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A Magazine for Growth Seeking Entrepreneurs
What Does Procrastination Do To Your Happiness?
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rules for getting ORGANIZED & DECLUTTERED
SCALING LEAN
STARTUPS
ASH MAURYA
WSJ BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND CREATOR OF THE LEAN CANVAS
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ScaleUp ISSUE 3 GROWTH . BUSINESS
PRODUCTIVITY .
MOTIVATION
Contents ■ ISSUE 3
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22 SCALING LEAN Learn to grow your business with Lean Guru Ash Maurya
SCALING LEAN
■ COVER STORY
36 FEAR OF SUCCESS What will happen if you succeed ■ MOTIVATION
39 04
15
GROWTH MINDSET Conversation with Rajul Garg on personal and business growth
8 STEPS TO BUILDING & GROWING YOUR BUSINESS Take your small business to new heights with these 8 tips
■ BUSINESS GROWTH
■ BUSINESS GROWTH
06 WHAT DOES PROCRASTINATION DO TO YOUR HAPPINESS? Learn to beat procrastination and get work done fast ■ PRODUCTIVITY
13 DEALS Free software perks worth $300 2
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7 MOBILE APPS TO AMPUP YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE Tools to make your life easy and boost marketing ■ TOOLS
46 HOW I BECAME AN ENTREPRENEUR Journey shared by Payal Lal, creator of social MOOC Taker ■ STARTUP JOURNEY
17 RULES FOR GETTING ORGANIZED & DECLUTTERED Make your life simple and HOW TO GROW YOUR minimalistic EMAIL LIST FAST & ■ PRODUCTIVITY CREATE WINNING CAMPAIGNS Adam Connell’s expert advice on email marketing
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■ THE WAY I WORK
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
MEET OUR TEAM
“Once your mindset changes, everything on the outside will change along with it.” ― Steve Maraboli
Editor-In-Chief Pete Williams
Successful people always have a growth mindset. They will always find ways to improve themselves and seek knowledge for the growth of their business and life. This is reflected in the current ScaleUp magazine cover story of Ash Maurya. Ash Maurya through his own experiments and learnings from experts like Steve Blank and Eric Ries found a unique way of running and scaling businesses. Based on his learnings he created Lean Canvas Model which was adapted from Business Model Canvas and wrote two books on lean startup methodologies namely Running Lean and Scaling Lean. He now teaches his Lean Canvas Model to companies around the world while running his own business in a lean way. His startup journey and personal growth are phenomenal. You will surely like his story and will get some new insights on running business smartly. We also have great advice on personal and business growth from serial entrepreneur Rajul Garg who founded GlobalLogic which was sold for $420 million in 2013. Payal Lal who is the creator of social MOOC Taker shares her journey on becoming an entrepreneur. Apart from this, we have some thought provoking articles on personal growth and productivity by Sandip Roy, Steve Pavlina, and Leo Babauta. We hope that you will like the content as much as we like it while designing and conceptualizing the issue. We are glad to have you as part of GrowthMonk Tribe and are always there to help you find growth in your life. The Editor Pete Williams
Contributors Rajul Garg Sandip Roy Shahara Wright Ash Maurya Leo Babauta Steve Pavlina Aditi Prakash Payal Lal Adam Connell Design Anna Heather Image Credits: Flaticon.com, Unsplash.com, FreePik.com
Scale Up Magazine: www.scaleupmag.com/magazine Letters to The Editor: editor@scaleupmag.com Advertising: advertising@scaleupmag.com Partnerships: partnerships@scaleupmag.com General Inquiries: info@scaleupmag.com
Copyright © 2016 ScaleUp Magazine. The content of the magazine are fully protected by copyright and nothing may be reprinted without permission. The publisher, editor and ScaleUp Magazine accept no responsibility in respect to any products, good or services that may be advertised or referred to in this issue or for any errors, omissions, or mistakes in any such advertisements or references. The mention of any specific companies or products in articles or advertisements does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by this magazine or its publisher in preference to others of a similar nature which are not mentioned or advertised. Published articles do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of ScaleUp Magazine.
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BUSINESS GROWTH
GROWTH MINDSET Conversation with Rajul Garg on personal and business growth.
“Having a well knit team that can stay together and keep innovating is one of the key to drive growth” 4
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2009, it had over 6,000 Q. Tell us about your people. I exited when the entrepreneurial journey company got acquired by a PE player in 2013 and RG: I was doing some continues to operate and part-time software grow since. development work in college and that became I started Sunstone after by first start-up as I a stint with the venture graduated in 1998. It was capital in 2011 and we called Pine Labs. While have seen steady growth the start happened easily, over almost 4 years. the going was anything Starting from a modest but smooth. For a couple 25 student batch, we are of years, it continued now among the largest in a survival mode and such programs in the while services were good country. I am excited to make ends meet for about our prospects. 4-5 motley bachelor’s, there was no real value creation. Q. What is your opinion on starting versus I got introduced to what I growing a business? would call value-creation Rajul Garg is the coRG: I feel taking a founder of GlobalLogic 2 years later when I started GlobalLogic, with quantum leap in growth and Sunstone Business some friends. Pine Labs is always very challenging School. He co-founded became a subsidiary, later and involves risk, belief, GlobalLogic which was spun off independently hard work and some sold for $420M in 2013 in 2003 with a new CEO. degree of good fortune. to Apax partners in the Starting a venture is a largest deal of the year in While it continues to grow from there on, I quantum leap in itself. India. exited in 2008 by selling However, every quantum to an incoming investor. leap in growth is also Rajul built the It seems to have taken equally challenging. Let’s GlobalLogic operation off in recent years as I define it as a 10x growth. ground up in India and then expanded it through see Pine Labs credit card Making the first 10 Lakhs is challenging when you global acquisitions, until terminals every year. start. Taking it to 10x, 2008. I feel great seeing that. i.e. 1 Crore is also very GlobalLogic started as challenging. Taking it to Rajul has consulted with a product company in 10 Crore and then to 100 top-tier venture capital the B2B space, raised Crore and so in is also firms such as Sequoia venture money in Year challenging. Capital and Aavishkaar, where he has got exposed 1 (2000) and promptly got in trouble all through I feel many businesses are to the education sector. 2001 before it re-invented not able to unlock this Earlier, right out of itself as an outsourced next level of growth. I college, Rajul founded wouldn’t call it the failure Pine Labs, a leader in the product company in 2002. It saw explosive if you are running a small Indian market in credit growth from their on, but sustainable business card transactions. Rajul and when I left my but in many areas, it’s not is a graduate from IIT management role in early possible. Delhi.
