Entrepreneur in steroids |
Thoughts that aim to accelerate entrepreneurs' growth |
As I work as a startup co-founder, I get to think a lot about what it is to become a CEO of a startup company.
Up until this point, I have identified several key aspects that CEO should excel in. Although the list of the bullets aren’t exhaustive, I just wanted to jot down here to remind me of the things that I should always care when the day comes where I become the CEO - which I eventually want to be.
When some people think about startups, they tend to associate it with great and unique ideas that will rock this universe. Obviously, there are some companies that truly is exceptional in building new things - a la Apple, but you will be surprised to know that most, if not all, of the startup’s ideas are mere change of an existing idea, and at times, a total rip-off of other competitors idea.
As a consequence, not a thundering idea, but having a keen eye to read the macro structural change, enthusiasm and determinism to attract the brilliant minds, empathy to sympathize and communicate with others, discipline and system to try and test multiples ideas are important.
1. Eagle eye on reading the macro trends.
Action plan:
- Keep up yourself with the industrial pundits and innovators
- Hone your view on several important trends
No startups could truly succeed without reading the minds of customers. Even B2B ideas, seemed as an indifferent matter about customer minds, needs to be constantly adjusted and fitted to customers needs. Add to this assertion that you will be targeting a sizable market where one could reap the benefit, then you will instantly know that satisfying the ‘mass needs’ is crucial. On top of that, add this crucial fact that human, as a highly social animal, usually moves in droves when they change their behavior, lifestyle, and culture. In sum, ‘mass needs’ sometimes reveal themselves as a ‘macro trend’, and as an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to win the minds of the mass, you gotta be an expert on this realm.
2. Vigorous enthusiasm
Action plan:
- Work on the things and needs that you understand the most
- (Or if it isn’t the case) Try to understand the problem and internalize your understanding as fast as possible
- Become the aggressive proponent for your idea anywhere, anytime (You can’t be a thing if you don’t act in that way)
Buying people’s minds aren’t as easy as one might thought. Without your exuding enthusiasm combined with bright optimism, people will easily notice the agitation. Who on earth could throw themselves into a cause that even the founder doesn’t truly believes in?
3. Experience on how to understand people
Action plan:
(As a CEO)
- Build two active channels (one upward, one downward) with which people can communicate and allay their concerns
- Proactively seek out moments to bond with others and become a true friend of others
- Ask about each person’s short-term objective and agenda
If you don’t have any money, you could vociferously sell your ideas to potential investors. If you don’t have any ideas, you could discuss with your peers to discover a stunning idea. But without good people, you are doomed to fail. Why not look for good people when you don’t have any? If the problem was that easy! To iterate and maintain an idea for such a long time where you can finally greet the moment of epiphany, without peer’s strong support, nobody could withstand the emotional, financial roller-coaster without exhaustion.
As as result, understanding people and having a strong relationship that could last is a crucial tenet a CEO should have. Every person have their unique agenda. Some people try to become a startup founder afterwards, while some people want a exciting working environment, while another group of people want a stable job security. Even though you may not be able to sooth everybody’s discontent, you could sympathize their concerns and seek out the ways where you could alleviate those. Another crucial reason for CEOs needing this ability is that CEO is in the best position to initiate the understanding. Especially in some part of the world where hierarchy is easily accepted and respect a social norm, one cannot easily express their concern to their direct reports, and understandably more hard to the CEO.
4. Discipline and methodology on how to solve the problems
Action plan:
- Through multiple trial and errors, hone your personal problem solving methodologies.
- Meet with people who have their view own methodology, and learn from them
Although, even start-up experts say that ‘running a startup is more of a magic’, it surely doesn’t imply that we all should be putting our hands off the table and wish for the magic to happen. There are some aspects that are worth having discipline. Such as, ‘how should you interpret customers feedback’, or ‘how could we change the course of our service based on current assessment?’. And these are the things that cannot be learnt through the textbooks. You gotta be testing multiple concepts starting from your initial belief on how things should work.
Seems like a pretty long list huh?
We cannot talk about startups without mentioning investors.
To entrepreneurs, at times, investors are the cherish-able ones who inject necessary capital into a startup on a deathbed. However, sometimes, they are the ones that make us to digress our attention from important ones to the minor nitty-gritty paperworks.
All in all, one thing that will forever hold is the fact that investor will be always near you when you consider yourself as an entrepreneur. It is near impossible to bring impactful changes to our society without getting necessary help from investors. Thus, we better focus on how to leverage them than to rant about investors.
So, here comes the million dollar question, ‘How will we able to persuade and collaborate effectively with investors?’
