Tag Archives: startup

The Feedback Loop

One of the things that I feel that makes certain people and organizations tick while others don’t is ‘The Feedback Loop‘. I believe most(all?) successful  people/companies have a good feedback loop which helps them gather external information, couple it with internal hunches/insights and improve their course of action/style of working.

“The Feedback Loop” is a great tool when you are learning something. It could be internal/self imposed practice->finding gaps->closing them or taking feedback/help from someone else/internet and improving your skill. This is purely an execution skill. Figure out how can you best assess your current level(the more sources the better), and then use your sense to improve yourself

For instance: If one were to learn a foreign language remotely. They can
Watch videos, join an online course, study tutorials, read a book or use an interactive app.
An evolved brain would be able to choose the best options from the above mentioned which in turn would help them by leveraging the benefits of feedback loop. Let’s say an app which let’s them not only learn the language but also practice it and rate their skill set and provide suggestions

The Feedback Loop

Similarly people/organizations which have evolved, have a tight feedback loop (Identify gaps/scope of improvement ->Have yourself/team figure out how to fix them->repeat) which serves as a continuous self improvement process. Like the perennial structured software testing which never stops and is actively followed up with not only bug fixes but also some learning in the system which ensures that such mistakes are not repeated again. To make the process water tight, there’s a metric/check in place which makes sure that learnings are executed and not lost

Most people are not good at taking direct feedback and thus end up seeking only the indirect feedback if at all. Which needless to say is less efficient. They are anti-feedback types, every time honest feedback about their abilities is pointed out, they start looking in opposite direction. If only they could set their egos aside and taken in as much as they can without bothering the form and source.I’d blindly side a guy who has figured out a way to improve themselves/their work on their own.
Implement –> Test/Seek Feedback –> Learn –> Fix –> Repeat

At a organizational level, there are various sources of feedback, namely employees, customers, partners, investors(if any). If you don’t have a process of continuously seeking their feedback, logging data in a structured format, analyzing it and using the insights to improve the ways things are done, you are missing out a lot.

Got any thoughts on ‘Feedback Loop’ for individuals and organizations?

The Conversion Funnel – Part One

The concept of conversion funnel is quite old and surprisingly still not as widely used/referred to.  Be it an e-commerce website or a social network, there are two, rather three aspects of workflow and analytics

  1. Getting customers – Acquisition
  2. Getting them to do “something”  –  Conversion
  3. Getting them do “something” again and again – Retention

For e-commerce sites aka pipes the conversion is applicable for customers only, while for social networks and other sites aka platforms where value is created and consumed by two parties we have to keep in mind conversion for both of them to be able to achieve the end goal.

Let’s consider a job portal and see what the conversion funnel for it will look like.

  1. Visit to home page
  2. Visit to job category page
  3. Visit to job listing page
  4. Apply to job

Note: All these steps don’t necessarily need to be followed in the same order. For ex:  A visitor can land directly at a job listing page via Google search

The above mentioned four points are the simplest way to accomplish task of applying for a job but there could be a lot of other variants which though complex/indirect but would still reach to same goal.  For instance instead of clicking on a job category page link the user does a search and goes to search listing page. One way to look at such alternate paths is to create a funnel for each one of them

conversion_funnel_jobssite1

These are some of the possible routes (for ex: some visitors would neither search or browse and just exist from home page itself). In best case scenario you should know precisely the split of people who searched, browsed and  existed. Further, you should create separate funnels or each search and browse loops.

Let’s say the home page had 100 visitors. Searched = 30, Browsed = 55, Exits = 15

The conversion funnel for search would look like

Visits (100) -> Search (30) ->  View job listings(10) -> Apply(2)

The conversion funnel for browse would look like

Visits (100) -> Browse(55)
1) ->  View job category page (15) -> View job listings(10) -> Apply(3)
2) ->  View job listings(40) -> Apply(5)

 

By considering  the drop off at each stage you would be able to pin point the problem. For instance if  only 1/3rd people are clicking to view job listings after search, maybe the search isn’t that efficient and needs to be worked upon. You could further zoom into this by dividing all searches into two categories.

  1. Searches for which some results were shown (20)
  2. Searches for which no results were shown (10)

In the above example only 20 searches had results against them, which means the click through rate for search is 50% and not 33% as perceived earlier. Now could consider improving this rate and on the side figure out how to reduce the cases in which no search results were shown.