BUSINESS GROWTH It’s possible in services or boutique businesses, but for many others, they need to achieve growth even to survive. When professionals quit their jobs and have a high opportunity cost, it does not make financial sense to them if they are not able to achieve a certain scale. Q. How would you define growth (personal and business)? RG: I would define business growth as 10x growth. You can use whatever metric you want – revenue, valuation, the number of users, size of the network, or quantification of the problem being solved. If you are seeing a clear path to achieve 10x in a few years and you see hurdles but not insurmountable ones, I would say you are in a growing business. Personal growth is harder to define since it is personal. Some people can define it as growth in fortunes, some in skills, leadership abilities, exposure or knowledge etc. For me, it would be growth in overcoming your fears. If you have greater ability to back yourself over time, I would call that personal growth. Q. What challenges did you face while growing GlobalLogic and Sunstone and how you overcame them? 5
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RG: GlobalLogic and Sunstone are both very different businesses.
are the pillars on which any business growth is dependent?
entrepreneur is constantly struggling for resources, then either the business itself is not very exciting GlobalLogic was a B2B RG: I think there are 2 or the entrepreneur is not services business and pillars from what I see being able to tell the story these tend to be a lot now: properly. Help is available about great execution. in both cases through One has to execute day Business model: The way mentors today – only in and day out, manage you serve your customer reaching out is required. capital, keep customers and make money in the happy, execute on sales, process. Sometimes it’s manage people and so defined by unit economics, Q. How can we have a on. The value proposisometimes by other growth mindset towards tion of offshore services metrics. In most cases our career and business? was relatively clear, so the where I see businesses are key challenges were also not growing, the business RG: This is truly the key around execution. model does not lend itself question since everything to grow. One has to be is about mindset. I feel With Sunstone, we went constantly keep looking at everything else can be too innovative. We got the business model, fine acquired – mentorship, into a new market, not tuning it and even pivoting skills, people and so on. something that clearly ex- till one finds the right It’s the same quality that isted. The very need that formula for 10x growth. pushes sports people to we saw – that there was excel or top actors to no high-quality option for Right people: When I am get their performances working professionals also faced with challenges, I exactly right. It’s truly a made it hard to market. try to find the right people million dollar question. Think of it like – if you to solve them. Having a Role models help. Reading are bringing a new vegewell-knit team that can autobiographies helps. table in the market, how stay together and keep Listening / reading / hard would it be to explain innovating is a major pillar watching / interacting to people, versus just in executing. with people who have this selling potatoes. So the big growth mindset helps. challenge has been and It’s a constant process of continues to be – market Q. What tips would you discovery rather than an building, market awaresuggest for growing end in itself. ness, and brand building. a business on limited Very different from anyresources? thing I had done before. The commonality beRG: To me, limited tween the two businesses resources are only a is though that the way to constraint in the mind. overcome challenges is to There are resources build a good team. I feel available out there and in both the cases, I have there are plenty of had fantastic teams that entrepreneurs who have have constantly experileveraged that. Ability mented and solved comto excite other people plex problems. to join your vision is the key. It helps finding management, investors, Q. What do you think and even customers. If an
“limited
resources are only a constraint in the mind”
What Does Procrastination Do To Your Happiness?
PRODUCTIVITY
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n September 2014, two British professors wanted to find out what happens when students do not hand over their assignments on time. Their study threw up an alarming surprise, which, if the students knew, would make them give up procrastination forever.
First, the professors David Arnott and Scott Dacko decided to define the procrastinators as the ones who wouldn’t submit their end-of-term tasks until the last day. Then they dipped into five years of submission data on 777 marketing students from their own Warwick Business School, and found that while each of these students had four weeks or more to hand over their assignments, only about a hundred had done so before the last day. The rest (669 of them) waited out until the last 24 hours to submit their task.
That is, 86% of them were procrastinators. In a different study at the University of Vermont done in 1984, it was found that 46% of the students had reported they procrastinate writing academic papers. But even that figure might not the surprise all of you. Students are known to be ‘natural-born’ procrastinators to school homework across the 6
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world. Everybody knows how busy the lives of young college-goers can be. So, 86% could seem unsurprisingly normal. The real surprise uncovered itself in the final 24 hours. As they analyzed the data, Arnott and Dacko found a disturbing pattern emerge as the last day of the submission had begun. The students taking another hour from here on started getting lower marks. It was happening by the hour. For example, someone who submitted at 3pm got lower marks than those who did at 2pm. It was as if every passing hour was chipping away their scores. The worse the procrastination, the worse were the marks. So clear was the pattern that those who handed in their assignments at the last minute, had the worst grades of all. In fact, these last-minute guys saw a full 5% drop in their marks over those who had checked in their tasks before the start of the last day. Now, mind it, those five percentage points are substantial for students, because they could well translate into a half or a whole letter lower grade. A possibly ‘B’ could end up getting ‘C+’, just because they handed in their tasks late.
PRODUCTIVITY
What Procrastination Does To Your Happiness? The verdict is out: Good things don’t always come to those who procrastinate. Procrastination takes away your happiness. It has been proven over many studies and surveys. Procrastination Research Group carried out a survey with over 10,000 respondents, and found
to disastrous consequences. And you could swear that all of that can take away a sizable bit of their happiness. The big culprit here is regret. It’s a story that goes around in a predictable circle: Procrastinators begin with hope, then go into anxiety, guilt and self-criticism, and end up in regret. Next project, same cycle.
the time. The three main areas of our life that we procrastinate on are education, career, and health. Education: We saw in the opening paragraphs how pervasive is procrastination in the education field. For many of us, this problem can be traced back to our earliest school years when we were perhaps slow learners, and got labeled by our peers and teachers. And we carry the label long after school. Career: On the career front, most of us know at least one person who despises his current job and desperately wants to change it, but doesn’t. Like a lost soul swimming in circles in a small fish bowl, perpetually planning to dive out into bigger water, but never makes the jump. That lost soul is often the person we know the best – our own self. Are you sure that person isn’t you?
that 94% of them reported that procrastination indeed does have some negative effect on their happiness. According to Procrastination and Science, almost 70% of the procrastinators were found to be less happy than an average person. As the Warwick study showed, when the students waited until the last minute to tie up their assignments, they got the worst grades. Habitual procrastination could damage relationships, create an unflattering reputation of carelessness, and invite setbacks in career and work prospects. Procrastinators frequently resort to lies to reason out their delays, and are often found out, leading 7
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What Do You Know About Procrastination? Procrastination is not taking action. It is avoiding starting something you mean to start. It is avoiding finishing something you’re supposed to finish. It is doing something else, or lots of something else, when you know you should be doing a certain important thing. Experts classify it into two types – decisional (putting off taking decisions) and avoidant (putting off doing things). Perhaps, all of us procrastinate at some of the times. While some of us do it more, and some less, but the truth is none of us do it all of
Health: We’re really bad procrastinators when it comes to health.Think of the new year’s day health goals that you set for yourself and kept delaying starting out on them, year after year. Think of that regular half-hour yoga that never came around, or those eight glasses of water or those eight hours of sleep that could never become a reality. That smoking habit that you left and picked up back so many times that you feel ashamed to even whisper it.
