As I’m sure you’re aware I love stories. I believe that stories are the best way to excite and engage people no matter the relationship and definitely the best way to teach.
Today’s story is from Arthur Bart-Williams, a client whose startup involves a masterful story-telling platform.
Arthur’s story is proof that a great idea is worth pursuing—even when there is a six year lag between first thought and market testing.
From Arthur…
I founded Canogle in late 2010. The name—from the words, “can” and “ogle” and pronounced kan-og-uhl—means to look without restrictions; to be fully immersed in and a part of a particular world.
Canogle is a platform on which to tell a story.
People love stories; stories about the natural world and places they visit and stories about things, happenings and the brands they love.
They want curated stories, but they also want commentary from their peers and the Canogle platform provides both.
The idea first surfaced in 2004 when I was honeymooning on Maui and Jess, my wife, was using a paper map to navigate and to note interesting sites.
She said she was paying more attention to the map than to the things around her and I thought someone ought to come up with a way to know about sites as you pass them.
By the time we got home, I was excited enough to write the first version of a business plan and convince my brother to develop a prototype.
Then life happened. We had a daughter, I co-founded Combase, which was acquired by ViaNovus and then by Sword Group, fielded a few of life’s curve balls and had another daughter.
I was inspired again while watching a Silicon Valley technology show called “Press: Here” in mid-2010 and decided to find out if anybody cared about my idea.
I told one friend about the project, her eyes lit up and she introduced me to her friend who introduced me to the Executive Director of the Muir Heritage Land Trust, which became our first beta.
In case you haven’t read the profile of Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital, which closed a Series B investment in Instagram 72 hours before the Facebook acquisition, I’m going to share some of the smartest advice I’ve heard.
It’s just 7 words describing 3 actions, but those actions will save your company when it’s hottest or when events in the startup ecosystem serve up major distraction, like Instagram.
Like all Facebook-related news, the deal stirred up a media frenzy. Kushner was already back in his Nolita offices in Manhattan and left notes for each of his four teammates: “Heads Down”; “Stay Focused”; “Ignore the Noise.”
Sounds simple, but when stuff starts happening, whether internal or external, developers, marketers, sales people and everyone else can quickly develop severe cases of ADD.
Those seven words make a great mantra; one worth putting on the walls.
Just remember, Kushner’s advice won’t work unless it’s followed from the top down.
SUBMIT YOUR STORY (like this)
Be the Thursday feature – Entrepreneurs: [your company name]
Share the story of your startup today.
Send it along with your contact information and I’ll be in touch.
Questions? Email or call me at 360.335.8054 Pacific time.
Once again Groupon says it needs to revise its numbers and once again the revision is in a southerly direction (along with the stock price).
Investors, whether co-founders, friends, family, angels or VCs, let alone the public markets, do not look kindly on management that gets its numbers wrong.
They may excuse it the first time, but from then on every restatement becomes a serious blow to the management teams credibility and integrity, not to mention the overall effect on trust.
Perhaps Groupon drank its own Kool-Aid (a major no-no), since it acts as if its golden boy status excuses it from the mundane requirements, such as accurate sales reports, faced by other companies.
I understand that startups love to brag about their hyper growth and lack of bureaucracy, but when internal controls are counted as bureaucracy the company is headed for a fall.
On another note, if you are a small biz looking for a successful approach to daily deals that has the metrics in place to really measure the value and will work with you to maximize where you already are check out this 14 year old alternative, with references up the wazoo, called Constant Contact.
Option Sanity™ structures incentive stock grants
Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock process. It’s so easy a CEO can do it.
Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.”
Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.
Last week I invited entrepreneurs to share the story of their startup (see below) and the first response came from “family.”
Matt Weeks is an occasional contributor here and member of my company’s board; he’s co-founder and CEO of WorkersCount, an advisor to two startups, volunteers for several other organizations in his “spare time, is an involved dad, all around family guy and makes time for friends.
Someone asks me what I do. “I make workers count.” Here. Have a cookie. Smile.
WorkersCount is a direct-to-consumer mobile service that anonymously measures worker sentiment at the workplace. Using a simple mobile “check-in” experience, workers can safely express their sentiment, discover what’s happening at their company and track other companies. They can easily see what workers in their roles or with similar backgrounds are saying and experiencing. Using a simple set of radio buttons, workers check-in several times daily and respond to “How are you doing at work right now?” and one “Question of the day” (such as “my boss values my contributions” or “I am proud to tell friends where I work and what I do.”
