• What will the product be?
• Who will the product be for?
• How will the product and company be built?

Know what you want.

The reason its so hard to set a vision is because as a startup founder you have to know what you want.  When I started BizeeBee I knew I wanted to build a tool for small businesses.  In fact all I did in the first 3 months of starting BizeeBee was walk around and talk about how I was going to build a tool for small businesses.  Had I built any of the product yet?  No.  Did I know who I was building it for? Sorta. Did I know how I was going to build the product and company?  Yes!

1/3 isn’t too bad.

So I knew how to build products and I knew how to recruit.  That was a decent start, and that’s where I began.  People who are about to risk something: a day job, their reputation, or other jobs offers, want to at least know that their leader has a decent idea of where they are going.  After all those who join startups know that there won’t always be a smooth ride, some actually thrive on a roller coaster, but everyone wants to know that there is a destination and their leader has charted a course.  Problems begin when founders don’t have a course, are constantly changing it, or abandon the pursuit altogether, this is by the way the quickest path to demoralizing employees.

The other reason its so important for employees to know where they are going is because they’re participating in helping you solve problems.  Letting them know where the company is headed gives them a heads up to start thinking of solutions.  I talked about how we were going to build a solution for small businesses, it had to be a very simple product with a consistent UI, and one that required little no setup.  Then when it came time to start building those became our guiding principles.

Part 1 of vision setting:  talk about what you’re going to build and set some principles to guide your decisions.

Got market?

I’m not going to get into the whole spiel about finding product/market fit because there are plenty of blogs out there that talk about it.  Figuring out what the product will be takes time.

But the one often overlooked point is how will the product shape the business.  The reason this is overlooked is because too many startups take a brute force approach to product/market fit trying a bunch of different product ideas, instead of trying to understand the market first.  This is also why coming up with a business model or monetization scheme is difficult for most.  Placing too much emphasis on the product and not enough on the market is what is driving many of the feature driven companies to exist.  Its fine to be a point tool if that is what you want, but know it, own it and focus.  Don’t spend time touting how you are saving the whales if that’s not part of your product benefit.

As a startup founder you  need to understand the landscape of the market you are in that means knowing the competitors, understanding the problems of potential customers across demographics, and finally figuring out how to differentiate yourself.  Its this differentiation that will help with product/market fit, creating a product roadmap, and then being able to market your product to customers.

Part 2 of vision setting: figuring out your market and what problem in that market you’re aiming to solve.

If you build it, they may come…

Every startup founder, especially those of us who are technical fall in love with the product we’ve built, and think its the greatest thing since sliced bread.  More than likely its not.  So first give yourself a pat of the back for knowing how to build, then go out and look for who is going to value it.  This takes sometime and can alter your vision.  For example, you might have originally built a product for say a yoga studio, only to discover that it only works for small independent yoga studios or private instructors  Well thats ok, at least you know who you’re initial customer base is.  You’re vision has changed slightly but now you can go out and look for more of those customers!

These kind of discoveries are merely detours, not a change in direction.

Part 3 of vision setting: if you’re customers don’t come, go out and find them, and tell them about your product!

No one calls a founder a visionary until they’ve successfully executed on bringing their vision to life.  So even if your vision is less than perfect its important to at least have one that consists of knowing what you want to create and how you want to create it.

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I know most startups like to take the quick and dirty approach to product development, and then go back and refactor or rebuild their product.  I think that’s great and we’ve certainly refactored a lot of our code base too.  But I started charging customers from day 1 of launching and had to convey confidence to get them to pay.  So I emphasized quality first and foremost.

My vision for BizeeBee’s product and engineering team was to create a simple and high quality product, and to do so cost-effectively.  I communicated these constraints to my team, and we knew there would of course be trade-offs, but we all agreed to these basic principles to guide our decision making and product development process.

Invest time in talent

In any industry employees are not interchangeable.  I know there are a lot of people who like outsourcing and just want something “built”.  This is fine if you are driving a culture of results.  But I truly believe employees need to be engaged in worthwhile work to produce quality.  So I hire for raw talent, hunger, and patience above all else.  I truly believe this is the only way to attract top performers.  You can look at people’s track record, but many don’t have one, so you just have to rest on raw talent and motivation.

