Do More Faster

by Brad Feld

  Third, the biggest way that people suck at email is simply by not being concise and direct. We have all experienced situations where we had to slog through a ton of information before getting to the main point. For example, you search for a waffle recipe and have to go through pages of content about how the recipe was the person’s grandmother’s, how it was modified, and how long it took to perfect it. We just want the recipe! Keep to the point and get there quickly in your emails. Enough said.

  We asked Nicole Glaros of Techstars to share her tips on being efficient with email because she has to be efficient: Nicole is a partner at Techstars, works 12-hour days, speaks regularly at national conferences, travels extensively, is married, and has two youngish children. She also tries to find time for hiking, biking, skiing, and reading. Yet she keeps up on email! Here’s what Nicole said:

  I have to be efficient at email. At one point in my career I received 500 emails a day that were addressed to me, each requiring a response. So, it was either figure something out or spend tons of time each day clearing out my inbox only to start over again the next day.

  The subject line is the most important part of the email and I use that to engage the recipient immediately. A good rule of thumb is to summarize the whole email in about three to seven words. For instance, “intro” is a terrible subject line, but David Cohen/Techstars ↔ John Doe/Acme Corp is a great one. The subject line is not an afterthought, but something I think carefully about.

  I’m a big believer in the “three-sentence rule,” and try to have only three key ideas in each email. With cold calls especially, I generally tell people who I am, why I’m contacting them, and next steps. That’s it. The key is that the reader doesn’t have to scroll through a long email. No scrolling!

  For people I know well, I don’t spend time crafting the email, and sometimes don’t worry about spell-check and often reply with one-word answers (yes!). But if the email is going to anyone other than my friends and family, I spell-check and make sure the grammar is correct.

  I always put asks at the top of my emails, so someone doesn’t have to search to find any requests. Make it easy for others to help and respond to you.

  When someone wants me to introduce them to someone else, I ask them to create a new, forwardable email for me, so I don’t have to spend the time crafting context. Learn how to write a good forwardable email and you’ll be amazed at how many more people will help you!

  Like David said, I reply to important emails right away, even if my response is, “I just wanted to acknowledge your email—I’ll get back to you with my thoughts shortly.” Again, any quick response is better than a delayed response.

  I go through my inbox oldest to newest. If I can reply to an email in less than 30 seconds, I do it, then archive it to get it out of my inbox. I use tools like TextExpander to type common responses and I use Gmail shortcuts to speed up my process. If I can’t reply in less than 30 seconds, I star the message, but still archive it to get it out of my inbox. I can usually process most of my inbox quickly with this method.

  I have dedicated time to go back to my starred emails and reply thoughtfully once a day. And on Fridays, I have a big chunk of time dedicated to ensuring that I have no emails, starred or otherwise, allowing me to relax and spend time with my family on the weekends.

  I move big project emails out of my inbox and into my to-do list, and I use Evernote to save emails that I want to reference in the future.

  Email is one of the most important forms of communication and I think managing it is a skill that can be improved. So, I’m conscious of where I can improve and try to improve.

  Finally, I just stick with it. I follow my plan and now my approach to email is just a habit of how I work. And, I don’t have a mountain of emails to get through at night. I actually get to spend time with my family and do the things I love.

  David Cohen aiming for “inbox zero” on a summer Saturday at the Bunker.

  Chapter 41

  Use What’s Free

  Jason Seats

  Jason is Chief Investment Officer at Techstars and prior to that, a managing director of the Techstars Austin and Techstars Cloud in San Antonio. He founded Slicehost, an early cloud computing hosting company, acquired by Rackspace in 2008. Slicehost became the core for the initial Cloud Servers product and Jason continued at Rackspace until 2010 as VP of Software Development, managing the cloud engineering teams.

  When I started Slicehost in 2006 I was a bootstrapper to the core—not because I chose to be or because of any personality trait, but out of necessity. With no money, our choices were to build things ourselves, use what’s free, or build on top of open source. We ended up doing all three of those during the early buildout of our product. And we were able to provide service to over 15,000 customers with just eight people—mostly by using free tools.

  Today, at Techstars, we still get a lot of mileage out of free tools. For example, we use Google Sheets and especially the scripting you can do on top of that. It’s infinitely extensible and completely free. Of course, we use lots of Google apps, which are also free.

  I reached out to the founders on our Techstars internal founders’ forum to see what sorts of free tools they were using, since they are in the building stage. Predictably, a lot of their responses were focused on cloud-based solutions. Matt Walters, cofounder of GoChime (2011 Seattle Accelerator) uses a number of Docker products—CE AWS, Flow Proxy, and Flow Monitor to quickly find and deploy new services on their cloud. Mike Schroll (2010 Accelerator) tracks system, service, and customer metrics through Redash. Other founders mentioned HubSpot as excellent for CRM and marketing.

  Not everyone in your company will be writing code. As your company grows you’re likely to hire more people who are not software engineers or technical experts, but who need to be equally productive. All sorts of tools are free and can help your entire company. Here are a few that I’ve found useful.

