Some teams from Seedcamp from London were in town this last week and I managed to get a private pitch session. Here is a video of uberVU pitching me, shot from a mobile phone:
uberVU – betaworks pitch from Vladimir Oane on Vimeo.
I don’t look too good without makeup, do I?
This slide from the infamous Sequoia deck is one of my favorites:
Running lean is something all startups should practice at all times, even if they are profitable. Keeping costs under control is an art and a science and is even more critical when you’re just starting out and don’t have any revenues.
So add in our economic woes and in the short term, the death spiral becomes a high probability and high burn startups can’t pull out of it, because funding has almost all but dried up. Venture funds are pulling back and getting super conservative; they have good reason too – the crappy economy does not allow startups with slow to prove business models to survive. At the early stage, it’s even worse; us angels and early stage funds can’t give a startup enough money to last out past when the bailout plan and economic recovery will begin. Early stage startups need enough runway to get to positive metrics so that they can raise the next round. If they can get to profitability, even better. However, if you try to raise money now and your metrics are average or not all that great, you won’t get your raise.
Hence you enter into the death spiral and you’re dead.
UNLESS…you reduce burn now. Do whatever it takes: layoffs, cutting salaries, removing non-essential services and perks. It’s all about survival now and for as long as you can, to give you as much time as possible to get your metrics to a positive place. Activate revenue generation immediately; don’t wait. Start getting cash in now and you’ll be able to last even a bit longer.
And if you’re starting a company right now, begin with good habits of running lean. Don’t get into thinking you can run the company as if it were a bigger, more mature company. You can’t. The bad economy exacerbates these problems.
It’s times like these when you really find who truly believes in the company and the idea. If you need cash in your life (ie. have a family), you should seriously reconsider being in a startup. Startups need to run lean to survive; it means that there is a huge amount of sacrifice that its employees take on to really run lean. Those who are truly believe in the company and idea will stay no matter what it takes; they will not leave when you cut salary or perks. And they will work their butts off for minimal pay and equity alone. If you can’t live in an environment like that, I would really urge you to look at what is truly important in your life before joining a startup.
A plug for a new company with a cool application and technology. A simple social gesture such as tipping hasn’t been explored much on the Internet. I think it’s an interesting area and filled with opportunity.
Check out their latest announcement and help with hurricane relief!
This year’s Ycombinator did not disappoint me in seeing smart, young people crank out new business ideas. But I was struck by the number of repeated ideas in this class’s mix.
In past classes, Ycombinator participants came up with truly innovative ideas and prototypes to illustrate those ideas. They were really new and concepts that I had not seen before.
In this class, I saw many that were remakes of old ideas, either from previous Ycombinator classes or even just improvements on products/services that were already out in the marketplace. All of them were better though; their user experience was markedly better and most people agreed that the Ycombinator teams produced better versions of existing products.
It brings up the question of what I would call “follow on innovation,” which is to take an existing idea and make it better and then customers should adopt the new product because it’s better, faster, easier to use,….right?
One of my favorite business books is The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. The book describes the classic case study of the hard drive industry. Established hard drive manufacturers would create one version of it, and either be unincentivized to innovate on the technology or miss seeing the opportunity of a smaller hard drive. Smaller more nimble incumbents would develop a faster, smaller hard drive while the established manufacturers missed the opportunity to develop the newer versions for fear of cannibalizing their existing business. This happened over and over again as hard drives got faster and decreased in size.
At each stage, the existing company would somehow miss the opportunity to jump into that new space. They would research and research and find that no customers would ever want smaller, faster hard drives. Their financials would always say that the new product versions would cannibalize their existing businesses and create harm to their companies. They were smart people doing the right thing and that right thing told them they should not innovate and that there was no proof in the innovation being good for their bottom lines. Their own analyses created an opportunity for new incumbents to enter the market and steal large amounts of share from entrenched, already-established companies.
