Laurent Kretz

Finding the G spot

Laurent Kretz — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 08:34:43 +0000

There are two types of social apps. The ones that crave for users, and pursue any option (features, dev, PR, marketing, R&D, acquisition, …) to get them, and the others, who crave for server power and load balancing to handle the massive flow of new users.

We all want to be in the second category. Those apps have found the growth spot, the startup “G” spot.

Bold assessment : there’s nothing new being invented on the web. Every new service coming out is essentially an iteration on something existing - not a breakthrough but an s-curve innovation. Any experienced entrepreneur will tell you that whether you’re the first or the hundredth to have had this cool idea you cherish, it doesn’t matter. What matters is finding what I call the startup G spot.

A case in point : for one Foursquare, going from 0 to 2M members in less than 2 years, you have a hundred competitors, craving to reach their first 10,000 users.

John Gruber says that it’s not about “being first”, but “being first to do it right“. So what does it mean to “do it right” ? I think it’s the result of a perfect mix of features (cool? new? sexy? fun? …), intrinsic elements (well known founders? location? investors? …), early adopters/users (you mother or @ceonyc and @fredwilson?) and of course execution.

Features is what makes your product. You have the general guiding idea, your core competency, your mission. But how do you go from there to being unique? Is their audience mainstream? Are they sexy? Are the marginal features well integrated with core features? It’s the basic of your product strategy, and your most important choices.
Intrinsic elements define the DNA: how many founders, what’s their experience, what’s their network? Are they well known? What’s the level of their social proof and roots in the tech scene? Where are you located: in Silicon Valley or Bourg-en-Bresse? How’s the startup ecosystem there? Will there be influential twitterers and bloggers around you can hang out with? Are you close to investors?
Early adopters is way more important than you might think. Is your product built for someone influential? You of course built a product that solves a specific problem you have. Who shares this problem? Is it a guy with 80K+ followers and 75K uniques per week on his blog that claims it publicly or is it you mother who talks about it at the hairdresser?
Execution is key and nothing will succeed without a clear (fast, public, flexible, …) execution path.

You also must be interesting. Yes, meaningless buzz word, but if you’re not “interesting” (i.e. new, different, sexy, seductive), who will remember you? An interesting read on the subject is the Startup lessons from lady gaga by Amir Khella. Being interesting results in having your visitors and users think “Hmm, finally something different that I get, that gets me, that I wanna explore further and talk about”. Think about Hunch: once you linked your accounts, their suggestions are pretty accurate in some categories. It makes you feel that their’s something underneath, it tickles your curiosity. You become interested in knowing more.

So finding the G spot is not only a matter of strategic vision and decision. It’s also a matter of chance. Will you be the new Silicon Valley darling? Who knows what made the initial difference between Pownce, Jaiku, Status.net and Twitter ? What made (is making?) the difference between Plyce, Gowalla, MyTown and Foursquare? You can do your best to do it right, it will only do 80% of the job.

Finding the G(rowth) spot has been our daily routine for the last months at SubMate. We’ve discussed many (like, MANY!) options and found something that users love, and that we’re REALLY excited about. It’s in the works now, and Clément, Axel and Kevin are working their asses off to pull it off the ground. Expect it for September!

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Startups and multiple choice questions

Laurent Kretz — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:23:02 +0000

When I was a kiddo, the type of knowledge and skills assessment I hated the most were MCQs. For subjects that I had most difficulties in, MCQs brought doubt when I had little confidence.

As startup founders, we face hundreds of MCQs every week.

The following thoughts came up to my mind reading two good articles last week: Pre-Launch Business Plans Are Always Wrong by Josh Kopelman and How New Ideas Almost Killed Our Startup by Vinicius Vacanti.

It’s only been about 6 months that we first started working on SubMate. In those 6 months, we’ve faced hundreds (thousands?) of decisions. Signup button : blue or green? Company type: SARL or SAS? Pizza: Luccio or Paulo? Team: interns or employees? Nothing new here.

We usually handle those choices the following way (and pretty much in that order):

does it need to be discussed?
are we internally knowledgeable enough to make the decision?
who do we need help from?

