It's an article of faith that culture fit is nearly as important as skills when hiring at a startup. I agree that's it's a critical part of a team's success, but it can also inadvertently lead to a homogenized culture that hurts rather than helps.
When I first heard culture fit used in regards to hiring, it referred to how people view their work and the company or product. For me, these two are absolutely essential. Every person on the team should share a similar passion for the work they do and what they're building. Especially when the team is small, a lack of work ethic or belief in the product has the potential to kill your momentum and create resentment and conflict. I don't mean that work should be someone's life or that every job should be a cause, just that each person should believe in what they do and do it to the best of their ability.
Today, culture fit has started to mean something different. It's become more common for startups to seek people who are like the people who started them and build a team around shared interests: from movies, television shows, games, music and other pop culture ephemera to how someone likes to spend their evenings and weekends. Do you like karaoke? Do you love to hike? Do you vote the way everyone we know votes? Are your favorite drinks our favorite drinks?
It makes sense. If you have the choice between two candidates with similar skills, you're naturally going to lean toward the one who you have the most in common with. The interview probably went better and they seem like someone you'd enjoy following on Twitter. Plus, they'll get along with the rest of the team really well.
If I was starting a company, I would do the same thing. In fact, I'd probably see it as one of the benefits of having my own company. Imagine, going to work every day with a group of people who are like me! We'll provide outstanding free chai and the company playlist will be filled with the Grateful Dead, Jack White, and Radiohead. We'll host Premier League and World Cup parties and everyone will receive a book allowance.
It's the wrong way to do it, though, and in the end, produces a stagnant culture. When everyone at the company shares similar interests and sees the world in the same way, your perspective becomes extremely narrow. It can be difficult to see potential challenges or take them seriously. Criticism from users, advisors, and the press fails to resonate because no one we know sees things that way. More importantly, the ideas and creativity that come from unexpected combinations of different perspectives and personalities are nowhere to be found.
Look for similarity in vision, work ethic, kindness, and openness. Look for diversity in everything else.
As I've worked on projects lately, I've noticed that once you get beyond the initial brainstorming and the whiteboard is full, it becomes difficult to think through all aspects of an app or site. The obvious solution is to start building, get it the hands of users, and iterate quickly based on feedback and metrics.
If you have the skills or the team, that is the best approach. Sometimes though, you don't have that option. Your flexibility may be limited by working with contractors who need a more thorough development plan. Alternatively, you may want to think through the idea in more depth to explore how much potential it really has, or maybe get a better feel for its complexity.
An approach I've found that works well is to write the FAQ for your app or site while still early in the idea stage. It seems counterintuitive since normally the FAQ is saved for the very end of the process or better, after launch when there have actually been frequent questions.
Writing an FAQ while you're still formulating the idea is a terrific way to see the app or site through a user's eyes, think through how features should work, and reveal what's missing.
Here's a quick example. Imagine you have an idea for an app that will allow you to enter your favorite bands and then show you upcoming concerts near you by bands that are similar in music style and performance. As you think through the FAQ, you quickly see the decisions you'll have to make. As you write the answers, you'll often discover that the solution you're planning is cumbersome or convoluted, or perhaps a feature that you weren't planning on including seems more necessary when you can't think of an adequate reason for it to not be there.
Can I signup without Facebook or Twitter?
How do I add a new band?
How do I remove a band?
Can I add more than 10 bands?
I added a bunch of bands, but I don't see any matches yet?
Is there a way to see all concert matches, even ones that aren't nearby?
How do I save a concert I want to see?
Can I purchase tickets in the app?
How do I share a concert with a friend?
How do I turn off notifications for new concerts?
Why does that app think some other band is like my favorite band in concert? They're not even close.
Is it possible to connect to my Last.fm, Pandora, Spotify, or Rdio account and grab my favorite artists automatically?
How do I delete my account?
If you're a developer, you know this is somewhat similar to user stories. I think the FAQ-driven approach works great earlier in the process, when you're still formulating the idea. It's also a gentle way to introduce the idea of user stories to people on your team who aren't developers, but will be contributing to the project.
Starting with the FAQ before the product is fully formed also reminds me a little of test-driven development, where you write the tests that your code will need to pass before you write the code. The tests in this case are the expectations of the people who will use your app or site. The earlier you starting seeing your product through their eyes, the better.
I recently read The Fast Food Revolutionary, a WSJ profile of Chipotle founder Steve Ells. If you're not familiar with Chipotle, it is a successful fast-casual chain known for a simple menu, food prepared directly in front of you using fresh ingredients, and really big burritos. It started in Denver in 1993 and now has over 100 locations. In the past decade, the menu has not changed in any noticeable way.