Here we see follow on innovation clearly overtaking existing, established businesses. If it can happen in the hard drive industry, couldn’t it happen with one of these Ycombinator companies in the Internet?
In Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center by Paul Kunkel, Sony’s Design Center looks at their products through a life cycle from “sunrise” to “sunset”. “Sunrise” is when the product is first introduced. The product is a completely new entrant to the marketplace. Competing products introduced into the marketplace from competitors compete on features and technology, and features are added until differentiation is no longer achievable through either features or technology. This is when the product starts crossing from “noon” to “sunset” and competing on design becomes ascendant.
Sony stops adding features as a main focus and starts creating new designs around the features and technology. Products are created in different forms and colors, appealing to every consumers’ taste in the way it looks and feels versus on features alone. According to the book, it is heaven for designers because now they are the important resource to which product teams must turn for further competition.
For Sony products like the Walkman, “sunrise” to “sunset” takes years, if not decades. Physical product development cycles usually take about 6 months to a year to complete back then; now they are faster given advances in manufacturing technology and the lack of need to innovate on basic technologies. Still, they take a long time to plan and build and for consumers to buy and experience and, ultimately, replace to try a new product. On the Internet, products and services move from “sunrise” to “sunset” in a matter of months. The pace of innovation is incredibly fast and a high percentage of the basic technologies enabling a product or service can be implemented very quickly. Products rapidly reach that point at which design and the user experience quickly becomes a differentiator between competing services who essentially accomplish the same thing.
In the beginning of an Internet product, engineers’ importance supercedes that of other disciplines. Basic technology must be developed, implemented, and tested. As other entrants emerge, they too develop similar technologies and then there are many competitors in a market where formerly there was only one.
As an internet product reaches “sunset”, the user experience becomes more important. Basic technologies have been developed and now you need to deliver the benefits of those technologies as easy as possible. Retention of users comes from clear, simple designs and hard-to-measure metrics like branding and emotional satisfaction from using one service over another. It’s the designers’ dream time because their discipline comes to the forefront for product development.
Or is it their nightmare?
It’s never as easy as saying that a great user experience is all you need, when other basic technologies have been developed, and all other things like marketing, funding, etc. are held equal. User experiences can be copied; they are near impossible to protect via patents. Branding can be mimicked. The more aggressive the design, the higher the risk that you attract some and alienate others. It also means that the more aggressive the design the more often you need to update the design because design can get dated and worn out.
And for early stage companies trying to enter into a market with entrenched competitors, you’re trying to build a better product through user experience alone. You probably do have a better user experience when compared to your competitors, but trying to unseat a gorilla in a marketplace because there is so much inertia in current users is incredibly tough without a lot of resources.
As a person with a design background, I am a big proponent of design and its importance to product teams. But in looking at some of this last Ycombinator’s products, I find myself wondering if a better user experience on top of a product that is already existing in the marketplace is good enough for it to compete and survive to grow to be a worthwhile sized business.
I intend on studying this further as I watch the current batch of Ycombinator companies and others attempt to gain market share through mainly innovation in design.
You know what – if we all sat down and thought for a while, we can all think of at least one company that made it big all by itself, nice and viral like, without any help from anyone but users, and that first user was able to drag all his friends in, and then exponentially drag all their friends in as well, and so on, and so on. Pretty soon it became an internet dynamo, a dominant force on the Web and its founders made a gajillion bucks off it for practically doing nothing.
No advertising. No SEM. No SEO. No nothing. Just magic. Maybe a bit of accidental viral-ness, but nothing else.
The funny thing is, I’ve met so many entrepreneurs whose site growth strategy depends on this magic.
I listen to them tell me their idea, and sometimes their idea is pretty cool. Sometimes they’ve got the site up and their idea’s coolness is actually reflected in what they built. I tell them I really like it and then ask them if they are going to start a company. Then the story gets murkier.