PRODUCTIVITY
Why Do We Procrastinate? Procrastinators have a complicated relationship with time, and often believe Time is up against them and they have outsmart it somehow. But even then, procrastination is not just a matter of time-management. Rather, it is a complex psychological problem with deep roots into self-esteem issues. The main reasons that make procrastination likely are: Uninteresting: We delay doing it till eternity because we find the work utterly boring and without any fun. That comes from the human nature’s basic Pain-Pleasure Principle – we run from painful activities and go after pleasurable ones. Scientists call it task aversiveness. Impulsiveness: Procrastinators have been found to be largely impulsive too. Being impulsive, they fail to handle their goals effectively, and keep jumping from task to task leaving most of those unfinished. Some researchers even argue that procrastination is a by-product of impulsiveness, even when these two behaviors seem polar opposites (just give it a thought!). Low Confidence: We don’t feel sure of our abilities and presence that we can tackle something effectively. We don’t do things because of fear of failure or even fear of success. This is the issue of low self-esteem that is believed to be the strongest reason. Anxiety: We have often felt that when a deadline is right upon us, we end up procrastinating more. That is anxiety causing us to procrastinate. In that anxiety, we
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drive ourselves busy doing everything else other than the project at hand. Suddenly, our desk clutter needs to be cleared immediately, and our cars need to be taken for service. Goal Problems: When the goals are not clear, or the goals lie too far into the future, or there are no goals at all, we procrastinate. Perfectionism: People who search for perfection often end up procrastinating. Perfectionism in certain fields is demanded by default, as in competitive sports and classical music. But for most, this is a handicap that leads to an unending delay in finishing things. Heredity: Procrastination could be 46% heritable, as a study on 347 Colorado twins indicated. Which means there is half a chance that you may have got it from your parents. But remember, that’s half a chance. The rest is how your environment molded you into. Mental Illness: Procrastination has been found to occur in some serious psychological illnesses, as borderline personality disorder, depression and anxiety, addiction problems, as well as in strained relationships.
PRODUCTIVITY
How can we beat
PROCRASTINATION
A
void Procrastination. This is the best method. As the professors hoped after the Warwick study that the teachers recognize the habitual procrastinators in time, and help them change their study habits. To do this, set clear goals with realistic timelines, break each goal into many sub-goals, and measure and review progress at fixed time-points.
G
et A Growth Mindset: This is a concept researched and presented by Carol Dweck in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. “In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment,” she writes. Building into yourself a growth mindset can increase your self-worth, and help take new tasks as challenges to thrive on rather than shirk from.
A
cceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): ACT is a mindfulness-based psychotherapy that centers around accepting what is outside your personal control, and committing to action that enriches your life. It has shown remarkable short-term as well as long-term effects in decreasing procrastination, especially academic procrastination.
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Sandip Roy is positive psychology writer, happiness science speaker, and medical doctor. Founder of Happiness India Project, chief editor of its blog since 2014. The site features articles on positive psychology, human strengths, happiness. Authored chapter ‘Psychiatric Disorders in Pregnancy’ in textbook ‘Selected Topics in Obstetrics and Gynaecology For Postgraduates and Practitioners’, 2009. Lives in Delhi, India.
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8 BUSINESS GROWTH 14
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STEPS TO BUILDING & GROWING YOUR BUSINESS
BUSINESS GROWTH
CREATE THE PROPER FOUNDATION FOR YOUR BUSINESS There is a parable in the bible which Jesus uses to describe the importance of having a strong foundation. Matt 7:24-27 states: “Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him to a wise man, which build his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which build his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fills: and great was the fall of it.� Growing a business is like a flood that brings rain, winds and beats upon your business like a drum. It is never a nice slow ascendance, it rushes like a wave. It can be a great moment in your business, but if you have not built your business on the proper foundation that growth will tear your business apart.
STEP 1 - GET A STRATEGIC PLAN A strategic plan is a management tool and is for established businesses and business owners who are serious about growth. Taking the time to do a strategic plan will help your business build its competitive advantage and prioritize financial needs. It will also communicate your strategy to your staff and provide focus and direction to move from plan into action. Do not complete strategic plan in a bubble. Do not sit at home alone working on your strategic plan over coffee or watching television. A strategic plan should be a team effort. Even if you are a sole owner, you should have a team. Get trusted advisors together to help you complete the plan. You need others to help you see things you may not see. If you do not have someone you trust to help, hire someone. A strategic plan starts with a vision. While I always suggest that vision be cast at least three to five years out. This gives you time to make changes. It is also short enough to be attainable. 15
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Little problems will become big problems and you will become overwhelmed by them. Your finances will be a mess; the crisis will become lawsuits; before you know it, you are in over your head. It is a horrible thing to explain to someone that your business failed because it could not handle the growth it was experiencing. There are countless stories about business failures, I do not want your business to be one of them. If you want to grow or are growing your business, then there are fundamental issues you need to deal with before it is too late. Before you expand you have to have a stable foundation to build upon. That means you have to work out the problems in your business and fine tune it so that the increase will not add problems. Undoubtedly, there will be new problems to occur, you do not want to deal with the old ones too. You must define want you want to achieve to know if you are getting the results that you need
The vision can be simple or complex, but it has certain attributes. A business vision should be 1. 2. 3. 4.
Future-oriented Describe the future in images or mental pictures Focus on possibilities and Explain what is unique about the business.
To some this may seem trivial, but a vision is necessary because you cannot plan for something that does not exist. Once you have the plan, you should review it often. You should have it with you for organizational meetings and review it once a month to ensure that you stay focused.
BUSINESS GROWTH
STEP 2 - GET THE RIGHT BUSINESS ENTITY If your business is still operating as a sole proprietorship, you are not in position. The first thing that should be considered is your business structure. I always encourage people to think five to ten years out when deciding on a structure. Where do you see your business in five to ten years? Based on that, you decide which structure fits that scenario better. Why? Because it is expensive and time consuming to change a business structure midcourse. What is easy, is changing the existing structure to fit your current needs. How your business is structured will determine the liability the business will face and you as an individual. Many entrepreneurs are concerned about liability when starting their business. However, many of those same entrepreneurs fail to follow through on those concerns. Those concerns start with what type of business entity they should form. From a sole proprietorship to a corporation, entrepreneurs need to understand what each of these entities will mean for them and their business.
