would promote the summit with us to make this a much bigger event than just an event that our audience attends to. The unsurprising factor is that it’s easy for partners of people to agree and say yes, we’re going to promote this, yes we’re going to send out an email, yes we’re going to let the world know. Even to agree to say, hey we’re going to do a list show. We’re going to promote really aggressively. You’re going to promote really aggressively and then, all the attendants that participate, we’re going to share that audience in the different marketing departments. It’s easy to get people to agree to this but then, to get them to actually do the work they agree to is surprisingly hard. So, a lot of people disappointed us. There were two levels of disappointment. One, was that man, the grass is always greener. You think some of these people, or companies have … You just assume that this massive audience and then, when they tell you how big their audience truly is, it’s kind of surprising because often times it’s much smaller than I thought it would be. That’s one. Then, two, it was much harder to get them to do what they promised us to do. So, some of them would promise us, “Hey, we’re going to do a dedicated email, for instance. We’ll send an email to all our email list to promote the Inside Sale Summit.” Then, they would just not do that-   [0:06:19] Hiten Shah And if that-   [0:06:20] Steli: Oh, go ahead.   [0:06:21] Hiten Shah And instead, what do they do?   [0:06:22] Steli: Instead they just edit it at their last item on a generic newsletter or something like that.   [0:06:27] Hiten Shah Did you write the copy for them?   [0:06:30] Steli: We gave them a template, an off copy.   [0:06:33] Hiten Shah Yeah.   [0:06:34] Steli: So, we followed that advice that we both have given to followers many, many times but, I found that many did not use the copy. There were some that did but many, because they didn’t do a dedicated email, they just did a little blur thingy.   [0:06:48] Hiten Shah Did you make them sign an agreement?   [0:06:50] Steli: Yes. We did but, the first few that we make sign an agreement, we made a mistake. I corrected that mistake in the middle of organizing the summit and I’m very glad we did but, it still turned out to be a bad idea that we did the mistake, at least one department at least. So, the original agreement was, you’re going to do these types of promotions, we’re going to do these types of promotions and then, we’re sharing the list with you, right? That was the original agreement. We did this with, I think, five or six partners. Then, at the seventh partner, I made a correction to this. I said, “You’re going to do this type of promotion. We’re going to do that type of promotion. Then, we’re going to do a list share with you matching the amount of emails you drive to the summit. So, if you bring us 1,000 subscribers, we’re going to give you 1,000 on top of it back that attended Inside Sales Summit. If you get us 10,000, we’ll give you 10,000. If you give us 100 sign ups, we’ll give you 100 emails on top of that back. So, we’ll match what you bring to the table.” That was a very, very good idea. I wish we’d done that for the first and not just starting from the seventh partner or whatever it was, because many of these partners, A, they didn’t do what they fully agreed on the agreement but some of them did. They still, the engagement on their email list were not as great as we thought. So, they would drive surprisingly little … There was one, or there were two partners that drove surprisingly little sign ups but they’ve got a big email … Big list of email back from us because that was the original agreement. Fortunately, we didn’t do this with everybody but, that was the big learning. Don’t just tell them promote it to your email, and whatever we’re going to do with all our other partners, we’re just going to share the entire list with you because most of them will not warrant to get that return because what they bring to the table is just not that great. Now, having said that, there were some great partners. Some partners that … I think this is another … This is a learning that I didn’t anticipate. One of the beautiful things about doing the summit is, you do one event, you partner with lots of companies, lots of speakers and you see which ones really are kicking ass, which ones are keeping their word, bringing value, doing an awesome interview, driving lots of traffic and sign ups and are a pleasure to work with. So, you make a mental note, which is what we did, and go, “Oh shit, these are five people, or six people. We should do a lot more fucking marketing with because they’re awesome. They bring a ton of value.” And, here are a bunch of people that although they seem famous and successful. They have a well known brand, we don’t want to do marketing with them in the future. We don’t want to do things with in the future. So, it allows you to really see, look behind the scenes in a big way with a large group of people and decide who do you want to invest more time with and partner more with because there were some awesome people and some awesome companies that really kicked ass. So, it was not all bad. But, it was interesting just to see, look behind the scenes, on how all of these companies do promotion, how big their email list are, how engaged their email list are. It’s always a healthy thing, and I know you and I try to teach this often times when people talk to us and they look up to us. They think we’re amazing and everything is amazing that we do. It’s like, chill out. Things are great but they’re never as amazing as you think. You know, reality sometimes is not as great as it looks like from the outside. So, that was an interesting learning. Moving forward, for the next summit, I’ll tell you this right up front. We’re going to spend a lot more time on the kind of picking up promotional partners and then, really investing much more time managing the promotional process. We spent most of our time actually just doing or inviting all these people, organizing the calls and the interviews. Recording the content, putting together the website. All that organizational stuff took a lot of our time and the promotional stuff took a back seat. The next time around, now that we have experienced, we already have the website, we already have kind of the structures and the processes in place, next time around we’ll spend a lot more time on the promotional piece and hopefully, do even much, much better. But, that was kind of one of the big learning lessons, is that you really have to babysit people through the promotional process. When you do promo agreements, my learning is, don’t just do an agreement that says you’re going to promote and then, you’re going to get everything. You’re going to get the entire list shared of the success that we generated. It should proportional to the success they’ve delivered.   [0:11:31] Hiten Shah Yeah, I love that model. I think, honestly, you basically did a postmortem right now on the event. Do you have any other key take aways that really stand out for you that you’d be willing to share, that you’re going to do next time?   [0:11:46] Steli: Yeah. So, I think, I mean, one thing we’re not sure about … I’m thinking about, I don’t have an answer yet is, the one thing that’s missing in a virtual event that you get in a physical one is the ability to network, an ability to check with other attendees, share some knowledge, get feedback. Getting a sense that something is truly life. It’s hard to do this virtually really well. I see this sometimes when I’m participating like YouTube live streams, or Facebook live streams. It’s kind of cool because it’s live, it’s happening right now. You kind of see the comments and the number of people that are watching it with you but often times, these discussions are really low quality and it’s kind of more noise and scanning than really productive. So, I’m not sure how to do this well but a thing that I’ve been thinking about is, how can we make this a little bit more social of an experience? The other thing that was interesting is that unsurprisingly, but still heartbreaking to us to a degree, is like okay, you can tell that people sign up for the virtual summit and then, we would send those people every day an email kind of pitching them. “Hey, today here’s the 10 speakers. Here’s the sessions. Here’s what you’re going to learn. Click here to watch the videos.” Unsurprisingly, many people watch the first day but then, although they were subscribed, I’m sure they had the best intent in mind that they wanted to watch all of it. They did really watch all the videos. You had the small group of people that watched tons of videos and most people just watched one. Even, I think, a really big portion of the list just didn’t watch a single video. So, how do you get engagement to be much higher is another … I don’t really have an answer yet but, that’s definitely something I’m pondering for the next virtual summit.   [0:13:29] Hiten Shah Got it. I got a couple things there real quick. One, spend more time on the content in the story for each email, and turn it into actual text, not just the video or whatever. In a way where it’s like … I know I had some killer nuggets in mind but they didn’t show up in your email, you know? Then, obviously, it’s like tease them that if they watch it, they’re going to get more and they’ll get a transcript if they click. So, that’s one thing. Story, and doing that. Then, the next thing that I thought of was consider, and I know this takes a little more tech, and we have a bunch to talk about on this, but I think we should end it after my thing and whatever you’re going to say next, but consider another channel besides email, such as slack or notifications, or something like that. Like, browser notifications. Chrome and Safari all have that where they can get notified right when the next one goes live. The last thing I’ll say is an ability to either save or bookmark it. Or, share it with someone else, even if that person didn’t sign up for it. So, all those ideas combined, I think, would be to better engagement within the videos and stuff.   [0:14:36] Steli: Yeah, I totally agree. We try to do … The emails that we were sending out on a daily basis were just like bullet points with the names and maybe the title of the subject. You’re right, we could spend a lot more time really highlighting some of the nuggets in the real powerful stories that were shared in some of these talks and interviews. I think it would make a drastic difference. I like the notification one and the slack one. There’s a lot more that can be done there that we just didn’t get to in the first one.   [0:15:02] Hiten Shah If you subject mine and said Heaton Shaw, Hates Sales, but we got him to talk about it. That would just crush it in terms of open rates and all that. I’m not saying that because it’s me I’m saying that because a lot of people know who I am and I don’t talk about sales a lot but you guys always get me to do that, right? I’m okay with you doing that. So, I don’t know. Just a thought for you because that problem, I feel like anyone that does a virtual summit, is going to have.   [0:15:31] Steli: I totally agree. Okay, so here’s my last tip on this for people who are considering doing this. One is probably we’re going to release this episode in conjunction with a blog post. Ryan is the person on our team that did organize the entire summit. All the interviews, so he knows even a lot more about this than me. So, he’s going to … We’re going to link to the blog post and you’re going to get a lot of more details on the summit with numbers and all that. But the other thing is, this to me is a general generic truth but, one thing that I realized with this just like with anything else, when you do something … If you as a company decided we want to do virtual summits as a marketing and branding tool, just don’t even get started if you’re not ready to do at least four or five of them. Don’t even get started because the first one you’ll do will never be perfect. It will never be all it can be and you do one thing and it has all the success in the world. You’re always going to learn so much in the first run. You’re always going to build … Going to have to invest to build the infrastructure and lay the foundation. If you stop after the first time you do it because it didn’t do the 10 million sign ups that you were dreaming out, you’re never going to get the out of the investment of time to do something new. So, for us, I think we’re going to do a number of these in 2018 and really get this perfected. Then, really get in our eye on all the investments that we made to get started with this. I see a lot of companies that do virtual summits that invite me as a speaker as well. They never do a second one, right, because it’s a lot of work and because they might had much higher hopes than what it did for them in the first time around. So, I really think this is a generic truth. If you start a new marketing challenge. If you’re not committed to spend significant time, and iterate, and improve, and learn and build on these learnings, then don’t even do it. Just keep doing and keep improving on the challenges that you are already using. Alright, I think that’s it from us for this episode.   [0:17:24] Hiten Shah Peace out. [0:17:24] The post 279: How to Run a Virtual Summit appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about anger and how to deal with it at work and in your personal life. Being angry is an extremely powerful emotion. If you’re somebody that gets angry easily, you run the risk of being avoided by the people you love and work with. On the flip side, if you’re someone that bottles up your anger, you risk becoming a pressure cooker that will inevitably explode, which could cause you to behave in a way that you regret later. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share some insights on what anger is, reasons why people get angry and how to manage it if you do so that you don’t act in a way you regret later. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:01 – About today’s topic. 00:34 – Why we talk about this topic today 00:50 – Hiten talks about his background and how he dealt with anger as a child. 02:30 – Steli also talks about his upbringing. 05:53 – How to move from one emotion to another in small steps. 08:15 – Reasons why people get angry. 09:55 – The biggest lesson Hiten has learned around anger. 11:45 – Steli gives an example of how helplessness gets him angry. 10:52 – Steli talks about what he has learned on how to deal with anger. 16:54 – Hiten talks about how he deals with resentment. 19:07 – Steli gives some tips on how to deal with anger. Quotes: Anger is a way that most people deal with the emotional feeling of helplessness. Resentment is like taking small sips of poison. I’d much rather be angry than depressed. [0:00:00] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli.   [0:00:03] Hiten: And this Hiten. And today on The Startup Chat, we wanted to talk about a topic we haven’t talked about probably ’cause neither of us gets too angry very often. I think there’s reasons why. I’m sure both of us used to get angry, and so today I was kind of inspired to talk about anger just ’cause it’s something I’ve been thinking about actually quite a bit. One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about it, on my end, is ’cause I’m the type of person that doesn’t really get angry. I had a very calm presence across the board in my family growing up, even when I did something really horrible, which I’ve done some things that are … Most parents would be yelling. My dad would not yell, and he’d give me more of this look and … It’s not even a look really. It’s just a feeling I got from him, like he was disappointed in me. I still kept getting in trouble. I probably got in trouble … Like big trouble. So, anyways, I never understood anger until very recently in that way, except obviously people would get angry around me in terms of like as I was growing up in college and other things. I would see their anger. I knew people that were hotheads, as you call it, or had a temper. So, for me, I’ll start out by saying that I didn’t realize I actually do get angry. I do one thing that I think I’ve been unlearning, and the one thing I do is I actually suppress it and then it comes out like weeks later or months later or hours later, and I think my anger or my frustration … It comes out not as anger, but as frustration or I say something kind of mean to somebody, but not knowing that it was related to something a long time ago or hours ago or days ago or months ago that I had suppressed. So, to me, this is just a fascinating topic because everybody gets angry, and I think we might not be realizing it. And then there’s also the kind of anger where you’re usually angry at another person, and that’s obviously not healthy. So, I just wanted to talk about it with you ’cause I’m sure you’ve got some really good thoughts on this.   [0:02:13] Steli: Yeah. I love the topic. It’s interesting because I had been thinking about this lately, but with a totally different … From a different perspective. But I never … Sometimes you’ll think about things very thoroughly, and sometimes there’s early thoughts that are not as verbalized and acts as more of an emotion, and you think about it for just … I do for just like split seconds here and there until it starts building up to my conscious, to a level where I start really thinking about it more consciously and more in depth and detail. Now, my upbringing was totally different than yours in this sense that anger was definitely part of my upbringing and my environment. So, my … I’ve told the brothers … The oldest … So, our dad — and we’ve talked about this in a prior episode of like how the death of our parents affected us as co-founders, as entrepreneurs and people … So, my dad died, and I’ve told the brothers … My oldest brother was like 16, 17, and he definitely got angry about the whole thing and had anger issues, and that displayed itself in many different challenging ways. One was that he would flip out at times and then scream around and get really aggressive and really angry with me and my other brother. So, my oldest brother was always kind of a very aggressive, angry energy in the house. I myself was really angry as a kid. I had this feeling of … Lots of shit happened to us when I was young, so I had this like very much chip on my shoulder and the feeling that the world is against us. So, I think between the age of 6 and 16 I was constantly getting into fights, and many of these fights honestly I was probably initiating. I had a very short fuse, so I was getting into a lot of fights, and I remember being really angry with the world and myself and everybody. And then my grandfather and my uncle … Lots of people in my family had anger issues for sure, so anger was definitely something that I experienced growing up. How to manage anger is definitely not something that I … I didn’t have a lot of people in my life that I would feel were very kind of evenly balanced and measured in how they managed their temper. So, being angry was definitely a big part of my life growing up. It’s not at all anymore part of my life now, at least not this uncontrolled anger that converts into aggression towards others, right? That’s not at all part of my life anymore. I don’t have a short fuse anymore, I think, and I don’t scream at people almost never. I almost never meaning … I might get loud with my kids at times after a challenging day full of travel — something like that. I’m not perfect. I never never get louder, but it’s very rare that I do. So, anger’s not something that’s a big part of my life today. I’ve recently been thinking about, “Huh, when was the moment where that changed for me?” So, that’s kind of the feeling that I had recently where I started reflecting on being angry and thinking, “Why isn’t this not as much part of my life anymore? And when did it change?” And I’m not sure. I’d love to explore that with you. One thing that I’ll say … One thing that I learned a long time ago, or a concept I’ve heard a long time ago that has been an interesting concept to me is that … Is that concept of moving from one emotion to another in steps and thinking about these steps. So, a lot of times people want to go from feeling depressed to being happy in one big swoop, and that’s almost to do because these emotions are so opposite. But I learned … Or I read about this concept once with like taking emotional steps from depression to happiness in small steps. The funny thing was that the person there, a psychologist there would propose to go from unhappiness, or depression, to frustration, and then from frustration to anger, and then from anger to a bias towards taking action, and then from action to feeling empowered, and from empowered to feeling excited, and from excited to feeling happy. The description was that anger is actually something that oftentimes comes to people right after they feel helpless. It’s a way that a lot of people deal with the feeling of helplessness because it’s a negative emotion, but it’s a more empowering emotion. People get angry usually either because they feel threatened, right? It’s like somebody’s trying to take something away from me, something bad is gonna happen to me, so I’m gonna deal with this with aggression because I feel threatened. Or, and this is something I never knew, people get angry as an empowerment tool from the emotion of feeling helpless because helpless feels so shitty, so instead of just sitting there and feeling sorry for themselves or feeling helpless, they eventually, in that feeling of frustration of helplessness, they get angry as a way to go from feeling helpless to feeling energy and power on their side, which is an interesting concept that I wanted to throw out there in terms of how anger happens and what anger is and how to use it.   [0:07:46] Hiten: That’s really powerful. I think that’s the non-obvious thing, right? If you’re angry, what’s making you feel helpless is probably a great question to ask. I mean, when I think about anger I think about a lot of the times … If I’m talking to somebody, and they’re telling me, “Oh, this is happening in my life,” or, “This team member on my team said they’re gonna leave, and I’m kind of pissed off about it. I did this, this, and this and this for them, and they didn’t … they’re still gonna leave,” and a lot of times they get angry about it. I think it comes … I see it clearly that in that situation a lot of times it comes from the helplessness. Like, “Hey. I wanted to work with this person. I did everything I could, I thought, and they’re still leaving.” And the person ends up having some kind of emotion around anger when really they just feel helpless that they can’t do … They can’t do anything about it and it’s gonna happen. I usually … The way I tend to treat those situations, maybe it’s over time or just realizing that I don’t want to be angry, is like I don’t even feel helpless. I try to think of … I don’t feel helpless. I don’t feel angry. I just say, “Well, when someone,” … And this is just more of a tip around when people want to leave your company. I know we’ve talked about that before. Just accept it and move on, ’cause that helplessness and anger leads to you being like grabby, being really needy about that person being in your company or in your life even. Obviously, we see this happen a lot with dating and relationships, and even marriage and divorce and things like that. But the helplessness, I think, is probably a little known sort of trigger. “A little known” meaning people just don’t realize why they’re getting angry. And so, to me, that acceptance is probably the biggest thing that I’ve learned myself even around anger. For example, I have what I call microaggressions and micro-anger, which are two different things. I think microaggressions are like, ” I’ll be passively aggressively … Or sarcastic and actually be pissed,” which are more like kind of microaggressions. For me, micro-anger is like getting … Literally like really … I could feel it in myself and my body of getting angry about something really small, and that’s like a micro-anger, and that to me a lot of times, for me at least, as I think about it … It actually comes from this feeling of helplessness and this feeling of like, “I can’t do anything about that situation,” or the moment has passed, but I wasn’t happy with that moment. And all of a sudden, I’m like feeling this emotion. Like, what the fuck? Why am I feeling this emotion, you know? It leads back to a lack of control, a helplessness. And so, I just want to point out that I think what you said is more powerful than people might be thinking because when you look back at why are you angry or a little upset or have a micro-anger, or even a microaggression about something, it has something to do with where you’re lacking control, or you have this perception that you’re lacking control over the situation.   [0:10:51] Steli: Yeah, absolutely. I think that … For me, the most obvious example of this to me is with my kids. If my wife or I get angry at one of our kids, it’s never because we feel threatened. Our kids are pretty cool cats and pretty actually responsible for their age, so it’s very rarely that they put themselves in danger, so that we are afraid and get angry. When we get angry, it’s because we’ve tried to influence them in a way and we can’t with the tools that we’ve tried. Maybe they’re running out of control and we’re running out of ways to deal with them, or we’re very inflexible in the way we’re trying to deal with them, and then we get angry. But that anger comes from helplessness. It’s like, “I don’t know how to make you do what I want you to do,” or, “I don’t know how to make you stop doing something I don’t want you to do.” Since I’m trying the same thing again and again and again — it’s not working … That helplessness, that powerlessness that I feel, it translates into anger towards you. It’s never really fear that we have or feeling threatened. It’s always helplessness that drives us angry at our kids, and it’s … Every time that I get angry at my kids, or many times, I’ll pick up on that like, “Ah, you’re really helpless. That’s all it is,” and just telling myself, “Ah, you’re really helpless right now. That’s why you’re getting angry at them,” that alone shifts my emotion instantly because I’m like, “All right. If I’m helpless, how can I help myself? How can I change what I’m doing right now?”   [0:12:26] Hiten: Yeah. I don’t ever need to feel helpless, you know?   [0:12:29] Steli: Yeah.   [0:12:29] Hiten: It’s not necessary.   [0:12:30] Steli: Yeah. I’m like that’s not useful, right?   [0:12:33] Hiten: No.   [0:12:33] Steli: And me going, “Oh, they’re doing this thing again, and they’re not listening to me,” … That’s a different mind frame that like, “Wow. I’m really inflexible right now, and I feel really helpless. How do I change that?” It just instantly changes the way I think about resolving the conflict. The other thing, I do believe that in many startup situations people probably get angry because they feel threatened or they’re afraid of something. But I know in our case that’s never the case. I don’t ever feel threatened … Six years of doing this with two co-founders and now 30 people in our startup, I never feel threatened, right, because we don’t allow people in our lives that are that type of person, right? We don’t have people in our lives that we don’t trust. We don’t allow people in our lives that are not great human beings. So, I want to acknowledge that that’s something many startup founders experience because they work with people that they don’t trust, or they work with people that are not trustworthy. But it’s not something that we experience, but I do experience anger in my company, but it’s usually coming out of helplessness. Either somebody wanting to leave that I don’t want to leave, or somebody not doing as well as I thought they should do and I can’t help them get there and I’m getting angry at them, but it’s really, again, helplessness. Like, “Why can’t I make this work? Why can’t I help this person to change?” Or, “Shit. Why’s this person not wanting to work with me on this or stay with my company on my team?” It’s usually helplessness within the startup context. For me, it doesn’t translate anymore into like screaming and being angry at them or being really loudly angry. It’s more of an inner-dialogue. It doesn’t come out in … I’m not really passive aggressive, I think. That’s not one of the channels that I use. I think what I do is I get really resentful in my mind. I start really criticizing them over and over and over and over again and being really automatic and habitual and repetitive with it, and people will pick up on that. In my mind, just in the terms of like … My energy is so clear with people. When I enjoy being around people it’s so obvious to them that when I start resenting them, when I start thinking critically with them, I’ve learned not to be criticizing to people, not to be aggressive with people, but they can just feel that my energy around them is not good anymore, or not excited or not positive or that I’m not comfortable around them. So, people pick up on that and they start feeling bad. They start sensing that I’m angry at them or that I’m resentful, that I think negatively of them, and then it kind of deteriorates. So, that’s something I’m trying to get better at, is like not starting to just internally deal with that anger because people still can feel it and it still comes out, but being more realizing I feel helpless in this situation, and now either accepting the situation, right? Just like you said, like acceptance. Well, if they go, they go, and I’ll wish them the best and we’ll move on with life. Or, to me, it’s like being in articulating my helplessness with people. “Help me out here. We’ve talked about this three times. I’ve tried to help you accomplish this. We’re still not there. I feel really helplessness right now. What do I need to do? How do we solve this? ‘Cause if it doesn’t work out, eventually it’s gonna be really bad for both of us, and I want our relationship to stay good.” Just being honest about it, I think, and honesty’s probably also part of acceptance, is a way of dealing with it. That’s something I’m trying to get better at because I’ve gotten away from being aggressive at people and being angry at them and screaming and being kind of more outwardsly projecting with my anger … I’ve gotten a lot better with that. It never gets to ten. I never explode or anything like that, but I do get resentful, and people pick up on it instantly. It just poisons the relationship, which is something I don’t want to do.   [0:16:39] Hiten: Yeah, resentment’s a tough one. I think if I feel a certain way about somebody, what I usually do is I turn that resentment into conversation, right? I find a productive way to have that conversation. It’s been one of my most valuable kind of things, ’cause like I said I don’t get angry. I learned growing up that that’s not an emotion that’s constructive, and so I think one way I deal with it is … As we’ve been talking about, right, this helplessness leads to anger. I think resentment obviously leads to anger, especially when you harbor it, hold it, you know?   [0:17:17] Steli: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:17:18] Hiten: So, if I have that inkling about somebody especially, usually it’s somebody important in my life, I tend to just think about it and find a way to have a conversation with that person directly, like literally directly. Usually it isn’t what you would think. It isn’t like, “Hey. I’m mad at you,” or, “Hey. I resent you.” It’s actually more like a very constructive like, “Hey. Can we talk about what happened at this time? I have some thoughts on it, and I need to just talk to you about it.” And those conversations go really well, I got to tell you, Steli. Like, if I just think about it and say, “Hey. I just want to talk about it,” and I think about what I want to say or what I’m feeling and where it’s coming from, like what event or what thing caused it, it’s amazingly … it helps me as a human personally not get angry, or more importantly not feel that harboring of any kind of negativity around somebody else, especially somebody who I have to interact with regularly.   [0:18:14] Steli: Yeah. I don’t remember the exact quote, but I think there’s a quote out there from Nelson Mandela that’s something around like if you’re angry at others, or if you’re resent … Resentment is like taking small sips of poison, right? When you’re resentful or angry at other people, it’s like you’re poisoning your own mind and body with those thoughts, and that’s always something that I’m thinking of. Whenever I pick up that negativity inside of me, I’m like, “I’m literally right now poising myself. That’s not gonna help anybody.” I want to bring up two quick … One quick thought and one quick tip because I think that both of us are probably … As we said, we’re not getting angry in the typical sense that most people would experience anger, and we’re probably a lot more in control of our own emotions or in touch with it, but I do think that there’s people out there, especially in the work environment, a stressful work environment, they get really aggressively angry either themselves or have to deal with somebody that is like that, so I want to give some tips on that as well. But one thing that I recognize about anger as an emotion is that it is an emotion with high energy, and what I’ve tried to start doing is … I always say that the difference between fear and excitement, the feeling of nervousness and excitement is just the way you think about it, just context. I’ve given this advice to lots of people about public speaking. We get that internal pumped up emotions all over the place — that could be excitement if you just think about it as excitement versus thinking about it as nervousness. I think that with anger as well, I think about … It’s a negative emotion, but the good thing about it is that it’s a high energy emotion. High energy … I always ask myself, “How do I use high energy?” I’d much rather be angry than depressed, right … Because anger is high energy, and high energy, if you know how to channel your emotions, you might be able to use that emotion, that energy, and channel it in a productive way. A lot of people have changed their life after they got into a point where they go, “No fucking more.” They hit rock bottom, and they’re not depressed, they get angry and pissed and they go, “Fuck this. No more,” and they completely change their life, right? They have that moment of high intensity where they’re like, “I’m done with this shit. I’m not taking this anymore. I’m gonna change everything around.” So, I think that anger can be a really productive emotion if you know how to use the energy and channel it in a productive way versus using that energy and channeling it down a negative path. The other thing that I want to say is that with people out there … One thing that is a very kind of universal advice that I still think is so valuable and people don’t follow is that if and when you get really, really pissed and angry with somebody, please don’t write to them, right? Don’t send them an email. Don’t send them a text message. Don’t send them a Facebook message. Don’t write to people that you’re angry at. Usually my advice would be if you’re really, really pissed, if you’re like at the level ten with somebody and you had it and you’re about to write a really angry, pissed email back to their shitty email to you, call a friend or somebody you trust and talk it out and let your anger out and tell them the email you’re about to write and have somebody console you and consult you. I have this with my co-founder Anthony. Whenever he gets really angry at somebody, he pings me and goes, “I’m about to write this email.” He copies and pastes the email to me. “I’m about to write this email to this person. Please help me not do it,” and then I’ll call and then I’ll laugh. I’ll be like, “I love your email. I get it. You’re really pissed. This sucks, but obviously don’t fucking send this email,” right? And then we’ll talk about it. I’ll do the same thing. In the rare occasions when I get pissed at somebody and want to write them something mean, I ping my co-founder and go, “Please stop me from doing this. It’s probably not a good idea.” So, that’s a … Just please don’t write to people when you’re angry, and maybe find an anger management buddy.   [0:22:22] Hiten: I love the buddy angle. I actually recommend to people to write an angry draft without putting the person’s email in it, and just write it. I love the build that you have which is go find an angry buddy, or a partner in crime on the anger that’ll talk you down and be like, “All right. Yeah, don’t send that. Here’s a better way to say it or whatever.” That’s great.   [0:22:46] Steli: Awesome. All right. I think that will wrap this episode up with this, although we could talk for hours about it. Thank you for suggesting the topic, Hiten. This, I think, is a killer topic because I do think that anger has probably caused a lot of unrepairable damage in startups, right?   [0:23:03] Hiten: Oh, yeah.   [0:23:04] Steli: Founders getting angry at each other. Founders getting angry at team members. Team members getting angry at each other, and then saying things or acting in ways that is so hurtful and so destructive that you can’t really repair that anymore and that kind of creates the beginning of the end. So, I love that we had a chance to chat a little bit about anger within life, but also within the context of like you’re working with other people — how do you deal with that.   [0:23:28] Hiten: Yep. I totally agree.   [0:23:31] Steli: That’s it from us for this episode. We’ll hear you guys very soon.   [0:23:34] Hiten: Okay. See ya. Don’t be- [0:23:36] The post 278: Anger Management in Startups appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about how to start a tech business without a technical co-founder. It’s normal for entrepreneurs these days to want to start tech businesses, be it a cloud-based service, mobile app, or a social sharing platform. However, when you have an idea for a tech company, but no tech experience, bringing your idea to life might seem impossible at first. In this episode, Steli and Hiten share some tips for entrepreneurs looking to set-up thriving tech startups but don’t have any coding experience including tips on how to work with a developer for the first time. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:01 – About today’s topic. 00:34 – Why we’re talking about this today. 01:35 – Why Hiten is the best person to talk about this topic. 03:53 – Hiten’s advice for starting a tech company when you’re not a techie. 04:15 – What Hiten did when he built his first tech company . 07:47 – Steli expands on Hiten’s point. 08:45 – What to do after you’ve found a developer. 10:52 – Steli highlights an example of an app that was developed by 4 students in Germany. 14:44 – How to work with a developer when you are not a coder. 17:50 – Steli talks about the most useful thing he’s learned in 11 years of working with software developers. Quotes: Make friends. Find somebody that can give you advice and guidance while you looking for a developer to build your product. Write your idea on paper so that you get a better understanding of the scope of the project.   [0:00:00] Steli: Hey, everybody. This is Steli.   [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about how to start a business that’s a tech business without a technical co-founder.   [0:00:12] Steli: Yeah, how do like-   [0:00:13] Hiten: Steli, you … Yeah, go ahead.   [0:00:16] Steli: Yeah, no, how to start a startup without a technical co-founder, but really what it means is how to build a software product without a technical co-founder, right?   [0:00:24] Hiten: Sounds good, yeah.   [0:00:26] Steli: Lots of people that are asking us this question.   [0:00:31] Hiten: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I get this question a lot as well, just because people are really curious about it because there are a ton of people out there that don’t know how to program and want to start a business and create software.   [0:00:44] Steli: Yeah. There was a time, I remember this very vividly, where I think the prevailing wisdom for a little while was wisdom, the fashion insight was like, oh, everybody should learn to code. And if you’re not technical and you want to build a software product, why don’t you invest a year on Codecademy or something and learn how to develop, and then, develop the product yourself, or develop an MVP yourself. I think that was really hot for a hot minute. Then, I know, I don’t hear that as advice as much anymore. I wanted to talk about this, A, because I know there’s lots of people, of our listeners, that are not technical and are building software products, or want to build a software product, or start a startup, but also because you have fucking built five products last year with a new co-founder of yours, that is also non-technical.   [0:01:37] Hiten: That’s right.   [0:01:38] Steli: And so, who better to talk about how to do this than you?   [0:01:44] Hiten: Yeah. I started my first set of software products, even the ones that weren’t successful, back in 2000, I guess we started coding the first one in 2004, and launched a Crazy Egg, the one that worked in 2005. All that, was with no technical co-founder either. I’ve never had a real technical co-founder in the traditional sense that people do. Both of my co-founders for different things are non-technical. Things have changed quite a bit, I would say. One thing that I would say that’s changed more than anything else is going to be, maybe a little funny, but it really helped solve problems is that, it’s very likely that if you’re out there and you’re thinking of starting some kind of software business, you know someone who can program. When I started, now 12 years ago, or 13 years ago, with programming, 14 on the internet, doing stuff while we were running a consulting business doing marketing, that wasn’t the case. I literally don’t remember or think I knew anyone who was a programmer when I started, like personally as a friend, or somebody I knew. Now, it’s like you go to college, you got lots of friends that are programmers because their getting double majors in this, or they just started picking it up for whatever reason, or at least they can design and do front end code, and stuff like that. I think that’s changed a lot, so the advice of learn to code yourself, is definitely died down quite a bit. I used to threaten our engineers that I would learn to code, and they would laugh at me. Yeah, I think that the biggest step that I had was, you probably have a friend that can learn to code, that knows code. I’m not saying that you should go ask them to build something for you. What I’m saying is, then at least as you go out looking for help building something, you can ask them to help you vet people. You can ask them for advice on what you should be looking for with the latest technology is that you should be using, Not even the latest, just what technology you should be using for it, trying to do. You can get a lot of advice for free from people who are probably your friends, or even friends of friends that know how to code. I don’t even think I had friends of friends that I could go to, and be like, yeah, are you a programmer? Do you know how to build stuff. It just wasn’t as much of a thing as it is today.   [0:04:03] Steli: I agree. At the same time, honestly, Hit, I think that most people around the world still are in that place. I do think that, if you leave the US, and especially the coast, and especially Silicon Valley, right, where we live, I do think that there’s still lots of places where people are growing up and eventually they say, hey, I want to do a fucking startup. I want to do a software product, but they really don’t know anybody who is in software, and they don’t have any friends. What do they do?   [0:04:35] Hiten: Yeah, that’s fair. I guess I extend friends to online friends too.   [0:04:40] Steli: That’s fair.   [0:04:40] Hiten: Back then, it was much harder to go find someone even online. I’ll tell you what I did. I still did it, but I was literally, I guess this just goes to the point of what advice I’d give anybody. One big piece of advice is, make friends. The way I did it back in the day was I literally talked to everybody that was part of the, that put their name as a programmer on the Ruby on Rails website. Ruby on Rails is now a very popular programming language. Back then, it wasn’t even in version 1.0. I knew that it was the hot thing because I’d been following 37 Signals, now, they’re called Basecamp, back then, and they were writing a lot of stuff about product development and design. They were an agency at just kind of launched these products, Basecamp specifically, and a bunch of other ones. They build this framework on how to build base on Ruby called Ruby on Rails on how to, it made it easier to build products like theirs. I hit up literally everyone on that list via email or even phone call because their phones numbers were listed. They responded to me, and I talked to them, and asked them if they would help me build what I wanted to build. At that point, I actually already had, I wouldn’t say, a bad experience, but a mediocre experiences with a set of developers, of a whole set of developers actually across many different products, and really had one specific problem that I was looking to solve, which is expertise in Ruby on Rails. Very few people had it at the time because it was such a new language. And so, I had hit everybody up, the whole list. I got lucky finding somebody who I still work with today. I made friends. Some of the folks, there’s a senior person at Airbnb that I talked to back in the day who’s had his own startup since that. There’s a few people outside of the country that were co-contributors to Rails that I still know, that I hit up back then, and a number of other people that probably remember me. I’d say, make friends. Now, it’s easier than ever. It’s not just Ruby on Rails. There’s so many other technologies. There’s so many others you can reach people who know how to program. You could probably send out a message on Facebook, and get some help if you want to. You could probably do the same with Twitter, or wherever you have some level of your friends hanging out online, or you can even just join a certain SOC community or group, and start asking around. I think back then it was much harder to ask around, and find trusted advice on engineering and programing, and so, I had to go basically hunt people down that I thought were good, or good enough to help me.   [0:07:17] Steli: I think that’s a super, super piece of advice. I think you’re absolutely right, today. I had the same scenario when I grew up, like, all my friends had nothing to do with startups or software development, or anything like that. But, in 2006-7, when I started to want to get into that area, it was not as easy as it is today. Today, you can just go on fucking Facebook and lookup a number of groups, and go on Twitter and follow a bunch of people, and just find friends, but I think the important thing is to highlight here is to, you’re not saying to people, go and try to find your technical co-founder, as step one. What you’re saying is, make friends, technical friends, developer friends, and find somebody that can give you advice and guidance as you’re trying to find somebody who’s going to build your software, your product, right? I think it’s a very, you said it very clearly, but I want to underline and highlight it because I could easily imagine people mishearing you on that point.   [0:08:22] Hiten: Yeah, exactly. Find help. Help comes in the form of advice from people that you can learn to trust. Or, programmers, there’s more of these people out there than ever, and that’s my point, right? I had to do a lot more work than I would have to do today, if I was the same person. Right. Exactly.   [0:08:39] Steli: Now, I found somebody who’s a friend who give me advice. What typically would be my next step? Is it finding a developer that I can outsource a version one of my product?   [0:08:51] Hiten: Yeah. Typically, I’m looking for, here’s the thing, right? This is funny, I mean, it’s true, you can go, come up with your idea, write it down in whatever way you’re able to. You can even learn how to do that if you want to go deeper, learn about how do I spec out a product, or how do I write requirements for engineering, and write something out that is cohesive and coherent. Then, you can go to a bunch of, either individual free lancers, development shops, or even something like, Gigster, and go actually get a bid for how much it’s going to cost to get what you want done. I’m not saying that you do that because you have the money or you don’t. What I’m saying is, that will start helping you get an understanding of more information that will help you figure out how does this thing get built, how do I actually get into this? I would do that even if you have somebody who you’re considering to join you as a co-founder of something like that, or even want to work with.   [0:09:47] Steli: I love that. I mean, the other thing you could also just use tools today, that weren’t available a long time ago, like Bavomack is a great tool, right? You could use a tool that requires zero development skills, where you can just mark up what you want to have, like, how should the app look like, what does it do? You could fuck around, play around and create a, four, five, six screens to then take and talk to a developer about, like, this is the app I want to build, and this is a few screens I’ve put together on how it would look like. Maybe your developer friend, hey, what’s your advice? What’s have I not thought about? What’s messed up about this? You can do things to create some progress. The other thing, I think we mentioned this in a prior episode, but I want to bring this up again because I love this story so much. There was startup that has became very, very successful, and sold for a ton of money, and was basically a mobile app for doing body weight exercises. It was built by four student kids somewhere in Germany. They were all kind of like body weight workout, fitness dorks. When they had the idea first, they were wise enough to not just go, oh, we want to build an app, let’s go and find some web development agency, or mobile development agency, let’s pay them a ton of money, and develop some kind of an app. They said, we know nothing about apps, or software, but we love doing body weight exercising and workouts, so why don’t we just start a Facebook group for our university, and we’ll do body weight exercise groups on weekends. They started that and they did that really successfully. The group grew, and then, other universities started joining the Facebook group, and so, Speckhardt, Germany. They built a really big Facebook group. Then, eventually they said, wow, we have this big audience, all these workouts are happening that are organized on our Facebook group, why don’t we write up a little e-book on body weight exercising and all that stuff, and we’ll sell it for a few euros, and we’ll promote it on the Facebook group, and then, the email list that we’ve built up over the last year or two, and make some money with it. They did it and they made, I don’t know, 30, 40k selling their e-book. Then, they said, shit, now, we have some money and we have an audience, and we have a much better developed idea of what people want, and what people would use the app for. Let’s go now to a web development agency and build a mobile app. And, that’s what they did. They took the money they made out of the e-book, and then build a mobile app. Then, they launched it because they already had a big audience. It instantly was ranked number one in a bunch of online stores and mobile app stores. It became a huge success. Two years later they sold it for, I don’t know, an insane amount of money, a 100 million or something a long those lines. To me, that’s a beautiful way of like, four people, they were all non-technical, building an incredibly successful mobile app, and selling it for millions, but they did it. Their first step was not even going and finding a developer friends. Their first step was trying to find a way to get started even without building an app, and build some traction. What they did was, they built the audience first, and then, they built the product, which is something we’ve talked about many, many times before. I find that often times, as you build an audience, it’s going to be much easier for you to convince developers to come and help you build an app. As you build an audience, you might learn a lot more about and get customers insights about what people want. It might morph your ideas from what kind of an app or product you should build. That can be a really beautiful way to get started. You don’t have to wait around necessarily for somebody to develop and code a version one to get going. But, here’s a question I have for you Hiten, one, the first software company that I built in Silicon Valley, I didn’t have the technical co-founder, and so, I started, I hired, I was not smart enough to look for friends and all that, so I just found a developer that was very inexperienced, but a really cool person, and I basically hired that person to be my first developer, and pay him to develop my product. One issue that I had from day one was that because I didn’t know how to code, and because I didn’t have a friend that knows how to code, I was always unsure about if the ideas that my developer had, or the timelines that my developer gave me, or if the technology, the tech steps that my developer wanted to choose, I could not weigh in on if these decisions were good or bad. I think this is a problem that a lot of non-technical founders have is that, as they work with developers, they don’t know how much to push them. They don’t know if the decisions and recommendations these developers make are good or bad. I understand that if you have a developer friend that’s really experienced that might help. How do you and Marie, how do you guys deal with it. You’re both non-technical and you’ve built five software products last year. You work with developers. How do you deal with working really productively with them, although, you don’t have the technical backgrounds to always understand if the code is good or not, or if those decisions are good, or if the timelines are realistic or not?   [0:14:59] Hiten: Yeah. That’s a great question on something that I’ve gotten good at over the years, myself. I think this year, I’ve gotten even better at for a bunch of reasons. One, Marie and I, on our producthabits.com, our newsletter, we share what we’re learning about the process because we always want to get better. We’re documenting a lot of things that I started to learn previously that weren’t documented about, how to do technical research, how to do it right if you’re more on the business product side, so there’s a tone of content we’ve written. I think, today, what I’d like to share though, is something that I find really important. I’ve shared it before, and I say it a lot, but it’s, look, act like you can understand anything, would be my first tip. It’s one of the reasons I work with Maria because until this year, literally, one year ago until last year, literally probably until January, she really didn’t have much experience building software, and much meaning none. She worked at a company that built software and she was doing a little bit of consulting around marketing and social media and other things like that before she started working with me, before that she had a corporate job. What’s been fascinating is, just having that attitude of, I can understand it. I can learn how to ask the right questions. I will Google what I need to when I need to. I don’t rely on someone else to tell me about these concepts or these ideas. That’s really all it takes. That was my attitude many years ago. That was my attitude back in 2003, which is, all right, I don’t know anything about this, but it’s just like learning anything else. Here’s a wonderful thing. If I don’t need to learn how to code, I can be much better at helping the engineers. The reason I say thing is because I’m not sitting there, spending that year or two years, or however long, how to code. I’m spending my time leaning how to understand their world and help them do their jobs. That’s really important because what I found is that, the scrutiny around planning, and timelines, and milestones, and decision making, and trade offs, and all these things that are actually business problems, Steli. They exist in programing. No offense to the programmers because I understand that they’re in code all the time and think very literally and binary. Man, most of them don’t know how to think logically enough around the business use case, the product use cases, and all these other things because they’re in code all day, right? It’s like a writer. If a writer never read, guess what? Their not that good of a writer.   [0:17:41] Steli: I love that. The most important part here is attitude, right?   [0:17:47] Hiten: Yeah.   [0:17:47] Steli: Attitude.   [0:17:48] Hiten: Yeah, good way to put it.   [0:17:49] Steli: Right. Understand that you don’t need a technical co-founder to succeed. If you find somebody that eventually grows into that role, that’s awesome, right, but you don’t have to be needy. You don’t have to be lacking confidence. You don’t have to be thinking, oh, I cannot do anything I want because I don’t have the technical skills. There’s hundreds and thousands of examples of people that have built amazing software products without having a technical co-founder when they started out, and being incredibly successful. You can do that too. Whatever you don’t know, you can learn or find out. I went through the exercise of trying to learn to code for half a year or so. It was useful, a little bit, but the most useful thing that I’ve acquired as a skill over the past decade or more so, 11 year of working with software developers, is learning how they think, and learning how product development works, so I can communicate effectively with them and I can work really effectively with them, but also, understanding that product management, and development, and software development, that’s not my strength. It takes decades and decades to get really, really good. I can bring a lot more value, be amazing at other things, right? Embrace the fact that you hopefully have strengths in other areas instead of beating yourself up over it, and thinking that you cannot accomplish your goals just because you’re lacking this mythical technical co-founder. I’ll give one more tip before we wrap up this episode because you have been given some gold today. My one last tip I want to share with people, because this is a mistake I’ve seen many people make, and there’s a simple solution to this is, if you meet somebody that you think could be your technical co-founder, first of all, I don’t think that you should go out and try and find an instant technical co-founder. I understand there is examples of people that have done that and succeeded. Just like there are examples of people playing the lottery and winning, but it’s still not my recommended strategy, like, you’re not a technical guy or gal, you have an idea for a product, and you go, I’m going to find my technical co-founder right now. It’s like saying, I’m going to get married. I’m going to find the man or woman of my dreams, and I’m going to be in a relationship with x, getting instantly married, and going bar to bar, which would be meet up to meet up trying to find that person. That’s usually not going to work. Try to meet developers and technical people. Try to become friends with them. Try to get advice from them. Eventually, if you meet somebody you really want to work with more closely, don’t instantly offer the co-founder a role. Try to date them for a little bit. Try to move in with them for a little bit, and then, offer them, you know, propose more formally. In this world, what I would suggest is, hang out with them, become friends with them. Then, maybe work on a project, but not your project. Work on a throw away weekend project. Come up with some kind of idea and go, hey, I want to work more with you. Here’s some random, cool ideas. Maybe we should just, you know, we can just rent an Airbnb, or go to this co-working space for a week, and let’s just work on some projects together. Work on something that you can throw away, so that you can learn how it is to work with that developer, and that person can figure out how it is to work with you. If you get along really well, and things are awesome, you can then say, hey, let’s work on this main idea I’m trying to build together. If it doesn’t work out, if you don’t like each other, if the relationship isn’t jiving, then you can part ways with no problems. There’s no children, so to speak. They didn’t work with your software for two, three days or weeks or months, and now, when they want to leave, they claim ownership over your software, the product you want to build. Now, you have all kinds of issues and problems and complications. You built something that had no commitment to it to really just learn if you can work well together. If you can work well together, then you can work on the main product or company together. That would be my biggest tip for people that start working with a developer for the first time, and get really excited, unless you find that, you go to a really big store, or something like that, and you’re going to outsource it to somebody. That’s a totally different use case.   [0:21:52] Hiten: I got one last thing just to double down, and then I think we can wrap this up. I totally agree with you. Testing the relationship is super important. I’m sure we’ll have an episode on testing relationships at some point. Yeah, I really like that topic. It’s one of my favorites. You just reminded me that I talked to so many people about that in almost every scenario. As we were talking, Marie is completely across the place that we’re in right now, and I’m loud so I’m sure she can hear me. She basically was saying, and she wanted to double down on the fact, and she texted me and she said, look, the reason that she thinks that people prevent themselves from building these business or software, or any of that, even thought they might have a great idea, or think they do, is that, they create conditions where they fail. They fail because they think they need to know x, y, z thing in order to even start, and that’s incorrect. You don’t need to know how to program a line of code. You just need to know how products are built. I think that really undertone is really a big deal because, don’t prevent yourself from starting just because you think you need to know everything about programing. You literally just need to know about 20% of it, and you can literally work with programmers and get whatever you want built.   [0:23:13] Steli: Amen. How beautifully said. I like that we’ve talked about potentially, and this is a little bit of inside baseball to people that are interested. This year, we might bring in some new voices on the podcast. We might not, but we’ve been thinking and talking about it a little bit with Hiten. Marie might be somebody you’ll hear in a future episode. I love how she’s already part of this episode via text message.   [0:23:39] Hiten: There you go, exactly.   [0:23:42] Steli: Our first guest on The Startup Chat via text message. I love it.   [0:23:46] Hiten: That’s right.   [0:23:47] Steli: Also, man, that’s it for us. For all of you that are listening and enjoying The Startup Chat, please do us a favor and go to iTunes or stitchel web, or you’re listening to us, and give us a review. Give us some rating. It really helps more people discover The Startup Chat, so we highly appreciate it. If you’ve got any feedback, or stories, or ideas, or tactics to share, on how to build products without a technical co-founder shoot us an email, hnshah@gmail.com, steli@close.io. We always love to hear from you. That’s it. Wrap from us for this week.   [0:24:21] Hiten: Bye. [0:24:21] The post 277: How to Start a Startup Without a Technical Co-Founder appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