WorkersCount is not a typical silicon valley start-up, and we’re fine with that. Most start-ups fail, and that is neither good nor bad, but just a statistic and a reality of life. Pack a lunch, bring extra water and a power bar. Because it’s a long run in the desert.
So we began with that vision in mind—that we had to be very different to survive. We knew that we would have to build it, launch it, develop traction and users before we would raise dollar 1. That’s the new reality in consumer software and services.
Who cares about this? We arrived at WorkersCount as a pivot from a much more complicated and difficult-to-scale concept. That was an important epiphany and a valuable lesson. Once you get your team and your concept into what we call the “information corridor” and begin the product and market validation process to find “product-market fit” you start down the path to success.
It was during these “getting-hit-over-the-head-lessons” (for Monty Python fans) that we became disabused of our preconceived notions, and landed on the real problem that needed solving.
I call this the “market invalidation process”—meaning that we needed to push ourselves to explain why our assumptions and the monetization and engagement models we had built were NOT invalid.
Most people do it backwards—they attempt to find data points that validate their preconceived notions. As a result they often get the answer they were looking for, instead of a new and more powerful answer. Even if it is “start over, this one won’t work.”
Great entrepreneurs don’t drink their own Kool Aid. Even if it looks great on a pitch deck for investors. Building a company and holding a team together through extreme weather is tough enough when everybody is being authentic and honest. It falls apart fast if everyone is agreeing to tell the same fantasy bed-time story.
Yes, your mom will love your idea (even if she doesn’t really understand it), and your dog will love it (especially if there is a treat involved). But real users only care about their own experience and their own problems. Not yours.
Through this painful process we found our market—where there was huge chaos, pre-existing spend by large entities, and an already connected and established set of communities of end users. We discovered that there was very little dependable and valid data, and even less information that end-users (of various types) could act-upon. The perfect storm for disruptive innovation.
Now all we had to do was build an engaging and meaningful mobile consumer experience and create habitual use, shake up some of the existing assumptions and build a trusted brand. On a shoestring budget. Ha! Welcome to start-up land.
Why are we doing this? We are a values-driven band of 5 workers with decades of work experience under our belts at large enterprises and startups alike. We have personally felt the pain of being a worker and of trying to be a great boss or supervisor. The experience is frustrating coming from both directions. We think we can fix some of that, and create a little bit of fun and lots of smiles along the way.
We are passionate about enabling workers to drive a better workplace. To discover where people like them are thriving and where they are struggling. To enable workers at all levels to validate that they are in the right job in the right role in the right company for them, now. And where they might look (with a little help from their friends at other companies) for their “next hop” now or sometime in the next 30 to 40- months (the average duration of the “gig” in a career these days).
We are making it fun, simple and easy, and we are rapidly introducing a fun game aspect and lots of cool rewards to build traffic and encourage people to share the experience. We want them to keep coming back to see new fun facts and get deeper vision into their own company and those of their friends. But it’s damn hard.
The pay-off is when our early beta users (please become one, by the way, at www.workerscount.com, and help us shape the features as they are brought live) say “where have you been all my work life? This is something that I’d use all the time!”“This is something my son/daughter/spouse/best friend needs to know about!” And when, as one beta user shared
“I would just be relieved to know that I’m having a bad day or a bad week, but that I’m really much better off here at this company with it’s imperfections, than people like me appear to be at those other two other companies I’ve been watching. Now I can relax and get on with my job knowing that, at least for now, I’m in the right place.”
For our friends not working or actively looking, not to worry. You are more than 8% of the workforce and we respect that. We are soon to launch insights and features for you, as well as for our college and grad school friends who want to get the same insights so that they can be smarter and more informed about where to consider for their “next hop.”
What about the “next hop?”
Are careers a series of “gigs” and short stints? We think that this may be the new reality. So even if you stay at the same company, your world will in all likelihood change radically every 30 to 40 months anyway. Having a handle in real time on what’s happening inside and outside of your company is a new type of power and knowledge that every worker can now have.
By the way, in case anyone is asking: we don’t work for employers or HR departments. This is a direct-to-consumer service, delivered on mobile, tablets and laptops.