Having a talented team is great because it means they will invest time in learning, after all talent is just a byproduct of learning, practice, and refining a skill.

So I invested the time in letting my engineers learn Rails and the entire stack of technologies that went with it.  I also had them talk to experts in the field about engineering process.  We adopted an Agile process and pair program.

Trade-off: giving people time to learn and not spend all their time developing means that less features will be built.  I know most founders would be too impatient with this approach, but I guess that’s why its helpful that I do yoga

Cost Effective Quality

I didn’t have the luxury of having enough money to hire QA engineers, but then again I never liked how engineers would abdicate responsibility for their code to someone else.  Not having a QA team meant that my engineers would need to test their own code.  So for the first time ever I got what I had wanted: TDD (test driven development).

Trade-off: once again less features are built, but what is built has a high level of quality.

Simple Design & Integrating Solutions

Over the course of my engineering career I’ve read a ton of design books, because my personal mission of becoming an engineer was to build things that improve human life.  So I wanted to build products that had an emotional appeal, and people would derive joy and want to use them all the time.  Life is already full of stress, the last thing I want to do is cause someone to have a bad day because I built a shitty product.

We don’t build everything, especially if we can find a good off the shelf solution.  If we don’t find one we’ll either build it ourselves, and if its not cost-effective then we’ll wait until we can afford to build it.  This of course means we’re spending a lot of time doing research, talking to vendors, understanding terms of service, and understanding the long terms implications of the partnership.

Trade-offs: this can stall product development but its important to know who you’re getting hitched to

I can’t speak for other startup founders but as one who wears both the business and technical hat I’ve had the freedom to create a company and engineering culture that I’ve grown to love and can be proud of.  I have to give a LOT of credit to my two developers: Alex Notov and David Grieser who pushed me into implementing a lot of processes and have made me a much better femgineer.  I also want to thank Jesse Taggert for her help with product design, and introducing us to Kevin Fitzpatrick at  Pivotal Labs.  And last but not least Lyndi Thompson our buzz bee who spreads the word about our product and team, and keeps encouraging me to write code and blog posts.

Its been a good year and I look forward to continuing to build BizeeBee in 2012!

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Why do you want early adopters? And how to do you get early adopters?

Because early adopters actually prove product/market fit.  Your early adopters are the folks who are going to use your product, give you honest feedback, and will wade through bugs and various iterations.

First you need to figure out who you’re trying to solve a problem for by creating a persona.  Then you need to get out, show them your prototype (preferably one that is paper-based), and then ask them to try out the actual prototype.  Drop-off point #1, people  are busy…  You’ll get a lot of “sure contact me when it’s ready” or “send me access to a demo”.   In reality you need to talk to a lot of folks before you can even get one to respond, play with the product, and give you feedback, which by the way is the whole point of getting early adopters!

The key to getting more early adopters is to think like one.  Figure out where these folks hang out (online and offline), what they read, where they learn about products, and who they learn about products from.  Then go out and talk your product up in these channels.  What you’ll most likely hear is what we heard at BizeeBee a bunch of: “No, we’re not interested.”  So we changed our approach, instead of trying to sell the product to people we started asking “Why don’t you like our product?  Who do you think would be interested in trying this out?” And that’s when things got interesting…

We got some “Well I know this guy in New Orleans who just opened a small studio…” and a “Oh my studio is too big, but our second studio is relatively small…”

Now of course we get “Well I really need this for my vertical, when is it going to be out?” Hook, line, and sinker

The final point I’ll make about early adopters is that they’re great for testing out the product’s concept, workflows, and positioning in the market.

And now the challenge begins…

How do you get customers?

When I first moved to the Bay Area in 2004 I’d heard buzz words like social and viral, because Facebook was dominating the market in terms of growth and there were social networks galore.  Now 7 years later I hear countless stories from startups who basically talk about how they hustled by iterating on the product, and finding the right customer base to target until they saw traction like Airbnb and Square.

At Mint we acquired customers through a combination of AdWords, InfoGraphics, and PR in print (blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc.).  PR was the most significant channel but also the most expensive approach, so I don’t know if I’d advocate it for every early stage startup.

What’s more interesting is the approach we took and how we explored various channels, measured the results, measured engagement, and then looked to see a correlation between engagement and monetization.  IMHO you don’t really have a customer until you monetize off of them.

