startup – my passion for startup and my experience in Poland vs USA

I was recently discussing several issues concerning workforce productivity. As I am a  big fun of startup culture, I try to read as crazy because my personal badge is to build one. During discussion with professors from Poznan University of Economics we looked at the several papers concerning workforce productivity. Actually, it doesn’t look good now:

Poland workforce productivity is 39,2% productivity of US when UK workforce productivity is 87,7% of US. Germany is 92,4%.

Recent research show that innovation activity in Poland is mainly aimed at imitation and adaptation of technologies developed in other countries. Share of high-tech exports in total exports ranks Poland at the bottom of the EU-27 countries and is almost unchanged since 2000 (with the level of around 3%), which places Poland far behind other new EU members: Czech Republic – with 14%, and Hungary with 20% (Eurostat, 2009). Poland also noted the decrease in corporate investment in R&D and is ranked almost at the end of the Global Innovation Scoreboard ranking (2009) with regard to innovation performance.

See a picture.

I think startups will change it. We need more entrepreneurs, more VC funds to be able to create new companies. Startup founders are needed as much as gold in Rio Bravo. We need more competition, more ideas, more money, more progress, more and quicker than ever.

We do not need better managers – we need leaders – people with charisma and vision which will be able to increase innovative way of thinking and individual motivation and thus boost workforce productivity.

On the other hand there is still a lot of opportunities to rock and roll here.  We are having more and more VCs, Business Angels, etc., so I am sure  next few years are going to be huge change.

We are currently building sem, e-marketing and seo strategy for our future mobile app. It is going to be a challenge as we are trying to put all the bricks together to mash-up seo, sem, e-marketing and e-PR together. Afterwards we have to find people who will be involved in turning that dream into reality. It is going to be a challenge but we are so happy to have that challenge under our roof.

Working on this issue I am forced to read a lot of things (posts, books, booklets) and I realized that there is only once specific goal we need to aim at: clickstream and conversion. Clickstream is just traffic, conversion is just download. I believe, nothing else is needed for startup. All the other metrics will be the result of clickstream and conversion.

If you are working on startup and your main goal is to get new people for your new app (web or mobile) I think it is reasonable to focus on clickstream and conversion only. Only these two metrics.

I was giving presentation in Poznan, Poland concerning “when to do / not to do startup”

I wanted to share it with you. You will find it here (pdf, 450KB).

Have a great weekend.

Because of my new project I just started, I wanted to involve myself in recruitment process. I think project leader has to be close to selection process.

We started recruitment, we received more than 30 applications so we opened meetings process. Afterwards we found 3 people who need to be very good at specific field. My personal recruitment experience started 2 years ago. I have had more than 150 interviews since 2008 and here are some thoughts I would like to share:

- involve everybody in recruitment process – ask your developers, database people, marketing people to spend 15 minutes with the person you are currently recruiting. Afterwards take feedback, get to know people opinion.

- character first, knowledge second – I personally believe that knowledge is easy to examine. You can send 5 maths problems, 3 coding problems to the person you are recruiting. More important, in my opinion, is to observe this person while working with these problems. How this person react when difficulties are on the horizon, is she emotional, rational or more like Robocop (no emotions). It is more important to hire somebody who is open for innovation, who needs (not like but has real need) learning new things (self-development issue) who wants to work on your project because is interesting one (for her personally).

- trust your nose – after this kind of recruitment process which I described above you have nothing more than feeling that this specific person is good for your work. Trust your nose then and hire.

- try before you buy – set up trial period, give specific goals and provide clear and objective feedback (based on metrics). Leaders are obliged to provide objective feedback as it is a sign of respect.

Why most startups fail, except for bad management and lack of luck

Reason 1. Complicated product

Fred Willson published a lot of interesting posts concerning apps simplicity. My personal experience as CEO and VC advisor made me think about it too. People are trying to build “all inclusive” application. It is wrong way. Why? Because it takes so much time for users to understand what you offer.

Reason 2. Complicated product = Complicated Goal

Steve Case, CEO of AOL said  we won with competition because our “focus was mainstream: How do you get everybody online?”. Simple product helps you decide as a CEO what is your goal. Simple. Product gives you clear goal instruction. Complicated product wrrr. a lot of hesitation – bounce rate or pageviews, what is active user? where is landing page? how many landing pages? … and you finish with complicated dashboards.

Reason 3. Complicated product = complicated cocktail talk

Imagine yourself at the cocktail party. Somebody asks you: what do you do? I am CEO of startup (yeah – sounds so coool). So what is your startup about…… and you have 20 seconds. Imagine your self standing at the conference describing people tones of features you offer. Keep your product simple. Less features better cocktail talk, faster investment.

Reason 4. Complicated product = complicated campaign

Let’s say you have mobile app which helps people to find free wifi spots. In this case, it is easy to make movie about your app, write blog about your app, get users to promote your app FB page. Each feature is like new product inside supermarket. Each product needs campaign because people are not going to find that free wifi app has also nice coffee places tab. You need to tell people that they can find nice coffee places and free wifi places. So please make sure you are not riding “Complicated product = complicated campaign” horse.

4. When complicated product = not complicated campaign

When you market each feature. If you have mobile payments product which helps people to buy parking tickets, bus tickets, pre-paid cards, credits in Zynga games, blogs content, laptops in e-store etc. you have to explain all these features separately. So produce 100 movies with use cases. Show funny guy paying for computer with your app. Show nice dressed lady paying for bus ticket with your mobile app. Explain people each feature separately. Then everybody will understand. Then, as CEO, you can easily prepare metrics and monitor what is going on.

Take care and keep this thing rolling by adding comments

Arek