Young Successful Entrepreneur

Photo by See El Photo

Patience is the key to everything in life.

People start blogs and quickly stop writing them because they don’t get any comments within the first month of writing.  Pseudo-entrepreneurs face a few bumps in their startup journey and end up quitting at the first sign of trouble.  What I’ve realized is that every startup takes patience to make it successful.

We are now going into the 4th week of launching Viralogy.  In just 3 weeks, we’ve conducted intensive market research, prepared ourselves to launch two new marketing campaigns, and completely redesigned the home page based on peoples feedback. Here is what I have learned in our first 3 weeks of Viralogy’s launch and how you can apply what I have learned into your startup:

When to listen to your audience

Every entrepreneur talks about how you should ALWAYS listen to your market.  If they want a new feature, it must mean that your company must build that feature in order to satisfy the user.  What they don’t tell you is that sometimes, the user is wrong.  The key is to know when to listen to the user and went to politely ignore the user.

The user will always tell you to build new products or features that will satisfy her wants.  This is good, but only if what the users want is 100% in line with your website’s core objectives and goals.  Here is a great example:

One of our users suggested that we stream in peoples blog content onto our site so that he can read and comment on the blogger’s post without having to leave our site.  Though this would be great for us for SEO purposes and to keep users on our site for a longer period of time, we can never implement this feature because it goes against our core objectives with Viralogy.  Our goal is to first and foremost rank people based on social influence, and then shoot people out to that person’s blog if they want to read their content.  In this way, we’re constantly promoting the people on Viralogy.com and we’re not taking any of their readership or comments.

Your company mission is your religion.  Don’t add features that contradict your religion.

Control the creative juices

As an entrepreneur, you will naturally have a bunch of ideas floating around in your head about what your company should do next.  One of the most dangerous aspects of a young startup company is feature creep and impatience.

Be careful when you receive feedback from your users.  When a user suggests you add a new feature, and it’s the feature you’ve been thinking about in your mind the whole time, you’ll instantly believe this is validation to go full-steam ahead on implementing your idea.  Wrong, this is about the worst thing you can do.

Constantly adding new features will DESTROY your startup.  You need patience, testing, and solid analytics to make rational decisions about what feature should be built next and to determine if a current feature is working.  Here is a great example:

Users want to be able to sync their Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts right now so that we are able to calculate their entire social media influence.  This is wonderful because it’s exactly the direction that we’re headed in!  However, if our team was not disciplined and patient, it could ultimately be the downfall of the company.  You see, we have VERY important features that we must complete now before incorporating new ones: we need to refine the home page, the claiming process, and our business model.  We CANNOT move on to incorporate a new feature without first making sure that each one of our core features perfectly does what it needs to do.

Here is the rule you should follow: Project timelines and goals should run two weeks.  During those two weeks, you religiously work on the goal that has been set, and do not stray away from the goal by adding new features or by working on other projects.  Once the two weeks are done, you intensely test every aspect of the goal you just finished.  After a week of testing, you should know whether the project was a success, or if there are some things that you need to refine and change.

It will take patience and discipline to build a successful startup.

Conduct market research throughout your startup and NOT just at the beginning

I can’t stress enough just how important market research and validation is.  Here is an example of the research we conducted for a core Viralogy feature:

We believed that given the opportunity, bloggers would pay to be on the front page of Digg.  We were therefore building a bidding system that would allow our users to bid money to be on the front page of Viralogy.com as a featured blog.  Though it seemed like a great idea, we needed to validate it.

I surveyed 75 of my closest blogging friends and made sure to ask non-leading questions.  This is key:

• Would you pay $100 to be on the front page of Digg (leading question)
• Would you pay to be on the front page of Digg?  If so, how much money would you pay? (non-leading question)

After collecting the data, we have decided to move away from the bidding system as a business model and move toward a Freemium business model focused on companies.  I am now in the process of collecting data from companies to verify that they will pay for our services.

Validate your business model before you build it.

Market your product before you have launched it

This is probably one of the most effective things we have done with Viralogy so far (I might be a little bias because this is my are of expertise).  We started to heavily market Viralogy on March 16th and the site officially launched on May 18th.  This means that we were heavily building our brand and traffic 2 months before the product was launched!  Here is how I did it:

Step 1: What is the core brand and mission of the company? -   The goal of Viralogy.com is to promote bloggers and rank bloggers based on their social media influence.

Step 2: How will you accomplish your core brand and mission through marketing? - We decided to video interview bloggers (promote bloggers) and write ranking posts (rank bloggers) on the Viralogy blog.

Step 3: Execute intensely on the plan - We decided to set very high goals: 3 video interviews and 2 ranking posts  a week. Be setting very high expectations, we forced ourselves to go above and beyond for our marketing efforts.

The result: Bloggers knew about Viralogy before the site launched, we had just under 1000 uniques per day before the site launched, and we had a lot of people online link back to our site and Tweet out about us.

Stick to your company brand and mission, and then intensely execute on your marketing plans.

Create systems to stay consistent while consistently launching new marketing campaigns

We have built a great marketing campaign with the Viralogy blog.  We are consistently pushing out new content every week day, and more and more people are starting to notice the brand.  Is this enough?  Should we just sit back in cruise control and keep doing what we’re doing?

This is why startups fail. They get comfortable and think that just because their campaign has worked this week, that it will continue to exponentially bring in new users.

Remember this quote because it will be the most important quote you will ever read for marketing:

“Build systems to stay consistent while consistently launching new marketing campaigns”

We have built the following systems with the Viralogy Blog:

• Jun Loayza sets up interviews with bloggers throughout the week
• Jason Lam edits the video and uploads them to Viddler
• Jun Loayza summarizes, edits, and posts on the Viralogy Blog every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
• Yu-kai Chou writes a VS post every Tuesday
• Joseph Yi writes a social ranking post every Thursday
• Dan Miranda evangelizes every post as it is published

This is the strict discipline that we adhere to every week. What kind of systems are you building for your startup?

Because we have built systems, I am free to create new marketing campaigns.  I plan on launching two new campaigns in the following 2 weeks: Viralogy Themes and Viralogy Experts.  Remember, before you implement a new campaign, you must build a system for the previous one so that it can continue to run smoothly without your supervision.

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Use these tips to build a strong company and have a successful launch.  If you have any questions, please ask me in the comments section and I will answer you immediately.  My goal is to not only build a successful startup of my own, but to help you build a successful startup as well.

Keep living the startup life!