Taste Isn’t Everything

Why do we choose one product over another? I’ve built a fair number of small web apps over the past year (DomainPolish, WhereMyFriends.Be, ReadStreamApp) and that’s a question I think about a lot. The common answer to that is whichever product has more advanced features is the better product, and will be more successful in the marketplace than its competitors. But in doing more thinking about this I’m not convinced that this is actually true.

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B2B Sales Aren’t As Simple As They Seem

About a month and a half ago I started working on a new project. It’s not currenly public but it’s live and used by 10 companies to help them do better email marketing. When I first conceived of the project I was pretty excited because it was the first B2B product I had worked on, and I had heard that B2B sales were much easier than consumer sales. 

While that may be true, B2B sales definitely aren’t simple. Here are a few things that I’ve learned to keep in mind over the last month of pitching, cold-calling and cold-emailing tens of companies looking to prove the idea and sign up the first few customers.

Know who the decision makers are

Companies are extremely hierarchical and so when you’re pitching a product you need to know who the decision maker is within the company and talk to them. If you’re pitching an IT product to the head of marketing you’re not likely to get very far. This is especially true when you’re cold calling or cold emailing because the marketing guy isn’t going to forward your email to the IT guy (unless your pitch is brilliant) he’s just going to say that it doesn’t seem that useful.

Make it easy for your pitch to get the right person

If you’re doing cold emailing, oftentimes companies won’t list email addresses for specific people and departments and will instead have a catchall email address like info@company.com that they ask you to send all general inquiries to. If you’re going to email that address make sure your subject line makes it clear who should be reading the email. A subject line like:

“Would love to talk to you about a new product”

Might get read by the community manager, by the CTO or by the marketing guy. But a subject line like:

“Would love to talk about how to improve your email marketing”

Will either get read by the marketing guy or get forwarded to him.

Make the math clear

The awesome part about B2B is that unlike consumer products the value proposition is just math. If the company has to spend $10 on your product every month and will end up making $200 from it a month then it’s probably something they’re interested in. Make sure you make it clear from your pitch to your pricing how the math works and why it will work for them.

Realize that the sales cycle is a lot longer for B2B

For all of my other projects which were more consumer focused people usually said yes or no within the first couple of minutes. Not so with B2B. It can take weeks and weeks, with multiple phone calls and emails sent back and forth before you get a straight answer. And even if they say they want to buy it, it can take weeks after that before they actually enter in their credit card and integrate it. The key is to just keep closing, keep calling, and keep nudging them until eventually they either ask you to stop (in which case you should stop immediately) or they sign up.

I hope this little rundown was helpful for someone. If you want to know more about what I’m working on you should follow me on Twitter.

Up and to the right

In the beginning of November I wrote a post about my goals for the month. They were:

1. Write one blog post every day in November.

2. Sign up 20 paying customers for my new project. This means I would be generating about $200 a month in revenue.

3. Bring one new team member aboard to work with me – preferably one that has a lot of coding experience.

Ode of Remembrance

Just memorized this part of a poem I found a few days ago. It’s called Ode of Remembrance by Lawrence Binyon written after the First World War.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young.

Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglo.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted.

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old.

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the setting of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

Interviewing at Y Combinator Part 2

“Someone just showed us an idea like this right before you guys. I don’t like it. What else do you have,” said Paul Graham sitting across from us. I could almost feel the air being sucked out of our collective lungs as we deflated in despair. This is not how it was supposed to go.

Two weeks earlier we had been notified that we were being invited to fly to Mountain View to interview with Y Combinator. With one caveat. Paul Graham, affectionately known as PG by Y Cominator faithful, had told us that he liked our team but not our idea.

Then he told us to come up with something new in the two weeks before the interview.

So in the frenzied days leading up to our interview we talked to everyone we could, brainstormed for hours on end, and finally settled on an idea. We built ReadStream in two nights, successfully got it on TechCrunch, and got on the plane thinking that we had it made.

YC always says that they look for teams that can execute and hustle quickly – and to us ReadStream was the epitome of that ethos.

Pulling up to the YC office was an unbelievably surreal experience. Here was this place that I had thought about, read about and dreamt about for what seemed like years and it was finally a real live thing in front of me.

We walked in the door, quickly found our way to the big open room where they hold their dinners and I pulled out my laptop. I loaded up a few different pages on ReadStream for our demo as we chatted with YC alums and other interviewees.

Then Jessica came out and said they were ready to talk to us. By the way, everyone says she’s the nicest person in the room and that is 100% true. Even though the whole experience is unbelievably stressful, a smile from Jessica is like an oasis of comfort in an otherwise crazy day.

They sat us down at a long thin conference table. YC partners on one side, us on the other. “So what are you working on?” said PG looking at some notes. Harj, Paul Bucheit, Sam Altman and the rest of the partners stared back at us. 