Each one tells me yes they really want to start a company. Each one has big dreams. Then I start asking them about how they’re going to get the word out about their product. Then it’s unclear. They say they want to put it up and see how it does.
Well….Okay.
I tell them do they intend on doing marketing, even some marketing on the cheap like reaching out to bloggers, or SEM, or something. As soon as the mention of spending more money comes into play, the answers get murkier and murkier.
I persist. I ask them why don’t they go out and raise money and become a startup. Then they would have money to spend on marketing. They give a range of answers from not wanting to leave the comfort of their current job to fear of committing to something that might not work to “still thinking about it.” Mostly, they got the site up and are just waiting to see what happens.
At this point, I have my answer at least (which is “no I’m not investing”).
You know, it’s hard to leave the comfort of where you are now. You’re making money to support a great lifestyle, or a family. You are comfortable, and don’t want to face the potential chaos of the unknown, let alone a startup and its challenges. You might even fail – god forbid what others might think of you, or worse, what you might think of yourself. You might fail, and end up with no money, no job and you bet it all on this one thing and now you might have….zip…nada….nothing.
So you say you’ll just put it up and see what happens.
My thoughts to you are:
1. Growth by “magic” into an internet dynamo happens SOOOOOO infrequently that the chances of what you built doing that are so vanishingly small.
BUT – what you built might actually be useful and cool enough to grow into a decent sized business (or even a dynamo) IF you were to put some sweat and money into distribution and marketing so that users know you exist.
In absence of full commitment, you might as well be playing Lotto.
2. Since you won’t fully commit, you’re unfortunately not risk tolerant enough to become a great entrepreneur. No offense, and I don’t say it as negative criticism. Not everyone is built to deal with the uncertainties of being an entrepreneur, and the chaos that inevitably ensues from running a startup and living on the edge of having no money. So just stay home, make your money, live your life.
And don’t be delusional about the chances of your site which you just “put up” and are “watching what happens.”
Our subprime mess is very much underway and the economy is suffering from that and a host of other issues. When consumers feel the pinch, that means they buy less, and companies don’t make as much money, and then they spend less on advertising and also on acquisitions. This is important to both startups and us investors: consumers spend less, so they are less willing to buy products and services from a company. Companies spend less and then they slowdown their advertising spend. Stats show that advertisers will maintain their online ad budgets when compared to offline budgets (woe to offline operations who are heavily dependent on advertising for revenue), but I can’t help but wonder how much online advertising could have grown MORE if our economy wasn’t so bad. Last as companies pull back and preserve cash, they will be less likely to acquire all these nice startups that we’re working on now. Granted, the wiser and the more resourced companies will actually go on a buying spree, but they’ll be after the startups at super cheap prices since they’ll be lower performing towards the end of the year as revenues become tougher. Beware the corporate development folks who seem to slow down a bit; they’re just waiting for you to go through your cash reserves and get to a more desperate place by end of year and snap you up at a discount!
When I meet startups, I am now telling them to raise more than they were thinking. I try to get them to run the numbers and to figure out how to survive until at least the second half of 2009, or further if possible. I want them to survive through the economic downturn and not be dependent on additional money until then. I tell them to expect that any revenue projections will be missed towards the end of this year, and advise them that if they try to raise money on poor metrics AND they have run out of money, they will have an extremely hard time doing it.
A lot of entrepreneurs are still coming to me with raising $100k-$300k in their plans. Then I try to convince them of the economic issues and that unless you can survive for 1.5 years on $300k, you’d better change the plan. Not all of them listen though. It will be interesting to see if I am right. To me, you should be at least $500k, even better upwards of $1-1.5MM, whereas in a decent economy, you could get by with $300k-$1MM.
