When you’re in the product business, you have to continually improve on your product. As soon as you hit version 1, you’re heading for version 2. You create a roadmap and set milestones, which are just intermediary goals to help you get from inception to some point in the future.

The reality of roadmaps, however, are that they are susceptible to change based on market demands – or, as it’s sometimes called, “pivots”. You can have a great product idea that has a wonderful two year roadmap, but if customers don’t like it or demand other features that have never been thought of, then it would be wise to modify timelines and roadmaps.

Many successful products have been the product of a “release early and release often” mentality where the entrepreneur or product team did not wait to have a fully developed product, and instead, hurried to get something to market for the sake of collecting feedback and input and improving on the product.

Eric Ries in Lean Startup talks about principles of testing market validation by creating an iterative cycle of development where a product is released, tested in the market, feedback aggregated, assumptions tested against that feedback, and new innovation created as a result of those tests.

There are a number of rapid-cycle development philosophies including Agile, Scrum and others. These philosophies put a greater emphasis on involving customer feedback and direction over pre-determined plans where feedback is not collected until the development cycle is completed.

What happens if your assumptions were all wrong? Now you’ve got a product that no one wants to use!

The best way to avoid this problem is simply to release early, even before your product is near complete, and collect feedback along the way. Based on the feedback, you may need to modify your development trajectory but at least you’re able to do that before it’s too late and keep your product relevant to the consumer.

Next time, I’ll continue this series and talk a bit about business visualization to help you track your business and make effective decisions. If you’re not already subscribed to this blog, do so now. Also, follow me on Twitter where I’ll be talking about entrepreneurship, WordPress and a healthy dose of sports on the weekend.

Google and Apple are not only competitors… they are collaborators. Indeed, Apple and Google both offer top level smartphones – The iPhone from Apple and the assortment of Android devices by Google (Google not only has its own phones but is the main proprietor of the Android open source project).

In the same world, Samsung and Apple are rivals (and becoming even more rival-ous) with competing smartphones (Samsung runs Android) sparking ferocious lawsuits back and forth, but Samsung is also a major supplier of parts to Apple.

This segment of my continuing series on Rules of Entrepreneurship is all about knowing when and how to compete and when collaboration is a better option. They are not mutually exclusive. This is a natural segue from my last post where I suggest that entrepreneurs focus on doing one thing well.

Principle: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

It frustrates me to watch startups (usually not very good ones) try to reinvent the wheel. A classic example of this was from back in 2007 when I was sitting in a Starbucks in Columbia, MD. We had a group of entrepreneurs who gathered there on a daily basis and cowork together.

One of the guys I was working with introduced me to a pair of African-American entrepreneurs and he wanted me to hear about what they were building. I sat down and listened to their pitch. They were building the “YouTube for the African-American community”.

Full stop.

What? Why? Why not use YouTube?

They were well into the process of building an entire video platform from the ground up, complete with their own video encoding technology, instead of leveraging what YouTube (and subsequently Google) already created.

The entrepreneurs real mission was creating a video-sharing community for African-Americans, not creating video technology for African-Americans to use. I told them that day that they should abandon attempts to build their own video service, and instead leverage YouTube (which is built and maintained by really smart people at Google) to build the community they really wanted to build.

Why re-invent the wheel? You distract yourself from your core goals.

Sidenote: I have never heard of or from those entrepreneurs since.

Collaborate

As an entrepreneur, part of the process is identifying your competition. We certainly have done that at WP Engine. Sometimes, it is to your benefit to team up with your competition to achieve a common goal. Remember, business is business and it’s not personal. Don’t let your desire to “win” get in the way of your ability to get ahead.

Also, remember the age-old saying, “A rising tide lifts all ships”. What is good for your competition is often good for the entire industry you’re in. Everyone wins.

Certainly that’s not always the case, but it certainly isn’t not always the case.

Compete

In my opinion, competition is a bottom-line issue and there are lots of ways to positively affect your bottom line. Usually, competition does not equate to a zero-sum game, an assumption that rookie entrepreneurs tend to make. (I did this a lot in 2006, 2007 while at b5media and trying to take pot shots at competing blog networks – years later, I find it all kind of silly).

When you do choose to take on direct competition, keep it narrow, precise and for a specific purpose. Don’t allow personal feelings to affect your business strategies and, in the process, keep the door open to cooperation with your competition in other areas.

Next week, I’ll continue this series and talk a bit about release cycles – which is always a fun debate. If you’re not already subscribed to this blog, do so now. Also, follow me on Twitter where I’ll be talking about entrepreneurship, WordPress and a healthy dose of sports on the weekend.

However, the odds on favorite number that people in the startup community like to throw around is that 9 out of every 10 startups fails. So, as I see it, I still have 5 more failures and a win to look forward to (although I think my current startup, WP Engine, is a pretty damn good company that probably is a win).

I can say that in all of my years in this world, I’ve learned a number of things. Many of these things are through trial and error, success and failure, and good old A/B testing.

Today I’m beginning a series (revisiting an old theme from years ago when Steve Fisher wrote the “Venture Files” track on this blog – before I simplified to a single channel site that is updated far less often than it was then) providing some “rules”, as I see them.

As of now, I have six rules to share from my experiences. That may increase over time, but they are slotted and ready to go.

Focus Your Efforts

As an entrepreneur, the carrot on the stick is to provide the best damn {product} that {your target audience} has ever seen. I’ll focus on web tech startups since that’s what I know best, but the principle can cross easily into other industries as well.

Inevitably, being the best damn {product} that your {target audience} has ever seen, involves taking an already existing idea and improving on it. It’s always nice when you can do something new and innovative, but most companies aren’t and maybe shouldn’t be. It’s hard to do something completely new. One quick peruse through Angellist will show you scores of companies who are pitching their products as the {blank} for {blank}.

Examples:

• Netflix for Digital Children’s Books
• Twitter for images
• Meetup for Professional Events
• eBay for College Tutoring

While I go into manic twitching mode when I see pitches like this, I have to hand the entrepreneurs and startups credit in that they are able to clearly identify exactly what they are building and why it’s important. Sure, they have to leverage some other known entity to get their point across, but their idea is concise and communicable.

Don’t be Google

To leverage a known entity for the sake of this post, Google is a poster child for leveraging someone else idea in the entirely wrong way. Tell me what all of these products have in common:

• Google+
• Google Buzz
• OpenSocial
• Orkut

That’s right. Every single one of these products were attempts to be the entirety of something else – to take it to their biggest competition in the space. Google+ is a direct swipe at both Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Twitter. Google Buzz was a direct assault on Twitter. OpenSocial existed to provide a social networking framework and was a play to undermine Facebook. Orkut took a swipe at Friendster, both of which are essentially dead today.

In every one of these cases, Google decided to “go big or go home” and ended up going home. The most recent, Google+, is still trying to get some traction but everyone seems to be sitting back and saying, “I’ve got social network exhaustion” and don’t see the big value in Google+ over existing products that do the same thing.

The better approach, if you want to assault Facebook, is a limited, targeted, precision-strike on a single feature and knock it out of the park. Twitter already has the status update. Don’t go there. The concept of +1, is already being done by Facebook with the “Like”. In other ways, Tweetmeme has been doing the same thing by enabling users to share what they like (who’s really gonna share what they don’t like… even if they don’t literally “like” it because it may be controversial, it’s compelling enough for users to share… which is the essence of a “Like” or a “+1″?).

But perhaps Google could really target photo sharing and tagging. Picasa is already there. Make it challenge Facebook’s photo albums and tagging. No one has done social event planning very well. Even Twtvite and Eventbrite are just for event planning, but don’t do social very well.

You Have Finite Resources

As an entrepreneur, you have limited resources. The last thing you need to be doing is getting “squirrel eye” and being distracted by every cool feature you could make. Does it fit within your vision? Does it help extend the main reason for building the product? (A good example of this is Foursquare building an Explore Tab… it extends their business product vision).

Especially at the beginning, you don’t have a lot of resources. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Stay targeted and laser-focused on doing one thing and one thing well. As your company grows, you can start exploring complementary features and products. You just can’t be everything all at once.

Next time, I’ll expound on this concept by talking about competition and collaboration. You’ll want to come back. If you’re not already subscribe to this blog, do so now. Also, follow me on Twitter where I’ll be talking about entrepreneurship, WordPress and a healthy dose of sports on the weekend.

Nonetheless, it, like any good story, is successful in no small part due to the parallels in life that can be drawn. Much like how Office Space taught me about Public Relations, Star Wars taught me about entrepreneurship.

Don’t doubt me. The nuggets of wisdom are strewn throughout. In fact, I’ve developed my entire professional life around Star Wars. ¹ You don’t believe me? Check this out.

Always Two There Are, a Master and an Apprentice

No matter how good you are in your professional life, there is always someone better. Yoda reminds me that, there should always be someone I look up to for learning. Sometimes this person (or people) is better than you at what you do. Other times, this person (or people) is someone who excels in a complementary way.

One of the founders of WP Engine, Jason Cohen, is one of these guys. Jason is amazingly technically (if I can keep him away from Javaisms while writing PHP code) and is the brainchild behind our infrastructure. More importantly, the dude is one of the savviest businessmen around in a completely unassuming way. He is not the guy who is going to walk into a meeting a toot his own horn like some investors or entrepreneurs do. He simply is and carries chutzpah. I have not known Jason very long but in the time I have, I’ve developed a real appreciation for him.

