By Jamie Snider
Sept. 16, 2010
As the recent co-founder of an Internet startup, I’ve learned as much in the past year as I have in the rest of my life combined.
In October 2009 I had the entrepreneurial bug and the idea to get started, but I had no experience in either software engineering or Internet product design. Several years of investment banking had taught me how organizations work, how markets are scalable and efficient, and how companies optimize their sales strategy to maximize profits. But nothing can truly prepare you for the intricacies of building a consumer Internet and social media business. It is the most sophisticated and competitive industry in the world and it attracts some of the best and brightest talent to take part. To boot, your competitors are constantly in a race to innovate, and half of them will be in stealth mode until it’s too late to know what they’re doing. You simply cannot build your business quickly enough. Needless to say, it is a tremendous challenge and the key is to minimize the mistakes in things you can control.
Here’s how:
Hire Smart. To be an effective manager you must understand what you know and what you don’t know. For me, it was software engineering and product design. Immediately my partner and I set out to find smart, hardworking, ambitious and ethical people to surround ourselves with. You cannot pay too much for good talent and the key is to identify the qualities that matter most to you and your business. We needed a lead engineer who we could trust to build the product we had a vision for, as well as manage a team at the same time. And we needed someone who could help us find other quality people in his or her network. We took our time to find the right person, and when we did we recruited hard! The person we hired did that and more for our business.
Incentivize and Reward People. Startups cause you to work long hours, and they have high rates of burnout. Everyone knows that. But to avoid burnout, you must reward and incentivize your employees. Treat them well, give them any perk you can – when you’re small they know you don’t have money to spend and will appreciate even the little things you can do. Celebrate their achievements, birthdays and other important events. Incentivize them with stock options or warrants that tie them to company performance. Ideally, your early employees, who will have the greatest impact on the product that your business develops, will be on board for the long haul and have a vested interest in the success of the business. They will show a deeper level of care and passion for the product than if it were just a normal job.
Learn to Sell. If you are a natural salesman, I envy you. If not, you have to learn how to do it like I have. You must be persistent and enthusiastic about your business and the product you sell, and you must learn to think on your feet when you get tough questions in a meeting. The best way to practice is to sell a lot. You will begin to become familiar with the tough questions that are generated for you and you will learn how to answer these questions and others like them. The more you sell your business, the more comfortable you become talking about it.
Stay Positive! The hardest thing to do as a founder of a business is not to take lost sales, hiring rejections, or investor turn downs - among other things - personally. It’s fine to show it, but it’s not fine to dwell on it. You have to stay positive and lead your team. There is a silver lining in every disappointment you find in business. For example, after our launch, which we felt was more successful than we could have hoped for, our sales had a short uptick and then flattened again. It was if we were still unknown, or so we thought. As we became discouraged we went back to the drawing board, dissected the good and bad things we were doing, and came out with a new tactic. It began to work slowly. If not for that meeting, we may have continued on our same course into a dead end.
My suggestions in this article are just some of the many solutions that exist to the tremendous challenges you face as an entrepreneur. However, no matter what roadblocks you stumble upon in whatever industry you are in, the experience of starting a business is unlike any other. You can’t learn as much as I did without trying.
Jamie Snider is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Yowie.com, a Santa Monica, Calif. -based live streaming video and social media platform. Yowie connects fans to the celebrities and entertainers they follow in a live video chat, and provides them the tools to socialize with other fans after the show. Snider can be contacted at Jamie@yowie.com.