I’d really welcome your help to validate some problems I see in various spaces and that I think I might have an idea to help solve. Whatever seems to have some promise will go into the next stage of me (with your help) trying to build something viable.
To be honest the ideas came first and I had to retrace my steps to get to the original problem – it’s a habit I’m trying to break – because I might be better lingering on the problem first without really forming a solution just yet!
Why Am I Sharing These?
Because I need help and more importantly, I don’t want to waste my life solving problems no one cares about.
Because I am not afraid of sharing any of this, on the contrary I welcome you to take from them as much as you want, be inspired and inspire others still.
Because I invite collaboration – if you feel drawn to any particular problem and would like to be part of solving it, then let’s do it together.What a better story to tell the grandchildren (Mike and built this amazing thing vs I stole this idea from Mike and shafted him royally!)
Browse the problems in the ‘I want to fix…’ column and add comments. Tell me how might I better understand this problem, what am I missing. I would appreciate more of the problem and less of the solution 😉
Vote for the problems you love using the ‘Vote’ button. The ones with the most votes will likely get built.
Subscribe to the problems you want to keep updated on, just click on the ‘Subscribe’ button.
Share this – if you know anyone who would can add value to our understanding of the problems – invite them to join – the more the merrier.
This is just the beginning – start your own Trello board of problems or let me know what ones you would like to add and we can make that happen too. Let’s fix as many as are worthy!
Kevin Dewalt – a really awesome startup investor and mentor and all round nice guy emailed me today about some of the lessons he has learned from offering his free advice service to over 150 founders.
Having spoken with, and shared stories of success and failure with so many founders, Kevin surmised that passion about the space that your startup is operating in is the fundamental key to having a successful startup. Basically if you don’t care about the people in that space and care deeply about helping them solve their problems, you’re going to have a really tough time making it work.
I absolutely agree with Kevin. I believe that passion is the fuel that sparks your curiosity and keeps you interested. It is the energy you call on when you are at your wits end. It is what makes you ask the questions others don’t. It is perhaps also what makes your failures hurt more deeply and hopefully what re-invigorates your recovery and success.
So now I use a passion test to filter the many ideas that I am lucky to have. If I genuinely don’t feel passion for the people the idea is designed to help, I ditch the idea – instantly. Sure, some ideas tease me a little longer and I dig deeper to see if something ignites that passion. But they still get tested.
What I am now seeing is that I actually have lots of excitement rather than a deep passion about many ideas and problems – a lot less passion than I thought I had. That’s the trouble with excitement – it passes very well for passion in the first few days of an idea. It’s kind of lust vs love!This is great insight because it also leads me to explore more deeply what I am truly passionate about. What are you passionate about? Whose problems do you want to help solve?
BTW – if you are new to startups and need some really insightful and relevant knowledge, I can highly recommend Kevin’s blog and his free advice sessions. Tell him I said ‘Hi’.
The world seems all skewed to the ’employer’ – clearly because they are doing all ’employees’ a favour by hiring them 😉
But seriously though, I think it is high time that people looking for work should be able to easily search organisations seeking people to work with using recommendations, endorsements etc. to determine if they would really want to work with them. If social media is going to make a difference, it surely should start in the world of work.
I would like to disrupt how people find work because I deeply believe this skewed world is keeping the world of work soulless and joyless. And that sucks, let’s change it.
As I start to explore this, I’d like some help to understand how people feel about the organisations they work with and whether they might even want to work with organisations that their friends work with.
Over the last few months that I’ve been building my startup (ServiceChat – a platform to help businesses have better conversations with their customers on Twitter) – this topic has been my constant companion. I am continuously discovering what it means to me to be a founder. There is no job description, no employee manual to tell you what to do or not do and actually no other experience to compare it to.
When I think back to all the jobs I’ve had – postman, video-tab-remover-guy, programmer, consulting coach, ‘startup founder’ is, by far, the hardest, most unrelenting, supremely challenging work I have ever done. It is also, without a shadow of a doubt, the most satisfying endeavor I have ever undertaken.
I have distilled my current feelings about being a startup founder and this is what I think it means so far, for me at least:
Incredibly hard work, emotionally exhausting
When I took my indefinite sabbatical from my really lucrative and pretty fulfilling job of being a consultant agile coach, I knew enough of the startup world to know it was pretty hard work. I knew also it is unglamorous work that demands you do what you know and often what you don’t, to make progress. Often for very little or no pay!