STEP 3 - MANAGE YOUR BOOKS Keeping good books is essential in running a successful business. Small business owners are notorious for keeping bad books. The “shoebox method” is not a method. Some people are good about the numbers and some are not. You should be concerned enough about the numbers to spend time dealing with what you have. Sitting down and going through the numbers can make a significant difference. If you do not know what is going on with your business, you are not in control. You cannot keep the numbers in your head or allow others to be in control of your accounts and run a successful business. Believing that the person who files the business tax 16
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returns should also keep watch of the business finances is a common and disastrous mistake made by many small business owners. It is common knowledge that your business should have a separate checking and savings account from its owners. While most small businesses do that, they make the mistake of using the business bank account to pay personal expenses. I will go on the record and say DO NOT USE THE BUSINESS TO PAY FOR YOUR PERSONAL EXPENESES. Now that, I have stated the official policy, anyone who has worked with or for a small business knows that this happens. All of the time! Even IRS knows. That is why small business owners are like sand at the beach for IRS auditors. Since we all know what is happening here are a few tips: • Keep track of the personal expenses paid and show them as “draws” or “income” to the person who the expense was paid • In your banking software (or manual ledger) keep a separate line item for those expenses so you know how much is being paid to the owner through this method • If you “reimburse” the company, show this in the books, do not just treat it as a wash and • Figure out why you need to use the company bank account for expenses.
BUSINESS GROWTH
STEP 4 - FOCUS ON RECURRING REVENUE It is important to keep up with and track your customer base. Do you have a way to do that? If not, you need to get a method and fast. If you want to increase your business, you need to know who your customers are and where they come from. That is important because you need to know how to find them again. Should you focus on the customers you want or the customers you have? I say you should do both, but in different ways. The first question you have to ask yourself is “are the customers I have the customers I want?” If you are selling high end clothing, then you want customers who can afford to pay the higher prices. If the only customers you are getting are the ones who buy off the sales rack, then you do not have the customers you want. So then, changes need to be made. Either you change what you are selling, or you change your customers. Maybe the customers that bring in the most money are not the customers you thought you wanted. Looking at your books, you should be able to tell which customers are bringing in the most money. This may be easier to determine if you have a service based business. However, even with a product based business, you can survey your customers and find out who they are. Take the time to look at your customer base and drill down as much as possible. Who buys what you are selling and why? Knowing the answer to those questions will help you to secure the growth you are seeking and take your business to another level.
STEP 5 - SUCCESSION PLANNING About thirty percent of family businesses survive a second generation and about three percent of start-up entrepreneurs intend to purchase an existing business. Those are not good odds. This means that if you want your business to be passed down to your great grandchildren you have a lot of work to do. If you want to sell your business at some point, you have even more work to do. You may not be thinking 17
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about selling your business right now. Nevertheless, you need to. That is because what makes your business attractive to buyers is the same thing that makes your business profitable. That means having things in place so that your business can be handed to the next generation. Do you have a business that can be handed to a family member? Would they even want it? Even after considering the ability to sell the business you have to plan for the “what ifs.” What if it does not sell? That means you need to plan for retirement and health challenges that may come along. It may seem impossible to pay for retirement when you cannot even pay yourself as much as you like regularly. Think about saving $3,000 per year to start; that is $250 per month. As you grow, you can increase that amount as necessary. Owning a business is stressful, but it is not worth having a heart attack over. That means you need to take a break when necessary, slow down and have fun. Take care of yourself, exercise, and create healthy eating habits. Start now! It is never too late.
STEP 6 - GET MORE HELP A business owner must learn how to let go of certain decisions and responsibilities as the business grows. It is a big stumbling block for founders. No one is perfect, and they do not know our business like you do. However, they have to learn, and you have to give them time to learn. Sometimes it means that the “control freak” that lives inside you must learn to be less controlling. Most importantly, it means lack of vision. Owners who cannot let go will ultimately drive their business into the ground. That is because management will become dysfunctional at some point. A founder that cannot let go will not let workers thrive or leaders be born. They will push out the talent and retain those who do not care about the overall survival of the business.
BUSINESS GROWTH Understanding your limitations is key. For most small business owners, giving up complete control is a nonstarter. However, the skills needed to get the business started may not be the skills needed to continue the business or grow the business. Be willing to bring more knowledgeable and skilled contractors to help move the business forward. While hiring professionals in this manner may be more expensive, it saves time because of the training and experience of the professional in an area. If you do not want to spend your time learning and trying to comprehend social media, hire a contractor. Bring in someone that knows what they are doing and let them train your staff on what to do and how to do it. If you need help with payroll and you cannot afford to hire a person to work on it full time, use a service to help you.
STEP 8 - USE TECHNOLOGY So many people have computers and smartphones. Our society is very technological. In some ways that is a good thing. There are so many software tools that are available it can almost make your head spin. However, before you invest in the most expensive and useless software, take the time to determine what your business needs to operate. There are certain must haves. Accounting software is one. If all of your receipts and invoices are in a file drawer or shoebox, you are not ready to increase your business. You should also have a calendaring system. You need a system that will update the calendar and can filter multiple schedules. Especially if you have employees, or different contracts with different deadlines.
STEP 7 - SERVE YOUR CUSTOMERS It is hard to survey customers. Many people just want to get their products or services and go. The major corporations are offering prices and coupons to get customers to give feedback. Is a dollar off of a Big Mac worth the time? Few people say yes. You should at least attempt to find out what your customers likes and dislikes about your services or products are.
Everyone is in the cloud these days. It is a useful tool to keep up with your old files and even secure them. However, do no rely too severely on these services. Offering incentives is a good idea. If you can make a Remember, these are third party services which can phone call great! The best time to get feedback is when falter. Use your own backup drive and the cloud you begin and complete the experience. Depending services. If you still have a lot of files on CDs and upon your business, you can ask a customer, what are heaven forbid floppy drives, now is the time to convert you expecting from us? all of that data onto a flash drive. It may be a long and unrealistic list, but at least you know. You will know how to speak to your future customers so that they expect what you actually deliver. You can also ask your customer what they did and did not like about your services or product. Many times, people are reluctant to tell you the truth when they are looking right at you. However, with online surveys being prevalent and iPads and Tablets being functional business tools. You can give your client a link to an online survey as you are wrapping up their experience.
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Shahara Wright is a CEO, business law attorney, professor, community leader, speaker and author. She has been the owner and Lead Attorney of The Wright Firm, PLLC for 15 years. Shahara provides small and mid-sized companies with legal and business strategies including entity formation, mergers and acquisitions, investor packages and contracts.
RECOMMENDED BOOK
Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising A new generation of megabrands like Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Twitter haven’t spent a dime on traditional marketing. No press releases, no TV commercials, no billboards. Instead, they rely on a new strategy — growth hacking — to reach many more people despite modest marketing budgets. Growth hackers have thrown out the old playbook and replaced it with tools that are testable, trackable, and scalable. They believe that products and businesses should be modified repeatedly until they’re primed to generate explosive reactions. Bestselling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for American Apparel and many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians, explains the new rules and provides valuable examples and case studies for aspiring growth hackers. Whether you work for a tiny start-up or a Fortune 500 giant, if you’re responsible for building awareness and buzz for a product or service, this is your road map.
