David Cummings on Startups

Blog

  • Update on Google Spreadsheet Dashboards

    Now that we’ve been using Google Spreadsheets for our KPI Dashboards over the past two weeks, as previously discussed earlier this month, I wanted to provide a quick update on what’s working well and what’s not working so well. Let’s jump right in and talk about what we’ve learned.

    • The color coding based on percent of goal really does work well. Instead of spending the first five minutes of our weekly tactical going around and saying our KPIs for the previous week, we only talk about the yellow and red cells, meaning items below goal get more attention.
    • We don’t have too many weeks of data, but I can already see how over time we’ll be able to quickly identify trends based on a short glance at the cell colors.
    • Each week the previous week’s values are copied into a new column to be filled out Friday afternoon for discussion at the Monday morning meeting. Google Spreadsheets doesn’t have an easy way to make certain cells in the formula fixed, resulting in having to update 10+ formulas each week. Does anyone know a better solution?
    • The Google Spreadsheet is shared with the rest of the company providing greater transparency for all team members.

    Overall, I think Google Spreadsheets for KPI Dashboards work great and I highly recommend it to other managers and entrepreneurs.

  • Partner Lessons Learned from Shotput Ventures

    This morning we had our last partner breakfast for Shotput Ventures to debrief on the year, discuss lessons learned, and talk about next year’s program. Each partner talked about things that worked well and things that needed improvement. Here are some of the takeaways:

    • Try to better discern which teams are “all in” vs those that see it more as a hobby or summer job
    • Mentor the teams to make the investment money last six months, instead of the just the three months during the program, so that they have more runway to be successful
    • Ensure each team has at least two programmers (we only required one programmer per team)
    • Don’t allow teams greater than three people, unless it is a special circumstance

    Of course, we discussed several more lessons learned that can’t be discussed here. Overall, I’m very pleased with our first year and I really enjoyed working with the awesome Shotput partners.

  • Medici Center in Atlanta

    Today I met with Peter from the Medici Center in Atlanta. I hadn’t heard of the non-profit until he reached out to me to gather feedback on entrepreneurship and incubators in Atlanta. First, some background on the Medici Center.

    The Medici Center is a relatively new non-profit created to buy Atlanta’s City Hall East and turn it into a renaissance center with arts, businesses, eco/green awareness, and social entrepreneurship. City Hall East is over two million square feet of office space and is mostly unused. The Medici Center is scheduled to purchase the building from Atlanta on January 1, 2010 and then spend 12 months refurbishing 400,000 square feet for offices, class rooms, galleries, and more. I believe the facility and resources will be a great asset for the City of Atlanta.

    Peter was interested in learning more about the entrepreneurship community in Atlanta. I told him that Atlanta could really use a space like his as a co-working facility, for networking and educational events, and for seed stage entrepreneurs because traditional office space is so rigid with terms. In addition, I pointed him to sites like TechDrawl.com, StartupRiot.com, StartupLounge.com, ATLSE.com, and others. He was amazed at how much entrepreneurial activity is going on in Atlanta and I explained that we’re only getting started. I also filled him in on the new direction of the ATDC and how it is really shaping up to be the center of the technology eco-system in Atlanta.

    It’ll be interesting to watch the development of the Medici Center and I’m excited Atlanta has a such a forward thinking organization.

  • Transitioning from Services to Products

    Today, I had the opportunity to meet with a successful entrepreneur who is working on transitioning his 18-person company from services only to a mix of software products and services. I think this is a common occurrence with service businesses: the business owner gets tired of selling labor-intensive work and looks for product ideas related to his or her core competencies.

    I offered up the following advice:

    • Hire completely new people to work on the product. It is very difficult to transition existing people out of their current roles, especially if you don’t already have excess capacity in the business.
    • The best new product development teams I’ve worked with combined a full-time marketing product manager and a full-time lead software engineer (you really only need two good people to prototype normal web apps).
    • Plan for it to take a solid three to six months to get the first worthwhile beta release into the hands of potential users.
    • Budget for 12 – 24 months of expenses to see the new product through to product/market fit.

    I haven’t done it, but I can imagine transitioning from a services company to a services and products company is very difficult. I hope he’s successful!

  • More Lessons Learned from Shotput Ventures

    After posting my first round of lessons learned from Shotput Ventures, and successfully completing Demo Day yesterday, I wanted to capture some more thoughts related to our first class. Let’s jump right in:

    • In the future, the Demo Day event should not be held on a Monday because most VC firms hold their partner meeting on that day
    • Pairing one mentor with each team at the beginning of the program would be better than having several mentors that work with multiple teams
    • Funding companies using the formula of $6,000 per co-founder is probably more aligned with each team’s actual financial needs for the three month program (as compared to the $5,000 per team and $5,000 per co-founder model we used)
    • While the ATDC did an awesome job setting us up with the 100-person TSRB event facility, we could have easily filled up a room that accommodates 200 people
    • Having a few graphic designers available for the teams would have saved them valuable time in designing their logos and web app user interfaces

    Again, I’m very proud of our first class and think that everyone involved did a great job!

