Zaki Mahomed

Bite Sized Ideas for Founders with ADD
About Me

I run GameVentures.com (we make social games) and TimeSvr.com (we help busy people save time) from our evil HQ's in Singapore. Both are profitable and growing fast. I'm going to use this to put snippets of "wisdom" on running companies, managing time, doing things well and life in general, that I come across everyday.

Getting in touch

alizaki at gmail dot com
facebook.com/zaki.mahomed
skype: zakicell

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Archive
2010 (4)
 

You are not Steve Jobs

Or more aptly, you are not in the same position Steve Jobs is in. I’m going to rant and vent a little here about how it's become really very fashionable for web folk to casually display their disdain for their users. I've heard founders call their users 'idiots', 'morons', even dumb f*cks. This has to stop. Your users are not stupid.

 

Most likely, many of them use your stupid product much more than you do. Or in different ways than you do, at the very least. Unless being a moron is pre-requisite to choosing your product over the hundred possibly (probably) better options available, they have something interesting to say. And while I'm ranting, you're not Henry Ford either, you fool. Customers can have a car in any color they want today. Truly.

 

You are not Steve Jobs. Listen to your customers/users. Take the good and discard the bad ideas they have. Throw in stuff you think would make them do a dance, even if they didn't realize it at first. How do you know the good and bad is? You don't. There is no recipe. Think, or give yourself a long runway to be able to make mistakes.

 

While you have your Customer Development/Lean Startups gaining steam recently, the above had to be said. (I love lean companies that are constantly evolving, but there is definitely whole other rant in me for folk who desperately cling to a recipe for success in order to tackle their fear of failure - in short: learn to pivot on your beliefs too!)

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The Business Development Blackhole

One of the biggest cash and energy drains for a new company are your business development staff. Every time I meet someone who identifies herself as the "Business Development" person for a startup, I always come away less than impressed by them (by always, I mean 99% of the time, of course!). The bigger/hotter the company, the less I feel the BD team will achieve (a function of having more money and the accompanying itch to hire more people).

Honestly, I was the "business guy" in both the companies I founded, and found myself pretty helpless/redundant at the beginning (read: at the mercy for my technical co-founders while they built the product). I realized that my natural response to this guilt due to not having 'enough to do' was to try and find more to do. While this comes naturally to founders and early employees, it might not be the innate response for Employee No. 5. Your job is to make this the natural response for every BD person in your startup. It's that simple. If you do this well, your life will be greatly simplified. If you don't, you'll be micromanaging them all the way to a stress induced heart attack. Align every single person in your team to growing the company. They need to be asking themselves every time they find a free moment: what can I do now to grow the business (I keep using that intentionally: the only job at this stage for your BD guys to be doing is growing your business towards a metric you've set in stone. This can be getting to a certain user level, improving a metric or reaching a certain revenue goal (best).

Once you have them doing this, the next step is to break the other natural response you have as a founder: to control everything. There is really no point to having your growth team being able to think for themselves if they don't have the power to initiate change/close deals. Now, these changes need to be in line with your strategy and you still have to be involved in the big ticket items, but your employees must be able to get to a certain point in the conversation without you watching over their shoulders. Great companies do this intuitively while soon-to-be-failed startups struggle with the power dynamic all the way to oblivion. There are no two ways about it, you need to encourage your Biz Dev people to think like hackers. Which is why you should only hire naturally curious people for the job.

Again, all of this seems pretty elementary, but it's really easy to become focused on a few tasks and lose sight of the bigger picture. I would be very interested in hearing how other startups manage their BD resources and set achievable targets while at the same time accounting for external factors like slow response times, etc.

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Prioritizing

Here's something that works for me: I'm famously disorganized, so I tend to rely on tricks to make sure I keep getting things done (hey, I even started a company that helps others do the same!: TimeSvr). Here's are a few things that work for me.

 

  • Step 1: Nothing replaces a notebook. As in an actual real honest to god pen and paper notebook. Put down ideas, to do, notes, etc. in here. 
  • Step 2: Use an electronic To Do list to clear things. Once something goes from doodling/brainstorming, I input it with various arbitrary deadlines into my To Do list. I might set a deadline for the same day, the next day/week or even Month. But you always need to put a deadline or the system doesn't work. I use a fantastic piece of software called Things. I believe it's Mac only.
  • Step 3: Just look at Today's To Do and don't worry about every missing another appoint or item every again. If you don't finish something today, it shows up the next day as Overdue by X Days. Then it really bugs you!
  • Step 4:Step 4: Your only goal is to make sure you have 0 pending To - Do items by the end of the week. Don't leave work on Friday/Saturday until you've cleaned this list up. Assign new dates to pending items which couldn't be comepleted due screw ups. Or better yet - off load it to someone else who has more time to tend to it (in my case, TimeSvr). Just don't leave the list unattended or filled.

I've tried stick notes, PDA's, Blackberry apps, emailing myself, writing on my wall (seriously!) and this seems to work best. I think the important take-home here is: figure out a system that works for you and automate it. Your Steps can vary, but the result will be the same:

Figure out what needs to be done --> Put a deadline to it --> Get it done or give it to someone else

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The Best Hiring Tip

When you're growing, you're always looking to hire great people and identifying the wheat from the chaff is pretty much a subjective guess for most people (except the rockstars who come in by reference, of course). Here's what doesn't really work:

* How many golf balls can you fit into a school bus (who cares?)
* CV's (people lie) and reference checks (everyone knows 2 people they like)
* Where do you see yourself in... (again, who care? Question is: will you get there?)
* Greatest achievements (You're now trying to hire the best BS artist)

I'm not asking you to totally disregard all of these. But you need a solid dependable question you can casually throw in once the prospective employee has been asked the usual golf-ball-where-do-you-see-yourself questions and you're still confused. Or perhaps when you're scoping a prospect and they don't even know it yet (always be hunting for talent!) So now for the good part: what really works, almost always. Here's the best question to

* What have you done outside of work/school that you are the most proud off?

When you ask people about what they're willing to do for free, on their own time, their passions are on display. Really good programmers, designers, business people always have a blog they're really proud of, a project they did that never worked out or that iphone game they're working on right now. These are hackers, You hire them. People who haven't done much usually answer with lame excuses like charity work (most likely they spent one night feeding the homeless and are bragging about it since), 'consulting' for other people's projects, trips they took, etc. These are perfectly normal people who will not bring the passion your growing startup needs. This works about 90% of the time, but your mileage may vary.

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