What about our next release?

When it comes to design/product questions, this process is becoming harder. It involves or impacts your team, your startup lifespan, your strategy, your funding, your goal as a founder, your revenue goals, you marketing/viral efforts, and your users of course (and first!).

What Vinicius says is that for the lifespan of Yipit (a new-york based startup doing deals aggregation), which now amounts to 3 years, they’ve been going through 5 different and separate models.

But the issue (the “temptation” as Vinicius puts it) also runs down for each of the unique models. When running a startup, those choices can take the form of alluring features buzzing for a day, a week or a month on all tech blogs. They can appear in moments of doubts (what Tim Ferriss calls the “informed pessimism“).
“Damn, those cool startups lately all revolve around feature B. We do feature A, what about spinning into A’ ?”.
Why would we? Because it’s sexy for investors. It’s sexy for the dev team. It’s sexy to be part of the buzz.

Focus

These QCMs are not the same as in high school: there’s no wrong answer. That’s the added difficulty of those choices. They all lead you to a different path, a different direction. Josh points out (and rightly so), that a pre-launch business plan is always wrong. And we know that - your startup DNA will evolve on a day-to-day basis for the next years.

So the real challenge is here: always choosing the right evolution (evolution is “mandatory”) while staying on the right track (your vision).

For those choices, the thought process might go like this:

is it really a killer feature/addon? (e.g. OpenID and Oauth)
will it “stick” or is it a fad? (e.g. Facebook apps in 2008)
do people really want this?? (e.g. Google Buzz)
do our users want this? (e.g. LinkedIn in Seesmic)
how well does it integrate to our product?
how much does it stretch our product?
how far does it push back the next release?

At SubMate, we have a big fat dashboard of where we wanna go - our mojo, our prayers. And I have a cool cofounder which preferred answer to any suggestion is “why??” before “cool!!”.

So guys, how do you handle the sirens of the additional features?

To end up, a great TED talk by Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex

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Working at a startups sucks

Laurent Kretz — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:41:19 +0000

Ok, excuse the alluring post title, but it seems in this world we live in, that there are two types of entrepreneurship blog posts you read. People giving startup lessons to other people (we did it), and startups guys bragging about how well their startup is going (we did it too).

That's cool. You need to give a positive image, satisfy or enoucrage your investors, motivate the crowd about your product, and the team behind it. But you rarely read about negative or difficult things. In clear, nobody rants about being a founder.

So here it is: working on your startup is hard. Very hard. If you're considering it, you should know that …

You'll spend your time looking for investors and/or clients, and you'll need to be heavily armed with patience and perseverance. "No" is the most common word people use - when they even answer. It lasts months, for a variable and unpredictable outcome. It can take months not to happen, and then happen in two weeks. Or it can be completed 95% in two weeks, and then take months not to close.

When you're not hunting for intros, you need to hire. It takes time. Lots of time. Tons of time. We're lucky to have a full team now, or at least the resources we planned for, but it took about two months to get there. Two months is long for the lifetime of an early product. And it can be a killer for motivation. Finding talent (your n+1 always need to bring something to the table you don't have) is a difficult equation: the spirit, the ambiance, the product, the fit, the money, to only name a few, are all variables of the problem. But moreover, it's a complete hazard.

When you have the talent, you need to build the product. You certainly have the long term vision, and that's cool. Congratulations, you manage to convince investors and employees to join you on that quest for the holy grail (that link would have done it too). Now forget it and imagine starting from scratch every morning. And putting your assumptions to the test every evening. And keeping your team happy, while maintaining the general direction you've given yourself.

If you're super rich, that's cool. If not, prepare to be poor. And not poor like in "hey, i'm working on Apple in a garage"-poor. Poor like in "hey, i'm on welfare, but i have a great idea, and my team is passionate and flexible enough to pull it off, and my banker chases me with a chainsaw"-poor. If you're 21, no big deal. If you're 30, well. Think about it twice.