Some of them only want to survive 6-9 months to get a prototype up and raise money on that. In a better economy, I would say that this is not a bad scenario. However, in today’s world, I tell them that if they are getting traction on an idea in investors’ eyes, that they should leverage that inertia and get more money now. If they build a prototype and are not gaining traction in a down economy, it’s only going to show that you could not gain traction and investors be much less likely to participate as they look for positive metrics. It’s much better to raise money on a beta and/or the idea and get as much money as you can now, and to plan on survival on minimal or no revenues for 1.5 years.
Another issue with the 6-9 month plan: August and the holidays. Running out of money by August really sucks for fund raising. This is because the venture community goes on summer vacation and it’s nearly impossible to find someone to get a meeting. You have to wait until they all get back in September. Then you have about a two month window everyone gets distracted once again because it’s Thanksgiving and then Christmas. From about mid-November to first/second week of January, the venture community goes on vacation, peoples’ minds are on the holidays and families and not on funding you.
If you’re an entrepreneur reading this now: raise more cash than you think, expect that any revenue projections you have will be missed, and try to plan to survive on minimal or no revenues until at least the latter half of 2009, and raise all that money now while you have investor inertia.
My last post Incubation 101 went over basic concepts which I think are essential to the success of any incubation operation. Basically, I think that risk of failure increases exponentially if you don’t follow these concepts in their entirety.
In this post, I want to bring out some subtle points mentioned in the previous post which refer to whether or not you SHOULD incubate at all. I assume that if you are thinking about incubating, that somehow you’ve reached a point in your career/life where you CAN incubate. But does it mean you should?
What are YOU personally willing to do?
Self-examination and knowledge is very important. You need to figure out exactly HOW you can contribute to incubation and the nurturing of ideas into businesses. Then you need to figure out what really motivates you and how you gain satisfaction, relative to the kind of participation you’re willing to give.
Are you willing to jump back into the startup life of working 24/7?
If you’re not in a position to go back to startup life, then you shouldn’t incubate your own ideas. Remember, the idea originator has the resonance with the idea, and is best poised to take an idea to a successful conclusion. If you’re not willing to do that, that’s a clear sign you shouldn’t incubate. Transferrence of an idea to someone else is nearly impossible and substantially decreases chances for success. Incubating at arm’s length is still possible.
Do you have incredible, kick-ass product ideas and want to see them flourish?
This is better than having dumb ideas, or ideas that others are working on, or no ideas at all. You shouldn’t incubate your ideas if you don’t have great ideas to begin with. Again, maybe you should incubate at arm’s length.
Being the “Guy at the Top”
The most dangerous thing you can do with incubation is try to be the “guy at the top” who directs things but doesn’t get involved in the day to day of any incubated operation. You generate great ideas, and then hire a team to execute that idea, and then think you can sit back and watch the idea flourish, grow big, and you reap the benefits while being able to kick back and just manage it all.
Incubating Your Own Ideas
So you have great ideas and are willing to go back into the startup world. Incubation is a great way to figure out what to do next, if you have the resources to work on many things simultaneously. You will need to be personally involved in the day to day of each incubated idea, and you’ll most likely max out at around 3-4 ideas, perhaps less.
Follow the principles in Incubation 101 and you’ll do great.
Managing Incubation at Arm’s Length
So you don’t have great ideas, OR you aren’t willing to put yourself back into startup mode regardless of whatever ideas you have.
My advice to you, is to let go of any notions that you be the “guy at the top” and find another way to help others with their ideas. Reorient your values and take great pleasure in watching others’ flourish with their own ideas, but contribute in ways that allow you to be involved.
This can be through advisorships and/or investments. Provide value to your entrepreneurs as you invest money in their ideas and they will come to you for help. Create a positive relationship and you can gain some satisfaction in knowing that you contributed to the success of their idea.
Raise a venture fund and support people more through cash, if you aren’t so helpful in other ways. Keep the incubated ideas and companies at arm’s length as much as possible to maximize incentives and reduce your exposure to ideas that aren’t going anywhere. Again, follow the principles in Incubation 101 and you’ll minimize risk and maximize your chance of finding something great.