In this special episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten are at Dreamforce and they talk about how and why you need to hire a head of culture at your startup, especially if your team members work remotely. Thanks to Jorge Soto and the team at First Cut for recording and editing the video! In today’s business world, a lot of startups are run as remote teams, and doing so has its benefits. Many studies have shown that remote working has valuable effects on employee productivity, happiness, and general well-being. However, there are some challenges of running a remote team and one of these challenges is creating a positive company culture with your team. This is where creating the position of head of culture can be beneficial for your startup. Tune in to hear Steli and Hiten’s recommendations for how to create the position of head of culture in your startup, when to create the role, what qualities to look out for when you hire for this role and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:24 About today’s topic. 01:23 Why this topic was chosen for this episode. 02:45 Hiten talks about how a similar position was created and filled at his company, Kissmetrics. 04:11 Hiten gives real-world examples of how important a person in this role can be to a startup. 05:26 Steli talks about how a similar position was created and filled at his company, Close. 06:17 Steli talks about the qualities to look out for when you hire for this role at your startup. 07:46 If you should consider hiring for this role and when to do so. 09:50 The real value of having a person with this role at your startup and whether it can be measured. 13:34  Steli and Hiten attempt to come up with an appropriate title for this role. Quotes: Having a person that team members can trust, come to and confide in can be a powerful thing for a startup. Once you get past 15 team members at your startup, start looking for a person in your team with incredibly high emotional intelligence, and is trusted by other team members for this role. A lot of the value that this person creates in your startup can’t really be measured. [0:00:01] Hiten: Here we like to talk about more than just sales and marketing.   [0:00:03] Steli: We just want to bullshit and chat about business and life and hopefully while we’re doing that provide a little value to people.   [0:00:08] Hiten: The world’s best business podcast.   [0:00:09] Steli: Ooh.   [0:00:11] Hiten: Shit.   [0:00:11] Steli: Oh shit, we got it.   [0:00:12] Hiten: We’re people trying to get shit done.   [0:00:15] Steli: we don’t want to give you feedback that’s bullshit.   [0:00:17] Hiten: We want you to do your best.   [0:00:19] Hiten: So are you comfortable?   [0:00:21] Steli: No, not at all.   [0:00:22] Hiten: All right.   [0:00:22] Steli: The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is that I’m not allowed to kiss you, they said that specifically.   [0:00:25] Hiten: Yeah, they said you can’t do that.   [0:00:27] Steli: I don’t know why they had to say it specifically, but now I’m totally thrown off by that. So, for people that just listen to the podcast, today’s a special episode.   [0:00:35] Hiten: Yep.   [0:00:36] Steli: We’re here with TeamFirstCut at at the Sales Hacker booth at Dreamforce.   [0:00:42] Hiten: Dreamforce, yep.   [0:00:42] Steli: So there’s gonna be a video to this episode.   [0:00:44] Hiten: Apparently.   [0:00:45] Steli: There’s gonna be a link in the show notes, but if you can’t watch the video-   [0:00:51] Hiten: We’re gonna embed the video in the blog post.   [0:00:52] Steli: In the blog post as well.   [0:00:53] Hiten: How about that.   [0:00:53] Steli: Yep. But if you can’t watch the video for any reason just imagine him and I making out the entire episode.   [0:00:59] Hiten: Yeah, there you go.   [0:01:00] Steli: All right, so today’s episode of The Startup Chat is gonna be about something a little bit funky, Hiten and I like to do this once in a while-   [0:01:07] Hiten: Make out?   [0:01:08] Steli: Yeah, talk about funky subjects, but that maybe too. And the thing that we want to talk about today is a role that I see rise in significance with startups that does not yet have a name, I’m not even sure if it’s really a role or it’s something that’s been around forever, but I’ve been thinking about this so I wanted to explore that further with you.   [0:01:31] Hiten: It has no name.   [0:01:32] Steli: It maybe has one …   [0:01:34] Hiten: How do you describe it? Bring it on.   [0:01:35] Steli: So here’s the deal, I’ve been talking with a friend at his birthday party last weekend and he was telling me about growing his remote team and some of the challenges they have that seem to be cultural and communication issues. And one of the tips, he was asking me about tips to create a really healthy culture, one of the tips that I brought up, or one of the people that I saw that highlighted in our our team, was somebody what we call has the motherly energy of the company, it’s like the cultural champion. The person that has a warm energy, that has a nurturing energy and has established herself in the team without having a role or title in that regard as the person that people trust with their issues.   [0:02:20] Hiten: Yeah, yeah.   [0:02:20] Steli: Personal or professional. And so I was describing how important it is to have that type of a person in a team in general, but in a remote team even more so. And then other founders were chiming in, some people that had that person on their team and some people that were lacking that and were discussing this whole-   [0:02:40] Hiten: How do you create that?   [0:02:41] Steli: How do you create, how do you find that person, why is that person so important? But I still don’t know how to call that, like what is that? You know, in some teams it seemed to be the office manager, in other teams it seemed to be a person on the support team and some teams it was a co-founder. So it’s hard to tell who’s going to take on that nurturing energy and what do you call that person? But I wanted to talk to you about that, I’m sure you had some thoughts.   [0:03:05] Hiten: Yeah, at Kissmetrics at some point it was about 30 people, we hired what I’m gonna call, what I’m gonna call right now a Cecilia.   [0:03:14] Steli: A Cecilia.   [0:03:15] Hiten: Her name was Cecilia.   [0:03:16] Steli: Oh, okay.   [0:03:17] Hiten: Is Cecilia.   [0:03:17] Steli: I was like, is that some Greek mythology story that I-   [0:03:19] Hiten: No, just Cecilia and I had, when I first met her she was coming off of being an office manager/admin type of person and when I met her I was like, “Oh, you can do so much more than that.” Just based kind of how her friendliness was with people and how she thought of herself. Well, I think that role, after we hired her, this is a funny story, I actually talked to my co-founder Neil and said I want to hire her. He didn’t understand, he was like, No.   [0:03:51] Steli: Why?   [0:03:51] Hiten: But I really want to hire her. He’s like, “Okay.” He calls me later, “I need some budget to hire her.” He’s the one responsible for budget and I was like, “Why?” “Well, you really wanted to hire her.” I was like, “Okay.” You never really want to hire someone that bad if I say no, I’m like, “Yeah, pretty much.” So we hired her and then two months later he was like, “Oh, I get it. I understand. I understand why you wanted to hire her.” And it’s like, we had a remote team, we also had an office in San Francisco and it was simple things like when Lars came to town he had a specific gear he liked. It wasn’t the easiest to find. Cecilia always found it and made sure it showed up and was there. Cecilia started conducting the exit interviews with the team members when they left.   [0:04:31] Steli: Okay.   [0:04:31] Hiten: Cecilia would actually be responsible for a bunch of the first level interviews with the team members. The cultural interview was her, it should be everyone, but it was specifically her in our case. So yeah, I don’t have an idea of a role or title, but generally I think there’s some companies that call them the happiness person or happiness manager, that’s why you mentioned customer support and in our team I even totally forgot what we had ended up having the role be. But it ended up merging with some HR title just so that she could fit in a box, although she never fit in a box.   [0:05:04] Steli: Yeah.   [0:05:05] Hiten: The cool thing about her now, just to give people an idea of the sort of person, she started studying NLP and so that’s Neural Linguistic Programming and after that now she’s become more of a CEO/executive coach. And she’s really good at it, she did that for me, I was not the CEO of the company at the time, but I was responsible for a lot of people and she actually did that for me. And so when we wanted to talk about people, she always had a great way to talk about people in the company and what was going on with them and she was always in the know.   [0:05:36] Steli: It’s so good to hear you talk about Cecilia because we have Mary and Mary does a lot of the same things that you’re describing with Cecilia. We call her queen of culture, you know, head of culture. She’s also the entire HR department, but from being our head recruiter and being the person that’s taking care of the recruiting process, of people being taken care of in our recruiting process, to doing the culture interviews to doing the exit interviews to doing … Organizing and planning our team retreats. All these types of things are kind of within her role, but even more importantly the one thing that I never thought about too deeply until I saw this in the last two years play out really strongly is that she is somebody who has instant trust in the team and the company and because maybe, especially because maybe she doesn’t have some kind of intimidating title, right? She’s not like the CEO, COO, even if it was CPO or something, or VP or something, just because her role was a little ambiguous people feel like they can open up. A, because she’s an amazing person and has a really good sense for people, because she’s very trustworthy, but also because she’s not intimidating in some kind of hierarchy, she’s nobody’s boss, technically. So people feel comfortable coming to her with issues and problems that they’re not comfortably sharing with anybody else in the company.   [0:07:05] Hiten: Yep.   [0:07:06] Steli: And these are tiny little things sometimes, but they do add up. And having a person that people trust and can come to and confide with can be an incredibly powerful thing for making small things stop at the beginning and never grow into big things?   [0:07:21] Hiten: Absolutely.   [0:07:21] Steli: And for making people just feeling treated really special in the company and feel like they belong. So you know you need, sometimes in teams we like to talk about leadership and we like to highlight especially the super overly-aggressive, confident, alpha-like type person that knows the direction and leads from the front and does all these things and I think that energy, that strong, dominant energy is important, but we forget to highlight leadership in a culture how important there is to have a nurturing energy as well.   [0:07:53] Hiten: Yeah, more community oriented.   [0:07:55] Steli: Yeah, so all right, now that we’ve talked about it and we realized that we both had a person like that, I feel like I did not know that this person needs to exist, so I was never looking for that person explicitly. Is that cool? Should startups not look for that person? Should they do look for that person? How do we think about, like …   [0:08:14] Hiten: I think it’s like the way you said at that dinner, that some people were coming and they’re like, “Oh. I know who that person is in my company, or I don’t know who that person is in my company, that person doesn’t exist.” So it’s simply just looking and seeing well, are you at a size where you need that? Usually, truthfully, I think founders are doing that role and playing that role for as long as they can. Sometimes they continue to, right? But once you hit some scale, usually probably around like 20 people, 15 people, some number like that, you start realizing the people who are taking care of it, the founders aren’t always able to kinda pay attention to everybody in that special way.   [0:08:47] Steli: Yeah.   [0:08:48] Hiten: And then having someone who’s either dedicated to that and also taking care of some of the sort of more traditional HR stuff or retreats and things like that, it’s smart. So if you don’t have someone like that in your company and you’re over about a dozen, 15 people, you should probably consider thinking about whether you can budget that hire, or what that looks like. And then usually, I think you’re right, a lot of those folks tend to be office managers or admins to start with. I’ve seen that go really great and really badly. I’ve seen it go really great when that person is promoted into that role. I’ve seen it go really badly when the person is just taking on those responsibilities and still being perceived as who they came in, the role they came into the company for, right? And then they end up leaving and having that sort of upgraded role at another company usually. Because when people, what I’ve learned, is people who are really into that culture and community like that inside a company usually, they tend to want to keep doing that. They’re not somebody who wants to do anything else. Like Cecilia is still coaching founders, it’s the same thing, or CEOs or executives, right? And so I think it’s just … They gravitate towards it.   [0:09:50] Steli: The one really important thing is I think to understand that a lot of the value that a person like this creates can’t be measured as easily as other things or cannot be measured at all.   [0:10:02] Hiten: Well, that’s why my co-founder Neil wouldn’t have it. In the beginning, he’s like, “Well, I don’t know.” Then he’s like, “Oh, I get it.”   [0:10:08] Steli: Because oftentimes we look at people, we put them in certain buckets and it’s like you’re the office manager, are you doing a good office manager job? You’re the support person are you doing a good support job? But here’s the person that you usually don’t hire for that role as a full time role, it’s kind of … We’re looking for somebody everybody will trust and will nurture our team-   [0:10:26] Hiten: Yeah, that’s not … We don’t hire for that in that way.   [0:10:29] Steli: But then the person might emerge and take on that responsibility, that’s incredibly valuable, but you cannot really measure that. You can’t really have KPIs, do people feel more nurtured and taken care of this quarter than last quarter? That’s a tough thing to really do. Since one of those roles where you … If the founders, the top leadership, if you don’t have culture and people as a priority and keeping a really healthy culture intact and making sure people are really healthy and happy at work, then you’re not going to be able to want to keep that person around or even promote that person in terms of their importance in the company because you’re gonna have a hard time justifying that because there’s no number you can point to that makes this person really, really crucial to the overall company.   [0:11:17] Hiten: That’s true. One thing I would say to that is that’s why a lot of these people end up either stuck in HR or have kind of responsibilities that are HR oriented and that kind of goes one of two ways. Like if the person really wants those responsibilities on top of the sort of culture responsibilities, they’ll gravitate towards it and they might even want to have the KPIs, because there are KPIs there. If they don’t though, what do you do? That’s kind of the big question I guess in my mind about this role.   [0:11:44] Steli: Yeah. I just had a flash- I don’t know if you ever watch the … what’s the television show called Billions? Have you ever watched that?   [0:11:52] Hiten: Yeah, huh.   [0:11:52] Steli: The Showtime show. There’s like a psych-   [0:11:54] Hiten: Yeah, one of the lead characters, yeah.   [0:11:56] Steli: She’s one of the lead characters, she’s like the psychologist of the-   [0:11:58] Hiten: At the hedge fund. Yeah, that’s awesome, that’s the role.   [0:12:03] Steli: That’s the role. Like, I was just thinking about her. And one thing I want to go back to quickly is at the beginning you said in the early days the founders typically or one of the founders will take on that role and usually the founding team are feeling pretty equal, nobody’s really intimidated by you being the founder hopefully, and everybody speaks very plainly and openly about their issues and challenges, hopefully, and there’s a high degree of trust. But as the team grows, even though no matter how much, and we’ve talked about this in a prior episode where I used to be frustrated by this, where certain people will not open up about certain issues with me, and I would be like, “Why? I’m like the most norm- why can’t you just tell me?”   [0:12:39] Hiten: In your opinion.   [0:12:40] Steli: In my opinion, I was just like, I just want to, I’m just a team member, like why … And then one of the team leads in our companies was like, “Yeah, but you’re Steli fucking Efti, this guy was watching videos of you for two years before he started. You might think you’re an idiot and I know you are.”   [0:12:59] Hiten: They don’t.   [0:13:00] Steli: “But this person, he doesn’t feel like sharing all his vulnerable weaknesses with you.” Right? So realizing eventually as you said around the, I think for many teams around the 20 person mark, roles will start to matter a little more, people that come new to the team will start looking at people above them in hierarchy and will open up to a certain degree to which they feel safe, no matter how great the culture is you just to embrace that and find ways around it versus, like, I was for most of the time resisting it and resenting it.   [0:13:30] Hiten: Sure.   [0:13:30] Steli: And being like, “That sucks. Why can’t we all just be the same?”   [0:13:33] Hiten: Yeah.   [0:13:34] Steli: So, okay.   [0:13:35] Hiten: You should be more vulnerable.   [0:13:37] Steli: I try to.   [0:13:38] Hiten: Okay, okay.   [0:13:38] Steli: There you go, you’re trying to lure me in there.   [0:13:43] Hiten: I did.   [0:13:43] Steli: But I caught it on early. All right, I don’t know what, should we do an attempt to try and brand this since nobody is really given it a name? Or maybe this is one of those roles that if it had a title it would be a bad thing.   [0:13:57] Hiten: I think it would be a bad thing. And sometimes it’s someone’s job on the side.   [0:14:02] Steli: Yeah.   [0:14:03] Hiten: Customer support, head of customer support for example. One company that I know had a customer support feels like, you know, that person’s role is this, but the person’s also running support, right? Sometimes one of the founders is really able to kind of connect with people in that way. I do know when the teams are smaller it’s not a role that you would hire for necessarily and I do believe founders should be doing that.   [0:14:31] Steli: Yeah. So I think that’s going to be the tip of the episode today, once you cross that 10, 15 person mark, don’t write a job post maybe, but start looking for who in the team or who you are hiring has that kind of incredibly high emotional IQ, who has a nurturing energy, who’s somebody that has a really good sense of how people feel and what’s going on and somebody that people trust and look for that person as a very important energy. It’s a leadership energy, even if that person doesn’t come with like a VP title. And make sure you give that person the power to really do their job well because it’s going to pay massive dividends in your culture.   [0:15:13] Hiten: Yeah, before we wrap up I think one thing we would add is … If you’re looking for this role, you probably just need to interview office managers even if you already have one. Or if you think you don’t need one or even if you’re a remote team.   [0:15:27] Steli: Yeah. With an office manager, I like it.   [0:15:30] Hiten: Right? And I think you will find that person.   [0:15:34] Steli: All right, I think that’s it for today’s episode.   [0:15:37] Hiten: Yeah, happy looking. [0:15:38] The post 276: How to Hire a Head of Culture appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten are in DreamForce and they talk about how to create a business ecosystem and shed some light on how to do this. Thanks to Jorge Soto and the team at First Cut for recording and editing the video! The startup world has changed remarkably in the past decade, and new advances in technology are paving the way for more revolution. Perhaps, one way technology has changed business the most is in the way we operate on a day to day basis, and tools like Zapier and IFTTT have been at the forefront of that. In today’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how you can build an ecosystem around your startup, how to make the right decisions when it comes to building ecosystems and things you should consider before building or joining an existing ecosystem. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:35 – About today’s topic. 00:56 – How to build an ecosystem around your startup. 03:08 – What role APIs (Application Program Interface) play in today’s ecosystem. 03:53 – Steli shares how Close wants to win in the ecosystem game. 04:29 – An alternative to a reseller partnership. 05:27 – Hiten shares his thoughts about Airtable’s ecosystem. 06:40 – Steli talks about Zapier, and why it has been so successful. 08:52 – How to make decisions on what ecosystem to build. 10:44 – Thinking broad vs thinking deep. 13:01 – What startups want to think about before becoming part of an ecosystem. Quotes: Ecosystems are built on business development relationships. Today’s ecosystems don’t rely on reseller partnerships anymore. Becoming part of an ecosystem requires commitment and iterations. [0:00:01] Hiten Shah: Here we like talking about more than just sales and marketing.   [0:00:03] Steli Efti: We just want to bullshit and chat about business and life and hopefully while we’re doing that provide a lot of value to people.   [0:00:08] Hiten Shah: The world’s best business podcast. Oh shit. For people trying to get shit done.   [0:00:15] Steli Efti: We don’t want to give you feedback that’s bullshit.   [0:00:17] Hiten Shah: We want you to do your best.   [0:00:18] Steli Efti: Welcome to .   [0:00:20] Hiten Shah: That’s right. We’re here at Dreamforce in the sales hacker booth. And first cut is recording a video for those of you that are not able to see us on video.   [0:00:29] Steli Efti: What are we going to talk about in today’s episode?   [0:00:31] Hiten Shah: Something about Dreamforce.   [0:00:32] Steli Efti: Something about ecosystems.   [0:00:34] Hiten Shah: Yes, so we’re going to talk about how to create a business ecosystem and our thoughts on that. We thought that’d be a great idea considering we’re at Dreamforce and they have a small ecosystem, right.   [0:00:44] Steli Efti: Yeah, tiny, but it’s …   [0:00:46] Hiten Shah: Spread over half the city.   [0:00:47] Steli Efti: It’s gaining speed, but it took them a while.   [0:00:49] Hiten Shah: Took them a while, right.   [0:00:54] Steli Efti: The theme is really how do you build an ecosystem around your startup and around your business, and like thinking about that. Now, this is a topic that need a little bit of a fine balance, because if a startup in the very early days, most startups in the very early days when they over think the ecosystem thing it actually concerns, but if you don’t think about it at all it’s also a problem long term, so what’s the right way to think about ecosystem in the early days especially.   [0:01:25] Hiten Shah: I mean, let’s go back to how it starting, so back in the day people would sell enterprise software and you’d have value added resellers. Those are VARs, that’s what they called them, and they would be people that would resell your product to their customers because they happened to be service providers, and that was when software wasn’t delivered in the cloud and things were more complicated to implement it from an IT standpoint, because that’s what we used to call it right. I think that’s for me the roots of ecosystem come from that, and a lot of those ecosystems are built on business development relationships, and it was very human to human approach. Now, I would say that we’re at a place, just fast forward all the way to now, we’re at a machine to machine approach, where even closed out IO has a bunch of integrations because you guys have level of an API, and that is in some ways a start of an ecosystem and it’s a different kind of an ecosystem. It’s not an ecosystem you’re necessarily using to acquire customer I would say, although it can help you with that. It’s an ecosystem that helps people use your products and other ones they’re using in conjunction.   [0:02:27] Steli Efti: Yes, so APIs is a great one, but I love the jump from human to machine.   [0:02:33] Hiten Shah: Yeah, it’s human to human,. Machine to machine, right.   [0:02:36] Steli Efti: Yeah, it was all about resellers, implementation specialists, consultants, that kind of an ecosystem, because software was really heavy and it took a whole army of people to implement it. Today, it’s much more light in most cases. Not when we talk about these massive organizations and implementation of software can still be pretty …   [0:02:55] Hiten Shah: Yeah, the enterprise stuff still tends to have the same model.   [0:02:57] Steli Efti: Yes, so it still exists in the logic, today’s systems, but in today’s world you can do a lot more lightweight things and one of the easiest and first things to think about is API. Having a strong IP. I can tell you with us, with , we knew from the get go that we wanted to stay a fairly small team, so we thought about ecosystem, but we thought all right, we’re not going to start hiring a partnership team and start running a conference and doing events and all kinds of stuff, so how can we do this differently in a lightweight way, and we thought all right, let’s have the best API in the game. Let’s make it that when customers or other software vendors, or even individual software developers that are thinking about building a little app, when they look at their API they go, “Oh shit. I could just build an app on top of close,” or, “I could just … This is much easier for us to integrate with our software than the other API.” So we wanted to win in the ecosystem games by having a really powerful API, and that made us go API first in our product development philosophy. From day one til today, whatever we do we first design the API, then we build the feature on top of it, so having a really strong or good API, or thinking about API in the really early days I think is super crucial in today’s environment. What other things can you do in today’s world in order to think ecosystem without doing reseller partnership stuff?   [0:04:26] Hiten Shah: I think there’s a number of things you can do, even without reseller partnership, but ecosystem also means like let’s say, a good example of this is WordPress. They have a whole plug in ecosystem. It is still API driven, but then they also have partners that’ll build custom plug ins for you, so that’s more of like this software that’s built running inside of your software, so I think that another example. Another one is still I think, I would say today an implementation, sort of onboarding implementation specialists are still important, and that’s still an ecosystem in my mind if you have a product that can be customized a lot that is one opportunity. Another opportunity that comes to mind is if you’re a website creation tool getting designers to create templates and things like that that’s another ecosystem that works if you’re a landing page tool too. And I think the ultimate thing, I’m going to give this example because it’s pretty interesting, this company called Airtable and they … It’s like spreadsheets on steroids is a very simple way to describe it, and they have beautiful website, beautiful product. One of the things they did is they have this thing called Airtable Universe now, so they’ve always had templates. Now, they’ve made it so that they have their customers basically be able to promote their own templates on their site, and it’s really early. They launched maybe a month ago or something with this Airtable Universe, but to me that’s an ecosystem to. It’s actually an ecosystem where customers are helping you get more customers, helping you show off use cases. It’s probably one of the more powerful ones in my mind and you don’t need a conference for that either.   [0:06:05] Steli Efti: Yeah, Draftsend is another example you guys just launched and one of the things you did earlier on is approach a bunch of people that have really powerful, unique presentations and ask them to upload them to Draftsend, so that’s how you launched, and you launched with highlighting a bunch of use cases, but those people are people with big audiences, with big businesses behind them, so it’s from day trying to create a little bit of an ecosystem in a different way for the platform right.   [0:06:34] Hiten Shah: Yeah.   [0:06:34] Steli Efti: Another things I’ll say, in today’s world is today, and this didn’t exist six, seven years ago, you have companies like Zapier, for instance.   [0:06:42] Hiten Shah: Yeah, it’s Zapier. Zapier makes you happier. I can’t say that without my friends over there getting pissed off.   [0:06:48] Steli Efti: All right.   [0:06:49] Hiten Shah: Wade, Zapier makes you happier.   [0:06:52] Steli Efti: Zapier makes you happier. I say the name all the time wrong. I said it wrong to him I think last week and he didn’t correct me. I’m not sure, but anyways they allow you to basically cretae integrations. It’s kind of like if this then that for business apps in many cases, and that’s something where you’re able to now, if you invest in your Zapier integration, and you can do a ton with it, if you really invest in that, you have somebody on the team, you can empower your customers a ton of waste integrate with other apps that they’re using, and you’re able to much quicker go to some of these companies and go, “Hey, we have a ton of customers that use our tool and integrate with yours.” If it’s through Zapier or not, who cares. That really doesn’t matter at the end of the day.   [0:07:37] Hiten Shah: It’s still an integration.   [0:07:38] Steli Efti: So a lot of our customers use our product as well and use it in conjunction. Let’s do an event together. Let’s do a webinar together. Let’s co-promote. Let’s work together and you can build a quick ecosystem and also empower your customers and show your customers that wow, these people are part of the larger ecosystem from day one, which is something that would have taken you a lot more energy, time, work and money to build up.   [0:08:01] Hiten Shah: Yeah, so Zapier is the ecosystem hack for Sass.   [0:08:05] Steli Efti: That’s why they’re doing so well because it’s a very powerful value approach position. So what about you? The ecosystem is never just a you show up and then you build around you. It’s always a you show up and there’s already ecosystems in place, and the question is how do you, what is your role in other people’s or other companies ecosystems, right. So how do you think about that? There’s platforms obviously right. Do we build on top of an existing platform? Do we build an app and add on? Like you could have a WordPress add on, or Chrome extension. You could be on Facebook with an app. You could be on whatever it’s called, reinforces exchange platform app thing, so you can look at ecosystems that already exist where your customers are and ask yourself what role are we’re going to play in that? How do you make decisions, again, especially from an early stage point of view when resources are limited in terms of what your role is going to be in other people’s ecosystems, or company’s ecosystems?   [0:09:02] Hiten Shah: I think it goes back to what you’re solving for. So if you’re solving form usage and retention and you think you can build a Chrome extension, Chrome is over 50% of most people’s sites, like people come from Chrome, so if you built a Chrome extension because it’s a productivity tool or some kind of tool people can use in their browser that’s super interesting. You can even go more lightweight and there’s the kind of browser notifications, which is also a form of the kind of ecosystem, so to me, early on, what problem are you trying to solve? Are you trying to acquire more customers by integrating with this tool? Are you trying to create a ten x better product experience, or are you trying to just simply, not so simply, but retains customers as a result of integrating? So I think I’d really think about the product. Like, today, if you’re in the document space in any capacity, it almost doesn’t make sense for you to not integrate with Dropbox. A lot of people’s documents live in Dropbox. If you’re focused on enterprise you probably want to integrate with Box.   [0:09:58] Steli Efti: Box.   [0:09:59] Hiten Shah: That’s I think an example there. If you can imagine doing anything in the browser where while someone’s browsing different website or doing their work in a browser your stuff can show up, then in a Chrome extension, even Safari has extensions and stuff like that, that would be super critical.   [0:10:14] Steli Efti: Yeah, I love that. I think the thing that I see oftentimes is that a startup in the early days, they’ll look at the different ecosystem that exist already, they’ll think of them primarily as a customer acquisition opportunity right. How can we go to somebody else’s ecosystem and get tons of users, tons of customers, not so much from a product value perspective, or how does this add value to our core customer base, our target customer base, and then what I see is a lot of them to … They thing broad versus thinking deep, so they go, “Well, there’s five ecosystems with known platforms. Let’s just build a quick app on all of them as quickly as possible, and then surely it’s going to rain customers our way,” and for those who don’t see the video, reaction is one of like heartbreak, heartbreak, because that’s obviously usually not a really good idea.   [0:11:12] Hiten Shah: It happens a lot in the eCommerce space because there’s a lot of eCommerce tools you can integrate with that are platforms that provide web stores for people, and there’s only a couple that actually drive reasonable volume when it comes to users, and still you’re doing a lot to promote yourself.   [0:11:27] Steli Efti: Yes, my point is always you’re going to have to work a lot harder than you think.   [0:11:33] Hiten Shah: That’s the case always though.   [0:11:34] Steli Efti: Always. That’s our life-long mantra, but it especially beautifully applies here because people think because there’s an ecosystem in place, a platform, I just hit launch on the app that we’ve built and then people just show up.   [0:11:50] Hiten Shah: Magic happens.   [0:11:51] Steli Efti: Magic happens. You’re going to have to do a lot to be surfaced on that. You’re going to have to work hard for it be promoted.   [0:11:59] Hiten Shah: Ratings and descriptions and integration of it.   [0:12:03] Steli Efti: Yes, and then talking to the marketing department, although partnerships and integration department, and make sure that maybe you’re included in a newsletter. Maybe you could be a featured app.   [0:12:11] Hiten Shah: Yeah, all that good stuff.   [0:12:12] Steli Efti: All that good stuff. Making sure that you segment out the users that come through that platform from others and you listen to their feedback. Do they like it? Don’t they like it? Are their expectations skewed. It might be raining users but they might not convert to customers for whatever reason, so you’re going to have to really invest in that, just like in anything else, and I think that too many times people go, “Well, our growth strategy is going to be we’re going to launch these five apps. It’s a Chrome extension here, it’s an add on here, it’s a core ad there, and then surely this platform has ten million users. This platform has a 100 million users.” And then it makes like messed up. We surely can get point one percent of them, and the eye roll, the eye roll at this point drops and obviously no, that’s not going to fucking work out, so pick and choose. When you’re a start up you have limited resources. You want to think about building an ecosystem and you want to be part of one, if there’s a useful important one, but you want to invest really deeply in those oftentimes and really make them work and remember that that’s also going to take iterations and it’s going to take, you’re going to start with an MVP version of whatever that is and you’re going to have to keep iterating until maybe six, nine, 12 months down the line you’re really are getting the benefits and the returns on that.   [0:13:30] Hiten Shah: Yeah, there’s no silver bullet on the ecosystems for sure.   [0:13:33] Steli Efti: I think that’s it for us for this episode. There’s another episode you can find in . We’re going to point to it, that we did about partnerships, which is very closely related to the ecosystem one, and don’t forget to give us five star ratings and a review on iTunes because that’s an ecosystem we’re playing on with this podcast. All right, that’s it from us. The post 275: How to Create an Ecosystem Around Your Startup appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the idea of nurturing talent internally vs hiring proven talent externally. When it comes to key positions that need to be filled at a company, founders are usually faced with the dilemma of nurturing talent within the company or hiring people with a proven track record. This decision typically depends on the amount of work a company is willing to do; nurturing talent means the company needs to put in time, effort, and resources in training its own staff while hiring one can be a much quicker process. In this episode, Steli and Hiten highlight the pros and cons of hiring proven talent from outside the company vs nurturing one from within. They also talk about reasons why some people aspire to management and leadership roles, what motivates people to do this and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:34 – About today’s topic. 02:56 – Steli is always big on potential and talent who always want to nurture people. 05:56 – Hiten thinks the decision is all about context. 06:50 – What makes management more important. 08:13 – Why it’s rare to see a successful company without managers. 09:06 – What making decisions really depends on. 10:16 – Why homegrown talent usually have a cultural bias towards the company. 13:22 – The reason why people aspire to leadership roles. 14:00 – Steli talks about a blog post that examines the leadership role vs being an individual contributor. 15:44 – One key reason why people want to be managers. 18:58 – Why you should give a chance to someone who’s eager to learn. Quotes: Hiring a proven talent or nurturing one internally depends on the circumstances/situation of the company. Not all internal talents want to take on leadership roles for various reasons. The only way to prove if someone is serious about changing is to give them a chance. [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: Today, what I’d love to talk to you about Hiten, is the idea of nurturing talent internally, versus hiring proven talent from externally. So, when you’re a startup, you put together a small team. Typically, in the early days it’s a group of incredibly entrepreneurial people, high risk takers. High buy towards action. Usually, maybe erring on the less experienced side of things. That’s the typical startup, I would say in many cases, but more generalist type of people. People that could just pick up work, fix things, get things done and get shit done. They don’t need to have a ten-year career in an area in order to tackle it and progress it, and move it forward. As the startup grows, there’s still, I think always going to be some value in having these super-entrepreneurial generalists as part of the team. But you start becoming more specialized, and you hire more people that have done a certain job for a few months or years, because your expectations are higher, and now you’re not a scrappy startup anymore. Now you’re a little business that’s growing. One thing in particular that I’m interested in, is the leadership perspective of this. You’ll have people inside of your team that have a lot of talent, a lot of potential, and have the desire to grow as leaders, but are totally unproven and have never managed people, have never grown a team, have never hired people. Then, on the flip side, you can nurture talent to become more, to grow into leadership roles within your company over time, and invest heavily in seeing if they can go from being a specialist or, not a specialist, but somebody that’s just doing … An individual contributor, to growing into a leader in the company or a manager in the company. You coach them into that transition. Or, if such ends, you just look for outside talent. People that are proven leaders or managers, that are maybe a year or two ahead of where you are, and you bring them in. Those people already know how to hire people, how to interview people, how to manage them, how to coach people and build a team. You benefit from the education and the development they’ve gotten somewhere else, and you just hire that in. I know there’s different school of thoughts and conflicting thinking on this, but we’ve never talked about this, and I’m super-curious about this subject. I’ll tell you in a second why, maybe just set the stage. So in general, I’ve always been a sucker for potential and talent, and I’ve always been excited about helping somebody grow as a person. So whenever there was somebody in my team that wanted to grow in a leadership position, that had the desire and the ambition, I’ve always leaned towards having a bias of pouring a lot of energy into that person to help them get there. I’d get a lot of fulfillment out of helping people getting there. But at the same time, having done this many, many, times now, I know that it’s not … Having somebody that’s a great individual contributor, and that has the desire to grow into a leadership role, and having me as a coach, these three components are not enough to make this work all the time. It’s a hit or miss. Sometimes it works because this person has leadership potential and management potential, because it’s not just a desire, but they’re really committed to it. In those cases, it’s an amazing experience to see, and to see how these people grow. But there’s been many cases where people wanted to grow, and I wanted to help them, and we worked together, and they failed, or they didn’t really do a good job, or they didn’t really learn fast enough, and I wasn’t able to help them get there. That’s a very costly exercise. It takes a lot of time and energy and resources out of other things that I could be investing my time an energy into. So I always felt like it was a hit or miss exercise, although I always tend to want to do it. At the same time, I’ve seen how incredibly valuable it could be when you find somebody that’s gone through this exercise on somebody else’s dime, and has grown in a way where they’re a year or two ahead. So the thing you’re trying to accomplish in terms of building a team or something, they just went through that exercise two years ago, and they succeeded, and they’re doing really, really, well. You bring them in, and it’s like these people are from the future. They come in, and they have such clarity on what to do, and how to do it, and who to hire, and who to bring in, and how to build a team. You see the amazing value that those sometime external people can bring to the table, that I’ve now gotten more and more used to looking for outside talent, not just for inside talent to grow in the company. We were recently in, I’d don’t even know what they’re called, a workshop session in Boston with a bunch of SaaS founders. One very experienced founder was like, “I don’t even bother training people to be managers anymore. I don’t know how to see if somebody’s going to be good a that or not. I go and I hire proven managers somewhere else, because trying to nurture someone else to be a manager, and then if they are not good at it, it costs much time and money. It’s such a deadly thing for your culture and your company, that I’m not even bothering anymore. I just go out and I hire proven people for management positions, and that’s the way I do it.” So I wanted to talk to you about this, and see your thoughts, your experiences nurturing leadership talent internally, versus hiring it externally. What’s your thoughts on that?   [0:05:48] Hiten Shah: I think it’s all about context. When you’re small, you probably can’t even afford a senior manager or a manager that’s done it before. So you have to get away with learning it yourself, as a founder.   [0:06:06] Steli Efti: Right.   [0:06:06] Hiten Shah: One of the founders, or both the founders, or all of the founders, depending on how many there are and how you structure it, have I think … Have to become managers. In fact, all of them should, is my opinion. If you want the company to be really healthy, because then you have founders who have the most equity stake in the company, as an individual at least even in the long run, learning how to become managers. Not all of them might want to, so that is something to think through, obviously, but that’s actually a big question and a big point. At this point in startup land, in business, management is becoming more and more important. The reason I say that is, gone are the days of software where you just put something out there and it just works. Now you require the management of individuals in order to make it work, because there’s so much competition out there, and so much … The bar’s a lot higher on getting stuff done that people love, and that which will grow a business. So I’m taking it back to that Steli, because I want to start by saying if you’re a founder, if you’re the CEO and you’re running a business and you have other founders, having this discussion with everyone is important. Is management something you want to do, if you’ve never done it before. Is it something you want to learn or not? Because if you can have that conversation early, that’s going to determine a lot more about who’s managing and how you decide on whether you grow managers, so to speak, or you bring in managers. For me, the context is still, “it depends”. That seasoned founder, I have a ton of respect for him. I actually agree with what he’s saying in the sense that if I need management to happen tomorrow, all of a sudden in my company, which as been the case in a lot of companies, it’s very likely I either have to do it, my co-founders have to do it, or we bring in someone who can do it in that area. That’s definitely something where it’s very rare to see a company that has growth, is doing well, and doesn’t have managers. The other piece of that discussion we had, was do you have a flat structure where there are no managers? Whether it’s product managers, marketing managers, head of marketing, whatever. I’m pretty against thinking that a company can scale without proper hierarchy and structure. Not necessarily rigid, like a corporate structure, but just in time proper management layers. Or not even layers, but proper managers in a system of management earlier than later. So for me, I’d really love the idea if you can afford it, or if you feel like you need it tomorrow, to hire someone experienced. That’s my take on it. That being said, it really depends on the founders. In some companies the founders become the managers and they do a great job. Some companies, they don’t do a great job, and they try, and it just doesn’t work. They probably just should have brought in some level of managers earlier. And in other companies, I think there’s a deliberate conversation that happens between the founders of who’s willing to do it, and who is not. I think the worst thing to see in a company is a CEO who doesn’t want to be a manager, but is stuck in the position of CEO, as a founder, or whatever. That’s probably the most terrible spot someone can be in. I’m not saying you replace the CEO, or anything, I’m just saying the consciousness of who’s doing management, how does managing work at your company, are all important things. Then, of the flip side, when it comes to growing managers, if you start learning what management looks like. If you start really learning how your company should do it, and you get good at it as the founder or business owner, you then start being able to see it in other people. So I guess I’m a little bit more optimistic than that veteran founder by saying that there are people that I’ve seen really grow into it really well. And, it does take, I don’t like things that take time, but it takes years. So if you’re willing to spend that effort on somebody, or they’ve been in your company long enough, and you start testing them and putting them in those positions? Or, even within a few months you see that they can do it, you start giving them the opportunity? You will have someone who has started out with your culture as an individual contributor, a single, a person who’s individually doing work, to growing into a manager role, and they tend to have a much stronger cultural bias towards the company, and alignment with the culture. I really, highly value that. So when you can find those rare opportunities with people like that, I would be looking for them all the time. That doesn’t mean that you don’t bring in people from the outside that are already know how to do it.   [0:10:50] Steli Efti: Yeah, I think there’s a ton of really interesting points here. One thing, regarding the discussion that we had, that I wanted to bring up in Boston that I didn’t, was the idea of no managers versus managers, structure and all that, is that in my observation, people will … In settings of when there’s a group of humans, there’s going to be some social roles that people will just assume, if they have a title or not. Oftentimes, somebody’s going to act like the leader of the group, even if that person doesn’t have the title. If in that group there’s no title for that. Just like sometimes depending on the situation, if you read the book, Tried, where he describes that sometimes people will take on a very harsh, dominant leadership role, or sometimes they’re going to take on a very nurturing leadership role. Both these energies that nurturing, that’s usually associated with the feminine side, and the dominance and aggressiveness that’s associated with the male side of things, these are not naturally just attached to a man or woman. That there’s a roomful of men, and depending on the situation or the crisis, some man might take on a very nurturing energy, versus somebody else takes a very aggressive, dominant energy. And in a roomful of women, the same thing will happen. It’s just human social dynamics. I feel like oftentimes in those company teams that I’ve seen, in teams where there’s not clear roles, people will still do the roles. They’ll just not have the title of that role. Somebody will assume responsibility. So I’m with you on the … I do believe that there needs to be some structure and some leadership for teams in growing companies to work really well. Now, the thing that I’m always conflicted about, and what I’ve experienced oftentimes and I’m curious about to hear from you, about this, is that I think that I’ve definitely seen that oftentimes people don’t know … People feel like they should want to become managers, because that is the way the world works. People go, “I want to be a really important part of this business. I want to have real impact in my life. Hence, probably I need to become a manager.” That’s a lot of times the reason or the motivation behind people thinking they should go into a leadership role is because they think they want to make more money, or they want to progress in their career, or they want to have maximum impact or influence, and they think that’s the only route to take. A lot of people that have that type of thinking are not necessarily … They don’t like managing people. They don’t like the job of being a manager. They don’t like the job of being somebody that has to do people management, but they think they want that position, because they think that’s the only position that is progressing them in their career and their life. I know even there was a company, I want to say it was Mars, but I don’t know if I’m wrong about this. But some kind of well known, high profile SaaS company, there was a whole blog post on having two career paths that you show to your employees that are equal in pay and in impact. One is like a people management path, and the other one is an individual contributor path. It’s like becoming a senior architect, versus being an engineering manager. Or having a career path where you can grow as an individual contributor, in influence and pay, in a similar, same way as a people manager, without having to become a people manager. And, how important it is to offer people two career paths in that way. I’ve seen a lot of people be terrible managers, but absolutely scream and shout that they want to get a chance to be a manager, because they want to grow, and because they want all these things. But it was clear from day one, this person doesn’t enjoy communication. This person doesn’t enjoy managing people. So the only reason they want this, is because they want to … Of course, they want to grow and change, but is this really a good investment for the company to do so? How do think about like … What’s the balance between spotting potential to nurture somebody into a management role, but also evaluating their motivation if they come to you and they say, “Hey, I want to grow in to a management role. This is my ambition in this business, or in the startup, help me do that.” How do you evaluate what their true motivations are, the reasons why they want to do this, and if those reasons are good or bad?   [0:15:34] Hiten Shah: Oh man, it’s a tough one, because I think one of the key reasons behind this is like, “If I’m a manager, I’ll make more money.”   [0:15:44] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:15:45] Hiten Shah: That’s the most common reason why most people want to become managers, not because “I’d be good at it.”   [0:15:50] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:15:50] Hiten Shah: “Or I really want to stop writing code.” Or, there’s all these reasons. I think for me, I just dig in, hard, and say, “Hey, you want to be a manager? Why?” And then figure out what path makes sense for them, depending on that. Usually if it’s an engineer and they want to be a manager, it’s like well, there’s not actually that many engineering managers at most companies. There’s a lot more individual contributor type engineers. So then it’s like if your answer is you want to make more money, let me give you a path so you get more skills on engineering. Let’s say you go in to data science, or something that would give you a career path so that you make more money, but you’re still an individual contributor because you’re better at that. So to me, it’s about convincing somebody there’s still a path for what they want, even if it’s not management. You can tell usually, by telling them, “Let it not be me, but let me introduce you, or let’s have a manager come in here and tell you about what their day looks like. And, if that excites you, even though I think it probably doesn’t, we can consider it.” So those are the two tactics that I like to use, but I don’t think I have a generic answer. For me, it’s more of an approach, because there are a few different reasons why someone would want to be a manager. It’s not always just money.   [0:17:09] Steli Efti: Yeah, the money part I think is easier to address. The part that is tough to address is when somebody says, “I know that I’m not the greatest people-manager right now, and I know that there’s some things about management that are intimidating to me or they don’t come natural to me, but that’s why I want it. I want to grow as a human. I want to grow as a person.” It sounds like a good reason, but it’s very unclear to me if this is the right reason. If this reason is going to be strong enough to sustain the pain of really changing as a human. Which is just in general, when people want to grow into a position that will require them to change as a person, I completely believe in change in humans. I’ve changed myself dramatically, so I completely believe in it. I love to see it, if it’s a positive transformational change, but I’ve also seen it enough times fail, that I know that just somebody rationally saying, “I’d like to change,” is not enough. “Oh, I’d like to lose weight.” That’s not enough. “I’d like to lose weight, and here’s a book about a diet.” Those two components are not enough to guarantee change. There’s a real commitment that needs to be so much stronger than the pain a person’s going to have to go through to change, that it’s hard to gauge. That’s the one reason for wanting to become a manager that’s for me, really tough to figure out. I’d have to spend a lot of time with the person, and understand how strong is that motivation, really. Is this like a nice idea, or is this a complete commitment that they have? It’s tough to tell, sometimes.   [0:18:53] Hiten Shah: So I think the way I would say this is if someone’s really that adamant to learn, you teach them. I think a recommendation I was given in the workshop that we were in, in Boston, was The One-Minute Manager, that is a book.   [0:19:07] Steli Efti: Yeah.   [0:19:07] Hiten Shah: So you would start by having the person read that. “Okay, you want to learn? Read this.” If he can do the crap in here, do you know what I mean? Or read the equivalent book. The only reason I like that book is, it’s small and it’s short. Then go from there. So give them opportunities to really get into it, but don’t make your company depend on them being able to manage.   [0:19:29] Steli Efti: I love that. All right, I think that we’re going to wrap this up on this end. If you guys have experiences nurturing people into management positions, hiring sole managers, the good and the bad, book recommendations, anything. We always love to hear from you. So shoot us an email at steli@close.io and hnshaw@gmail.com or tweet at us. We just love to hear from you. The other day I was in a co-working space, and a lady knocked on the door, opened the door, and was like, “Are you Steli from the startup chat?” I was like, “Yes.”   [0:19:59] Hiten Shah: .   [0:20:00] Steli Efti: I’m at my laptop, working. She said, “Oh, I love the podcast. I listened to …” this that, and the other. We exchanged information. She’s a very successful founder, and runs a very interesting company. You know who you are, if you’re listening to this. We’re always excited to hear from you guys, so let us know. If you have any feedback or ideas, and make sure to go and give us a rating. Five stars and a review on iTunes. The more of those we get, the higher iTunes ranks us, so the more people get to discover the podcasts. Hopefully it’s going to be useful for, and valuable for everybody. All right, that’s it from us for this episode.   [0:20:33] Hiten Shah: Bye. [0:20:34] The post 274: Hiring or Nurturing Managers Within Your Startup appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about company updates and the idea of updating people about the status of your company on a regular basis. Company updates are a great way to keep stakeholders up to date about your business, and as a founder or CEO, you might be thinking of doing this, even if you don’t have investors. In this episode, Steli and Hiten shed some light on what makes a great update, why doing so could be valuable for you and your business, and they share some tips on how you can present your updates in a meaningful way. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:25 – Hiten talks about the idea of updating people outside of your company on a regular basis. 02:29 – Steli talks about a time when he did weekly updates to investors at his company. 05:06 – Steli talks about what company updates currently look like at Close.io. 07:18 – Why it’s important to have a reason to send out company updates. 07:53 – Why almost no company survives the 6th-month mark. 08:24 – The most challenging thing about sending out updates. 09:31 – Steli gives examples of people whom you could be updating about the status of your business. 12:27 – The worst and most powerful thing that can happen from sending updates. 15:32 – Hiten talks about what makes a great update and what distinguishes it from a bad one. 19:57 – Steli talks about giving feedback to those you update, especially if you tried out their recommendations or ideas . Quotes: Never do an update if you’re not committed to being consistent. Keep your updates structured and easy to read and understand. Always give feedback to the people who respond or gives tips to your updates. [0:00:01] Hiten: Hey everybody this is Steli Efti…   [0:00:04] Steli: …and this is Hiten Shah and today on The Startup Chat, we’re gonna talk about company updates and this idea that you should be updating people outside your company, about your company, on a regular basis. And we’ll talk really quickly about different levels of this because I think this is becoming more and more popular and obvious. Something to point out is, this isn’t just for investors, and if you have investors, this is also for self funded companies and we’ll talk through that. One of the reasons this is an important topic to me is, two things. One, I used to listen to Ernie’s calls and read the transcripts and learn a lot about companies and public companies. Also, S1’s, at one point in my life … Just to learn about how they thought about themselves and also learn how to communicate about your company to the outside world. I just find a lot of curiosity. The second way I learned it is, when I got funded for my company, I needed to figure out how to do good company updates, and all that. And what I’m realizing now, in today’s world, meet, to talk to, or hang out with that could give you feedback on your company. And so putting them … Obviously with their permission, or knowing that they’d be cool with it on a list, so that you are updating on a monthly . Even if they aren’t official equity holders or advisors to you, can be very valuable. So, I just wanted to talk about that cause I’m seeing this trend and I think it’s good for all of us.   [0:01:37] Hiten: It’s interesting, I think that when you think about investor updates with sending regular company updates, it can feel like a chore, from a founders perspective. Like, “Oh my God, I have to write this update and tell everybody how things are going.” When you have investors, your kind of forced to it. And often times companies will do-   [0:02:00] Steli: I mean there’s probably still ranges from terrible job to exceptionally good job at it. And we will digest a little bit … We’ll go into the detail of what makes a good update, a good update and how to think about that. Companies that don’t have investors and don’t have kind of, a forcing function for giving regular updates to stakeholders, usually they don’t, right? Because there’s no external pressure to do so. What I’ve seen is that it takes a high degree of discipline to do it when you’re not forced to, right? That discipline is really, really healthy. I remember for us, we never had to send updates to investors. We never did regular updates to investors, even when we raised money from investors. . But we had one person, Paul Graham PG, from WhyCommunitor, that we would send an update every week with our growth number. We had the most important KPI, we would just send every week, an email updating him on that one KPI and we did this for … I don’t know, I wanna say nine months or something … Six to nine months, a really fucking long time. And once in a while, when the number was consistently good, he would write back and give a little comment and once in a while when the numbers were consistently bad, he would write a little comment and ask some questions like, “What’s going on dudes, what is this? Why is this going bad the last four months? Or the last four weeks? Or guys, you’re crushing it, this is the last three months I just calculated you had this amount of growth. Awesome, just keep doing this and you’ll crush it.” He was just give a little bit of comments and once in a while would have the number and the question to him or something we’re struggling with. It was probably the shortest investor updates of all times, which is like a number … This week we grew X-percent and then once in a while, one more sentence, like a question. We had this problem, how do we deal with this? We did this very consistently, on a weekly basis though. That’s the crazy thing, not on a monthly basis, which is probably the usual cadence. After that, after the company became more established and outgrew the early, pre-product market fit stage in the first six to nine months … We stopped sending those updates eventually. You know what I mean? And today … This is something I’ve been thinking about for the last few weeks, it’s always fascinating to see you suggest this topic today. Because it’s been on my mind a little bit, in the background, is thinking about doing this again … Starting this again, voluntarily, with a few people that we trust and that we admire, that can give us really great advice. Just to have the discipline of reporting to somebody else what’s going on and learning and getting feedback and getting advice and getting somebody to point to the blind spots we might have. Right now, for the past few years, the only updates we do is within the company and within the founding team. But we don’t send any updates to anybody else, externally.   [0:05:12] Hiten: Yeah, it’s funny. I think it might be an end of the year thing too, how it’s better or how you want to change and Marie and I actually came up with the idea, for ourselves, a few weeks ago and we were thinking, “Well there’s a lot of people we know, including yourself Steli, that we’d like to share updates for at least one of our five businesses or more products and we’d love their input on a regular basis”. I used to do company updates. I also get a lot of company updates from people who I don’t have any equity, ownership, or any relationship with on a professional level. And they send me their company investor updates just cause I’m always open to it. One, obviously, seeing how other businesses work and two, they tend to find my advice valuable when I do give it. I think we were both talking about the same thing, maybe end of the year just thinking how to improve but for me, it’s about really how do we improve? How do we get what we’re doing? And one thing we haven’t been doing ourselves either, for this year, besides internal company updates, is we haven’t really been deliberately on a regular time base cadence, letting our friends know what we’re up to or letting people who we want their opinion on the stuff, know what we’re up to. Even if we don’t engage with it, we’d like them to know and see if that helps us out in any way. I’ve seen it help the people that , I think it’s valuable and it’s something.   Hiten: I think this is just a end of the year thing, that’s probably why it’s on your mind and my mind. I think we’re the type of people that tend to wanna improve every year. And end of the year is good time to reflect and think about it. So, for us, we have friends, we have multiple products, and we know that at least the friends would be willing to read whatever we write and possibly give their input. So, we wanted to start doing these updates for ourselves too. I think that’s why we were thinking about it. But you’re right, it is something where if you’re not forced to do it, you have to find a really good reason and see the value in doing it. Otherwise, it’s yet another thing that’s like a chore.   [0:09:22] Steli: Yeah, so let’s maybe do this. Let’s go through the list of different types of updates you can send or different types of people that you could send updates to. And then, what makes a good update, a good update? But I will say before we even jump to any of these two kinda tactical, more practical ways of thinking about it … I’ve been on updates of either individuals or startups for a variety of reasons and one thing that they almost all have in common is that nobody survives the six month mark. So, meaning most of the company updates that I was included in, either as an advisor or a friend or in any other capacity, they started sending updates and they did it like 3, 4, 5, 6 times max and then they just stop. It makes me realize that being consistent with these updates is probably a really challenging thing, especially if there is no external force that is pressing or forcing the company to do send those updates. And then the second thing is that probably the way that most companies send out these updates, is not structured in a way where they get enough help or feedback from them, in a way that reinforces them to see the value in it and wants to continue doing it, if that makes sense. So, let’s talk about those two things but I … One of the reasons why we haven’t started sending updates to groups of people yet is because … My thinking is before I start doing it, I need to commit that at least I’ll do it for a year. Cause I don’t wanna get started on it when … If I do it, I need to think about the types of people I wanna include, the way I’m gonna structure it in a way where me and the group can get some value out of it, and in a way where I can be very consistent with it. So, I think consistency is the top thing that comes to my mind when I think about updates. But real quick, let’s run through the different list of people that you could be updating as a startup or as a company, right? We have investors, that’s the obvious one. If you have an advisory board, that’s an obvious one. Friends … Your community, friends and family … I’m not sure if that’s the right circle but there is a … For us, we started a Facebook group recently that’s like the clothes’ aisle mafia. It’s all kinds of people that worked in the company, that are friends of our company. And so over the years, there’s a network of people that have either worked with us as contractors or full-time employees, that are now doing other interesting, cool shit. And we wanna keep all these people up to date, with what’s going on with us and we wanna hear what’s going on with them. How do you do that? So one person on the team took it upon themselves to be like, “I’m gonna start a little Facebook group and be posting updates in there and try to create a little community of alumni for the business.” People that have worked for your company or are friends of your company in one way or another. And then mentors, advisors, people that, you know, operators. People that can give tactical advice or strategic advice because they’ve run companies, they’re subject matter experts or something along those lines. People that you update to get feedback on the progress of the overall company or get strategic feedback or tactical help with introductions of anything else. Those are the groups that I can think of that want to be sending regular updates to.   [0:13:02] Hiten: Yeah, I think all those groups make sense. One I’d add is, if you meet someone and they’re helpful to you, you can always ask them if they should be added to the list. I meet a lot of people and some people will just ask me, “Hey, I like what you have to say and your feedback on your business was great. Do you wanna get our updates, no obligation to respond or anything, but I’d just like to keep you posted.” That’s a little on the casual side but I’ve found those to be valuable. And a source where I know that, the people who I talk to, who I ask, when they ask me that like, “Oh do you do this often or?” He’s like, “Yeah, when I meet someone. Once a month I do this and I get someone new on the list cause they are useful to me and had a perspective that I valued.”   [0:13:49] Steli: I love that. And this is also the feedback to people that are seeking advice from mentors or people they look up to or they think could be valuable to them. I always tell people when I chat with founders and I give some advice, I always tell them, “The worst thing that could happen now”, at the end of the conversation, “is I never hear from you again.” Right? That would be the most heartbreaking thing. We spent like 30 minutes, 20 minutes talking to each other, I got to know you a little bit better, I heard about your challenges, I offered some solutions. We’re not this very positive place where you’re like, “Yes. Oh my God, this is an awesome approach, I’ll try this. This is exciting.” Worst thing that could happen is I never hear from you again. Please keep me up to date, keep me in the loop. Most people don’t do that. But the few people that do, they really stand out. Half a year, year, two years into the relationship … I have a guy that’s been updating me for the past three years. I love that guy and I feel like I really know him. And I would do a lot to help him because I he’s taking me on a ride through all the highs and all the lows and he’s always kept me up to date and in the loop on his journey as an entrepreneur. That makes me a lot more invested in him and his story than … There’s thousands of people I met three years ago that I’ve never heard of again and I don’t know who these people are. If they sent me an email today, and they go, “Hey Steli, it’s been a while and can you help me with X-Y-Z?” I won’t even remember who this person is. Keeping people up to date and in the loop is such a powerful relationship building tool that I love that idea that when you meet people that are valuable just asking if you can keep them up to date and add them to the list. That’s killer. And then one other thing, before I forget it, before we go into what makes an update really great … I actually even have a friend, who’s doing this for personal reasons. I just realized this. This guy, Max, shout out to Max. Max once a year, in December … This is the month … Sends an email to all his friends and whoever else is on the email. But it’s like, it’s a personal email. It’s basically like, “Hey, to all my friends out there in the world, here’s what Max’s year was like. Here’s the cool shit that happened this year, we got another little baby, we moved, we have a new house, here’s some pictures. Here’s some stuff, I changed mt job, I’m not in this department working on these projects.” And gives a life update and then quirky enough he’s like, “Here’s the top three products I bought this year that I really love and I can recommend. Here’s the top four movies I watched that I really loved” … With a little description, here’s the summary of this movie, why it was incredible. “Here’s my favorite music albums of the year. I’d love to hear from you guys just hit reply and let me know what has been new in your life if we haven’t met or talked recently.” It’s such a powerful thing. Its such an awesome thing because he there’s many years … Now he’s living in the Bay Area, but there were many years where, a three year period, where I didn’t see him almost at all. Because he was in Germany, I was in the Bay Area. But sending a personal update and here’s what happened in my life last year, the things I appreciate, I wanna hear from you, with a large, global group of friends. It’s a really cool idea, I think. Just throwing that out there as another venue for doing updates. Not just for startups but also for your life.   [0:17:11] Hiten: I love that. That’s amazing.   [0:17:13] Steli: Yeah, it’s an awesome idea. With that being said, let’s maybe dive a little bit … It’s the end of the episode, give people some tips on what makes a good update, a good update besides being consistent with it. What distinguishes the great upgrades from the good ones and the bad ones, in your eyes? You’ve been part of many of them, what comes to your mind?   [0:17:36] Hiten: I think data transparency and learnings. So, data is talk about the metrics. Just like you were saying with the Paul Graham update that you had, you told him what the growth update was or how many … Number of customers or whatever it was that you were sharing, that you got every week, right? New customers or whatever. Then the transparency is just if something went wrong, tell people. If something was bad, tell people. IF something was good, tell people. And then the learnings are more like, what did you do and what did you learn? Those are the three things, to me, that matter the most. Data, transparency, and learnings. A thing I’ll add on top of that is keeping it the right length is also super important. So don’t make it super long but give enough context and if you have the … If you’re the type of person that likes to make things super long, put it into bullets and structure it more. A long email is okay, a long update is okay, as long as it’s structured. That way the people that are reading it can decide what they look at or not. Also, I’ve seen more and more of these updates include a TLDR, or too long, didn’t read, sort of section at the top that summarizes essentially what happened. I’m not saying do an update and write it in five minutes and call it a day. I’m saying do an update and spend like 20 minutes, an hour on it, and actually make it thoughtful. Honestly, make it the same thing you send your team, if you’re in to that. That way you’re not just doing it for people outside the company. You’re also sending the same thing to the company, if that’s helpful in getting you to do it.   [0:19:15] Steli: Yeah, I love the summary tip at the top. I always love that because sometimes I won’t have time to go through everything, even if it’s well structured … Which is another thing you said it right … An email can be really long if it has headers and sub headers and bullet points, it allows them to scan through and zoom in to the areas they want to read more. That makes it easy to digest. But sometimes I don’t even have the time for that and all I wanna know is everything going well. Or what’s a big problem? What’s the summary of what’s going on? Having a little sentence that just says “Hey” … Because sometimes you can read … The worst updates to me are the ones that have lots and lots of data but the data is structured and communicated in a way that at the end of all this, I still don’t know how to feel about this or what kind of advice to give. Because there’s context missing, because it’s too broad, in terms of the type of data that is shared. Now I know these random things and have all these random data points but I don’t know what the interpretation of that data is. I don’t have enough context, day to day, to know what to say, think, or do, advise about this. Sometimes it’s very powerful to summarize at the top, hey things are going well, here’s our problem. Or here’s the one area in our funnel that we are most concerned with, here’s why. Here’s what we’ve tried to do, if you have any ideas let us know. You can dig more in to that data in the update in the third subhead or something. Now I can go, “Oh, they’re really struggling with converting or getting people engaged in the trial.” And we look at the trial funnel numbers down here and ask some questions or make some suggestions. I think that’s really crucial. Having a summary, having the information of the data really well structured, learnings is a really powerful thing. Not just talking about it like, “Here are the things we’re struggling with, but also here are the things that we have recently learned. Here’s how we’re putting those learnings into practice.” And then sometimes I’ve seen this, again, some companies do this really well, others don’t … A call to action, or an ask. Oftentimes at the end of the email it’s like a one ask to everybody and sometimes companies are too broad with their ask or they have too many asks. They’re like, “Here are the things we need”, and it’s like seven bullet points. It’s like, “I don’t even want to read all of this. Can’t you just ask for one thing?” And sometimes companies are really focused and really smart about how they ask for help. They go, “We need this one thing and what we want from you is one simple action, we’d highly appreciate it.” That’s one thing and then the other thing that I’ll say about updates is, when people give you feedback on the updates, right? It doesn’t matter if they ask you questions or if they give suggestions or if they give you some kind of an advice, the most valuable thing to me is to give some feedback or close the feedback loop eventually on if the company tried that advice and it did work or it didn’t work. Or if they tried something else that did work or didn’t work. So, the worst thing that can happen is, I’m getting these updates, I’m replying to you and telling you … Giving you some ideas or suggestions on some stuff and then I never hear from you about that. Then I keep getting generic updates. Right? If you want people to keep engaging with the update, you wanna be communicating really well back with them on how valuable or not valuable their feedback was. Even if it’s like you never tried any of the stuff that they told you to do or you always go the opposite way, that’s actually good feedback. Being like, “Hey, here’s the three reasons why we never do what you tell us, Steli. And here’s why things are still going really awesome.” That’s valuable. That’s exciting to me. So, making sure that you keep people in the feedback loop … Or when they help you if you ask, “Hey we’re trying to hire somebody, can you make introductions?” I now send you three introductions to people. Awesome, right? This update thing works really well. Well, it doesn’t if I never hear back from you about these three people.   [0:23:19] Hiten: Right.   [0:23:19] Steli: Because last time you asked for more … Like now, we’re hiring this other person, I’m not gonna make interest anymore because I don’t really know what happened. So, keep me in the loop. If I make intros, send me an email a few weeks later and say, “Hey, these three people are great, we made one person an offer. The other two people weren’t the right fit because of X-Y-Z.” Educate me, share learnings with me. So the next time you ask for hiring recommendations, I know now, a little bit better, who you’re looking for culturally or whatever you’re looking for. And I also feel good about making recommendations because I know that you actually talked to these people and try to hire them. There was like a productive exercise. So keep people in the loop with the feedback they give you or the responses they give you to your updates so they keep being engaged. They see the value in engaging with your updates, reading them, responding and trying to help you.   [0:24:06] Hiten: Yep, that’s a wrap.   [0:24:08] Steli: That’s a wrap from us. Before we go, this is a very unusual episode … So typically, just to give you a behind the scenes look … Hiten and I, most of all 300 episodes that we’ve done so far are one take, no editing whatsoever. And it’s funny, this week I was interviewed on a bunch of podcasts and it’s such an interesting, weird feeling when I’m on a podcast and it’s constantly stop and go because the host or the hosts … Well let’s say this again. Let’s go back, note to the editor, let’s cut this out. They have these multiple takes, its such an unnatural thing for me. But I think that’s probably what’s the industry standard. But Hiten and I, we do one take, we don’t do a lot of-   [0:24:50] Hiten: Editing.   [0:24:52] Steli: But today we had issues with the mic and the wifi and the cutting in and out and we had to do three starts. Both of us were suicidal, we’re like, “Oh my God, this is such a painful experience”. One shout out that I want to give to the team that helps us upload the podcast, helps us edit the intro, has now just launched a new product. It is the podcast motor guys, big shout out to them and to Craig from Podcast Motors. They just launched a brand new podcast hosting service called Castos, C-A-S-T-O-S, castos.com. Check it out, the team over there is stellar. These guys are killer and we couldn’t have made it to two years of the Standup Chat without them. So, if you’re thinking about doing a podcast, if you need people to edit, to upload, to work with you on the podcast, or to host your podcast, check out castos.com. A big shout out to them. And that’s a wrap from us.   [0:25:53] Hiten: Yep, couldn’t do it without them, so please check them out. [0:25:56] The post 273: How to Give Company Updates to Investors, Advisors & Friends appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about what’s currently on every entrepreneur’s mind – the holiday season! For the most people, this time of year is a time for celebrating the holidays with family and friends. But for many founders and entrepreneurs, the end of the year is a time to reflect on the last year and think ahead to the new one. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about what you can do to use this time of year in the most productive way and make sure the new year is even more successful than the last. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:36 – About today’s episode. 02:58 – Hiten talks about why this season is used as a time for reflection. 04:00 – Steli points out that everyone finishes the year with reflection and goal-setting. 05:03 – Steli shares an online discussion he participated in, in whether you should hustle or take a break through the holidays. 07:19 – Hiten points out that making such decisions personal to entrepreneurs. 08:05 – Why the decision to work or take a break during the holiday season is irrelevant to both Steli and Hiten. 09:38 – What you should really do instead. 11:49 – Why it’s important to should use this season to reflect and think about what to do in the new year. 15:18 – Steli points out that momemtum in all areas of life can be a good and bad thing. 16:06 – Steli teaches a hack that you can use to track your year. Quotes: What to do should not be a discussion — “to each his own” is a phrase that perfectly applies to this. Do the things that you want — it’s your personal choice. Track your year by listing down your biggest achievements and the lessons you’ve learned.   [0:00:00] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.   [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah and today on the Startup Chat, what are we going to talk about Steli?   [0:00:07] Steli: Well, Hiten, I think we’re going to talk about the mood that we’re all in, which is, you know, we’re kind of in the tradition between holidays, New Year’s, and kind of kicking off 2018. I think we’re going to talk a little bit about that season from an entrepreneurial point of view, from a subtle point of view. First, things slow down, right? Kind of, I think it puts people into kind of a contemplating mood, you start reflecting back on how this year went, and you start trying to prepare for what the goals and what the change is, and what the, quote, unquote, resolution should be for next year. I think we want to just go through this a little bit from our own lenses and maybe highlight some of the things startups and entrepreneurs can do to use this time in the most productive way possible to make sure that the next year is going to be killer and successful and that they accomplish the right type of things that they want.   [0:01:11] Hiten: Yeah, I love that. I think I’d like to split it into two. I think there’s two things people do during this time in my experience, which is they reflect on the year and what’s gone on, in this case in 2017, and then they think about kind of what’s next. In some cases, one thing I wanted to mention is, you mention startup and founder perspective. I found this to be a business and personal perspective as well, holistically, regardless of size of company or what you’re up to because a lot of companies go into planning mode pre-holidays and even into the holidays depending on how aggressive the company is and how much they let you have a holiday, so to speak. They’re planning out next year, they’re doing forecasts and all the fun / boring stuff depending on how you look at it. And then, other companies that are much smaller, like a startup, they tend to not have formal processes. Sometimes they don’t even think about this stuff, but there’s still a bunch of reflection and kind of figuring out what’s next going on. Let’s talk about reflection really quickly. What I found, and this is mostly in the advisor role I have in a lot of situations whether it’s with friends or companies I’m formally advising, as well as in my own companies. I definitely take that role more than I take any other role. It’s either advisor coach or some form of a manager. In terms of the contributor to the work, that’s definitely in a latter, kind of Q4 of most years, I’m more on the other side, not as much as the contributor to things. What I’ve found is this is the easiest time to get somebody to reflect on the past, especially the past year. That’s one of the most common things I found. Sometimes it’s even easy on a personal note to get people to reflect even further back because of the holidays and the time with family. That’s how I’m going to start on the reflection side of things.   [0:03:09] Steli: It’s an easy time to reflect so you might as well use it to do so. That is actually a really interesting observation, very astute. I think that we don’t have to dive into too much why that is. I’m sure it has multiple reasons why. One is just the season in general when the days get shorter, it gets darker earlier, people start to kind of close in on the chapter of the year from a seasonality point of view and think about the next year. It just puts you in a certain mood. Then, people are just in that mood. In general, people start talking more about it. The talking that pops up in social media, the conversations you are having with friends and family and colleagues, everything just starts evolving around finishing up this year, looking back. Closer to New Year’s, people start thinking ahead and start planning. It’s a good time. If you’re in that mood, don’t fight it. One tip that I’ll give is, some people like to be rebellious and be like, this is all bullshit and I don’t like the holidays. I’m not a particular fan of holidays or celebrations in general. Not that I’m not a fan, I’m just not overly participatory when it comes to this stuff. When everything around you is in that mood and the momentum of something pushes in one direction, you might as well just use that energy and go with it and go, well, if everybody’s reflecting back, let’s just use this time instead of fighting it and do so ourselves as well. This points to a quick side note that I want to bring up. There was a little bit of a discussion going on online about should you hustle through the holidays and work through it as a startup, or should you take a break. I think some founder or ex-founder, or whatever, posted a like. Some start-ups will slow down and take holiday break. The ones that don’t, they have an advantage over you there. They’re going to kick start the next year with a competitive advantage. Something along those lines. Then, there were many other founders that reacted negatively to them. There was a whole debate going on in social media, I’m sure you saw this, about should you take a break or not take a break or do both or whatever. It’s an interesting …   [0:05:31] Hiten: I actually didn’t see it.   [0:05:34] Steli: Oh, you didn’t see it.   [0:05:36] Hiten: Because I didn’t see it, I have even a stronger opinion about it.   [0:05:41] Steli: All right, so hit us with it.   [0:05:44] Hiten: Fuck this shit. I don’t know. That’s my reaction. My reaction is like that because it’s, you know what, I really strongly feel like this about it because after so many years of working on stuff, working on business, it’s just like, God, just do you. If you want to take a fucking break, do it. If you want to go figure out how to hustle or keep working, you know what, do it. All I hate about this is, there should be no rule around this. There should be no guidance anybody tries to give you because it doesn’t fucking matter. That’s the truth. Like right now, in my case, I don’t know how to stop working. I’d be working regardless. But, if I told you, hey, I worked hard this year at the end of the year compared to last year, I have no fucking idea. I don’t know. Why is this even a discussion? Just do you. If you want to take a break, take a fucking break. If you feel like taking a break, take a break. If you want to keep working and do what you do, do what you do. Right? It’s so personal. I guess that’s my response. It’s personal. It’s fucking personal. So many things happen in our lives that are not just our businesses, that affect our businesses, and our businesses affect our personal life. But, it just doesn’t fucking matter. Why are we making this such a big deal, right? This is so personal. People are going to do what they’re going to do. If you feel like you need to work through the holidays because you’re not going to … Someone is going to beat you, I’m sorry for you, I really am.   [0:07:22] Steli: Yeah. This is why 90 percent of the time when people argue on social media at times, I look at it and I go, I could say something here and probably benefit from a retweet or point of view, like exposure point of view, because people like those kind of arguments. A lot of attention flows towards them. But I don’t really care. I just don’t. I can take a counter opinion to this, but I don’t really care about this discussion. I think in many cases, we often land on the, there’s not a fucking … There is a … It depends. There is not an answer that’s universally true. Some people should work through the holidays and other people shouldn’t. It shouldn’t be determined by some fucking expert or founder or successful person on Twitter. And, it shouldn’t be determined on your competition. And, it shouldn’t be determined on your bad conscious or your stressful inner voice that’s trying to tell you that you’re not enough and you need to work less or more. Be more like this guy or less like that girl. It depends. It depends on your situation. If you’re totally inspired and out of your mind motivated and your work gives you joy and there’s not anything that you have to take away from, work through the holidays. Awesome. Who gives a shit that these are holidays? If you’re a 22 year old kid somewhere away from family, it doesn’t matter if it’s holidays or not. Maybe this is the best time for you to work. Maybe it’s quiet, nobody is in the office, nobody is bothering you. You can be the most creative person you are. That might the best gift you can give yourself. In other situations, it’s crazy for you to work and feel the need to answer some bullshit emails and do busy work all day to just create the feeling that you are progressing or that you are not falling behind. I couldn’t agree more with you. But, this goes back to, it depends. What is right for you is the right question. Not, what is everybody else doing. What is the right thing to do as a startup during the holidays? There is no such thing. There’s no right thing to do. For every piece of advice, and I tell this often. I’ve gotten into the habit, Hiten, that whenever I give really strong advice to somebody, whenever I’m incredibly convinced of what I’m saying is right and I say that in a very forceful way, I always now end with this side note, or this public service announcement. I always go, and this is the way to do, and by the way, for everything that I’m telling you, there’s ten counter examples of startups that did it the other way and still succeeded. I’m just putting that out there. There’s always a counter example. There’s always somebody that did it differently that still succeeded. There’s not one path to doing life. And, there’s not one path to doing startups or entrepreneurship or business. Don’t look for what am I supposed to do during the holidays. Ask yourself, how do I feel; what’s my life; what’s the context around my life. How do you use that context at this time in the best way possible for me. Right?   [0:10:43] Hiten: You know, this is why I love giving one on one advice and I really hate generic, I have to go up and speak and give everyone advice. The best advice I have is don’t take anyone else’s advice. If I’m up on stage trying to give some generic bullshit advice. If you have to caveat it, it’s not really advice in my opinion. I think … Not to get off on this tangent, or I’m sorry, to get off on this tangent-   [0:11:10] Steli: To get off on this tangent.   [0:11:13] Hiten: When I give advice and it’s one to one, it’s always great. The reason it’s great is I listen to the person. I hear what they have to say. Honestly, half the people I talk to, I tell them, you better be working right now. The other half of the people, I tell them, you better take a break. That’s just what it boils down to. I can’t say to everybody the same thing. This is the problem with these Twitter debates, like you said. I think we’ve talked a bunch about reflecting, right? I think we can talk about growth. The one thing I’ll say is, this is a great opportunity to think about what I call, what’s next, and what you have upcoming in your life regardless of whether you’re the hard worker doing some hard work, so to speak, or trying to relax during the holidays or whatever. Just thinking about what’s next in whatever way is really useful especially because ideally you probably just reflected. Reflecting is like one of the easiest things to do right now. It’s actually typically hard during times when the world is moving faster. Definitely in Q4, starting Thanksgiving and onward, especially in the U.S., I’m sure in other countries too, but other countries I hear from are a lot more chill most of the time anyways. But, it’s just a great time to think about what are you going to do next year, what’s going to happen, whether it’s personal or professionally or in any way that kind of resonates with you.   [0:12:39] Steli: The thing that I love about this time of year is that momentum is such a powerful thing. We’ve talked about momentum plenty of times here. It can be a good and a bad thing. Momentum in all areas of life. When you have been doing something more and more and more and more, at some point very hard to stop that thing, especially when you’re going the wrong direction. It’s important to keep doing the same thing if you’re going in the right direction. The beauty of this season is because things slow down, it gives a chance to ask what’s next from a perspective of what needs to change. When you’re not in the day-to-day hustle bustle and stress, it’s easier to then potentially adjust and add or subtract something from what’s going on in your life or your startup. Right? I would take this time when it comes to thinking about what’s next and ask the question, a year from now, like next year during this time, what do I want to look back to when I think about the year. What should have happened; where do I want to be; where should we be. What is something that I’ve been carrying out for this year that next year around this time I don’t want to have anymore. I want to let that go. Startups have habits. Startups keep doing things, any group of people will keep doing things, that will be useful and valuable but we will also get into the habit of doing things past their prime or past their utility. Being able to take a moment and ask, what do I want a year from now and what do I not want to have anymore a year from now. What do we need to let go of? Where do we need to change? By asking those big questions, and one way to do it is to go backwards, to start with the end in mind, like end of next year. Working your way backwards to the beginning of the new year. The other way to do it, and I tend to do both things, bottom up and top down. The other way to do things is not to think a year or two or three or five ahead, but just to think a day ahead. From a day-to-day perspective, what’s one little thing I want to add and I want to add consistently and do throughout the entire year. And, what’s one little thing that I’m doing that I want to subtract, just take out. That’s usually the way that I approach the new year, reflecting on a high level, but also taking the time to think big picture. What do I want to accomplish a year from now and jump back, but also what do I want to add and subtract on a daily basis, habitual basis. And then think, if I do this for 365 days, do I think that’s going to create a ton of value.   [0:15:34] Hiten: I love the subtraction part. I think a lot of people don’t think about what they can stop doing or what they can less of. Especially, the idea of doing it in small chunks, day to day. I don’t actually have anything to add. I think you really gave people a lot to think about, if they’re thinking right now.   [0:15:52] Steli: Sweet. Well, wrap this episode up then in just one second. I’ll just throw out one more thing that I forgot to mention. We talked about this in a prior episode. I don’t remember which one. This little hack that I do where I have an Evernote or you can have any kind of note that you want, where I track the entire year, a gratitude tracker. I just put in a month, like December, and then in bullet points I just write down everything good, awesome, or exciting. Things that happened during that month that I’m grateful for. At the end of the year, I just go through the entire list to kind of reflect on the year. Depending on how much time I have, I go back two or three years. Usually I write a little summary about the year, and I’ll read the summaries just to reflect because life is a blur. I don’t remember what happened four months ago, three months ago, the entire year. Sometimes in the moment, I feel like, oh, this year was really stressful or this year was not as great or this or that. But then when I look at that bullet point list, I go, holy shit, this year was amazing; I totally forgot about it. One of those exercises that I tend to do at the end of the year and one exercise that I can highly recommend everybody to add as a habit for the next year. I’m not a big journal guy, but this bullet point in a simple text editor, that habit has worked for me really wondrous. I’ve been doing this four or five years. With that out of the way, we wish all of you an incredible life, day, and next year, if you’re listening to this prior the new year. We’ll hear you very soon.   [0:17:31] Hiten: See ‘ya. [0:17:31] The post 272: Beginning of the New Year – How to Reflect and Plan Ahead appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Welcome to another episode of The Startup Chat with Steli and Hiten. This week we’re talking about the pros and cons of the Freemium pricing model in startups.    This Week’s Updates: Steli is getting ready to go on a 6 week trip to Europe.  Planning how to get stuff done on the trip and stay productive. Hiten is working on moving on from KISSmetrics and focusing on building out new software for Crazy Egg.  In this transition he’s seeing the benefit of using chat products like Slack instead of email. Today’s Topic:  Freemium Hiten says you must start a SaaS product with a free offering.  Steli doesn’t agree, and that’s why Close.io does not have a free pricing model. In the B2B space it’s important to set the expectation of paying up front instead of allowing users in the door without charging.  Unless you’re a massive scale product like Dropbox or Evernote it just doesn’t help move the business along. However, if you are thoughtful about free products, and don’t just throw something together this can be a successful model.  Include limiting functionality or users on top of a core offering to prepare free customers for paying for the fuller featured product down the line. Consider freemium as a part of your marketing plan.  When a paying customer doesn’t convert after a trial they’re gone from your funnel.  Free customers at the top of the funnel will give you more chances to convert them into paying customers over the life of their use of your app. Hiten: “The fastest growing SaaS companies all offer free plans” The question of whether to start a new company with a freemium offering is a tough call. Over the long term it will increase revenue, but may take longer to build up user base with those free users. This Week’s Tips: Steli – Take a snapshot of who you were and what you were thinking a year ago.  If you look back and don’t think you were an idiot last year there’s something wrong! Hiten – From the book “5 Elements of Effective Thinking” – Whatever you think, think the opposite. The post 271: Encore Episode – Freemium appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

On this episode we take a close look at the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and what it means and how to apply it to your business.  The concept sprang up during the early startup movement and has become a bit muddled in definition over time.  In a product development sense, it refers to the first thing you can release for a product in a minimal way that helps you start learning about your product and its viability. We share some examples of how startups can begin the process of testing an MVP and pitching a concept to get response from potential customers.  Testing often includes pitching something before release and before any real functionality. Topics discussed today include: Using information gathered from single features used by testers to help you move forward How to determine a Minimum Viable Product by working backward How emotional detachment is a necessary tool for success Why perception changes when customers look at actual products vs mockups How launching something that lacks features can be a signal of eventual success If you are interested in  learning more about the concept of Minimum Viable Products there are many available resources, including this image from Spotify. We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community. The post 270: Encore Episode – Minimum Viable Products: How to find out fast if your idea is legit appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.