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Andrew Warner is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mixergy. He interviews successful people to learn how they did it. You can listen to his interviews...
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Mashable Channel -
Andrew Warner is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mixergy. He interviews successful people to learn how they did it. You can listen to his interviews at Mixergy.com.
Guy Kawasaki, the investor, entrepreneur and best selling author, just wrote a new book called Reality Check. The book is a collection of practical ideas for building a successful business. With the book in mind, I asked him for a few reality checks for Mashable readers. Here are seven:
Reality Check #1: Do one thing well
If your startup tries to do too much, you’ll lose. Guy told me, “I meet companies every day who say, ‘well we’re software services, and we’re also consulting. And we are a social networking site, but we also do white labeling in case you want to use our technology to do your own social network.’ And you know what, it’s hard to do any one of those things, try doing four.”
Reality Check #2: Court your thunder lizards
Quit pretending that you’re smarter than your community. Find ways to act on the energy of your “thunder lizards,” Guy’s term for your most passionate community members. Guy does that at Alltop, his RSS aggregation site.
“There are some people who not only suggest topics for Alltop, they send us their OPML files with all the feeds that should be in those topics. All we had to do there is have an open mind to having other people contribute to the community and to the quality of Alltop. But many, many companies will refuse that help. They’ll say, ‘NO. We know better.’”
Reality Check #3: Be crappy
Stop working on making your product perfectly perfect before you launch it. “You need to ship something that’s truly different and valuable and all that, but version 1 doesn’t have to be perfect,” says Guy. “Version 1 of Alltop had only 12 topics. We didn’t exactly have critical mass. If we had waited till we had 500, we’d still be waiting today. Once you have an idea…you ship it and then you test as you go.”
Reality Check #4: Learn to steal
You don’t have to invent your best business ideas. Guy has said many times that he created Alltop by copying popurls, an aggregations site that focused on a narrow set of subjects.
“Popurls was sending Truemors [a site Guy launched previously] so much traffic. And so we looked at what the hell is this popurls thing sending us as much traffic as Google. And then I got to know the creator of popurls and I asked him if he was going to do anything besides tech and business. And he said, ‘no.’ So I said, alright, I’m going to do them all.”
Reality Check #5: Hire “blindly”
Without realizing it, employers bring biases into job interviews. To hire smarter, Guy suggests doing your interviews over the phone–without seeing applicants. ”When you do things in person,” he said, “because of the person’s physical nature–attractive/unattractive, sloppy/not sloppy, fashionable/not fashionable–you make these judgment and it changes the interview. Where if you didn’t see the person and didn’t know what he/she looked like or smelled like or dressed like, I think it’s a much more objective interview.”
Reality Check #6: Just build it already
This is a tough market for raising money. Before you waste your time trying to raise money, work on building your product. “I think now, you truly have to show up with a prototype and even better a working site,” he told me. “You can no longer say, ‘give me a few million bucks and trust me I’ll build it.’ Now you have to show up with something that’s done.” After doing that, you might find that you don’t even need investors’ money.
Reality Check #7: Be honest
How’s this for openness? I asked Guy about his crowning achievement as a venture capital investor. “I don’t have a crowning touch,” he told me. “I believe I am still not proven as a VC. … I haven’t picked a Google, Yahoo, Apple or Cisco. I want to, but I haven’t.”
Have you heard another VC admit that? I haven’t. But it’s the kind of openness that helped Guy’s readers trust his honesty.
Now it’s your turn to hit us with a reality check. What do you think startups need to know about building companies in this environment?
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