My Personal Experience
Back in early 2006, I attempted to raise a venture fund with an incubation component. I was having a hard time raising it, and ultimately this caused me to get involved with startups in a different way. Looking back, I was glad that I didn’t fully realize the incubation operation as I think it would have gotten to a bad place.
In my self-examination, which happened much later, I discovered:
1. I was not willing to put my personal time into any one idea. This would have lead to a bunch of ideas run by me, the “guy at the top”. This would have been a risk increasing move.
2. I really didn’t have great ideas. I had some, but none that were earth shattering. I didn’t have a way to generate great ideas but would have tried to execute some mediocre ideas, again increasing risk.
3. I realized I was much better at taking someone else’s ideas and making them even better.
Thus, I am today at something-like incubating at arm’s length. I feel that I have yielded a much better risk profile through my work with startups across a number of great ideas and entrepreneurs, and leveraging my personality preference for making an existing idea better versus coming up with a great idea myself. I also have higher personal satisfaction working in this fashion.
Read Incubation 101, do the self-discovery, and do incubation the right way for YOU.
Over the last few months, I spent some time interviewing a whole bunch of people about incubating businesses. It was very enlightening not for the information I uncovered, but the fact that it just brought to the forefront of consciousness things I already knew.
Incubation has had a bad reputation over the years, especially the large ones like IdeaLab and Internet Capital Group that raised enormous sums of money but didn’t return nearly what they were supposed to. When I tried to raise my own venture fund 2 years ago and wanted to include an incubation component, I was advised unilaterally to not call it an incubator or else I would get nowhere fast! Investors had been burned way too much on the incubator model in the past to trust new ones.
Yet incubation is sexy. Generate new, cool ideas. Create new businesses. Find the next Google. Unbridled innovation, unlimited success! Wow!
If only it were that easy or certain. Incubation is really hard, but in my research I’ve uncovered some guiding principles which make incubation viable and possible as a strategy.
Here are the highlights:
Incubation works nicely for internet projects
Developing products and services for the internet has gotten so cheap and easy that invested capital can be very small relative to other industries.
Incubation is HARD
It’s not easy to come up with a great new business. Attempting it is not for those wishing for a quick win. You have to be patient, focused, and be able to let go of projects that aren’t getting anywhere or waste too much of your time and resources.
Go cheap
The less money you spend, the less money you need to properly incubate. Testing ideas as cheap as possible reduces overall investment. Don’t invest a ton in infrastructure liking buying a pretty building and cool office furniture. Outsourcing can help with being cheap especially in the international marketplace for talent.
Build fast
Get your concepts out there fast and test. Being slow means competitors can get into a space before you can test properly. Also, the more ideas you can generate and test, the more chances you have of hitting on something worthwhile.
Fail and remove fast
If something is failing, close it down fast! Have the discipline to kill projects that aren’t working. Throwing money at failing projects doesn’t solve the problem either. The ability to let go of bad projects is extremely important. Otherwise, projects that are sitting around languishing just waste money and effort to keep afloat.
Go wide…Carefully
Risk is reduced if you cast your net wide of ideas to try. Throwing all your eggs into one or a small number of baskets increases risk substantially of failure. But go wide carefully, meaning don’t stretch your resources too thinly.
The founder of an idea needs to go with that business
It is nearly impossible to properly transfer an idea to someone else. Trying to do so raises risk tremendously. To reduce risk, the person who comes up with an idea should stay with that idea, should that idea blossom into a business. This is because the originator of an idea typically has some intrinsic resonance with that idea as a business, and is the right person to build, innovate, and nurture it.
If you are not willing to take an idea through to its proper conclusion, my advice to you is to re-examine your life and what you want to do. If you’re not willing to jump back into a startup, then I would tell you to just let others develop their own ideas and let go of your own. Take pleasure in nuturing others and their ideas into great businesses. Raise a venture fund and help others do well.