I easily put in sixty hours or more a week, work weekends and unsociable hours (the sky at 3am is beautiful!). All this whilst trying to be a half decent husband to a lovely wife and an attentive dad to four lovely people. Every spare minute I have is devoted to ServiceChat – building it, finding customers, crafting experiments to find customers, talking to customers, learning how to talk to customers, designing, developing , redesigning, strategizing, financializing (hey, that’s my word!). You name it, I do it because I’m a founder and it is what needs to be done.
And when I’m not working on my startup – I’m thinking about working on my startup!
Every success, every failure, every hope dashed, every dream realised is felt 100% by the founder. Praise does come, so does criticism – mostly from myself!
In any given day I go through the entire spectrum of emotions – fear, delight, sadness, anger and love. And that is just before lunch!
By the end of the day, I am not only physically tired, I’m also emotionally drained.
Requires focus, demands discipline
By nature, I’m easily distracted. This startup experience has shown me that starting is easy for me, I approach all new ideas with deep passion, huge excitement but I mostly suck at execution.
This is itself is great learning, because I now know what I need to improve on or buy in. Given that I’m building ServiceChat on a small budget, buying in an ace executioner is not really an option right now and besides, I need to get better at focusing and the discipline to focus.
Over the next few posts, I will share how I try and sustain my focus and train my discipline. Finding a focus is important because you bring all that you are to the challenge. You are present, some call it bringing your ‘A’ game, whatever you call it, you need it to be effective. What has helped me hugely is creating a routine that I can stick to and form a habit around. The discipline to stick to it becomes easier as it becomes habitual.
Without focus, time will pass and nothing would have been done. I would be no closer to my vision, remaining ignorant of the learning I need to more forward.
And time is money – whether you are spending it or not! ServiceChat is self funded, I moved to Spain (from England via Ireland) to extend my runway for a few more months, so every moment I am distracted, is cold hard cash that is burning away, inches of runway being lost to Father Time. But that is another story.
Deeply satisfying, hugely liberating
Being a founder is so deeply satisfying, I cannot find the words to articulate it as deeply as I feel it. Sure there are risks – it might not be viable, customers might not emerge from all the experiments. Finding those risks, facing up to them reaffirms my courage and encourages me to square up to the next scary thing. What a brilliant feeling!
Sure, there are dark undiscovered jungles in my map, big question marks about ‘what next? , ‘what if?’ and ‘how bad is it?’ . But discovering them, finding ways to answer the questions, learning what problems my startup could help solve and solving them are all satisfying things, at least for the curious mind.
Whether my startup succeeds as a sustainable business or not, I have learnt what professional liberation truly means. The freedom to learn and to explore. The freedom to take risks safely and to adjust the direction I take based on what I discover, the freedom to fail without the harsh judgements and condemnation of most traditional jobs.
As a founder, it will be damn near impossible for me to work ‘for’ someone else and be subject to their rules of how I work, when I work, what I do and how I do it. A wild bird is hard to cage, but an imprisoned bird that has experienced the freedom to soar unrestrained is almost impossible to re-imprison.
Feeling part of something
What I continue to love about being in the startup community is that there is one – and it is rich in learning and support. As a developer for nearly twenty years, I am used to the open source community, where ideas are freely shared and welcomed and I feel the same with the startup communities I have participated in.
I especially love the LeanStartup movement. Eric Ries (and to a large extent others like Steve Blank and Alex Osterwalder) has provided a manual that we can learn from and a common language that immediately connects us. Around it has grown a beautiful ecosystem to be part of, full of meetups, mashups, startup weekends, hackathons and so many community activities to help the starry eyed dreamers. They do help and support, but ultimately, as a founder, you have to go back and build your vision. As a startup founder, I feel part of something revolutionary, almost like we are redefining the future of work as something driven by passion and is deeply humanised.
What does being a startup founder mean to other founders?
I was really interested to hear what other founders thought, so I asked around and here a few responses from my twitter shout out:
Hass Chapman (@hasschapman) from @TORCH_sh – “A very steep learning curve. Daily tests of commitment. Sacrifice. But also; Achievement. Pride. Enthusiasm.”
Marc Cooper (@auxbuss) from fndout.com – “freedom, destiny, change I want to see, daily confronting daemons, sacrifice, awesome. Not for everyone.”
Enovia Bedford (@accessoryremix) from mixieManagement.com – “Being start-up founder allows me to improve systems of the past and produce similiar products in a sustainable way.”
What does being a startup founder mean to you?
It does not matter whether you are contemplating starting a startup or just starting up or whether you are a tried and tested founder, we each bring a unique perspective to this gig and I would love to hear and share what you think?
Do you find it exhausting?
