Fab CEO: 90 things that have been taught to me by the founding of four companies

To write down these 90 list of things, just as crazy as the entrepreneurial itself Jason Goldberg is the CEO of the design class Flash site fab.com, this article comes from his personal blog betashop. June 2011, Fab product line was officially launched. Fab sales reached $600,000 in 12 days. Outstanding performance brought it 8 million dollars in a round of financing. The number of fab users broke through 1 million in November. In December, Fab conducted a 40 million-dollar B-round financing with a valuation of $200 million. The craziest thing about the fab thing was that he was writing about 90 things he had taught him in a succession of startups to share with entrepreneurs. There may be so many things that the original text is lost in the final sequence. However, this does not preclude us from mastering its content. The following is his blog original, by the Tiger Sniff compiled, slightly abridged: 90 things to start the October 27, 2010, I wrote a blog called "from the experience of the founding of three technology companies, I learned 57 things." I am honored to see that blog spread like a virus, translated into many languages, inspired many entrepreneurs. Last week, I met with fab potential partners in Tokyo. I was invited to participate in a discussion on the industry forum. The discussion soon referred to those 57 things. What a surprise. Two years later, thousands of kilometers away, people are still talking about these 57 things! That's the problem. I realized that I made a list of things in 2010, which I learned two years ago, but also needed to be updated to incorporate what I have learned recently. Especially in these two years, I have a huge change, in 2011, we transformed Fabulis into Fab (the translator: from gay social networking sites to design-type product flash sites), and within 15 months, FAB registered users expanded to 7.5 million, 7,500 supplier partners, 600 employees, The scale of business expanded to 150 million dollars. So here are my upgrades to "57 things". Find the "thing" in your company. It takes three conditions: you and your team are most passionate about this, and you and your team are sure to be the best at it in the world, and there is a huge market potential. If you do not meet the above three conditions, then what you are doing is wrong. Just do it. Other things are distracting. Do not make additional items. Don't attend unnecessary meetings. Say no to anything that doesn't help you do it. Everything is about the product. This is always the case. The only thing that matters is how good your product is. The rest is noise. In Fab, our Vision product is our website, the APP, our entity product is we sell the thing, our experience product is our operation and the service, put these three parts to fix is all. The only criterion for judging your product is how many users are using it and how much value they have gained. In the early days, the determinants of your future success are suckingGravity。 Take the time to figure out how to be more attractive and optimize around this, and attractive things will become more appealing. If you can't make something attractive in a year, transform it. I firmly believe that in a time when the product lifecycle is so short and user feedback is so fast, you will know for a year whether you are doing something worthwhile. Of course, you can't start right, no one can. You can iterate over the product features one at a time, but you can't iterate over your business model. I've seen too many examples of startups failing because they are endlessly pursuing new features and hoping for it. Don't do that. There are many interesting questions to solve. If you can't make something appealing within a year, go to the next product. If you can't do something attractive for a year, I'll bet you if you and the team think about the three questions I mentioned before (Are you and your team passionate about this? Do you and your team have the confidence to be the best person in the world to do this, and is there a huge market potential? You will find yourself doing the wrong thing. When Fabulis was a social networking site targeting the gay community, we developed a lot of cool features, and then we continued to iterate, hoping to make the site sticky by doing things, but we didn't really catch that thing. A year later, we sat down, talked to ourselves honestly, and realized our "that thing": Our team's most passionate, we are the world's best at doing this, this thing has great potential, that is, design. So we turned from Fabulis to Fab. Once the transition, focus on, do not look back. When I and the team made the transition decision within 10 days, we focused entirely on the new product, and we chapters that the people on the team could not continue to do the old projects. We need everyone to invest in new projects. We immediately shut down the old sites and apps. In 10 days, the whole company looked to the future, no longer look back. Self-Knowledge. Know what you are and what you are really good at. Also, know what you're not good at. "The key is not you" one: The key is the team. Creating a successful company is more about letting people around you display their talents. It takes guts. "The key is not you" bis: The key is the customer. From the first day we are committed to customer satisfaction. In the beginning, we decided not only to determine the product function according to the income, but also to focus on the things that make the customer happy, only then our income will increase day by day. Find good partners and have some jobs you'll never be as good as they are. Work with the people you love. Work with people who excite you. You trust them. Every day you can look at them and say, "No one in the world is better suited for this job than they are, and no one else is my partner who is willing to fight alongside." I am a very sentimental person. Love for entrepreneurial successIs。 