Likewise, Geoff Livingston has become a close friend but he’s also an incredibly focused entrepreneur. I’ve known Geoff since his early days where he was running a social media PR firm out of Alexandria, VA. Geoff and I became close but it wasn’t until I lived with him for six months in 2008-09 that I realized the drive this kid had. He frequently asked for my advice on things that were happening professionally, all of which will remain off the record in the circle of trust.

However, he has demonstrated since that he knows how to make tough decisions and go after what he believes in. Earlier this year, Geoff co-founded Zoetica to assist non-profits and socially conscious companies in their communications efforts. His drive has led him to lead in the CitizenGulf effort to raise money for oil spill cleanup in the Gulf, and to raise awareness and change in the policy world.

His dedication to his cause is something I’m watching and learning from.

Yahoooooo! You’re all clear, kid. Now let’s blow this thing and go home

Remember when the Death Star invasion was happening in Star Wars IV? The X wings were being pursued down the trough by TIE fighters. Darth Vaders fighter was on the hunt to blow Luke away. Han Solo brings his Millenium Falcon into play at the last minute and with some perfectly timed shot, knocks Vaders fighter into oblivion allowing Luke to handle his business and blow the Death Star away.

In business, the ultimate goal is always to have an exit. If it’s not, you’re holding it wrong. You don’t want to stay in a job forever. You may want to delay because you have more you want to do with the startup before selling it, but at the end of the day, if you’re putting blood, sweat and tears into a startup… you want the big pay day at the end.

This is what drives many entrepreneurs to settle for less money in exchange for more equity in the startup. Get less cash now for way more cash down the road.

Like the Death Star invasion, startup mode will have you fighting a guerrilla war at times… fighting for your survival… skirmishing to get a leg up. Once you’re clear and have done everything you can to get the company to a specific place, cash in! Blow this thing and go home. Live to fight again another day.

Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?

One of the more hilariously ridiculous quotes from Star Wars IV came from Leah when Luke rescued her from being executed by the Empire.

The takeaway from this quote is pretty simple… never let anyone denigrate what you do as an entrepreneur. There will always be second guessing and there will always be other entrepreneurs who feel like thy know better and can offer advice. You know your company better than anyone else. You know your decision-making fiefdom better than anyone else. Own your offense and maintain confidence in what you do, and what you are building.

Luke, there is another Sky….walker…

The dying words of the Jedi Master Yoda. These words were the clue to Luke that he had a twin. That there could be another Jedi candidate. That there could be another Skywalker to defeat the evil Empire.

In the Lean Startup mode of starting businesses, the idea is to fail and fail fast if you’re going to fail at all. That way, if you fail and fail quickly, you can learn quickly without having put a lot of time and effort into something that will never work. Taking lessons learned, you can move on to the next startup and try again. Keep in mind that, statistically, 9 out of 10 companies fail. There is nothing wrong with failure as long as you realize there is another around the corner.

There is another Skywalker. There is another idea. There is another startup. And there may be another failure.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

We don’t know specifically what Chewbacca was talking about when the Millenium Falcon’s hyper drive system failed. If there are any Wookie translators in the audience, please step to the front of the room. However, we can deduce that, based on what we know of Chewie, that he was doing tactical consulting.

In other words, it’s my opinion, that Chewie was making sure Han knew that there was a lot of problems with the Millenium Falcon and it wasn’t like they had the money to fix the bucket of bolts. Chewie was suggesting solutions for Han to fix problems quickly without spending a lot of money. I mean, can you imagine if Han had to take a VC round to fix the Falcon? What would the valuation on that sucker be anyway? I’m sure it would be a diluted round.

Instead, Chewie was helping Han realize what he needed to do to fix the problem on a budget. Maybe even in bandaid fashion. As entrepreneurs, use your creative juices to find ways to self-fund and not take stupid money just so you can extend runway. Find ways to be revenue positive now instead of later. Find ways to cheaply outsource problems so core team members can focus on the core solutions.

See?

See. Everything you need to know about entrepreneurship can be learned from Star Wars. It’s a geek favorite for a reason. I’m sure there are lessons you have learned as well. Feel free to share those.

In the meantime, may the Force be with you.

Photo by xtyler

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when I was 4-5 years old and my memories were just starting to really stick with me, we were living in the inner city of Buffalo. The neighborhood is tragically drug-ridden today, and it wasn’t a fantastic neighborhood then either. It was inner city. My father grew up on those streets in the Lovejoy neighborhood as a brawler of sorts. Fighting was the problem, not drugs. How times change. But I digress.

One of the memories I remember from those days is the milk machine. This milk machine is an oddity these days. No one buys milk from milk machines and, I’ll be honest, I have no real idea why we did either. But there was a milk machine at the corner of Longnecker St and Lovejoy St and we went to buy our milk there quite often.

Considering there was a Wilson Farms (similar to 7-11) right there as well, one can only assume that mom chose to buy the milk from the machine because it was a better quality or offered a better value.

Which brings me in a long-winded way to my point. Whoever the hell owned that milk machine didn’t exactly have a huge demographic. It was basically people who could walk to it and chose to walk to it instead of Wilson Farms. I’m sure he wasn’t getting rich off the milk machine. But he was serving a very targeted audience and doing so in such a way that wasn’t trying to take over the world and be everything.

If you’ve got a startup… if you’ve got a venture… do not try to be everything to everyone. It just doesn’t work. Know your audience and what makes them tick. Figure out exactly who you’re serving and stay on track. Especially in early stages, venturing outside of the laser-like target is an expensive proposition, especially in the early stages.

Make your milk and make it good and find the machine that earns you money.

Photo Credit Robbie’s Photo Art

Despite moving to Austin, my allegiance to the Baltimore Ravens remains as strong, and maybe stronger, than ever. It’s been an exciting offseason with lots of power moves and now training camp is in full swing.

For third year Quarterback Joe Flacco, this appears to be his coming out year. The Baltimore Sun ran a story about him the other day noting that this offense is now Joe’s offense. He’s taking command. He’s inheriting responsibility. He’s taking ownership.

He’s taking more command and making more adjustments at the line of scrimmage. He’s looking to become more effective in the red zone. And he’s tutoring new backup quarterback Marc Bulger when everyone thought it would be the other way around.

“I want to be able to just run the show and go up and down the field, blow out points on the board and come out successful,” Flacco said after a 75-minute practice featuring rookies and veterans coming off injuries. “That’s what it’s all about.”

That’s the mark of a leader and something that anyone who aspires to leadership is required to do at one point.

Since being in Austin, I’ve been exposed more and more to the startup life – something I used to live in as the Director of Technology at b5media, a company that used to be a blog network but now is something, well, frankly, unidentifiable.

As a result of my new exposure to a startup culture, I’ve already talked to a few companys to get a feel of how they do business. It reminds me of those early days at b5media. Four founders, making decisions by committee, and hoping for the best. Sometimes consensus was a blocker to real innovation.

This mode is common for early companies. Small group. Everyone needs to be on the same page to do anything. And they suffer from paralysis of no decisions. No one is willing to take charge and lead.

At b5media, once we took our first round of VC money, Jeremy Wright, became the CEO. He was forced into a role of trying to get consensus but not suffering from the paralysis of required consensus. Many times, those of us in those leadership roles diverged in opinions and advocated different directions. It was Jeremy’s role to distill this feedback, foster the discussion, and then ultimately take ownership of the situation and make his call.

Sometimes it was the right choice. Sometimes it wasn’t.

Imagine this. It’s a third and long situation. The Ravens offense is backed up on their own 10 yard line due to an unfortunate series of downs involving an incomplete pass and an offensive holding penalty. They are down by 13 points with 6 minutes left in the game. The safe call, and the one called in to Flacco by Cam Cameron on the sideline, would be a slant play down the middle to a slot receiver or tight end.

As the offense lines up, Flacco sees the defense showing blitz and crowding the middle. Understanding from experience that this is a situation fraught with disaster and the need for a big breakout play to energize his offense, he calls an audible. Ray Rice on a draw play – bait the offense to continue to see the pass, but then destroy them with an off tackle run. Rice runs for 24 yards and gets the first down and better field position.

If it wasn’t for the leader having the confidence and insight to see the minefield upon him, he might just go with common wisdom or, more naturally, the wisdom of his advisors. However, he decides that he has the information he needs to make a big play, owns the call and gets a win.

While it’s common for young startups to operate on consensus, sometimes it requires someone with enough balls to make a tough call and own it. A good team will support that and have their leaders back regardless. If they don’t, they shouldn’t be on your team.

Photo credit: Keith Allison

The conversation came to an issue that I’ve only marginally thought in great detail about. I had made the comment about how I am potentially looking to leave the DC area because, as I put it, it’s not my scene. I feel like a square peg trying to be fit into a round hole. While I certainly have political views and will sometimes voice them, my life does not revolve around politics, policy and advocacy as it does in Washington. In fact, when pressed to explain my feelings around why I dislike DC, I described myself as a regular guy wanting to live a regular life in a regular town.

Defining that more explicitly, I appreciate town like Baltimore, where I was raised and lived most of my life, because it’s filled with people who go about their normal everyday lives. No one is trying to “save the world” as seems to be the case in DC. Certainly, there are people and companies (hopefully many) who take a balanced position in life to be good stewards of the earth, energy and the planet. Certainly, many are socially conscious in how they live their lives. But it isn’t an all consuming agenda such that you find in DC.

I love Austin too. Why? Well, it is the self described live music capital of the country. On any given night, from my experience, it is not difficult to find bars that have a good live music set that is original and that doesn’t carry a cover charge. Outside of a handful of live music venues (DC9, 9:30 Club, Velvet Lounge, Madames Organ to a degree, Rock and Roll Hotel, etc) it’s hard to find a burgeoning music scene in DC.

