David Cummings on Startups

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  • Sell to Customers Before You Build

    What message does this sign send?
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    This week I’ve had the opportunity to talk with three different idea-stage entrepreneurs. Two of them are on the right track talking to prospects in advance of the building the product. Unfortunately, I could tell from their answers to my questions that the picture they painted for their prospects was much too vague for their proposed solutions.

    Selling to customers in advance of building a product is critical. Here are some tips:

    • Mock up a few screens in a wireframing application
    • Ask general questions but make sure they aren’t leading questions (entrepreneurs love leading questions!)
    • Explain how the system will work
    • Ask for a commitment for them to use the system once it is ready
    • Get at least three commitments in advance of development
    • Work with the committed parties during the development (it’s much better to make it too simple rather than too complicated)

    My recommendation is for entrepreneurs to better clarify their product’s functionality with potential prospects before building the actual system.

    What else? What other tips do you have during customer discovery?

  • Two Ears and One Mouth for Sales Reps

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    Image by firehole via Flickr

    Earlier today I sat in on a product demo with one of our top sales reps. By the end of the demo, I was reminded of the old adage: we have two ears and one mouth and we should listen twice as much as we talk. As a sales rep the beginner inclination is to excitedly talk about all the amazing bells and whistles, both to show how great the product is as well as to show off your knowledge. Successful sales reps know that asking the right questions and listening is more important than doing all the talking.

    Our successful sales reps did the following today at the second product demo for a prospect:

    • Explained his understanding of the top five pain points for the prospect
    • Articulated what areas would be covered during the demo
    • Gave a two minute background on the company (no slides ever)
    • Presented a story of a user performing common actions
    • Showed the results of those actions and our system
    • Paused and asked if there were any questions at every step in the demo
    • Respected the prospect’s time and ended promptly after 25 minutes
    • Received an affirmative response at the end signaling the prospect is likely to move forward

    Again, two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listening is one of the most important traits for sales reps.

    What else? What listening tips do you have?

  • Where’s the Value Created

    New York Stock Exchange
    Image by Randy Lemoine via Flickr

    A few weeks ago I mentioned something similar but I think it is important to understand that value in a startup and established companies isn’t always obvious. There are many different ways to create value and the public perception of how money is made by a certain company can often be good to obfuscate the real value being created. Let’s look at a few examples:

    • Someone once told me the market capitalization of airlines is equal to their frequent flier points. Meaning, one significant way airlines make money is by selling frequent flier miles to other companies like credit card issuers.
    • There’s an Internet company that recently received a good deal of bad press about their selling social media data. One of the strongest ways they make money is by acting as a credit score of sorts for email addresses, even though you’d never know from their main website.
    • In Atlanta there are several retail store fronts in expensive areas for a company that helps people find apartments. Of course, they pitch the service as free and make money by referral fees from the apartments. This one is a bit more obvious but it shows that there are non-obvious ways to build a business.

    What else? What are some other examples of non-obvious ways companies create value?

  • Explain What Your Startup Isn’t

    A Startup Company's Server Room
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    Startup founders love to explain their vision, strategy, and rattle off all the product features. I’m a fan of offline analogies as well as creating mindshare hooks. Startups also fall prey trying to be all things to all people, but with such little resources it is best to do one thing and do it extremely well. One of the things I’d like to see more founders do is think through what their startup isn’t. Here are some examples:

    • We don’t target companies with more than 300 employees
    • We don’t target B2C companies
    • We don’t sell with field sales reps

    Yes, the opposite could be articulated but it’s easy to say “we focus on B2B companies” while also seeking out B2C companies. The key with explaining what the startup isn’t is that it makes it more clear where you stand, helping enrich your core focus.

    My recommendation is to make a list of what your startup isn’t.

    What else? What are some other benefits of explaining what your startup isn’t?

  • 9 out of 10 Entrepreneurs Have a Sales Challenge

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    One of the things I enjoy doing is talking to entrepreneurs about their business. I’ve talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years and 30+ entrepreneurs just last month. My conclusion recently is that nine out of 10 entrepreneurs have a sales challenge. By sales challenge I mean that increasing sales is their number one goal, focus, and priority. Unfortunately, for many of them, they aren’t making the desired progress.

    Here are the recurring themes I see:

    • Not enough time to devote to sales, but they are the only person selling
    • Don’t like to sell and the recently hired sales rep isn’t working out
    • Trying to sell over the web (e.g. self-service) with no luck
    • Wanting recurring revenue but still doing one-off projects
    • Performing sales-like activities with co-founders but deals aren’t materializing

    Now, I don’t have a silver bullet solution to these challenges. My recommendation for entrepreneurs is to think through customer acquisition as one of the most core aspects of their business and realize it is going to be the hardest.

