Value yourself
As the new year starts we all set goals and have ambitions to make it a year to remember – as we should. But sometimes we need simple philosophical shifts too. Small shifts that can have a dramatic impact. One of mine is to ‘value myself appropriately’. As startup entrepreneurs an important part of the process is to be a bootstrapper, to maximise the limited resources we have to gain the momentum we need. This often leads us to doing it all ourselves. To be our own courier, printer, door knocker, community manager, clerk, mail room assistant…. anything and everything which is possible to do ourselves. And this is one of the greatest false economies in startup land. A simple rule to circumvent such folly is this:
Never do a task which can be outsourced at a lower hourly rate than what the open market would pay you for that hour.
While it’s easy to argue that we aren’t actually paying ourselves the market rate, it is certainly true that we should be creating the value of our market rate. And this is usually at least double the pay rate. Hence a person earning $100 per hour, should be generating at least $200 per hour for their organisation. Every hour wasted doing a menial task, has more impact than we actually think. Let’s take this simple example:
If we work 60 hours a week for 50 weeks for 2 years and end up with an equity stake valued at $3 million our hourly rate comes out at $500.
Which doesn’t leave many tasks that are worth doing ourselves. Startup blog says value yourself in 2013!
Would you like some pie?
There are 2 people who are offering you some pie.
Person 1:
They tell you that they are about to bake a pie. They then continue to tell you a story that they are terrific pie makers and that all of their experience in and around the kitchen (watching their parents bake) and eating lots of pie, gives them the right qualifications to make a really great tasting pie. They also tell you about their secret recipe, which has never been used before. They are certain it will make a far superior pie. They even show you the written recipe and tell you about the ingredients and methods.
After all this explaining they then ask if you’d like a taste, but before that, you will have to wait until they bake it. Then they ask you to give them some money to go build a kitchen and buy some ingredients. They want to bake these pies at great scale. They think they can sell many of these pies.
Person 2:
Has already baked a pie and offers you some. They have only baked this one small pie. But would like you to try it even though it is just a small sample. It smells nice, and it looks nice. You try some and it tastes lovely. You then engage in some conversation about their pie. How they baked it, the ingredients, and if they think they could replicate this pie and make it at scale. It turns into a really great discussion and evolves into a deeper immersion about the pie business. You’re both really inspired by each other and start planning some next steps.
Your startup is the pie. Which person would you invest in?
Simple & memorable
When I first met Sean Callanan for SportsGeekHQ he gave me a business card which I thought was pretty cool. An old footy trading card – with a player from my favourite team. As below:
What I love is how he did it. It’s a simple mashup. No printing costs – just a card with a sticker of his details on it. He carries with him a card from each team and during the conversation (without me realising) he asks which team I follow. When we said farewell he gave me the card – which I clearly took notice of. Not only was the player from my team, he was even from an old era – my one!
100,000 eyeballs for $8
If you want to know how to get your brand exposed to 100,000 people for $8 then we need look no further than what David did.
You may remember this post where David go his Jarritos soft drink van all branded up. Well, he took the next step in exposure and got to the AFL grand final early for a front row car park near the MCG for a measly $8. As far as I can tell it’s one of the greatest media investments of all time – there were 100,000 people in attendance. See photo journal below. Great startup bootstrapping David.
When we get big
There are many things we’ll implement when we get big enough. When our footprint is big enough to deserve the investment of the bigger, game changing idea. When we achieve X, we’ll implement Y.
Maybe we ought implement Y now and skip X altogether?
Salvage Bazaar
I’m really impressed with new Melbourne Startup www.salvagebazaar.com
What is it? Salvage Bazaar is an online marketplace where you can buy and sell recycled and scrap building materials.
I’m impressed for a few reasons:
- It’s a nice iteration for on line real estate market
- It has strong eco / environmental credentials
It’s a very nice addendum to the existing established real estate websites in most markets such as www.realestate.com.au in Australia.
It also has a strong play with the move towards gentrification of housing in inner city areas, as well as green / eco requirements emerging in the architecture scene.
But here’s the kicker: the founder Kim Pannan, has never done anything in the tech space before in her life, not even blogging let alone founding, designing and building her own commercial web business. The bit I love is that Kim was a graduate from Startup School. So a feel a bit like a proud uncle.
If you want to learn to what Kim did – who incidentally bootstrapped Salvage Bazaar on very little money, then you might want to grab 1 of the 2 seats left at the Melbourne Startup School.
Simple startup advice – Ben & Jerry’s
Today I was fortunate enough to meet Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Jerry is not only a smart guy, but a nice one too. I asked him one simple question for entrepreneurs and here’s what he had to say:
(More detailed insight will be the topic of subsequent blog entries)
International team & Time zone issue
I’ve always been an evangelist for international outsourcing. Especially as it pertains to digital work. I was asked recently if it has added complexity because of time zone differences. I had never consider the issue before, so I stopped to think about it for a while.
And this is my answer:
Having staff work on the other side of the world is usually an advantage. It feels like we have double the amount of business hours in a day. For example, when it is 5pm and something important comes up, I don’t have to wait for the next day for it to get started on. I can brief it out, and have it on my desktop by the next morning. For small startups getting things done quickly is what matters, and this process is a bit like inventing time.
Startup blog says: having a team in different time zones is rad.
Building a web community
I was asked during one of my live twitcam sessions the title of this blog entry, with the number 3 in front of it. What are 3 things needed to build a web community. This is the answer I came up with right on the spot.
- Participate
- Share
- Keep costs low
Participate: Use the service, website and community you are building. Be an avid user and of it yourself, even though you own it or built it. I use rentoid more than anyone and love it. You are not part of a community if you are a spectator. You need to be involved in it. Listen, create, help, assist, but not rule over. It’s not a kingdom or a principality, it’s a community, which means that all participants are equal regardless of their status. It doesn’t matter, if you are the customer or the creator of the community, everyone matters. It should be evident in the organic dynamics that all of the community are valued. everyone has something to offer and add that we can all benefit from.
Share: Share not because you expect something back. Share because we are all humans, and this is how humans roll. We are great at being there for each other a providing support. Doing stuff for the benefit of others for reasons that go beyond the financial. it was once said that the perfect day is the day you help someone who will never have the chance to repay you.
Keep costs low: Not for any economic reason, other than building things of incredible value like communities take time. If you build an expensive infrastructure for your community there will be too much financial pressure on making it work quickly, and communities don’t work like that. They are organic and take time to find a balance and set of values and systems. If you have too much cost associated with what you are doing, your behaviour will become non-community like. It just wont work.
Startup Blog says, Start building.
3 comments