Similarly from View listing to Apply. You can break this task into the below mentioned to be able to see the exact stage of drop off

View job listing -> Click Apply Button -> Login/Signup -> Apply

I’d end this post by stating that, you should try to use the workflows/flowcharts to identify various stages of a user goal and then analyze data across them to be able to identify the issues and fix them

To be continued…

10 ways to hire great guns for your start-up

Just like “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department”, for start-ups

Hiring is too important to be left to the HR department.

In the previous post I talked about ‘Who to hire for your start-up‘. Many of you agreed to most of what I shared so the next question that comes out is how to hire these guys. As @mohak put it brilliantly

Recruitment is marketing. If you can’t hire well, you can’t market well 

If like most others you are finding it incredibly hard to recruit your A team here are some obvious and not so obvious tips

HowSuccessfulStartupsHire-poster

      1. Be Involved: Unless you have someone really well in the team who can handle this for you, be involved in hiring. Another pro tip is not to hire a standard HR professional to do the hiring for your start-up. I’m yet to see a regular HR person turn into a great start-up HR pro. Most of them just don’t have it in their DNA. To avoid bad hires, stupid hiring processes and missing out on some exceptional talent its best suggested to be on TOP yourself for as long as you can afford to be. Founders set the culture of the company and the people they hire initially defines it.
      2. Brand: Be it your founding team, your VCs, the cool tool/service that you are developing or the world changing impact you are going to have. The easiest and surest way to get talent is to be remarkable. Unless your company’s mention people go WOW, you’ll always have a tough time getting smart people to work for you. PR/Social Media/Customer Care or what ever it takes, make sure you have a plan to create a brand around your start-up
      3. Recruitment begins at home:  This bit is so obvious that most start-ups tend to forget it. Every start-up should try to leverage their existing employees to hire more people. This is applicable as much to a 10 member start-up as to a 100 member. No one is better suited to spread the word about you than your existing workforce and you never know which one of your employees gets you whom.  What’s needed for this to worka) Happy & Empowered Employees – Unless one likes their job/company they won’t spread the word and as a founder you need to make sure that your employees aren’t just having a great time working for you they are actually so proud that they’d shout out to all their great friends as invite them. However you at your end need to ensure that they are empowered enough to do this and don’t have any bad experience about the whole thing/process.
        b) Incentives (Icing on the cake) – $$ or mobile phones, might just do wonders.Keep asking them for feedback about hiring/referral process and keep getting it implemented
      4. Customers/Partners/Investors/Vendors: The second best source to get smart folks to work is to leverage the people who do business with you. Keep them in loop about your openings and you never know who they help you hire. They might not even need any incentives and would be just happy to do some matchmaking for you (Assuming you have a healthy relationship with them and serve or pay them well). A power user/customer is a great hire(obviously they need to be talented and not just power users), they’d be obsessive about the product and would already have some ideas on how to make things better. I’d given an arm to have a passionate customer join my start-up
      5. Promotion on Your Website: Sounds too obvious again? Trust me it’s not. Far from what some of you think. Only a handful of hundreds of start-ups use their website to promote their job openings. How many of you(founder) have an updated jobs page on your website? Here are some of them that “Get This”slideshare_hiring
        Visual Website Optimizer
        Heroku
      6. Social Media:
        a) Sponsored ads on Facebook
        Sponsored Updates
        b) Company Page on LinkedIn
        linkedin_twitter
        c) Email Lists
        google_groups
      7. Content Marketing: Content is King” so to speak, for it has a life of it’s own. You can leverage content  to market yourself and attract relevant employees. Interest content will find its way around layers of social media and reach places you can’t. Here are some examples
        Brandologistakosha
      8. Start-up Events/Meet-ups: I know by experience that most start-up events are as (or even less) than the websites/blogs that organize them but even those events attract some bright people who are just out to explore interesting opportunities. You should be checking these events every once in a while. Also, you can consider organizing some meet-ups/hackathons to attract enthusiastic folks.
        has
      9. Internship portals/Start-up Websites: Some of these portals provide access to ambitious and talented people. Also,the sheer fact that some is following them means they are already a bit ahead of the curve
      10. Random Pick-up: This one is as nasty as it sounds. Like somebody’s blog post on tech architecture? Find someone’s slideshow amazing? Follow this amazing sales person on twitter? Stumbled upon a script on github that you found useful?
        GO ahead and make contact. Start interacting with these folks and see if they’d like to join you in your journey.
        The entire kwippy team was hired for Mpower Mobile(in 2008) like that

