Lessons Learned: Pre-Launch

1) Technology development takes longer than expected. Be directly involved with scoping, requirement specification, and important technology decisions. Choose platforms on which skills are available. For most software development projects, it doesn't make a big technical difference if the development tool is Java or Microsoft. However, the availability of skills has serious ramification on project deadlines. Don't be a tech freak when making important decisions; think them through with a business mind. Would you rather be rich with the wrong tools, or broke with the right ones?

2) Play to your strength. Look for customers and funding in industries that you know well. Focus your energy on smaller wins, within familiar accounts and the bigger fish will follow.

3) Don't wait too long to signup customers. In the beginning its just assumption used to define/map the specific needs of a channel, and a particular industry in the business plan. However, you must regularly check your assumptions against real world to see if you can make money based on what you already have. Keep the initial direction, and the grand plan intact, but be willing to roll your product out to customers even if that doesn't conform to your distribution/target market model.

4) You only get one chance to do branding. Don't blow it. The logo and marketing message are critical elements of the initial impression. Spend time on it, poll some friends/peers about the impression it evokes, trust your gut, don’t let the advertising agency push you into something that you are not excited about. If your heart doesn’t flutter when you see your logo, why would your customers care?

Highlights of the day

1. Book debuts at Amazon at 151,461 and quickly slips to 160,000.

2. Certainly better than debuting at 250,000 and slipping to 500,000. Finally an indication that the book sold atleast one copy.

3. Thankyou God and the mystery shopper who bought a hundred copies.

4. Website traffic stable at 300 visitors per day and 2000 hits. Expect it to go up as round two of network introductions take effect.

5. Shane delivers on the perfect foreword. Will be up on the book website tomorrow morning.

Blue Screen website STATS

As of 9:30 pm tonight - summary from 17th - the date of the initial launch email:

Hits 8,516
Page Views 2,904
Unique Visitors 1,596


Top five US states contributing traffic:

Visitors - Bandwidth

California 696 23,851
New Jersey 58 2,186
New York 29 6,798
Massachusetts 29 6,358
Florida 15 1,827
Virginia 13 1,651

Will who ever lives in English Town, New Jersey, please identify themselves.

Lessons Learned: Hiring

1) HR is serious business. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that people would be dying to work for you. The problem is twofold, firstly, startups are typically strapped for cash and offering competitive salaries is often not possible. Secondly, startups have a very high probability of failure making them risky bets for potential employees. Keep an eye for candidates with an entrepreneurial mindset, who thrive in a high risk-high return environment.

2) Paying market competitive salaries is not enough, because it simply means that your compensation is average. Given the choice between a stable company and a risky startup offering the same package, which one would you chose?

3) Assuming you have the cash, one option would be to pay higher than the market average. This is generally a futile (often disastrous) exercise. The reason: Loyalty. If the sole motivation of a candidate to work for you is because you offer 10% more than the market, do you really think he’s going to stay when someone offers him 15% more?

4) The trick is to show a bigger, long-term picture. Where will the company be 5-years from now? What does it mean for the candidate? Remember the bigger picture doesn’t have to be a monetary one. It could also be an articulation of the skills that the candidate will gain, and the exposure he will get.

5) Manage expectations. Don’t give false hopes to potential employees, just to get them onboard. Tell them the about chances of success, and the possibility of failure. Regardless of which way the venture goes, your reputation and integrity will come under serious doubt if you deliberately show a partial, rosy picture.

Lessons Learned: California

1) Keep all the stakeholders updated. Running a business is not a one-man show. Partners not working fulltime are particularly anxious about whether their interests are being protected or not. Manage expectations, talk to your partners often, acknowledge conflict, openly discuss concerns and resolve disagreements

2) Find a customer FAST. You only know how good (or bad) your product is once it's tested by a real user in a real environment. Most assumptions go straight to trash, when faced with customer requirements from the business environment. Finding a customer who pays is often easier, and more effective than looking for angle or venture cap funding.

Lessons Learned: Aleph on the Scene

1) Outsource technology. Focus on the core processes, and business development. You shouldn't have to worry about processes that are not central to your business.

2) While outsourcing technology is a good idea, DO NOT relinquish control of development. The end product is only as good as it's defined in the specification document. Don't expect your developers to innovate. Describe exactly what you want, don't leave too much room for imagination and chances are you won't be totally disappointed with the result. If you come up with a vague requirement specification document, the poor result is your fault, not the programmer’s.

3) Put your understanding down on paper, especially as it relates to partnership percentages. Debates over petty percentages points may result in nasty arguments and failed ventures. Be very clear about the numbers, write them down, get agreement on them, and then continue.