Yes, we’re looking to scale rapidly when we exit beta, and with broad engagement we aim to change the way workers communicate with one another, with their companies (via our public indices and reports) and with friends at other companies.
WorkersCount. Your voice counts. Come along with us and join the community.
We will soon have cool schwag, tee shirts, hats, mugs and yummy cookies. Naturally. It’s a startup.
Thanks for asking what I do. “I make workers count.”
Thanks, Matt. I encourage all of you to sign up at WorkersCount, enjoy Personal Time, the official WorkersCount blog Matt writes, like them on Facebook and follow them @workerscount.
ATTENTION FOUNDERS, FRIENDS OF FOUNDERS AND STARTUP EMPLOYEES SUBMIT YOUR STORY
Be the Thursday feature – Entrepreneurs: [your company name]
Share the story of your startup (not a product pitch) along with your contact information.
I’ll be in touch.
Questions? Email or call me at 360.335.8054 Pacific time.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Pivots are the name of the game, but why would someone go from founding a commodities company in Dubai (that died when the economy crashed) to creating an e-commerce site offering merchandise from socially conscious startups supporting a wide variety of causes?
“What I was doing before was incredibly unfulfilling.”
It’s a more common sentiment than you might think.
Even when the exit is lucrative it may not be satisfying.
As someone once said to me, “My startup job made me rich, but it didn’t make me happy.”
Perhaps that’s why so many alumni from places like Microsoft and Google become socially responsible angels.
How fulfilling is your startup?
Option Sanity™ is fulfilling.
Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock allocation system. It’s so easy a CEO can do it.
Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.”
Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
A few weeks ago I had lunch with a potential client to get a feel for his MAP, i.e., management style, cultural vision and underlying beliefs, etc., while “Tony” got to know mine.
Afterwards I told him I didn’t believe we could form a productive relationship, wished him luck with his startup and we went our separate ways.
Yesterday I received an email from him regarding a senior level executive he was anxious to hire.
Tony said that the interviews seemed to go well, but when he made the offer it was turned down.
When he asked why the candidate responded in writing, below is the relevant paragraph.
The company culture can be moderately formal to moderately informal. I care most about professionalism and mutual respect. I do not tolerate a highly politically charged environment where I must spend a lot of time calculating what the impact of a recommendation or observation will have on alliances, potential career tracks and other selfish-focused issues for the people around me. I must be in a place where we are solidly aligned towards a clear set of goals, and those goals are not about personal advancement per-se, they are about people exceeding their own goals in pursuit of the company’s goals (which may shift with market conditions). I need to be in situations where there are bright, optimistic people, who are open to new ideas. There needs to be an environment and culture of accountability, and at the same time, one of try-fast, fail-fast, try again. I need to surround myself with people who are good at not “this is not possible” but rather “this is what needs to happen for this to be possible.”
Tony said he didn’t see anything in the email to account for the turndown and asked if I had any suggestions on what he could do to land the guy.
I’ve only been speechless a few times in my life and this was definitely one of them.
Option Sanity™ reflects culture.
Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock process. It’s so easy a CEO can do it.
Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.” Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.
The media loves to focus on young entrepreneurs and Internet startups, most of which offer little real value and solve few problems—other than how to acquire more stuff or a greater online reputation. (Sarcasm intended.)
However, there are exciting things happening that look to solve real problems using real science in totally innovative ways.
One is an effort, driven by scientists, that is pushing to end the scientific elitism fostered by exclusive periodicals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine. It is a movement towards a kind of “open source” science that is gaining traction within the scientific community itself. There’s been an explosion of open access archives on which a scientist can not only share research results, but also find research connections and collaborators they would normally never meet.
Dr. Michael Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet.
The DIY movement has made itself felt in many areas of life, but I find none more fascinating than its application to biological research and is another push towards more open scientific endeavor.
“I want to generate the sort of tools that make it easy to do DIYbio at home.” –Cathal Garvey, Cork, Ireland, inventor of the DremelFuge, a small centrifuge that can be fabricated by a 3-D printer, who offers the plans free of charge via the Net.
But the pièce de résistance comes from the National Science Foundation, which announced last summer the founding of the Innovation Corps, a program to turn the scientists of academia into entrepreneurs. This is not a fluff piece or election year propaganda, nor are they twenty-somethings locked in their dorm rooms coding all night. NSF recruited serial entrepreneur and now professor Steve Blank to teach the program—and a very tough program it is.