Even with sports, which consumes a fair bit of my life, it’s hard to find supporters of the home team. No one, it seems, is from DC. They all came here with an agenda. You have to go out to Maryland or Virginia to find real hometown fans.

This is not my scene. This is not what I like. I am an entrepreneur because, first and foremost, I want to make money. When I made a break from my former corporate job, it was after becoming aware of how much my employer was billing our customer for my services and realizing that if that was how much I was worth, I could damn well do that on my own.

But that’s the crux. As entrepreneurs, our general purpose is not to do social good (though there are exceptions). Not that there is anything wrong with that. There isn’t. But entrepreneurs get our kicks from building something. From doing something. And of course, from making money. Who starts a company with the intention to not increase profit margins? You show me that entrepreneur, and I’ll show you an entrepreneur who will fail within a year.

There, of course, is a balance. Like Geoff, Beth and Kami are doing at Zoetica, there’s a balance between making money and doing good. The more I had this conversation with my friend, the more shallow I realized I sounded.

But as I thought some more, the more I realized that doing good is not something you do. It’s something you are. Based on the integrity and character of the entrepreneur, the decisions that are made, whether geared for profit or for building a product or spinning it up into an acquisition by Google, become decisions made out of the character and integrity of being “good”.

Frankly, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that even what I do as an entrepreneur creating services and products around WordPress, (and yes, even sometimes writing patches for WordPress core itself) is done to make the world a better place. Even writing a book on WordPress and travelling to San Francisco, Dallas, New York, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago and Raleigh speaking to WordPress users, developers and designers is done to extend the platform, thus extending the reach and improving on the largest self-hosted blogging platform on the planet.

Think about why this is important. It’s not just about WordPress. It’s about enabling voices. Giving those who never had a chance to speak before the opportunity to be heard. We’ve heard as recently as this week about the man who used an iPhone app to figure out how to treat his own wounds while buried under the rubble in Haiti.

The Chinese government is so threatened by web technologies, and blogging in particular, that they have banned WordPress.com in China.That is not likely to be lifted anytime soon, especially as the government lockdown and censorship of the Chinese people is thrust back into the limelight with the latest Google-China fallout.

Even the internationalization efforts in WordPress is putting WordPress into the hands of more people in more countries and making it possible for voices to be heard, not only in the United States, but in the Sudan and Kurdistan as well.

As an entrepreneur with integrity and character, even the mundane decisions that go into building a company can be seen as social good. This is not intended to diminish the efforts of those who explicitly set out to do social good, but with the right mindset, the things that make us successful can also make the world around us better.

In that case, it’s up to all of us to find them. Perhaps take a look at something like the Power 150 and start the list backwards (or maybe get out of the marketing echo chamber all together).  If you yourself have become the new breed of “gatekeeper”"”ask yourself “is it who I know, or what they know?”. Ideally, its both””but up to us individually to strike the right balance.

Armano and I proceeded to have a lively discussion on Twitter over this idea. I agreed with his assessment  that the current landscape of the social web does cater to the idea of knowing people being more important than having a good idea. I disagreed on his conclusion that people should seek to extend their influence by knowing more of the top people on the web.

On principle, the “top people on the web” is a bit elitist and self serving. Both Armano and I enjoy being “top people on the web”, yet, I know my ability to scale is small compared to the ideas and conversations being pushed around. The web is bigger than me. It’s bigger than Armano. We both enjoy large networks of people that we know, and I don’t mean six degree of separation type stuff. We both can show you 10,000 or more collected business cards from over the years. At least I can. I presume it is the same for him.

I can brag about knowing over half of the Technorati Top 100 bloggers personally. I can point to the multitude of networking events that I attend (at least one major one every month) where I have a difficult time talking to everyone who wants to share their ideas and thoughts with me.

The problem is scale. The web is bigger than we are. You can put a gallon or five gallons or ten gallons of water in a sink, but if the drain is only an inch thick, you won’t be able to process more water out of that bin. You need a bigger drain to do that. In fact, it will take longer to drain that bin with increasingly more water. It’s physics.

Unlike Armano’s assessment that communicators, entrepreneurs, and brands should exploit the current landscape that values the personal connection over the business process (that is, good ideas can thrive on their own if they have merit), I see it as a hybrid. You must have a one-to-one network and you must have a one-to-many network, but your many-to-many network (the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th degree of separation) becomes fairly useless fairly quick. Good ideas cannot thrive in a vacuum.  However, simply knowing influencers aren’t going to make it fly either.

I can’t tell you the number of people who are friends, not just business network contacts, who have talked to me with great gusto and passion about an idea and I simply look at them blankly. They know me personally, but realistically, they have a sucky idea. It’s not going to fly and no amount of knowing the right people is going to make it fly.

On the flip side, having a great idea and knowing the right people can make all the difference in the world. This is a reflection of the truth that many of the worlds greatest idea people don’t have the communication prowess to “sell” that idea and make it work. Likewise some of the greatest communicators in the world have great bullhorns, but suck at innovating themselves. So we end up in a world where we all need each other for something.

This blend of traditional (networking) and innovation is really where we need to be. We’re getting there, but we ain’t there yet. Reinforcing an unscalable paradigm of who you know as the primary enforcer of innovation is a dangerous trend that really does need to be changed. Sometime. Hopefully soon.

Update: Armano chimes in in comments and corrects the record. He is recommending a balance, as am I. Different slants on the same issue.

Pay Yourself First

Over the last 9 years and two startups I have learned many things and screwed up royally in some cases. This series is about providing you best practices of lessons learned and avoiding the mistakes I have already made.

In the past, I have had good years and bad years. When you have employees, they expect to be paid and when you mess with payroll (and payroll taxes, but that is a post for another time) you create such a negative culture that nothing will get done.

With that said, when you are starting your business regardless if it is a service or product company, you will have startup costs and probably forgo paying yourself for 6-12 months to keep growing the business. That is fine and to be expected. What you should not do (and what I did) is keep adding staff and sacrifice your own salary in the name of growth. If you keep going like that and have a bad quarter you will have nothing saved for a rainy day and if the business fails you will probably be in immense debt and got nothing out of the business.

Granted, the balance between growth and cash flow is a tenuous one but it is one thing you should never defer to someone else in beginning. Plus, there is a difference between creating a lifestyle business and an enterprise. A lifestyle business is really making enough money for yourself and having some contractors or 1-2 people that gives you a good salary but is more about freedom. An enterprise is a business that scales and gets big over time but you will be working intense amounts in the beginning but will need to hire those smarter than you with the intention that you are looking for an exit and will have time for freedom when you cash out.

So when you are growing the business you should work the first 6-12 months paying off the initial capital expenses and getting about 6 months of cashflow for yourself before you hire anyone else. Once you have that done, start paying yourself something, even if it is small and will ramp up over six months, pay yourself first. This will get you in the habit of being committed to making the business pay for itself and you so you are not worrying about living month to month and let you find some resources to help you deliver while you continue to sell and grow the business.

Once you are looking at hiring someone use these two rules as a starting basis:

- Have six months of payroll for that person in the bank on top of your salary

- Have 90 days of projects or sales committed for that person to deliver so they not only have something to do but are earning their keep.

You may have to be conservative at first in your growth but in the end you will scale better and create a business that is focused on delivery and customer service without putting you and your employees on a cash flow roller coaster.

Being a serial entrepreneur I have been through many business cycles, but the Internet boom of the late 1990′s was an extremely heady time. People were so enamored with what the Internet could do, every one really believed that the old rules didn’t apply.

The reality was that those rules applied more than ever and with the crash in the early part of the century we have tried to learn our lesson.

With these new companies deemed Web 2.0, everyone is expecting another bubble. So many of the same types of companies have been funded so there are bound to be consolidation and just plain failure.

According to Michael Arrington, his entry “Bubble, Bubble, Bubble“, the despite the fact that some companies are failing, the sky is not falling.

In fact I would call this time around the ol’ startup track “saner, saner, saner”.

Despite many of these companies basing their success on being an aftermarket for Google, the smart ones I think many people know that you have to be in this to create a real enterprise and one that makes money. It is not so much about the VC’s but about the ability to use the low cost and barrier of entry to innovate.

But the Dead Pool is not cool

I think that the blog A VC gets it right his counter points on “Building It Up and Then Knocking It Down” are right. He says “over hyping young companies where people are working their butts off and then throwing them overboard quickly into a “dead pool” when they fail is not healthy.

I believe it is dead wrong to put this up there. It just feeds the fire for the chicken little’s of the world. Mike Arrington has known successes when he co-founded helped flip Achex and sold it to First data. I don’t know if he has experienced building a company from scratch and having it fail, many times from circumstances out of your control.

But there is a bubble developing and not where you think…..

The bubble is not with companies it is in the private equity market itself. The model of funding and the way people are evaluating companies is changing. The way investors look at companies is not based on a fast IPO but aligning it to be a sweet acquisition target.

This is helped in no small part since most VC’s invest like they are teenage girls. “Oooo, you invested in a video sharing site, I want one too! You put $5 million into social networking for eco-friendly baby boomers? Find me one so I can get one too!!

Here is how I got there:

1. The amount of money chasing deals have lightening strike twice to find that repeat of unrepeatable past returns is growing rapidly
2. The number of opportunities are declining and there are too many copycats plus the cheap money is pouring out to fund them.
3. Not enough VC’s to serve on boards effectively and make the existing investments get to a proper exit
4. IPO market is still not there and there is and there are only so many acquisition partners
5. Higher prices of entry and lower returns

What I don’t know:

1. When the IPO market might be friendly to tech stocks
2. If investors will broaden their portfolio choices to get their money working in unique ways
3. If funds might start giving their money back

Only time will tell if this comes to pass. If you have a good idea, the money is out there but might not be for very much longer.