In the article, Ells says something profound:
People ask me why I bother to hire chefs like Nate Appleman or Kyle Connaughton when we never change our menu. We may never change our menu, but we are always changing our food.
Chipotle is a company obsessed with focus and execution, a company that refuses to deviate from its mission. Many companies, especially startups, tinker endlessly with who they are. They constantly change their menu, hoping to attract more revenue and customers, but often at the expense of the original product and customers.
Of course, sometimes it takes a number of experiments and false starts to define your menu. Until you have an answer to that question, all of your time and energy should be dedicated to the Build, Measure, and Learn cycle described in The Lean Startup.
Once you know your menu, embrace it, celebrate it, and talk about it constantly to your employees and customers. But as a company, put everything you have into the food. Every day, ask yourself, how can this be better? How can we execute better, remove obstacles, and improve the experience?
From Chipotle's perspective, their food is endlessly changing, but from our perspective, it never changes. Make small, subtle changes to your food, but do so in incremental ways that are imperceptible to your users. Satisfied customers don't crave change, they crave the food and experience they love.
It's true that the best companies do expand their menu at times and smart startups know when to pivot. Apple gets into the music business, Starbucks adds Frappuccinos, juice and smoothies, and even Chipotle is considering breakfast food. The most successful expansion is when the product fits perfectly within the company's core mission or when the company intentionally expands its vision to accommodate it, as when Apple embraced its Digital Hub strategy in 2001. On the flip side, Howard Shultz returned to Starbucks when he saw that their intense focus on coffee had been lost in an effort to chase lunch customers, which eventually started to push away their core audience.
In another interview, Ells said:
It's important to keep the menu focused, because if you just do a few things, you can ensure that you do them better than anybody else.
Doing a few things really, really well is hard. Delivering small improvements that build on your core vision rather than detract from it is challenging. Working everyday to execute better takes intense focus on minor details.
What's especially hard, though, is that none of this is sexy. Blank slates and new features attract enthusiastic designers and developers in ways that legacy code and cautious refreshes often do not. The press doesn't write articles about small improvements to your products. Headlines are reserved for additions to the menu. Bold changes are celebrated simply for being bold, when smart and effective change is what really matters.
The press, investors, and some users have an insatiable desire for the new thing. Fools listen to them.
Perfect your menu, then spend every day improving your food.
We know how to identify when a company, organization, or conference has stepped over the line. We know to sum up the misstep in 140 characters (hashtag optional), fill the comments of the official blog with criticisms and demands, and rally people from around the world to the cause.
I think outrage is exactly what injustice deserves. I'm concerned, though, that our outrage is increasingly becoming our default response to anything we think is wrong, improper, or offensive. Outrage has its place, but when wave after wave of outrage washes over the web every day, we start to lose our sense of perspective and proportion.
Perspective
The emotion and tactics of collective outrage once focused on public servants, large corporations, and institutions who were caught violating the public trust. Power and privilege rightfully bring with them accountability and high standards.
Now that we're connected to one another across states and countries, and the Internet and social media have made expression and organizing almost effortless, our targets have expanded substantially. Any startup, blogger, first-time journalist, or small conference who makes a mistake might face the collective anger of thousands of people.
These mistakes rarely involve violence or the breaking of laws. They are mistakes of judgement; embarrassing decisions, poor choices of words, failed attempts at humor, offensive behavior, and things that generally violate the shared standards of the community.
Grace
I admire anyone who stands up for what they believe in, who speaks out when they see things that are harmful, especially when it has the potential to silence or discourage others. That's how we progress and make things better for us and for those who come after us.
There has to be a sense of proportion, though, and an understanding that every one of us and every company will make mistakes, often many of them. There is a difference between one mistake and a long pattern of bad behavior. If this is their first one, let them know. The vast majority will acknowledge the mistake, learn from it, and do better. If they refuse to change and continue to do things you can't support, then by all means, take your business elsewhere and encourage others to do the same.
Too often, though, we're skipping past disappointment, frustration, and anger and immediately landing on outrage, regardless of the offense, whether or not the company or person has taken steps to address it, and sometimes, whether we had ever heard of them until today.
I've seen people make demands of companies they had no prior relationship with. They demand an apology and then judge whether it was sufficiently sincere. They demand answers: How did this happen? What steps are you taking to make sure it never does again? Who has been fired?
