Lately, I have been reading the E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. If you start your company because you are tired of working for your boss, this book is for you.

Here are a few interesting things I’ve learned from the book so far.

There are three personalities within everyone bootstrapping a business: the entrepreneur (dreamer), the manager (the organizer) and the technician (the worker). The entrepreneur lives in the future, the manager in the past, and the technician the present. The entrepreneur is the one who wants control; the manager wants everything to be organized; and the technician just wants everyone to let him do his job. The technicians are the programmers, hair dresser, chef, pie baker and so on. The success of your small business depends on the balance of these three personalities. You need to see the opportunity, be organize and disciplined about your execution, and do the daily work in order to succeed.

If you start a business because you are tired of working for your boss, you’ve suffered from the entrepreneurial seizure: an epiphanic moment when you decide to take control of your life by starting your own business. What begins as a dream often ends in disaster. When you start your own business as a technician, you know how to do the technical work. After all, you are the one that makes everything happen. But you know little about the things around the business. You bury yourself at what you do, working 16 hours a day only to realize that you’ve started a job, not a business. Worse yet, the ‘business’ you started ended up becoming the worst job there is, one that you cannot be absent from! You are enslaved in the pursuit of freedom.

In order to become successful, you must change your perspective. Think like a entrepreneur, not a technician. An entrepreneur looks at a business in terms of opportunities. He tries to fulfill the needs of potential customers. A technician looks at a business as the work to be done. An entrepreneur has an integrated look. A technician is short-sighted by the work needed to be done and miss the big picture.

This book is written with a unique style. The points in the books are presented in dialogs between the author and a desperate bakery owner. The writing style reminds me of the Republic by Plato. It’s almost like reading a novel while learning profound lessons.

As I am reading it, I am struck by how important these lessons are. I highly recommend the book to anyone struggling with the daily grind of your startup life.

In his paper A Theory of Human Motivation, Abraham Maslow outlines how we think in relation to external and internal factors.

In the business world, there is a similar concept called the Customer Buying Hierarchy. The hierarchy is outlined as:

• Functionality
• Reliability
• Convenience
• Price

Interestingly, a few things come out of the theory.

1. 1. When it comes to buying, price is the last thing that a consumer cares about
2. 2. A product that is simple to use has more money earning potential
3. 3. The lowest grade product is one that has lots of features that nobody uses. It’s unreliable, hard to use and expensive.
4. 4. On the other hand, the ultimate product is free and does what the customers want in a reliable and easy to use manner.

What is an example of the ultimate product? Google search. In the online consumer world, none can compete with Google search in terms of functionality, reliability simplicity and price. Hence, if Google search is free, how can you possibly charge for your consumer product online?

This forces companies to focus on the online B2B market: creating values for other companies who are looking to buy what you offer. Examples of such companies are 37Signals, Campaign Manager, and Involver.

What are some innovative ways to charge consumers online? If more and more companies choose to ignore the consumer market, where will the innovation come from? Giant corporations only?

Free creates its own problems that stand in the way of innovation.

Restaurants are more than just a place to dine. It’s a social platform. Every day, social events are held in restaurants – couples go on dates, friends socialize, business people meet…

It’s time restaurant owners rethink how they approach their business and monetize on their social platform. Take a more active role in bringing customers together.

Do you have a promotion in your restaurant? Why not create events for your customers?

Host social events where the food is center stage. Target local photographers. Organize a photography competition event. Get them to take pictures of your new dish and submit to local newspapers or your website.

Do you have peak and off-peak hours? Create an event for the off-peak hours. Offer your customers an incentive to come back when your restaurant is less busy.

Create a sampling event for local food critics and bloggers. Get them to sample your new menu and blog about it.

Create food events. Call it the taste of Shanghai. Become the center of the food scene in your market segment.

Promotional events are great ways to do marketing in the restaurant industry. But where can you find such service? Check out my company TrAvid.

I hate remembering random facts. I remember back in my school days, I had a lot of trouble with them. It turns out that there are a few memory tricks that you can use to remember these arbitrary information. I will talk about two of them, and how they are related to data structures in computer science.

I will start by talking about linking. Linking is used to remember a sequence of words or facts. Here is how linking can be used:

Linking method has 3 steps:

1. Create your sequence: this is where you look at the sequence of words that you want to remember.
2. Symbolize each object in the list: this is where you form the mental image of the objects in step 1.
3. Create your link: this is where you link two adjacent objects together with an exaggerated or ridiculous image. The more ridiculous the image, the better. We tend to remember our emotions, and ridiculous images set off emotions.