These 10 ways should help you with your hiring. Do share what you think about them and if you have any experiences around start-up hiring that others can benefit from

Update:  Here’s another super geeky way to pick up nerds

BUEDhMsCcAEHmEA

 

 

Thoughts on Start-up Hiring

Hiring is undoubtedly one of the hardest part of doing a start-up.  Getting the right set of people to work for you is easier said than done and almost every start-up  founder is  in ‘always hiring’ mode.

Despite the fact that there are a lot of cool(and many funded/profitable) startups  run by some really smart folks with a vision, they are unable to attract/find the right kind of talent and end up with mediocre to bad hires.

leoniadas

Given the dynamic nature of a start-up the last thing founders want is to hire somebody who isn’t sharing the same vision, thinking on the same frequency(macro level) and walking the same path. Not only are bad hires bad for the roles they are hired for, they are terrible for the company culture in general and set the barrier low for other/potential hires and might just end up setting the company back instead of moving it forward.

Traits of BAD Start-up Hires

  1. Slow/Non learners  They are hardly interested in spending time and effort in learning how to do their jobs better
  2. Reactive –   They will only do (a % of) what their bosses tell them to do. They will never be proactive and do things on their own
  3. Micro – They will never be able to think beyond their immediate task list and think about the bigger picture, or even how what they are doing/can do can impact the company in general
  4. Laid Back – Nothing for them is an urgency. They will crawl while they are expected to fly. Most things that will annoy the hell out of founder/core team will not cause them an itch.

As an entrepreneur you must always be thinking about iterating the hiring process and make sure that even if you move to other bigger things, the people who take hiring calls must be on the exact wavelength as you and should not hire people just to fill roles. You MUST make sure that the person who is in charge of hiring should be A class her/himself and is always thinking on how to get incredible people on board and also how to make the workplace best suitable for brilliant people.

I’m particularly rigid about hiring great people and feel very strongly about it as I believe a bad hire can actually undermine the speed and efficiency of one(or more) good hires. Not only will they take up time, they will leave you with bad aftertaste which will last for a while, so it is best to hire people who will not just be at par with your expectations and company culture but are likely to take things to the next level.

vcs-pivot-too-some-thoughts-on-startup-hiring

Formula for a Great Hire

Great Start-up Hire =  Smart + Passionate + Committed to your cause

So you should evaluate your hires for these 3 parameters, the ways you choose could be different but it is critical to evaluate them on all these parameters. A fancy yet apt term for some such hires is “Entrepreneurial Lieutenants”. These guys are what I call “Mini-CEOs” who take complete ownership of their respective divisions and run the show mostly on their own. A major thing that I look for is “compliance”, it is very important to make sure that people start following what you tell them almost immediately. Anybody who doesn’t take this seriously won’t last for me.

Some of the ways which I use while hiring are

    1. Smart – Asking them a puzzle or two/Testing their problem solving skills by giving them a situation and asking for a solution/Asking them to do a mental calculation or something which involves logic and requires them to think on their feet.
    2. Passionate – Asking about what they do in their spare time, stuff which they are really into (Anything in which I can ask them anything or stuff about which they feel they’d know more than me) or stuff on which they have strong perspectives (design, visual, usability, scalability or just about anything in the relevant context). Passionate people are inherently curious to figure out how stuff works and how to improve thing around. Asking them to share if they have ever built something is another key question
    3. Committed – I’m particularly keen to learn why would anyone like to join your start-up. What do they really like so much about the small limited resource set up which not many people have heard about or has a certain amount of uncertainty or air of oblivion attached to it. Basically you’d like to find out if the person is really excited about what you are doing or they want to join you because your office is quite close to their home and they expect a job here won’t be as demanding as that in a corporate which is located at the other end of the town or something equally lame.I try to learn what is the real motivation. Some of the best reasons could be

      a) Love for product/service – It’s best to find someone who’s a happy customer and wants to spread your message
      b) Love for domain – Next best is to find someone who is passionate about the domain in which your start-up works. Someone who believes in better healthcare deep inside will come out with a lot of creativity and empathy for your customers
      c) Love for founding/core team – Someone who is in awe of the founders or core team and wants to work with them is another reason.