I'm not suggesting that we tolerate things that shouldn't be tolerated. I am asking for more grace, compassion and patience. Many of the people making these mistakes are very young, often in their first or second jobs or running a company or conference for the first time. Help them learn and be better people, offer advice (privately at first, if at all possible), but give them room to mess up, even fail, and then come back with better judgment and a broader perspective. Every person we admire regrets mistakes they made in the past, often serious ones. Most will also say that those mistakes helped them become who they are.
If nothing else, imagine if you unintentionally stepped over the line next week. How would you want to be treated?
Some of this outrage is born from our frustration at the injustices we see all around us every day, and how hard it is to change things. The gridlock and ineffectiveness of our politics makes things even worse. The instinct is the right one, “I want to do something”, but I'm the first to admit that it's easier to type an offended tweet from inside our office than help a homeless person outside our office.
The world isn't the way it's supposed to be and I'm tired of it, too. But a professional class dedicated to judging every mistake and misstep isn't the answer.
Is your passion planting and tending a garden of different products or a single tree that will live and grow for years? Think about where your heart is and build your company so that its success doesn't turn it into something you're not.
One or many?
Most teams set out to develop one successful product, either by building the entire company around it (such as Asana, Sprintly, and Glitch) or creating a series of products until they find the one with the most traction and potential. Once they find the one, the focus shifts to the breakout hit and the other experiments are usually abandoned.
Others build a portfolio of related products, whether productivity software, games, development tools or something else. Different products, yes, but in a way, branches of the same tree, sometimes sharing a common foundation.
The most unique approach is the one taken by Jim Coudal and Coudal Partners. As he explains in this great CreativeMornings talk, they've kept the agency model, but eliminated the clients. The diversity of products and projects (from Field Notes to Layer Tennis) is absolutely intentional. From the Twitter bio: “Unable to focus. OK with that.”
The goal isn't to finally figure out what they want to be when they grow up; the goal is to not grow up. They don't want a single hit to define who they are; success is exactly what they're doing. Coudal's example of how much you can accomplish if you don't set your mind to it is a continual inspiration.
Which is it for you?
You don't want to find yourself in a place where who you are and the product or products you're building are in conflict. When you thrive in the garden and end up dedicated to a single tree, it's easy to become frustrated and less productive. Adding one more feature to an established product, solving issues of scale, and refactoring code are very different from beginning work on a new product and smaller products in general.
I've talked with designers and developers who can't imagine working on the same product year after year. When they end up in that situation, often as a result of great success, they typically develop new outlets for their pent up initiative and creativity. If they have influence over the direction of the product, the result is frequent redesigns and rewrites.
This sounds completely unintuitive, but sometimes startups suffer by not having enough products.
The same is true in the opposite case. If someone wants to put everything they have into a tree project that will still be around in 20 years and instead is working on their fourth new app this year, they'll be equally frustrated. Each of those projects will feel horribly incomplete and unsatisfying, their crude simplicity and unfinished bits an unpleasant daily reminder.
The company can suffer in that situation as well. Projects that should be released quickly to gauge interest can take months more than needed as design and engineering decisions are made and re-made as if a tree that will outlive us all is being planted, instead of a small garden experiment.
Know yourself, your team, and what success is for you, and build a place that honors and embraces that.
People want to see action and progress, no matter how small. [3] They want to hear about milestones and rave reviews. Even if you're not adding new users and customers rapidly, you can still show momentum within the company and product. And if product updates aren't forthcoming, hopefully you can be forthcoming about why. There are many different ways to make and measure progress, the point is to share them with your community regularly.
Momentum fuels traction. As with sports teams and candidates, if the two begin to multiply, you have the start of a bandwagon.
How do you show commitment?
People tend to be protective of their social capital. No one wants to spend it promoting something to their friends that seems to have little chance of success. When you're building something new, people want to see that you and your team believe in it.
People want a sense of an ongoing story, especially at the beginning. Who is behind this, why did they build it, and what does the future hold? What's new and what's next?
Belief and commitment are demonstrated by how the team uses and evangelizes the product. It's shown through the stories of employees going the extra mile for the company, the product, and the people who use it.
The community feeds off of the energy and passion of the people behind to product.
Finally, people watch for consistency and follow-through. How often do you change the way you talk about the product? It's hard for people to embrace and spread your message if it's constantly changing.
If you rally your community to help out in some way (posting reviews, inviting friends, etc…), do you show the results and offer thanks? If you say you're going to do something weekly (release a new product, run a contest, post an update on the progress of a new version), do you do it? Is your marketing tied to broad, recurring themes or is it a series of fleeting experiments?
