When starting a company there are some unique elements that hold true for an early stage company that might not have been true in hiring in larger companies where you may have worked previously in your career. A clean slate means you get to choose who you hire and who you cofound your company with. These people will impact your company DNA for years to come.
- Think about your own personal values; you get to choose who you work with and it’s important you have people around you that espouse the same values you have. I use the test of “If you were in a car driving from Seattle to California would you want to be with this person for the whole trip, driving straight through with no stops?”
- Be careful about hiring friends and roommates. You may lose your best friend over a company where they start out as the VP of something but end up as the product manager of something else. Is your family relationship or personal friendship most important. Most people think they can make this work and some can but more can’t.
- It’s not all equal. Who had the idea for starting the company? Who’s taking the most risk? Who’s contributing intellectual property? Having 3 founders and each getting 1/3 of the ownership will often cause problems when the buck has to stop somewhere and when the investors want 1 person they can turn to. This means you will want to have buyback provisions on the equity so that when someone leaves they don’t own same amount as the people who stay and toil onwards.
- Having a B player in the seat (or worse, a C player) is far worse than having no one or having one of the A players do the function part-time along with other duties. Investors don’t expect all positions to be filled from the start, they know key openings might not be filled until more funds are raised.
- If someone starts asking about days off, benefits, sign-on bonuses, salary grades, etc. they’re probably not a startup person. If they ask how they can get more equity in exchange for reducing their cash compensation they are probably a startup type!
- Be wary of people coming from large companies. Do they need structure you don’t have? Do they have expectations for resources you don’t have nor will have any time soon?
- Be slow to hire and fast to fire. Every person makes a BIG DIFFERENCE both positively and negatively. A players can yield the work of 2-3 people while C players may suck resources away from your own productivity and that of the teams to yield ½ or ¾ people. Just because you can’t pay top dollar doesn’t mean you can’t attract or expect top talent.
- Every interview and every email with candidates is a marketing event for your company. How people who don’t get hired or who don’t accept your offer feel about your company can impact the “buzz” around town and how other candidates view your company.
- Treat candidates how you would want to be treated.
As a founder you will spend more time on hiring than you can possibly imagine. It’s that important!
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Janis Machala is the Founder and Managing Partner of Paladin Partners.
A lot of people are just starting to understand the Internet. I'm not talking about the low-tech mom, your accountant, or the car salesman across the street. Those people will never really understand how it works. I'm talking about techy-savvy engineers and entrepreneurs. They think they know everything because they understand HTTP, HTML and AJAX. But how many of those people can explain Google's PageRank? How many can explain how TechMeme works? How many know about Trackbacks and Pingbacks? Or even some basic SEO techniques. The reality is that most tech savvy people don't care much about it, but they should.
Here are the 5 biggest mistakes I see (quite often) on websites of brand new startups, and some very well established companies as well:
Mistake #1: Homepage Redirect
That is pretty bad in many levels. The smallest problem you have is that every time you redirect your homepage, it increases the time it takes for a user to see your site. If your user is on a low speed connection, like Dial-up or iPhone, they might get very annoyed.
But that is not the worst of homepage redirect. Let's suppose you redirect your homepage to "http://mydomain.com/beta/start.htm" . Now, everybody that bookmarks your site, add to del.icio.us or write a blog post about it, will point to that link. They will just copy and paste the link or use a Browser Toolbar button. This will affect you in two ways: First, you'll need to provide a redirect until the end of times, otherwise the web will be full of links that point nowhere on your site. Second, it might affect your PageRank on Google and on similar search engines.
Always serve the content on your Homepage and don't redirect the user.
Mistake #2: No RSS Feed
Just a tiny percentage of users get new content through feeds. But almost all sophisticated users and opinion makers use it, and in a future not so distant almost everybody will use it, knowingly or not. Sometimes you have just one chance to tell a user your site has a feed. He might never come back to your page, but if you have a feed, he can easily subscribe to it and be notified of new content.
You don't have to have a blog to have a feed. You don't even have to have anything on your feed. Get somebody that understands RSS to build you a simple XML file that you drop on your site (feed.xml) and add a link on your Homepage to it (notice this is a <LINK> link, not a <A> link). That is enough to get started.
If you didn't skip #1 above you should also know that a feed address is the Homepage address of your site with regards to syndication of content. Pick a name for your feed and never, ever rename it, otherwise people that subscribe to your feed will stop receiving content and they won't even know why.
Mistake #3: No mailing list
Did I say that just a tiny amount of people use RSS today? Oh yeah, I did. So why force an alien technology upon people that are interested in what you are doing to let them know of news about your site/company?
Do provide a way for users that are email-centric to get notification. At minimum, you can use Google Groups (when it works) or Yahoo Groups (w/ the annoying ads). Don't wait to create the list. Do it from the day 1, from the moment you buy the domain and put a single page up. Over time you'll be able to gather a few hundred email addresses that will be very valuable when you need your first beta (or alpha) testers.
Mistake #4: No contact information
Credibility comes in many forms. If people search a website and can't find a person's name, like a founder or CEO, or they can't find a real physical address or a real phone number, it all affects the perception of how legitimate the business is.
I recommend that you at least tell which city you're located and provide an email address for contact. A lot of partnerships and investment might get started just because the two sides are on the same city. It makes everything easier.
Mistake #5: No copyable/useful logo There was a time when you needed to be a member of the press and request a press kit to corporations to get screenshots, high resolution logos and other material. In a world where bloggers generate so much news, not having marketing material easily accessible on the site is just, well, stupid.
I see quite a few companies that make their logo part of the background of the page. For any ordinary user that wouldn't make any difference, but for somebody that needs your logo for a blog post, they will try to right-click to save and it won't work. So, they either skip this step, and you lose the opportunity to have your brand displayed on somebody else's blog, or they will do a screen capture and butcher your brand.
Do me a favor and go to
www.sampa.com and right-click the logo. Surprised?
The key lesson to take from these 5 tips is that some of the mistakes you make very early when you decide to setup a site for your startup can really be hard to fix later. There are too many things that can decrease your chances of success, the five above should not be on that list.
Ignite Seattle is August 8th and they are looking for some great speakers. The event is really fun and I was the speaker at the second instance of the event. This is a great opportunity to talk about something interesting to a couple hundred of smart geeks in town.
Check their blog for more info: http://www.igniteseattle.com/
I'll be there.
November, 2007
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