Igor's Computer Blog

When I worked on Smile, I struggled because I wasn't interested in profit, but interested in making the world a better place. To achieve this, I'd need a sustainable business, not an exponential one. However, investors want exponential, not sustainable businesses.  This table comparnies unicorns and Zebras is from a great article on the topic.

Imagine a Fortune 500 company trying to build a car.   Because the company has lots of resources, they likely have a customer research team dedicated to understanding what the customer wants. They have lots of engineering experts each of which is able to produce products of technical complexity. Finally, and probably most importantly they have a culture which rewards accomplishing big things, often before they hit the market. As a consequence, at a large company a car would probably be developed one functional component at at time.  However, the risk here is that the customer never wanted a car, and you build the wrong thing. By contrast a startup has almost no resources, and is usually evaluated by customer growth rate.  This has the virtuous side effect that product is constantly being guided by customer need. In Startupville it's essential you are always building something the user wants to achieve their goals, in the car analogy, you'd progress by building a ska...

TLDR:  When you're disheartened, do something that you can control and succeed at. Succeeding recharges your motivation and lets you take another run at your most important problems. Staying motivated is easy when you're having wins, or executing again a plan you believe will succeed.   Unfortunately, there will be long stretches where you won't have wins, and the longer it has been since a win, the farther you will be from believing your plan will succeed. When it's been too long since I've had a win, my motivation will tank, and I'll find you stop doing much of anything. For me to get back on track, I need to start working on things I can control and succeed at.   Often that means working on things that are less important then the things that have me disheartened. Except that's a fallacy.  See, the thing that's most important when I'm disheartened is finding my mojo. So, when you're disheartened, do something that you can control and su...

Books I recommend: Start small stay small  - How to build a realistic software business.   Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition design - Value prop, and business is king. This book is a must read.  Be sure to by the print book as it's full of pictures and diagrams.  V is for vulnerable - A cute book on the attitude you need to survive as an entrepreneur.   Lean startup - The book that kicked off how to run a startup Traction - A treatise on customer aquistion strategies or how to get traction. Books I'm reading now: Zero to one - In progress looks great.  Blogs/Articles In progress Paul Graham  - Paul is the founder of y-combinator and his writings defined the startup industry. Brad Feld - One of the other best loves VC's. Often talks about funding, very interesting. We don't sell saddles here  - A treatise from the founder of Slack. How to think about MVPs  - A classic picture of how to build ...

TL;DR - Optimizing, is figuring out how to do make a result better.  Testing is checking if something is so good it doesn’t need to be optimized, or so bad you're better off doing something different. Founders spend a significant portion of their time comparing alternative to see which is better and why. For example how to make a landing page more appealing, or what price they should set for a product. This process is incredibly important and called optimizing. Optimizing is often expensive so before you start optimizing, test to see if something has so little traction it's not worth starting to optimize, or has so much traction there's no need to optimize. For example, imagine you have a customer acquisition cost (CAC) budget of 5$ and you run some search ads and get a 0% click through rate.  In that case, instead of trying to optimize search ads, you are probably better off trying a different channel like social network  ads.  Now, imagine when you try social...

As an entrepreneur, figuring out what your customers need is your top priority. When you have lots of customers, surveys are a great way of doing this. If you're doing surveys I strongly recommend typeform . It's simple to setup, and produces beautiful ux on phones and desktops for data gathering.  When you're thinking of using typeform, don't limit yourself to surveys. For example, I use typeform for sign up forms.  This saved me several hours of initial development, and even more hours when I made changes to my sign up process. 

If you would, I've got news for you, he already knows, and what you said was futile. Just as the single father already knows his child would benefit from a Mom and telling him won't help, it's not helpful to tell a founder he needs a partner. Like a single father, a Solopreneur knows the benefits of a partner are huge, but is wary of settling on the wrong partner. Having a partner who wouldn't cherish their baby through thick and thin, is far worse then going through the same think and thin alone.

To run a startup you need three personas represented by your founders:Hustlers, Hackers and Hookers. The hustler is the founder who can breaks down doors, she unlocks segments, captures funding, she's makes sure the startup engine never stalls for lack of leads or funding. The hacker is the founder who builds it. She is a McGyver and can build anything quickly. When there's a technical problem she can get it duct taped and bubbled gummed back up in giffy to keep the technical side of the business running. The hooker, often called a designer,  is the least known of the founder personas, but possibly the most valuable. His job is to love the customers. He listens to the customers emphatically and deeply understands what customers need,  even when the customer can't describe it.  This founder figures what should be built, how it should work. what it should look like, all within the constrains of the business model and technology. Often startups don't have dedicated...

Running a startup is hard. Soul crushingly hard.  I suspect if you haven't done it before, you can't understand it, but I'll try to explain it with an analogy: Imagine you decide to row across the Atlantic  alone. You don't get a GPS, you don't get a map, you don't even get a compass, all you can do is navigate by the stars.    Oh yeah, you do get a one way radio you can't turn off. At first, as you leave your home filled with confidence. You know you're a strong rower,  you think you know where you're going, and you  you feel great! But then it gets dark and cloudy,  you can't see the stars, you have no idea where you are, you have no idea if you're going in a circle or heading back to where yous started, and you're tired, rowing is hard work.  You become filled with fear and doubt.  Even if you wanted to go back to a place you thought was safe, you don't know how to get back. And did I mention rowing is hard work, and you'...

TL;DR - Your customers don't provide referrals because it's a risk to their credibility. Remove the credibility risk, and your referrals will follow. As an entrepreneur I imagined  my user count would grow by leaps and bounds as soon as my happy customers started providing referrals. However, when it came time to start providing referrals, my customers kept saying they would, but didn't follow through. At first, I assumed my customers weren't providing referrals because they were lazy.  Thus I spent a bunch of time nagging my customers. Guess what? No referrals. Then I assumed the problem was that my customers had no idea what to say for the referral.  So I spent a bunch of time creating a referral message my customers could use. Guess what? Still no referrals. Then I got wise and asked one of my favorite customers why he wouldn't refer me -  and he told me the answer. "Igor, I won't refer you because when I refer you it's my credibilit...