Ryan Holiday is a strategist and writer. He dropped out of college at nineteen to apprentice under Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, and later served as the director of marketing for American Apparel. His company, Brass Check, has advised clients like Google, TASER, and Complex, as well as many prominent bestselling authors. Holiday has written four previous books, most recently The Obstacle Is the Way, which has been translated into seventeen languages and has a cult following among NFL coaches, world-class athletes, TV personalities, political leaders, and others around the world. He lives on a small ranch outside Austin, Texas. 19
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IF YOU LIKE WHAT YOU READ FOLLOW US
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COVER STORY
“Life is too short to build something no body wants” ASH MAURYA
WSJ BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND CREATOR OF THE LEAN CANVAS
A
sh Maurya has been an entrepreneur for more than a decade now. He came to the U.S. on a student visa and after graduation, he worked for a large company. Later he worked for a startup in telecommunications which was a good experience for him as they had a number of false starts and number of failed products as expected from any startup. 21
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“in the beginning, you make lot of mistakes so it is good to learn in other people’s time” Eventually, the company got acquired for a big round and at that point, he left to start his own company which he always wanted to do. So in 2002 he started WiredReach and immediately fell in love with the solution which he was building for his customer’s problem. He told no one about the product and launched it in stealth mode and eventually found that it was too early for its market. It did not really meet the customer need at the time. He did not want to go back working for someone else at that time so he had to figure out how to make the business model work and he somehow managed to survive and ultimately pivoted his product into something which his customers were ready to pay. He continued running the business for many years and eventually sold it in 2010. In 2009 he got exposed to some early writings of Steve Blank and Eric Ries and he realized that lot of what they were writing about were the mistakes he was making along the way and kind of learning on his own. So he decided to adopt some of those principles and found a better way to launch products. 22
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He took one of his newer product and applied a lot of lean startup techniques to it and then refined those techniques further into what is now called Running Lean and Scaling Lean methodologies. Eventually, he started another venture called Spark59 which they recently renamed to LeanStack. The mission of LeanStack is to help entrepreneurs avoid the same mistakes that he made while starting up.
WHAT MISTAKES HE MADE WHILE RUNNING HIS STARTUP Like many entrepreneurs both new and seasoned, he fell in love with the solution. He says that when founders get hit with an idea it is usually based on some observation about market opportunity or customer problem. But instead of going deep into the problem, they instantly jump at the solution. They keep thinking about how they can fund building the solution. In the beginning, you can bootstrap with your savings which is how he started. Eventually, you build a half finished product by the time you are low on funds and try to push it
to customers. He did that for many years. In another approach, you may want to raise venture capital so you put together a team and pitch and you go and tell this awesome story to investors in the hopes of raising money and building the product out. However, your first product is almost never going to work simply because it is based on the assumptions that just will not match. You need to be very lucky to hit the product market fit in the first go and so these were the mistakes that he made. But a lot of people make the same mistake of rushing to build out the solution or rush to acquire the resources like the team and the money to go build out the solution. A better approach is to really fall in love with the problem first. You need to study the market, customer problem. Once you understand this well, you can build simple things like mockups, demos or minimum viable products which will not require a lot of resources. The idea behind building simple things is to learn that there is really a customer demand first and then jumping in with the right solution. If the traditional approach is to build,
COVER STORY demo, find customers and then sell, the new lean approach is to start with the demo first, test with customers and even sell a demo to customers. You need to first get a customer and then build what they bought which is a much better approach.
LOVE THE PROBLEM, NOT YOUR SOLUTION
HOW HE WROTE “RUNNING LEAN” USING LEAN APPROACH? Ash had no intention to become a self-published author and it was more of a side project. He was really writing a blog to crystallize his own thinking. He wanted to hold himself accountable and join the community to get conversations around how and what people think about the lean approach and whether it was the right one or not. Gradually along the way, he seemed to have found the voice as his readers began to encourage him to put those writings into a book because it would be a good contribution to the community so he reluctantly agreed to take the project. But he did in a very iterative manner. He decided that the best way to really understand what was going to go into this book is to go out and talk about it and to teach it. Because the job of a book is to really disseminate ideas to change people’s perspectives and he could do that with just a workshop for 23
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instance or with a one hour talk and so he decided that instead of writing the book, he would put an outline of the book and then go out do a whole bunch of speaking and teaching at workshops. And interestingly enough people came, they found the content very interesting, they engaged in conversation, asked lots of questions, pointed out, brought up more questions than he was initially tackling and so all those became his input problems that he went and explored, came up with more solutions. After about 6 months of doing that he pretty much had the outline of the book because he got all these questions that people asked him, he put slides up and slides became essentially the MVP of the book, they were essentially the book without it being a book. At that point of time, he had people on his mailing list who had joined him by seeing the outline of the book. He went back to those people and said it is going to take him some time to get this book written but if they pre-order the book now, he would release it incrementally by giving few chapters to read every 2 weeks. A number of them bought into this idea and they bought the book. So he began to write and every 2 weeks would release chapters out and even then he learned a lot as people would take
those chapters, they would find bugs like spelling errors and simple things like that but they would also find issues with content or how the content was not resonating with them or not applying to their businesses. So he took all the inputs and then again refined those chapters. So when he finished the book, it took him about a year from the point he decided to do the project to having the first version of the book completed. Even in the case of traditional publication, authors will take that much time except that they don’t write by talking to people, they just write by themselves. So the lean approach took about the same time but he ended up with a product that was incrementally tested with his readers along the way and so it ended up to be a better product at the end of the day.
COVER STORY
LEAN CANVAS Business plans take too long to write, are seldom updated, and almost never read by others but documenting your assumptions are key. Lean Canvas solves this problem using a 1-page business model that takes under 20 minutes to create. Lean Canvas is based on Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas but optimized for Lean Startup. Some of the benefits of Lean Canvas:
Fast
Effective
Concise
Portable
Compared to writing a business plan which can take several weeks or months, you can outline multiple possible business models on a canvas in one afternoon.
Lean Canvas forces you to distill the essence of your product. You have 30 seconds to grab the attention of an investor over a metaphorical elevator ride, and 8 seconds to grab the attention of a customer on your landing page.
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Whether you’re pitching investors or giving an update to your team or board, Lean Canvas’ built-in presenter tools allow you to effectively document and communicate your progress.
A single page business model is much easier to share with others which means it will be read by more people and also more frequently updated.
