David Cummings on Startups

Blog

  • Getting the Most out of Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce ’13 Conference

    Next week is the annual Salesforce.com Dreamforce ’13 conference out in San Francisco. For the past five years I’ve attended the show and enjoyed watching the Software-as-a-Service market grow extensively. I won’t make it to the show this year but I have a few thoughts on getting the most out of the event:

    • Plan your itinerary in advance around the sessions and events, but stay flexible as more opportunities will always pop up
    • Remember that the most value comes from building new relationships in the hallway discussions between sessions
    • Never pay for a meal or drink while at Dreamforce — there’s always something going on
    • Engage in social media, especially Twitter, to meet like-minded individuals at the show
    • Set five personal goals for the show, whether it’s meeting certain people, finding answers to business problems, or helping push forward other initiatives

    Dreamforce is a great event and anyone in the software industry would do well to experience it at least once. I’m disappointed I’ll be missing it this year, but with these recommendations, anyone who attends will get tremendous value.

    What else? What are some other ways to get the most value out of Dreamforce ’13?

  • 4 Tested Scrappy Startup Ideas

    One of the best things an entrepreneur can do is figure out how to get stuff done on a limited budget and build scrappiness into the DNA of the company. Once the business catches fire and has unbelievable growth, some of the scrappiness will have to be unwound, but that’s a high class problem to have. Let’s talk about some common scrappy ideas.

    • Subleases – Never do a direct lease unless there are flexible terms (more ideas on subleases)
    • IKEA Furniture (or Goodwill) – Invest in great chairs but otherwise get the cheapest desks and furniture possible (costs to furnish a nice office)
    • Interns – Young, ambitious talent is eager to help out and make a difference
    • Crowdsourced Design – Look to talent from around the world for high quality logos and graphic design (see 99designs and crowdSPRING)

    Scrappiness is an important part of successful startups and should be employed whenever possible.

    What else? What are some other scrappy startup ideas?

  • 3 Next Steps for an Entrepreneur Without an Idea

    At last night’s Startup + Student Connection event a number of ambitious students came up after my talk and expressed interest in becoming an entrepreneur. Naturally, I asked why they hadn’t started a company already. Of course, the standard response was that they didn’t have a good idea. My response was either to a) start an eBay store to learn some basic entrepreneurial skills or b) build a personal brand that will help your future company.

    Here are the first three steps for building a personal brand:

    1. Register the domain name of your personal name at Namecheap or GoDaddy
    2. Create a free blog at WordPress.com that uses your personal domain name
    3. Start blogging and tweeting on a regular basis about things you’re passionate about as well as ideas to make things better

    How does a personal brand fit in with being an entrepreneur? Brand awareness helps with recruiting team members, validating ideas, finding potential prospects, raising money, and a number of other things. Plus, regardless of being an entrepreneur or not, it helps with any endeavors in life. So, the next time a potential entrepreneur expresses interest in starting a company but doesn’t have an idea, tell them to start working on their personal brand.

    What else? What are your thoughts on these three next steps for an entrepreneur without an idea?

  • Prioritizing Amazing Employee Benefits

    Two weeks ago an entrepreneur was asking me about the amazing employee benefits offered by Pardot. Specifically, he wanted to offer more benefits in his startup, but couldn’t afford all the ones Pardot offered, so he was interested in how I would prioritize the Pardot benefits based on how much value they added. Now, we didn’t survey team members to get a precise understanding of the value of each benefit, so this is an educated guess.

    Tier 1 Benefits (most value)

    • Health insurance
    • Dental insurance
    • 401k profit sharing plan

    Tier 2 Benefits

    • Healthy snacks and drinks
    • Short term disability
    • Long term disability
    • Tuition reimbursement
    • Vision insurance

    Tier 3 Benefits

    • Catered Monday lunch
    • Catered daily breakfast
    • Full-time on-site massage therapist
    • Wellness bucks (e.g. for a gym membership)

    Note: Check out Liazon as a service to offer a marketplace of benefits for employees (e.g. standard health insurance as well as more unusual offerings like pet insurance).

    Finally, amazing benefits should be icing on the cake of an awesome corporate culture. It’s important to build a strong culture first as a priority over great benefits. Once the team is in place, find out what benefits matter most to them.

    What else? How would you prioritize different types of employee benefits?

  • Monthly Advisor Update Email

    Over the years I’ve been asked several times to be an advisor or mentor. While there are a number of good posts about the benefits of an advisory board (see Jeff’s great thoughts here), I want to focus on a little used technique that adds tremendous value: monthly advisor update emails. After you’ve built an advisory board and scheduled a nice recurring quarterly dinner, one of the best things to do is to keep everyone up-to-date on a regular basis. Monthly feels right as it’s enough time to make progress but not too frequent so as to become burdensome.

