Things I Wish I Spent Less Time On

“Focus is saying no to 1,000 good ideas.” — Steve Jobs

Events

I realized the error of my customer acquisition strategy as I awkwardly made my way through a small Meetup I had just pitched. It was 11pm on a Tuesday, I was exhausted and still had real work to do once I got home. Yet there I was, in a shitty bar trying not to skewer anyone with my Sonar sign as I dodged person after person asking me to install THEIR app.

Lesson Learned:

Events are for research, business development, and hiring; NOT for getting to 10,000,000 downloads.

Brands & Agencies

When MTV, Kraft, Digitas, and the like reached out to us we weren’t sure what they wanted. It took us at least 10 meetings to realize that, rather than delivering us millions of their customers on a silver platter, they were keeping tabs on us so that they could get access to OUR audience if we ever took off!

Lesson Learned:

Be polite, but postpone brand and agency “intros” until you’ve built your own audience. If you build it, they will come (and pay).

Corollary: Investors know this. You sound stupid when you talk about your impending “big deal” with “XYZ brand” that’s going to drive massive customer acquisition and revenue.

Side projects

In the winter of 2011, we signed a partnership w/ Wired magazine to demonstrate our technology by providing visitors of their Times Square popup store with personalized in-store product recommendations.

That “small side project” cost us 6 weeks of development and delivered no appreciable benefit other than getting to hang out with the cool people at Wired.

Lesson Learned:

You do not have 20% time. Identify your top three priorities. Throw away numbers two and three.

Competition

In the run up to SXSW 2012 when the insider media had fabricated Highlight as heir to the throne and some of our more fair weather investors had written us off, my confidence was against the ropes. We reordered our roadmap to rush out comparable features but were now BEHIND. I put on my best brave face but inside my gut was rotting away. I still remember thinking on the flight to Austin “fck, we had it, and now we are going to lose it.”

Oops! Highlight never went anywhere but we definitely wasted a ton of energy and sleep “responding to the threat” when we should have been figuring out how to make our own business work.

Lesson Learned:

Be steady at the wheel. The only way one startup can kill another startup is by getting into the other’s head and leading them off a cliff.

If you don’t believe me, try this proof. Are your competitors releasing a bunch of the same features that you have on your roadmap? Yes? Do you know what consumers want*? No? Great, then neither do your competitors. Get back to figuring out what users want!

*Hint: If you did, you would already have traction.

Selling the company

When the ambient social networking space iced over in the spring of 2012, Sonar’s controlling investors decided it was time to “flip the asset.” They connected us with a daily deals company looking for “Big Data” solutions. We stopped working on the app and devoted all of our resources to repacking our backend technology to solve BigCo’s problems. Instead of paring down expenses to extend our dwindling runway, we piled on hires and ramped up our infrastructure.

The daily deals space imploded but we spent nearly nine months, dozens of meetings, and several hundred thousand dollars “selling” Sonar into a company that nearly went bankrupt.

Lesson Learned:

Companies don’t get sold, they get bought. The best way to get bought is to build something of value. That’s hard to do when you are trying to sell.

Misalignment

We built Sonar out of an incubator that I helped launch in 2010. To be absolutely clear, the incubator was instrumental to getting Sonar off the ground and helped us considerably along the way. Unfortunately, there are a number of structural issues facing incubators and the operators they employ. I address some of these below.

The decoupling of responsibility from control created ambiguity and confusion, tension and frustration for all parties. From day to day decisions such as negotiating an employment contract to company defining ones such as when to sell the firm, alignment was a constant challenge. Occasionally, we were simply at odds.

Perhaps the most detrimental aspect of the incubator model was not its potential for hinderance but its facility as a crutch. As someone responsible for building and running a company that I ultimately didn’t control, it was far too easy to point a finger.

In my opinion, the most tragic example came when our incubator sat on a financing that would have rebooted the company. After nearly a month at loggerheads, our would-be investors gave us 48 hours to “take it or leave it.” In hopes of saving the company, I made an ultimatum: we move forward together or I would have to walk away. No one budged, time elapsed, and our term sheet evaporated. I resigned as promised, blaming them for killing my baby.

Lesson Learned:

As John Burroughs said, “A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.” Avoid bad relationships like the plague but when you inevitably find yourself in a difficult partnership, don’t waste precious energy wailing against it. Make it work or move on quickly.