Arhiva completă: engleză

Or, as they call it, “Stand-up meeting” or “daily SCRUM”. Which, for a product manager and team leader shouldn’t be new at all. But if you were not either, it might come as something new and, I might say, interesting.

As a freelancer and, afterwards, owner of a business, I got pretty good at scheduling and prioritizing my own tasks. I needed to, since there is no one looking over your shoulder to force me work or do anything other than wandering around aimlessly on Facebook (or Digg, if you take into consideration the time frame: 2008-2009).

Still, since starting MavenHut, one of my co-founders, Cristi, “forced” the entire team into 10 minutes stand-up meetings every morning. And while it didn’t necessarily improve my own productivity (my own “to do” list is more detailed than the one I present at a stand-up meeting), it helped me understand better what my team is working on, what their issues are.

Because this is what SCRUM basically does (in my experience):
– it forces you to be really to the point in explaining what you are working on;
– it allows everyone in the team to understand what you are working on. It’s really helpful, because they can also pitch in with suggestions;
– it allows you to see what the others are working on and understand if their work impact you directly in that specific cycle.

So, if you don’t do it, try it. Read here the basics and try it with your team, your co-founders. Heck, even with your cat, if you have no one else available. It creates a great habit, that will surely help you, in time.

P.S.: do not, I repeat, do not ask the cat for her SCRUM report. You might get something like “sleep. human petting. eat. sleep. sand. eat. sleep. human petting. sleep. wake up human in the middle of the night”. And this will really get you down :))

Think about this: it is so hot outside that your cat, in the house, is pleading for some cold air. Unfortunately, there’s no one home, what do yo do? Well, you setup an IFTTT recipe so that if the temperature is too high, it turns on the fan in your home. Oh, the things we do for our cats!

Obviously, though, I am not writing this to help you keep your cat in shape. Or not only for this (note to myself: write a blogpost about our cat!).

So, did you know about ifttt? Or, the longer name, If This Then That? It’s an automation service: it takes specific actions and executes them on specific triggers. I started using it recently (about 6 months ago) and here are some tasks that happen currently over some of my accounts:

1. If I post a link on my Facebook account, it automatically goes to my Twitter account
2. If I upload an image on Facebook, it uploads it automatically on my Dropbox account
3. If I send self emails which usually means something I want to remember, it saves it in Evernote
4. If I publish a new blog post on this blog, it saves the content on Evernote

There are several more, usually to save things to my Evernote or Dropbox accounts.

Among the things you could do, though, if you want to:

1. Update profile photo on Twitter when you change it on Facebook
2. If it’s going to rain tomorrow, send me an email! (or an SMS)
3. Text to IFTTT to fake a Phone Call
4. If Hell freezes over then email me

There are lots and lots of “recipes” (this is how they call the automations), you can see a list of the most popular here. There is a list of funny ones on Mashable, also.

The “channels” you can use to create recipes with include, among others: Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Dropbox, Evernote, 500px, iPhone Photo Stream, Wordpress blogs, New York Times, ESPN, Pocket aso. The full list of “channels” is here.

P.S.: they recently launched their iPhone App, which I didn’t have time to test yet.

[Image unavailable: TechCrunch Pitch]

“If you create a great site, people will find you anyway, you don’t need promotion, SEO or anything similar!”. In my 5-6 years of doing online promotion, SEO, online PR and similar, I’ve heard something along these lines from a lot of people. And I thought it was completely wrong.

Last week I wrote a post about pitching (actually, it is about a book about pitching, but nevertheless). I mention that I think you should be, or better, you ARE always pitching. I’ve got some people telling me, though, that they don’t need to pitch if the product is great. And this, I think, is a mistake.

The are two situations I encountered related to this: the startup crowd understanding of “pitching” and the English as a second language understanding of “pitching”.

First, the startup crowd. Because of the buzz with VC backed businesses in the last 10 years or so, especially in the last 5, since lots of accelerators, incubators and whatnot where created, people think of pitching as just the pitches you do for investors (the pitches you do in order to get financed). The thing is, though, that in the last 2 years, I’ve hardly talked to more than 60 investors. But in the years before MavenHut, I think I’ve talked to more than 300-400 people, one on one, to get support, to get involvement, to get financing of other projects. Not to mention the events I’ve been speaking to, where I would be pitching my projects in front of bigger audiences.

Moreover, while I was managing the blogger’s forum in Romania (no longer active), I think I’ve talked, in 2-3 years, to about 1000, if not more, people, to convince them to use the forum.

