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My Ignite Talk: How I Set Out to Kill Email and Ended Up Building an Email Client

About a month ago, I was invited by Eric Ries (also an investor at ToutApp), to speak at Ignite – Lean Startup. I decided to talk a bit about the big irony in my life right now: how I spent nearly a year and a half working on a startup called Braintrust that was aiming to “kill Email” and then ended up doubling down on a different idea that is aiming to “evolve Email.”

Ignite – Lean Startup – Tout from DreamSimplicity on Vimeo.

The entire event was fantastic. Special Thanks goes out to Sarah Milstein for doing an awesome job picking the speakers, planning the entire event and running it remotely!

Overall, this was a fantastic experience. Being up there was a huge rush, and I met a ton of cool people at the event. Next time though, I think I’ll try to speak a little bit slower.

4 Comments

Categories: my thoughts.

By Tawheed
— June 17, 2011 at 2:09 pm

ToutApp receives an investment from 500Startups and joins the Summer Accelerator Program

I’m happy to announce that over the next 5 months, we’ll be taking our 1.2 year old New York company and product, ToutApp, to the next level here in California as part of Dave McClure’s 500Startups Accelerator program.

ToutApp is a New York Company

I had always thought ToutApp would be a New York company, in fact we still are a proud New York company. But a lot of my plans changed after I met Dave McClure at SXSW. Shortly after meeting him, he decided to invest, and he extended an invitation to come to 500Startups for the Summer so that we can work together to make “ToutApp go BOOM.” Who can resist an offer like that?

“All Systems GO.”

 

Moving to California

And so, about a month ago, I packed up my bags, said goodbye to my wife, my family and my close friends and headed out West (again). It was a little rocky at first, but after 2 hotel beds, 1 miserably failed CraigsList sublet experience, 1 AirBnB bed, and 1 couch, and about 1,000 miles on my rented Toyota Yaris, I finally set up an apartment, moved into the 500 office, closed out my Advisory Round, and started to build out my Team.

Fortunately, I was even able to convince Derek (our new lead engineer) to move out here as well. You can read more about his journey on his recent blog post. And once we got our space set up, we then convinced our iPhone developer, Andrew, to “visit” for a week or so. He ended up buying a one-way-ticket.

Thoughts on 500Startups so far

Just from the first 2 weeks of the Accelerator, I can already see how a) these 5 months are totally going to fly by, b) what an amazing impact this accelerator program is going to have not only on my personal growth but ToutApp’s business and product and c) how Dave seems to scour all ends of this planet to source some of the most amazing Entrepreneurs I’ve ever met in my life.

Some snapshots from the Journey so far:

“From UX Bootcamp, my thoughts on how I conceptualize the E-Mail ecosystem”

 

“Someone snuck this picture of me as I was in deep thought thinking about how to evolve E-Mail”

 

“We eat our own Dog Food”

 

“Notes from a UX Review”

 

We’re excited. We’re scared. We’re now heads down building product so we can help people communicate better using E-Mail.

1 Comment

Categories: my thoughts.

By Tawheed
— June 9, 2011 at 1:57 pm

How I Hired Employee #1 for Tout

About two weeks ago, I hired Derek Hopper, Employee #1 for Tout. It was an intense moment for me and a big decision. There are a lot of questions that start swimming through your head as you start to make a hire (especially when it is your first hire). So in true form to this blog, I sat down and wrote down some key principles that would help drive my decision making process. These principles were based on my own experience in hiring in my previous jobs and from what I’ve read online.

The Cliff-Notes-Version

For the anxious, here is a summary of the key principles I defined. You can read the rest of this (lengthy) article to read about the thought process and thinking behind each of them.

  1. Only hire for the core of your business
  2. Don’t hire for Skills, focus on VALUES and ABILITIES
  3. Incentivize for all senses (i.e. its not just about the paycheck or the equity)

Why should you hire someone?

It may seem like an obvious decision to a lot of startup Entrepreneurs to just go hire people, but I think it is important to recognize that there are a number of different ways to go about staffing. With the number of service businesses that exist today, it is possible to literally outsource every single business function in your company — everything from design, development, marketing to the obvious stuff like legal and accounting.

While for most technology startups it is a no-brainer to have an internal development team, I think its important for you as a startup Entrepreneur to stop and think through which aspects of your businesses should be “core” and which aspects you can get away with contracting or even sourcing from service companies.

With this context — I established my first Principle – Principle #1 – Only hire for your core.

For Tout, our unique advantage, our secret sauce if you will, comes from our ability to create clever user experiences and rapidly connect into various technology platforms to create the best e-mail client possible. This makes Engineering and User Experience the core of our company — and directly defines that types of people we should be bringing on initially.

And so, I set a short term of goal of hiring a Hacker and a Community Manager as the first two key hires for Tout.

What kind of person should you hire?

As a Technical Founder (who can also put on a sport jacket and do business development) — I absolutely CRINGE when I meet potential hires and they tell me “I only do front-end.” What do you mean you only do front-end? How did you draw that line and why did you do it?

When it comes to sifting and sorting through people, one of the biggest lessons I learned (from my last job) is to be able to tell the difference between a given person’s Values, Skills and Abilities.

Most companies focus on Skills when hiring, they focus on “C# developer with 3 years experience” or “CSS, XHTML and Javascript” and even resumes that read “PHP 4 LiFE, I’d never mess with Ruby.”