Put your desk on a good angle and you can make eye contact with your friends. If you don't enjoy seeing them every day, your startup partners are choosing the wrong one. The founders need to control something very important. Just being in command is not enough, you need to do something that is vital to the company's business and branding. You need to really, really control it. My personal idea is that, because everything has to be put into the product, the best entrepreneur is the product manager. As of now, no pixel on the Web site or app has come through my input or approval. As a founder we must be good for the final product. As CEO, you have to do what other people can't. It's generally about promoting and selecting investors, managing boards, coaching managers, helping your team understand the general direction and making the team work for all of them. Most importantly, tell us what the business focus is. Only the CEO can do it, you can't outsource it. Work with people who argue with you and say no to you. The most important consideration for hiring managers is to be culturally integrated into the company. You need people who can work like you, who can appreciate your style and rhythm. It doesn't matter how smart you are or how rich you are, if they don't fit your style, nothing can be done. You can fight very hard at work, but still love each other after work. As CEO, only you can understand the direction of the company, how to achieve the goal, how to mobilize resources. The clearest strategy for a company is to configure its resources. For the decision to deliberate. Start-up companies do not have the time to find a target to go all the way down. It is better to learn from the experience of failure than to make a decision behind closed doors. Inspire others. Entrepreneurship is a chore and exhausting. Motivate your team to move forward, make it impossible to become reality, and persevere. Let the others around you care and devote to it. As CEO, you're responsible for every decision you make. My partner and I are interviewing every new guy. If it's wrong--and sometimes that happens--I'll take responsibility for it, and I'm not going to be the one to blame. Hire people who are passionate about solving problems. Just creating a company is not enough, you need to be passionate about your users, and passionate about solving your users ' problems. As CEO, you set the tone, choose the style, the rhythm of things, the expectations of things. I like confidence and humility. I like to cheer for victory while focusing on management and meeting challenges. No one needs to wonder what I'm thinking. I have no reservations (also on my blog). My pace is fast. I am constantly striving for perfection and knowing that we will make mistakes in this process. We will debate each other during the meeting so that we can get unexpected results. Be strong. Sometimes you even have to be a bad guy. It's not going to happen very often, but sometimes. If you are happy every day, it is too easy. I don't mean to be obnoxious. I mean, there's always pressure to do great things.In particular, managers need to understand this. If it's easy to start a business, do it yourself. Sometimes it's hard when we're creating something special. Sometimes you do 98% of your work and I ask you where the remaining 2% is. Remain sincere and remain transparent. Say the same to yourself, your company executives, your ordinary employees, the journalists interviewed, the external observers, and the investors. About the team and the product if you're disappointed with someone, other team members already know. Give Bad Seeds (to bad employees) one day and then fire them. Be quick when you fry. Are employees trained to teach, or are they not satisfied with the replacement? When I started my first company, it was easy to lose patience with management, blaming them, and taking on a heavy load. A coach or mentor can make a positive difference to a good seed that has been inactive for a few months. The problem may be with you, not the employee. There is a difference between the ability of an employee to cope with his job or his inability to integrate into the company, and the capability of another employee to integrate into the corporate culture but not reach your expected level. Whether your people are new or going, treat them kindly. Provide feedback. Even executives need to reassess. My evaluation of the company's executives is: culture. Does he embody our corporate culture, help build our corporate culture, and nurture our corporate culture? A passion. Does this executive have a passion for what we do or work in any company? Is our company all his life? Are they fit to work for our start-up companies? b Superior. How did the senior officer report to me? Are you asking for my advice at the right time? C Lateral. How does the senior executive get along with others? Do they work individually or in teams? They came to me to solve the problem and let me rule? Or is it a common strategy to offer me a choice? By the way, this is the biggest headache for most start-up executives. D subordinate. Does the senior executive lead and manage the team well? Do all team members have a clear division of responsibilities? Is the team increasing? E incentive. Does the senior executive have a good incentive to surround people? Is there a role model that motivates employees to move forward. F Masters. is the executive responsible for the outcome, good or bad, just or not? Did they stir up the beam and accomplish the task? G. Does the senior executive understand the long-term direction of the company and know what to do? H attention to detail. Is the senior executive following the project plan carefully? Is there any detail that has been overlooked? I stand by. If I wasn't there, would the executive be able to run the company for one months independently? Can they not be sent to another country or region and put into work immediately? Can you receive investors and journalists? You're never as right as you think you are. For you and your company. Five paces ahead of others. It's hard to do, but it's a great company.The difference between a good company. In the course of things to consider, today's decision on the impact of tomorrow? What is the cause and consequences of the event? These things are difficult, but very important. Develop your own technology. This is necessary if you want