Of course, things will always change and people understand that. Just be up front when they do.
If you mix momentum and commitment with a great product and experience (or even just great potential), you'll quickly gain traction with your core users and have a great chance of success.
[2] Sorry, I'm just not ready to start including Pinterest in this list.
[3] I actually don't think this is entirely healthy and it become the focus just for the sake of meeting other's expectations. Nevertheless, I understand that people are hesitant to invest their time and money in an app or service that may have a limited future (specifically ones you fill with content, from photos to todos, not $0.99 games). it's the reality of software that people expect a purchase to be the start of an ongoing relationship. If that's not how you view it, be sure to be as clear as possible about that from the beginning.
Can you launch a new product for free? What are the best tools for building a web app quickly and cheaply?
It seems like nearly everyone has ideas for apps and sites they'd like to build and share with the world, myself included. Over the past month, I've put a band together to do just that. We're toying with a few little things [1] which I'll talk more about soon.
Your time and the time of the people you're working with are by far the most expensive parts of bootstrapping anything for the web. And that assumes you can find awesome, talented people willing to give up some of their weekends to do what that they do during the week for actual money. [2] Developers are looking for designers and founders are looking for co-founders. There are only a few people who are capable of creating an entire product by themselves. They should know that the rest of us hate them.
Unfortunately, I can't help with finding co-conspirators, other than to say, make friends and be consistently helpful, humble, and kind. That person you meet at Build might help you with your app icon two years from now.
What I can lend a hand with is the tools part. I've spent a lot of time looking at options and asking people for advice. My guiding principle was, What is the easiest, quickest, and cheapest way to accomplish this? I've seen too many small ideas and experiments lose momentum to over-complicated, sometimes custom-built, solutions that attempt to anticipate and solve problems (especially of scale) you're unlikely to have.
With the following choices, you can go live with no recurring costs. [3] The only expenses you'll incur are when your traffic requires more hosting resources or people spend money [4]. This removes the financial limitation from bootstrapping. Now you just need skills, time, and a few good ideas :)
Decision: It's difficult to top the simplicity of Heroku and it's not unusual to run small apps for months entirely for free. There are limitations in this approach and monthly fees can increase rapidly, but you've eliminated a great deal of complexity from your getting started phase.
Decision: There are endless blogging options and nearly all are free, so it's more a question of what you're most familiar with. I do love Jekyll and static sites, but Tumblr is my likely choice here, primarily for making it easy for a group of people to contribute.
Decision: Gumroad is perfect for selling anything digital, but it can work for small volumes of physical items, too. It's has the simplest, most beautiful payment experience you'll find. They take 5% and it's not a store, per se, but it's the fastest way to see if people want to buy your stuff. Plus, you only pay when others pay.
Email Newsletters
TinyLetter (free, limited to 5,000 subscribers) MailChimp (free, limited to 2,000 subscribers) SendGrid ($10/month for 40K emails via API, Heroku app option)
Decision: I'm inclined to pick TinyLetter, but either free option works.
Decision: I've been using Campfire for years and it has a free option, so this is an easy one.
Code Repository
GitHub (free for public repositories, $7 for 1 collaborator, $12/month for 5) BitBucket (free private repositories for 5 people)
Decision: Both are great, but GitHub is the place to be if you might be working with a lot of different people or are considering open sourcing some of your work. A public repository on GitHub seems to make sense unless what you're working on needs to be private from the beginning.
Decision: Two conclusions: 1) For a bootstrapped experiment, you should be able to avoid this initially. 2) Intercom is building something really interesting.
Decisions: You're really doing all of this for a sticker to put on your laptop, so make it happen :) There seems to be a strong consensus on the best choices for buttons and stickers. There are hundreds of t-shirt vendors and often the best option is a local one, but I might give Threadbird a try.
Total Recurring Costs: $0
I don't expect these choices to be the same as you would make in your specific situation, but hopefully this will make it easy to research the best tools for you. A big thanks to everyone who helped out.
[1] This isn't a tease wrapped in false humility. I really mean little things, fun, small experiments that may entertain, befuddle, or intrigue.
[2] You say you're an awesome, talented person with unfulfilling weekends? Say hello!
[3] Seeking out free options may seem a little contradictory given my Means to an End post. For me, the difference is these companies are building tools for businesses, not consumers, and offer free tools specifically to entice small teams to use them, be successful, and grow into their paid plans. Presumably, that strategy is working for them.
