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Trends from Entrepreneurs’ Starts on NPR

National Public Radio (NPR) has a great podcast called “How I Built This” anchored by Guy Raz. From the show:

How I Built This is a podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. Each episode is a narrative journey marked by triumphs, failures, serendipity and insight — told by the founders of some of the world’s best known companies and brands.

There are some really fascinating stories including Spanx’s Sarah Blakely, WeWork’s Miguel McKelvey, and Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia.
Here are some trends I heard from these stories:
  • They’re opportunistic. Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard started life out by becoming a metal worker to make climbing equipment when he couldn’t find what he wanted.
  • They start things with people they haven’t known for a while… or they go it alone.WeWork’s Miguel McKelvey shared how he met his cofounder through his roommate after he wanted to work in NYC. He moved there. He met Adam Neumann who was highly complementary in skill sets and the ability to hook people on vision and sell.
  • They fake the sh!t out of it. Spanx’s Sarah Blakely would pop up her display in department stores on her own without getting official consent. People thought she was legit and bought her product.
  • There’s the hustle we all think we’re doing, and there’s the hustle they do. It’s next level. Toms’ Blake Mycoskie rolled from idea to idea, startup to startup – from a laundry delivery service for his college peers to doing giant advertising displays on the side of buildings only after seeing them work in LA. Then, he spent weeks in S. America to help hand-craft over 2,000 pairs of shoes when orders started piling up when he first started.

Go listen to the podcast. It’ll be motivating and inspirational.

What podcasts do you listen to?
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Spinning Wheels on the Next Move, but Finding Traction with a Serial Entrepreneur

The last several months for me have been… interesting. Since Body Boss became a zombie, I’ve been poking and prodding and brainstorming and wandering what the Next Move is. I’ve helped out a startup with business development, but decided it wasn’t a good long-term fit. Though, I still have demos and conversations just to practice. It would appear at times that I’m spinning my wheels.
I’ve been putting myself in various positions whether that be working with startups, interviews of restaurateurs, and of course, good ole reconnects with friends and otherwise. A couple weeks ago, I was staring down from a new nadir… unable to sleep, I got up and wrote a Proclamation of sorts to my close friends and family about continued support and to push me and hold me accountable to what I’m trying to achieve. Needless to say, it was a dash of poignant revelations and a whole lot of “I think I can, I think I can”. It’s good to know I have some very good family and friends who push me and are supportive…
Aside from knowing who’s got my back, I was able to connect with a serial entrepreneur out in San Francisco who’s a friend of my older brother. I didn’t ask if I could use his name, so I’ll call him “Wayne”. Wayne has been an entrepreneur since his days in high school. He’s founded companies whilst at Georgia Tech, and had a great idea go bigger when he joined YCombinator (YC) a few years ago. If you don’t know Y Combinator, think of it as the Harvard Business School of technology accelerators with notable alums including Dropbox, Reddit, Airbnb, and so many more incredible companies. Since then, though, he’s founded another startup that is reaching crazy great levels of recruiting with specific roles, companies, and even select cities. It’s how he maintains some version of what Paul Graham describes as “wells” – target companies/ pains/ niches and go deep vs. going after a larger audience with limited depth of services or otherwise.
So, Mr. Wayne… I explained to him my position, and inquired about his experience and sought his advice. Here are some take-aways from our conversation:
  • If you want to be on the business side, know your numbers. I shared with Wayne an idea I’m currently incubating, and he had some great questions regarding the business model. In effect, he was testing the economic feasibility of the idea as well as my wit. Sadly, I didn’t quite respond as well as I wanted. His advice was to practice mental/ back-of-the-napkin math for ideas. That should at least help early on determine if there’s a viable business idea.
  • Early on, it’s about the product rather than the team. This was an interesting viewpoint. For… ever, I heard how VCs, entrepreneurs, etc. invest in the team behind the startup. Wayne’s point was that if the idea (i.e. product, service) is good, then the market will pull you up. From there, you’ll find money both from your customers and want-to-be investors. Also, the team will quickly learn and get the experience. Wayne cited this as a key learning from watching company after company go through YC.
  • Build a pain pill, not a vitamin. Okay, that phrase is actually pulled from David Cummings, but it’s apparent in what Wayne was prescribing (see what I did there?). From the preceding bullet, the underlying take-away is to find an idea that addresses pain points for markets. If you find a real pain killer, customers will come to you. Of course, marketing will help, too.
  • If you’re not a programmer, don’t bother. On Saturday, I bit the bullet and bought a MacBook to learn how to program in iOS for this new idea I’m incubating. Since then, I’ve churned through hours and hours of iOS programming tutorials (for Swift) through 4 courses. Wayne cited that if I wanted to stick to the business-side of things, get better at that. Many good programmers have been programming for a long time, and there are 18 year-olds who would smoke me. It’s always going to be catch-up. I should focus on what my experience has given me, and hone those skills.
  • Notion of “Liquidity” – 3 tenets: proximity of the sale, right product and right customer, and timing. At least for my current incubating idea, I must deal with these three sides of liquidity that will challenge my success vis-à-vis if I can EASILYaddress these three tenets to facilitate the marketplace.
  • It’ll take 2-3 years to reach any level of success. Obviously, that’s not applicable to every startup, but from his experience, that where he’s found the greatest success in his startups. He also cites that San Francisco could be a great place for entrepreneurs, but with the added cost-of-living considerations, there are significant downsides. At the end of the day, be good at where you are.