COVER STORY
RIGHT WAY TO FIND GROWTH METRICS FOR A BUSINESS
WHY GROWING SLOW IS BETTER THAN FAST
Like with many things, the world has changed. Now we can build lots of things and when it comes to metrics we can also measure a lot of things. Too many people get into the trap of implementing every analytical solution on the planet and he did the same mistake looking for that Holy Grail of a metric dashboard or some metric that is just going to make the business take off. He has found out that when we do that we end up drowning ourselves in lots and lots of numbers and actually get lost. It doesn’t get clear and it actually gets murkier. So he is a big advocate of starting with just a handful of metrics and for that, he recommends Dave McClure’s pirate metrics.
He sees that startups want to go as fast as possible and get to the scale stage as quickly as possible. So while that is a good intent, he recommends going slow in order to move fast. You need to do things which do not scale at first. Your goal should be to get the first paying customer for which you may need to get 10 qualified leads. To get 10 leads you may need to get 100 visitors to your website. Your goal should be to talk to at least 100 people to get that 1 magical customer. When you get that first customer, it’s a magical moment because you understand how you may have position yourself against all the other solutions out there and that gives you lots of insights to then scale. Use any of the nonscalable channels, in the beginning, so use your networks, use first-degree networks, use LinkedIn, go to trade shows and even cold call if you have to. Key there is to go to where customers or potential customers hang out and really use some of the lean techniques to understand problems, show them solutions and sign up that first customer.
So when he looks at any startups metrics irrespective of the stage (whether early or growth stage), he just wants to look at those 5 key metrics. He likes to see them in a relative sense instead of a snapshot at any given time. He recommends checking this month’s metrics versus last few months metrics so that you can tell which ones are going up or down or which are just stagnant. When you do this, it brings focus. You will find a low hanging fruit which can be fixed quickly. For example acquisition or retention. Once you identify the metric to be fixed, you need secondary metrics as you need to understand why something is happening. You may have to do more learning experiments or go and talk to customers or dig deeper into metrics.
Once you have your first customer, your next goal should be to get 10 more customers. After 10 customers, make your goal to get 100 customers and so on. You have to take the learnings about customers, your value proposition and accordingly, invest in scalable channels going forward. These can be content marketing, advertisements, social media marketing etc.
Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics Source: StartitUp 25
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HOW LEAN TEAM WORKS? He advises having a small crossfunctional team for any business whether big or small. A good team size for a startup is 1-5 people and 3 is the magical number based on his experience. Your team should have complementary skills which can help remove any biases in decision-making at every stage of product development. He also recommends working as a team in a startup instead of dividing the tasks and working in silos. It is very easy to let developers take technical decisions while designer do all UI/UX related decisions. This will create inefficiencies and soon you will have have a company which is running in multiple silos. So he advises getting people come together and work on a customer problem so that everyone has an input on all decisions like landing page design or pricing decisions etc. So it needs to be crossfunctional effort instead of divide and conquer effort.
KEEPING YOURSELF & TEAM MOTIVATED Ash comes from an Agile scrum kind of a background and there he is a big fan of a periodic cadence of progress updates. So in the lean context, he has devised this thing called lean sprint and the idea of a lean sprint is really getting the team together and communicate the issues in the business model and then the team also comes up with solutions. As a solo founder, it becomes very hard to hold yourself accountable so you are going to have your roller coaster moment, the ups and the downs. The more important 26
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thing is that in all those instances if you have no one to talk to then you again become very biased because you are just looking at your problem and solution and nothing may be changing but you are just fooling yourself or lying to yourself unconsciously. So he advises building an ad-hoc advisory board which could be your entrepreneur friends, seasoned entrepreneurs that agree to meet with you on a regular basis over lunch or more structured setting where you just go and share a progress update and you get their advice. They will hold you accountable and let you know if you are on track or not, what might be some of the things to try and that’s a great way to build that focus. So in the marketing circles this is called a mastermind group, while with startups people call it advisory board but it does not have to be too formal, it is just something that can be done very loosely. For a team, he recommends having a meeting which is weekly or bi-weekly depending on your needs. The whole purpose of that meeting is to get together and talk about whether the business model is making progress, what are the problems, how can we break
through those problems etc. This will be very inspiring for the team because everyone will look at the problems together but it also allows for a lot of new idea generation. When you think in isolation you get very biased but when you think as a team and when you bounce ideas across each other, you just get this kind of idea generation moment, so it allows you to find new ways out of all problems.
ASH’s PRODUCTIVITY SECRETS
“On the surface, it seems I am doing a lot of things but I tell lot of people, it’s an illusion so if you look at a juggler and see how they juggle 3 balls, it may look that they are juggling 3 balls but there is really only 1 ball in the air and 2 of them are planted in their hand and so I am not a multi-tasker, I only do one thing at a time”
COVER STORY Ash is a big fan of doing tasks which can be repurposed or that can be connected to a bigger problem so everything that he does feeds into each other. If he writes something new this morning, that may actually end up becoming a blog post, that may actually end up going into the next talk that he would do or next workshop that he would conduct and so for him everything gets repurposed across everything.
early in the morning at 5 AM. He has kids and they usually get up at 7 AM and get ready for school. So from 5-7 AM, he pretty much have a 2 hour block of uninterrupted time and that’s when he do things like his writing or take a big problem that he is trying to solve or really just prioritize his day but he need to get that one thing done because then he can relax that allows him to be more interrupt driven, he can then go with flow, he can open email.
He is very big accomplishment driven, so he prioritize his day wherein he does more of his maker activities in the morning. He didn’t use to be a morning person but he realized that was the time when he could do uninterrupted work, for some people they do that at night so at night when people are sleeping you can stay up and do uninterrupted work.
So he doesn’t do any email, he doesn’t do any of those things in those 2 hours. After 7-8 AM he will look at what’s happening in the day, maybe the team needs a meeting, may be customers need calls, may be pending emails that he has to pay attention to and so then he become more managerial at tasks, but he finds that if he does that it always helps him push forward progress on the overall business and still doing a lot of the firefighting for the rest of day.
He realized mornings were better for him so he usually wakes up
HIS FAVORITE BOOKS He reads a lot of books which are applicable based on what he is currently facing. He is a fan of lean books like Lean Thinking. He also recommends Positioning by Al Ries, Jack Trout. He suggests reading marketing books to all technical people. If you have a great idea but can not market it well, it will die a sudden death. He recommends Seth Godin’s books for marketing. His other classic is Nir Eyal’s Hooked.
HIS HOBBIES He is an ardent Yoga practitioner so he does typically 6 days of Yoga a week. It also helps him stay fit. He also enjoys cooking as much as he enjoys his food.
HIS BUSINESS IDOL Over the years that has changed as he admire people for different reasons. Currently he is fascinated with Elon Musk and the way he works.
