Why You Should Start With A Minimum Viable Team

This week I was thinking a lot about what makes a great startup team. So many of the “lists” that come out try to identify what “not” to do in a startup and the 10 reasons why startups fail. A lot of times, these lists focus on the product – explaining that the startup failed because the product was too complicated, or too simple, or just didn’t make sense. However, I think another key reason that we need to address is the element and influence of the initial team, the first key hires that you make as a startup.

Rather than give my thoughts, I’d like to point to you to a really awesome post that Charlie O’Donnell wrote on the subject. His blog post Minimum Viable Team is a complete breakdown of every conceivable role you think you would need, and then he slowly eliminates each role that you don’t really need to get to a Minimum Viable Product. This method of slowly showing you what you can Continue reading

High School, Start Ups, And The Power Of Perspective

In high school, I was on the volleyball team. We were pretty good, but we had one big problem. In volleyball, you play until you get to 21 points. Every time we’d get to 10 or more points, we’d just simply freeze up. We missed plays, we messed up serves, we just couldn’t play anymore. One day in the middle of a game, when we reached 10 points, our coach called a time out, gathered us on the court and said “You’re down. The score is now 0, 10 … for them”. We went on to win the game.

Every game for the rest of our team’s career, when we’d reach 10 points, we would all yell “0,10”!!! I’m sure the other teams thought we were completely crazy. But this reverse psychology worked for us.

Sometimes when you think you’re winning the game, it’s easy to fall into the trap of guaranteed success, entitlement, or feeling more secure than you should. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter where you are right now. Because in an instant, the other team could catch up. And for my little volleyball team, we needed to think different. We needed to focus not on where we were, but where we were headed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and it’s especially relevant in start ups. A small victory can give you a boost of confidence and make you feel like you’re on top of the world, that there’s no way your idea could actually fail. But it’s at those very times that we tend to ease up a bit, get a little too comfortable, and leave just enough room for the other people to catch up.

Small victories are great, but the key is to not lose sight of the rest of the game that’s in front of you. Because chances are, in order to win you’ll have to overcome about a million times more setbacks than you faced to get to that one small victory.

Only you know what it took to get to where you are. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter where you are right now. What matters is what you are doing to get to the next level. And to get to the next level, sometimes you need to turn your focus away from any victories you’ve had, and keep your vision on what’s yet to be achieved.

On Creating A Culture Of Design: The Founding Team

Products are not only judged on what they do, they’re judged on how they do it. The experience that someone has when using your product is largely what they remember. These experiences are not forgotten quickly and are shared stories that spread through networks of people as their either praise or throw punches at your product.

Today, consumers expect great experiences, and they really are learning to spot the difference between a good and bad experience. It’s not enough to just fulfill a need or solve a problem. You have to do it in a way that creates an experience. In the past, we’ve had a strong focus on creating great technology. But, unless the great technology is woven into a thoughtful user experience, chances are that it will never be accessible to a consumer.

How do we ensure that experience is part of the fabric of our products and process? Continue reading

Unproductive Technology

A great article in the New York Times called Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast poses an interesting question – are the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused?

RescueTime, an computer habits research company, conducted a study and found that a typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times. The study also found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.

Perhaps the area of greater concern is the financial impact of distractive technology in the workplace. According to Basex, a management science research group, in the United States more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.

According to John Tang, a researcher at IBM, the challenge today lies to finding ways to prevent software tools from distractions in the workplace.