It’s great knowing a couple degrees of connections away is yet another successful serial entrepreneur. It’s incredibly inspiring. Though, I have to admit that it’s also incredibly daunting. You can tell Wayne’s got his $h!t together with how we speaks and his questions – no doubt through fine tutelage of YC and Paul Graham et al. I’ve taken a lot of his advice to heart, and I’ll be considering all of these take-aways and then some over my present and future (both short and long-term).
Though, I will say that I will still plug away at iOS. I don’t hope to become a CTO and CEO in a startup I found. Instead, I do want the ability to quickly build apps web or mobile and test out ideas. Wayne cited his earlier days in Berkley, CA where he was holed up in a house with two other co-founders, and they would build an idea a day. With that type of iterating, they were able to test ideas quickly. That’s where I want to be. I want to be able to test ideas quickly, and build something great like him.
Closing thoughts. Wayne suggested reading the following two Paul Graham essays:

What are your thoughts on my conversation with Wayne (or at least the take-aways)? How else would you recommend entrepreneurs building up for the Next Move?
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U in UX stands for You: The Evolution of Consumer Engagement

Delta’s approach at engaging fliers at LaGuardia airport. Source: http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/512b78736bb3f77f7b00000c/laguardias-delta-terminal-is-packed-with-ipads-as-far-as-the-eye-can-see.jpg
Ah, the world is changing so damned fast, and the plethora of technology and startups is sometimes overwhelming. So what gives? How does one really bring in consumers and cultivate the relationship in such a way that they don’t leave? My answer: user engagement/ experience.
If you’ve been reading my blog for every so often, chances are you’d have read me go on about how technology is, in many ways, fragmented. APIs, large platforms, access and ease to program, etc. has lowered the barriers to entry (acquire) and exit (churn). Refer to “Who’s poised to profit in this fragmented, online dating world of startups?” The key for success for today’s entrepreneurs and is almost becoming the minimum/ common denominator is beautiful design and an engaging, easy user experience.
In fact, I actually once wrote how design was a key lever in success in “Winning Combination = Speed + Design + ???”. In retrospect, I should have chosen my words more wisely and had substituted “Design” with “User Experience”. I read a great Fast Company article about this evolution from design to user experience – “Move Over Product Design, UX Is The Future”. The article has several interesting points about this shift and this “[g]lobal competition and technological diffusion” per FastCo.
Here are a few takeaways and nuggets from the article:
  • “today’s product innovations, and the growth they create, are often incremental, narrow, and fleeting”
  • “Global Innovation 1000, R&D spending rose 5.8% last year, yet revenue for those companies increased less than 1%. Global competition and technological diffusion mean that competitors quickly catch up with most improvements, while the transparency of digital and social media also prompts consumers to quickly switch allegiance with each new alluring offer”
  • Go beyond the product or service you’re building/ selling. Instead, focus on the experience and the interaction of the consumer. Uber “fundamentally changed how you order, meet, and pay for a car”
  • Focus on the consumer, but you’ll have to be the one who leads the experience. Henry Ford famously said, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Consumers tend to focus on the pain and fixing that pain by “lessening it”. They need you to think more creatively and think more broadly. Delta, for example, brought the lounge experience to the gates in LaGuardia and Minneapolis airports. This way, Delta may not be able to speed up traffic controlling at a whole airport, but they can make the whole experience a lot more appealing (*phew!* that was a long bullet)
  • Your company’s culture is viral and spreads outward. “Before an experience will come across as real to the outside world, dozens, hundreds or thousands of employees need to be educated and empowered to deliver the vision”

I change the word from “customer” to “consumer” in many of the above after sitting down recently with MaxMedia. MaxMedia is a consumer engagement company here in Atlanta. They believe that there’s a much, much larger scope of people who “consume” an experience, a brand, an idea who may not actually be “customers”. I tend to then think consumer is the aggregation of both prospects (target and non-target prospects), and customers. MaxMedia has recently announced a new approach (for marketing but for real) called You&Me. The focus is all about – you guessed it – consumer engagement with the brand.

Consumers = Prospects + Customers

Okay, so let me step back and close this baby out…
Technological innovation isn’t enough these days. It gets you out the door, but by and large, the market catches up, and you’re struggling to hold onto those precious consumers. UX is key to bringing in consumers as well as preventing them from leaving. UX can be the difference between why I switched from Pandora to Spotify. UX is the masterstroke that enabled Airbnb to grow so fast, and made renting someone’s home for a more local experience rather than focus on price. Uber stepped back and reimagined the whole experience of ordering a car, and now, it’s so easy and fun to call your “own personal” black car service. The tech behind it all is cool, sure, but to us as consumers, it’s all just fun and opens our world to much greater.
What are your thoughts on the criticality of user experience in business/ startups? How do you see the interplay between the underlying technologies and user experience in gaining new consumers and keeping existing?

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