Let’s think about that for a second. Does that really make sense? The reality of the situation is that “Best Practices” come and go, Frameworks rise and die, and most importantly, Skills can easily be taught — PROVIDING — the person has the right Values and Abilities.

So, let’s establish our second Principle — Principle #2 — Don’t hire for Skills, focus on Values and Abilities.

Tout happens to be built on Ruby on Rails today. It is a platform that I have learned to love, but in the past 12 months, I’ve also built stuff on Python, PHP, .NET and even C++. If we are going to be building in a technology startup — you simply can’t afford to blindly support a single platform — you have to be open to different technologies, different languages — you essentially need to build an engineering team that is willing to be open minded and pick the right tool for the right job.

And so, as I defined who to hire, I definitely didn’t want the “Front End ninja” nor the “Backend rockstar” — I wanted the person that would pick the right tool for the job, and if he never used it, would figure out how to use it. This meant that the person had to have the abilities of a natural Engineer, a Hacker or a Tinkerer if you will — and it also had to be someone who values learning and trying new things.

A Values match is the most important thing

I think entire books should be written on how Values are the single most important thing when picking people to join your company. Skills can be taught, Abilities can be developed — but Values never change — it is the core of a person and it is what makes up that je ne sais quoi of successful teams.

There are different ways to identify a Values match between two people — whether it is the simple litmus test of “Would I want to grab a beer with the guy every week?” or something more involved like a detailed categorization of what you value in life (see my blog post about how I defined my own values) — it is probably the most important thing you need to figure out about yourself and your company.

Inspiration, Compensation and Incentivization

People are built differently. This means that what incentivizes and motivates me as a person can and will be very different from others. In addition to that, once you start to consider other factors such as location, married vs. single, kids, experience, etc — you start to realize that a blanket stock equity package with a base salary is neither fair nor enticing to every person.

With this realization, I established Principle #3 – Incentivize for all senses.

Having known Derek for a while, I knew he wanted to explore beyond his day job and really wanted to learn more about building great technology in a startup environment. So, when I initially approached him, my entire sell to him was the idea of joining Tout’s journey to build a great product. It was the opportunity to build a beautiful user experience, figure out unique new ways to integrate into APIs, and most importantly, really transform how people communicate using e-mail. Only after he was bought into the vision for the company and the ideas around how we were going to actualize that vision, did we talk details about salary and equity.

Both Derek and I are happy with the package we put together for him to join Tout and I’m really excited about the tremendous impact he is going to make on the product. However, I’m very cognizant about the fact that the next person I hire, which will most likely be a Community Manager, will require a completely different set of incentives and value propositions to be inspired to join the team. So remember, appeal to all the senses when you’re working to inspire someone to join your team, it is almost never about the money.

In Conclusion

Those are the three key principles I applied as I thought through and made the decision to make the first hire for Tout. This was not my first time hiring, nor was it the first time interviewing, but this certainly was the first time I literally built something and created a job.

Seasoned Entrepreneurs always talk about the emotional rollercoaster our journeys bring — emotions that take you to the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Although I conceptually knew about these highs and lows, I think I came to truly realize how much of a high Entrepreneurship can bring — its no wonder so many serial Entrepreneurs exist in this world.

Calling someone up, looking him in the eye, and telling him to quit his steady and secure day job to join a startup was one of the highest highs I have ever experienced as an Entrepreneur or as a Human Being — ever. As I reflected on my train ride home, I thought to myself — “I created a job today.” — it felt amazing.

9 Comments

Categories: entrepreneurship, Principles.

By Tawheed
— May 5, 2011 at 12:03 pm

Tout – How My Weekend Project Turned into a Real Lean Startup

Its been about 3-full months since I made the conscious decision to ramp down on my Consulting business, my other products, and focus full-time on Tout. In my previous two blog entries, I explained my thinking process behind why I decided to double down on Tout (through a full 2010 year-end reflection), and also why I decided to switch from being a bootstrapper to a funded startup.

This blog entry is more of a pause and reflect on where I am today and how Tout went from being just an idea to a real lean startup (yes, this entry is also being submitted to the Lean Startup Challenge). Check out AppSumo for more details! And let them know that Tout should win their Lean Startup Challenge.

How Tout Began

It was around April of 2010, I was slowly ramping down on my day-job at the Hedge Fund, and I had already started to work on my then-main startup idea: Braintrust. I was waking up at 6am in the morning, working on it, and then heading to work around 8:30. I’d then put in a full work day, come back, have dinner, and then work on it from about 7pm to midnight.

I kept struggling with Braintrust. It was a solution in search of a problem in an already crowded market. It was also the first product I was building out on my own, so I was not only re-learning how to build a product from scratch, I was also learning Ruby on Rails, learning how to design, and learning how to market.

At a time like that, I needed all the leverage I could get. And the place I needed the most leverage was marketing — I needed a better way to reach out to potential users, tech influencers, bloggers, and actual people that signed up for the product. This is how Tout was born.

Frustrated from working on the same codebase for months, and frustrated with having to write the same e-mails over and over, I decided to spend one fine Saturday morning working on something brand new. Something that would solve my own problem of repetitive emails, and more importantly a problem that didn’t seem to have an obvious solution.