  You’re probably already using LinkedIn, WordPress, YouTube, and Google apps, but here are some others that are free and valuable.

  Zoom—a Skype replacement

  What’sApp—a Messenger replacement

  Bluehost, Inmotion, or Dreamhost for website hosting—not free, but under $3 per month

  Google Keep—jot virtual sticky notes

  Wunderlist—to-do list and organizer

  TeamViewer—remotely connect to your own computer

  Trello—plan work on virtual bulletin board, and share with others

  Pocket—central storage for articles, video, content

  LastPass—secures all passwords for all websites

  G Suite—Google productivity apps that don’t take up Google Drive storage

  Buffer—create, schedule, and track all social media posts

  Join.me—simple virtual meeting organizer

  Foxit—view and edit PDF files

  Scanbot—scan and fax docs from your phone or tablet

  Pixir—edit images

  Pushbullet—custom notifications for anything

  WolframAlpha—an information tool, especially math- and science-based

  CloudConvert—convert any file to any format

  Balsamiq for screen prototyping

  DropBox for file storage and sharing

  Evernote for organizing tidbits of information

  GitHub for source code sharing

  Jing for screencasting

  SendGrid (Techstars 2009) for email delivery

  SnapABug (Techstars 2009) for chatting with customers who visit your website

  Twilio for audio conferencing and phone and SMS services

  Vanilla (Techstars 2009) for hosting a great forum for your community

  Voxer for walkie-talkie communication

  If you have a little money I’d recommend Office 365 since it’s basically the de facto business app, and why make things difficult for everyone else you deal with?

  The thing about free tools is, if you don’t like ‘em, you move on to the next
one. There’s no sunk cost. There’s no trying to make a round peg fit in a square hole. There are no search costs looking for the “best” tool. You don’t have to deliberate to make a decision, nor go to a committee for approval. There are no contracts and no negotiations. And, there’s no expense. Free tools can help you keep costs under control during the early startup growth of your company. Why pay for something when you can get an equivalent for free?

  So, in my experience, it’s not just the bootstrappers who should use what’s free—it’s every founder.

  Jason Seats introduces DigitalOcean at Demo Day.

  Chapter 42

  Be Tiny Until You Shouldn’t Be

  Jeffrey Powers

  Jeff Powers is a cofounder and CEO of Occipital, which created RedLaser computer vision software for smartphones (sold to eBay) and Structure Core Hardware for robots, drones, and AR/VR headsets. Occipital remains an independent company, and Jeff is still the CEO.

  In December 2008, the situation for Occipital was dire. We had a $10,000 deferred legal bill, dried-up personal bank accounts, and no revenue. Seven months earlier we had flown out to Boulder to join Techstars with little more than a prototype piece of software that could recognize the logos on paper receipts. In the first week, we realized that everybody thought the technology was cool, but otherwise hated the idea.

  We came up with a better idea that everyone loved. We were going to build a huge, multiplatform consumer application that used artificial intelligence to solve the world’s photo organization problems. There was a lot of buzz in our favor after we demonstrated an early prototype in September, but we failed to close funding for a number of reasons.

  This failure gave us one major asset: a big chip on our shoulder. We didn’t need anyone else’s money. We already had what we needed, which was a core competency in computer vision, a technology area that we believed had incredible intrinsic value. We were borderline arrogant about it—we hypothesized that we could just hack off a tiny chunk of this technology and turn it into revenue. We tested this, stayed small, and launched ClearCam on February 3, 2009. ClearCam was a $10 iPhone application that captured high-resolution photos with the aid of computer vision. ClearCam became popular and we immediately were cash flow–positive. Near-death averted and hypothesis reinforced.

  We got excited about going big again. But this time we wanted to become even bigger, which translated into technology that was an order of magnitude harder. That led to a near-merger with a group of seasoned entrepreneurs and another failed attempt at getting investors excited. The chip on our shoulder got bigger and led us to hack off a slightly larger chunk of technology than ClearCam. This turned into RedLaser, the first iPhone barcode scanner that really worked because it used computer vision to compensate for blur.

  The response to our new product blew us away and RedLaser claimed a position in the top five paid applications on the iPhone App Store for many months. Today, we’re more confident than ever about the technology area we have focused on, we have a growing reputation with consumers, and we have the money to stop worrying about the premature death of the company.

  By staying tiny and taking incrementally harder technology steps, we saw Occipital’s value increase dramatically. Now that we’ve found a formula that works, we are finally about to start growing our team from a stronger position than at any point in our history.

  Jeff and his Occipital cofounder, Vikas Reddy, are the epitome of bootstrap entrepreneurs. Every Techstars class seems to have one, and Occipital wins the bootstrapper of Techstars Boulder 2008 award. They hunkered down and with no financing reinvented themselves several times until they launched RedLaser, which became a runaway hit. As RedLaser took off, they had a set of interesting investment offers but no longer needed outside capital and chose not to take any of the offers.