The team members also should go with that business
Shared resources developing an idea is a nice concept, but to reduce risk, as soon as an idea starts taking off, the development and product team should immediately be deployed on that project. Switching people on a project is hugely problematic and wastes time in education, learnings, and experience.
Any resources working in an incubator should be told beforehand that if they work on an idea, they can’t just sit around and keep coming up with new ideas; they need to see the blossoming idea through to its conclusion. If anyone can’t buy into that model, then they should find a job somewhere else.
Keep resources at arm’s length
The more resources you can keep not on recurring payroll, the better. It’s easier to remove people who aren’t working out, or shut down projects. Hire the teams on projects that are flourishing to the corporations in which those projects reside.
Build a rolodex of resources you can deploy at a moment’s notice. Find great people who are willing to give you great rates and can do great work.
Be disciplined in a process for evaluation
Set clear checkpoints for your incubated projects. If they do not reach basic minimum levels, then they should be shut down ruthlessly. Budgets, time, goals all can be used to create checkpoints.
Incentives are key
Nothing motivates people better than survival instinct and a life or death deadline. The survival instinct is activated when they know they’re going to run out of money (like their salary, their means for eating and paying rent, etc.) if they aren’t successful. The life or death deadline is activated when they know they’re not going to get any more resources or help beyond a certain point. So they MUST be successful or else they’re gonna starve.
On the other side of the coin, it is highly motivational to know that their success is also tied to success of their project in a large and singular manner.
Paying them a regular salary from the overall incubator pool is not motivating enough; it makes them too comfortable knowing that they could fail on any idea but still are able to go on surviving. It also severely reduces their urgency, knowing that they’re still going to get a paycheck whether or not it launches today or 3 months from now.
Giving them large ownership in a separate corporation formed from their project is. Tying their salary to the separate corporation is even better.
Forming a separate corporate entity per project increases clarity in ownership and process
Keeping projects internally makes it difficult to track and assign costs properly to each project. When you have a separate corporation each with its own budget and resources, tracking becomes easier.
It also makes it clear who owns what part of what corporation, and how much of it. Keeping projects internally removes that fact as you’re part of and being paid by the whole.
This clarity extends to funding as well. When an entity is running out of money, you have to take an official step to put more funds into that corporation’s bank account, along with all the ramifications in doing so in ownership, and why you have to do so. It really makes you think twice about funding a business that may be faltering or flawed.
As mentioned before, when peoples’ salaries are tied to the corporation, then incentives are highly aligned with the success of that corporation, and not blurred with the whole incubator.
Some ideas require a sustainability component to be fully tested
A recurring theme among internet products is that ideas can be launched quickly and once it’s out there, people will come and use it, love it, and it will grow. Banking on an idea to grow organically by itself is a recipe for disaster. The problem is that not many ideas have the ability to do so. We often fool ourselves that by launching a new idea live, that people will just come and use it and it will be the next Google. It might happen, but probably won’t. Then we get frustrated wondering why it isn’t growing, and often end up thinking that the idea sucked and we should close it down.
However, it is deceptive to think that an idea which does not grow organically is a failure. The reality is that the idea might actually be good, but just requires people, time, money, and smarts to apply to it and then it might grow. Thinking through the sustainability of a launched idea and how that can be supported for at least some period of time is really important.
Incubation works great if you’re personally trying to figure out what to do next
If you have some personal capital and want to find a new idea to work on, incubation could be for you. I’ve talked to a number of people who have employed incubation at a personal level successfully. Instead of working on just one idea, they launch 3-4 and work on all simultaneously. Each idea gets funding and their own team. At the end of the process, the most successful idea survives. The other projects are closed down or sold, and you become CEO of the surviving, thriving business.
It could work much better than working on singular idea and trying to determine if that idea is the right one or not. Or working ideas serially. Being serial takes up a lot more time than doing things in parallel.