[4] One thing I didn't cover is payment processing, which you'll need to charge people to use your new app or game. Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, and Recurly are options worth looking at. Skipping this also allowed me to skip charges for SSL. Once you go down this path, free is no longer an option.
Startups come and go. They shut down (we used to say “go out of business”), get acquired, or sometimes both. They grow and buy other companies and “join forces” and go public. Sometimes, they just go quiet. The startup you love today will be different in a year, one way or another, and we shouldn't expect anything different.
But what about the startups that are built by us? Services like Tumblr, Instagram, Gowalla [1], Twitter, Path, and Foursquare whose product is the sum of what people contribute to it? Should our expectations be any different? And is the company's responsibility any different?
The relationship between startups and their users is changing.
The negative reaction to Facebook's acquisition of Instagram [2] was telling. For some, it was like their mom had just shown up at a party. “Don't you understand, the point was to have fun without you!” Others simply don't like Facebook or expect that the app they love will change substantially or be shut down. [3]
At the core of it is a sense of ownership. All startups need users desperately (in special cases, the word is customers) . When the product is what people create with it, though, whether through photos, reviews, comments, locations, written content, or checkins, users aren't enough. You need passionate fans and evangelists, people who won't stop talking about your app until their friends love it as much as they do.
You need a community that believes in what you're building.
To be successful, you have to have a worthy product, no doubt, but you also have to foster a sense that everyone is working toward a common goal. You say things like “We love you!” and use words like community, family, and team endlessly. You invite people to be volunteers, super users, or part of the street team. In some ways, you turn your product into a cause.
I don't personally know any companies that aren't 100% genuine about this, because for nearly everyone at a startup, it is a cause. They believe in it, put everything they have into it, and think it will make the world better in measurable, though sometimes convoluted, ways.
At the end of the day, however, the two causes are not the same. There is a lot of overlap between them, which adds to the confusion, but the people who make the product are pursuing a different goal than the people using it. And the people using it are a means to that end.
The sense of community and a common cause, the very things that makes the best products successful, is what makes that a hard thing to accept when your favorite startup is acquired or shut down. For the people who invested so much in the product, people who felt like they were part of a family, it's disconcerting.
This isn't exclusive to startups. Jon Huntsman ran for president and built a small, loyal following that included myself. The campaign was active on social media and like any campaign, worked hard to turn his candidacy into a cause and develop a relationship with supporters. Yet, the campaign ended with a short press conference, which was followed by… nothing. It simply went silent: no final email and thank you, no tweets from the official campaign account or more importantly, the candidate's himself, who had over 80K followers. Both accounts sit frozen in time.
Voters, of course, are also just a means to an end. What I find perplexing about this is that at some point in the future, Huntsman will want attention and support again. There will be a new cause, a new election, but the campaign made the mistake of ruining the illusion. We were only “in this together” until we no longer served a purpose. Do they think that no one will remember the last time?
It's a question startups and founders should ask themselves as well.
The result of more high-profile services going this route is a growing mistrust of new, free apps that require substantial time investment by users to be successful. I would attribute the lack of traction for Oink and Stamped, apps for rating things, partly to this. Skepticism regarding Oink, whose website is already gone five months after it launched, was prescient.
What can users and startups do differently?
For users:
Support companies that charge for their products by paying for them. The best post on this is Don't Be A Free User by Pinboard's Maciej Ceglowski. If you haven't read it, please do.
Before you invest your time in a new service, make sure that you can retrieve your content at any time.
Remind yourself and your friends that 95% of the apps and services out there are not causes and shouldn't be treated that way. They may be great products built by awesome women and men, and if so, use and enjoy them, and give their creators some of your money, but find true causes and invest your heart and soul into those.
For startups:
Be as up front with your users as you possibly can. If this is an experiment to gauge interest, say so. Define what success is for you and your team. Your most passionate users are more than willing to help you get there. Just don't say your goal is one thing when it's really another.
Appreciate everyone who uses your app, but resist the temptation to oversell the level of emotional connection. “Love” and “family” are words with a lot of meaning wrapped up in them. If you insist on going there, don't act surprised when the family you love is upset that you've closed down your service and moved on.
Stop using the excuse that because you don't charge your users, they have no right to care what you do with the product.
[1] I had the privilege of working at Gowalla for four years. We did many things right and we made mistakes. I'm proud of what we accomplished.
[2] Garrett Murray shared his interesting perspective on Instagram + Facebook. You should read it.
[3] I have friends at Instagram. To the extent my opinion matters, I thought the sale made complete sense and I would've done the same thing. The reaction to it inspired some of these thoughts, but this is about startups and their communities in general.