You have a bit of genius and/or crazy in you. Cool, that's part of any great entrepreneur. Are you sure it's the good genius part, or the good crazy part? Can you manage this doubt on the long run?

All this is fine, and you're amazing girlfriend is supporting you in your project. Oooh wait, you have a girlfriend? Does she know that for the next year and a half, you'll have no vacation, you'll see her about an hour a day max, she'll pay for the rent, have to cope with your stress?

Voila.

I won't end this post with how we went through and how well we're dealing with all those issues, how we're leading an amazing ultra-motivating project and preparing a killer release for September. If I said things like that, it would kill the idea of the post. Ooh damn, I just did :)

So I'll just say this: heading SubMate with @bjonathan for the last 4 months has been the most rewarding experience in my life. But for aspiring young entrepreneurs, know it's *not* a long, quiet river.

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You tech team is also your sales team

Laurent Kretz — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:04:05 +0000

We got into a friendly debate with @bjonathan about biz cards. Some argue it's an unnecessary expense, and I don't agree. It costs $5 bucks to make an intern or employee happy.

Luckily (and it's the case at SubMate), he'll even be proud about what he does, it will be his first business card and he will be eager to show off with it :)

Or, another way to look at it, it costs $5 buck to distribute 100 cards to 100 people. Meaning $0.05 per person to get the word out. That's less than AdWords.

So here it is, the team of 4 !

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Getting your tech team pumped up !

Laurent Kretz — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:01:19 +0000

At SubMate, we’re blessed with a super cool team of engineers. We got Clément, a killer ruby on rails developer who joined the team last month, and Kevin, a ninja iPhone hacker who joined last week. Both are ultra motivated by our project, and don’t count hours.

Fresh air

As business guys, Jonathan and myself know how frustrating it can be to work on the very same issue for a few days in a row.

The same goes for any engineer, working on complex problems to solve. Spending days, weeks, on similar items can be exhausting, and make you loose interest, motivation on the long term.

It’s great to get some fresh air, test new technologies, get your hands on that new cool framework everyone is buzzing about. Those might not be adapted to your main project. For instance, Rails3 is not stable yet for mainstream release), but the challenge to master it is super-motivating for a tech guy hacking on rails. MongoDB is hot right now, and we wanna test it before further deployment.

We’re not Google. But…

Our team starts as interns, before a potential hire. We’re a startup, our funds are limited, but they want to work on a great project with an amazing team ambiance, and accept a lesser financial reward than what they could get in the Fortune 500 company.

What Google does is great : Google allows its engineers 20% time to work on something that interests them.

How could we adapt this to SubMate?

We’re not Google, we cannot afford loosing 20% of our manpower on the project, especially when tech and financial resources are limited. But we know that 90% of a fresh and happy brain is more efficient than 100% of an exhausted one.

Go for a run!

So Jonathan and I took a cool initiative today. What we decided to do is super simple. And seeing the reaction of our tech team, it was a good idea.

Our tech team will be allowed, as for Google, to work on a different project a few hours a week, and will benefit financially of any outcome it will bring.

We put all variables into a single big fat cooking pot to define the scope:

it must be beneficial for the company and sharpen their skills (non-negotiable),
the project should be fun,
they have to push their skills to the top (non-negotiable),
it could be transactional so that they can benefit of the financial results,
they can work together or individually,
it should bring them fame, girls, power, and ninja skills,
SubMate is their job, their mission in life, their reason to live, … :)
Oh, and did I mention their skills ?

The most important thing, of course, is that it remains a side project. One afternoon per week, one day every two weeks, the format is to be adapted to our load on SubMate. Also, we need to make sure that what they learn will benefit the company as a whole.

And we know what you might be thinking right now: who has time for side projects in an early stage startup?? We think that when you’re 120% on a project, you should spend 10% on other things, just to cool down and see other things.

What else?

Have you worked in a company putting that kind of measures in place? Have you yourself implemented something similar for your company? What other variables should we consider? What’s your opinion as an engineer on the subject?

Also…

You’re a genius engineer and wanna work for the best coolest friendliest anything-est company on earth?? Contact us!!

