I prefer second time (or more) entrepreneurs. Sure, I would love to work with people who have had multiple successes. But I’m not afraid of entrepreneurs that didn’t succeed the first time. I want to work with talented people with good judgment. And so I’m out to spread the word, “Good Judgment Comes from Experience, but Experience Comes from Bad Judgment.” Go out and learn.
There’s a big difference, however, between failing while giving your very best, and failing for the sake of failing.
I discuss this difference in the following short video.
Success makes some people complacent. Other people expect to continue to succeed by doing the things that made them successful. This is not always possible, however. To innovate, you have to stay dissatisfied. Here’s why:
I have little doubt that every investor has heard an entrepreneur touting how their new product or service will “crush” the competition with great features that the competition hasn’t yet seen. Many entrepreneurs – especially aspiring entrepreneurs – believe that product or service features represent a great competitive advantage.
There’s a dirty secret about features – they’re rarely a competitive advantage. I discuss why in the following short video.
It’s tempting to promote a product, service or company by using popular buzzwords. The formula is simple: pick some buzzwords, string them together in a few sentences, and voila!
Buzzwords can be appropriate and convenient. But 90% of the time, they are misused.
I am growing increasingly sensitive to how I use buzzwords, because I am noticing that I react negatively when others use buzzwords in written and verbal communications. When I start hearing a parade of buzzwords, I conclude that the person isn’t communicating – they’re just stringing together a bunch of words for effect.
I suspect that you too react negatively or that like me, you start to tune out the conversation when you hear many buzzwords. That’s the rub with buzzwords – if everyone uses them, they are no longer unique. Who cares if you have a ground-breaking or viral product if every single other company claims to have a ground-breaking or viral product?
If your audience is tuning you out, your marketing or fundraising message will fall on deaf ears.
It’s tempting for startups to count everything that can be counted. After all, prospective investors and the media are often influenced by numbers of followers, visitors, users, paying customers, etc.
But there are a number of challenges when trying to count everything. Relying too much on statistics can be very distracting and can lead to decision paralysis. Startups that become obsessed with metrics often lose their way.
Many entrepreneurs and business owners forget that not all metrics are important. Albert Einstein famously said:
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Wise words – and most startups (and small businesses) should take those words to heart.
We tend to rely very heavily on metrics (at my company, crowdSPRING) and therefore, are more likely than other companies to become distracted if we don’t smartly pick and choose the metrics that influence our decisions. Sometimes, we make the right decisions and focus on the right metrics. Other times, we make the wrong decisions and lose focus, paying attention to metrics that aren’t nearly as relevant as we mistakenly thought they would be. (Last week, I suggested four questions you should ask when making decisions based on metrics and statistics).
Given the wide availability of good software and plenty of data (from your internal and from many external sources), it’s pretty easy for startups to put together measurements on just about anything.
One of the lessons we’ve learned from our successes and failures: we are more likely to succeed when we spend a greater portion of our efforts discussing and debating what should be counted – and a smaller portion of our effort counting.
Numbers are good – but as Einstein correctly pointed out, everything does not need to be counted.
People are generally obsessed with metrics and statistics. Some on Twitter constantly talk about their number of followers or the number of lists on which they appear. Those on Facebook talk about how many friends they have. Bloggers talk about how many comments people have left in their blog or the number of times their posts have been tweeted. The media fixates on traffic to websites. Statistics and metrics are everywhere, and most people make decisions based, at least in part, on those statistics and metrics.
My experience with crowdSPRING over the past several years has proven to me that with few exceptions, startups must keep their feature-sets simple and release software more often so that they can iterate and leverage feedback from users. Time and time again, we’ve made the mistake of over-thinking a feature only to learn that we didn’t do a good job planning and took far too long to release that feature.
Over the past three months, we’ve done a better job – simplifying our scope and iterating more often. It’s clear to me that what we’re doing now – simple, focused features followed by iteration – is the best way for startups to operate. I explain why in the following video.
Do you agree that startups should simplify features and iterate more often?
Experience tempts us to accept that a particular solution to a problem is the best solution. For example, an engineer who solved a complex technical problem in a certain way might assume that similar technical problems could be solved in the same manner. A marketing person who achieved success with a viral marketing campaign might assume that when they next need to build buzz about a product or service, a viral marketing campaign would be the best way to proceed. An entrepreneur with a successful startup and exit might assume that they can repeat again by simply doing the things that made them successful in the first place.
I was reminded of this when recently talking to my engineering team about scaling crowdSPRING and the different approaches we can take to scale our site.
As we talked about a menu of options (hardware improvements, threading, database scaling, cache strategies, etc.), I was struck by this: we were all relating our personal beliefs based on our experiences with different scaling solutions as if those beliefs and our experiences were the only truth. For example, those who had negative experiences with reverse proxy solutions were critical of such solutions. Those who had good experiences with reverse proxy solutions spoke favorably about them.
Experiences can lead us to stop questioning, and that’s exactly what was happening in our discussion about scaling strategies. That’s a dangerous situation to find yourself because true innovation requires us to see problems as opportunities, not as threats.
It’s natural, when we see problems as threats, to try to solve them quickly and to solve them in ways that we successfully solved other similar problems. And that’s sometimes not unreasonable – solutions that worked for us before are sometimes the best solutions.
But if we want to see problems as opportunities – so that we can innovate and build on our experience, we all must remember to never to stop questioning.
I’ve talked previously about the need for startups to differentiate from their competitors and the need to understand your competitive advantage. For example, my company, crowdSPRING, differentiates by delivering outstanding customer service to our community of nearly 70,000 users from nearly every country in the world. In the following video, I offer five suggestions based on our experience, of the things you can do to improve your company’s customer service.
Can you suggest other tips for companies who want to provide world class customer service to their customers?
People are obsessed trying to figure out ways to measure ROI (return on investment) from social media marketing – and from other forms of marketing. ROI is important, but can be a red herring. At the end of the day, ROI is meaningless if your product or service isn’t relevant. Here’s why:
What do you think? Is relevancy just as important as ROI?
Ross is an entrepreneur. He co-founded crowdSPRING - the marketplace for creative services. For 13 years prior to crowdSPRING, Ross was a successful trial attorney. And yes - that is a puffer fish to the right.
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