CONNECT WITH ASH
Websites
ashmaurya.com leanstack.com
Social
twitter.com/ashmaurya facebook.com/ashmaurya instagram.com/ashmaurya medium.com/@ashmaurya linkedin.com/in/ashmaurya
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RECOMMENDED BOOK
You’ve talked to customers. You’ve identified problems that need solving, and maybe even built a minimum viable product. But now there’s a second bridge to cross. How do you tell whether your idea represents a viable business? Do you really have to go through the whole cycle of development, failure, iteration, tweak, repeat?
progress (it forces you to fly blind and, often, to overpromise to your shareholders) and instead embrace the metric of traction—which helps you identify the leading indicators for future business model growth. • Set progressive goals that set you up for exponential long-term success by implementing a staged 10X rollout strategy, like one employed by Facebook and Tesla.
Scaling Lean offers an invaluable blueprint for modeling startup success. You’ll learn the essen• Stop burying your breakthrough insights in tial metrics that measure the output of a working failed experiments, but rather illuminate them business model, give you the pulse of your compausing two-week LEAN sprints to quickly ny, communicate its health to investors, and enable source, rank, and test ideas. you to make precise interventions when things go wrong. You’ll also learn how to: • Ballpark the viability of a business model using a simple five-minute back-of-the-envelope estimation. • Stop using current revenue as a measure of 28
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HELP US SERVE YOU BETTER TAKE OUR SHORT 2 MINUTE SURVEY Your answers will help us make ScaleUp magazine better for you.
Your wish is our command Tell us what you would like to include in next issues and we will implement them for you. TAKE THE SURVEY
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Ask GrowthMonk
Ask GrowthMonk is our free virtual mentorship program where you can ask your business and personal growth queries. Our expert panel members will answer your questions and provide valuable insights. You can learn from their vast experience across multiple business domains. The best answers will be featured in next issues of ScaleUp magazine. Submit your questions by clicking the button below and your GrowthMonk will answer them soon.
ASK GROWTHMONK YOUR QUESTION
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“You don’t have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.” Michael Dell
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17 RULES FOR GETTING
PRODUCTIVITY
ORGANIZED & DECLUTTERED
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“What would it take to get your life decluttered & organized?” That might be a tall order for many of us, but the truth is, we could do it in bursts and spurts, using a handful of easy-to-follow rules. I know in my life, going from being overwhelmed with clutter to minimalism was a slow but rewarding journey, and now I feel happy every time I look around and see the lovely space around me. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, I’m here to testify that it’s not impossible, and it just takes some small steps that add up over time. Here are the rules I suggest — though I don’t suggest adopting them all, and especially not all at once. Try a few out, see how they work for you, then try a few others. 33
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Get yourself organized at the start and end of a day. As you start your work day, write down your 3 Most Important Tasks (MITs). Write down a handful of other things you’d like to do today as well. Clear your desk, get things in order. At the end of each day, tidy things up, check off your list, maybe even get things ready for tomorrow.
1
When you get up from your desk, put one thing away. Whenever you get up for a glass of water, to go to the bathroom, to take a break … pick up something off your desk and put it away. If your desk is clear, look for something nearby.
2
it away. When you shower or change clothes, instead of leaving them on the floor or on a piece of furniture, put the clothes away or in a hamper. Look for a few other clothes to put away too if there are more lying around. Keep flat surfaces clear. Your tables, counters, desks, floors … keep them clear. If there’s a ton of clutter there now, see the rule below about decluttering on Saturdays. But if it’s doable, just start clearing whatever is on the floor (except furniture and the like). When you walk by the kitchen counter, look for things other than oft-used appliances to put away.
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At the end of the work When you’re done day, file stuff. If you still eating, wash your bowl. use papers, file them at This is self-explanatory. the end of the day. If you Mindfully wash your are all digital, clear your computer dishes instead of leaving them in desktop and put files where they the sink. If there are other dishes in belong. the sink, wash a few of them too. Deal with an email instead Wipe down the sink of putting it off. When when you use it. you open an email, give Whenever you wash your it the space to deal with hands or brush your teeth it immediately. Read it, reply, take in the bathroom, wipe down the action, or archive it. Or put it on sink so it’s clean. Do the same in your to-do list for later if it’s a big the kitchen sink. Clear away a few task. Don’t just constantly open things around the sink too if you emails without handling them. can. When you walk through Declutter on Saturdays. a room, find one thing Every Saturday morning, to put away. If you’re spend an hour or two (or going from your bedroom half a day) decluttering to the living room, find one thing one area. during that trip to put away. You don’t have to get stuck in putting everything away, just one thing. PRODUCTIVITY
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3
9
4
5
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10
When you take off a piece of clothing, put
Work to only having 3 emails in your inbox. Slowly clear away the hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox. Archive or delete them, put a handful in a to-do folder, file others into informational folders, unsubscribe from newsletters.
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Put non-essential items you want to buy on a 30-day list. Create a 30-day list, and whenever you want to buy something that’s not absolutely essential (other than groceries, cleaning supplies, toiletries), put it on the list with the date you added it. Then don’t allow yourself to buy anything until it’s been on the list for 30 days. At the end of the 30 days, see if you still want it before buying.
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Put your clothes in a different closet or box, and only take out what you need. Move all your clothes to a closet in an unused room if you have one, or put them in a box or two. Only remove the clothes you really need to wear. After a month of doing this, you’ll see what clothes you can consider donating.
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One in, two out. When you bring something new in your life (buy something online, get a gift), get rid of two other similar things. For example, if you buy a pair of shoes, donate two other pairs. In this way, you’ll 1) think more about each thing you buy, and 2) slowly have fewer and fewer possessions. Eventually you’ll want to switch to a “one in, one out” rule when you think your possessions are at a good level.
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Limit how many things you have. Consider
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Leo Babauta limiting yourself to 30 pieces of is the author clothing, or 30 books, or something of The Power like that. Get rid of everything else, of Less and don’t allow yourself to go beyond the creator and the limit. The individual limit you blogger at Zen set is up to you, whatever feels Habits, a Top 25 blog (according slightly uncomfortable is good. to TIME magazine) with 200,000 subscribers — one of the top At the end of each productivity and simplicity blogs on month, clear out comthe Internet. puter clutter. Self-explanatory. Back things up! Babauta is considered by many to be one of the leading experts on Every three months, productivity and simplicity, and purge. Also self-explanhas also written the top-selling atory. Spend a weekend purging all your unneeded productivity e-book in history: Zen To Done: The Ultimate belongings. Simple Productivity System. It Of course, these are just suggested has sold thousands of copies and has reached tens of thousands of rules … you should modify them readers. to suit your life.
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How to Implement the Rules Now, those are a lot of rules, but I don’t think you should implement them all at once. In fact, I suggest trying one per week. Really focus all week on making that rule happen. If it goes well, keep it. If not, toss it out. The next week, try another. Set a reminder on a certain day each week (let’s say Monday) to review how your rule went, and to pick a new rule to try out. Have a physical, paper note somewhere visible so you’ll remember to do the rule throughout the week. One at a time, you’ll find the rules that work for you. And one step at a time, your life will slowly become less cluttered, more organized. And you’ll be set up to make great things happen in the PRODUCTIVITY rest of your life.
