I Don’t Have Time To Be Part of Your Community

Posted on June 21, 2009
Filed Under Business | 9 Comments

It seems like everyone these days wants to build an online community around their company or product. It’s a great idea because communities can provide feedback to let you know how your customer service is doing. They can get engaged early in your product development and help you build something better than you would have built otherwise. They can lower your customer support costs by helping each other through your community platform and capturing the most common questions and problems so that you can provide standard answers. This is all fantastic news for companies looking to do more with less, except for this one tiny barrier called time. There are only 168 hours in a week.

168 hours. Sounds like a lot of time doesn’t it? All you are asking is that I spend 20 minutes a week participating in your community. Everyone has 20 free minutes a week, right? If not, surely I will make 20 minutes for you if you give me something cool, like a higher ranking on your site if I participate, or maybe early access to some kind of new feature, or maybe even a discount on some of your stuff. Except, what you forget, is that I use a lot of different products and deal with a lot of different businesses in a week. Twenty minutes times 85 communities is not something I have time for.

So I don’t really have time to be part of a community around my local bank, and a bunch of local restaurants, and 5 non-profits whose founders are friends of mine (even though I support what they all do), and your LinkedIn group, and your my college alumni group on Facebook, and my high school alumni group on Facebook, and Digg, and Twitter, and the message boards for UK basketball (despite being a huge fan). It’s just that, at the end of the day, I need time to do things like work and sleep.

So if you want me to participate in your community, what can you do? I have time to do engage a little bit here and there. How can you get some of that time?

It has nothing to do with how passionate I am about your product. I love RainX and think it is one of the best products ever invented, but I have zero interest in chatting with other RainX lovers.

It has nothing to do with how important of a role you play in my life. Even if you are my financial adviser and my future retirement is in your hands, I don’t necessarily want to watch your webinar and chat with other people my age about their retirement goals.

The way to get me to participate is to provide me a better way to do the things that I was already trying to do without you. Your community has to save me time, not drain it. Your signal to noise ratio has to be extraordinary, because social media has made this a very noisy world.

So when you set up your Facebook page, or follow me on twitter, or launch a blog for your company so that you can “connect” with me, please don’t be offended if I don’t reciprocate. As George Costanza said, “it’s not you, it’s me”. I like your organization, and I plan to keep using your products, but I just don’t have time to join your community.

Entrepreneurship Is Not Sexy

Posted on June 19, 2009
Filed Under Business | 14 Comments

The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.” - Nolan Bushnell

Entrepreneurs are the celebrities of the business world. The business media loves to profile Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Rose, Evan Williams, and others the way the regular media stalks Brad Pitt and Lindsay Lohan. It is a profitable media formula because most people have the dream - the dream to work for themselves and also make few million dollars in the process. But, it’s a myth.

I know a lot of people who want to be entrepreneurs. Even people who will never take the plunge will tell me that they wish they had the composure to do it. From the outside looking in, it seems so sexy. But is isn’t.

Last Friday I was in Boston to visit David Friend, CEO of Carbonite (a six time software entrepreneur) and Dharmesh Shah, who is one of the investors in LifestreamBackup. I traveled with another entrepreneur friend of mine, and we stayed with his entrepreneurial friend who just had a major exit. During the weekend, I heard multiple stories of startups. There stories weren’t just about any startups, but successful ones. None of the stories were sexy.

Most of the people involved never intended to be entrepreneurs, it just sort of happened. They didn’t start with a grand idea, a patent, or even funding in many cases. Some of the businesses were in competitive spaces that you would have thought they were nuts to go into. Time after time after time, the story was not sexy. It was about grinding it out. It was a story of will. It was a story of perseverance. It was a story of doing tasks that, from the outside looking in, would seem boring, dry, and monotonous. Every single one of these stories followed that same story line.

I thought about that as I was planning my weekend, which will mostly be spent reading about landing page optimization and analytics. We have received lots of congratulations on the launch of Lifestreambackup, great feedback on the product, and have signed up quite a few early adopters. In some ways, it seems like we are pretty far along, but the truth is that we are just beginning. The strategy sessions, the product development brainstorming sessions, the planning… it was all a lot of fun. But that doesn’t build any business value. The business value comes when you take it to the customer and you get paid for providing a valuable product or service. The grind-out starts now, and it won’t be sexy. It will be tiring. The thing about being an entrepreneur though, is that for some sick and twisted reason, you like that part. Pouring through data, pitching your product, building partnerships, all the stuff that seems like boring work from the outside is actually pretty enjoyable in the right context.

The web has been a bad thing for entrepreneurs because too many people believe they can just build something and “throw it out there.” That somehow, magically, people come and then even if you don’t have a revenue model Google buys you because you had a cool idea. No one would ever say “let’s just build the hotel… put it out there and see what happens.” No one would ever say something like that about any non-web business. Web startups shouldn’t be any different.

Too many entrepreneurs stop after they build the product. They think that building products is what makes them an entrepreneur. But entrepreneurship is about building businesses, and the product is just one part of that.

People often tell me that they want to start their own business, they just need an idea. What they really need is to just start doing something. Entrepreneurship isn’t about wild launch parties and billion dollar IPOs before age 30. Those types of things are rare, as is most of the entrepreneurship that is portrayed in the media. Most entrepreneurs, and the stuff that they do, isn’t featured in magazines because it isn’t really sexy.

So, when you think about starting a business, don’t do it because you think it will be sexy. It probably won’t be. Instead, it will be about grinding it out for customers, constantly learning, making lots of mistakes, and some beating your head against a wall. It won’t be fast, and it won’t be easy, but in some strange way, you will probably love it.

Doing What Others Won’t Do

Posted on May 16, 2009
Filed Under Business | 6 Comments

Mark Cuban published a series of blog posts a few years ago about his own story of success. He recently republished them and as I re-read them something jumped out at me.

Fortunately, things turned out well for me with MicroSolutions. I sold it after 7 years and made enough money to take time off and have a whole lot of fun.

Back then I can remember vividly people telling me how lucky I was to sell my business at the right time.

Then when I took that money and started trading technology stocks that were in the areas that MIcroSolutions focused on. I remember vividly being told how lucky I was to have expertise in such a hot area, as technology stocks started to trade up.

Of course, no one wanted to comment on how lucky I was to spend time reading software manuals, or Cisco Router manuals, or sitting in my house testing and comparing new technologies, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

This is interesting to me because there are some people who believe the key to success is to avoid doing things you don’t like. There is actually a popular quote from Marcus Buckingham that says “The one thing you need to know about sustained individual success: Discover what you don’t like doing and stop doing it.“ But here we have Cuban saying that part of what made him successful is that he did things (like read boring manuals) that others were not willing to do. It doesn’t mean he hated his business… on the contrary, he loved it. But throughout his posts on this topic he continually harps on the idea that plenty of knowledge is out there, but that people don’t take advantage of it, and that his willingness to take advantage of it is what made him successful.

I’m just curious what some of you think about it.

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