If you are familiar with computer science, you can think of linking as the process of forming a linked list. For the uninitiated, linked list is a data structure used in computer science to store data.

Here are the analogous steps for forming a linked list:

1. You have a collection of objects (random words) to be stored in a linked list
2. You store an image in each node
3. You set up a pointer pointing to the next node (by forming an ridiculous image).

Interestingly, our brains store information similar to how computers do. In the next part, I will talk about another method – Pegging, and how it is related to hash table.

Process

Race to Running Software

• Get something real up and running quickly
  • Running software is real.
  • Once you’re there, you’ll be rewarded with a significantly more accurate perspective on how to proceed.
  • Stories, wireframes, even html mockups, are just approximations.

Rinse and Repeat

• Work in iterations
• Iterations lead to liberation

From Idea to Implementation

• Go from brainstorm to sketches to HTML to coding
  • Brainstorm
    • about big questions
  • Paper sketches
  • Create HTML screens
  • Code it

Avoid Preferences

• Decide the little details so your customers don’t have to
• Preferences are a way to avoid making tough decisions
  • Customers shouldn’t have to think about every nitty gritty detail
  • More options require more code: evil
• Make the call
  • Examples: sorting order, number of items to display on each page

“Done!”

• Decisions are temporary so make the call and move on
• Keep the momentum going
• Revise if necessary
• Execute, build momentum, and move on.
• To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

Test in the Wild

• Test your app via real world usage
• Do it quick
  1. Decide if it’s worth doing, and if so:
  2. Do it quick – not perfect. just do it.
  3. Save it. upload it. publish it
  4. See what people think

Shrink Your Time

• Break it down
  • Keep breaking down timeframes into smaller chunks.
  • Same goes to tasks
  • Smaller Tasks and Smaller Timelines are easier to manage

Useful SEO Tools

Here is a list of useful SEO tools from “Analytics 2010 – Driving the Data!” webinar I attended recently. Enjoy:

• Search-based Keyword Tool:

  • http://www.google.com/sktool/
  • How to use it: http://bit.ly/aksbkt

• Compete (competitive intelligence – US only):

  • http://www.compete.com

• Google Trends for Sites (competitive intelligence – WW):

  • http://trends.google.com/websites
  • How to use it: http://bit.ly/aksites

• Insights for Search (organic keyword and competitive research):

  • http://www.google.com/insights/search
  • How to use it: http://bit.ly/aksearch

• Micro & Macro Conversions

  • http://bit.ly/akmicro

• Bounce Rates & Analysis:

  • http://bit.ly/akbounce

• Webmaster Tools (For the search engine SEO perspective)

  • Bing: www.bing.com/webmaster
  • Google: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

• Social Media Analytics

  • Twitter Analytics: http://bit.ly/aktwtr
  • Blog Metrics: http://bit.ly/akblogm

• Six Key Performance Indicators To Die For:

  • http://bit.ly/akkpi

Outbound Marketing is Harder

• old marketing strategy

Inbound Marketing*

• book
• gives leverage
  • reach more people with few resources
  • scale better than outbound marketing
• budget vs brain
• http://hubspot.com/ROI

Reasons to do website redesign

• get found by more prospects
• convert more prospects
• “business websites are for lead generations”

3 Keys to a successful website

• Get found
• Convert
• Analyze
• “Websites should attract prospects.”
• Create great content
• Optimize that content for search
• Promote that content through social media

Content Drives Visitors

• fresh content good for SEO, people

What to publish

• blog
• podcast
• videos
• photos
• presentations
• ebooks
• news releases

Conversion

• Calls to action

Landing pages

• get the conversion
• registration form, tour page, etc
• uses
  • use for per-per-click ads
  • call to action on website homepage
  • links to email newsletters
  • after tradeshow or events

Metrics drive website redesign

• redesign without a measurable improvement is a waste of time
• know your current stats

Tips for Website Redisign

Audit your website, then protect your key assets: don’t touch these

• links
  • inbound links
  • powerful links (coming from established websites)
• keywords
• conversion tools (how to increase conversions)
  • Use Hubspot to find your assets

Redesign should focus on creating content

Blogging

• Create great content by blogging
• Blogging attracts more links
• Blogging attracts more visitors
• Blogging brings social media success

