Young Successful Entrepreneur

(Please take the time to watch the video.  Trust me, Raul Midon is amazing!)

Most entrepreneurs focus on the cash flow, team, market, and product, but neglect one of the most important factors in the success of the startup - morale.  Morale is the thing that keeps you working at 2am in the morning; morale is the element that keeps spirits high when cash flow is running low.  Without high company morale, your startup will feel like it is failing even when things are going very well.

I’ve recently been plagued by low moral.  I had low energy during my startup meetings and I found myself arguing with Yu-kai all the time.  Maybe creating an internet startup from scratch that changes the advertisement game is too hard? Perhaps I should just take the Tim Ferriss approach and create a business that is focused on driving revenue and nothing more.  A self-automated business that allows me to do what I want when I want does sound pretty sexy.

Yesterday I decided to change my state of mind.  I decided to throw out all of my thoughts about Viralogy and focus on it with a blank slate.  This is the list I came up with:

1. We just closed a round of funding (our first ever!)
2. The team is financially secure
3. Talking to agencies at conferences has shown that there is a high demand for our service
4. We have sold our product to clients and validated our model
5. We’re looking to hire a full-time developer and full-time sales person and have the cash to pay them!

I realized that Viralogy has been doing much better than it has ever been before!  Why then do I have such low morale?

Like Raul Midon says, “It’s all a State of Mind.”  I have the choice of viewing my company in a positive or in a negative light.  Ultimately, I believe it is the entrepreneur’s duty to think of everything as the glass half full.  We entrepreneurs have the special ability to see the positive in things that others see as only negative.  Without this special quality, I believe an entrepreneur will never be able to achieve huge success.

So aside from it being a state of mind, how can we learn from this so that you can apply the lessons to your startup team and make sure that everything is always at a high point?  Here are the lessons that I have learned:

1. Don’t mistake failure for a lack of patience

Let me set the scenario:

Your team gets an amazing idea!  You and your team are so excited that you start building the product right away.  Two weeks into the build of the product and your team starts getting frustrated because it hasn’t been finished yet.  Since the product isn’t finished, your team thinks of another “great” idea and starts to build that one.

See the problem here?

It’s easy to mistake a failing product with an unfinished product.  In the startup world, speed is key, but if you don’t have the patience to see a feature all the way through to the end and really test if it is a viable model, then you’re just going to end up chasing your tail in circles.

The solution: Set concrete milestones for the completion, promotion, and validation of your product.  Make sure you write down your milestones on your PB Works (my system manager of choice), and adhere to your milestones until your set deadlines are complete.  Here are sample milestones for a product that you can use:

1. Development
2. Marketing
3. Feedback research and analysis
4. Revision
5. Viability decision

2. Meeting Effectiveness

I love chit-chatting with my team and goofing off, at the same time, the team must always feel like they are accomplishing something during the meeting.  There’s no point in meeting with your team unless you guys actually get things done.

Too often I find that meetings are a great time to complain about the company and just talk about what’s frustrating the person about the company (this is NOT Viralogy by the way.  It’s other companies that I’m involved with).  Instead of thinking about a solution, the meetings turn into a playground for complaints and no one gets anything positive from the meeting.

The solution: All meetings must have the following:

1. Purpose (the agenda - which should be emailed prior to the meeting)
2. Leader
3. Minute taker
4. Actionable next steps
5. Set end time

If you have an end-time, then you won’t stay on one topic for 30 minutes just because people have something to say about it. At the end of your meeting, each person should know exactly what next steps he or she should take to move the company forward

But always keep in mind: the meetings must be fun and lively.  Kid around with your team, make a joke, make fun of a team member, and just have a plain good time.  The best meetings I’ve been in are productive AND fun.

3. Feature Creep

Developers hate this.  I’m guilty of it all the time because I constantly find ways to “improve” an idea or feature.  Feature Creep happens when you decide to add more features to a product that is already being developed.  When you keep adding features to the development of a product, deadlines get postponed, feature become unpolished, and the team is demoralized because the product is not ideal.

The solution: Details, details, details!  When you build a product, make sure that everything is detailed out to the last step.  I suggest creating mockups of what the final product will look like, what each feature of the product is for, and detail exactly how everything will look and work as a final product.  In this way, no one has any debates about what the final product will do.

Furthermore, I suggest keeping the first public version of the product as simple as possible.  Your product should do one thing and do it well! Gosh that is so important!  If you get anything from this post, this is it - do one thing and be the best at it!

4. Manage Expectations

This is by far the most important point that I will make on this post.  Carefully manage your team expectations because the team morale greatly depends on it.  Here is an example from Viralogy:

We had the expectation of making revenue with Viralogy by July of this year.  However, we had not yet projected when the final version of the Viralogy platform would be finished.  Furthermore, we did not even finalize what the final version of Viralogy would look like.

How can we make money with a product without even knowing in concrete detail what the final product will look like and how we’re going to sell it?

This is what I mean by managing team expectations.  Because we expected to make revenue by July, we had low moral when we didn’t.

The solution: It’s all about setting concrete milestones.  Know what the final product will look like, know how long it will take to build, and most of all, make sure your entire team is on the same page.

Seriously people!  It seems like such common sense but it you don’t proactively manage your team’s expectations and make sure everyone is on the same page, people will get disappointed!

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Life is a state of mind.  You can choose to be happy today with what you have achieved thus far.  You can still be ambitious and have future goals that will be hard to achieve, but the fact that you haven’t achieved them yet should not disappoint you.