  While Jeff and Vikas were on their way to creating an interesting mobile company, they wanted to work on a much bigger set of technical challenges than RedLaser in computer vision and augmented reality, their areas of passion and technical expertise. In their travels, they had a few inquiries for an acquisition of the company, but really only wanted to sell the RedLaser product, not the entire company. Fortunately, they found a buyer in eBay, which was interested in the RedLaser product without requiring Jeff and Vikas to stay involved long term. Financial terms were quickly reached, and eBay acquired RedLaser.

  Because of the sale of RedLaser, Occipital didn’t need to raise outside capital right away. Today, they have received over $25 million to help the company unleash a disruptive new wave of computing where software can operate over real-world spaces. Spatial computing, as Jeff and Vikas state, “is bigger than just us.”

  For the startup entrepreneur, one of the best lessons from Jeff and Vikas is not scaling too quickly. They stayed tiny and made sure they were “too small to fail” until they shouldn’t be, and it paid off big for them. This is where vision comes in and taking small steps to achieve a grand vision can pay off in the long run.

  DigitalOcean shows growth from tiny to HUGE at Techstars Demo Day in Boulder.

  Chapter 43

  Don’t Celebrate the Wrong Things

  Rob Johnson

  Rob was a cofounder of EventVue, a company that helped conference organizers by providing an online community for the event and driving new conference registrations. EventVue raised $500,000 from angel investors after completing Techstars in 2007 but ultimately shut down.

  All startups have too many available choices. It’s the fundamental challenge of a startup—what customers to choose, what problem to solve, and what flow to present to the user. Several methodologies have emerged, such as Eric Ries’s lean startup, to help guide you through the critical market and product decisions that drive you toward the promised land of hockey-stick growth. But these methodologies fail to directly address an absolutely crucial component of doing a startup: how to keep everyone excited about your company.

  In my firsthand experience with EventVue, and my experience watching other Techstars companies, I’ve come to understand that the magic to keeping and growing momentum in your startup is knowing what to celebrate. If you celebrate what matters when it matters, your team, fans, and investors will push you forward. If you celebrate the wrong things, you’ll wake up from the celebration no closer to success.

  If acknowledging and marking the accomplishment of the right things is so important, how do you know what to celebrate? It’s tempting to celebrate the one-time events, and early in EventVue’s life we did exactly that. We celebrated our first round of angel funding by hosting a funding party for all our investors, our team, and our friends. While it was an important milestone in our company’s life, we weren’t actually closer to being a significant company; we simply had more time to keep working. When we came back to work the day after our party we didn’t have any more customers, users, or revenue than the previous day. While we had rallied enthusiasm and attention in a public way, we didn’t have any actual progress to sustain it.

  If a first funding isn’t always the moment of actual great celebration, surely customer growth is, right? Again, you must be careful. At EventVue, there had always been several tech conferences that we would drool over one day signing as customers. That day finally came when we successfully closed one of these conferences. I went on a stage and announced it to an audience of current and future investors, took the team to dinner, and generally declared that we were now the market leader. We were proud of landing this prestigious customer and we were going to show it. What we failed to realize at the time was that we hadn’t actually learned to grow the business. We were celebrating getting one customer but didn’t know how to get the hundreds that we needed.

  In each case, our celebrations were us saying to our team, investors, and market, “Here’s what matters, and we’ve accomplished it!” This is implicit in any celebration and can pay huge dividends for you in energy, awareness, and momentum, if and only if you can actually continue to have p
rogress. Without continued, meaningful progress after celebrating, you’ve created a debt of energy, momentum, and credibility. Therefore, you must ensure that what you celebrate is actual progress toward a repeatable business.

  Of course, everyone loves (and needs) positive feedback. You should congratulate your team for a major code release but save the champagne for the first month you meet your weekly ship date each week. Ring the sales bell for the big close but save the party for the first consecutive quarters of making your targets.

  How you celebrate will largely determine your company’s culture. Make sure you celebrate the things that matter for the long haul.

  Startups are hard and many fail. Rob and his cofounder Josh Fraser gave EventVue a good shot, but ultimately decided to shut it down. They wrote a very public and thoughtful postmortem on their company blog announcing and explaining the decision while demonstrating that there is as much—and often more—to learn from failure than from success. The main points from their postmortem follow:

  We deeply believe in the power of failure to teach and help us learn. In fact, we understand with even more clarity now why there is so much advice for entrepreneurs—no one who has failed wants their mistakes repeated. In that spirit, we’re sharing publicly our EventVue postmortem.

  Over the past three years, we have tried various products and markets in the event industry and have not made a business with growth. The product that we used to raise our first round of funding was private social networks for events. During Techstars, we had an early nonpaying customer who deployed an EventVue social network for his conference of early adopter tech guys. We saw strong usage at this event and used those numbers to tell an investor story that led to our first angel round. At the time, we did not think about or understand the challenges of getting a lot of conference organizers to use EventVue. Internally, we had begun to think that we needed a stronger value prop for our customers than “we help your attendees meet more people” and so we pitched EventVue as a way to drive more attendees to events.