4) Network. Meet people, tell them about what you're doing, and don't be shy to ask for help. Networking skills are essential for entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial community is a supportive bunch too. The bigger and more diverse your network, the more likely you are to find a good strategic fit for your venture

5) Maintain balance. Feature creep is endless. Requirement specifications change and features creep in. That is just the nature of the business. You can't take one extreme, where you freeze all change from the outset, nor the other extreme where the flux is so high that there are no clear cut requirements. It takes judgment and experience to know what to include, what to defer and what to exclude. When in doubt, simply ask the customer, or a business domain expert. And yes, follow a change management process.

Lessons Learned: The Beginning

This is the first in series of posts in which I’ll discuss the meaning that each chapter in the Blue Screen had for me. Incase you haven’t read the book, don't worry. That’s all the more reason to read the lessons. Consider it a shortcut ;).

1) Don't let business insights go so easily. Think about them, plug in some numbers and see how they add up.

2) Substantiate your imaginary numbers by taking input from peers, and if you're lucky, then professionals. Maybe its all in your head, perhaps you're missing an important aspect of the venture. At any rate, have a peer network that you can turn to for this kind of advice.

3) Don't be a smart Alec in b-school. It will haunt you.

The First Post

Hi,

I’m Adnan, and have been reviewing and editing the Blue Screen of Death over the past 2 years. My background: I was infected with the entrepreneurial virus in the final semester of college when I met Jawwad (yes, the evil/infamous author of this book) who had come to teach us entrepreneurship.

Over the past two years, I’ve worked on two ventures. An online marketplace for Pakistan (http://www.lootmaar.com/) and an e-mail response management system (iCERMS). The business plans for both projects had been selected as the top 25 in a country wide competition organized by the Pakistan Software Export Board (http://www.pseb.org.pk/). Until last week I was working with a Fortune 100 technology company, specializing in data-center storage and business continuity solutions. I’ll be joining graduate school this fall to study technology management and entrepreneurship in the US, until then, I’ve decided to take (another) plunge into startup land.

I’ll be posting here on subjects that are covered in the Blue Screen. If you’re intrigued by ventures and startups, do jump in and join the discussion.

Regards,
Adnan.

Victoria Pearson Review of the Blue Screen

Met Victoria on elance when I was experimenting to see if I could get enough work through elance to justify building a practice around it. Did a really lousy job but she was generous enough to forgive me. Here is what she has to say about the book. Victoria's Blog. Thank you Victoria

Blue Screen website STATS

Launch email went out on the 21st. Here are some interesting trends.

Page hits - 4,500
Page views - 1,400
Visitors - 700

Top two cities of visitors - Sunnyvale and MountainView, California. For an author based out of Karachi, that is a very encouraging trend.

We are averaging 220 visitors per day with around 10% downloading the table of content, the first 25 pages or the original paper that became the inspiration for blue screen.

For the book to become noticeable need to add atleast one more zero to all of the above.

Jehan's note on PASHA Forum

Jehan, (PASHA president, entrepreneur and a good friend) forwarded the launch email to the Pakistan Software Houses Association PASHA forum.


QUOTE

Hello everyone,

One of our young IT entrepreneurs has finally done it! He has written a book. "The Blue Screen of Death" is now available as an e-book and will soon be launched on Amazon.com. The author is Jawwad Farid, CEO of Alchemy Associates. I have had the privilege of reading a pre-launch copy and, much like Jawwad, the book is witty and takes one through a rollercoaster ride of events (including the failure of his earlier ventures) before leading to the success of Alchemy Associates.

It is definitely worth reading. I am attaching a message below from Jawwad that is a launch email that he has sent out. I hope this is the beginning of Pakistani success stories becoming more visible worldwide. Good luck with the book Jawwad! I am sure all your friends in the tech industry in Pakistan will definitely buy a copy of the book. Let us also spread the word so that friends and colleagues in our circle become aware of the launch of this first work from one of our IT entrepreneurs.

Best regards,

Jehan

UNQUOTE

The discussion with Allen

Allen Dixon is a good friend from my days at AnnuityNet and also a published author. Here is our email exchange about his comments on the Blue Screen of Death

Allen: Jawwad, you have written a great book. I was most impressed with your writing style. I think you would make a great novelist. I did make some mental notes as I read through it. So in case you are interested here are my thoughts (for what they are worth).