As a matter of fact, we should start from basics, which is, to know what their purpose and objetive is. Investors share a common concern when they make a decision to invest on a startup. “Will this startup be able to bring necessary returns within next 5-10 years?” And to alleviate their concerns, we gotta be show the followings
I am sure most people are familiar with these type of concepts. (I am sure there exists much more exhaustive elements. Please take this list just as a starting point)
But one thing that we easily overlook is the psychological aspect of the investors. We, as a human, are easily affected by our own experiences, although these experiences may not be representative enough to be applied to every situations.
For example, I tend to value customer needs strongly, since my first startup went under due to the fact that our understanding of our potential customer was minimal. If I were on the other side of the table, where I should decide which startup to invest, I would be anal retentive on whether the company understood their customer’s needs and wants.
In short, if you can somehow have a glimpse on potential investor’s history, you may be able to make yourself get readied for ‘the critical aspect’ that investor highly values on. But remember, investors’ money alone does not guarantee your business’s success, only your customers and their pocket will tell the truth. Am I focusing too much on customer needs? haha
Don’t get me wrong.
I would never say that intelligence-wise, user is inferior, which is just totally far from the truth.
These days, most of users are living in an environment where majority of their deeds could be done quite effectively with the tools in their hands. Within this context, we - the entrepreneurs - could be said as an intruder who wants to change the users’ behavior. We want them to disband their previous habits and to adopt a new service which in effect may bring more joyfulness in his/her life.
But an important hurdle that an entrepreneur should climb on is that some, if not majority, of the users find it extremely hard to get accustomed to using a new service or product. They usually want to stick to their past behavior, whatever the reason it may be. Only a small portion of users who dare to try out a new-ones are usually called as ‘early-adopters’ who became one of the critical user group that every entrepreneur should carefully nurture.
Back to the main topic, to entice those non-early adopters we should accomplish the following two BHAGs.
1. Enable users to use the service / product for sufficient time.
2. Make users to use the service @ right occasion, w/ right way.
Since #1 is a thought that comes up quite easily, entrepreneurs usually focus on that aspect by throwing out events, building communities, granting rewards, only to name a few. However, without showing user the ‘right way to solve the right problem’ users may be spending precious hours trying to, in surface, know about the essential feature of a service, while, in fact, working on some minor feature that hardly can grasp users attention at all.
So what should we be doing to save ourselves from this seemingly deep death spiral?
We, humans, are naturally great imitators. We learn mother-tongue language by following mother’s mumblings, and learn social skills by imitating peer’s reactions. Once an exemplary example is shown and gets applauded for its greatness, users can more easily grasp about which action should she take, and which value could she earn by using a service.
One of the good living startup example for effectively utilizing exemplary education is ‘Pinterest’, one of the hottest startups of the year. During the supposedly innocuous signup process, users get to follow some, so to speak ‘influential’ users activities, which becomes the first page of one’s using a service. As a user literally see how the service should work and how beautiful and useful using a service could be, engagement level could easily increase and viola! you become one of the hottest startup in valley.
( This feature alone NEVER had made this day’s Pinterest. However I am pretty sure these processes are one of the factors that strongly accelerated Pinterest’s wide user adoption. )
Think about it.
Oh no! I inadvertently closed browser while I was writing an article.
I would rather just succinctly write down the core ideas that I wanted to communicate with.
Insight without measurement and correction is like an action without execution. No one could point to the exact right solution before they try and test out their insightful ideas.
Effective measurement and solid feedback system is important. By ‘effective’ measurement, measurement should be able to cut through systematic complexities and give simple illustration of current status, while by ‘Solid’ feedback, decision on how to utilize the measurement should be clearly defined so that result could be directly used for improving customer experience.
Our team has been deploying a lot of complex statistic / analysis tool without specific objectives. When we initially started out to build some stat tools, we assumed that there are very specific reason for us to build it, but in most occasions, it was ‘Let’s build it and then try to make inference out of that stats’ kind of approach. However one should always bear in mind below two questions before they start out building a stat tool.
“What kind of decision should I be making through specific numbers?”
“How will the number affect the decision process?”
By clearly having these objectives in your mind, you can pin-point the stat number that you want to calculate while reducing the clutter to finally apply the findings directly onto your service ASAP.
Remember. Having analytics tools is not an end but a way to deliver quality decision in the end.
As an entrepreneur, you’ll often run in to a situation where you should make a quick judgement call and execute it once the decisions are made. But this peculiar question, for me, was such a hard one to chew. Frankly I am still hammering on this question, but here are my up-until-this-point thoughts.
If you were to ask me about the important tenets of a successful entrepreneur, before I came here to bay area, I would probably tell you one thing that captured my mind some years ago.
“Focusing one one specific topic laser sharp, and deliver maximum value within that problem. Identify small beach-head where you could easily target, and try to expand the region further once you become the big fish on that market”
This is the essential summary that I personally swallowed after reading one of the start-up bible, ‘Crossing the chasm’. These conclusions were so fixated within my mind. I sometimes reminded myself that I will focus on specific topic and nail the problem effectively once I start a company.