We monetized off of lead gen, which is one tactic amongst a wide array.  The good news is that unlike the early to mid-2000s when everyone was giving away their product in hopes of  making money off of advertising and users were use to everything being free, nowadays users are willing to pay for things on the interwebs, but only for things they absolutely can’t live without…

Acquire first, monetize second?

Call me a capitalist but I’m not sure when the concept of going into business to give stuff away became the norm.  Yes I think you should pay to acquire a customer, that is of course the point of advertising and marketing, but this phenomenon of essentially giving away your product for free in hopes of luring a bunch of users, getting them hooked on the product, and then charging them seems silly to me.  That’s got to be the fastest way to make a hockey stick graph flip 180 degrees on its x-axis…  Even in a platform play there’s going to be a level of engagement (as in click throughs and conversions).   So what’s the point of having a 100k users if you can only monetize off of 1k or worse 1 of them?  You can of course build a cool product to sell it to someone else, in which case that should be your monetization scheme, i.e. exit strategy.

So to summarize:

• Get some early adopters to fall in love, play with your product, and give you constant feedback.
• Getting customers is going to be a bit of a shotgun approach, but measure each channel, and test which ones convert to paying.  Be quick about this unless your gut tells you that some channels take longer than others.
• If you’re going to give something away for free you need to make up the cost of building it somewhere else.

Remember this is a hard process and it takes time.  But it gets easier if you create feedback loops, listen to what your early adopters and customers are telling you.  If the product sucks fix it, if the pricing is confusing make it clearer, if marketing is expensive look for less expensive channels, and if you aren’t building something that people want then figure out what they do want and build that!

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1. Develop personas

Sure some would say this is easier said than done because at an early stage the customer is constantly evolving.  But if you’ve gotten some level of product/market fit you should have customers that are using your product everyday, or have some predictable rate of use.  Fortunately for us we have a core group that is using the product everyday, and I know this because I log into the admin I’ve built everyday to see what people are doing.  But here’s the next part that is hard for startup folks to do… pick up the phone and give customers a call.  Yes I know they’re busy, you’re busy, everyone is freakin’ bizee. But I’ve learned more about the nuanced ways in which people use our product by listening to them on the phone or watching them in person.  The other great thing is that once you’ve got them on the call you can learn more about their needs. Its finding out the needs that’s the key to developing personas.

To me a persona is a set of personality traits and problems that a person faces.  We currently have 3 personas that our product works well for, meaning they adopt our product and are relatively happy.  I know those who don’t fit the persona will drop off, and that’s fine too.  Here’s what I do with the persona:

• I convey it to my team so they develop empathy.  Its that empathy that lets them design and build a product that actually meets the needs of the persona.
• I use it when talking to potential customers.  When someone calls us, I ask them some pretty basic questions to see if they’re a match.  If they are I try to sell to them, if not I tell them they’d be happy with one of our competitors.
• I put the personas in ALL of our marketing materials.  I want the world to know who BizeeBee is for and who it isn’t for so that I get a match.

2. Build a Community Brand So You Know What to Build

I’ve always had an issue with the vocal minority and using anecdotes to build features, to avoid it even being an issue I actually took sometime to create a customer feedback forum.  Our customers can post bugs, ideas, and vote up  features.  We use the forum as a guide for what gets built.  There have been a couple times when I have literally dropped everything to build a feature because I saw how popular it was and I was tired of losing leads.

I know there are a lot of founders out there who take a “father know’s best approach” to product development.  That works too.  The reason I chose the community route is because I saw that the people we’re catering to weren’t being heard by our competitors!  The other is that people who have a voice that is being heard are willing to contribute their ideas to improve the product and tell other potential customers about it!

Now the one caveat I will mention is that what gets built still needs to match the main persona.  And this is important, because then your team begins to understand the reason why they are building or refining one feature as opposed to another.