Yes it takes a lot of time and effort, and requires a multi-tasking brain. But if you’re a startup person, you’re probably used to working like that anyways.
Find great startup people
Seems basic right? It’s actually harder than you think.
Find creative, hard working, caffeinated people who are smart and motivated AND can take a project to a conclusion. Too many people float at the creative, idea stage and don’t have what it takes to stay with an idea over time and develop it. Discovering people who are like this is very hard, so beware.
As mentioned previously, keeping them at arm’s length makes it easier to get rid of inappropriate people. Be ruthless in culling people who aren’t working out.
Young people are great. They can work for long hours, live cheaply, have almost no other attachments in their lives. They will try stuff because they don’t know better, unlike us old, jaded, experienced people. They’re not so great because they don’t have enough business experience to know how to take a business further.
Build an idea with revenue generation on the mind from day one
If an idea is generating money, its ability to sustain itself grows dramatically. Creating products which bank on the free model and gain lots of users, but have no concept or plan for short term revenue, is great for people who have a powerful investor as backer and who is willing to fund growth beyond that point. For an incubator, I would say that this is not a good path to go down and substantially increases risk of failure.
Revenue generation sustains the incubation process
Following on the last principle, if you can find a way to generate revenue immediately, then the incubation process can be self-funded and sustaining, and opens up the ability to try new ideas without deploying more outside capital.
Good luck with your incubation efforts, and I’d love to hear how you’re doing if you are going to incubate new businesses.
Over this last year, the topic of exploratory products versus utility products has come up so many times. And I’ve always felt uncomfortable with products that engage users because it helps them “discover” or “explore” something.
“Discovery” and “exploration” are always so alluring terms. Throughout human history, we’ve always envied the explorer. Christopher Columbus set out to discover the New World. Lewis and Clark went looking for a way to the Pacific Ocean. Neil Armstrong sets his foot on Lunar soil and declares, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Even watching Star Trek with the Enterprise on their 5 year mission to explore new worlds, we can’t help but wish we were on the Enterprise alongside Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. It sounds so wonderful, so romantic, and speaks to our ingrained cultural tendencies that achieving, discovering, and exploring makes us feel that blazing new territory like pioneers puts us out of the comfort zone and sets our senses afire, and takes us out of our normal, boring lives.
First, I think that there is a segment of the population with a natural “gene” for exploration. I personally know people whose first inclination every morning right when they get up is to go to click randomly on news articles or websites, like StumbleUpon or Digg, or Del.icio.us. They always do this before doing anything else.
Second, I think there are differences in the manifestation of the “exploration gene” based on age. Young people seem to engage in more exploratory behavior. But once young people grow older, they get more responsibilities, their time gets occupied by a whole bunch of things, their lives get so full that there is little or no time for exploration unless you have a natural “gene” for exploration.
To me, exploration is either an activity relegated to a small population relative to the whole, or one that does not sustain itself as a person ages. Given this belief, I think there is a tremendous amount of risk associated with products that depend on “exploration” and “discovery” as the main reasons why users would want to and/or continue using a product.
What’s the difference between an exploratory product and a utility product?
Utility products are those which depend less on exploration and discovery as primary tenets. Instead, utility products work their way into our lives because they are essential and we gain continual value from our usage and interaction with the product.
Here’s an example. News sites like NYTimes.com are utility sites. We consume news every day and find value from that by being informed. But they also introduce exploration to keep things interesting with their Most Emailed Stories module. But it’s not the focus of the site; it’s secondary.
Another example: StumbleUpon. I consider StumbleUpon a classic exploration site. You go there because you don’t know what you’ll find. You have to like discovering new websites and are ok with spending your valuable time doing so. But yet traffic over the last year has been dropping.
Here are the Alexa graphs for NYTimes and StumbleUpon:
Do you want your product’s graph to look like NYTimes.com or StumbleUpon?