What are the sacrifices you are making to be a startup founder?
What are you learning?
Are you enjoying it?
Comment here, on the FounderSync forums or holler at me on @mhsutton. I also share my daily startup experiences on my personal blog at http://mhsutton.me
I meet many people who struggle with ideas for a startup – at least for one they would be ready to take a risk to explore.
Thankfully this is not a problem I have. There is no shortage of ideas nor of the capability to generate ideas. Neither do I have a huge aversion to risk – I try to fail cheaply and try to learn as fast as I can.
My biggest problem is finding customers. Not customers to buy a finished product that I have spent thousands of pounds and countless hours building – I don’t often get that far. What I struggle to find are early adopters to test the ideas on for real – meaning that they actually have the problem I am trying to solve and would be willing to pay for the solution.
Early customers may not stick with your product all the way through, but the early feedback they can give is invaluable – at least this is what I hope. Without early customers helping to validate my assumptions, my real risk aversion kicks in and I will stop working on the idea. The lack of feedback may, itself, be valuable feedback!
There may be lots of reasons why early customers are hard to find, but some reasons are more reasonable indicators of the viability of the idea than others. My main reason is fear of what I perceive selling to be, crossed with impatience.
My Definition of Selling (and marketing)
My operating definition of ‘selling’ is this:
Selling is the art of persuading someone to exchange something they have – that you want – for something you have.
Interestingly, my definition of ‘marketing’ is:
Marketing is the art of persuading someone to want what you have to sell.
In my mind, selling and marketing share the same process – persuasion- and differ only by goal.
To me customer development is a form of selling. One where I’m trying to persuade someone with valuable insight into how their business works and real world needs to exchange their insight, time and money with me for the chance to have those needs met through my development of a product/service. Once I ‘sell’ them on the idea – then I can do surveys, usability testing, A/B testing blah, blah, blah. But if they don’t ‘buy’ – I got nothing!
My Name is Mike and I’m Afraid of Selling
I love people, I love talking with people and listening. I love hearing about the problems they have and I have learnt to not jump in with solutions. However, when I think that what I need to do is ‘sell’, my brain goes into lockdown. I find every possible reason not to ‘sell’. I procrastinate, dive into distractions and otherwise avoid this activity.
My perception is that selling is a black art that I am unqualified to do and this ‘inferiority’ complex haunts me. This means I constantly second guess myself in a way I don’t do when I code or when I coach. It also means I over-analyse what possible response to my approaches will be (and overwhelmingly I conclude they will be negative, hostile or both). Inevitably I never do anything.
To make matters worse, the people I want to contact are busy people. They aren’t sitting around waiting for my call. So, often their responses are delayed and this plays into my fears.
Frankly I’m stuck at this point. I think I understand where my current problem lies. Once I can get to speak with a potential early customer, I’m fine. All my skills kick in and mostly I can persuade them to try what I am offering – if they have a glimmer of the problem I am trying to solve.
My problem – when I zoom into it, is in generating leads. Getting folk interested enough to get to speak with them. This is where the art is the blackest for me. This is where I need help.
Do I have to be good at the approach?
My gut answer is that early customers are key to building businesses – at least using a lean startup/customer development approach. So generating leads would seem a fundamental skill that every founder should have. So now, I am operating on the basis that I have to go from ‘crap’ to ‘good enough’.
When I have wanted to improve at things in the past, I have often hired someone with the skills I wanted to improve and I then paired with them doing some real work. It was slow for me and them, but the learning was incredible. It cut out a lot of the noise and the outcome was awesome.
That is what I intend to do this time. This worked for understanding SEO and learning Ruby on Rails. So I am exploring hiring someone to help with customer development who I can pair with. More on this soon – in the meantime if you know someone I should be talking to , ping me!
Do you have a fear of selling? I’d love to hear your experiences – maybe something you have learnt can help me, maybe vice versa. Either way – let’s not suffer in alone.
I’m a solo founder. I’m working on the startups to the right —>
I work from home in Pinos del Valle in Andalusia, Spain. There are 2 bars and almost no other tech entrepreneurs and most of my time is spent online – coding, research, emailing, reading, twitter or customer development – pretty much all online.
Isolation Sucks!
I love many things about being a solo founder – having my ideas and running with them and the freedom that comes with only having my own feelings to contend with.
I hate the isolation I sometimes feel, not having people in the same situation as me to have conversations with, share ideas and otherwise be sociable.
Let’s Lounge!
Are you a solo founder or solo worker, freelancer, sole proprietor or generally work without the comfort of a team?