3. Let Ideas Simmer

One of the interesting things I’ve learned about the bees is that on average it has taken each one about 3 months to get into their groove.  By groove I mean building, selling, and communicating with one another.  As a founder you cannot rush this process.  I know it can be painful for them, but watching them go through the process and coaching them through it has actually been really rewarding for me as a founder.  People need time to absorb the vision, adjust to their environment, and let the ideas simmer before they really feel like they get what it is they are working on.  There will be moments of confusion and clarity.  What helps bring clarity is having your teammates talk to customers, read customer emails, and understand the dichotomy of who is and isn’t a customer and why (once again refer to #1).  There will also be a lot of “Why don’t we go after this new group?  Why did so-and-so not convert to a paying customer?”  Instead of answering these questions yourself have the last hire explain the answers.  You’ll be surprised by the results

So why is it so important that your team understands your customer, why not just have them shut up and build?  I’m no genius nor am I capable of coming up with solutions to every problem.  I’ll admit I need help selling, building, and running a company.  The more I communicate with my team the more they know what’s going on, and in turn can make educated decisions.  Having direct interactions with customers is even more powerful because part of the reward of being in an early stage startup is seeing that what you build actually matters to people and improves their lives, that’s the greatest motivating factor of all!

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After launching BizeeBee I realized that my initial post on what to do after you launch wasn’t enough to cover all the work that the BizeeBee team has done after launching and thought I’d share some of our efforts.  We launched BizeeBee about three weeks ago with a few yoga studios across the nation.  The on-boarding process was pretty smooth, but once we had customers up and running I had an epiphany:  we have paying customers who depend on us for their livelihood, and we are a reflection of their business.  The team’s entire perspective about how we were managing our development process changed!  Here are the key things we added to our process:

1. Backup and Restore

We were responsible for the reliability of our users’ data.  They need this data to understand the health of their business and convey it to their customers.  If something happens we need to be able to retrieve their data and most importantly restore it!  So we started doing backups, initially daily, but will move to hourly.

2. Testing

We could no longer just deploy to production anytime we wanted because our users use our product daily and hourly to run their business.  While continuous deployment is pretty seamless, I was more afraid of introducing a bug during someone’s working hours, so I wanted plenty of time to test and do a hotfix if necessary.  If testing hasn’t been a priority in the alpha or beta, it should become an imperative once you’ve launched.

Even if you don’t have time to setup a full regression suite, you can take a cue from our development process:  we have all our flows documented, and run through all of them manually every night, even if the feature hasn’t been touched in months.  We also test across the three major browsers: Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.  The last thing I want to break is something simple like password recovery or deal with browser interoperability issues.  We’re working on creating an automated suite that will run daily to ensure code quality.

3. Branches

I initially disliked GitHub but now I love it!  It has made branching and merging a breeze because unlike SVN the cost of checking out and switching between branches is very low.  It doesn’t suffer from the same large data footprint that SVN does.  We created 4 categories of branches: master (current development branch), features (one off apps like internal tools), releases, and hotfixes, and also setup a policy of what could be checked into each branch.  For example, once a release branch has been created we can no longer check in new features only bug fixes.  Instituting these kinds of policies minimizes risk of introducing a bug after a release, and people have a good understanding of the ongoing changes in each released version.

4. Track Customer Support Issues

I created an admin tool that lets me login daily to see our user growth count and feature usage.  This also lets myself and my team troubleshoot any issues that customers might be facing.  It has read-only access to their data and the authorization is limited.  If you find yourself constantly querying logs and databases, and have teammates who don’t know SQL or how to query logs then creating a tool that reflects the data empowers them.  And resolving customer support issues as quickly as possible is critical to the quality of your startup!

These are just a few changes we made, but we’ve got even more in the pipeline: more data encryption, site monitoring, and scaling the system based on growth rate.  I’ll post another follow-up once we tackle those shortly.

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Its been 10 months since I started BizeeBee.  As a founder I’m faced with the same level of independence that I had growing up.  I have “no boss”, I set my own schedule and goals.  Being a founder of a startup is not a cushy job.  Here are some of the challenges that I did not anticipate experiencing and how I’ve dealt with them:

Resolving human conflict is the hardest challenge

Many people think that building a product, distributing it, and raising money are the toughest problems they will face.  None of those are not the hardest problems or even remotely close.  The hardest problem is putting a team together and motivating them to help you find solutions to these problems.  And above all else that is the job of the founder.

Sure you can outsource away your coding, have a PR agency run your marketing campaign, and hire a college student to manage your social media.  But at the end of the day who are the people that you are going to talk to about building a company or bounce ideas off of when it comes to anticipating customer needs?  Or help you put together a kick ass demo and deck to wow investors?  Its your founding team.  These are the people that will stick with you and want to work with you to build something great.  But in order to accomplish things you have to be willing to work with them and for them!