The conclusion is that yes, you are always pitching. Just not to investors. You are always pitching to the stakeholders in your project. And no matter how brilliant your idea, your implementation, if nobody hears about your work, nobody will use what you are creating.

The second misunderstanding of “pitching” comes from people using English as a second language. Pitching means, to them, just investors. Or, in case of Media Agencies, calls to pitching mean meeting the potential clients in a competition-like environment. It’s the same mistake as to the startup crowd, but for different reasons. Well, it’s true, when the two of them combine, though, and you get a startup crowd that’s using English as a second language… well, things get really confusing :))

So, start pitching today. Pitch to your family, your friends, your users. You will be better for it. And, yes, always be pitching!

P.S.: in the photo at the top, you can see Mike Butcher, from TechCrunch UK. And if you would want to be featured in TechCrunch, you would need to pitch him, in some way. He actually has a great presentation on how to pitch the press here.

Photo source

People often asked how MavenHut, with three co-founders that nobody knew anything about in Ireland, managed to get a seed round so quick and so big (especially in terms of European investment levels). And I was having a hard time explaining it in short words, until I’ve found this: Be Investable.

The first thing you’ll notice about Graham’s essay is that it isn’t filled with tips or tricks for getting investor’s money. Rather, the best way to convince an investor to give you money is to actually be investable. Usually that starts with having a product with some amount of traction, but some people are investable even if they have no product. Usually those aren’t first-time founders though.

Basically, MavenHut was an easy sell (as far as looking for investment could be called easy). And that was because of one thing: we had traction. We had a product that was up and running, that was acquiring users, that told us (and the investors) things like demographics, buying intent, session length aso.

This means that before going to investors with “I have a great idea”, find a way to make it happen. Yes, I believe you can get investment with just an idea, but not the first time you try.

There are, obviously, other elements that help the investment process (the team, the industry, the type of investor targeted), but I think the most important thing you need to do is to Be Investable: make their decision as easy as possible.

P.S.: You would be surprised how many startup founders (or wanna be founders) don’t really grasp the concept of having something to show investors, other than “And I have this idea…”.

Photo from ShutterStock

I’ve been playing computer games pretty much for ever. I am 35 now, and I have seen the first computer ever when I was about 5-6, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (pictured above). My best childhood friend’s father, a Maths professor, had one of these brought in from UK, a rare occurrence in the communist Romania I was living in. That’s when my long love relationship with computer games has begun.

The first game I’ve ever played is either Lode Runner or Jumping Jack. Yeah, it’s been 30 years ago, do you really think I would remember exactly? :)

The thing is, I played a lot of games on that specific computer and I’ve played even more once my parents managed to find, through some connections (as with everything during the communism), a Romanian clone called HC85.

That’s when I started to play everything from the Dizzy series to Manic Miner, from Match Day (the precursor of FIFA games) to SimCity. But the games I fell in love with were the adventure/quest games like The Hobbit, Dizzy or Seymour. This is the main reason I started to learn English, after all, to understand the long lines of text that the characters of these games spoke to each other.

My fascination with adventure games continued into the PC era, with games like Larry. I remembered now that I’ve contributed to the KickStarted campaign for the re-mastered Larry – also, I still remember the happiness when I finally got the “Undress Her” command right. Space Quest, Indiana Jones games or the great Day of the Tentacle (not to forget Sam and Max hit the road, the weirdly funny game) were also games that I would spend my time on over and over again.

30 years later, I still love to play games and I book entire weekends just for this (not as many as I would’ve wanted, unfortunately). The last games I’ve played? The Last of Us, Dishonored and Bioshock: Infinity, on PS3, Runaway: A Road Adventure and Score on iPad, while on my MacBook the last download is Braid. Of course, I am not including here the throng of casual games I play on all devices to learn as much as possible for MavenHut, the gaming company I am part of.

What are you playing now? :)

About a year and something ago, while in Dublin for Startup Bootcamp, I’ve found a video of Mark Zuckerberg speaking with Jessica Livingston at Startup School in 2011. I’ve looked for it this week to remember something and I’ve found that he also talked at Startup School in 2012, with Paul Graham.