Crystal Ball? 2-3 years or mid-2008 this is gonna come to a head. Only time will prove me right or wrong.

Editors Note: At the end of 2008, we do now know that the economy has imploded, not simply from web valuations. In fact, web valuations hardly played any part like they did in 1999-2000.

In fact, the web sector has seen much less damage, than the rest of the economy. In fact, there are still investments taking place, if devalued. A series investments for web companies typically range in the $1-2M range which in the larger picture is fairly small. Biotech companies, for instance, typically pull in around $20M for a Series A round.

That does not make the web sector immune, and in fact, Steve is correct in recognizing that there would be a bubble coming, and that it has arrived.

If America recommits itself to science and innovation, then we can lead the world to a new future of productivity and prosperity… it’s about constantly raising the bar so that we are more competitive.

Though individual writers of this site may have their own political views, it is the position of this publication to join the rest of the tech sector in recognizing that Obama has the stronger leadership in this area and will serve the most good for the industry. Technosailor.com has already endorsed Mr. Obama and re-emphasizes that endorsement today. Go vote tomorrow for the better option for this industry.

The economy has everyone shaky, even those in the web space who have been largely unaffected, so far, by the ups and downs in the market. The Web market is largely filled by companies who have, at best, private equity via venture capital or angel funding, or they simply are bootstrapping and don’t have any outside investment.

Times are tight, but even in the VC-stage where a company might have anywhere between a million dollars in investment capital to $35M or more, the money really isn’t that big in the grand scheme of thing and the funding is privately held. Mostly.

Here in Baltimore, VC money flows toward Biotech companies where significantly higher investments are made in comparison to small investments in the web space. Obviously, biotech has a higher overhead when it comes to research facilities, labs, expensive chemicals and doctoral employees. Web startups deal with much smaller costs like commodity priced hardware, and much cheaper salaries. Again, by comparison. Biotech is drying up, but web investments continue to happen.

However, just in the last three days, at least three people I know in the web space have lost their jobs due to the slowing economy. We’ll probably see more of it as well. eBay, who is admittedly a public company and outside the realm of the “typical” web company, just announced a 10% reduction in their workforce. That’s not going to be the end.

The worst time to try to change jobs is right now. If you are able to get a great job, you’re going to be subject to a last in, first out layoff policy. It’s likely anyway. Nothing is ever guaranteed.

If you’re independent, you may very well encounter a slowdown in business (so I hope you’ve saved!), but you probably aren’t going to fire yourself. Now would not be the time to start that practice.

Conflicting recommendations exist. Some recommend that work is going to be hard to come by in an entrepreneurs world, so flee for stability and medical benefits. The other side says, as I do, that work is going to be hard to find and if you get it, you’re going to be far from stable.

Be very careful how you proceed. Make sure you have a backup plan. Try not to panic. Hunker down for the long-haul and do what you can. Don’t let the economy frighten you but instead, lean on your strengths and make money how you can. It’s going to be tough for everyone, myself included, but there will always be a demand for quality people in essential positions.

If you’re in a stable “day job”, I would not recommend quitting now to go the entrepreneurial route. It’s going to be tough going. However, if you’re already there, stay there and kick some butt. It will be slow. Times will get tough. But you can survive!

And lo! A light shone in the heavens. Okay, maybe it was just a tweet — but here before me was the springboard to blog stardom: love him or hate him, Aaron’s a social media playa . . . and it just made more sense to hitch my wagon to Technosailor than trying to build from scratch.

So what can you expect from me? Experiences — good and bad — in funding, growing, staffing, powering up. . . and winding down . . . startups. Thrill of victory and agony of defeat, all that. I’ll write about the DC startup scene (although my flying radius extends to New York, and occasionally Silicon Valley). And about events (like Podcamp) that I attend. And, as appropriate, I’ll relate some real-time experiences with my current [stealthy] startup, CHALLENJ (though I promised Aaron I wouldn’t shill).

And maybe the occasional rant — about the self-obsessed San Francisco startup scene (what — you’re missing TechCrunch 500″) . . . lawyers . . . and bloviating CEOs, VCs, and other tech ego-trippers lacking the humility gene.

My first co-founder used to say, “I’d rather be lucky than smart.” (Then, coming from a megalomaniac hell-bent on global domination, the words didn’t exactly ring true.) The point is, a heckuva lot of what we entrepreneurs have to confront is neither predictable nor under our control. Still, we prefer it this way.

My hope is that some pearls appear in forthcoming posts that will help you navigate the shoals of murky startup waters. (Warning: more metaphors ahead.)

Hello [brave new entrepreneurs'] World!

Ray contacted me after my post the other day, and he has agreed to step in to the Venture Files editorial role. Ray comes to us with over 20 years of entrepreneurial experience having had multiple startups, some that have succeeded and others that have failed. His successes include an IPO and $30M in venture capital raised over the years. He has also gone through Chapter 11 bankruptcies and had other failures.

He is also an experienced journalist having worked for several years with Electronics magazine.

He is the perfect candidate for this job. Tomorrow morning, he will introduce himself here at Technosailor.com. Join me in welcoming him to the family.

In the meantime, I’m looking for a passionate and knowledgeable editor for the Venture Files portion of the site. The topic is entrepreneurship and includes marketing, business and the world of Venture Capital from the perspective of an entrepreneur.

This is a great opportunity to create a name for yourself, and increase your visibility using the Technosailor.com brand and platform. If you’re interested, drop me an email at aaron@technosailor.com.

To be fair, they’ve been here but many people simply didn’t realize quite how influential they were. In some cases, the oblivion stemmed from a general obliviousness in the blogosphere where bloggers and social media aficionados simply never stepped foot outside of their sphere of influence. In other cases, if rhetoric is to be believed, the oblivion has been an intentional misogynistic mentality.

I don’t quite think it’s as nefarious as the latter, but I do think that women have been taken for granted and probably not given enough credit in a world that is largely powered by geek boys of all ages and types.

In case you missed the news this morning though, this group of women under the BlogHer umbrella, made a pretty bold statement about their mainstream appeal with a $5M series B funding and content syndication deal with NBC Universal. (Press Release)

The content syndication deal would involve BlogHer content, written by over 2200 bloggers, being syndicated across three women-oriented NBC properties, iVillage, BravoTV.com and Oxygen.com.

In addition to content syndication, NBC Universal and BlogHer will collaborate on joint advertising sales, a space currently dominated by Glam Media.

And of course, BlogHer has their annual BlogHer Conference happening this weekend in San Francisco. Festivities begin tomorrow night and continue through Saturday. If you can’t be in San Francisco, the BlogHer Second Life Conference is happening in conjunction. You know… if you don’t have a first life. ;-)

If there’s one thing this deal accentuates, it’s that women are a force to be reckoned with on the internet. While I may not like the insular nature of BlogHer, and the inability to address the fact that never having any man speak at the main conference is off-putting, aggressive and offensive to some, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the hard work the women behind the site have put into organizing, instructing, and educating many women bloggers and providing a venue for their voices to be heard. And they have underscoed that by getting NBC to sign on.

So congratulations, ladies. Your hard work has paid off.

Usually, a good launch product is the result of a perceived need. Or maybe a need not yet realized – it’s hard to say for sure. There’s some black magic involved in all that.

FriendFeed launched not long ago because there was an empty hole in Twitter – that was aggregation and conversation. FriendFeed figured out that, to be successful, it was going to target that emptiness in the highly popular Twitter experience.

Disqus and Intense Debate figured that, in order to be successful, they needed to target the missing piece in blog comments – that was reputation and reputation management across blogs. The two fight it out, post-launch, over which is going to differentiate it over the other.

In these cases, the timing of the launches was critical to the uptake. Twitter started experiencing significant problems and influential early adopters began getting itchy to be somewhere that scratched their itch.

Putting aside timing, the most important part of a launch is what. It’s feature-sets. It’s determining the balance between a fully developed roadmap of features and what is needed to “hook” early adopters and get them to stay.

Take Identi.ca, the new Twitter clone that is completely open source and is timely in that Twitter faithful are really, really close to burying the hatchet and simply abandoning it altogether. The timing could not be more perfect. Folks have been talking about distributing Twitter and relieving the strain of a centralized service at one time. Open sourcing the product does this, to a degree.

However, Identi.ca gets a big “FAIL” for its launch for a few very important reasons.

1. There is no coherent way to deal with “replies”. Folks used to Twitter realize that when there is a river of content, and that’s what Twitter is, there must be a way to manage conversations. There must be a way to keep up with followers who are talking to you. In my working with Identi.ca, there is no way to do that and, while that might be coming, it wasn’t there at launch. Very conceivably, I’ve been lost forever and I generally have tons of followers as an early adopter. FAIL.
2. XMPP doesn’t work. The one reliable way to reply that folks on Identi.ca were talking about last night was with XMPP, the protocol used for various IM clients including Google Talk. I could deal with replies that way if it worked but at some point, XMPP stopped working. I could receive, but I could not send. A one way conversation is a monologue. FAIL.
3. OpenID integration must be seamless. I was pleased to see OpenID supported when I signed up. Unfortunately, today, I could not login with my OpenID account. If I can’t get in, I can’t use it. FAIL.