When month 7 rolled along I noticed people were getting stressed out and taking it out on one another.  There was just too much to accomplish and everyone including me was maxing out on throughput.  But it was my job as the founder to keep the team happy.  So I tried a couple things.  First, I setup weekly 1-1s with everyone.  No matter what was going on it was time that each person had to voice their concerns and talk to me.  Second, I checked in with everyone everyday, not to micromanage, but to see how they were doing emotionally.  Third, I planned time for us to spend outside of the office.  Fourth, I started spending time and money on technology that would make people’s lives better: laptops, monitors, and software.  Fifth, no more Saturdays unless there was an immediate deadline.  Sixth, I gave them more time to learn rather than constantly having to produce.  Seventh, I gave us all time to improve our development process and let the team have the freedom to suggest improvements.  Finally, I started delegating and letting people have freedom to own their area: engineering, product, design, and marketing.  I stopped being a control freak perfectionist, and let others have a real voice and the ability to chart the company and product’s course, and above all else create a culture where its OK to make mistakes.

Don’t do it if you just don’t want a boss

A lot of people tease me and ask if I started my startup because I wanted to be my own boss.  Yes that was one of the motivations, but in all honesty, its no what gets me to jump out of bed.  As a founder, your boss is your team, your investors, and your customers.  I realized that early on, and then my primary motivation became the freedom to build: a team, a company, and a product.

Understand your company culture and where it comes from

When you’re last startup is successful you start to think that that is the way to conduct business.  Wrong.  You’re dealing with a new market, working with a different set of people, and your role is also completely different.  I made the mistake of using my past startup as a model, and it certainly backfired on me (see point 1).  What I realized is that the group of people I attracted and hired to work for BizeeBee were completely different from my previous startup.  Yes this is a group of highly motivated people capable of accomplishing great things similar to the last startup.  But fundamentally this group is actually a reflection of who I am, not of my previous boss.  As such they want to be treated the same way I do and have a similar persona.

You must set a clear and consistent vision

You are the only one in the company that can deal with ambiguity, no one else can and should.  You have to set a clear vision of where you’re headed now, tomorrow, 3 months from now, and next year.  People want to know what your goals are for them, for the product, and for the company.  If you don’t tell them they feel like cogs.    Yes the vision may change and when it does, its up to you to let the others know.  But above all else, you have to be consistent in setting that vision and working towards it.  People are working long hours and producing results, the last thing they want is to satisfy someone’s every whim.  They want to know that you have goals that you’ve set and are working towards accomplishing them everyday.

Slow, steady, and smile!

Before I left my last startup I spent 2 months reading about everything: new technology, management and leadership, customer development, and the list goes on.  I learned a lot, but it prepared me for some challenges but I’m still learning.  Everyday there is a new challenge that requires me to rally.  Somedays the challenges are simple, and somedays they’re extremely gut wrenching.  I fight, hustle, and above all else smile!  Because this is supposed to hard but fun

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Burning and Earning

As a startup founder, I’m obsessed with burn rate and runway.  Bootstrapping only heightens your awareness.  But taking in money doesn’t mean you have a free ride to spend as we you please.  I actually started to loose sleep once I knew I had someone else’s hard earned savings at stake.  I’ve also witnessed a lot of startups that wished they had raised less money because of the pressure associated with a large round,  such as growing a team quickly, ramping up the number of users, and getting to revenue.  Is there a happy balance?

I’m of the camp that every founder should invest some of their own personal funds into their venture.  The exact dollar amount is up for debate and depends on an individual’s comfort level and lifestyle.  A founder devoting time alone isn’t enough of a contribution, because to me money signifies an opportunity cost, as in I could be making money but I’m choosing to hold off and actually use my savings because I believe what I’m creating is valuable.  Also putting in your own money you become more thoughtful on the things you spend.

