Andrew finally reveals the key to success: rubber duckies, Purple Cows, and The Game.

LESSONS LEARNED:

• 

  Why reinvent the wheel? Look at guys who are successful and steal their template when designing your MVP.

• 

  Advice isn’t the same as hand-holding. Early advisors said here’s what you should tackle next, but we’re not going to help you do it.

• 

  Recruiting: build an MVP and start asking for feedback and referrals from experts, developers, etc…

• 

  Recruiting: Use Linkedin to find engineers who have been at larger co’s for 2 years and odds are they’re a bit burned out and looking for a new challenge.

• 

  Recruiting: You need to make sure that the person next to you can do their job way better than you ever could.

• 

  Give A players the chance to be challenged and suffer serious brain drain on interesting problems. Huge motivator.

• 

  Every member of the team needs to have their own personal goal they’re working towards.

• 

  If you feel any tension with co-founders early on, stop what you’re doing. Trust your gut because you’ll be with these guys for the next 5 years.

• 

  Honesty matters. Don’t be paralyzed by your fear that people will hate you if you tell them the truth. They might not like to hear it, but they’ll respect you.

• 

  Test your MVP in sales meetings. Demo product and ask questions. Purpose is to gain market feedback not sell. Watch prospects facial reaction to each feature in the room.

• 

  Your memory is not as good as you think. Take notes in meetings.

• 

  When going to a conference: set up a booth near the bathroom and grab people’s attention. Guaranteed foot traffic.

• 

  Recruiting: Sell the vision. This is where we want to head. We think there’s X problems, hav you been seeing that as well? People who want to solve problems are ideal candidates.

Jim proves nice guys do finish first, but only when they’re twice as smart as everyone else and just a bit more humble.

LESSONS LEARNED:

• 

  Build domain expertise as resource to partners: Yipit helped identify what makes a “good” offer “great”?

• 

  Differentiate: daily deals may have been crowded, but a tool to help users navigate this crowd became Yipit’s valuable niche.

• 

  Get to know your users: Yipit invites power users into the office every Friday afternoon to share feedback.

• 

  UX Challenge: how do you get users to provide preferences during registration before receiving value from your site? Provide incentives to encourage ideal user behavior.

• 

  Targeting algorithms: more complex doesn’t mean better. Location and broad category were meaningful enough to create loyal users early on.

• 

  Key metric to assess word-of-mouth marketing: how much traffic arrives directly at URL or via keyword search for your startup’s name?

• 

  Timing a fundraise: wait until positive press and traffic draw investors to you instead of wasting time chasing investors.

• 

  Recruiting: Very hard to hire the 6th+ employee when you’re not trying to build the next Google. Must craft compelling story about the work and team.

• 

  Recruiting: talent dilution is real. World-class talent either works for world-class companies or starts their own company. Convincing them to join you instead is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.

• 

  Standard recruiting channels don’t work: It ain’t about the highest salary. Google will always have deeper pockets. Incredible people like to work with friends on interesting projects.

• 

  Built community around blog and leveraged it to source key hires.

Eliot defines the benefits of pulling a Rudy, aligning incentives, and adding value.

LESSONS LEARNED:

• 

  Working capital leverage, lead times, replenishment rates, & cash-flow cycle aren’t just B School buzzwords. They can destroy your startup. Learn what they mean.

• 

  Diligence isn’t about theoretical analysis. Pick up the phone and call potential customers. You’ll get candid feedback and maybe even a new customer.

• 

  Can I establish incentives that align your interests with mine to elicit candid feedback during diligence?

• 

  Eliot takes a networked approach to investing: find out who knows the industry? what are the necessary resources to successfully invest? What’s the upstream look like?

• 

  Finding mentors is essential. Don’t be afraid to pull the Rudy card- I’m young and don’t know anything; could you teach me?

• 

  Support your partners by defining roles and responsibilities. Ensure they have a consistent, challenging goals. Protect them from becoming distracted.

• 

  If I can’t find some way to make your business better before I write a check, I don’t invest.

• 

  The problems at a board level are caused by management not understanding you and vice versa and wasting time doing that dance when critical issues arise.

• 

  More sales without more profitability is not necessarily a good thing

• 

  Job of a VC: raise money, introduce you to people that can help you, and listen very acutely to what you need and try to get it for you before you even have to ask.

• 

  Companies are bought, not sold. If you’re building your company to sell it, you have fundamental issues. Why are you not making something people want and are willing to pay for and finding people to kick the cr*p out of it to make your product better.

Marketing is about customer acquisition. PR is about creating “buzz.” Usually, the thought process goes something like this: what can we do to get an article written about us? An article will create buzz, which gets investors’ attention, which leads to financing, which means we’ll have a business. Wrong.

You want to know what gets investors’ attention: loyal customers. Figure out how to get more of those. And yes, Fred Wilson is right, that starts by having an awesome product: “not one of [USV’s] top performing companies had a marketing budget in their initial business plan.” Well, notice what I’m not saying. I’m not saying you have to spend a dime on marketing. In my mind, Marketing and PR are philosophies, not expense items. Ask yourself how each action will lead to more customers. If the answer is a couple of steps removed, stop and rethink your approach.

So how does that play out:

Press Coverage: “unless you’re a startup like Quora and your customers are fellow startups, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to pursue articles in TechCrunch or Mashable” according to Angus Davis (Swipely). Couldn’t agree more. Find out where your potential customers are; what they read, watch, and listen to. Find a way into those publications. That’s marketing.

Just my 2 pennies.

Schuyler

Joe shares what it takes to bring great talent through the door. He should know, Jibe’s revolutionizing recruiting and turning Monster into a munchkin.