Thanks to common services in the crowd, I built Tout over a weekend. Instead of spending time on setting up servers, and deployments, I just used Heroku. Instead of setting up e-mail servers for sending Tout E-Mails, I just used Sendgrid. And seeing as how I thought I couldn’t possibly the only person trying to tout stuff, I decided to even put a Premium Plan at $30/month. I didn’t bother building a billing system, I just used Chargify.

I kind of amazed myself about how much I was able to do over the course of a weekend. I blogged about the whole experience: How I took my web-app to market in 3-days thanks to common services in the cloud.

Tout After the First 30-Days

Needless to say, I kept things Lean. To be honest, I didn’t keep things lean because I wanted to run a lean startup, I kept things lean because I didn’t have much time to devote to it. Braintrust and my day job was still my primary point of focus.

After 30-days of “launching” Tout, I posted another blog entry about the updates. Here were the highlights:

  1. Tout got about 334 users within the first 30-days of launch.
  2. It processed about 1,600 e-mails, again within the first 30-days
  3. About 10 people signed up for the Premium plan

I just couldn’t ignore this kind of activity. So keeping with true lean methodology, I kept e-mailing and calling up customers and put in my 20% time to iterate over the product. During those first 30-days, I made some key changes:

  1. Customers started complaining about slowness. At the time, Tout had been running on the 1-free Dyno that Heroku gives. I quickly turned up the Dynos to 2, and made the e-mail delivery offloaded to a separate Worker. Still still kept costs less than about $150, which I was making in revenues already.
  2. A lot of people complained about the $30 price-tag. So instead of lowering the price, I focused on adding more value. I figured out from customers that they were not always working solo — they were often part of a team. So just to try things out, I added a “Share Templates” feature and allowed Premium users to Share Templates and Analytics with up to 5 people in the Team (the current team plan is priced differently).

Tout 2.0

Although I stopped developing Tout for a few months during the middle of 2010 (I was putting in my final push at my day job, and was working through consulting projects), I never stopped talking to Tout customers.

I “got out of the building” and continued to talk to customers. I took notes, looked for patterns, and finally by November of 2010, I decided that Tout deserved some real love and there was clearly something there.

I took all the notes from the field and created Tout 2.0. I didn’t wait to do some big re-launch, or any crazy hooplah though — I just called it Tout 2.0, but in reality, I launched and re-vamped each part of the site and launched new features over the span of November, December, January and February. And through each of those months, as I launched new features and tweaked the product, I constantly monitored my metrics and course corrected along the way.

Today, its funny to see the original screenshots of Tout. It was pretty barebones, but people still used it, because it solved a real problem. Its also funny to see how much the product has matured. And yet, the product is still incredibly simple — because there isn’t a single thing there that a customer didn’t ask for or I didn’t perceive the customer would need.

Connecting the dots

I was always of the feeling that I basically stumbled onto Tout. I went through a lot of explicit thought processes for my other experiments in 2010 (e.g. Braintrust and Main Street). Tout came naturally. I kind of just discovered it. And I kept going back to it. And the more I dug into it, the more I realized was there.

During a recent conversation with a new friend, I was telling him how sometimes I still worry about sharing my product ideas around Tout openly. What if an extremely well funded startup comes after me? Maybe I need to hire like crazy and move really fast…

He responded…. “You don’t get it yet do you…. YOU are Tout. Everything you’ve done over the past 10 years has lead you to Tout. Your time building a shared calendaring service to help people communicate better. Your time at Plaxo where you learned the ins-and-outs of e-mail communication, e-mail plugins, and user behaviors, and even your time at the Hedge Fund where you helped Traders communicate faster for completing trades… all of those experiences… all of that time… you were thinking about the problem. And now you’re working on the solution. No one can come after you.”

It reminds me of my favorite Steve Jobs speech: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

And because of this, I’m moving in the same careful and calculated way I’ve done so far and the way I know how to. I’m talking to customers, I’m curating what I put into the product. I’m building a team. I’m keeping it lean. This is the same reason why I’m raising a conservative amount. This is how I know to win.

Next Steps

In little less than a year, that is how a simple weekend project got enough traction for me to focus on it full-time and place a huge bet on it. I can’t say it happened over night. And needless to say, we’re not close to being “done.” That’s why I keep this picture in my office. It reminds me that it may seem sometimes life is a long empty road, but it almost always leads to the place you want to go. As an Entrepreneur, you just have to have a little bit of faith, and a bit of plan.

If there is one take-away I want you to have from this blog post, its that great ideas are almost never manufactured. Great ideas are the things that happen in between all the stuff you’re doing to manufacture your great idea. (I think I read this somewhere in the past week, but I can’t find the link).

Are you tired of re-writing the same e-mails? Use Tout. http://toutapp.com.

10 Comments

Categories: my thoughts.

By Tawheed
— March 23, 2011 at 4:48 pm

Why I’m switching from being a bootstrapper to a funded startup

I’ve decided to stop being a bootstrapper and seek angel funding. This entry talks about why.

To set the context: Last year, I quit my day job and decided to experiment with a number of different product ideas. In the beginning of 2011, I reflected on the year of experimentation and shared my game plan for the year in a blog entry titled: I quit my job. Shipped 2 products. Launched a Services business with clients. Now what!?

