Category: Startup Life

9 weeks in: a report

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I last did a report about life with Hunter when I was 3 weeks in.  Since then, I’ve learned a few more things.

Getting up in the middle of the night repeatedly can make a man (and mom) batshit crazy.  For us (and most people), the getting up in the middle of the night to feed the child never stops and is totally exhausting.  Diane and I are taking turns who gets up for the main feeding in the middle of the night.  We found that if the same person keeps doing it, that person becomes not so fun to hang out with.  We’ll see how this new experiment goes.

Hunter is not always happy

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The B-17 Bomber and the Checklist

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Life has gotten pretty complex. Especially in hospitals. I just read this New Yorker article and found it really fascinating.  It’s about a genius doctor that got obsessed with process and devices a checklist that is saving hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of lives.  If it is so useful for them, just think of how else it could be useful.

The article also shares a pretty cool ancedote about the B-17 bomber and how it was the first plane that required a checklist on takeoff and landing.  He writes:

On October 30, 1935, at Wright Air Field in Dayton, Ohio, the U.S. Army Air Corps held a flight competition for airplane manufacturers vying to build its next-generation long-range bomber. It wasn’t supposed to be much of a competition. In early evaluations, the Boeing Corporation’s gleaming aluminum-alloy Model 299 had trounced the designs of Martin and Douglas. Boeing’s plane could carry five times as many bombs as the Army had requested; it could fly faster than previous bombers, and almost twice as far. The flight “competition,” according to the military historian Phillip Meilinger, was regarded as a mere formality. The Army planned to order at least sixty-five of the aircraft.

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Two Funnels, Two Types of Content Marketing

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Note: I wrote this post on Kapost but thought I’d republish here as lots of people, especially those who read this blog, don’t really know what I do or what Kapost does.  Here’s an attempt to explain.

The term “content marketing” has been hot in 2012 and is often heralded as the best new marketing tactic.

“Sure, there are still other ways to get in front of your target audience, but content marketing is proving to be an indispensable tool to complement traditional communications strategies,” writes Brian Aitken, director of new media for the Foundation for Economic Education, on CNN’s iReport.

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The REAL tech meetups in Boulder

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This morning I took a ride up Sunshine Canyon in Boulder.  We stopped half way up and we looked around and took a little poll about who was on the trip.  We had 4 Techstars companies represented (Orbotix, Kapost, Everlater, and PivotDesk), one VC (Hwy12), and one Techstars mentor (Jamie).  

While biking 6 miles straight up, and in between deep breaths, we talked about building product faster to meet demand (Dave from PivotDesk), growing revenue (Mark from Hwy12), and how to correctly build a financial model for a an early stage company (Nate and Natty from Everlater).  If you’re wondering how work in Boulder happens or how the tech community interacts, I’d say this was a pretty perfect example.  

Oh, and the views aren’t bad either….

You can see the damage from the fire from 2 years ago still: 
 

Moneyball and Big Data

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I just had an interesting breakfast with Tom Higley which i try to do once a month but ends up being about every other.  He sat down this morning and said, have you seen the movie “Moneyball” and then we got into a very interesting talk about what that film means in today’s world.  Here’s a few thoughts we had.

Aaron Sorkin can take any story and make it interesting.  He took a horrible book about Facebook (Accidental Millionaires) and wrote a fantastic and Oscar-winning script for The Social Network, and here he took a stats-filled non-fiction book about baseball and made an interesting movie.
The story of the Oakland A’s is not as simple as it was told.  They did not just find high on-base percentage players and ride that to a successful season.  No sir.  One thing that always beats good hitting is good pitching and there’s no mention of pitching in this entire movie. Why? Because it didn’t fit the narrative. Was their staff good? Hell, yes. The had a trio called “The Big Three” of Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder.  Zito was their ace.  He went 23-5 and won the Cy Young award that year.   Mulder won 19 games, and Hudson led the league in shutouts.  That seems pretty relevant to me – you might want to mention it. Continue reading “Moneyball and Big Data” →

Steve Jobs is Shocking in his Biography

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I’ve got the mp3’s of the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson and i’ve been listening on my daily commute for the past few weeks. So far, i’m 25% through the book and loving it. Here’s what i like about the book so far.

  • Describing the social, music, and industry scene of Silicon Valley in the late 60’s and early 70’s is fascinating. The confluence of hippies, technology and drugs must have been amazing.
  • The hobbyist movement around electrical engineering. What people thought of computers and how the PC emerged from microprocessors and silicon. It’s so hard now, in a world where there’s a computer on every shelf, to imagine how people didn’t logically think of the PC.
  • Steve Jobs vs. Woz. It was an interesting partnership and highlights how you need different people with different talents to get a business off the ground.
The main plot of the book is around Steve Jobs and his rise as the leader of Apple. I’ve been pretty shocked about what i’ve read so far. I’m shocked by his demeanor and his behavior. The book does a good job of showing his passion, and his attention to detail. But i’m amazed about the amount of abuse he dished out to his colleagues. The book describes how each engineer, although degraded and demeaned regularly by Jobs, holds up that period as one of the most memorable is his life. The book attributes this to Jobs. I disagree. These guys were at the perfect moment of time where technology was making this type of a product possible- and were designing a product that didn’t yet exist. The market was poised to explode and did. What Jobs did was bring the right list of specifications but did it for a product that the world was clamoring for.

