101 Lessons Learned for Startups

101
Lessons Learned
for
Startups
Andy Harjanto

Collected from others’ and my
experience as running startups

More details, please visit
Shift Happens Blog
http://www.andyharjanto.com

Why listening to me?
I’m just one of you
Not a startup celebrity,
Nor a superstar genius

Building astartup today
is not the same as
building it a decade ago
Shift Happens

Down Trend
Time to Market
Development Cost
Capital Expenditure
Distribution Cost
Fund Size
Better Tools
Cloud Computing
Modern Programming
Social Media

Up Trend
Market Size
Competition
Noise Level
Impatience
Globalization
Social Media
Easier Barrier to Entry

Lessons Learned Topics
we’ll be discussing

Most of topics discussed
are also applicable
to “startup” teams
inside a company

Thinking Starting up?

1
Do you have what it takes?
http://bit.ly/5dGJFb
to be a good
Entrepreneur
Risk Taker
Competitive
Resilience
Tenacity

2
Prepare to unlearn
what you’ve learned
2010s Startups have to do
many things backward and
unconventional
more later…

3
Your “killer” idea is just a hypothesis
Talk to potential customers, friends,
family without writing a single code

4
No need to perfect your idea
It’s almost a guarantee to change

5
Careful for creating a new market
Less competition,
yes, but…
It’s a lot longer
to create
than you think

6
Some games are in town really over. Don’t compete
Let the big boys play

7
Ride the wave,
Be the first
You have millions
of potential usersfrom day one
Facebook Apps
Twitter Based Services/Tools

8
At the end of the day, does your product solve problem?
Remember,
just cool won’t cut it
Can you retain users?

9
A 5 year business plan? How about 5 day operating plan?
Startup is operating
under extreme uncertainty

10
Targeting Consumer Market..
..seems so binary
More often than not, you have to be BIG fast
(millions of users) in order to succeed
OR Go Home

11
Targeting Business Market
…be prepared for long cycles
Work with channel partners, sales,
build relationship.

12
Your Plan: Getting revenue from advertising… Think again
Unless you’re to top 5 sites
in your market, you’re
almost nobody

13
Overnight success is a myth
Build a long runway
Media loves
overnight
success stories
All you heard is,
6 month start; 1 million users

14
Don’t sweat over your
competitors
They could be even
more clueless than
you are

15
Going against entrenched players?
They resist to change
Provide a product that solves
problems in a different,
better way.

16
Be wary of a small number of
competitors in your market
It’s either you’re genius
OR there is no market

17
Sadly, luck plays roles in your startup success too
Your product is ahead of its time
Celebrities love your product
It’s the economy, stupid

18
Gauge market interest first via
Social Media
Don’t worry about someone
stealing your ideas

19
Be prepared for extreme rollercoaster emotional rides
Low of the lows
High of the highs

20
Be prepared for rejection after rejection
No one cares about your startup
Persistenceis
the key

21
Just Do-It, you’re ahead of
99% of people
Too many people just talk
with zero action

Money Matters

22
If you start a startup to get rich, you’re in the wrong business
Only few will make it “big”
Change The World
Challenges
Solves Problems
Independence

23
Startup is a very high risk business
It does not make
sense from
financial
perspective
Many ways to minimize the risk

24
Be prepared for at least 18 months without pay & benefits
Don’t jump
before
you’re sure
Too many jump and abandon
before fully developed

25
Always operate under assumption of no investors
Got change for
my startup?

26
More than anything else,
tractions are what investors looking for
Traffic
Number of users
Number of subscriptions
Can business scale?
Growth
Retention Rate

27
Knowing when to fold
More of art than science
Gut Feeling will tell you
Measuring your tractions is a good indicator

28
In many countries, government grants are plenty for startups
Governments encourage
high tech companies to
have presents locally, create
local jobs, and national
pride

29
Your passionate user are sometimes your best investors

30
Watch your burn rate very carefully. You’re on diet
No Physical Office
Skype (Free)
Free Email, Docs
FreeSoftware
Open Source
Ramen profitability

31
Less money gives you sense
urgency and boosts creativity
It’s amazing to see how human
survival instinct kicks in

32
Charge for the service
from day 1 is not a bad strategy
You’ll get
very passionate customers
who believe in your product