Some would say I’m being too hard on this startup. Screw that. Perform or get off the stage. There are very obvious and defined features that must be included in a microcontent site at launch. I’m not saying an entire roadmap needs to be worked out. No, get a working beta up and get testers in there. However, without replies, without reliable “offline” access (i.e. IM, SMS or client integration) I’m not going to stick around. Finally, direct messages would be a nice feature.

While I have high hopes for Identi.ca, I will remain there only to squat on the name “technosailor”. Bye, guys.

The KnowThis web site has a great explanation of the Marketing Objectives section:

“Marketing success is quantifiable using several non-financial market metrics. You want to show the underlying conditions and circumstances facing the company that are not easily seen within financial measures. The marketing objectives section should indicate targets to be achieved across several marketing decision areas. To add additional strength to this section include marketing metrics where possible.”

The Chamber of Commerce web site identifies three major areas for your objectives:

• company definition (e.g., “to be a manufacturer of 100 percent all-natural snack food products”)
• market definition (e.g., “to attain leadership in dollar market share and volume for the healthy, all-natural snacks segment of the salty snacks category”)
• technology (e.g., “to become known in the industry as the leading developer of new vegetable protein products”)

KnowThis web site has a great breakdown and outline of how you should structure the objectives section:

1. Target market objectives

• market share
  • total
  • by segments
  • by channel
• customers
  • total
  • number/percentage new
  • number/percentage retained
• purchases
  • rate of purchases
  • size/volume of purchases

2. Promotional objectives

• level of brand/company awareness
• traffic building
  • (e.g., store traffic, website traffic
• product trials
  • (e.g. sales promotions, product demonstrations)
• sales force
  • (e.g. cycle time, cost per call, closing rate, customer visits, etc.)

3. Channel objectives

• dealers
  • total
  • number/percentage new
  • number/percentage retained
• order processing and delivery
  • on-time rate
  • shrinkage rate
  • correct order rate

4. Market research objectives

• studies initiated
• studies completed

5. R&D objectives

• product development

6. Other objectives

• partnerships developed

Next time in the Marketing Plan Series, in Part 5 – Strategy we discuss how having a well written guideline that sets forth the business’s marketing strategy is critical to the success of your business.

Next time in Part 5, we will discuss the strategy section which lays out a plan for the situational analysis and the problems and opportunities must be addressed by the marketing plan.

To pop this proverbial bubble, the idea was presented that a community-driven show should be created where “panel members” would include an equal cross-section of the community, regardless of sex or race.At one point, a panel was suggested that I noted were all “talkers” and not “doers”.

Photo Credit foolfillment. Used under Creative Commons

Naturally, some took offense to this characterization, but my question is why? There is an equal need for both and is non-hierachal. In fact, it may be too simplistic of a thought considering the diversity that exists across sectors, bloggers and industries.

I think it’s important to establish a premise for talkers and doers. What are they, why do they exist and what do they contribute to the ecosystem?

Talkers

Talkers are visionaries, by and large. Not always. Sometimes they are just pundits. They are the idea people, often challenging the status quo and causing people to think based on data, research and innovative thinking. They share their ideas readily and often bring a different level of communication to the fray.

Talkers are often CEOs, PR, Marketing, or members of management teams and they frequent the conference speaking circuit.

Doers

Doers are often mistaken for developers. Though developers generally fall into the category of “doer”, the definition is far wider than just physical “doers”. Doers are usually the ones that have ideas and instead of talking about them, they gather the resources (financial and human) and set about putting plans into actions.

Entrepreneurs are often doers. They are the ones with the ideas that have the guts or experience to run with them. Though they may sometimes be talkers too (small business CEOs for instance), their bread and butter is in the action. Smart doers listen to talkers ideas and filter them for actionable items that make sense for the ecosystem.

These are my definitions. They may be simplistic, but I think they provide a great framework for this conversation.

I think there is a symbiotic relationship between doers and talkers. One cannot exist without the other and gets its lifeblood from the other.

For instance, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester is largely a talker. Though he comes from Hitachi where he was largely a doer, by his own admission he’s more of a talker now.

I think there’s a negative connotation to talkers. That they are just windbags excelling in the art of punditry. But talkers bring ideas to the table that often shape the course of what is going on in the ecosystem. Talkers need doers who will take their ideas and run with them.

Doers, of whom I would classify Dave Troy of Twittervision have ideas but instead chooses to innovate on ideas and create new things. In this case, David (whom in disclosure, I realized a few weeks ago I interviewed with back in the 2002-2003 timeframe when he was the CEO of Toad) has taken ideas surrounding Twitter and made a visualization for them. He also recognized that there was a need for something like SocialDevCamp East and created it (with help).

Others like Jason Calacanis straddle the line between talkers and doers by challenging the status quo of spammy search engines and proposing a concept of human-powered search and running with it. People who can straddle the gap, place themselves in the most valuable position of seeing the cloud, recognizing it’s potential and doing something about it (pardon the reference).

Identifying and Maximizing Opportunities

This is where you look externally for areas your competitors are not fully covering, then go a step further and think how to match these to your internal strengths. Try to uncover areas where your strengths are not being fully utilized. Are there emerging trends that fit with your company’s strengths? Is there a product/service area that others have not yet covered?

Once you have uncovered these opportunities take each one and discuss how you will market them. Will it be a mixed marketing campaign? A targeted sales effort? What resources will you need (e.g. new collateral, selling guides, web site content, e-mail marketing)?

Addressing and Overcoming Problems

Problems are not necessarily a bad thing. They are just issues that need to be overcome. It is better to get out front of problems that may exist than have them rear their ugly head when you are selling or raising money. Problems could be strong competitors, your product lacking critical features that you are not able to roll out yet or a long sales cycle.

You should list each problem and discuss an approach to overcome them in a sales situation and with specific marketing messages that counter what a customer might be thinking.

Next time in Part 4 – Strategy

In our next part, we will discuss the strategy section which lays out a plan for the situational analysis and the problems and opportunities must be addressed by the marketing plan.

Thus was the case today when a guy named Sergei [last name withheld for privacy] emailed me about a web based project management tool called 5pm. His hook for this pitch (at least what caught my attention) was:

It’s a new web 2.0 tool that we launched recently. 5pm is an online
project management application that looks different from anything else
on the web in this category, but still feels familiar.

Web 2.0 was not the hook, but it was interesting to see that adjective used nonetheless. What hooked me was that it was different from anything else, yet still familiar. This is good because I’ve not been a fan of all the other web based PM tools out there.

I did a little investigation and am smacking myself for not seeing VentureBeat’s “Strong Project Management” endorsement from January. Or this from my new favorite company, Mixx from last year. (Of interest to Mixx fans is that Saturday night is the opening salvo of the new official Technosailor.tv which will be aired on Saturday nights at 9pm Eastern. As part of the format, I’m including a Mixx hour – which may or may not be an hour. ;-))

The Mixx story had a fantasticly engaging comment from one of the 5pmers which explains some of the thinking behind the product:

In terms of features – we implemented what worked for us and skipped what we thought is redundant. It’s difficult to find the right mix, as there is no such a thing, since each team works in their own way. That’s why we were developing our own project manager for about four years now (we had an old version called PTManager). And that’s why there are so many PM applications out there. It’s about finding the right balance, as the core features are common.

To mention new features, I would point to two things. Firstly – the interface. We spent a lot of time designing an interface which is very fast to navigate. Everything is within a click or two. We consider the UI being very important, since any pm application is just a tool. Less time navigating and clicking around, means more time for actual work. For example, coders usually hate to spend time on reporting, so our model for them was “get in. get out. fast”.

Second, I would like to mention our Flash timeline. It gives an alternative view to the projects and tasks and helps visualizing the durations and deadlines (kind of simplified Gantt). In time we plan to make it fully editable, which means you will be able to drag the tasks around the timeline. We think it will be pretty cool.

So this is just version one of our new tool. There is more to come – the feedback from our users will dictate that.

Hardcore. In fact, I may use this because, honestly I can’t stand using Basecamp and desktop-based apps are really no-go when it comes to client work. The one thing that I would really like to see before committing, is Freshbooks integration. I use Freshbooks for all my quotes, estimates, invoicing, time tracking etc. And all my clients have the ability to check in and see whats been done. Integration with Freshbooks is an absolute must for me.

I registered my 14-day free trial, poked around at it for a bit, and I can see how it is different.

Current Product Analysis (if you have an existing product)

If you already have existing products/services you should start with this so that you provide a “lay of the land” for readers not familiar with where you are at with your current product(s) and/or service(s). You should cover the product attributes, current pricing, current distribution and services offered. This should be about a page or two in length. If you are a new company, you can skip this part and dive straight into defining the market.

The Market

The market is a description of your total potential market (your potential customers). You should include the needs of this market. You will also need to describe the particular customers that you will target. This includes the size of (1) total potential market (number of potential customers), and (2) your target market.

This subsection of the situation analysis section provides actionable information on selling to target buyers and stimulating purchases or usage by the ultimate end users. Key questions answered in this subsection include: description of target buyers or end users in demographic, psychographic, and lifestyle terms target buyer/end user wants, needs, attitudes, and perceptions of category products and services where target buyers/end users are located and how to reach them which segments of the total market or category are growing or declining and why.

Demographics: Consumer wants; preferences and the frequency of their purchases are mostly associated with demographic information. Demographics help you determine the market’s age, gender, nationality, education, household composition, occupation and income.

Market Geographies : This section addresses where your customers are physically located. If you are marketing your services over the Internet, your client’s physical location may be irrelevant. However, if your job is to promote a local fundraising or store, having an internet as marketing tool is a fast and cheap way to advertise your products.