As I said in my gameplan, there were a number of hard decisions I made in the beginning of the year. The most important decision being the one to focus on Tout and double down on it; even though my other products showed promise as well.

The Known Problems in my 2011 Plan

As I set the goal to build Tout to a revenue generating product, I saw two key impediments to actually achieving my goal:

  • I was still relying on my Consulting business to pay my bills
  • I am a one-man team spending 50% of my time (sometimes less) on building Tout

I flagged these as impediments but I was still willing to work through these without any drastic changes since Tout 2.0 had just launched and it was still more of a hunch that it would make a significant impact in increasing user retention, user growth and revenues. Additionally, I still had consulting contracts that would go on for at-least another two  months that I wanted to see through to the end anyway. I got these customers through my relationships, so the last thing I wanted to do was screw someone over.

Here’s whats happened in 2011 so far

  • Tout passed 1,000 users
  • We’re close to processing our 10,000th email (note that Tout doesn’t let you mass-email — so that makes 10,000 times that an actual person pressed the Send button on Tout)
  • I’m starting to see regular upgrades to Premium — which means some real revenues for Tout
  • I’m staring to see the marketing strategies (which were mere theories before) actually working
  • I’m starting to see beyond the current version and well into the future where Tout can actually EVOLVE how we use email
  • I’m working 80+ hours a week juggling my time between Consulting and Tout

Here’s what I’ve learned so far

  • I’ve come to the realization that Consulting is a treadmill. There is very rarely a natural stopping point or transition — especially when it comes to 1-man teams. 37Signals and Harvest may have transitioned but thats about 2 companies out of the ~20 consulting companies and independent consultants that I’ve talked to or read up on.
  • I had a ton of reluctance to even think about funding when I was working with theoretical ideas. But as soon as I started to see a product “click” — as soon as I started to deal with support requests with happy customers wanting more, and as soon as I started to see settlement reports in my Inbox…. my entire perspective changed. As soon as I saw traction, all of a sudden, I had ZERO issues looking an investor in the eye and asking for money — because all of a sudden, I was able to map out in my head how I’d not only get him 3x his money in a few years, that I’d also achieve my dream of building my own company and changing how the world communicates.

Ever since I was in 3rd grade, I knew that I wanted my own company. I never wanted to run a huge conglomerate or anything. I wanted a small outfit of about 10 extremely talented people that worked on a few products that truly changed the world. Most importantly, I wanted to be working on my vision and my ideas. Thats the vision I had since the 3rd grade, and part of that was the idea that I’d build up my business naturally with no one else’s help.

Now, I don’t know where I got the whole idea of doing it all myself — but as I grew older, as I worked in actual teams, as I managed people, and as I saw how relationships were just as important as ideas, and how a small braintrust of people can actually accomplish a hell of a lot more than one person or a large team, I slowly and begrudgingly started to morph my views of how I’d build my empire.

In Conclusion

Call it growing up. Call it turning 28. Call it getting wiser. I don’t care what you call it but what it comes down to is the fact that today, I’m ready. I’m ready to focus 100% of my time on Tout. I’m ready to build and evolve email through Tout. I’m ready to look an angel investor in eye and tell him or her: put your trust in me and my company, here is why we think we can deliver.

If you are an angel investor and would like to talk, just shoot me an email: tk@braintrust.co. I will immediately respond with a 2-pager PDF with an overview of myself and Tout, and then I will work with you to set up a time to talk/meet.

My goal is to close out this funding round before SXSW starts, so that I can focus my time there on evangelizing Tout and meeting awesome people to help build by team.

9 Comments

Categories: entrepreneurship, my thoughts, Principles, self improvement.

By Tawheed
— February 28, 2011 at 1:49 am

Tuesdays work best

Through December and January, I’ve been meeting up with a ton of amazing people from the NYC startup scene lately. Over coffee, lunch, dinner and drinks, we talk about our respective projects, our beliefs, about how NYC feels just-so-different these days, and most importantly, we work out who we can connect from our respective networks to help each other out. I’ve even started to experiment with holding Office Hours through OHours.org (an awesome idea/service created by Nate Westheimer).

This has been an excellent way to not only make new friends in the industry, but also to get new customers and feedback for Tout (a product that Entrepreneurs actually find very useful).

However, at the same time, its been wreaking havoc on my schedule.

Meetups can kill your productivity

All these little lunches, dinners and coffee meetups has been breaking my primary principle of not having anchors in my schedule, and pretty much been wreaking havoc on my creative process.

I learned last year that if I’m going to have a productive work day packed with creative output, I need to have little to no anchors in my schedule. This means no conference calls, appointments, or meetings. I found that all it takes is a simple 2pm conference call, and I end up counting down to 2pm for the entire morning and thinking about what I can quickly get done before than rather than embarking on solving a tough and meaty problem regardless of how long it will take.

I believe that if you’re going to be truly productive, and produce something actually creative, you need to eliminate any reason for you to be “counting down”  – in fact, you need to be in an environment where you’re just not thinking about time. You start when you start, and you stop working when the job is done. Period.

Moving all meetings to Tuesdays

And so, I’ve instituted a new policy called “Tuesdays work best.” Anytime I’m coordinating a meetup with someone, I always start with Tuesdays work best. For the month of January, I’ve been cramming all of my meetings, Skype calls, coffee/dinner/lunch meetups into action filled Tuesdays.

