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The panic was creeping on me little by little. I was breathing through my mouth, as told, but the water was going from above my eyes back to under my neck and back again and I would feel compelled to breathe through my nose every time my head was above the water.

This is how my first ever scuba dive experience began. Sheer panic, no matter how much I tried to control it: WHY CAN’T I BREATHE THROUGH MY NOSE? After all, in my 15 years of competitive sports (handball), all I was told and forced into was to breathe-in through my nose and breathe-out through my mouth.

Looking back to that first day of diving I can compare the feeling to that of building a startup. Its life is like a sinusoid, with ups and downs and feelings of drowning and terrifying panic for the person crazy enough to try and start one.

Fortunately, though, 10 minutes later you control your the breath, even if you swallow some Mediterranean salty water from time to time. And 25 minutes later you are really surprised that you need to go back to the boat, because the lesson it’s over (Oh, so soooooon???). Of course, this is just the beginning, because dangers are close by, you are just blissfully unaware of them.

And that’s how you feel for exactly 5 minutes in startups: you have everything under control. Yeah, right!

Still, I wouldn’t trade that panic for anything else. Or, frankly, I could live with less of it…

Photo credit

Several years ago I was talking to a friend and he said that he is more interested in a lifestyle business than in “high risk, high reward” type of business. I was interested in the second one (which is, usually, about the VC backed startups – like MavenHut), while he was interested in the first type, which means growing slow, bootstrapping and taking a longer time to see either success or failure.

Most of the time, you don’t really hear too much about the lifestyle business. The most obvious that I know of is Evernote (which is more of a hybrid), but today I’ve found an interesting article on Hacker News about a lifestyle business that generates revenues of about $15 million per year from Malaysia.

I like the article, I think it underlines the most important thing about a lifestyle business: being really passionate and enjoying what you are building. Otherwise, how will you be there for the next 10-15 years?

This is important to me. I’m a lifestyle entrepreneur. Mindvalley was built around my passions – meditation, personal growth, play, culture, travel and epic interior design (our offices are magical). Having total ownership means I’m not pressured by partners, boards or investors to deliver something that I’m not passionate about.

Link to 7 Lessons from Building a Lifestyle Business

If you could choose, would you choose a lifestyle business that generates steady income, grows slow and takes a longer time to reach the valuation you want (but it might be less risky), or the VC backed business?

In the recent years I’ve found myself pitching a lot of times: many different projects to a lot of different people. Some pitches worked, most of them didn’t (which is not bad, it’s just the way it is, not everyone is interested in your project at the specific moment).

Some time ago, a good friend suggested I read Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal, by Oren Klaff. Thanks to a short, but long overdue and needed vacation, I started to read it. Some of the quotes I found interesting in the first 50 pages are below. They explain some of those moments when I felt I lost the control of discussion while I was pitching. Basically, my frame lost the collision :)

“A frame is the instrument you use to package your power, authority, strength, information and status.”

“When you are responding ineffectively to things the other person is saying and doing, that person owns the frame, and you are being frame controlled.”

“Every social interaction is a collision of frames, and the stronger frame always wins. Frame collisions are primal.”

If you have a chance to read the book, do it (You can find it on Amazon here, for Kindle or hardcover). After all, you’re always pitching, right? :)

Also, below there’s a video of the author talking about his method (it’s an hour and 30 minutes video, just so you know):

Up until two years ago my job meant, among other things, participating in a lot of events, meeting lots of people, talking to lots of people and, generally, consuming lots of energy by entertaining people around me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it, but the thing is, from time to time, I would get completely burnt out.

So I needed to accept, at some point, that you can’t do everything, all the time, at the highest energy level. That you would need, from time to time, to recharge.

This is how I came over the “me” time. “Me time” is defined as a specific period of time (it can be from an hour to several days) when I am being as selfish as I can be, when I don’t care what happens in the outside world. Business or personal (family, friends, whatever). Unless something REALLY, REALLY bad happens, I will not be available for anything besides what I REALLY want to do.

And what is that, you might ask? Well, mostly playing computer games, go to movies, go on short trips (I’m more interested in the driving, not the destination). I also read books I postponed reading – SF books, mostly (btw, did you read The City and the city? great, entertaining book). Or I just walk around, thinking of stuff.

Up until two years ago (before MavenHut), I would have those moments whenever I felt like it, now I try to “schedule” them every other weekend, at least. And the thing is, my productivity goes through the roof after these “me moments”. Moreover, the best ideas I’ve had (business or otherwise) come as a result of these reflection times.

So, what’s the conclusion to an otherwise incoherent Saturday blog post?

Take some “me time”. You’ll love it :)

Photo credit

Since today is Sunday, maybe you have some spare time to watch an interesting video of Fred Wilson, from USV and A VC fame, speaking with Sarah Lacy, from Pando Daily.

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? :)