Redsign should focus on making it easy to run conversion experiments

• Track conversion rate on landing pages
• faster experiments = Better results
• What’s the cost of experimentation

Redsign should focus on easy to measure results

• Focus on 3-5 metrics
  • traffic
  • leads
  • sales
    • by channel or source
• Simple is better than complicated
• don’t measure everything

Feature Selection

Half, Not Half-Assed

• Build half a product, not a half-ass product
  • build half a product that kicks ass
  • Stick to what’s truly essential.
  • Take whatever you think your product should be and cut it in half.
  • Minimal Viable Product
  • Start off with a lean, smart app and let it gain traction.

It Just Doesn’t Matter

• Essentials only
• Answer to customer support questions: “It Just Doesn’t Matter”
• Leave out the nice-to have and not important features

Start With No

• Make features work hard to be implemented
• Each time you say yes to a feature, you’re adopting a child. (e.g. design, implementation, testing, etc.)
  • The secret to building half a product instead of a half-ass product is saying no
• Don’t be a yes-man
  • Feature request => No.
  • If keep hearing about it, implement.
  • “Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features” — Steve Jobs

Hidden Costs

• Expose the price of new features
  • be on the lookout for feature loops (i.e. features that lead to more features)
• For every new feature you need to…
  1. Say no.
  2. Force the feature to prove its value.
  3. If “no” again, end here. If “yes,” continue…
  4. Sketch the screen(s)/ui.
  5. Design the screen(s)/ui.
  6. Code it. 7-15. Test, tweak, test, tweak, test, tweak, test, tweak…
  7. Check to see if help text needs to be modified.
  8. Update the product tour (if necessary).
  9. Update the marketing copy (if necessary).
  10. Update the terms of service (if necessary).
  11. Check to see if any promises were broken.
  12. Check to see if pricing structure is affected.
  13. Launch.
  14. Hold breath.

Can You Handle It?

• Build something you can manage
  • Build products and offer services you can manage.
  • It’s easy to make promises. It’s much harder to keep them.
  • Consider: organizationally, strategically, and financially

Human Solutions

• Build software for general concepts and encourage people to create their own solutions
  • Give people just enough to solve their own problems their own way.
  • Example: Twitter

Forget Feature Requests

• Let your customers remind you what’s important
• How do you manage them? You don’t. Just read them and then throw them away.
• If you keep reading about a feature request, it’s time to consider implement it.

Hold the Mayo

• Ask people what they don’t want
  • Sometimes the biggest favor you can do for customers is to leave something out.
• Innovation Comes From Saying No.
• Filtering out the noise and get the signal

The paradox of choice: Why more is less, and less is more.

Nowadays, people are overwhelmed with information. This signal vs noise problem keeps showing up everywhere.

In web design, preferences settings is consider a bad thing to have. Good designers make those decisions for their users.

“Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.” – Steve Jobs

In consumer products, companies with fewer product types tend to do better. Consider GM vs BMW and Honda. More choices tend to confuse consumers. Another example is Mac vs PC.

In dating, because of the existence of online dating websites, people tend to become restless. Why settle when there are so many options out there to choose from?

A few years old, you have Reddit vs Digg. Reddit used to be my favorite website. The quality of stories used to be better with fewer categories. Now, I read hacker news. How long would it be before hacker news become like Reddit? Consider another example: Twitter usage. You can tell when someone is using Twitter as a marketing tool when he is following more than 200 people. Unless you have nothing to do, and reading tweets was your full time job, there is no way anyone could handle all that information overload. If you are following more than 200 people, you simply don’t read your Twitter tweets.

More is less. On the other hand, less is more. If I learned three words from more than one year of working on my startup TrAvid, this is it. Hence, the title of this blog.

Priorities

What’s the Big Idea?

• Explicitly define the one-point vision for your app
• Mantra

Ignore Details Early On

• Working in iterations from large to small.

It’s a Problem When It’s a Problem

• Make decisions just in time, when you have access to the real information you need.
• examples: scalability, features, servers

Hire the Right Customers

• Find the core market for your application and focus solely on them
• If you try to please everyone, you won’t please anyone
  • Know who your app is really intended for and focus on pleasing them.
• Polarize your customers

Scale Later

• You don’t have a scaling problem yet
• Create a great app and then worry about what to do once it’s wildly successful.

Make Opinionated Software

• Your app should take sides