33
Spend generously on tools, books, chance to network.
Your ROI is excellence

34
Don’t optimize your product
For VC
VC:
How big is the market size?
Superstar developers?
At the end of the day,
tractionmatters the most

35
Get into partner programs
with the big guys
Many offer free software
and services

Building A Team

36
Find a great co-founder
Share the same values
Compliment skills
Check and balances

37
1st Stage: Hire Designer and Community Manager, instead
This could also be You
Gauge Market Interest
Ideas Validation
Quick Prototypes

38
2nd Stage: Hire Great Developers, Testers
This could also be You
Knows Scalability
Supportability
Quality Code
Security

39
Hire for Culture Fit & Passionate
Set min-bar for Intelligent
Interview Process:
Make the candidate as if
an employee for a day
Ideas Validation

40
Hire temp, consultants to keep
burn rate low
Channel Partners
Product Videos
Marketing materials

41
A very short daily meeting is much
better than a long weekly meeting
Human needs
constant reminder
of progress, accomplishment
and togetherness

42
Run effective meetingin
22 minutes
http://bit.ly/caXq6h

43
Don’t grow fast, until you
get to the product-fit phase
Keep in in quick tight cycles of
build, validate, learn

44
666 is the number to avoid
In a given startup project, nomore than
6people
6months
6day a week

45
Everyone should be CEO of
something
Promote a culture of
Veni, Vidi, Vici
I saw the problem
I own the problem
I solve the problem

46
Be decisive; majority of decisions are irreversible
Heard on the street:
“An hour meeting with 7 people
to decide one API change
What a waste!”

47
External dependencies are kiss of death for startups
They’re not moving
at the same speed
Reorg does happen
They can easily out-live you

48
Run your team on POT
(progress, ownership, transparency)
http://bit.ly/6XT3NG

Designing Product

49
Why building an awesome product no body wants?
“Build it, they may notcome”
Talk to customers,
before writing a single code

50
Fail-Fast; and
Get Traction-Fast
Really means Fail-Fast on bad ideas
It does not mean abandoning project too
quickly

51
Quick build, validate, measure and learn.
It’s in our engineer DNA that we
like to build a perfect system
In an early stage,
Resist to be perfect

52
Can you tell the difference:
Progress vs. Wasted Progress?
Run tight,
small loops of
Ideas (Hypothesis),
Validate/Measure and
Build

53
Don’t just accumulate work done without measuring
Measurement will give you
feedbackto continue path, or to
change direction
Retention Rate
User Traffic
Bounce Rate
User Happiness
Conversion Rate

54
It’s OK to write messy codes
during validation process

55
Your spec should be UI
prototypes
Written spec is easily
obsolete
The cost of writing,
maintaining
UI prototype is minimal
and fun

56
Suppress many of your ideas
It’s not a feature to feature
competition
It’s who solves
the problems the best

57
Just build it now and fast.
No need for optimization yet.
Your code will likely
be a throw away
as you gather feedback

58
Concentrate on core scenarios
Make it great!
No place for mediocrity
People either love it
Or hate it!

59
Ignore your 10% cases.
That will take 90% of your energy

60
Eat your own dog food daily
Use your own product
regularly
In the early phase,
It’s better than hiring
a full-time tester

61
Boost virality, make sharing a click a way
People love to share

62
Boost retention rate.
Human is a curios being
Add a few analytics, news
about themselves and friends
e.g.“your doc has
been viewed 5 times”

63
Boost retention rate.
Human craves for attentions
RIM (Blackberry), Twitter, Facebook do this perfectly
They make users addicted to their product, by telling
them – “You’re important”

64
Minimize Frictions
Users are “very lazy” nowadays
One click
One minute setup
No installation

65
Don’t give user options
Set appropriate default
They have enough
other things to
worry

66
Ship your product with a minimum feature set
Enough to showcase
Your core scenarios
Add features
later after
after undisputable
feedback

67
After iterations, often ask what features to drop, instead of add
Remember, your ideas are just
a hypothesis; willing to let go
Pivot on your core beliefs, and
go to other directions appropriately

68
What Microsoft, Google, Apple can’t afford, but you can?
They can’t ship a crappy product,
even for their beta
They have reputation to maintain,
You don’t!
Use it to run
a tight feedback loop to
improve your product

69
Without instant gratification
Users drop like a fly
First 60 second experience is critical
I saw dead users leaving

70
Create a product that 10x
better
Dare to be different
Stand up and get noticed
The world is a very noisyplace
(and getting worse by day…)