Do you feel the same sense of isolation? Let’s do something about it. Here is a little experiment to see if it makes things better.
I’ll set up a team room on Sqwiggle for 10 days – a lounge of sorts. In the lounge:
Video is always on – you’ll see everyone else.
You can set your mode to ‘Busy’ – you’ll still be seen but no one will disturb you.
We can talk to each other, chat and share stuff. We can talk about anything – tech/sport/politics/religion around as though we were around the coffee machine/water cooler/pub!
Generally get on with whatever we are doing.
Interested?
Fill out the form below and I’ll check you out. If you meet my very simple criteria, I’ll send you a free invite to the ‘lounge’. I’ll only be sending out 10 invites a day, so please let me know if you have any preferences on days. I will not share your email or other details with anyone else. Ever.
My simple criteria:
You should be an independent solo professional (startups, freelancer or some kind of sole proprietor). You’ll need to have a link to your startup, website or LinkedIn page that I can go check out.
Please tell me something about yourself – so we can have stuff to talk about. I’m not knowingly going to choose people who don’t want to be sociable!
I ceased work on ServiceChat – the startup that I have been working on for six months. It might not seem that long to you, but to me it is a very long time of illusions and self discovery.
My learning from why ServiceChat didn’t go where I had ambitions for it to go will continue to emerge over time, but one thing that pops straight out is that I didn’t know my own my mind. Let me explain?
Too many sources of information
We are in an age of startup frenzy. All the cool kids are in startups and it is an exciting time that is all the more exaggerated by the media feeding on the spectacular valuations and fortunes. Politicians rest the recovery from recession on startups and entrepreneurs, kids are encouraged to code from a young age and be the next Zuckerberg and dreamy eyed youth are cluing on to the fact that the barriers to realise their ambitions are lower than at any other time in the history of business – well at least for tech startups anyway.
There is such a rich ecosystem for startups – blogs, books, incubators , accelerators, coaches, advisers, mentors and so much more – maybe too rich. The reality is that almost everyone in this ecosystem is a startup themselves. They are selling something – their idea, their learning and some times their services. So you are their customer – of sorts – and their messages can be interpreted to make you think their way is better or your goals are the wrong ones. With so many opinions competing for your attention, it is easy to get distracted.
I got sucked in. I bought and read the books, I read the blogs and heard expert after expert tell you how to do it – or how not to do it. Everyone means well – absolutely – and there is a wealth of anecdotal sense in what they say. But in a blog or a book, you read what was written whereas the learning you might need is in what was unwritten. In any case, as much as you recognise the symptoms they talk about, they are not talking about your particular condition in its entirety. I still needed to know my own mind.
But there is no recipe for growing a successful startup. There are general ingredients – test your idea, continuously validate and others. The exciting bit is that you get to decide what you are cooking and what the recipe should be.
Fail on your own terms
My trouble was I was seeking my mind in the words of others. That took a huge amount of focus away from what I was supposed to be doing – finding customers and trying to find market/product fit. It was also emotionally wrecking, constantly second guessing myself when yet another blog implied to do the opposite of that the previous book advocated. Was I following the *exact* process or was I doing what the book said? Occasionally my rational mind would chime in and say:
‘Screw them, they don’t have to find next month’s rent, you do – you have to do what you have to do to build this thing!’.
But I would mute it. Failure is hard to accept. But it can be easier to deal with if you understand why you failed and you learn from it. Failing on your own terms is perhaps the best you can have. In my case, one of the reasons I failed was not knowing my own mind.
My Learning
I’m not blaming anyone or anything – I don’t believe in blame.
I do believe in behaviors being more or less effective towards a goal. My learning here is that focusing on a process or a body of other people’s experiences to build my own startup was not an effective way for me to achieve my goal of a successful and viable startup business. The next time – and there will be a next time – I won’t do the same thing.
I will have my plan and I’ll be comfortable with my plan. I’ll formulate it from my own experiences and instincts. I may run it past advisers or check for obviously stupid aspects of it with books or blogs or other sources of information. I may otherwise revise it but ultimately I will do it because it makes sense in my mind.
I encourage you to completely disregard this post. It was my learning and my experience and it absolutely may not apply to you. Know your mind.
Whilst researching a post about Morrisons and its customer service on Twitter, I discovered that even though I could see all the customers that had an experience on a given day, they couldn’t see each other and at least one person commented on her impressions being totally different when she discovered the ‘big picture’. This left me intrigued.
Then I was reading about Elon Musk and his suggestion about first principles as great place to start looking for innovative ideas. I prefer this idea to thinking in analogies – which are great for many things, but perhaps less for disruptive innovation.