These weren’t 22-year olds who wanted to build a social shopping web site. Each of the teams selected by the NSF had a Principal Investigator – a research scientist who was a University professor; an Entrepreneurial Lead – a graduate student working in the Investigator’s lab; and a mentor from their local area who had business and/or domain expertise. And they were hard at work at some real science.
A link at SF Gate led me to When You Should Quit Being An Entrepreneur at Business Insider. It’s one of those articles with an interesting premise written by someone with no authority on the subject and little real-world experience. This was mentioned in the comments, which have more value than the article.
The most glaring misstatement was that shutting down your startup equaled failure.
Admitting that you are riding a dead horse does not equal failure.
It’s also stupid to say that a startup fails if it does anything other than go public.
Based on that Zappos was a failure, as are the thousands (millions?) of startups that grow moderately, if at all, but provide a decent living for the entrepreneur, not to mention jobs for others.
And there are those that choose to stay private, such as SAS and its $2.43 billion in sales.
Shutting down a startup doesn’t mean you quit being an entrepreneur; being an entrepreneur is as much a matter of right idea / right time / right place / right circumstances as it is of your MAP.
And entrepreneur is not the same as entrepreneurial, which you can be in any size company, and defaming corporate jobs as of less value and that by working in one you are a failure is pure garbage.
As so many of the comments pointed out, failure only happens when nothing is learned and even that isn’t failure if you consider Einstein’s comment that expecting different results from doing the same thing over and over is insanity, not failure.
In my book the only time you can actually fail is when you are dead and as long as you weren’t the cause you still didn’t fail.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
I met an interesting guy over the holiday.
“Chris” has a small startup in the financial services sector and is starting to gain traction.
He said it’s been an uphill battle and that he wishes he had spent the same energy doing something “socially responsible,” because it would be a lot more satisfying.
I’ve heard similar comments from other entrepreneurs and small biz owners.
Happily, this is one of those times it is possible to “have it all,” because all it takes is changing the way you look at the world.
Having a socially responsible business doesn’t require a focus on solving social ills and it certainly doesn’t mean forgoing profit—without profit your business won’t be around.
It does mean running your business in a responsible manner
pricing fairly, passing on savings whenever possible and never gouging
fair wages and other compensation
fair employee treatment (not playing favorites, etc.)
reducing your carbon footprint
community involvement and contributing whenever possible; and
None of this is rocket science and all of it makes good, profitable, business sense.
In fact, Chris and others who feel the pull to help fix the world would do well to read Richard Branson’s Screw Business As Usual to see how others are ‘doing well by doing good’.
Note: the unseen pause is between ‘screw’ and ‘business’, not between ‘business’ and ‘as’,
Option Sanity™ is socially responsible
Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock process—so easy a CEO can do it.
Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.” Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.
I read an article on naming a company or product, but it is the need to REname it that I want to focus on today.
Not when, why or what to rename it, but the founder resistance to doing so.
I work with both foreign and US entrepreneurs and although I’m not any kind of naming expert I’m often asked what I think of the product or company name (often one-in-the-same).
As a good wordsmith, I can spot many of the obvious problems described in the article, especially those that center on meaning, sound, spelling, etc. (I have no knowledge of legal stuff, other than knowing that domain availability is not sufficient.)
The resistance to any suggestion of name change is almost laughable—not just resistance, but umbrage—about the same reaction you would get if you comment unfavorably on a child’s name.
Yes, startups are often compared to babies and references to founders giving birth are common and no where is that more obvious than when discussing the name.
Falling in love with anything in your company, let alone a name, is never a wise move, since responding to your market is a big chunk of your success.
But strange as it seems, founders are more willing to pivot than they are to change a product name.
I founded Canogle in late 2010. The name—from the words, “can” and “ogle” and pronounced kan-og-uhl—means to look without restrictions; to be fully immersed in and a part of a particular world.
It’s just 7 words describing 3 actions, but those actions will save your company when it’s hottest or when events in the startup ecosystem serve up major distraction, like Instagram.
Last fall I commented on 
The media loves to focus on young entrepreneurs and Internet startups, most of which offer little real value and solve few problems—other than how to acquire more stuff or a greater online reputation. (Sarcasm intended.)
A link at SF Gate led me to 
I read an article on 
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