LESSONS LEARNED:

• 

  Debt’s aren’t just monetary: you’ll have to pay down your technical debt too so make sure it’s manageable when scraping together you’re beta.

• 

  Early hires aren’t the same as later ones: I view early hires as partners. Made first technical hire based as much on leadership as coding knowledge.

• 

  Make sure every person through the door is either building something or selling something

• 

  Recruiting tactics: informed Linkedin search- Gilt was transitioning from Rails to Java and Rails developers felt left out so started poaching.

• 

  Treat recruits like investors- make them feel wanted. Recruits can smell desperation; don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Get to know each other. It may take time, but it’s a must.

• 

  Interviews are valuable even if they don’t lead to hires- leverage them to compare candidates to recognize when someone really is that good.

• 

  I want to have a meal with a candidate and want to know that I’ll enjoy working with this person.

• 

  Inside Sales recruits: Ideal candidate is someone that’s so hungry and has so much desire to be successful that they can let the “no’s” roll off their back.

• 

  Inside Sales: much more data driven and did develop a method. Brought on veteran to provide training once a week to develop the right calling scripts, follow up emails, etc…

• 

  Sell to people you know early on so you don’t waste time. Leverage their interest as social proof/credibility for investors by providing reference calls and LOI.

• 

  Head Hunters: requires hands-on management. Mike Fitzgerald at Winter Wyman. Made recruiting into a competition. If I found that candidate I wouldn’t have to pay him thousands of dollars in fees and he knew it. I also shared thorough feedback after every interview to recalibrate our search.

• 

  Define your culture: We’re small but we’ll give you the best benefits we can. 1) health benefits 2) food 3) competition. We pick the best healthcare and explain how to use it. We buy everyone lunch. Internal competition over something other than work sets a positive tone: doesn’t matter if it’s ping pong.

Ian breaks down how to tackle worst-case scenarios and what it takes to scale a technical team from 0 to 20.

LESSONS LEARNED:

• 

  Cardinal sin is over-promising and under-delivering: start simple and build on top of that incrementally in order to overcome customers skeptical initially.

• 

  Can’t control macro: started Sailthru the week Lehman collapsed so instead of raising funding, bootstrapped to $20k per month. Persevere no matter what.

• 

  When EC2 crashed last April, prioritized getting operational again ASAP, even in a degraded state. Then communicating issues to customers & conducting post-mortem: how can we be resilient even for systemic failure.

• 

  In crisis: divide and concur. Technical team’s responsibility to identify problem and address it. Account team’s responsibility to communicate that to customers.

• 

  Early detection is crucial: 2 redundant external monitoring systems that are early warning alerts. Entire dev team receives automated text whenever an issue is detected.

• 

  Take responsibility for your mistakes, analyze root cause of issue- what is the process that lead this to happen. Focus on the process not the person.

• 

  When recruiting: passion & the desire to learn is the most important question.

• 

  Interviews: Ask how did you get into programming in the first place? Answer is telling to understand the candidate’s motivation. Is it passion for the work or just a salary?

• 

  When on-boarding new hires: initial assignments are internal facing, building unit tests or something that isn’t core to our functionality. Goal is to provide a quick win that’s motivating.

• 

  Keep new features ASAP: As Simple As Possible. Complexity is inevitable, but part of your job as an engineer is to build things in the simplest possible way.

About Ian:

Ian White is the co-founder and CTO of Sailthru, which provides true one-to-one targeting for publishers across both email and webpages. Prior to Sailthru, Ian served as lead developer for Business Insider. He also happens to be the Robert Parker of whiskeys…

Company | Twitter

]]> http://foundersatfail.com/iansailthru/feed/ 0 http://foundersatfail.com/sailthru1/ http://foundersatfail.com/sailthru1/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 03:34:56 +0000 founder1 http://foundersatfail.com/?p=453

Want more? Order the entire first season on DVD. We’ll send you episodes #1-10 BEFORE they’re released on the web.

SUMMARY:

Neil got married, launched Sailthru, and went out to fundraise the same week Lehman collapsed. Macro may be out of your control, but it didn’t stop this guy.

LESSONS LEARNED:

• 

  Tell your story: as a CTO I’d outsourced email and it never worked- so I built a product to solve my own problem.

• 

  Can’t control macro: started Sailthru the week Lehman collapsed so instead of raising funding, bootstrapped to $20k per month. Persevere no matter what.

• 

  Find an ombudsman: didn’t know fundraising process so I started by talking to a friend who did at NYCSeed who introduced me to others.

• 

  Leverage Investors: It’s in an interested party’s interest to introduce you to others in order to raise a round.

• 

  Don’t overcomplicate your fundraise: should have done a convertible note instead of priced seed round.

• 

  Speak Investor’s language: Know how to talk to investors and realize they are partners. Be honest. They’ll find out anyway.

• 

  Learn how to motivate your team. If you’re going to do something, do it well.

About Neil:

Neil Capel is the co-founder and CEO of Sailthru, which provides true one-to-one targeting for publishers across both email and webpages. Prior to Sailthru, Neil served as CTO to Hyphen, Musicnation, ASmallWorld, Money-Media, as well as CEO of Redscope. A graduate of University of Portsmouth, Neil has true technical expertise in LAMP, cloud based systems, systems arch, scaling, email, management of technology teams. He also happens to have a wicked sense of humor.

Company | Twitter

]]> http://foundersatfail.com/sailthru1/feed/ 0 http://foundersatfail.com/chriscali/ http://foundersatfail.com/chriscali/#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:07:17 +0000 founder1 http://foundersatfail.com/?p=436 Media Technology Entrepreneur, New Denver-ite (but still a New Yorker at heart)

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