David Cummings on Startups

Author: David Cummings

  • Hiring Inside Sales Reps

    Last week I looked for my first crowdsourced answer to a question by posting to my network on LinkedIn. This was the first time I’d asked a question, and I must admit I was surprised by the variety and quality of the responses. It isn’t that I didn’t think that my network would have good responses, but rather that very few people would respond. I had many more responses than expected. Here were some of the consistent themes to the question “What are some recommendations for finding good inside sales reps”:

    • Hire a “Sales and Marketing Assistant” that does all of the coordinating work with prospects so that current sales people can spend more time on serious leads
    • Use a staffing firm that specializes in sales reps as well as uses TopGrading to evaluate candidates
    • Use job boards from local colleges and universities focused on management majors and general business majors
    I wanted to say thanks to everyone that responded.

  • Product Speed as a Feature

    One of the things I like to focus on is speed as a feature. What this means is that the performance and responsiveness of the web application is an important factor in success. With the web and web browsers working over long distance high-speed connections, there are still delays and headaches that differ from standard client-side applications.

    The speed of the application should be treated as a feature and time should be appropriately allocated for the engineering team on a regular basis to continually fine-tune the application. Here are some quick tips for improving the performance of web applications, but remember that premature optimization is also a cause of failure:

    • Offloading anything that doesn’t need to be processed in the current request to be a background job
    • Use asset hosts to request things like images, JavaScript, and CSS from different hosts
    • Use memcached along with database query caches to reduce the database load
    • Make sure your HTML is compliant and conforming to the appropriate DTD
    • Use tools like YSlow to measure performance

    Good luck in making your application as fast as possible and remember that speed is a feature.

  • 3 Reasons I like Google Chrome

    I’ve been using the Google Chrome browser as my main browser for the past couple weeks and I’ve been very impressed. As a multi-year Firefox user, I was loathe to move on but the number of times Firefox would freeze on me on a daily basis was beginning to get annoying (probably partially related to too many add-ons installed). Here are three reasons why I made the switch:

    • Speed — Chrome runs a separate application process for each tab open resulting in a significant performance boost
    • Access Keys — Chrome has Alt and the access key enabled by default whereas other browsers require Alt + Ctrl and the access key (unless you manually change configuration settings)
    • Universal URL/Search Bar — Chrome has a single text box at the top that is used for both URLs as well as Google searches making it fast to enter URLs, search, and pull up previous sites
    I recommend Google Chrome for PC users everywhere.

  • Tips for Office Subleases

    We’re in the process of securing a new office for early next year and I wanted to share some tips I’ve learned over the years when it comes to offices and subleases:

    • Offer much lower than they’re asking as it’s a sublease and they likely already have a new lease, especially in this soft commercial real estate market
    • Try to offer a deal when your company grows into the space over time e.g. pay for 50% of the space the first six months, 65% the next six months, 80% the next six months, and the full amount the remainder of the time
    • Shorter subleases will result in better deals as companies don’t like moving very often

    I’ve found that you can consistently rent office space for 50% of the market rate using these approaches during normal market conditions.

  • Product Feature Request Pruning

    In my experience the issue tracking / feature request system that you use as part of your product management strategy will quickly become bloated with lots of ideas from different constituents (employees, partners, customers, media, analysts, etc). It is important to be very opinionated with your product’s functionality and to fight hard to keep the application focused.

    One of the things I recommend doing is similar to old saying that you should give away any clothes you haven’t worn for a year: you should delete any request older than six months that hasn’t come up again in the past six months. This strategy helps clear out items that kept getting re-prioritized lower. The act of letting the requests sit there and fester creates noise — delete them now.

  • Tips for a User’s Conference

    We’re putting on our third annual User’s Conference tomorrow and have 123 registered attendees (sold out!). After having done it for a few years, we’ve come up with some recommendations for those who haven’t done one before:

    • Charge 50% more than you think to cover costs as there are always expenses you didn’t anticipate (shuttle buses, swag, videographers, etc)
    • Book the least number of rooms possible to still get a good rate — you don’t want to be on the hook for extra rooms and hotels will always add more at your rate once you’ve filled your allotment
    • Use a nice conference center and hotel — we made the mistake last year of using a nice brand hotel that was 20 years old and woefully out of date. The conference is a reflection of your company.
    • Make sure your company employees know that the conference is a time to engage with customers and prospects — don’t just chat with other employees.
    • Have fun!

    I’m a big proponent of User’s Conferences and recommend them as a great way to engage with your customer community.

  • Commercial Real Estate Economic Nonsense

    Our office lease ends in six months and we’re in the process of looking at lease options. We have an amazing office now (MTV’s old office) and would like to extend the lease for one year. The building won’t do it — they won’t do anything less than a two year extension. They claim that they are worried that with all the new buildings coming on the market they’ll be left with more empty space and want to solidify longer term deals now. Wait, we’re offering to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to them for a space that is going to sit empty indefinitely and they are saying no. It doesn’t make sense.

    My take is that the building management companies are so far removed from the building ownership companies that are so far removed from the pension funds that own it that there is a moral hazard of sorts. Economic wastefulness continues to amaze me.

  • Y Combinator for Atlanta – Part 2

    My previous post on a Y Combinator for Atlanta has generated a good bit of off-line interest. Here are the most common questions I’ve been asked:

    • How would you choose the teams?
    • Do you think there will be enough interest and applications?
    • How will it differ from the original Y Combinator?
    • What happens to the teams at the end of the program?
    We’ll find out these answers and more over the next 12 months.

  • Transitioning to a SaaS Business Model

    Just under a year ago we started the process of overhauling our business in an effort to have 75% of our total revenue be recurring. It is very difficult to transition a traditional, enterprise software model to that of a SaaS type model. Our particular niche in the market was not suited to charging an annual per user fee for installed software (although some vendors in other B2B markets have made it work). We decided on a two pronged approach:

    • Offer a hosted version of our installed software, with a monthly per user fee
    • Build a new system from the ground up with a multi-tenant architecture

    We started with 25% of our revenue as recurring and I predict we’re 1/3 of the way of a three year process.

  • Tools for Meeting Preparation

    As part of a local intiative I’m working on I’ve had the chance to meet a number of entrepreneurs over the past couple weeks. Historically, I would have Googled their name to see what blurbs I can find out about them. Now, in addition to the standard Google search, I always check their LinkedIn profile, their blog (if any), and their Twitter account (if any). While it might take a few minutes, it is invaluable to learn as much about the person as possible and to read what they’ve been writing (even more important!). With this at hand, the conversations can get much more interesting in a shorter amount of time and shared experiences can be discussed to establish rapport.

    I recommend taking advantage of the different online tools as part of your meeting preparation routine.