“So because you didn’t like the idea we applied with, we built this app called ReadStream in two days, got it on TechCrunch and have some early traction with it,” said Wesley launching in to our pitch. 

The partners gathered around our laptop and looked at what we had built.

30 seconds in PG stopped us in our tracks. “Someone just showed us an idea like this right before you guys. I don’t like it. What else do you have?”” 

Bravely we struggled to continue, and started to throw ideas out. That’s when the questions began.

People tell you that it’s impossible to prepare for a YC interview and it’s completely true. That’s because they ask you a bunch of different questions about you, your co-founders, your experience, and your idea. Then they figure out what your weakest answers are and hammer away at them. No, seriously, they just keep asking about your weakest areas and don’t let up. It’s an unbelievable experience.

“So you guys are students?” “Are you going to leave school?” “Why now?” “Why would you leave school it’s only freshman year?” “Are all of you going to leave?” “What happens if you get sued?”

The rest of the interview was a complete blur. At one point I remember PG pausing, scrunching his eyes and running his hands through his hair. “So does anyone have any other questions?”

The room was silent. And that was the end of our interview. 

And so concluded one of the craziest, most intense days of my life. Later that night we got the “you’re not getting funded” email, and we flew back to college. 

Good luck to everyone interviewing tomorrow, I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world.

You should follow me on Twitter here. You can see part 1 here.

Calvin Coolidge on Persistence

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.

Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.

Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Life Lessons According to Reddit

I was looking through my bookmarks today and came across this awesome post called “I’ve been on this Earth for 35 years, and this is what I’ve learned. What about you?” The original poster says:

If you always seem to have drama in your life, you are probably the one causing the drama.

If customer service representatives or restaurant servers always seem to be rude to you, you are probably the one being rude.

If your computer always seems to be freezing up on you, you’re probably doing something wrong.

In my experience, drama begets drama, rudeness begets rudeness, and ineptitude begets ineptitude.

One last lesson – The lessons you pick up in life, whether they increase happiness or reduce unhappiness, work for you. They may work for others, but they probably don’t work for everyone. But it’s fun to share them.

Check out the rest of the thread here.

My Credo

I wrote this credo and delivered it as a speech for my English class senior year of high school. It’s supposed to basically sum up my viewpoint on life up until that point. I still agree with it today.

The late American author David Foster Wallace wrote, “Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest most vivid person in existence.” Think about it. You have never experienced anything except through those eyes and ears with which you are listening and watching me today. We all have it. We are all the centers of our own senses and thus our own experience. But this predicament that we all share also imposes another one, the fact that we are alone within ourselves. Any thought, or experience, or message from another person has to be delivered through indirect means. We are forever inmates in a prison tapping morse code to our fellow inhabitants through the walls of our cells. We can’t feel what another person is feeling unless we have felt it ourselves; words can’t quantify human existence, they can only sketch it.

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Getting Up Really Early

For the longest time I followed the stereotypical hacker schedule: code from the early evening until the wee hours of the morning, sleep until the afternoon (if possible), rinse and repeat. There’s something I really like about going on a 12-hour work binge, and there’s also something to be said for the complete lack of distractions and intense focus that comes with working at 2 AM.

Recently, however, after reading a few articles that mentioned it, and seeing it in more than a few biographies of successful people I decided to do the unthinkable: start getting up early. Usually waking up is one of the most difficult things for me to do. Let me repeat: I hate getting up early. Even waking up at 10:30 or 11:00 for class can be a struggle sometimes. But I decided to give it a shot anyway.

And I love it. 

I try to get up at 6 or 7 AM when I have few enough things to do that I can go to sleep early. It’s shocking how much it adds to my day to get up in the morning. I get to watch the sun come up (in winter) and hear the birds start chirping which is refreshing in itself. Plus there’s a total lack of distractions – I feel like it’s much easier to get stuff done. And the best part is, even if I end up messing around for an hour and not being productive it doesn’t matter. By that point it’s only 7 or 8 AM and I have plenty of time left in the day to things that matter. 

I think the only reason this has become feasible for me is because I’ve started to be able to do it without having to rely on my alarm. As I’m falling asleep I just think in my head over and over that I want to get up at 6 AM, and for whatever reason I usually wake up at around 5:55 or so. It’s the weirdest thing. I still set my alarm just in case, but after doing it for two weeks or so I haven’t needed it. Getting up without one is such a refreshing experience it’s ridiculous. Especially since when I do use one I’m a chronic snooze button addict. So not only do I feel better, but my roommate doesn’t get disturbed either.

Just thought I’d share an interesting thing I’ve been testing out. Let me know what you think in the comments or on Twitter.

Weird Things I Do: Memorize Things

This is the one in a series of (at least) 30 posts I’m going to write this month as part of what Wesley Zhao and I have dubbed No-Blog-Sloth November Challenge. One post will appear here a day from now until the end of November.