#startupadventures

Assumptions - we've all made them from time to time, sometimes they can be harmful, nowhere is this more true than in developing a business. When it comes to taking an idea to prototype, and then from prototype to product, there is a key ingredient to success that is all too often overlooked: assumption testing. In a nutshell, assumption testing is the systematic and objective analysis of the idea and the business model to determine where guesses and assumptions are being made. 

The key to success is to take the assumptions and determine how to turn them into actionable, answerable hypotheses. By taking this step, an entrepreneur can save themselves a lot of stress, time, and money. 

More than anything, assumption testing requires both you and your team to be painfully honest and objective - you get exactly as much out of this exercise as you are willing to put into it. 

Divide the assumptions into distinct aspects; this will make your approach much more efficient and effective. Every prompt should also be followed by: "...and how can this be measured and verified?" 

Problem/Solution Assumptions: 

a) Is the problem that you are solving significant enough to warrant a business? 

b) Is the problem  significant enough that somebody would be willing to pay for it? 

c) What alternative solutions exist (or have existed) that are not sufficient?

  d) Does your solution present a clear differentiating factor?

Market Assumptions:

a) Is your target market interested in a solution that you are offering?

b) Are your market demographics able to make a purchasing decision? (i.e. Don't market to the cashier, if you need the store manager to make the decision, etc.) 

c) Why has the competition not done what you are doing? (sometimes there's a very good reason, and you need to find out why.) 

d) Does your target market currently have the buying power to make the relationship economically feasible. (Every business has a customer, make sure that your target customers actually have cash in the bank!)

Operating Assumptions: 

a) How long can you run and scale before you require outside financing? (maybe you won't need any if you are bringing in excellent revenue, but again this is an assumption till proven otherwise.) 

b) Does your business rely on any key employees/partners/customers? (Who are they, and how can you decrease your concentrated risk?) 

c) Does your business take advantage of any trends/fads/patterns? (It likely does, and this needs to be understood to determine how to architect a long term strategy, think "Beanie Babies") 

d) What assumptions are you making about your key strengths? (How can you improve them and consolidate them?) 

e) What assumptions are you making about your key weaknesses? (How can you minimize these and protect your position?) 

__________________

On any given day, I push my Macbook towards its capabilities - having some reserve "horsepower" always helps. I figured out a quick "hack" to grab some more performance. I did this on the Lion 10.7.5 OS 

- This quick trick works by entirely turning off the internal functions of "dashboard" and its widgets. These functions run in the background no matter what, and they take up valuable RAM and CPU resources. To get rid of them properly, you need to modify the OS. 

- This process is reversible. If done right, you will see improved speed in application loading and bootup. If you love your widgets, then don't do any of this! 

*Line command codes are in bold below the screenshot, enter them exactly. (Spaces are indeed actual spaces)*

Step 1: Open the Terminal 

Yours might look different, mine just has different settings. 

Step 2: Enter the first command

defaults write com.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Press "enter" to execute the command. 

Step 3: Enter the second command

killall Dock

Then press "enter" to execute the command. 

Step 4: Close the terminal, you're done! 

If you entered everything correctly, your dock should disappear then reappear immediately, indicating that you've modified the system. Your Macbook Pro should now be running a bit quicker. Anecdotally, mine feels about 15%-20% quicker as a result. 

To reverse the changes, do the whole thing again but type NO in place of YES in step two. 

Recently, I was musing on effective and ineffective branding - in this age of social media and search engines, it can truly be a make or break factor.

I often purchase a natural sleep aid made by a company called "Nature Made" the product is simply called "Sleep" - while the product is good, the branding is not. I urge you to do this quick exercise: go on google and type in "Sleep" and see if you can confidently find the product, now type in "Nature Made Sleep" and see what you find.

What you will see is that to find the product, you need to have the brand name - this is clearly an issue. Having named their product so nebulously, it becomes difficult to verbally recommend, and even more difficult to track down online. If I wanted to recommend the product to a friend, but didn't know the company name, I would only be able to tell them "Go and buy 'Sleep' it's a great product." 

An opposite example is a company I worked for that had a 'made-up word' for a name. We focused on using our name everywhere, developing a specific set of keywords we used everywhere, and by applying our name to every channel we could. We owned the Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and AngelList accounts all associated with this unique name. Furthermore, we contacted the press periodically to get something published about us. On top of this, we made sure to keep our activity through all these channels as consistent as we could. The result was flawless - last I checked, we had an outright monopoly on the first 10 pages of results when our name was searched. Even better, because we linked back everything to our homepage (even if it was hidden) our main site was always locked as the top result no matter what. Quite simply, because of our strategy to build uniqueness, we had no reason to use any "black-magic SEO", it was all quite natural. 

What this all comes down to is engineering your brand with uniqueness as a top priority. When it comes to naming your company, giving it a slogan, or even writing about it, making things as unique as possible is vital. So how do you do this?