Market Psychographics: This category describes the personality of a person and how they might buy your product/service. It is less tangible to quantify, but still important that you address this area to demonstrate what motivates people to buy. For example, the lifestyle of a single person is significantly different with a two-income family.

Market Behaviors: Buyers can be analyzed based on their knowledge, use or response to a product or service. These behavioral variables may include the occasions that stimulate a purchase, the benefits realized when reading a testimony, the rate of possible usage, their loyalty, the buyer-readiness stage, and their attitude toward the service you offer.

Market needs: People have three buying modes. They buy what they want, what they need and what the can’t live without. Where does your product/service fit into these buying modes? Your product/service value and worth is determined by the user or client. Whether it is in tangible or intangible forms, the question is what is needed? Are you providing the right solution to the right problem? Are you making the users or clients overall value as a company increase or satisfy the needs? These questions would be compiled in this section.

All of your marketing activities should be based in meeting the needs of your customers. For each market segment a strategy should be included that outlines the market needs that would lead this market segment group to want to buy your products or use your service.

The Competitive Environment

The competitive environment is essentially a SWOT analysis. You may have never heard this term but it stands for “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats”. Start with posing these sessions to your brainstorming team: Are your competitors becoming stronger? Are there emerging trends that amplify one of your weaknesses? Do you see other external threats to your company’s success? Internally, do you have financial, development, or other problems?

Strengths: Here is where you must capture the positive aspects internal to your business that add value or offer you a competitive advantage. This is an opportunity to remind yourself of the value existing within your business. Think about what your company does well. You should address the strengths within your business that add value to your product or your marketing efforts. You should also describe your positive tangible and intangible attributes.

Weaknesses: These are factors that detract from your ability to have a competitive edge. It includes the negative aspects internal to your business that distracting customers from seeing the value you offer or place you at a competitive disadvantage. These are areas you need to enhance in order to compete with your best competitor. The more accurately you identify your weaknesses, the more valuable the SWOT Analysis is to your readers. Some questions to help you get started are: What do your customers complain about? What are the unmet needs of your sales force?

Opportunities: Traditionally, a SWOT looks only at the external environment for opportunities. I suggest you look externally for areas your competitors are not fully covering, then go a step further and think how to match these to your internal strengths. Remember, these are opportunities external to your business. If you have identified “opportunities” that are internal to the organization and within your control, you will want to classify them as “strengths”. Try to uncover areas where your strengths are not being fully utilized. Are there emerging trends that fit with your company’s strengths? Is there a product/service area that others have not yet covered?

Threats: A threat is a challenge created by an unfavorable trend or development that may lead to deteriorating revenues or profits. As with opportunities, threats in a traditional SWOT analysis are considered an external force. By looking both inside and outside of your company for things that could damage your business, however, you may be better able to see the big picture. Competition — existing or potential — is always a threat. Other threats may include intolerable price increased by suppliers, government regulation, economic downturns, devastating media or press coverage, a shift in consumer behavior that reduces your sales, or the introduction of a “leap-frog” technology that may make your products, equipment, or services obsolete. What situations might threaten your marketing efforts? Get your worst fears on the table. A part of this list may be speculative in nature and still add value to your SWOT analysis.

The Technological Environment

The technological environment is creating new ways of satisfying needs (i.e. using technology to enhance the demand for existing products). Innovation can create or wipe out industries and businesses in less than a year. One example is the popularity and convenience of DVD players all but eliminated the sale of VCRs and seriously depressed the manufacture and sale of video tapes. This is especially important for you if your product is technology based.

The Socio-Political Environment

These are governmental policies and regulations that affect the market. It is also the economic environment around your company; which is the business cycle, inflation rate, interest rates, and other macroeconomic issues. For example, here in America there is a sweeping trend to dress more casually, with function and comfort driving new clothing and shoe trends. People are cooking less and are more concerned about nutrition and fat in their diets. And today, American business people are less willing to sacrifice family life for business careers. These types of factors can impact the marketability of your product or service.

Other

This section is open for other situational factors that will affect your marketing plan. It could include additional environments that the product/service must address. It could also expand on aspects of the market or product analysis as well as alternative distribution and promotion ideas that are not part of the core sections of the plan. I guess the bottom line of the this section is that anything is game as long as it relates to the situational analysis of the marketing plan.

Next Time….Problems and Opportunities

In the next part of our marketing plan series we will take the SWOT analysis and the problems you uncovered in your situation analysis and really dive deeper. This is so your readers, some might be investors and will definitely be your upper management will see the potential issues ahead, the fact that you know them, know how to address them and have plan to overcome them. It goes a long way and much farther than you may think.

Your marketing plan should be the reference document you use as a basis to execute your marketing strategy. It sets out clear objectives and explains how you will achieve them. Perhaps most importantly it looks at how you can ensure that your plan becomes reality.

Remember that marketing in itself will not guarantee sales, but by adopting a well-researched and coherent plan, you have a much better chance of building long-term, profitable relationships.

It is funny, when you start writing a series like this you start with the Summary section because it is first in the document. However, it is usually the last thing you write.

So how can you write a summary without knowing the content you are summarizing?

The approach that you should use is that you should keep this section up as a separate document during your overall plan writing to take notes and capture important points that will be used when you submit this to your management and/or board. Everyone will read the intro and summary, some will read various parts they want to dig into more, and very few will read the whole thing

I know that might sound depressing but keep this in mind. If your intro and summary do their job, they won’t have to read further and that is a credit to you. However, for those that read the entire plan it will be a critical roadmap to help you reach your sales goals and guide your team as it builds marketing momentum.

Logically, the names intro and summary should speak for themselves as to what they should have but it is important to elaborate on what key information it should contain.

Elements of the Summary Section

Your marketing plan should start with an executive summary. The summary gives a quick overview of the main points of the plan. Writing the summary is a good opportunity to check that your plan makes sense and that you haven’t missed any important points.

Business Strategy

It’s a good idea to introduce the main body of the plan with a reminder of your overall business strategy, including:

• what your business is about (your business mission)
• your key business objectives
• your broad strategy for achieving those objectives

This helps to ensure that your marketing plan, your marketing strategy and your overall business strategy all work together. For example, suppose your business strategy is based on providing premium quality products and service. Your marketing strategy and plan will need to take this into account, targeting customers who appreciate quality, promoting your product in ways that help build the right image and so on.

Strategic Focus and Plan

To connect readers with your overall business plan and strategy, you use this section to connect it with your business unit and/or company strategy, depending on your company size. You should address your vision and mission, the environment in which you are marketing, and the results you expect from a marketing plan.

The vision statement is something that you will pursue over an extended timeframe. It is not
quantitative in nature and should be one or two sentences at most. The mission statement contains the ideas attainable in a five to seven year range. This is a general statement shared in one or two sentences. You want it to be something that can define your unit/company and its purpose. The best mission statements are those that staff””and eventually constituents””use as a guide for where you are heading.

You should also include your objectives at a high level. These are general statements about what you hope to accomplish through marketing. You will provide more specific marketing strategies and quantitative goals later in the document. These will also be a guide for setting priorities as you develop strategies for reaching target audiences. You may choose to include unit objectives with general program goals listed under each.

Next you should have a summary paragraph on your competition. This should show how your awareness of the competition will make you stronger. Outline the competitive environment of your market, including both direct and indirect competition. You should describe the competition, their strengths and weaknesses, how you are alike or different, and how you plan to effectively market with the competition in mind.

The last paragraph should capture a SWOT Analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Within this analysis provide information about current marketing efforts, programs and services, client reactions and any other details that may be helpful as you develop marketing strategies.

Marketing Focus

In this sub-section, you will describe all of the objectives you wish to attain through your marketing program. You will start with measurable marketing goals and a detailed description of how you will accomplish each one. Based on your Marketing Goals, list markets that you plan to target. Include research about target marketa and reasons that you plan to direct marketing at this area. If you do not
have valid research or information regarding the target audience/market for your goals, this is
a good time to develop focus groups to learn more about the market.

Marketing Strategies

Generally, your overall marketing plan will focus on promotion strategies, although you will want to keep an eye on the product, price and distribution. Including all four factors in the marketing plan, provides you with opportunities to reach your target market more effectively. As for promotion strategies, it is one of the most important sections of the marketing plan and is your action plan based on your goals. You need to identify your target audience, channels for reaching them (advertising, media/ public relations, events, strategic alliances, direct contact, internet, etc.) and the consistent message and other branding techniques you will use to engage your target audience. You will need to prioritize these strategies, tie them into your marketing budget, assign tasks and set deadlines.

Marketing Evaluation

In this section, explain how you plan to gather data to show that your plan has worked. You may need to look for resources that already exist or develop surveys that can give you baseline data for comparison over a period of time. This is your proof of success, so you must work closely with your team and include key stakeholders to ensure this follow-up effort is completed.

Marketing Financial Strategy

As with all plans, the seem to hold the financial stuff for the big finale. The end of the summary is going to bring the full impact of the strategy laid out to bear in terms of costs and return on investment (ROI) for those that are the hard core numbers people. You will need to include the high level information on the various market share amounts each product and/or service line will garner over the life of this plan. You will also need to include a few sentences on break even, which is when the investment in this marketing strategy will start to pay for itself. Last should be how you will handle cash flow and when and how much you might need to dip into the well for the strategy you have laid out.

Other Summary Sections You Should Include?