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Availability of talent - Avoid Ruby on Rails ?

Laurent Kretz — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:36:51 +0000

Our good friend @Romain_David, the cofounder of BalloonUp (an app that helps conference organizers and companies events improve participation and interaction), wrote a rant about ruby on rails. Romain is a business guy, and his partner in crime is a cool dude called @Pierre Valade, an engineer, real rails ninja with a business oriented vision.

The post follows a lunch we had two days ago, where we talked specifically about that : biz guys being left by their tech cofounders on a cool techno with limited local community. Which is exactly what happened to SubMate at the beginning. Cofounders leaving a projet early is normal, happens all the time, and - from what I've seen and known - quite rarely happens in bad terms. You split because of a difference in vision, in direction, in goal, … Until you've worked together for a couple of months, you don't know how it will pan out.

However, as Romain points it, the technology choice of the early stage project is critical. Ruby on Rails is a pretty damn good technology, with limitations. But the problem is not there. For an early startup founding team, the problem lies in the size of your local tech community for that specific language.

Ruby and its rails framework have something other languages don't have: they are cool. Anyone will tell you that. And any dev will brag about it. And even non-tech founders like me brag about it. And the cool guys in the space hack in rails. And as it's not yet taught in French engineer schools, you can be pretty sure that the rails hackers you'll find in France are passionate ninja geeks. And you pretty damn want them on your side of the table.

But being cool is not something a young startup should look after. What you should look after is talent, and especially availability of talent. If the community is small and passionate, your chance of getting talent is quite high, but you need to either have the coolest project in the space, or loads of money to attract. Or you could reach for a broader and wider spread language, hence a wide community. PHP, Java, you know the drill. Talent (and especially passion!) might be more difficult to find, but your issue will be choosing the person, instead of finding her.

In any case, if you're a business guy founding a startup, take the time to poll your local tech community about the language you're choosing.

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Untitled

Laurent Kretz — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:16:53 +0000

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The art of the perfect launch

Laurent Kretz — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:39:10 +0000

In short, I don't pretend to have it.

However, SubMate can boast about having had some amazing press, great early feedback, thousands of super active users, tons of requests (partnerships, new cities, recruitments), and tens of thousands of uniques over the first 3 weeks of the service. That didn't arrive magically. We pushed our luck.

And it could be summarized with this: a few years back, the French Lotto had the best catch phrase ever - it would translate into something like "100% of the winners tried their luck". Basically, you can't win if you don't play.

So in bullet points, here is how we tried to do it (or did it, if I may):