to maintain a continuing competitive advantage. If you think you can use other people's technology to create a great company, you are lying to yourself. I don't mean to say that open source or existing platform technology is bad, I mean don't outsource your programming work. Has implanted social elements into corporate DNA from the start. We started thinking about social elements very early on, defining and implementing the concept of social commerce. It's hard to make social elements right, and it's often a matter of sorts. Keep it going. There are 1 billion people using Facebook, 1 billion. Your clients are in social media. It was six months ago to consider mobile priority or Web priority. Mobile platforms will soon become a big source of traffic. Run at least four times a week at the gym. Keep your body strong if you want to be clear. A lot of people don't realize it, but it's important. Exercise allows your body and mind to cope with a variety of challenges. After a whole night's flight to land at the airport, the first thing I did was go to the gym, no exception. I don't care if it will delay my meeting. After the flight, fitness can counteract the body reaction of jet lag and prepare me to face the challenge. Do not drink on the plane unless your voyage is over 8 hours. Alcohol hurts your body and wastes your time. Believe in your courage, but have data support. We like to say, start with feeling, but use the data to support the feeling, and then see if it feels right. But if it feels so fast, I'll be very firm and believe it. The user experience is important and more important than most people realize. The best user experience is to throw the user experience aside and focus on helping people solve problems. Less is more. If you want to explain what, you have failed. Understand technology, understand how technology is founded. Not every entrepreneurial leader has to write their own code, but you have to understand how the product is created, what the process is, and how it works. It's easy to subcontract the work you don't like, but you can't make it a blind spot. For me, it should be operation. Although I choose to hire people who are more passionate about operations than I am, I have to keep my focus on detail and make operations a competitive advantage for our company. Pick out the least part of the company's business that you know and study it carefully. Give yourself pressure to stay away from ease. Prioritize the functional features of the product. Calls to scarce resources need to be prioritized, and no two product functions can be treated equally. You can't do all the things at the same time. There are first and then. Put on the market. You never know how good your product is unless the real user touches your product and gives you feedback. If you've been standing in a row for four weeks and haven't had a user test, maybe you've gotToo many points. Divide them into small chunks so that you get fast user feedback. Fast delivery, frequent launch. Don't worry about adding extra functionality. Make the most streamlined prerequisites and start collecting feedback. Repeat the process, release the next version, and release the next version as soon as possible. If you use more than three months to release the first product, the time is too long. If you use four weeks to update the version, the time is too long. A small update is released every week, or several times a week. A large version upgrade is performed every three weeks. If 50% of the previous plan has been successfully implemented, you are doing a great job. Contact your users as much as possible. Don't rely too much on the opinions of the target group. The target group will tell you where to change and help you locate the potential attraction of your product so you can focus on it. But you still have to figure out how to synthesize their opinions and understand what to offer to users. Most people use only five to seven services frequently. If you want to be an important product and become a big company, you have to think about how to be one of these five or seven services, which means capturing the hearts of users and gaining their trust. You have to give the user a reason to devote time to using your product. If you're selling, give the customer a reason to pay for it. It's not easy. About investor relations and culture as CEO, you need to balance business needs and investor interests. If these two points don't clarify the relationship, you are in trouble. Work with investors who have the same long-term vision. Keep reminding investors what your long-term goals and plans are. If your investors are looking for a return on investment for two years, and you're implementing a 10-or 20-year strategy, the problem comes. And only you can save yourself. Always choose an investor who is willing to work with you, willing to make friends with you, and willing to advise you. Never, never choose an investor on a valuation basis. The dilution of the stakes here and there is not a big deal, but working with the right people is important. Business goals and personal relationships are far more important than valuations. At the beginning of the start, the less money the better. Force yourself to be careful, and it will make you spend as much money as you have on your last payment. After getting some attention, get a little more in financing, but not too much to not know how to spend. This requires some skill, not to be perfunctory about raising money for fear of diluting equity. Every expenditure is prudent. But don't be afraid to spend money. Know what kind of company you're building. Google and Facebook are few. A good result you can reap is 10 million dollars, or 20 million dollars, or a billion, or nothing. Prepare your company for a rainy day and don't aim at the moon-unless you find yourself actually sitting in a rocket ship. From the point of view of the money, two years to get 20 million dollars of 20% and then to go away is far better than five years to get a value of 100 million dollar company 3% shares. Figure out what youWhether the start-up companies are VC-type business. VC-type business to invest 10 times times the return. This means that if the valuation after the financing is 5 million dollars, you will have to create at least 50 million dollars of VC exit opportunities. The 10 million valuation is the 100 million exit target, and the 500 million valuation is the 5 billion exit target. That's not to say you can't sell a company at a price below that, but that's not why you sign up for the money at this valuation. Know what it means to take the money the wind throws, and know how much you're expecting. Make sure your personal goals are consistent with your investors ' goals. The company will succeed only if the founders are motivated. Investors cannot force a business to be made, nor do they force the CEO to care about something. If you're on a rocket ship, fasten your seatbelt and target another planet. 