  • The Unacknowledged Legacy of MSA on Atlanta

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    Management Science America (MSA) was the largest software company in the world a few decades ago and headquartered right here in Atlanta. It’s legacy profoundly impacted the Atlanta technology community through alumni of the company that started some of the most successful startups, invested millions of dollars as angels and VCs, and helped in the management and executive ranks of numerous companies.

    The impact of MSA on Atlanta has been well documented but there’s an area that is rarely talked about: the MSA legacy of a hyper sales-focused culture. In my experience, B2B software companies that are the most successful are ones with excellent engineering and amazing sales teams. If you look at some of the billion dollar Atlanta successes that had MSA-alumni involved, like Internet Security Systems and Witness Systems, as well as current success stories like Vocalocity that are well on their way to being a big company, they all had sales as a main strength.

    My recommendation is to focus on building a sales-centered culture and the next time MSA is brought up in a conversation, acknowledge that their sales-focused culture was a major driver of success.

  • #1 Thing the VC Industry Can Do To Save Itself (but can’t)

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    The VC industry is great catalyst of job and GDP growth in the U.S. Only, it has a major problem on its hands: it is going to shrink considerably over the next few years. The challenge is that investors like pension funds, college endowments, and wealthy families allocate a certain percentage of their money to the VC industry (e.g. 3%).

    Now 3% of investments in 2008, before the stock market, real estate, and other categories crashed was a larger number than 3% of investments today. Unlike publicly traded equities, VC investments are very illiquid so what was 3% in 2008, with portfolios lower overall, might represent 5% of the portfolio today. Thousands of investors needs to shrink their VC allocation down from 5% to 3%, and that’s going to result in many VCs going out of business.

    Here’s the number one thing the VC industry would like to do to save itself:

    The VC industry should make an across-the-board cut of 30% to all internal company valuations.

    Internal company valuations are required to report back to the investors but in reality represent a guess at the company value since the companies are private and the valuation is but a range. After cutting the valuations internally and reporting the new values back to the investors (that’s not a tenable conversation or legal) the investors’ portfolio allocation would back inline.

    Since the portfolio allocation would be back inline investors can put new dollars into VC as the rest of the portfolio grows. As it stands now with a significant overallocation to VC, investors are going to allocate even fewer new dollars (or none!) to VC for a period of time until the existing dollars plus new dollars equals the desired percentage of the portfolio.

    This strategy won’t happen but would be the number one thing the VC industry as a collective could do to save most of the size of the industry.

    What else? What do think of this idea on how the VC industry could help itself?

  • A Startup is More Valuable on Day 1 than Day 100

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    There’s an interesting phenomenon that takes places with startups looking to raise money: the startup is more valuable on day one than on day 100. Naturally, you’d think that working over three months on a business would make it more valuable, but for startups with no operating history a clean slate makes it easier to paint a big picture on this new, valuable business. You see, after 100 days, the entrepreneur should have launched the product or service in a minimum viable manner, have prospects and (hopefully) customers, and be well on his/her way to making money.

    The strange disconnect occurs when the company starts generating revenue and has paying customers. Now, with real numbers, an investor can start doing projections and come up with a model for how the company will grow and be valued. Almost always this results in a company valuation which is less than the pie-in-the-sky value assigned to the business on day one.

    So, if you’re raising money, and have a track record (required to raise money in Atlanta for an idea-stage startup), think hard about how the value of the business is likely to be higher at the beginning when you don’t have real-world data.

  • Startup Progression Example Two

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    Yesterday I also had a chance to meet with another new startup in town. This startup took a very different path from the other startup I met with as it is a spin-out from a large, established company. Here are some of the details:

    • The founders have worked together for two years at a publicly traded company in town
    • The CTO was the CTO of the company the publicly traded company had acquired at a strategic valuation
    • They spun out with a handful of high profile clients as well as four employees (inclusive of the founders)
    • They are in a fast-growing industry that has a lack of market awareness
    • The team has an excellent technical background but doesn’t have experience building a sales and marketing machine

    This is a team that will have an easy time raising money locally if they choose to do so. I’m looking forward to watching their progress.

  • The Startup Progression

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    This afternoon I met with a local startup founded by two recent UGA grads. Impressively, they’ve had a great startup progression so far. Here’s what they told me:

    • Spent three months working on a business plan only to realize it was a waste of time
    • Spent the last three months building a fully functioning web app
    • Didn’t know web design so they taught themselves PhotoShop, HTML, and CSS
    • Hired a local programmer to build a working site with PHP and MySQL
    • Raising a small seed round to launch their sales and marketing

    There were a few items I didn’t agree with:

    • Going to roll out the product to their main market and then focus on several related markets (I think they should stay laser focused on their initial market until the business is profitable)
    • Going to invest in 10-30 hours of programming per month (I think they need to innovate faster than that)
    • Don’t have a programmer as a co-founder (a technical co-founder is critical)

    My recommendation is to launch early and often (within 60-90 days of start) and solicit feedback from the market. These guys are well on their way.