Conferences: We applied to ALL tech and startup conferences as soon as we got a workable prototype. Amongst the 8 or 10 conferences we applied to, we got selected at 5, were finalists at 4 and won 1. And we presented live, on stage, in front of an audience of more than 2,000 people in total. That can only get your some press, feedback and contacts.
Negative criticism: There no such thing as bad publicity. If users don't like your product, don't understand it, give negative critics about it, embrace them. They are the best source of feedback, and, if you can understand their real reasons, the most constructive one. Reply, answer, retweet, contact, do whatever you want but *don't* ignore them.
Speak, speak, speak: We spoke about SubMate. All the time. And we've been doing so all along the way, since February. On this blog, on our twitter page, on our facebook fan page, on our blog, … We speak about the product, its development, the ups and downs, the business challenges, we've been totally transparent and anti-stealth.
Be nice to bloggers: If you have friends who write at blogs (big, small, tiny, whatever), be nice to them and keep an open conversation. SubMate got some great press coverage after launch, and some early articles can be traced to even earlier blog posts about us in great blogs.
Launch !: Perfect is the enemy of good. As of day one of your project, your only horizon should be the minimum viable product, or minimum desired product. Talk about it, ask feedback about it, brag about it. Show it. And launch it as soon as you can, even if it's ugly, even if you're not satisfied with it.
Listen: Listen to your users, the satisfied ones and the angry ones. If you launch a local product, your audience might not be where you think it is. Ask the people where *they* want *you*. On SubMate, you can request new cities. It's a dumb $0 google form, and we got thousands of requests. Literally. We opened Hong Kong one week after launch as we had hundreds of requests there. One week before, Hong Kong was way down in the deployment pipe.
Get there: Talk to investors and successful entrepreneurs early on. Trying to get a meeting with a "star" in your sector will give you credibility, great feedback, and will have people talk about you. Maybe the "star" himself will talk about you. Maybe he will even recommend you to journalists, investors, partners. One famous French super-angel received 13 recommendations about us. 13 ! And one of the testimonies of our service in the New York Post article about SubMate was actually one of those successful entrepreneurs.
Get into the conversation: Embrace social media as soon as possible, if you're not already in/on it. But don't only speak about your project, embrace the conversation. Help people. Ask for help. Give feedback. Thank critics. When we started SubMate, I had about 200 followers on twitter. A couple of months later, I'm now close to 800. It's nothing to brag about, but it's 4 times more eyeballs than before, so 4 times more chances to be "heard".
Be part of your local entrepreneur community: There some good chance that you're not the only entrepreneur around. Wherever you are, participate to events, organize events, try to help organizing others. You will create a great network, and you'll be glad you did. Jonathan and myself are the organizers of Start In Paris, a monthly startup event in Paris getting some cool buzz. We never put SubMate forward for that event, but definitely got some good karma points in the local startup community.
Be nice: Introduce people to people. That's closer to the subject of online reputation, but your early stage project is *you*. If you build a positive reputation, your audience will follow up.
Be everywhere: Be a media whore. Never refuse an article, interview, and do yourself a favor: be enthusiastic, impressive, passionate. Try to be everywhere. If you are French, forget the dogmas: it's not bad if you like to (want to!) talk about yourself and your product!

I don't think this is an exhaustive list, but those are the main points I'm thinking about 3 weeks after launch. We haven't been bought out by Google yet, and there's PLENTY of work ahead to go where we wanna go. But - without being presumptuous, I think we did pretty well for a 4 months old project!

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Remember that …. you’re beautiful !

Laurent Kretz — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:59:19 +0000

Yesterday, I pretty much took a day off: my interaction with "the world" was limited to my twitter timeline. I took the opportunity to think about the last two months of SubMate.

Being an entrepreneur is not easy. Nothing new here. Sometimes, a potential partner is not as interested as you'd like. An investor is taking longer to answer than expected. And you don't yet have a million members ;)

So just always remember that…

Tons of people tell you they'd love to start a business. How many do? Not that many. You have balls and guts to try out. Congrats.
VCs reject up to 98% of opportunities (here). If you're already there, it's pretty damn cool.
Angels groups and super angels receive hundreds of funding requests every month. If you managed to get started, get some money, get some meetings, you're already amongst the happy few to get investors' attention.
You get things done. You move forward. Even though you think things are moving slowly, remember: nothing moves as fast as startup.
You work for yourself!! Isn't that the most fulfilling feeling ever? No boss except yourself. No deadlines except the one you set.
You might change the world. Finger crossed.
You might become millionaire, but you don't care.
Don't feel bad when taking a day off, or some well deserved vacation. You're on a 4 to 5 years marathon. You'll need all your strength.

So now, get back to your freaking business plan or code, and get things done!

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SubMate has launched!

Laurent Kretz — Thu, 06 May 2010 12:02:35 +0000

I'm pretty sure you've heard it already, but SubMate has launched! The public beta was announced last week on Thursday at TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam.
It was followed by an incredible weekend of buzz, with articles and interviews all over the place (NBC, BBC, Gotahmist, New York Post, Washington Post, Business Insider, …).

If you haven't tried it yet, you definitely should! SubMate is available in New York, Paris and London. And we'll soon be expanding to many other cities (vote here for your city!). It's really exciting and in less than a week, the overall feedback of the few thousand members (already!) is positive and strong.

I'll come back to the PR thing in a later post, as I have been overwhelmed with people asking us how we managed to have all this.

Thank you all for all your help - you know who you are :) - we couldn't have done it so far and so good without you. Now the real work begins :)

See you on SubMate!

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