However, there were some another aspects of the start-up that I totally overlook. Which is that there are so many ‘unexpected unknowns’ in start-up arena. In addition, even though you interact with your core customers vigorously to finally deliver a quality solution, once it is not scalable, it is just a SOHO business plan that no VC will give a hoot about. Sometimes, you should cast your net wide-enough to capture a serendipitous moment, where you discover your small feature loved by so many customers, only to make a pivot to that specific business model and succeed.
Yes, once you try to tackle the startup-problem like a logical surgeon, you have pretty high probability to kiss goodbye to one important goddess of startup, ‘serendipity’.
So if the seemingly disparate two solution both have their significant weaknesses, what do I think the solution is?
Fortunately, the direction in which we could take is not black and white. We could take a path somewhere in the middle where we maintain our sharpness of our idea, at the same time, validating multiple hypothesis simultaneously to root for a ureka moment. Seems pretty simple huh?
However, sadly, it isn’t. You will be encountered a situation where if you sided with one option, you must have made your mind pretty easily and go forward, whereas because of your vague stance on this matter, you will mumbling while screaming your throat out. That is where priority and region of your interest comes in play.
You should have one biggest hypothesis that you want to validate and deliver, and should define a region in which you want to play. Also, each of the small hypothesis should be always kept in mind with its priority set. If one another hypothesis comes out, carefully gauge that with your current hypothesis and decide whether to include the new one into your hypothesis pool, while maintaining manageable number of hypothesis at a time. ( Which should be around 3-4, but strongly depends on your teams fluency to handle the matter )
I, myself, too wil be maintaining my hypothesis list and priority. Hopefully, I could bring out impact-ful service to people so as to somewhat validate my stance on this matter.
What make one person to become special?
There are a lot of people who are so called specialists these days. Some political pundits call themselves as the wonk, while brokers in Wall Street boast about their prowess to read the market’s mind. But what really makes them as a distinguishing specialists? Do they really confer to our society a tangible benefit so as to justify their existence?
One book that I am reading nowadays are ‘Thinking, fast and slow’ by an nobel laureate psychology professor. He boldly claims that our highly praised ‘intuition’ should be always interpreted with a grain of salt.
Our brains are working in two different modes simultaneously each of which is called System1 and System2, respectively. These two mode of operation shows strikingly different traits. System1 could be explained as animal-like, instantaneous thinking, whereas System2 could be thought as sophisticated, logical thinking. To illustrate further, Jack welch’s gut, chess champion’s instantaneous judgement should be the result of operating System1.
The professor not only stops at explaining how our brain works, but goes further into why and how the intuition is made, and how should we judge the intuition of others. Because of System1’s inherent associative nature, intuition work fluidly only when the situation in which you are is familiar, whether by your own experience, or thought. Also, for intuition to be un-biased, the learning process should be continuous and feedback have to be tangible enough to accurately calibrate the associative memory. Which means, you gotta be putting a lot of effort before you can truly become an intuitionist. You have to be continuously assessing your hypothesis and adjust bit by bit to become an respectable specialist. That is why some specialists, who’s exposure to a specific event is limited by nature, and who’s feedback loop isn’t clear, fails to become a ‘true specialist’.
Everybody will nod their head vigorously with the statement ‘practice makes perfect’. However, what people are prone to overlook is that what is challenging within the statement is not about knowing it, but about executing it.
I am a firm believer in entrepreneurship, because I believe I could make a dent in the universe through it, and because I could do so effectively by learning continuously. Although I may strongly believe in one business model, it doesn’t mean there is no chance of failure. There are innumerable ‘unexpected unknowns’, and also ‘insufficient knowledge’ as to prevent failure from happening. However, the fact that I would learn through multiple attempts, the fact that I would become an expert in this area, will increase the odds of success continuously, and someday I will become the man that I, myself dreamed of.
Considering that the startup experience is hardly recurrent, and the feedback loop is vaguely defined, without my peculiar attempt to advance myself, I would be waddling in the muds in the middle of nowhere. I should continuously trudge my steps one by one, occasionally checking progress I have made so far. And so will I.
Being an entrepreneur isn’t a pleasing job.
You get to go through painful decision process, persuade seemingly indifferent customers, painstakingly pull the all nighters, just to name a few.
However, it is such a rewarding job where you can have a sense of control on your destiny. A sense that could never be attained without going out on a limb to start business by yourself.
Through this blog, I would like to share my experience as a first-time entrepreneur.
Before I started this company, which I would rather not disclose as of this moment, I was working as a consultant in a well-known global strategic consulting company. Having experience on the both sides of aisle gave me bit of insights on how the thing works in both startup world and large conglomerate world.
Hope this blog works, both for me and the readers. Previously I have tried multiple times to write a periodical blog but to fail miserably. Maybe now is the right time.