If this Tuesday is booked, that’s too bad, the next time we can get together is next Tuesday.

For all practical purposes, Tuesday is just the arbitrary day I picked. It just happens to work best for me because I can use Monday to catch up on everything that happened over the weekend, and then I can use Wed-Friday to get sheer amounts of work done feeding off the energy and inspiration I got from meeting all these interesting people on Tuesday.

In Conclusion

So far, this experiment has given amazing results. Not only is it easier to schedule, there are way less things for me to have to worry about re:travel, context switching, getting into the mood for meeting people, etc.

Do you have a  trick of scheduling? Do you have anchors on your schedule? Reflect on that and get back to me.

4 Comments

Categories: entrepreneurship, my thoughts, self improvement.

By Tawheed
— January 17, 2011 at 1:57 am

I quit my job. Shipped 2 products. Launched a Services business with clients. Now what!?

My plans for 2011 has been marinating in my mind for the last few weeks. Staying true to the spirit of this blog, I wrote out this blog entry on my Game Plan for 2011 both to share my thoughts and to aide in my own thinking process.

Note: Originally, I was going to do this as a 2-part post. I’ve changed my mind and consolidated it into one.

Major milestones of 2010:

  1. I quit my day job through a principled decision making process
    Blog: How I made a principled decision to quit my six figure job
  2. Launched Braintrust, a collaboration tool for small tight-knit groups of people
    Blog: Introducing Braintrust, my bootstrapped lean startup
  3. Launched Tout, a web-app that helps you spread your message faster
    Blog: How I took my web-app to market in 3 days thanks to common services in the cloud
  4. Established my umbrella company: Braintrust & Co. - my NYC-based design firm that believes in actuating change that leaves the world better than we found it, and does so by building awesome technology products. I also made the conscious decision to stay bootstrapped, and do consulting to pay the bills.
    Blog:  I want to be Bootstrapped, Profitable and Proud
    Link: Learn more about my consulting services
  5. Started a Single Founder Mastermind Group — which eventually failed but connected me to some of the most amazing people including Andrew Wicklander from Ideal Project Group.
    Blog: I’m starting a Single Founder Mastermind Group

  6. Built Main Street during NYC Startup Weekend, pitched it, and won a couple of prizes.

  7. Launched Tout 2.0 – after nearly 700 users and 7,000 emails processed through the system.
  8. Helped build and improve the user experience for NotaryCRM – it was a pleasure working with Paul Singh on this. I learned a tremendous amount about customer development and SEO.
  9. Did some more consulting projects: Helped prototype and build a series of Internet Applications that will be debuting at a major industry show in Las Vegas in early 2011. Also, helped build a creative way to evaluate and view people’s competencies and capabilities for my previous employer

2010 year-end reflections

2010 proved to be an incredibly transformational year for me. I started the year with a standard Technologist job, and ended the year with owning my own company, a consulting business, and a couple of products in the market with real customers. Some days, I don’t even recognize my life and I have to remind myself that “this is not a movie…I’m living this!”

Concretely speaking, 2010 was a year of rapid prototyping.

  1. My wife and I moved twice and lived in three different places this year. We finally feel at home at our new place on the UWS.
  2. I experimented with a home-office, working out of coffee shops, and finally settled into to getting some office space down in SoHo with a couple of really close friends.
  3. I took on a wide variety of consulting projects and experimented with hourly rates vs. retainers, project-based work vs. longer term arrangements, and enterprise clients vs. individuals.
  4. I churned out rapid iterations of features and concepts for both Braintrust and Tout, and constantly measured metrics and talked to customers to gauge which idea/concept fit.

By the end of 2010, I ended up with a ton of data points, reflections and observations on the possible “design” for each of these various aspects of my life and my business. Armed with all these reflections, I believe I have a much better grasp of “what I want” and definitely a better grasp of “what I don’t want.” Similarly, for my products, I believe that I’ve got some solid theories that I can comfortably double down on to make these product visions a reality and a success.

In summary, I think the big theme for 2010 was “understanding the possibilities” and establishing a base foundation. I think 2011 is going to be about raw-and-powerful execution.

2011 Gameplan

Life

Fortunately, now that we’ve set up our home base in Manhattan, I feel that not only are we infinitely happier, it also feels like we’re standing on a strong foundation. Between our friends that are close by and the strong energetic startup community, I am 100% convinced that this is the place to be for us for the next few years. It’s an interesting thing — with a happy life, being able to focus on the business and make great things happen seems to become infinitely easier. Hopefully this will continue to trend upward through 2011.

Products Business

With the release of Tout 2.0 — getting this product to be profitable and successful will be my #1 priority. In 2010, I was able to figure out the ins-and-outs of rapidly developing products and features and got pretty good at it. In 2011, my focus is going to be to sharpen my marketing skills for these products and completing the last mile to make them successful. Things like SEO, content/article marketing, engaging in social media, drip campaigns, business development, and continued customer development are my primary focus and the skills I’m going to be sharpening+applying this year to make Tout, Braintrust and eventually Main Street a success.

One thing I noticed in 2010 is that since I tried to build as many repeatable systems as possible for development, creating Tout and Main Street after originally creating Braintrust became infinitely easier. For example, I didn’t have to re-create a login form, a forgot password mechanism, nor did I have to create another billing system. I tried to make these things as repeatable so that I could create and launch something like Tout over the course of a weekend.