Did I miss anything? Is there a critical section that you have included in your summary that is missing here and should be added to the list? Do you have a different opinion on what should go in the summary? Please let me know in the comments.

Next Time – Part 2 – Situational Analysis

Situational Analysis lays out the overall marketplace you are competing in and the various environments your business will have to address. We will discuss the market and the various types of environments that your marketing plan will need to address for your products and/or services.

The Wikipedia definition of “Founderitis” is stated as follows:

The term “founderitis” or “founder’s syndrome” refers to the unhealthy condition that afflicts many companies whose founders maintain a stranglehold on organizational leadership. While many companies owe their success “” and in fact their very existence “” to their founders, those same individuals can create chaos that ultimately leads to the organization’s collapse. The challenge to founding CEOs and boards of directors is to take steps to change conflict and chaos into opportunities for growth.

Diagnosing Founderitis

I came across this funny diagnosis from Infoshackle.com and it comes complete with a 12 step program.

“When Founderitis strikes, the Founder’s drive, energy and vision, characteristics crucial to the startup’s initial success, become a hindrance to the company’s maturation into a self-sustaining entity. To assess yourself or a loved one for Founderitis, determine if any of the following symptoms are present:

• Inability to delegate
• Anger when not included in every decision
• Paranoia derived from a sense that the venture is “œslipping out of their control”
• Ignoring input from subject-matter experts
• Expressing prescient knowledge, even when lacking subject-matter expertise
• Lack of respect for formalized planning
• Subterfuge of efforts to institute procedures, processes and controls

Founderitis is akin to an active, engaged parent who is a wonderful caregiver until the child reaches adolescence. As the child enters its teens and requires an increasing level of independence to properly mature and prosper, the Founderitis parent futilely attempts to restrict the influence of outside factors and limit the child’s ability to act autonomously. The result is usually a fractured parent / child relationship or an “adult child” that never develops the life-skills necessary to succeed on their own.

One of the most insidious aspects of Founderitis is that the more profound the case, the deeper the denial on the part of the carrier. The afflicted Founder will honestly believe that all of his actions are in the company’s best interest, though their definition of “best interest” is actually whatever is in their own “self-interest”.

Like any startup executive, the Founder must honestly separate his self-interest from the company’s interest. For instance, it might be in his self-interest to lead the sales efforts, as well as a great learning experience and a heck of a lot of fun. However, it may not be in the company’s best interest to lose precious time to market while an inexperienced sales novice attempts to learn on the job.”

5 Ways to Avoid Founderitis

I have personally experience this running my own business. I have found some ways to avoid it:

1. Respect the need for planning activities, staff meetings, and administrative policies;
2. Realize that as the company grows circumstances may dictate new approaches;
3. Institute new systems with approval of your board;
4. Seek and accept input from others in making decisions;
5. Delegate, Delegate, Delegate

Don’t worry if you can’t over come this there is a simple solution. The route many take is to get your board to hire a professional CEO and take a long vacation.

So how many of you have had problems with founderitis? What is your story? Have a great example to share? Let the comments be the conversation.

In the past, I have had good years and bad years. When you have employees, they expect to be paid and when you mess with payroll (and payroll taxes, but that is a post for another time) you create such a negative culture that nothing will get done.

With that said, when you are starting your business regardless if it is a service or product company, you will have startup costs and probably forgo paying yourself for 6-12 months to keep growing the business. That is fine and to be expected. What you should not do (and what I did) is keep adding staff and sacrifice your own salary in the name of growth. If you keep going like that and have a bad quarter you will have nothing saved for a rainy day and if the business fails you will probably be in immense debt and got nothing out of the business.

Granted, the balance between growth and cash flow is a tenuous one but it is one thing you should never defer to someone else in beginning. Plus, there is a difference between creating a lifestyle business and an enterprise. A lifestyle business is really making enough money for yourself and having some contractors or 1-2 people that gives you a good salary but is more about freedom. An enterprise is a business that scales and gets big over time but you will be working intense amounts in the beginning but will need to hire those smarter than you with the intention that you are looking for an exit and will have time for freedom when you cash out.

So when you are growing the business you should work the first 6-12 months paying off the initial capital expenses and getting about 6 months of cashflow for yourself before you hire anyone else. Once you have that done, start paying yourself something, even if it is small and will ramp up over six months, pay yourself first. This will get you in the habit of being committed to making the business pay for itself and you so you are not worrying about living month to month and let you find some resources to help you deliver while you continue to sell and grow the business.

Once you are looking at hiring someone use these two rules as a starting basis:

- Have six months of payroll for that person in the bank on top of your salary

- Have 90 days of projects or sales committed for that person to deliver so they not only have something to do but are earning their keep.

So I hope I got my point across on this one. You might have to be conservative at first in your growth but in the end you will scale better and create a business that is focused on delivery and customer service without putting you and your employees on a cash flow roller coaster.

What have been your experiences in starting up? When did you start paying yourself? Do you agree with my conservative approach? Did you do something different?

I look forward to hearing from you.

This next step is the marketing plan.

Logically, your CMO or VP of Marketing would be in charge of this effort but in many startups you don’t have someone in that position so it is probably you with the ultimate responsibility. So my dear reader, I am here to the rescue to guide you through very important part of executing your overall business plan. Each one of these headings will generate one or more posts so here is an overview of what you can expect.

SUMMARY

Describe product or service. Emphasize unique or innovative features and/or protection by patent,
copyright or other legal means.

SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS

Situational Analysis lays out the overall marketplace you are competing in and the various environments your business will have to address.

The Market

The market is a description of your total potential market (your potential customers). It will also address how your product/service satisfies the needs of this market. You will also need to describe the particular customers that you will target. This includes the size of (1) total potential market (number of potential customers), and (2) your target market. Here you will have to support your estimates with factual data. It must also discuss the growth potential of (1) total potential market, and (2) your target market. You will have to look at local, national and international markets. Support estimates with factual data. Lastly will be the market share you expect to garner.

The Competitive Environment

Here is where you will identify major competitors: name, location, and market share. You will also compare your product/service with that of your major competitors (brand name, quality, image, price, etc.). This leads to you having to compare your firm with that of your major competitors (reputation, size, distribution channels, location, etc.). You must address how easy is it for new competition to enter this market and what have you learned from watching your competition. Some important elements to include are how competitors’ sales are increasing, decreasing, steady and why.

The Technological Environment

Since every company these days incorporates some type of technology to be competitive, how is technology affecting this product/service? How soon can it be expected to become obsolete? And is your company equipped to adapt quickly to changes?

The Socio-Political Environment

One area that many marketing plans forget to address is the outer social-political environment that may impact your market potential and competitive edge. You will have to describe changing attitudes and trends plus how flexible and responsive is your firm. This will also include a list new laws and regulations that may affect your business an what might the financial impact might be.

Other

This section is open for other situational factors that will affect your marketing plan.

PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES

This is a wide open field and specific to each business. Here you will have state each problem or opportunity and what you will do about them.

OBJECTIVES

The objectives section are the milestones that you will achieve as you execute your business on a daily basis. You must state objectives in precise, quantifiable terms. (e.g. “œTo obtain a sales volume of 3000 units by the end of the fiscal year.”)

STRATEGY

At the high level, the strategy section addresses wow will you reach your objective? (New market penetration, expansion of market share, entrenchment, etc.). This will also address how you have taken into account the previously mentioned problems and opportunities, and the potential reactions of your competitors.

ACTION PLAN

With all goals in sight, there must be an action plan to meet those goals and objectives. How will you implement the above strategy? What is the quality, branding, packaging, modification, location of service, etc? How will you price your product/service so that it will be competitive, yet profitable? What will you do for promotion/advertising? What are your selling and distribution methods? How will you service the product?

FINANCIAL DATA

All of your plans must be supported by financial data that ties into the overall business plan financials. This includes sales projections for the next five years (optimistic, pessimistic, realistic), a Breakeven Analysis (See Appendix B), and monthly cash flow for Year 1, quarterly for Years 2 and 3.

APPENDICES

As in the business plan, the appendices are the data that would bulk up the core plan too much but are important to support your information.

Appendix A – Market Share

This includes market share data tables and more detailed competitive analysis data.

Appendix B – Breakeven Analysis

This is in support of the financial data section and shows how with your objectives met, when you will breakeven with the revenue goals and expenses detailed out and tied with the various parts of the action plan.

Appendix C – Cash Flow

As important as when you will break even, you must be able to show how, on a monthly basis, you will manage the cash flow to support the business and not sink it from an overly ambitious strategy and action plan.

Do you have any experience writing a marketing plan?

If any of you have experience writing a market plan, I would like to know what elements I might have missed and any war stories that will help other entrepreneurs learn from your experiences. Please use the comments and let’s get this conversation going.

So I started thinking about what smaller bits of advice I could organize in a great ongoing series of posts. This is where I came up with “Rules for Entrepreneurs”.

These rules will range from how to hire lawyers, leveraging PR the right way, setting up your first site, how and when to hire your first sales person, putting together your sales/venture pitch, etc.

I would welcome from all of you requests for how-to’s that will help me provide you and the rest of Venture Files readers with the rules that will guide you through building a successful company.

Examples.

Biz Stone, founder of Twitter keeps a blog over at http://bizstone.com. Surfing over to his website, you are greeted with:

Hi, I’m Co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter and also helped make Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and Obvious. I’ve published two books about social media and have a more professional profile on LinkedIn.

Tantalizing.

In fact, the title on his RSS feed is “Biz Stone, Genius”. Brash. Okay. Let’s read some of his headlines to see what this guy is about. In his only posts in April he posts a list of Twitter updates plus, as a bonus, a post on insects and telephones.