My basic tenet is:
If you want a chance at success, you must make your product essential from a utilitarian point of view. You can use exploration to make your product more interesting, but if you make exploration your main purpose, you’ll reach a topping out point of users and potentially decline over time.
Is it a perfect rule? No, of course not. I am sure if we thought hard enough, we could think of some sites who are successful at employing exploration as their main purpose. However, I’m talking about risk reduction of failure and increasing the probability of success dramatically in my opinion. Wouldn’t you want to reduce the risk of failure by a great amount?
Occasionally I come across an entrepreneur who insists that his current strategy is to go for users and not worry about revenue now. It always makes me cringe. Then I try to talk them out of that strategy and find a more balanced strategy of getting users and revenue at the same time. Why do I feel this way?
In the past, the “get users now worry about revenue later” strategy has been successfully employed, so it’s not totally without merit. Yes it’s true; if you have tons of users then at the very least you can monetize the eyeballs via advertising. But certainly if many users find your product/service useful, that’s evidence that they would probably pay to use some version of your service at some point.
In examining how this strategy does work, I’ve come up with these cases:
You hit on a killer app early and you have hockey stick growth in users.
Somehow you’ve hit on a killer app early and you’ve got users up the wazoo. You see exponential growth and you can increase your valuation by waiting a bit longer to really cement your negotiation position when fund raising. In any case, operations can last that long because the speed at which your users are growing is so fast that it is obvious you can survive cash-wise until you reach your goal, before you need to figure out your revenue strategy.
You can last expenses-wise long enough to grow users to a point to be valuable.
You’ve built a service and found it valuable to users, and now you want to wait to build up users before figuring out a firm revenue plan. Expenses to run the site are low enough that don’t eat into your funds. Whatever money you’ve raised now, you can extend that budget for a very long time (try 1-5 years). Or maybe you’re rich or you are married to a rich spouse and don’t need the money coming in from the company to survive.
You’ve got the initial backing of a big fund.
I’ve seen cases where if you get seed money from a big fund, like Sequoia, then it gives you a bit of comfort that there will be someone there to infuse you with cash if you get the huge amount of users but don’t have revenue. Often their terms enable them to get first right to fund you when it comes time for the next funding round. But also realize that they can spend $100k-$500K on a company and not bat an eyelash if they lose it all; they’ve got billions under management and can afford to give you seed cash knowing that they might lose it.
If I see an entrepreneur that fall into these categories, then I usually shut up on this issue. But most people are definitely not, especially when they are in the early stage of their startup.
That’s why I try to talk entrepreneurs out of going just for users. I want them to think about revenue right from the beginning. Even if it’s incomplete or risky, at least they are thinking about it now versus getting into a budget crunch and then realizing they should figure out revenue when they’re almost out of cash. And who knows, they may actually hit on something that brings them revenue to survive or even do better than that. But you’ll never know unless you try as soon as possible.
I’ve also seen entrepreneurs argue they have a funding plan along with their business/product plan. They will build the product and user base, survive until their current cash runs low, and then they will go for their Series A funding and everything will work out great. The problem with this plan is that there is no backup; it pre-supposes everything will go as planned with no hiccups. This is a highly risky supposition to go on.
One problem is that you think you’ve got something great, but those pesky users don’t behave like you want them to. They might actually NOT come in droves to your wonderful product! Or they come slower than you think.
Another problem could be that engineering your incredible product might take longer than you think. Or you launch but find out you need to do more.
The last problem is that convincing people to give you tons of money can be easy or hard. I’ve seen a company close Series A in a month and a half, and I’ve seen companies still out there after a year trying to raise money. You can’t plan for how venture funds and investors are going to react to your plan and progress, even if it seems great. Even if you court someone, the terms negotation and the due diligence process could take months.
Mitigating the risk of all these bad things happening could just simply be…to think about revenue from the beginning. In that way, you can get cash coming in as soon as possible in case you need to survive longer than your plan dictates as you can never predict if you’ll need to or not.