Similarly, I’m going to try to build out similar repeatable processes/systems for marketing and all its components so that not only will I apply them to Tout initially, I’ll be able to quickly flip a switch and apply them to both Braintrust and Main Street when the time is right as well.

For 2010, my consulting business paid the bills. My intention for 2011 is that the products business takes that over and I continue to do consulting not to pay the bills but because I truly enjoy connecting with new teams and helping them prototype new and creative ideas.

Consulting Business

As I mentioned earlier, I tried a wide range of projects and consulting engagements in 2010. Through these different projects, products and types of organizations that I worked with, I developed a pretty good idea of the type of consulting work I like to do, where and how I can provide the most value, and most importantly, how much I should be charging.

It turns out that I provided the most value when a company had a vague idea of what they wanted to accomplish and needed someone to take on the goal and develop something “end-to-end” with everything from conceptualization, to design, to development to a game plan. The best way I found to describe this was rapid prototyping but with the idea that we’d still release something into the “real world” a the end of the project so that all our assumptions could be tested.

For 2011, I want to continue along the theme of providing end-to-end prototyping services, but I want to make a few tweaks. They are:

  1. I want to reduce the number of clients or simultaneous projects to TWO at most. Ideally, this would be two clients that I establish a long-term relationship with through a retainer of some sort.
  2. I take on projects that are less “internal facing” and more “external.” I want to build prototypes and test ideas for people/companies that are much like my own ideas — they must have the potential to actuate real change in this world and impact a large group of people. My initial research shows that this would probably mean connecting with some design agencies in New York City, but this is something I have to dig into a bit more.
  3. I want to continue to prototype with web-based technologies, but I want to be able to work on projects that embrace more fo the established platforms on the web. This means that I want to do more projects that are in-line with Twitter-based, Facebook-based or Twilio-based applications.
  4. I want to charge based on the value I provide, not the number of hours I work. One of my friends said it best. I’m a guy that can “build the shit out of just about any idea” — meaning, I can very rapidly take a vague goal/idea, establish a set of hypothesis, design a solution and bring it to life so that you can actually test it. This means a few things, but in the context of $$ this means that I do things very fast and at the same thing provide an incredible amount of value.

In order for my consulting business to be worthwhile, I want to be charging for the value and not for the # of hours. Maybe this is the entrepreneur in me speaking rather than the altruistic developer, but I do want to explore idea further in 2011.

I’m still finishing off the two major consulting projects form 2010 through January, but I will start actively looking for my TWO key clients for 2011 very soon. The Derek Sivers RFP looks very interesting right now, having him as a client and working on those projects would be AWESOME and is one of the leads on my list of people to approach.

Building out my team

Through 2010, I was basically a one man band. I did all of the conceptualization, design, development and marketing for all of my products (Braintrust, Tout and Main Street) and all of my clients for consulting.

I know very well that this has to change in 2011. So along with Products and Consulting, building out a real team that compensates for my weaknesses is going to be my 3rd and final priority for 2011. Ideally, I’m going to be building out a team that believes in the same things I believe in and we share the same values.

At the onset, this will probably start off as me setting up some contract positions to help get leverage on either my products business or consulting business. But hopefully, the contract work will turn into full-time positions. I’m 99% sure this won’t be about “finding a co-founder” — I’ve gotten very lucky with finding a life partner, I doubt I’m going to get lucky twice and find a great co-founder. At this point, my energies will be around filling up my team through employees and possibly phantom equity.

I fully recognize that I am severely limited due to that fact that I’m just one person — I want to fix that in 2011.

Things I’m still contemplating

The things I’ve outlined in my game plan are things that I’ve though about pretty hard  and am quite confident is the direction I want to go in. The game-plan is going to be all about raw-execution. There are a few things that I’m still unsure about and therefore will want to still mull over and experiment with.

Funding

I like the fact that I call the shots and can set the direction. However, I do wonder whether the consulting business is going to help or hurt the products business. There is something to be said about Focus, but it is also hard for me to ignore that my consulting business has been a fresh source of inspiration and ideas to fuel into my products business (and vice-versa ofcourse). I do better when I’m working on a couple of things rather than working on one single thing non-stop.

Nevertheless, I still wonder whether I should take on any seed funding to help move faster — especially for hiring people that I need to actualize my vision. I want to explore this a bit further in 2011 and understand what the right course of action is.

TechStars/YCombinator/etc.

I’ve gotten this once or twice. Not that many times, but it was suggested by people whose opinion I do trust and value and so I haven’t dismissed it. I don’t know whether joining one of these programs would just introduce more noise into my “raw-execution” plan or actually provide a ton of leverage.

Now that TechStars is setting up shop in NY, I’m started to consider this a bit more.

So, I’ll also be spending some time in early to mid 2011 to explore whether applying to TechStars or a similar program is a good move for me.

In Conclusion

So there you have it. That is my game plan for 2011. I’d love to hear thoughts, commends and feedback. Even more importantly, I’d love to get to know you if this type of thinking jives with you and if you’re on a similar path. Feel free to post a comment below, or just e-mail me directly.

Happy New Year.

13 Comments

Categories: entrepreneurship, my thoughts.