    Here’s an example template for a monthly advisor update email borrowed from the format Kyle Porter uses for regular team and investor updates:

    • Current quarter goals and progress towards goals
    • Product update
    • Sales update (New MRR, total MRR, and current weighted pipeline)
    • Marketing update
    • Quarterly priority projects update
    • Culture stories

    The next time you develop an advisor relationship, regardless of role, make sure a regular update email is incorporated.

    What else? What would you add or change about the monthly advisor update email?

  • Giving Up Control

    Recently I was talking to an entrepreneur about his journey. Early on in the conversation, I asked one of my favorite questions: what were some of your major milestones and lessons learned? Then, he recounted how one of his more important lessons learned was giving up control of the day-to-day operations so that he could work on the most important and strategic issues. Less tactical involvement turned into more results.

    Thinking back on it, I was an immature micro-manager for the first several years of my entrepreneurial journey. I wanted to control and monitor every piece of the business including every customer support ticket and every line of new code in the product. I didn’t know any other way. The startup was so small and fragile I felt I had to smother it to make it successful.

    Only, once we had achieved some level of success, I wasn’t self-aware enough to change my ways. After hitting a wall with our growth, scalability, and culture, I finally started the journey to unwind from the business and fully empower other team members. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

    What else? Have you gone through the process of trying to control everything only to realize that giving up control was necessary to get to the next level?

     

  • The Joy of Ideas

    Whenever I give a tour at the Atlanta Tech Village I try to point out ideas we’ve implemented that aren’t mainstream yet. As an example, we have several 70″ TV scoreboards on the wall displaying objective metrics about startups in the room (using Geckoboard), iPads mounted outside each conference room with room reservation info (using EventBoard Pro), and a number of walls covered with white board paint (using IdeaPaint). It’s not that we’re showing off, it’s that we enjoy trying out new ideas.

    In fact, ideas are a form of currency. Not currency in the sense of having a monetary value, but rather a currency in the sense of a third-party item readily traded for mutually beneficial gain. Whenever I talk with an entrepreneur, I always try to find out what’s working, and what’s not working, so I can share ideas about what worked for me. And, of course, I love hearing new ideas.

    In addition to ideas being valuable, I get a real joy from trying new ideas, especially ones that work well. As part of my desire to always tinker and look for ways to continually improve, ideas provide fuel for new initiatives. Fresh ideas that work well can then be propagated online as well in person, and more people can benefit from them. More joy.

    So, keep the ideas flowing and spread the joy.

    What else? What are your thoughts on the joy of ideas?

  • Rejecting Entrepreneur Requests for Help

    Last week an entrepreneur emailed me asking for advice about building out a sales team. Knowing the entrepreneur, and his situation, I replied that he shouldn’t be spending any time right now trying to figure out how to build a repeatable customer acquisition process. Why? He hadn’t achieved product / market fit yet (see the four stages). Spending time on a sales team would take away from the more important task at hand.

    Here are a few requests that should often be rejected:

    So, the next time an entrepreneur requests help that doesn’t make sense, reject it and point them in the right direction.

    What else? What are some other examples of entrepreneurs asking for help on things they should be avoiding?

  • Routine Sets You Free

    I get asked on a regular basis about balancing time between several different initiatives. I’m working on a new software company (Kevy), a tech entrepreneurship center (Atlanta Tech Village), and investing in startups (Atlanta Ventures). Yesterday, I was talking to an entrepreneur and he said a statement that helped crystallize my thinking:

    Routine sets you free.

    There it is: a simple four word strategy for business and life. The idea is that by having a simple routine I can maintain a pulse of how things are going, regardless of number of projects, and jump in and help wherever I can add the most value. When people hear how many meetings I have, there’s a tendency to think it’s overkill. In reality, they’re focused and add a tremendous amount of value (list of meetings).

    So, the next time there’s a challenge juggling a number of different initiatives, considering developing a more consistent rhythm, and let the routine set you free.

    What else? What are your thoughts on letting a routine set you free?

  • New SalesLoft Prospector Product

    SalesLoft has a new Prospector product designed to make it easy to build high quality lists of prospects based on results from Google searches (Disclosure: I’m an investor in SalesLoft). As background, one of the biggest challenges for sales people is getting targeted lists of potential prospects that fit the ideal customer profile. There are many data sources out there but the information is often out of date.

    The SalesLoft Prospector idea is really straightforward. LinkedIn has the best, most up-to-date information on professionals, and Google caches the public LinkedIn profile pages. So, provide a tool that takes the data from the Google results, puts it in a spreadsheet or CSV for a CRM, and augment it with phone numbers and email addresses via a third-party data sources. The end result is the best semi-automated list building tool on the internet.

    SalesLoft Prospect Interface

    So, the next time you hear a sales rep complain about the quality of their lists, have them give the SalesLoft Prospector a try.

    What else? What are your thoughts on generating lists of potential prospects and the SalesLoft Prospector tool?