First, great writing really seems like it would be a great novel. Second, the emails started off fine, but as the venture started to wind up thetone of how they were presented changed and it seemed to come across as being obsessed or defensive. Something changed from the start in how they were presented, soul searching being done, etc. In the end it felt like there was too much internal focus and really dragged down the story.

Jawwad: Is this with respect to emails or with respect to the context part that precedes the emails.

Allen comment: I think it was the context more than the emails, but then again maybe the power of the emails carried over.

Allen: Third, not sure I agree with the assessments. They are made with 20/20hindsight, yes, but some things are not knowable. A different approach may ormay not have helped, but in telling what went wrong the prescription seemed dogmatic, like of course this would have worked. And what is missing is the context of the times. Technology was king and any new venture had to play to that strength.

Jawwad: Absolutely. I think I needed to qualify more strongly that though I feel that this should or would work better but there must be other variations around. And that there are no right or wrong answers – but approximations driven by the context of our times.

Allen: Fourth, working in "proof" that this advice is right because of the latest success doesn't actually strengthen the argument. In fact it gives the story the tone of someone with an axe to grind.

Jawwad: Yup. Agreed. Have you read Crimes against logic.

Allen comment: Nope, but it sounds like something I should look into.

Allen: Fifth, it is still not clear what the venture was really trying to offer, howit would make money, market itself, etc. This was admitted throughout the story, so in the end when going over lessons learned that makes it hard to say what would have worked. If more of the advice was hedged, then the tone might be more supportive less combative.

Jawwad: a. Sell per seat licenses to corporate that are a function of number of courses
b. Sell individual courses to individuals on a course or yearly subscription basis.

Allen comment: Okay, and maybe I just missed that in my reading. That sounds like a very good approach.

Allen: Finally, the impact would have been some much greater if the initial character"told" the story. The emails could still be the core of the plot, but there needed to be more narrative, more scenes to see the context see current events see the impact on family and friends. That would have spoken volumes as opposed to the guide section. It seems to me that people are more likely to take advice when they see it in action than when it is offered in bullet form. Besides with every situation being different, it makes more sense to pick just a small number of lessons (between 3 and 5) for people to hear and retain.

Jawwad: Possibly looking at book two with a different tone and more narrative but with Alchemy as the background, not Avicena.

Allen comment: I really liked the idea of rating bad decisions based on impact. But it seemed to be just at the macro level. Is there a way to pull that down a notch so that people could use these guide posts while starting a new venture and determine how far off track they are? or at least develop a way for measuring potential impact of red flags? That would seem helpful.

Jawwad: Could you give me an example of how a specific list could be made more relevant. I am looking at a revised edition within the next two to three months based on feedback like this from friends and family.

Allen Comment: I can't find the exact passage now, but you talked about making bad decisions
and how long it takes to recover. Some are minor and you rebound quickly, other
of course are more catastrophic. It seemed to me in reading that section that
you might have really niffty way to help young businesses avoid trouble. We
all make mistakes, it is how fast you recover that seems most important to me.
And the key there is to understand how bad the mistake, and hence how strong
the corrective action. So to make the list hit home, if you could describe some
warning signs. The best I can think of is an analogy from project management.
You know you are in trouble when the things you would like to say to a client,
without them knowing the source, varies so much from what you can officially
tell them that you know there is a real problem. In other words if you can't be
fully honest on material facts, then you have a mess. Lots of folks find themselves
deep into this type of situation without realizing they have a problem. So this simple
gut check can help project managers.

Allen: Although it begs the question is the goal to create a company or to go after a big IPO? The underlying premise in the story is that the IPO was the goal, yet many ofthe lessons seem geared towards getting a company, any size, going. I doubt,but I could be wrong, that any size would have worked in the Internet IPO world of 1999/2000. It had to be big, it had to dream, it did not have to have revenues, or customers or even great products. At least that is the way it seemed to me.

Jawwad: Yes and No. I think we always debated whether we would be better off without VC money or even an IPO because the target market and the underlying business model if executed properly were very promising.

Allen comment: Good, and maybe that was in the book and I just missed it. But I think it is
important to your lessons whether a new business is focused on a grand IPO or
just survival.

Allen: In the end though this was a great read. I really enjoyed the book and hated to have it end... When can I order a hardback copy?

Jawwad: No hardcopy for now – only ebook edition on Powells.com and Dieselbooks.com. Print edition most likely somewhere in October/November of this year depending on the feedback and reaction to the ebook.

Blue screen of death is here

The book is finally here. Given the number of comments and questions that have been coming in decided that it would be better to have a dedicated blog for blue screen then to asnwer questions on desistartup or desibacktodesh