The best business advice often comes from
those entrepreneurs who have "been there and done that." Here are 4
tips for startup founders from startup founders:
Don't rush your product
to market.
"It’s natural
to be in a hurry to get product out the door, but take a breath first and really
gauge where you are. Slow down when it comes to key decisions, said Dan
Belcher, co-founder of Boston-based Stackdriver. Sometimes doing things too
early is just as bad than doing them too late.
Do all the jobs first.
Think of this as
the "Undercover Boss" paradigm. On that popular reality show, a CEO
puts on a disguise and goes down to join the workers to get their perspective
on things. Perhaps you should give this a try. "Founders should do every
role first before hiring someone to take it over. This helps me understand who
I’m hiring, what they should be good at, what they should be doing and how to
measure their success,” said David Mytton, founder of Server Density
which is a London-based provider of server monitoring services.
Be smart with your hiring.
This is solid
advice because hiring before there is a demand for your product is a good way
to run through all your working capital. That doesn't mean you shouldn't always
be on the prowl for new talent. “You should always be interviewing and always
be hiring regardless of your headcount plan,” says Stackdriver co-founder Izzy
Azeri. “It’s so hard to find good people and the founder is always the best
recruiter.”
Brace yourself for failure.
This doesn't mean
you should expect that your company is going to go under but there will be
times when things aren't going to work out like that should. That applies to
whether you're selling shoes or developing mobile phone apps. Dan Foody is the co-founder
of Cloze. They have created an app merges a user’s mail and social media
messages. "Apple restricts developers to at most 100 beta test devices for
any app. In today’s world that’s not nearly a large enough audience to refine
an app (especially a consumer-focused one),” Foody said. “You need hundreds to
thousands of beta testers. How can you avoid this pitfall? Build a web app
first so you can learn the hard lessons up front with a wide audience without
being restricted by platform and store limitations.”