So far this book has increased my respect for Jobs ability to intuitively know what people want but i’ve also amazing how bad he was as a manager, friend and as a person. He seemed so erratic and awful.

I’ve yet to read about his exile, his days at Pixar and Next days, or his Apple comeback. i’m sure he gained perspective and some humility but man, in those early days of Apple he seems brutal.


The Future of Content

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Over here at Kapost, we talk to a lot of publishers and people creating content.  These are all sorts of people such as large known publishers, college newspapers, small company blogs and mommy blogs.

We noticed one obvious trend and one not so obvious one.

The obvious trend is that traditional journalism is struggling.  Companies that rely on their content to generate traffic for ad revenue are hurting.  They aren’t getting enough money for their content so they are doing all they can to get leaner and meaner.

The not so obvious trend is that many companies who are not content-based companies are hiring more and more journalists for themselves. They are doing so to populate their blog.  This is a marketing tactic and one that is pretty effective and becoming more and more popular.  This is a large emerging segment and, in my opinion, is the future of content.

My partner Toby wrote a great piece about this that was published today about this topic.  He goes even deeper and gives some good samples of why hiring journalists for non-content companies work and why it doesn’t for ad-supported folks.   He compares Fitness Magazine with the company Weight Watchers.  Both produce high volumes of content about dieting and exercise for essentially the same audience.  He concludes:

Fitness likely generates around a $6.50 effective CPM for the ads that it runs, a blended rate for its direct-sold and remnant inventory that is consistent with industry averages. Assuming that three ads are run on each page and that the average visitor visits five pages, Fitness would have an ARPU of about $0.10.

Weight Watchers, on the other hand, does not run ads, but tries to convert visitors into becoming paying customers. Given its $194 price point and a conservative 2 percent conversion assumption, the ARPU for Weight Watchers is $4. What we see here is a 40X ARPU difference between the media publisher and the content marketer.

This is a big difference.  People follow the money, and the money now is in content for marketing and not content for revenue.   That’s the future.

 


Making Progress

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You can read all over the internet how hard it is to build a company from scratch.  There’s customer development which leads to product/market fit which leads to revenue which leads to profitability.  And that’s only if everything goes right.  It’s a challenge.

The analogy i always have in my head is a walk in the woods.  When you start a business, it’s like walking through a dense jungle.  You have a machete, hacking your way through the brush, and talking to whoever you can, trying to find a path.  Once you get a product and a sense of direction, you find a path, the walk becomes a little bit easier but, as they say, you’re not out of the woods.

As you talk to more customers and continue to develop your product, that path becomes wider and eventually turns into a dirt road.  Improving the sales and dev process plus hiring more help turns that road into a paved road and eventually, if everything goes right, it becomes a highway.

Each step of the way is exciting.  Right now at Kapost we’ve built a path and we’re working hard to turn that into a road.  It’s hard and challenging but it’s also damn fun.  We have a great team of folks and the daily progress we’re making is impressive.



So, what do you do again?

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I’ve been asked this question a bit lately.  I remember a funny Friends episode where the gang played a trivia game about how well each person knows the other friends.  The final winner-take-all question asked to the group was, “What does Chandler do for work?”  To which nobody, not even his wife, could answer.  Well, it seems that I’m the Chandler Bing of my friends.

I’m not too surprised by this as the startup that Toby, Nader and I started last year, named Kapost, has shifted (aka “pivoted”) three times in the past 18 months so I frequently end up describing my work in different ways to the same person.  I could see where the confusion comes from.   Luckily, describing my job just got a little bit easier today when we launched a new commercial describing Kapost.   What we do is build software to help Editors of websites manage their users and the content they want to publish.   Watch the commercial below to get a more fun and colorful explanation of this.

Allegory of the Cave

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I was reading Nick Flynn’s new book The Ticking Is The Bomb and he recites in the Allegory of the Cave which came from a Plato dream.  

In this dream prisoners, locked-up in a cave since childhood, are chained in such a way that they cannot look away from the wall they are facing.  Even their heads are fixed, somehow, in that one direction.  Behind the prisoners, some still children, is a walkway, sightly elevated, and along this walkway the jailers, or their assistants, carry various objects back and forth.  Beyond the walkway a fire burns, continuously, a large fire, and this fire casts light onto the objects, which then cast shadows on the wall for the prisoners to contemplate.  The object might be something benign, a bunch of carrots, say, but as a shadow the carrots can appear frightful – each could be a knife.  Or an apple could be a rock that could crush a man’s hands. Or his son’s testicles. Or a jar of milk could be a jar of acid, if all one sees, all one is allowed to see, are shadows.  And the jailers grunt and snort, sounds that echo off the walls and so seem, to the prisoners, to come from the shadows themselves.  And don’t forget the fire, which makes another sound, and which heats their backs, perhaps too much, and fills the cave with smoke, making it hard to breathe.  It must seem a little like hell, with its silent goons carrying menacing shapes, with your head strapped into place, though this allegory comes from a time well before we perfected our modern-day concept of hell.

I have found this to be quite true in startups as well.  If all you see are TechCrunch articles or tweets of possible competitors, you can’t help but imagine the worst.  All you can do is try to get out of the cave and into your customers offices and work on actually solving problems and adding value.  The rest are only shadows.