Scrappy Stack

With technology costs reducing startups can build a prototype on a shoestring budget.  At my current startup I’m using Heroku to host our web app, Google Apps for e-mail, mySQL for our database, Gmail for our mail server (but switching to MadMimi soon), GitHub for source code repository, and Pivotal Tracker for bug and project tracking.  I did purchase licenses for RubyMine bought a few external monitors (refurbished), desks and chairs from Ikea, and I try to do a team lunch/dinner once a week at the very least I’ll make dinner for my team.  I also don’t balk at the thought of sending my developers and designers to conferences.  When you’re working on a small team you need a flow of new  ideas and creativity, what better place to acquire them than at a conference.  Its also a great place to scout and recruit talent.

To me office space is a luxury.  For the past 8 months we’ve been working out of my apartment to cut down on costs, and while most people would be opposed to the invasion my startup has been my personal life for most of this year.  But there does come a time when you need office space.  For us, it was when we realized that we needed to start doing more usability testing, and having a designated space to hold meetings with customers and investors.

On the issue of hardware, I’ve been dreaming of the day I can buy each of my developers and designers their own machine.  But its just not in the budget right now.

What do I spend money on?

Employees and legal fees.  Its hard to find and retain talent.  Anyone who has tried to recruit knows this.  In a startup time, culture, and creativity drive the creation and success of a product and company, and you can’t expect success if you’re both a taskmaster and slavedriver.  Sweat equity is nice to have, but in a town where you’re competing with startups that are funded by VCs, six-figure salaries of techies, and high rent and gas prices you have to at least handle basic living expenses.

Just like a household you will need an emergency fund.  To handle calamities like machines breaking or even just being able to do something nice and relaxing with your team once in a while.  A startup isn’t a death march nor is it something you can flip instantly.  It takes time to build a team and product.  You also want to spend on little things like running simple marketing campaigns, networking events, conferences, books, or even experimenting with new technologies.

A startup is after all an investment.  As a founder it’s an investment in your potential to build something and to direct your career.  There’s no need to bet your life savings on it, but realize like an investment you have to know what you’re getting into, what the hidden fees are, budget and cut extraneous costs, project performance, and be willing to take bear a certain amount of risk for the potential rewards.

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Risk and Rejection

As a first time entrepreneur I understand that I’m seen as a huge risk, even though I was on the founding team of a startup that successfully exited recently.  I’ve pitched at several events and met with angels and VCs.  I don’t know if a lot of other entrepreneurs feel this way, but from what I’ve observed and read I’ve developed some empathy.  I understand that all investors are just as concerned about their portfolio companies, and delivering value to their shareholders as I as an entrepreneur am to my employees and customers.  Investors have have to raise funds, and maintain a certain return/revenue stream to stay in business.  Given the current market conditions, their past experiences, and the overly zealous and optimistic nature of entrepreneurs investors have to be cautious.

I’m a big girl, I can take rejection, and I welcome it as a challenge to the way I think and present my product.  If I wanted someone to tell me I’m awesome I would just call my mom up everyday…

Following up with Feedback

I’ve found it immensely valuable to hear from an investor right on the spot: “I understand the first part of your pitch when you explained how you were trying to solve problem A.  But I don’t understand how problem B fits into it.  Perhaps you should focus on A first.  Or make it clearer to me.”  Or the investor who tells me on the first meeting that they wanted to meet with me, but are averse to space that I’m in, or just don’t feel like they know enough to add value.  Being clear and forthright makes the process not only easier for me, but then I start to learn and understand how investors think and what they are looking for.  I also have other founder friends who are fundraising and farther along that I am that I can then refer the investor to.

Followup calls and emails are really helpful too.  I’ve received a few of these where the investor will tell me that they aren’t sure about my distribution model, think that there maybe a conflict with one of their existing portfolio companies, or want to see how customers will react to make sure that I’m solving the right problem.
I’m not saying its mandatory to give feedback.  Its just useful, and I’m the type of person who wants someone to lay it on thick.  How else am I going to improve as an entrepreneur, and build a product and company if I don’t get beat up once in a while?  I think its important for investors to do this to test the strength of entrepreneurs.
What I’ve found hard to dissect is vague feedback.  The investors who take a meeting with me and state they are early stage, but early stage doesn’t include before Product/Market fit.  Or are very excited and like the concept of my product, but want to wait and see traction.  Whats hard to pin down is their criteria of traction.  And maybe that’s just an exercise for me as an entrepreneur to discover.

