How to start a startup

So, I’ve wanted to own my own business for a while now, maybe - let’s say 7-8 years now, since I was about 16. Growing up in South Florida, wealth was a big part of my later teen years, with a real estate boom, lots of kids in my high school’s parents owned their own business. Couple that with MySpace, YouTube et. al’s rise to fame - maybe now you understand me.

Being young & cocky, I tried twice. Failed miserably for different reason’s both times, but learned a lot; after that I decided to take a step back and work for other people for a few years (which I am presently doing), to see if I could learn anything about starting a company. In short, I have & this is what I have to say:

There is a certain set of attributes a person or company needs, to become profitable almost from the start:

Ability/Skills/Experience - Most obviously, competence is extremely important in a start up company. I believe it to be the most important attribute of the founding team. If you build a faulty ship, how do you expect to helm it?

I say this for good reason: I’ve worked at places with the best sales team I’ve ever seen, but the core product team could not manage to build a single, self serving platform. It required customization for each & every customer. This lead to increased costs and the eventual death of the company due to sales lapping development by 15 or 20 fold & customers demanding refunds of their deposit (which in turn affected cash flow).

Control/Administration - This most definitely my number 2. It’s closely related to my first point - building customer, content & order management is a HIGH PRIORITY. I personally believe you should not launch your product or service without management/administration tools.

I have multiple anecdotes for this point - I’ve been “forced” to build static websites multiple times only to be annoyed to no end by being required to change 1 word on a page or even worse, 1 character in a price. In another case, I believe it to be my lack of foresight, but building a product without being able to list every account that signed up - major FAIL. This led to being constantly asked to get up to date sign up numbers.

Measurement - I believe you should MEASURE EVERYTHING YOU POSSIBLY CAN. This also ties in to #1 (ability); Whatever you can track, track that shit. Really, a short list includes: traffic, referrers, browsers (google analytics) - repeat log ins, actions within your application & payments from customers - user interactions with your signup process/forms & application (userfly + crowdflower/crazyegg) - marketing response to your company throughout “social media” sites like twitter & facebook (insttant/cotweet works for twitter, still waiting for facebook to give us measurement tools). All this data will allow you to understand your customer an order of magnitude better than if you don’t collect it.

I have 2 reasons for this point - the first is because I HATE debating about whether or not some feature or part of a product is useful, data driven feature selection is what I would like to strive for. I’ve had to fight & collect data & then collect more data in order to fight down things that are opposing to users best interest that management has wanted to implement because of a gut feeling they had. This is perhaps my biggest peeve, making decisions “just because”. The second reason I say measure everything is because it will ABSOLUTELY help you establish your bottom line & assist in your efforts to refine and improve your bottom line costs, period.

Clarity/Transparency - This has A LOT to do with customer service. It’s important to keep an OPEN line of communication with your customers. There are plenty of great examples of how to do this, starting with Zappos leading on to Wufoo & others. In addition transparency into product development can have a very nice network effect, as 37signals has proved. Not counting the free marketing provided by transparency into product development, customers will almost certainly tell you what they want which you can use as a base for your further development.

I’ve seen customer service botched OVER AND OVER again at the companies I have worked at. Crappy call centers, crappy self-service interfaces, crappy customer service agents, crappy “project managers” that interface with agency clients - the list goes on. You NEED to be available to your customers, they are the ones keeping your company alive.

Focus - This is a key ingredient, in my opinion. Staying focused on a product until it’s able to receive feedback is VERY VERY important. This is self-explanatory, finish what you started.

I’ve seen companies lose focus, CEO’s asking my team to build a competing product to Company X’s new product in 4 weeks all while expanding the core product into 5 different verticals in the next 3 months & splitting the core product into a educational product, telephony product, marketing product & customer relationship management tool. Some other examples include attempting to launch an email marketing product while the core product is a CRM & trying to enter the government contract space / business (enterprise) space while 100% of revenue is coming from consumers of which there are hundreds of millions.

Efforts are often the most effective when focused.

Motivation/Rewards - This is more for employee morale - but no one likes a cheapskate, at all. If the company is doing well, or the team is pushing out great products it’s important to make them feel appreciated in order to keep them motivated. This doesn’t mean a raise, but perks like paid cell phone, well stocked fridge, health insurance, extended time off, expense reimbursement and most importantly, public recognition for work completed are very appreciated by employees.

I’ve worked at companies where appreciation is VERY VERY apparent. On the other hand, I’ve left multiple positions because I didn’t feel appreciated.

Dedication - This is required by everyone who works for the startup - PERSEVERANCE IS A DETERMINING FACTOR in success or livelihood of a company. It’s important to last as long as possible & have people who are motivated enough to make it through a rough patch, especially if you are near the end of your proverbial rope. Stretch it as far as you can.

In the past, I’ve given up a little early, when things got just a *kinda* tough. I’ve seen employee’s move towards greener pastures when things started to slow down only to miss out on a nice set of customers or deal.

So there you have it - Auston Bunsen’s guide to starting a start up. I definitely hope to incorporate this into my next venture (coming soon). Thoughts?