1) Develop a rock solid keyword strategy, make sure they are more specific (don't compete for ultra-common words)

2) Use those keywords as often as you can. 

3) Grab all the internet channels that you can, and place your name and your keywords into them (preferably within the URL)

4) Develop a name that is entirely invented (Look at how pervasive and effective "Google's" name is.)

5) Get press. This will be hugely important to getting your name indexed and publicized - don't underestimate it. 

In getting a company off the ground, or in growing an existing company, there is often a decision that needs to be made: "do we buy X or do we build X?" This is a tricky one, but taking the time to arrive at the best decision is worthwhile. There are many facets of business where this decision is important - from hiring v. training, to developing v. licensing. I don't know that there is ever truly a "right" answer, but there are certainly "wrong" answers. 

As one example. Imagine a company whose technology product is very specialized, requiring a knowledge set that is less common. The company faces two possible options: a) find and recruit someone who is a perfect match, or b) find somebody that can develop the necessary skills and become that person. The truth is, the company didn't really have a wrong choice, but having chosen option "b", will emerge with leadership that is specialized to their unique product. Furthermore, an individual with the experience and skill set would be difficult to find, not to mention very expensive to directly hire. This is an interesting situation: the more unique your product is, the more likely it is that developing your talent becomes a better choice than buying it. 

In software this becomes an even more common conundrum. I have two principle suggestions. When your product is genuinely novel, chances are that developing everything from the ground up is most sensible. But the less novel the product is, the more viable it becomes to explore buying or licensing prior work to repurpose. This might seem obvious, but it isn't. Take time to examine your plans and determine the various ways that you can avoid building something from scratch, it's time consuming and expensive - and often times unnecessary. This brings me to my second point, open-source software is frequently overlooked by the non-technical entrepreneur. If your product is not incredibly unique, hunt for open-source code similar to what you are building. There is a good chance that somewhere, a zip-file is waiting for you with 60% of your project already finished. Just find the right pieces, and then repurpose them. In some cases this may be frivolous, but it's definitely worth exploring regardless. 

There is a fine line to walk when it comes to positioning your company within its market. When your segment focus is too broad, you risk wasting marketing budget and feeling too "general", your branding and imaging will not appeal strongly enough. On the other hand (disregarding genuinely specialist products), too narrow of a focus can endanger the brand's opportunities for natural growth beyond the original audience. 

Having worked on marketing a startup originally focused tightly on the college-student segment, I've seen how important market focus really is. Early on, it absolutely made sense to keep our aim as tightly as possible on this single demographic, all branding, marketing, and design were engineered with this customer in mind. We routinely ran into an interesting problem however; customers outside of our intended demographic were interested, but felt that the product wasn't for them based on our branding and marketing. In essence, if the product was more "them" they would be more likely to use it. We had a bad case of too much focus. 

I’ve come to realize, in developing my own ideas and my own company, as well as from working for other tech startups that the features make or break everything. This might sound a little obvious, but stick with me and I’ll explain. Perhaps the most fitting analogy is to compare a company’s features to cooking a good dinner. There is simply no great dinner composed of only one item, but on the other hand, the incorrect combinations of side dishes and seasonings can ruin the best intentions. Likewise, an overwhelming combination of twenty different tastes is repulsive and confusing, no matter how good they might be alone. As just about anybody would agree, having the right variety, diversity, and cohesiveness on your plate is what makes for a memorable dish. And building a company is no different. 

In essence, there is always a key component to a concept, the central feature that defines everything else, this is of course of paramount importance to develop and understand. This can be analogized in our model as the “meat” of the dish, serving a Thanksgiving dinner with a horrendously prepared turkey is sure to ruin everything. The central idea needs to be prepared with the upmost care, it should do its job perfectly, if the most critical component doesn’t solve a problem for your audience, no amount of marketing, development, or peripherals will nurture success. This requires you to use the much lauded “lean startup” approach, take your central element and its assumptions, and test the hell out of it. Does your target audience respond positively, are they interested, what do they suggest? Use the results of this exploration to develop this central product, build what they want - not what you want. 

Next is your side dish, this is your complementary feature. To match and develop this most effectively, determine what your main feature does, and what it neglects or instead what subsequent issue remains. In simple terms, you want to sell the razors and the shaving cream, they complement one another. With regard to this, it is critical to really assess the secondary feature and ask yourself; “Does this improve upon or broaden the effectiveness of the big idea?” Despite the fact that you might have ideas for features that are exciting and interesting, it simply isn’t intelligent to add a feature that doesn’t effectively complement. If you begin to diversify the model too much, you will find that your company does several things badly, rather than one or two perfectly. Don’t serve french fries with the caesar salad! 