4 months after my startup project started, we had 1 million users, 50% from social media sharing, and we knew it was a big opportunity. So we started thinking about our business in a different way. How big can this scale be? We reviewed the first 6 months of performance in January 2012 and found that two-thirds of our daily sales came from repeat customers, and 50% were still social media sharing, and we realised there was a great opportunity to create a brand. We are beginning to reduce our consideration of short-term results and more on long-term plans for five, ten, 20 years. As we begin to do this, the focus of our daily design work is how to create the next brand with global impact, or do some short-term business data. Find yourself a "sherpa". These are the kinds of people who have done this before-financing, trading, and fighting with the entrepreneurial team. Give him 1% or 2% of the company's shares, or even 5%, in exchange for the time he invested. They can find future investors. Listen to their opinions on the company's development plan. Not in the form of committees, the Advisory board has never had much weight. Find a partner and let him be your sherpa and depend on them. If you want to have a long-term business, don't give up on short-term stress. Once you have decided to embark on a rocket ship, plan for the long term. Most startups are short. Catch a big fish for the long haul. Protect and nurture your brand. Too many companies are having problems at this point. Your brand is more important than your business. Your brand is the emotional reflection of your customers, partners, and employees on your company. Brand is very fragile, need to build trust repeatedly, constantly interact. Service is more important than sales. Sales are good and bad, service is always the same. With the company's growth, the most difficult to manage is culture. Cultural body now, who you hire, who is running the company, how they do it. Don't just put your culture on the tip of your tongue. Hire smart people, manage them smarter, and create corporate culture in this way. Don't let the team lose its strategic focus. Execution to win. When we started our first company, we kept talking about various strategies, brainstorming, and how to lead the company to the next step. This distracted the team, ignoring the work in hand. Now I'll takeSet opinions and consult with partners at dinner time. Convene an executive team two times a year to make strategic evaluations and plans. In addition to these two meetings, the rest of the time we have to focus on implementation. Stick to perfection. Never, never compromise. If you compromise here and compromise, you will soon ask yourself, "How did we get to this situation?" "But to err. Adhere to the perfect no delegation team members should live in the fear of not making mistakes. Encourage them to try new things and make mistakes as a learning opportunity. Just don't screw it up. There is a difference between turning a mistake into a learning opportunity, doing something stupid and screwing up the business. Although the difference is subtle. Celebrate your challenge. Every week we have a company-wide group meeting. 30% of the meeting was about what we did well, and 70% of the meeting was about our future challenges. If you want your company to grow and do great things, you should. Our management meeting is more exaggerated, 10% talk about successful experience, 90% talk about improvement suggestions. Or that sentence, I think it should be. The seminar was basically a waste of time. I know a lot of people disagree with this, but that's how I feel. Meeting with team members, solving problems, listening to customers and partners, and even hanging out at a trade fair can help me understand more. My rule is to avoid attending seminars unless it is purely for PR purposes or you have a sales mission. Wear funny socks and colorful shoes. I wear funny socks and red shoes to remind myself not to be a mediocre innovator. and to tell others, boring CEOs like me can be fun. Do anything to show that you are not just a robot. Let people know about a real you. Sometimes Friday 4 o'clock in the afternoon I will be the office of the DJ, I will use cotton candy to throw others, no malice is fun to play that kind. Show the problem that bothers you. Dare to laugh at yourself, but also allow others to play their own jokes. When I mess up something, I have to be honest with the team and make everyone happy. We're all people. Tell a good story. People derive inspiration and motivation from stories, not from plans, tactics, or results. To live a dull conclusion and become a personal experience for you and others around you. But don't lie. Never. You can polish it, but you can't make it up. One is one, two is two. Get inspiration from the people around you. Listen to their opinions and cultivate their feelings. Learn from them. Helping others will make you better. Have fun every day. If it's not fun, stop right now. No one is forcing you. For salespeople, your value lies in your last sales performance. Go home. Yes, it's cool to start a successful fast company. But the cool thing is to go home and get back to your partner. Be mature, but don't grow up. Remain humble. But change the world. Do something meaningful. Bring a difference to the world. Smile, this is your purpose. If you read this, thank you. I write this to help other entrepreneurs and to benefit myself.