It’s that time of year to start next year’s planning. We’re currently debating the three most important items to measure and set goals against. Here are the current three we’re working on:
This Economist article on the Broken Windows Theory has been making its rounds on the blogosphere. The theory goes that the small things, left unchecked, lead the way for more serious problems. In criminology, an example is not dealing with graffiti and minor infractions giving way to people committing more serious crimes. In business, an example is not dealing with little headaches or friction that impede doing a better job leading to more complacency. I’m fan of asking the “five whys” and drilling down into the core issue.
This one is for entrepreneurs and not consumers: debt is your friend. Too often, first time entrepreneurs think the first step to starting a business is raising money from other people or venture capitalists. My recommendation is to get the business off the ground doing whatever it takes — including using your credit cards. I used credit cards for my business eight years ago and even played the game of applying for new cards that had no interest for the first X months and transferring balances between cards in an effort to minimize the interest rate. Having tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, like I had, isn’t for the faint of heart, and is not recommended for most people, but it is often times the only way to get access to money.
As for banks, the truth is that most entrepreneurs will never get a loan from a traditional bank unless you have collateral for 80% of the value (e.g. stocks, bonds, real estate, accounts receivables, etc). People think banks are in the market of loaning money but they are really in the market of buying physical goods on your behalf and letting you pay them back for it. They aren’t there to fund your dreams that involve intangible assets.
My advice is to seriously consider debt whenever possible.
My younger brother is a first year student at Harvard Business School and was recently discussing a case in class on Jack Welch’s management style. After 35 minutes of discussing the case, the professor surprised the class by having Jack Welch come in personally and answer questions. The key message by Welch was that of the four types of employees and what you should do with them:
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”:
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:
Good luck in making your application as fast as possible and remember that speed is a feature.
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:
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:
I’ve found that you can consistently rent office space for 50% of the market rate using these approaches during normal market conditions.
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.
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:
I’m a big proponent of User’s Conferences and recommend them as a great way to engage with your customer community.
David Cummings on Startups 