Gregg Pollack's Founder's Talk 1
25 Lessons:
- As a founder, you must be willing to wear all hats
- Do one on ones
- If you have an audience, you can make money
- Sponsorships
- Charging people
- If you can bring an audience, you can probably figure out a way to monetize.
- Learn to be a salesman. Follow up!
- Be careful about joining companies after they've been acquired
- Just because you would use and pay for a product, it doesn't mean anyone else will.
- Most businesses are built at networking groups
- There is work to be had in hot niche markets
- Build a community to find like minded people
- Gregg created the Ruby users group in his error
- He'd do a lot of presentations on things
- Identify gaps in knowledge and write a blog post about it
- Gregg would create a tutorial, make it entertaining, tell a story and even include a table of contents
- Writing is 50% writing, 50% self promotion
- You need to promote yourself and give yourself time to build an audience
- Submit it to Digg, submit it to Reddit, email popular bloggers and ask for feedback. Ask for help to promote it.
- You don't have to give someone equity unless they want it
- Eventually turned their blog "rails envy" into a company, updated the website, etc.
- Found sponsors who wanted to get in front of their audience
- Started a Podcast.
- Reuse all content often
- Take content and put it into different forms and publish them all. Don't worry that it's the same - some people like learning in different or mutliple ways.
- Blog post with links
- Link to Podcast
- Do a blog post, podcast and made a mailing list.
- Pay professionals when it matters
- If Gregg had tried to record the commercials himself they wouldn't have been very good.
- Provide value to others and it will come back to you
- All of the conference talks wouldn't get filmed and the knowledge would go to waste
- Gregg would go around to every speaker at a conference and give them their name and their talk in 30 seconds. Create a blog post and link to their slides and their video.
- Sometimes conferences will give you free tickets
- Blog's goal is to put out some video
- Find who has your audience and give them value
- Consulting is a good way to build a company
- Hire slow, fire fast
- Keep an eye for what people try to hire you to do
- Don't over engineer
- Spam - It works :(
- Unfortunately this works, it's effective sending out emails and mailing lists.
- Don't be evil / be respectful with it.
- Over deliver to your customers
- No one is competition in a growing market
- Advertise about each new feature
- Don't be afraid of giving it away
- Crowdfunding is easy if you already have social capital
Gregg Pollack's Founder's Talk 2
25 Lessons:
- Properly advertise yourself
- Something on the homepage. Maybe a video?
- Don't make yourself look like the corporation
- Put your face on your web page (not just boba fett)
- Get money up front
- Quote clients on an hourly basis
- Get them to prepay a certain number of hours, in advance (a little a head of time), give them a little discount
- Always try to make a friend
- First priority, not to make a sale but make a friend. Small talk. That's how you should be treating your business / clients as friends. Make this the first priority.
- Solidify your core values
- Figure out what drives you to do the work you do
- Why it's worth doing the work we do, well.
- Be trustworthy, honest and humble
- All businesses are based on systems
- Business book "E-Myth"
- Hire a part time project manager
- Scheduling, reporting, meeting notes, client arrangements - easily delegated to someone who likes this stuff.
- Practice the pseudoscience of projects
- Hang out outside of work
- As you are building the company this becomes important
- Build the relationships and friendships
- Hire people that fit your core values
- Important when you are interviewing people, personalities that fit
- Don't try to manage your friends
- Surround yourself with people you can hire
- Started in a co-work space
- Join a support group
- Create Traditions
- Catering lunch, annual trips
- The more social connections you have, the happier you are going to be
- Don't be afraid to apologize to your customers
- It's okay to lose money on a transaction, just let your customer know about it
- Estimate a task will take 10 hours. Takes 20 hours. Send the client an email saying this task took 20 hours but were only going to bill you for 10.
- Loosing money but sticking to your word - it adds up to expressing transparency, honesty, etc.
- Seriously, follow up.
- Check back in with your customers and potential customers to see if they need help
- Like to win your business some day, let us know when we can
- Communicate with your customer more than your competition
- Gregg created screen casts with customers. Used Jing.
- Customers were more likely to look at the work you did.
- Constantly look for things you can delegate
- The engineers dilemma: If I'm capable of doing something I should, because it's in front of me.
- Just because you can doesn't mean you should, someone might be better, someone might not find this task to be boring like you do.
- Not everyone's like you
- Don't be afraid to take on more than you can handle
- Ton of things on your plate that slip through the cracks. Sometimes you need things to fall through the cracks for you to identify the most important things
- Never pass up on work
- Should never be sorry we can't help you.
- If someone comes to you and you can't help them out, think about who might need that work or where they could go
- This sounds like building up your network - that you can refer work out to.
- Give more compliments
- No one works well when they feel like they will be criticized all the time. Give some motivation or meaningful compliment
- Meaningful doesn't mean "that looks great", it means something specific or personable.
- Understand that it's your job to wear the hats
- If you business is stagnating it could be because you aren't wearing the hats
- Take calculated Risk
- Big businesses die because they stop taking risks.
- You don't have to build a product to sell it
Gregg Pollack's Founder's Talk 3
35 Lessons:
- Bootstrapping, do it if you can.
- Ask your employer if you can work less or part time (if you can afford it)
- Ask friends and family
- Maybe ask your spouse?
- Find an investor
- Realize that investors will want a 10x return and will push you to take risk
- Lastly, consider using some of your savings
- Stay away from ideas that requires lots of capital
- Don't create a startup that sells to small businesses (unless you're making them money for free)
- As a startup, half your job is sales and marketing
- You can pay people to do stuff
- Publishing content is 50% writing, 50% self promotion
- Nothing wrong with following in other's footsteps
- No such thing as competition
- Traditions are important
- Think about who has your audience
- Do equity right
- Have a rainy day list
- 12 things you can do to get more customers
- When people pay for you, you may be getting wined and dined
- Most startups wait until after they have a product to start marketing it
- 50% of your job is to do sales and marketing. From Day 1
- All startup ideas can start small. Figure out how to start small
- As soon as you start building a startup, start a mailing list
- Find revenue quick
- Motivate people to play / buy
- Get your audience to promote you
- Let everyone get a taste before they buy (free levels for codeschool)
- There are lots of sponsorship opportunities, usually from marketing departments with budgets
- Learn how to spend money
- Think about who you want to work with, and how you could make it happen.
- Layoffs suck more than you know
- Work with an organizational psychologist
- Build a leadership team when your team gets big enough
- Build a board of advisors
- If you are building a Product, you want Product Developers