Genius.

Let’s go to March, shall we?

All photos. And a Blue Team rah rah!

Come on, Biz. Blog or get off the internet. We read you because you’re a “Genius”, right? We read you because you’ve got something to say about Twitter, Xanga, Blogger or Odeo, right?

Biz is only one of lots of CEOs and executives who are blogging absolute crap. Listen guys, I know blogging is about transparency and being “normal” but isn’t there enough noise out there already? Shouldn’t you guys know this? Don’t you have any signal you can give us?

Give us insights about what you learned at your companies. Tell us how you made a bad decision and learned from it. Tell us about the leadership you garnered from managing a small group of developers in an unfunded startup. Tell us things that make our lives better. Give us something to chew on and make us want to come back.

Don’t just fill space. Don’t waste the bandwidth. Don’t waste the energy. Don’t bait us and tease us into thinking there might be something there when we see you have an update in our RSS reader. You are valuable gold mines and if there’s anything young entrepreneurs need in this world, it’s mentors and people who can inspire and provoke.

Be that person.

Update: Ann Bernard makes the point that CEOs can have a personal blog, but should expect to be associated with their company, even if their blog is personal.

The origins of this post were motivated by Seth Levine’s post today How to get a job in Venture Capital revisited his earlier post, How to become a VC and it seems to hit on the same advice that I got from my VC friends in the business.

The gist of it seems to revolve around either going to a top B-school, being a banker or consultant, working in a startup or starting one of your own.

So instead of telling you how to become a VC, let me take a different angle and tell you why you don’t want to be one.

Everyone acts like they want to be your friend but all they really want is your money

When you are an entrepreneur you go to networking events in the hope of meeting investors, you leverage VC networked lawyers and accounting firms to get you introductions. What are you there for? To get money. As a VC you are just on the other side of the table and now when you go to dinner parties you are faced with the “Doctor’s dilemma”. That is when they find out you are a doctor and then they tell you something hurts them and expect a free diagnosis and prescription write up. As a VC you might suffer through people with “hey, I have this business looking funding” or “I have a really great idea, would you fund it?” crap. Just tell them you sell insurance and they will stay away from you.

You get stuck in board meeting hell

As a VC you will sit on boards to meet with the company on a regular basis to see if they are meeting their milestones and vote on critical issues (i.e. stock options, new key hires). The only problem is that this most of your interaction with a company and as a former entrepreneur you will have a tendency to want to be more involved. You can’t. You must keep the deal flow coming through for the firm to make the investments that will create good exits for great payoff to the fund’s limited partners. Yeah, I think that kinda sucks too.

You only really work day-to-day with a startup when it is having trouble

As I mentioned above, you are really only working with them in a board capacity when things are going well. When things start to go bad you have to spend more time and usually have to be the bad guy. You might have to kick out the founder, recommend budget cutting strategies, etc. Yep, that sucks too.

You have to read the most insane business plans

The average VC firm sees about 2000, that’s right 2000 business plans a year. Do the math. If you are an associate you have read around 50-100 per week depending on the size of your firm as an associate. You have to filter the crap from the interesting and then further find the fundable in the interesting ones. Many people blindly send plans that don’t fit the investment size or focus of the firm so they are immediately tossed. Still, you have to find the ones that are good and then have a phone conversation with them. If the chat goes well, they will come and pitch you so can report to the partners about the ones that they should really sit in on. If they end up sucking it reflects badly on you.

Do you like Excel?

When you join a firm as an associate you are analyzing deals from every perspective tearing apart an entrepreneur’s business model to see if it is actually not full of shit. You are also looking at it from various bad-to-great scenarios to understand the risk exposure the firm would be taking in the deal. I hate excel and the thought of living in it just makes me shudder.

You have to work insane hours to close a deal

You work insane hours as an entrepreneur but there is a long term payoff that can be huge. To get a deal done especially if it is syndicated or there is competition from other firms means you have to work insane hours to get it closed. If you don’t you risk losing the opportunity and looking like a lazy idiot to the partners. What is the upside? Maybe a bonus when the fund exits? Maybe. At least as an entrepreneur you can have a little more control over getting a big pay day.

Limited Partners are worse than investors

Investors in a startup expect risk and are betting on you to succeed. They hedge their bets and usually 7 out of 10 deals funded crash and burn. The remaining 2 get a good exit and the remaining one you hope will be the next google. Limited Partners have a long term outlook (7-10 years) for a fund to complete. But boy do they expect results. You might return a solid 20-30% return which is fantastic for any other investments but they might just bitch. Especially if the previous fund had better returns. Yeah…I would love to have that to deal with.

Are there any VC’s in the house?

Many people read the blog and hopefully there are some who are VC’s and could comment. It would be especially great if there are a few out there that have been in the business and left it.

When you work at a big company you are kind of trapped with the corporate standard they push upon you. As an entrepreneur, your business card is your brand, your elevator pitch and your first impression. So WHY OH WHY do people not take enough time or invest a little money in creating good ones.

Sure, some people think they have great business cards because they are more about creating memorable impact and not communicating any information but they have it all wrong. There are certain things you MUST HAVE on a business card and certain things you MUST NEVER HAVE. So here we go…

Have an Industry Relevant Design

Now I work in the tech industry and there are a broad spectrum of business card styles in just one sector. The design firms have more funky, fun designs because they have to communicate they are hip and creative. The startup firms are generally all over the board because some people spend money and others don’t which is just stupid since many people don’t know who you are. The big government contractors are boring cards but that is to be expected. Law firms and financial services companies should like clean and professional to show that they somewhat conservative and will treat you well. So the lesson here is keep within the expectations of what your competitors are doing but do it with a little flair if you want, just not overboard.

Branded/Corporate E-mail Address

Nothing says “amateur” than using a Yahoo/Hotmail/AOL/Gmail e-mail address as your main address. I mean come on, a domain name costs only $10 these days and usually a hosted e-mail account is $1.99 more. The biggest perpetrators are usually those trying to be “consultants” but have a day job and this is their side thing or they are just starting out and haven’t talked to one person about marketing.

What does your company do again?

Business cards are supposed to have the usually information – name, address, e-mail, title, phone, company name. To make some real impact, you should use the space on the front of the card to have a single statement below your company name that is your main marketing message. For example “Next Generation in Sales Software” let’s me know you are innovative, provide sales software and are a tech company. Simple.

You can also use the back of the card for this too but don’t jam it full of sentences or a big paragraph. 2-3 sentences at most and it should build on the marketing message you have on the front. You can also use the back for the marketing message itself to change it up a bit.

No Tiny Print

This links to “what do you do” section above. People try and put alot of information on a business card but for the love of something good and sweet, don’t try and think more is better by using a small font. We need to read it from first glance and not grab a magnifying glass. 11 point font at a minimum, 12 and 13 is better.

No Folded Cards

Yeah, they look neat but they are a bitch to scan. I find myself ripping that half off to get it through the scanner. If you need to say something else, use the back of the card.

No “Captain Obvious” Statements

As I stated above, we want a good marketing message to remember you and know what you do. That doesn’t mean putting stupid statements like some of my favorites – “I love leads” or “We sell real estate”. Really? I love leads too and if you have to tell me you are begging me and I won’t give them to you. Really, you sell real estate? I couldn’t gather that from your company name “XYZ Realtors” so you must think I am stupid. Into the trash you go.

No “Do-It-Yourself” Business Cards

Next to the AOL/Yahoo/MSN e-mail is doing the business card yourself on the laser printer or worse, the ink jet printer. Using those perforated cards that come in a sheet just look horrendous and screams “I DON’T CARE ABOUT MY IMAGE, BUT PLEASE HIRE ME ANYWAY”. Not. The worst offenders I have seen are the startup government contractor/outsourcing firms sucking off the GSA contracts as a sub of a sub of a sub.

No weird or stupid titles

I know, I know titles are boring and don’t matter much in the scheme of things when you are an entrepreneur. You are doing everything. Do you have to jam it my face that you are the founder? CEO is fine and enough. Chairman? Chairman of what? Your 1 person company? I am so impressed. Not.

Then there are the “I am so creative that no titles out there fit me”. I have seen “Code Ninja”, “Code Poet”, “Fearless Leader”, “Marketing Overlord”, “Marketing Evangelist”, and my favorite “Voice of Reason” — see Technosailor for that one. And don’t even get me started on the cards from people that work at Yahoo!

Get some focus dude…

Don’t jam three businesses into one card. We want to know what you do in VERY BRIEF statement or two for that specific company. If you have multiple ventures you should have multiple card. ‘Nuff said on this one.

I Can’t Write on Glossy or Weird Hippie Cards

When I meet you I am usually trying to understand what you do and how you might become a client, a partner or a vendor. After I finish talking with you I usually write a note on the back of the card so I can keep the e-mail to you in context and have something to discuss. The glossy cards, and I have been guilty of this one, don’t work for writing on and they usually cost you more anyway. The other side of the spectrum are what I call “the hippie cards” and are made of some weird “save the planet” material that is impossible to write on as well. Stick with normal paper, it will serve you well.

But you really want a wicked cool and weird card…

If you have an urge to create a funky business card, make it your second one to have impact or be gimmicky but have the main one as the one people will scan or save to contact you. They might save both but at least they have the one that they will scan and save for later.

So what are your “bad business card” experiences?

Since there are so many bad business cards out there I couldn’t capture the sum of things that you my reader have probably seen. Please use the comments as your place to be funny, trash bad business cards and most of all call people out on their bad business card protocol.