David Cummings on Startups

Blog

  • Don’t Add Too Many Features Before Customer Input

    This has come up two times in the past couple weeks making it worthy of a blog post: don’t add too many features to your produt before soliciting customer input. In fact, in some cases, you should sell your prospects on the idea of a new feature and/or product just to get their feedback to see if it is the right direction to go. 

    As a rule of thumb, you should be able to build and launch your web application in three months tops. If it takes longer than that, you’re making it too complicated. We made that mistake with one of our products and are now spending hundreds of hours refactoring the back-end and actually removing some features from the product. Don’t let it happen to you.

  • Crowdsourcing Creative

    For one of my latest projects, I decided to try and see how cheaply I could get a really nice logo and web design done for Shotput Ventures. Here’s what I did:

    Of course, it is powered by the eCrowds Community Management system and Pardot Marketing Automation system, but that’s a different topic.

    I think the site and logo turned out pretty nice for under $1,500.

  • How to Get Value from Twitter

    I’ve been enjoying Twitter more and more over the past two months, once I made the resolution to participate and understand it. Here’s my recommendation for getting value from Twitter:

    • Use TweetDeck or a similar tool to participate
    • Add searches in TweetDeck,  or use search.twitter.com, to monitor your company name, product names, community issues, etc as well as follow people that are talking about things you care about
    • Don’t try to read everything everyone says that you follow — jump in and join the conversation when you have time
    • Think of Twitter as an asynchronous instant messaging conversation with the world (never default to making all tweets private)

    Good luck with Twitter and try it for a full month to fully appreciate it.

  • The Buzz of Daily Check-ins

    For 2009 we started a new strategy of daily check-ins from the bottom up every day in the office. This means that every department does a scrum-like daily check-in answering the following questions while standing in under 10 minutes:

    • What did you accomplish yesterday?
    • What are you going to do today?
    • Do you have any roadblocks?

    Then, the department leader asks if there are any ideas for improvements as well as any heroes to recognize for outstanding work. We do this every single day! People that telecommute (we have a one day a week telecommute policy for everyone) dial in to a conference number.

    This is a bottom up daily check-in as everyone does at least one and up to three of these in a row in the morning. It works as follows:

    • 9:30 – Managers with direct reports
    • 9:40 – Managers of managers
    • 9:50 – Leadership team

    This way, any issues are immediately propagated across the organization and can be worked through by the leadership team within 20 minutes of finding it out.

    There’s an awesome buzz of noise every morning when this takes place. I’m a big fan of it.

  • Webapp Sign-in Security Re: Twitter Happiness-gate

    Last week’s Twitter snafu involving the hacking of several celebrity Twitter accounts and posting commercial and lewd remarks was found to come from an individual hacking into a Twitter support person’s account. The gist of the story is that an individual wrote a script to automatically try every word in the dictionary to break into an online account. It turns out that the password was ‘happiness’ and was found relatively quickly. 

    For programmers and online entrepreneurs, the moral of the story is to only allow a few login attempts before the account is automatically locked. How is the account unlocked? The account can be unlocked by contacting support, if applicable, or by going through a forgot password sequence that involves answering a question or having a link emailed and clicked.

  • Frameworks for Fast Growing Companies

    One of the hardest things to do for a fast growing company is to get everyone aligned and on the same page. One business guru said successful businesses are 1% vision and 99% alignment. Here are some good books for entrepreneurs once they get past $1 million in revenue:

    What are your thoughts? What books do you recommend?

  • Cons of Ruby on Rails Compared to PHP/symfony

    The user drkyzar asked for a follow-up on my previous post comparing Ruby on Rails and PHP/symfony. His request got me thinking about some of the cons of Ruby on Rails. As expected, some are due to the language and some are decisions of the Ruby community. Here are my initial cons of Ruby on Rails as compared to PHP/symfony:

    • Ruby meta-programming in Rails, and other gems, make it hard to debug problems. You can do meta-programming in PHP but it isn’t very common and symfony follows a heavily object oriented approach. In the Ruby on Rails world and the acts_as_*** gems, it is very common.
    • Ruby gems (plugins) don’t always work on the different OS platforms and are often OS-specific making it difficult to include them in a projects source code repository. As an example, the json gem version 1.1.3 doesn’t install on Windows but works fine on Mac and Linux. The json gem version 1.1.1 does work on Windows but other gems like the latest Twitter gem require 1.1.3. This isn’t fun to work through when there are a variety of software engineers running the major OS environments.
    • The biggest con with the RoR platform is how long it takes to compile everything when you have a big project. You can run Rails in different environments like development and production. Development recompiles everything on each request and production compiles and caches everything on the first request. So, a large project will take 20 – 30 seconds on each request in development mode as you click around. With PHP/symfony, there is no massive recompiling resulting in almost no difference changing a file and re-requesting a webpage as compared to running in production.

    These are just some of my observations after building large scale SaaS products in both Ruby on Rails and PHP/symfony.

  • SaaS/Web is Ideal for ADHD Entrepreneurs

    A common trait you’ll find among entrepreneurs is that they have tons of ideas and routinely can be described as ADHD. Due to this phenomenon, SaaS products, and the web in general, make for an ideal medium as it affords an elegant manner with which to constantly tinker. In many cases, you can have an idea, see it live in production, and get customer feedback in a matter of days or weeks (with strong automated testing, of course!). What other types of products allow you to do that? Physical goods? No. Services? Rarely.

    Constant iteration and innovation really is adrenaline for enterpreneurs. It doesn’t get much better than SaaS/Web for products.

  • Some Thoughts on Sales Commission Strategy

    Sales commissions are a tricky thing. Once you put them in place, it is difficult to change them without the sales team being demoralized that their compensation is going to go down (even if it isn’t!). The goal, generally, is to minimize base salary and maximize performance based compensation. Here are some thoughts on strategy:

    • Align company interests with the commission (e.g. have commission percentages based on the profitability of the item being sold such that things like license revenue have a higher percentage commission than services revenue)
    • Significantly reduce compensation if quota isn’t hit (e.g. cut the standard commission in half if quota isn’t reached for the designated time period)
    • Don’t limit the up-side (e.g. don’t put a cap on the maximum amount a sales rep or account manager can make)

    Sales, and management of a sales team, is one of the most difficult, and rewording, aspects of a business. Good luck!

  • Time for Twitter

    My new year’s resolution last year was to write one or more blog posts per week. I’m happy to say I achieved that goal and it’s time for my next resolution: use Twitter several times per week by posting tweets and joining the conversation. I’m not going to post a ton but I will try to capture thoughts, anecdotes, and anything else that is interesting to me.

    Follow me on Twitter: @david_cummings