That is when a weird thought came to me – a first principle of human interaction is that we seek connection. What if we could be connected by shared experiences as customers – what might happen?
Honestly I don’t know and I would like to find out. Better still I would like to see if what I find can form the basis of a viable startup business. Regardless – it would still be interesting to explore what a direct interactive connection between consumers around a shared experience would mean for customer services, how commerce is conducted and maybe even how we think of each other as human beings.
What’s with the timer?
So my last experiment took me almost 6 months to fail – that is way too long – I need it to be 6 weeks or less. I got distracted and I lost my sense of urgency. This timer, along with my plan and a new found discipline are to help me not make the same mistakes again. If this experiment is still running when this clock runs out – it may have been validated as unviable before – I will stop it unless I have a paying customer for something. It sounds aggressive and it is. Game on!
I am mothballing my ServiceChat startup experiment.
After six months, I have to admit to myself that ServiceChat has no legs. People who I thought should be interested are not and actually trying to find people interested is proven too difficult for my abilities. The lack of interest is itself great feedback – if you struggle to find 10 customers how impossible will it be to find 100? So as it stands, I don’t have a marketable product, nor even one I can get customers to use. So I’m done with it.
My enduring philosophy in life is failing fast – not only because it costs less financially but also because it costs less emotionally. I want to fail fast because it means I can get to the next thing sooner – and with the learning I make from each ‘failed’ idea – I increase the probability of future success.
Here is my check in:
Sad that ServiceChat is not going any where and that I am mothballing it. Nothing ever truly dies. But for now – learn, adapt, repeat.
Sad that I have unanswered questions – for example why could I not get people interested, what was truly incorrect about my choice of customer segments.
Glad that I now know a lot more where my strengths are and I can better make decisions about how to address those areas I suck at.
Glad that I am much clearer about what my passion is. Without this, I will fail on any startup before I even begin. I really didn’t know this before. Now I know that all the ideas I care the most about are about harnessing diversity and connecting people so they can be better informed, make better decisions and generally be happier and more joyful.
Glad that I learned that I need to experiment more about what idea I want to build a startup business around. For this I need to take a fundamentally different approach (more lab like and less startup like).
I’m grateful for all the help, concern and love I’ve had this last 6 months.
I’m out of ServiceChat. I’m in with life.
Improve On
Do more research about competitors, partners and the problem.
Get MVPs out faster. Find more creative ways to test the idea out – without necessarily coding a damn thing!
Understand the marketing channels from day 1 – it is by far the most important thing and the riskiest one for me. I assumed that good ideas would naturally float and become viral – they don’t.
Fail faster than 6 months. Ideally 6 weeks.
What Next?
ServiceChat was based on monetising ChittyChat for business. ChittyChat as a free tool was mildly successful with absolutely no marketing. I will work to reinstate it with the enhancements I made whilst focusing on ServiceChat.
I see a need for a more usable answer to public group chats on Twitter using hashtags. The current solutions are crap. The tech that drives much of ServiceChat can help me build something for me to use twitter hashtag chats better. I will experiment with this.
Bizbuzz is providing interesting insights into how people connect with business and the deep lack of consumers connecting with each other. This is an exciting space to explore – I will continue to mine this for insight and blog about what I discover.
When I set out to build my startup in January, we moved to Spain to immerse in the culture, learn the language and extend my startup runway by 4 month. I knew I would have to revisit how I would fund our continued stay in Spain and how I might continue to explore my startup. Quite fortuitously, one of my close consulting partners offered me a coaching engagement in my old haunt – Galway.
So here I am, in Galway Ireland , doing something I am very comfortable doing (and arguably pretty good at it too). I shall be here for 5 weeks working with people who are very good at what they do and trying to help them harness that goodness and focus it on greatness.
Here is my check in:
Sad that I’m not in Spain. I’m in Galway, on my own, far from my loves.
Glad that I will focus on startup tasks as my night job – once the initial chaos of training and fatigue wear out.
Sad that there do not appear to be any Spanish language meetups over the summer in Galway.
Glad that I have 50mb/sec internet in my accommodation.
Glad that I reached out to a few people about reviewing my blog post on Customer Service and Social Media – why it sucks. Thank you @joneversett and @joshkehn for taking the time to read the early draft and offer such rich and considered feedback which helped me improve the post.
I’m grateful for the abundance of learning all around and the capacity to learn from it.
I’m in.
Improve On…
Writing this blog in a timely fashion
Today
Write the next customer service related post
Buffer up some of of my twumps and Bizbuzz tweets /li>