By Tawheed
— January 1, 2011 at 9:57 pm

My 2011 Content Strategy as an Entrepreneur and Startup Founder

2010 has been a great year for my blog. Not only did I meet a ton of great people by sharing my thoughts publicly, this blog has been the #1 traffic driver to my products this year.

For 2011, I want to take things to the next level.

It’s actually pretty complicated these days with Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the other ways to publish content. There is no doubt in my mind that producing good content and publishing it on the web is not only excellent for clarifying my own thought processes, but is also great for relationships and revenues (two things I care about deeply as a Startup Founder and Entrepreneur).

I’m writing this blog entry to share my thought process on how I’ll be thinking about publishing content and make sure I’m using the right tools and employing the right strategy.

#1 I want to continue to churn out good, timeless content

Most of the popular blogs out there today are by Entrepreneurs with huge exits under their belt. They churn out a ton of valuable content on how they’ve been-there-done-that-and-here’s-how-you-can-too. Well, I don’t have to offer. I’m still hustling and so I decided to write about the hustle, I decided to write about the journey of entrepreneurship as I crossed each exit and took each turn. To make sure  it appealed and was helpful, I made sure to always distill it into Principles. Principles are timeless, universal, and most importantly appeals to a wide range of people. For 2011, I’m going to continue to blog timeless content about my journey on this WordPress blog.

#2 I want to experiment with Video and Podcasting

Written word is great and has wide reach. However, after presenting this year at Startup Weekend and participating in a panel at BootstrapMD, I realized how much I love shouting out my ideas. It feels so much more dynamic and the rush is absolutely amazing. So in 2011, I want to experiment more with posting Videos (Gary Vaynerchuk style) and short quick thoughts. I’m also hopefully going to be starting up a Startup-related Podcast with a couple of good friends in 2011. Details on these will be coming soon.

I’ll be using my Tumblr account to post/share this kind of new media content. I’m using Tumblr for this because I consider it more of an “in-the-moment” thing, which I expect these videos, pictures and quick braindumps to be. Whereas, I expect  my blog to be more thought out content that spans a few hundred words and focuses on being timeless and about the meta.

Most importantly, I’m choosing Tumblr for this because I think the community aspect of the site is really cool and has a ton of potential to bolster my two big goals (remember? relationships and revenues).

#3 I want to embrace email

RSS readers are dead. Getting on the front page of Hacker News brings traffic spikes but not long term visitors. So with all of this timeless content I’ll be writing and with all these in-the-moment thoughts I’ll be putting into Tumblr, I want to be able to build a more dedicated following. I want to be able to distribute my content more effectively. To do this, I’ll be starting to develop an actual Mailing List.

In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, Mailing Lists and E-Mail in general is making a major comeback in our community, and realistically speaking has been the real money maker for all other “normal” people for quite some time now.

I’ll be building one master Mailing List where my blog readers, my customers, and people I have relationships with will be opting into. I’ll be segmenting the list as best as I can (based on Product, Relationship, etc). Once I have this set up, I’ll be taking the best performing new content  and will be sharing it with my mailing list monthly.

#4 I want to use Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn primarily for Relationships and secondarily for Distribution

I signed up for Twitter back in 2006. Ever since Day 1, I always just assumed I “knew” how to use Twitter. I was wrong. Twitter works best when you stop copying and pasting the link to your product/blog-entry/whatever blindly and start focusing on all those little clues Twitter gives you on who you should be talking to.

I’ve found that Twitter works best when you follow up on the lists of people Twitter says is “similar to you” — when you follow up with people friends you think are awesome are talking to, and most importantly, when you “@” someone and say “Hey, what’re you working on?” instead of just shouting at them about how awesome you are.

So, in 2011, I’ll be doing more of this on Twitter, on Facebook and most importantly on LinkedIn.

#4a Do Not Write Off LinkedIn

Whatever you do, Do Not write off LinkedIn. LinkedIn is awesome because of their Groups section. In there, they have atleast 2 vibrant groups for any imaginable target audience you can think of. Go join those groups. Don’t just join and shout out your product, join and observe, join and have conversations, naturally, your awesome solution that can transform that target audience will surface and you’ll make a lot of money.

#4b Relationships first, Distribution second

My first focus will be on forging relationships and getting to know people on all these networks. Hopefully a byproduct of this will be a really large following. Once you have this, I’ll probably take advantage of that and share a few self-serving links here and there to promote myself/my product or a new blog entry. As long as my focus is relationships, I’m sure I won’t come off spammy and lose followers. And more importantly, since my focus is relationships, I’ll hopefully end up with followers that actually pay attention to my tweets.

#5 Easy-peasy CMS for each of my product’s domains

The last part of this content strategy is a very specific thing having to do with content related to my product’s target audience. I mentioned that this blog is the #1 traffic driver to each of my products. While thats great news for this blog, its actually pretty bad news when it comes to my products. As part of stepping up my Marketing game for my products, I’ll be churning out a ton of very specific content that will hopefully appeal to my product’s target audience. While these may take the form of blog entries, these will actually be highly specialized landing pages.

For example, Domainers happen to love Tout. They use it to pitch potential buyers on their domain inventory. Since I want to get more domainers, I’ll probably be publishing some content on Domaining best practices and a HOWTO page on how you can make more money with Domaining if you use Tout. I”ll be using a simple CMS for publishing this kind of content within my product’s domains.

