A couple of blog posts crossed my desk today which in turn have inspired me to write my own. The subject is startups and getting things done.
The first post which I urge all startups/entrepreneurs to read is elegantly entitled "Fucking Sue Me". I've reproduced a bit of it below but the essence of the story is how a young entrepreneur lost a contract worth $340k because he spent too long sweating the small stuff, in this case legal paperwork. When there's the chance he may lose another deal he asks his Dad (a lifelong entrepreneur) for advice on what to do when it comes to the legals, his response was:
“Just sign it,” he said, calmly.
“But it has all kinds of crazy stuff in it!” I replied. “It says I’m personally liable if anything goes wrong! It says I owe them money if it’s late!” and so on.
“Just sign it,” he said.
“But what if something happens?? What if the site crashes? What if I’m late? What if..??”
“Do you think any of that stuff is going to happen?” he asked.
“Probably not. But what if it does?”
“Then you know what you do?” he said. “Tell them, ‘fucking sue me.’”
He was right. I got the job, they paid, things went well, nobody got sued.
I then got sent this post from New York Magazine that rambles on a bit but it has some fascinating insight into how some tech entrepreneurs go about lanching a product. Read this:Feross Aboukhadijeh likes to tell the story of how he got famous. It happened last fall, as he was beginning his junior year at Stanford. Google had just unveiled a feature called Google Instant, which shows search results in real time, as you type. “I thought it was kind of gimmicky,” says Feross. But it gave him an idea: If Google could pop out instant search results, why couldn’t YouTube produce instant videos? He bet a friend he could slap something together in an hour. “I lost the bet,” he says. “It took me three hours.”
Three hours. I know startups that have taken over a year to launch. I also know startups that are still debating whether to launch or not. When I was a mentor for the Difference Engine last year I was struck that some of the startups didn't have a product. They had an idea, and that's fine because the whole purpose of an incubator is to nurture ideas into startups. But what amazed me was that some startups had flipcharts, whiteboards, note books full & whole walls of a room quite literally full of post-it notes...but still no product. "We're still researching" was the answer I was met with when asked why they hadn't built anything yet. Now while there's value in research it should be there to help you not hinder you. These guys were drowning in data, opinions, analysis and quite frankly crap. What they should have done is just gone with their gut and built something.When I first had the idea for ShareMyPlaylists.com I had no research, my walls weren't covered with post-it notes and I didn't own a flipchart (still don't). All I had was a gut instinct so I wrote a one page spec sheet of what I wanted the site to do and look like, sent it to a developer I know and agreed a price. £500. A couple of weeks later the site was built and SMP was born. Sure it was far from perfect, was built using WordPress and hosted on a less than reliable server but it was out there. It was live, it wasn't confined to a sheet of sticky paper or written on a whiteboard. Over the weeks and months I refined it, added features, built upon the user experience and look where we are today; well funded, over 2.5 million page impressions a month and generating 10,000 playlist plays a day.
Another great example of this is from my good friend Paul Smith's startup, appysnap. Paul launched appysnap with (and I hope he won't mind me saying this) hardly any features. It was quite basic, but it did the job and since then he's added a ton of more cool stuff to it and there is a lot more to come. If Paul and his development partner Jon had waited until he had the app perfected then it wouldn't be launched today and he wouldn't have tens of thousands of photos shared and be a part of the white hot scavenger hunt space. But he is and appysnap is going to be huge. Trust me on this.
The moral of the story is don't spend too much time researching, conducting customer surveys, analysing data and anything else you can get your hands on, writing business plans, doing forecasts & anything else that stops you from just getting something out there. Instead go with your gut, launch it and launch it quick before somebody else does. It doesn't matter if it isn't perfect at least you will have a product. Which is more than I can say for all of those startups that are still sticking post-it notes to a wall. And that's what I'll be telling Ignite 100 candidates too :)
With thanks to @Shak and @DrRichEx for the blog posts.
What I'm listening to right now: Piano House
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I am the founder of ShareMyPlaylists.com, ContentNow.co.uk and some other stuff. I have no idea why I'm blue on this photo though but I like it!
Totally agree with you Kieron, I’m a firm believer in going for it when you have the idea. Heck, look at Facebook.
One of the things I loved about “Agile” project management techniques was the idea of breaking any task into the minimal marketable feature. This was the smallest chunk that would actually add anything to the business.
There is no point in doing less as if you don’t deliver something at the end you may as well not have bothered.
No point in doing more as if you have a feature to deploy – why wait?
At the site I used to work at our dev teams would get prototype ideas up and running within hours of an idea being hatched. That’s how it can work!
Totally agree Kieron, I can think of way too many startups that use agile as an excuse to basically procrastinate using words like ‘leapfroggin differential’ or ‘gamification monetization’ till they have a ‘viable’ product,that nobody has seen or used outside the dev circle.
some call it agile, I call it fucking around. Just build it and ship it already!
Great post Kieron! The point that you were making doesn’t just apply to start-ups but to everything – just do it!
It’s interesting to see that the start-ups that do ‘just do it’ are often the ones that make the best progress, as they get people interested early on with the potential of their product, and then keep them coming back for more with the new features. It’s often the early adopters that shape the future of the product too with their feature requests, and finding new ways to use it.
I’m intrigued to hear that your inital spec for SMP only cost you 500 to get developed though – that’s fantastic! Perhaps you could write a post on how to write decent software / web specs with examples?
Rich
Sometimes I feel like I ‘need’ to read articles like your’s. I’m one of those people that has to think, rethink, and re-re-think things, and then ask other people over and over what they think before I even do something so simple as to update one of my web pages. So, your story is inspirational! But, you didn’t say if you were *always* this fast — I mean, could you always go from the “idea phase” to “production phase” so quickly? Or, were you like me, but over time you improved?
I totally agree with you. Thanks for this great post Kieron. This definitely applies to everything,not only start-ups!
I know what you mean, back in the day I worked for a recruitment agency who wanted to start a specialist job board, by the time we got through countless useless meetings and plannins several other job boards in the same sector had started up making it much more dificut to become the market leader, some people just love the sound of their own voice to much
you’ve certainly raised an important point, most of the people don’t even have the courage to start a thing because of the fear of the unknown.
Excellent post that hits the nail on the head. Why spend so much time sweating the small stuff when you have got a product or service to launch!
I totally agree with you. Thanks for this great post Kieron. This definitely applies to everything,not only start-ups!
I definitely agree that a lot of entrepreneurial ventures never even get off the ground due to neverending procrastination. Everything carries with it some risk and if you want to be successful, you have to be willing to decide on taking a chance on something when time comes for it. It is no surprise that most of the successful people in our times are impulsive by nature.
-Jean
Yep, totally agree and we’re all guilty of it. It’s way too easy to spend ages over analysing things and getting all the details right before launching a site – many of which aren’t actually important yet still take up most of the development time! Far better to just get the product out, then work on improving it once you’ve seen how it performs.
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