Vegetables. Classically, there are few of us that enjoy eating them, but they are indeed good for us and essential to good health. This is your company’s intellectual property (IP) and defensible material. As entrepreneurs, patents, trademarks, licenses, and copyrights are hardly the most exciting order of business, but they are critical. If you are able to explore the various ways that you can protect your company from copy-cats, competition, and lawyers, the healthier and stronger your company will be. Patents are mighty expensive, but if some IP is indeed unique and critical to the company’s operation, securing a well-written patent could mean the difference between mediocrity and glory. The caveat here is to only do this when it is clearly intelligent. If the patent is easily bypassed (i.e. another solution to the same problem for similar cost), or if you are unable to effectively police it (i.e. protecting your patent), then it is not worth the time or money. VC’s and Angels love to see an arsenal of patents in the company, but don’t allow for their enthusiasm to delude your own thinking, a patent for the sake of it is a spectacular waste of resources. Only the multi-billion dollar companies can afford to scoop every piece of IP they develop, and even then it is arguably a wasteful practice. In summary, put your “vegetables” together strategically, align them to make it as difficult as possible for somebody else to replicate your company. Prepared correctly, your vegetables can taste good and be good for you.  

Next is dessert, the capstone of the perfect meal. For your company, this needs to be a feature that your consumers will find useful, enjoyable or amusing. Importantly, this feature doesn’t need to generate revenue (although it shouldn’t cost you a fortune either!) it simply needs to provide something to your customer that enforces the value of your company, perhaps analogous to seat-warmers in a car - wholly unnecessary, yet wonderful. This could be as simple as a useful blog or perhaps more complex, a helpful software tool that you include for ‘free’. To put together the best “dessert” feature for your company, make sure that it is purely superfluous, build something that sends the message to your customer that you really do want to make their lives better. 

Finally is the drink pairing. This is your company culture and image. The point I hope to make here is not to undervalue culture and image, but to instead highlight the fact that it is all too often forgotten. The right wine with a good dinner can take it from being great to perfect - likewise, a great company culture can take great features and make them unparalleled. When the experience is improved by great customer service and an image that communicates the right feelings, your customer is more likely to develop loyalty and recommend you to their own networks. 

By completing the experience by considering each aspect of it, from the most essential to the minute finishing touches, you are far more likely to build a company with strong features that will eventually develop a loyal customer base. Stay true to the dish and its theme, and the collective result will be tremendous. Sure the hot sauce is delicious, but don’t try putting it in your creme’ brûlée! 

Once, while on a scuba diving trip I was partnered with Jason, an audio-engineer who had worked with the likes of David Bowie and Jay-Z, an interesting guy to be sure. Talking with him about his work, I learned a few interesting things, some of which I would later find had true relevance to tech startups. Jason told me that his job was essentially to fiddle with the frequencies, volumes, and layering to ensure that the music sounded as good as possible. This is perhaps not so surprising or interesting, but what Jason told me next really stuck with me. “I make sure that the music is engineered to sound its best on iPod headphones and over the radio, and sometimes that comes at the expense of the clarity and crispness with the nicer audio gear.” Optimizing his product for his platform essentially. 

This wisdom and practice is remarkably applicable to tech and “Web 2.0/3.0” products. Put simply, why would you design and build a website optimized for desktop browsing in Google Chrome, if your users will be accessing most frequently on their phone using iOS Safari? There is simply no use in building a fantastic product if the users never really see the full potential because they never view or use the product in its optimal environment. In fact this very thing has proven problematic for Facebook, who were slow to optimize their platform for mobile use - this now haunts their stock price! 

My advise is quite simple: do the research. Before you spend time and money building a beautiful “launch-ready” product, figure out who your demographics are, how they will use the product, what platforms they use most often, and how those platforms change and adapt. If your website is better as a mobile application, just build the mobile application and don’t waste your time and money! So really this all comes down to effective market research in the early development phase, my personal belief is that you simply cannot overdo the initial research. Take this quote for what it’s worth: 

               “Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought” - Sun Tzu 

In too many cases, startups fail even when they have a customer base developing. "How can this possibly happen?!" you might ask. The answer is simple, but perhaps elusive; because we don't pay attention. To borrow a saying, a startup is really just a "faith based proposition", essentially, nothing is assured and everything is nothing more than an intelligent guess. 

Once a business model has been established, we think that we understand who our customers should be. The key phrase here being "should be". It becomes easy to repeatedly rebuild, redesign, and market the product frivolously to a market segment that just isn't responding. All the while, there may likely be developing interest from a market segment that wasn't in the "plan", and surprisingly, this new customer might be ignored! This isn't because of stupidity or ignorance, but simply because the entrepreneur is what I like to call "intelligently delusional". We need this adaptive psychological "flaw" to be successful in entrepreneurship, it's what leads us to chase a vision without being dissuaded by naysayers. However, sometimes this can be a huge issue, when the drive to execute the original plan obscures reality. 

So put simply, every entrepreneur should pay careful attention to where the volume is coming from, and where the enthusiasm is. We all have our "dream customer" but the real customer is the one paying money - and they are the one to rebuild and redesign for. None of us are omniscient, so we can't possibly know who will really love our idea, but chances are someone will - so listen, and then react to them.