Both videos are below and they are worth it, especially because Mark talks specifically about the startup part of the Facebook. Moreover, interesting, he says, in 2011, that he wouldn’t start Facebook in Silicon Valley if he would start again now. THe reasons? :) See below:

This month MavenHut is hitting some awesome fine round numbers and I am taking a break from the regular posting to revel on it:

1. We’ve hit 1 million Monthly Active Users for Solitaire Arena (we’re actually closing on 1.5 million)

For Facebook games, this is a really important milestone, since this means we are going to the 1-5 million tier, with the “Big Boys” :)

2. Since we’ve improved a lot on retention and acquisition, we keep growing really well and, as a consequence, we’ve hit, for the first time, top 100 Facebook Games. Which is awesome!

We’ve posted on our company’s site a little bit more numbers, but for the moment I am extremely, truly happy that the company is doing well. So bear with me for not writing something else and just enjoying the moment. In a startup, happiness rarely truly lasts, so I am taking as much as I can now :D

Yeah, it sounds like this is a post about religion. It isn’t.

Actually, this idea came to me after reading an article on Medium where a woman says that she finished a 24 hours running competition by believing that 90% of the women that started the specific race finished it. It said so in a book she read (Born to Run, I also enjoyed the book a lot).

The truth was, though, that only 45% of the women that started the race actually finished it. The information in the book was incorrect, from the lack of documentation (which makes you wonder how much of the book is incorrect, also). The thing is, though, that it didn’t matter. She finished the race because she believed she should and she could.

And I find a lot of similarities between this and business (especially startups): you rarely have enough numbers and facts to go on, but you hold on to the ones that give you the energy to keep going.

Like the fact that when you start your own business, you think you will have more time for yourself because, let’s face it, now you’re your own boss. But this is not true, you actually work a lot more, on worse hours, on a much smaller wage than you could get if you got hired. But the fact that you KNOW it’s gonna get better (even if it doesn’t, most of the time), makes you go through with it. And, yes, at some point, it MIGHT get better. So you keep hoping :D

Or the fact that businesses fail a lot in the first year (they say 95%). But, well, you find different numbers, that say a different story. Even if they are not suited for you (Y! Combinator ot TechStars companies aren’t a good example, because of the ecosystem around them), you still prefer to believe those numbers. After all, only 22% and 10%, respectively, of the companies failed. Which is a lot better than 95%, right? :)

In the end it doesn’t really matter. As long as you are getting closer to your dreams, who cares what leads you there and what kept you going? It’s only about what you believe…

Photo from Shutterstock

One thing you start to value a lot once you become an adult is sleep. Being a startup founder is like becoming an adult over again: it adds even more pressure. I’m sure there are other activities where you don’t get much sleep, also, but I am talking about what I know, so don’t be too mad about it.

Anyway, while a startup founder goes without sleep for long periods of time (no sleep or less, a lot less sleep), you realize, at some point, that you need to sleep better to get more productive.

This is something I rediscover these days, when I’m, again, starting to wake up at 6-7am. The problem is that you do not go to sleep as early as you should and, as a consequence, today I am little bit off. I still get done everything I started to do today, but I wish I would’ve slept more last night (and the previous, for that matter).

Even writing this article didn’t come easy.I have an interesting case study almost finished since Sunday and I wanted to publish it today, but in no way I could. I need all the energy I can gather for some number crunching that I’m doing for the company. Which is, frankly, more important >:)

Sleep tight!

P.S.: yes, that’s our cat :D

One of the most important skills of a startup founder is considered to be networking (Emi actually wrote on article on how important it is for a CEO).

When we talk about networking, people usually think about meeting business partners, investors and so on. And yes, it is one of the best ways to get to your targets, but I also take into consideration the smaller things.

Two days ago we’ve been expecting a huge traffic surge from Brazil on Solitaire Arena. While happy for it, one of my colleagues said: “Guys, you know we do not have the translations finished for Portuguese, right?”.

And all of a sudden, all hell broke loose, since we needed the translation in 4 hours, tops. Because not having it would mean worse retention, worse monetization, worse everything. So what did we do? Well, we went to our networks. I went to mine, of course. First option: Facebook (click on the image to see the bigger version). Initially as a simple status, then with a $7 promotion to all my 3000 contacts on Facebook (you can see the results and the reactions in the screenshot below):

The result: in 4 hours we had the translation completed and everything was good again. While it may not seem like much, most of the people replying gave us at least 2 days deadline (and that was pretty fast). Which is how it should be done. But we didn’t have two days.

The network you have is a lot bigger than the one you actually think it is. So nurture it, even it is a virtual one (on Facebook, twitter, blog). It might help you a lot someday, even when you not expect it.