Another great thing about committed people is that they think “Long Term” which is a huge differentiator. The sheer fact that someone is thinking of spending the next 3-5 years (yes, it’s as long term as it gets in most startups) or more implies that they’ll be motivated enough not only to do their job well but also go out of the way to do things that’ll help the startup become better in various other aspects for which they might not be directly responsible/accountable just like we all do things for our family or friends where we are emotionally invested.

It is painful to see start-up’s not thinking about hiring hard enough and making sure the right hires are given all the freedom and autonomy to weave their own stories. I like how @tarunmatta puts it, if someone would to write a story on your start-up who do you think would be the key characters (except you) ?

If the answer is none or 1-2, you have a huge task at hand. You need people to build upon the vision and spread it along with you. These people are the ones who would be almost as sensitive or paranoid about the big and small things alike and would spend endless hours obsessing about problems your startup is trying to solve and how to come up with beautiful solutions.

I know enough founders who are brilliant but someone haven’t been able to manage to build a great middle level management (for the lack of a better/startupy word). You need driven people who will manage various aspects of the business and relieve you of your routine tasks so that you can solve higher order problems. They will also help in making sure your vision/company culture is embedded in the team at large. Do all you can to hire these folks

If you can get someone who is smart, passionate and committed to your cause, give them enough salary to keep money out of the table for now and next few years to come. Also, whenever possible offer them ESOPs. Incidentally I haven’t heard many start-up founders talk about ESOPs but I am a big believer is offering ESOPs to folks who you think would be instrumental in charting the course of your company. ESOPs in many cases will get you more loyalty than $$ which any other company could offer and with ESOPs (however small) the employee has another reason to push the envelope harder and make sure that the company makes it big for them to benefit.

Recommended Read – The Mechanics of Mafia (Peter Theiel’s Startup Class Notes by Blake Masters)

So, what do you think about ‘Start-up’ Hiring?

 

Perspective is Everything

For some time now I’ve started thinking more about ‘Perspectives’, particularly about my Perspectives.

Everybody has a way of viewing things and mostly your views about various things would be different than mine. Perspective to me is a deep and thought out opinion about something. The more you think about something, chances are the better you understand them and the more you understand things, the more you like and enjoy them.

I believe most people tend to have perspectives on only a handful things, particularly things that impact them. For ex: Not everyone will have a strong opinion on the design of things or  internet freedom or climate control or the way cities should be planned etc. I strongly feel that it is very important to have a perspective on a few things if not a lot. Having a perspective on certain things opens up your mind about them, it helps you deconstruct the current state of things, particularly what’s wrong and also on how they can *possibly* be fixed.

You need to deliberate deeply about something and be emotional about it to be able to have a perspective on it and to me having a perspective on something is why/how most innovations and disruptions happen. You feel passionately about healthcare for the poor, you feel motivated enough to change things around, you figure out a way to get things moving and bang your idea becomes a reality and ends up changing someone’s life for better.

Think about it, if an entrepreneur doesn’t have a strong perspective about their new startup idea/product what are the odds that their product will be different(and maybe an improvement) from others, will add some value and end up becoming a sustainable business?

Unless you really want to change things around and have some idea on what the change should be, you can’t be good at it. Not only this, my perspective is that we as entrepreneurs need to have perspectives on not just one but a lot of things. Say as a start-up entrepreneur I should have perspectives on disruption/innovation that I want to bring to my industry, building a profitable and sustainable business, hiring, customer service etc etc. The number of these aspects I feel strongly about would determine to a large extent to how I fair in this journey.

Also, I feel that the person who has perspectives on more and possibly varied things the better positioned they are to change things and have an impact. I have certain perspective on usability, product design, health care, education, independent artists, social media, publishing/media among a few other things. I have spent fair amount of time analyzing some of this things and have some idea of how I can add value in these domains. Hopefully soon enough I’d get a chance to move things around in them.

Till then, what do you think about this? Do you Agree/Disagree with what I just said?