Before Product/Market Fit Push Back

I’ve been bootstrapping my startup and have taken in a small amount of angel investment.  For the last 7 months I’ve devoted myself to my startup: building the product, the team, acquiring customers, fundraising, and creating a vision.  As an entrepreneur I think its important to show a vested interest and belief in your own product, vision, and risk taking abilities.  And while these are all positives I know they aren’t enough to compel investors to invest.  When faced with push back the onus of proof is still on the entrepreneur to prove they are worthy of a large round.  Go home, get more customers, refine the problem, product and pitch.  Competition and market conditions will always be against you, but those are natural forces that you have to work against, its just part of the fun of fundraising.

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Engineers jump ship early for various reasons, its usually a combination of the following three: instability in management, unclear path to an exit, and work that is mindless and unyielding.  But there are those who stick around even if there isn’t an end in the near term, there are periodic shakeups in the organization, and they’re well past their vesting initial vesting period.  The reason they stay is that they are enjoying the work, being challenged, and experience the impact they are making on users.  They also have a manager who has given them the support they need to advance in terms of projects, and believes in quality of the work they are doing.  So how does an engineering manager retain talent?

Prized Projects

Managers should realize that if they have engineers on their staff that have a decent track record, have been at even one successful startup (including the present one), and can bang out code on a couple platforms then chances are they are going to be wooed all the time!  You can’t blame recruiters for trying to covet your prized programmers.  Instead you’ve got to learn to understand each of your engineers and continue to motivate them.  This is hard to do in a startup.  Why?  Because as a startup manager your time is limited and you’re under a lot of pressure to produce results and end up prioritizing it over making sure that everyone on your team is satisfied.  And even if you wanted to please everyone there are only a limited number of juicy projects to work on.  If you can’t promise a project don’t.  But if there is a chance to break up a project into parts, and divvy it up that might be the way to go.  That way you’re not playing favorites and you’ll benefit from building redundancy in the knowledge base over time.  Remember startup engineers don’t want hand-me-down projects, i.e. they don’t want to feel like someone else has built everything and now they just get to maintain it.  They want to be part of the creation phase, and if you can give them a slice of it then they’ll stay motivated because they’ll feel like you listened and cared about advancing their experience and skill set.

Communication and Coding Style

Most people speak up for what they want.  Some just go off and build stuff.  While others sit around and wait to be asked if everything is ok and are afraid to go off on their own.  As an engineering manager its important to figure out what your engineers’ coding and communication style is right off the bat.  Its perfectly ok to ask people whether they like having freedom to manage their own projects or need a more disciplined task master.   You also need to know their preferred work style.  Some people like to come in late and code into the night while others may be morning people and want time off to relax in the evening.   There are those who code away in noisy environments while others need a quiet room to think in for a few hours a day.  There are also some who work best if they just work on a single project and others like context switching or working along the entire stack as opposed to just front or backend development.  These are the types of questions an engineering manager needs to ask during the hiring phase to gauge their candidate’s personality.  It will of course change with time, which is why its important to do a monthly checkup at the very least.

Checkups

I’ve been on both sides of these, and frankly its awkward for everyone.  The manager sits there and first wants a status update then moves onto pressing issues, and then finally asks the engineer how things are going.  At which point an hour or more has gone by and everyone is exhausted.  Checkups should not be status updates.  A manager should know what the status is if they’ve reading checkins and tracking bugs.  One-on-one time is meant to place the engineer’s concerns first.  Find out if they’re stuck on something, if they’ve been exploring a new technology, how they like the project so far, or if they have any concerns with a member of the team or the company.

Rewards

Yes there are limited funds, so monetary rewards aren’t always possible.  If you can’t afford to give someone a raise then at the very least give them praise!  There are a lot of other ways to incentivize people: conferences, giving them time to learn a new technology, showcasing their latest achievements in front of their peers, and for heavens sakes tell the founders, investors, and management about the stellar job they’ve been doing!

Remember in a startup emotions runs high especially if there are periodic fires to fight.  If there is one unsatisfied engineer then chances are there are more or there will be soon.  As a manager your time is limited and its hard to motivate everyone on your team all the time.  But that’s another reason why you have to make sure the team dynamic is one where people help each other out.  Collaboration isn’t just about getting things done its about building a culture that can last through the fires.

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