  • Shotput Ventures Demo Day

    Today was Demo Day for our inaugural Shotput Ventures class of 2009. Over 120 people attended the event and had the opportunity to watch eight young startups present their products and businesses. Here are the eight companies and a brief description of what they do (in my own words):

    • Looxii – Looxii makes it easy to monitor and analyze terms across the social web
    • ShoutNow – ShoutNow allows users to send broadcast voicemail to telephones, as well as to incorporate audio snippets into Facebook and Twitter
    • OpenHatch – OpenHatch is essentially a LinkedIn for open source developers, designed to showcase projects people have worked on and connect companies that need help with developers
    • ZETA – ZETA analyzes several different factors related to user generated content online to come up with an objective score measuring the authority of the information
    • Ninja Post – Ninja Post is a modern message board platform that incorporates real-time updates into the user experience
    • KHU.SH – KHU.SH’s LaDiDa reverse karaoke iPhone app allows users to sing into the phone and test different matching accompaniments in order to make their own music
    • EventHive – EventHive provides technologies to make conferences more interactive, including audience polling, Q&A, and other services
    • SocialGuides – SocialGuides is a location-based service for restaurant reviews that is like an intersection of Twitter and Yelp

    The event today was a big success and I hope you’ll take the time to visit and support the different Shotput companies.

  • Some Lessons Learned from Shotput Ventures

    As we finish our last minute preparations for tomorrow’s Shotput Ventures Demo Day, I wanted to reflect on some of the lessons I’ve learned. This is not an exhaustive list, but rather a few quick thoughts based on my experiences over the past three months. Without further ado, here they are:

    • Offering a co-working space as part of the program is a better way to go than no office space in a spread-out city like Atlanta
    • I saw the most progress and excitement in the final 30 days of the program, correlated with having tangible products to test
    • Letting a team change product directions mid-course is a good idea if they still have time to build something solid for Demo Day
    • Community support is invaluable and Atlanta has been amazing at helping out
    • The teams didn’t interact with each other as much as I would have liked, and we could have done a better job promoting and facilitating them spending time together
    • Developing a timeline with general deliverables at the start of the program would have been beneficial (e.g. product user interfaces, roadmaps, potential beta testers, etc)

    After Demo Day, and having more time to reflect, I’ll work to come up with additional lessons learned. I’m excited about tomorrow!

  • Deciding to Build a New Product

    After today’s entrepreneurship talk for one of Emory’s MBA classes, several of the students lined up to ask me questions. One of the questions was essentially “Do you have a finance person that helps decide when to build a new product?” I quickly said that we didn’t have a finance person help us decide and that it was still based on a gut decision and customer driven input.

    This provided a good segue into describing what I think is necessary for new product development and what I think our core competency is as a company. As for a new software product, assuming you are already following Steve Blank’s advice, I think it is critical to have a domain expert product manager and a separate lead developer software engineer. With today’s awesome web app frameworks, a small, two person team can really put together a prototype of just about anything. In my company, I believe our core competency can be distilled down to three main areas:

    • Scalable web applications
    • Online lead generation and marketing
    • High quality customer service

    So, while I don’t have more specifics on deciding to build a new product, I look at what we do best generally, solicit feedback on the idea from internal and external stakeholders, and then make a decision one way or another. Also, don’t be afraid to kill a product if it isn’t going to be successful. We stopped development of a product over two years ago after working on it for several months, and we should have stopped even sooner.

  • Iterating in a Startup Slideshow for Emory

    I’m giving a lecture tomorrow for an Emory MBA class on entrepreneurship. As for the topic, I’m basing it on my previous blog post series titled Iterating in a Startup. The slides were my first attempt at using the Beyond Bullet Points style of presentation. I hope you enjoy the embedded slideshow below:

  • Google Spreadsheets for KPI Dashboards

    My main project this week has been redoing the tracking of our key performance indicators (KPIs) so that they are centralized in a shared Google Spreadsheet with automatic color coding to indicate where we are in relation to our goals. We’ve been monitoring KPIs for years but never had a system that was as transparent and simple as I would have liked. With that said, our existing One Page Strategic Plan does contain our goals for the current quarter, current year, and next three years in a readily digestible format.

    Google Spreadsheets proved to be a logical choice as the framework for tracking our KPIs on a weekly basis due to its flexibility with conditional formatting as well as its team collaboration functionality. The spreadsheet has the following three tabs and content:

    Data

    • Department in column one
    • KPI categories in column two
    • Columns three and beyond each represent a week, with the current week in column three
    • Each row with the KPIs has a corresponding row beneath it with the calculated percent of goal in a color coded cell (based on percentages outlined in a previous post)

    Goals

    • Similar to the Data tab with departments in column one and KPI categories in column two
    • Columns three and beyond each represent the goal for that KPI in a specific quarter, with column three always being the current quarter

    Explanation

    • Columns one and two are the same as in the previous tabs
    • Column three has a paragraph explanation of the KPI and why we track it

    I’m excited about tracking our KPIs in this new dashboard format and seeing how it helps us focus on areas where we can improve our business. Please let me know how your organization implements KPI dashboards and any ideas for improvement of ours.