71
Collect less, better privacy,
security.
Many analytics tools are good
enough to measure user behavior

72
Don’t put any features, concepts that you can’t explain in 15 secs
Does your product
ship with you?
Don’t make
user think

73
Reach Product-Market Fit Phase. Celebrate, Work Harder.
40%
will be upset
If your service discontinues

74
Watch out for your
site performance
Users have no patience
for sluggish sites

75
Do a side project/experiment.
Minimize your risk
Many side projects
made it big

76
Use Cloud Computing
Let’s not be IT guys
Let’s focus on building
great product
Sleep better at night

77
Building a new walled garden,
community is really, really hard
Piggy back existing ones
facebook
linked-in
twitter

Customers, Where r u?

78
Never too early to start your
marketing campaign
How about Day 1?
Or even 90 days before
valuable contents
quality
comments

79
Show the world what you’re
doing. Stealth Mode is counter intuitive.
No need for private beta
Are you worried someone
stealing your ideas?
Really?
Are you building
space shuttle?

80
There is no such thing is product launching for startups
Continuous
improvement
Unless you’re Apple.

81
Approaching Press. Do you have unique, interesting stories?
They’re not your writers
Build a human
connection first

82
Don’t have good retention rate,
Don’t go to press yet!
News
published
Traffic
Wasted

83
Most effective way to acquire customers? Your passionate customers
Good news, travel fast and far

84
Save your money on press releases. Ineffective.
Different countries, however, it could be different stories

85
SEO, Social Media takes time to develop
Millions of others
are doing it;
how you stand out?

86
Viral is not a strategy
People are immune. Mutate!
Unless your
Product is
irresistibly good

87
Simple pricing is almost always better than complex one
Have 1-3 pricing
options as opposed
to complex pricing
choices.
Customers want predictable costs,
not many options

Going Global

88
US is a crowded place.
Go play outside
Less competitors
Growing market
Of course, there is a catch…

89
Partner locally. Remote management is an illusion
Close, personal relations
often are prerequisite
outside US

90
Global team communication
is easy. Culture fit is hard

91
In many countries, social status is more important
…than your product itself.
“Your product sucks,
But X uses it, so I use it”

92
One size does not fit all
Package your product
differently in
other countries
based on market
demand

Miscellaneous

93
Nice guy finishes first
… in the long run

94
Admit mistakes, start from the top. We’re all learning

95
Set expectation to team
Changes are constant
We’re a startup
not a manufacturer

96
You’ll be surprised, many people
are routing for small guys
Many offer
a helping hand

97
Whom Microsoft, Google, Apple should be worried?
You
They may have the muscles, but you can run faster
Few of youwill be the next them

98
Startup is not a job
It’s a life style. It’s drive and
passion to change the world
with little financial reward.
Yes, few made it very big
Yes, it has been known that startup entrepreneurs have genetic defects

99
It’s a growing pain experience with big personal rewards

100
Subscribe to these excellent blogs, vlogs, podcasts
Paul Graham http://bit.ly/pgqy8
Steve Blank http://bit.ly/juvQr
Venture Hacks http://bit.ly/1BOE8x
Both Side of Table http://bit.ly/EsjT7
Mixergyhttp://bit.ly/rgDKP

101
It’s a blank canvas…
What are you waiting for!

For more presentationslike this….
Please visit:
http://www.slideshare.net/Guppers/presentations

Contact me
mailto:andy@gestone.com

http://www.andyharjanto.com	1909
http://apprentissagetntic.typepad.fr	547
http://konnaissances.blogspot.com	320
http://blog.akova.ca	317
http://www.apprentissagetntic.typepad.fr	272
http://konnaissances.blogspot.fr	145
http://www.slideshare.net	69
http://konnaissances.blogspot.ca	11
http://paper.li	6
http://konnaissances.blogspot.be	4
http://konnaissances.blogspot.ch	4
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	3
http://www.konnaissances.blogspot.com	3
http://www.bonweb.fr	2
http://konnaissances.blogspot.com.br	1
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	1
url_unknown	1
http://www.hanrss.com	1
http://www.lmodules.com	1
http://www.linkedin.com	1

101 Lessons Learned for Startups

by Andy Harjanto

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

20 Embeds 3,618

Statistics