So there you have it. That is my content strategy for 2011. What’s yours?

6 Comments

Categories: entrepreneurship, my thoughts.

Tags:

By Tawheed
— December 28, 2010 at 11:15 pm

Think about your values before you start or pivot your business

This video is from a talk I gave at BootstrapMD right before our panel discussion (the first in my career). The theme of the panel was “Getting to Plan B” — what to do when your business isn’t quite working and you need to pivot.

Pivots are a Change of Direction

A pivot is a change of direction for your company. That’s all it is. I think with the word “pivot” becoming so popular in the tech media, its easy to make pivoting a huge mystifying and complicated thing. The key new idea that the word “pivot” brings is that if you want to have a successful change of direction, you want to make changes based on what you’ve learned, and tether yourself to some reference point before you make the change, so that you can still have some sort of continuous flow. Thats all it is. That is pivoting.

What are your values as an entrepreneur?

So whats that reference point you ask? What do you tether yourself to? That’s the essence of my video above. I think the most fundamental thing you need to define for yourself before you start your business, or atleast before you decide to pivot are your values as a person and as an extension the values of your organization.

When I say values, I’m not talking about “honesty”, “integrity” or any of that standard stuff. I’m talking about what is the key reason or the key thing that drives you. Why start a business at all? Why wake up in the morning and go to work? Why do you do the things that you do? — When you can succinctly answer this, you’ve probably got a pretty good list of your key values.

For example, I deeply value doing meaningful work. I define “meaningful work” as work that makes society better than it is today. And so, if you go to my company’s site, my values, and as an extension my company’s values are right there, front and center. “We believe in actuating change that leaves the world better than we found it.” We happen to be a technology company, we happen to have products, we happen to offer services, but the core reason we get up in the morning is so that we can actuate change that makes this world better.

Connecting this back to “pivoting” — as I mentioned in the video, once you know your core values, the difficult decisions around where to take your company next, or how to start your business, or which idea to pursue, or whether to make the sign up button green or blue — becomes infinitely easier. They become infinitely easier because you’ll find that a ton of the options that you face don’t align with your values and therefore they’re really non-options.

For example, if you tremendously value money — bootstrapping a company thats here to stay for the next 20 years is probably not the most congruent thing for you to do. You might be better off identifying a problem, any problem, raising a ton of money, developing a solution, and flipping it for a quick buck.

Getting to defining YOUR values

I did a ton of thinking for myself on what my values are. Its made the day to day decisions I face for my company infinitely easier to make. I urge you to stop and reflect on your values.

1 Comment

Categories: my thoughts, Principles.

By Tawheed
— November 11, 2010 at 12:52 pm

What not to do in life

These days, I come across a lot of advice on the web that I wish I had heard, or had the mental capacity to understand, when I was younger. Usually, when I come across articles such as “There is no speed limit” by Derek Sivers, or “How to make wealth” by Paul Graham (both incredibly mind-bending articles in my opinion on how to think about life) I usually tweet it out, or re-blog it on Tumblr or share it on Facebook for my friends.

However, a few months ago, I received one such article of the same caliber, except it wasn’t published on the author’s blog, nor was it on some magazine’s site. As odd as it might seem, it didn’t have a URL. It was simply a Word document that was forwarded to me. I loved it so much, I decided to request an introduction to the author, a friend of my Father’s from Bangladesh, and request that I have him post it on this site as a guest post.

Here it is…

My dear Little Mama,

Now that you have turned 22, done your degree and beginning work can I please give you some advice! No, do not say no, please. It is a father’s prerogative!

Do not ever work
Picasso used to paint all the time, Henry Moore sculpt the whole day. Others would have thought they were working themselves to death. They actually were reenergizing and reinvigorating themselves. Do what you enjoy doing. Do not ever work.

Do not try hard
Let it simply flow. Jimmy Hendrix did not play guitar. He simply let his feelings flow unabated. Muhammad Ali used to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. (Do not go into boxing though!)

Do not go into any competition
Quality has no competition. Only mediocrity has competition. If you do what you do at the highest quality you have no competition. Quality creates a moat around yourself.

Do not market
Create your own demand. People are always on the lookout for the good. People seek out winners. Therefore be a winner all the time.

Do not read
Fire your imagination and creativity. Read not what is written but read into the writer’s mind. It is Einstein, one of the greatest minds of our times, who said that imagination is better than knowledge.

Do not run after money
Do not run after money. You will find that money runs faster than you do. Bring total mindfulness to whatever you are doing. Hit Nirvana. Money will feel ignored. It will stop running and fall back on you head over heels. In a heap.

Do not run after success
Carry on doing what you like doing without unduly bothering about success or failure. Success is also like charm. If you think you have it surely it will elude you.

Do not take advice
Advice is what others did not take but wish to give. Your mind is your best guide. Certainly keep your eyes and ears open. Absorb everything but add your own pinch of salt. Filter out what does not suit you. (Do not think I put this at the end on purpose. Honest.)

Love,
Dad

Mr. Attique Rabbani owns a small software firm out in Bangladesh. For his daughter’s recent graduation, he wrote this short letter to her, giving her some small (AWESOME) pieces of advice on what NOT to do with life.

23 Comments

Categories: my thoughts.

By Tawheed
— November 5, 2010 at 12:01 am