 

The Best of the Web: 26/6/2012

Looking for something interesting to read? I read the following links(and visited websites) today and liked, you might want to read them/check them out

  1. Too Big to Chug: How Our Sodas Got So Huge  (Gulp soft drinks? Might find it interesting)
  2. Science Acquires Indian Startup Pinpuff to Measure and Monetize Influence On Pinterest  (Interesting startup)
  3. Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years   (The classic epic post by Peter Norvig)
  4.  How can I learn to program in Python? (Quora post with links to some very useful resources)
  5. http://www.surveymonkey.com (Great site to create free surveys)

The Best of Web: 23/6/2012

Looking for something interesting to read? I read the following links(and visited websites) today and liked, you might want to read them/check them out

  1. The Future of Social Networking: Web Entrepreneurs, Vision 2.0
  2. Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup – Class 18 Notes Essay (Founder as Victim, Founder as God)
  3. Rapportive (Email Pluggin)
  4. Codeacademy (Learn Coding)

 

 

Empathy: The Secret Sauce For Mind-blowing Customer Experience

I am a sucker for remarkable, awe-inspiring,  mind-boggling customer experience and can’t think enough about it. The more negative experiences I have as an end user (with consumer goods companies, mobile operators, eating joints etc) the more determined I am to offer the best possible customer service for my business. Obsessing about customer service has had its share of good and bad realizations and continue to help me in connecting the dots. It was in one of these moments that it occurred to me that Empathy or the lack of it could be an indicator for good/bad customer service.

Sometimes while taking care of Dial-a-Book operations I find myself in a situation where I have to deliver an order (because of urgency of the situation and unavailability of other designated resources). Last such case happened 4-5 days back when a student ordered a book in afternoon on a condition that it should be delivered the same day as he had an exam next day afternoon, Fair enough. There was however a little problem in this, we didn’t have the concerned book in stock and it had to be procured locally. After a few hours and towards the end of our office hours when we managed to procure the book, we had no one left in the office to deliver it. Now came the last resort, for me to deliver them personally, when I told this at home that I’ll be at home late as I had to deliver a book, pat came a reply, “You can get it delivered tomorrow by your delivery team”. While in normal course of action that’d have been except in this case it was urgent as the customer had an exam due next day and thus wanted the book the same day.

The reason why I shared the above mentioned case was because I felt I could take care of this case because I could relate to the customer and their problem ( a student needing a book desperately for an exam scheduled next day) . Empathy with the customer had the power to drive me to go out of the way and make sure that the book is delivered the same day.

Isn’t this how this generally works?

If everybody from product designers to the customer service executives could empathize with their customers they would be in a position to offer much better solutions to their problems.  On the contrary if the person in question can’t feel the pain of the customer they might not be able to offer exemplary customer experience.

What do you think?

E-commerce to M-Commerce?

This post is partly meant to be a rant and partly to share what I feel. Feel free to agree/disagree.

In middle of a telephonic conversation with a friend(web entrepreneur) I popped a question,

Did you see Indian e-commerce stores putting up phone numbers on their website/product pages to help people buy (read order) products?

Gladly, as expected he replied with a “NO” which brings me to the question if/why/how do things change in the startup/business world with new things being introduced and then blatantly reused (copied) by others.

When we started Dial-a-Book some 1.5 years back, we were the ONLY ones that took orders on phone and accepted Cash on Delivery(COD).  Yes, none of the existing players had anything remotely similar in their way of working.

Come 2011: The two biggest e-commerce players in India have started COD (about 6-8 months back for one and  2-3 months back for another) and now they also have put phone numbers on their portals to take orders.  Surprising? Hardly.

Wait for a couple months and you’ll see almost everyone following steps. In fact I remember one of the young and aspiring e-commerce startups went to the extend of launching a service similar to ‘Dial-a-Book‘ and branding it as “X.com’s Dial-a-Book”, Duh.

I don’t mean to say we are the inspiration behind these but definitely the uncanny resemblances are a bit too much for them to be completely independent in thinking and execution. I know it might be really difficult to acknowledge but that’s how it is. The idea of sharing this here was that I felt like putting it done of paper/web for records.

Copying a feature or idea is one thing and doing justice to it is completely different. The most painful part of it being the big guys almost always get the credit for doing new things which aren’t really new.

It will be interesting to see how things change going forward with the e-commerce scene also extending to the phone commerce scene. Stay Tuned !!