Fear of Success: What Will Happen if You
SUCCEED? S
ometimes you find yourself with a goal you think you should want to achieve, but you just don’t seem to be taking enough action to reach it. You aren’t really afraid of failure or rejection, the path to the goal seems clear enough and might even be an interesting challenge, and occasionally you’ll make some progress. But most of the time you can’t seem to get into that flow state, and you’re not sure why. This often happens with long-term goals that require intermittent action, like losing weight or transitioning to start a new business and eventually quit your job. One question I’ve found helpful to ask in these situations is this: What will happen if you succeed? Forget about what you hope will happen or what you fear might happen, but realistically consider what probably will happen. So you achieve your goal. Then what? What else will change?
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MOTIVATION
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I’m not talking about giving a 5-second cursory answer, like “If I lose the weight, then I’ll be thain.” Set aside at least 15-30 minutes just to think about how your life will really change once you achieve your goal (with no TV, radio, or other distractions). There are often unexpected side effects that you may not be aware of consciously, but subconsciously they can be enough to prevent you from taking committed action. For example, if you lose a lot of weight, here are some possible side effects: people will notice and will comment about it, other people will ask you for diet advice, you may feel you need to continue with a permanent lifestyle change to maintain your new weight, you may need to buy new clothes, you may become more attractive to others and thereby attract more social encounters (wanted or unwanted), overweight friends might become jealous, your family may resist your changes, you may feel stressed about whether you can keep the weight off, you may worry about the loss of certain favorite foods from your diet, and so on. It’s rare that a goal is all roses. Success requires change, and change has both positive and negative consequences. Often while people claim to want to succeed at something, the reality is that the negatives outweigh the positives for them. But one way to overcome this problem is to consciously think about what those negatives are, and then uproot them one by one. MOTIVATION 36
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Uprooting a negative side effect could mean figuring out how to eliminate it completely, or it could mean just accepting it and learning to live with it. It’s certainly helpful to focus on the positive side of a goal. But don’t forget to take an occasional survey of the dark side and accept that you’re going to have to deal with that too. Unlike fear of failure and fear of rejection, fear of success can be far more insidious because it’s almost always unconscious. But it’s not fear of success itself that is
the problem but rather fear of the side effects of success, many of which may be genuinely unwanted. Fears that are never evaluated consciously have a tendency to grow stronger. The reason is simple behavioral conditioning — when you avoid something you fear (either consciously or subconsciously), you automatically reinforce the avoidance behavior. So when you (even unknowingly) avoid working on your goal because of a hidden fear of success, you actually reinforce the habit of procrastination, so as time goes by, it becomes harder and harder to get yourself to take action. Insidious!
MOTIVATION Asking, “What will happen if I succeed?” can solve this problem because it focuses your conscious attention on those fears. Fear has a tendency to shrink under direct examination, making it easier for you to take action. When I say that fear shrinks, another way of stating this is that subconscious behavioral conditioning weakens under conscious scrutiny. I know some people dislike the word “fear” with respect to their own behavior — don’t get hung up on the exact wording; call it “avoidance behavior” if that’s more to your liking. But an additional benefit is that you can also devise intelligent workarounds for those fears-madeconscious, some of which may indeed be valid signals of unsolved problems. For example, going back to the weight loss example, if you lose a lot of weight, you probably will need new clothes. And if you don’t have the money to buy new clothes, then that is a real problem you’ll need to address (unless you don’t mind wearing oversized outfits). Left unacknowledged, even a simple problem like this can be enough to subconsciously sabotage you from achieving your goal. But once you examine the situation consciously and figure out a way to deal with it in advance, you’re sending a message to your subconscious that you needn’t fear this problem because you have a practical way to solve it. Now let’s consider the opposite side. Suppose you ask, “What will happen if I succeed?” and upon considering all the side effects, you realize that you don’t actually want to achieve the goal at all. The negatives outweigh the positives. I encountered this when I made a plan to grow my games business but didn’t seem to make as much progress as I wanted. When I asked 37
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this magic question, I realized that I didn’t really want to achieve the goal with all its side effects — what I really wanted was to transition to writing and speaking full time, and further building my games business would actually take me farther from that more important goal. Growing my games business seemed like a goal I should want, but when I really thought about where I’d be if I achieved that goal, I realized it wouldn’t be the success I truly wanted. That was a difficult realization for me… to recognize that my original ladder of success was now leaning against the wrong building. So I actually had to “unset” that goal once I really understood the likely consequences of achieving it.
What will happen if you succeed? If you lose the weight… get the date… earn the promotion… start the business… get pregnant… quit smoking… become a millionaire… stretch yourself?
Even now as I set goals in the direction of writing and speaking as my new career, I recognize that there are big side effects. I simply don’t have the mental bandwidth for two full-time careers. One of the hardest side effects for me was letting go of the goals and dreams I had for my games business. All those creative ideas for new games that will never be… and the would-be players who will never experience them…. But this is outweighed by what will happen as I succeed in my new career. To create a new game that challenges, entertains, and uplifts people is wonderful; however, being able to help people grow fulfills me even more. I found it a very enlightening process to review all these side effects and one by one to acknowledge that I accept them. Steve Pavlina is widely recognized as one of the most successful personal development bloggers in the world, with his work attracting more than 100 million visits to StevePavlina.com. He has written more than 1300 articles and recorded many audio programs on a broad range of self-help topics, including productivity, relationships, and spirituality.
7Social Media Presence Mobile Apps to Amp-Up Your
A
ll that time that you spend traveling or waiting at the dry cleaners is such a waste. If you could use that time to get the little stuff done, it would amount to a lot at the end of a day. Especially if you’re a social media manager, your job runs around the clock, and has a substantial amount of real-time engagement.
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Experienced social media managers know that social media never sleeps – it keeps evolving and changing every day. To keep up with this, you have to constantly be online and this is not always possible. So can use your down-time to take your online presence up a notch with a few cool apps. Mobile apps let you handle social media no matter where you are. Several of these apps are only available for certain platforms but a good deal of them are available for web, Android and iOS.
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DrumUp
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DrumUp is a content curation web and mobile app that gets you great social media content from all the latest happenings in your industry. It can greatly improve your social presence and all it takes is a few minutes of your time everyday. You can add multiple accounts and fully customize each of their content feeds effortlessly. Once you’ve set up your content streams, you can schedule content with a single click or customize the time and date for scheduling completely. Once scheduled, you can review your queue and remove posts that you don’t like or find irrelevant. You can also add your blog feeds to add your posts to your queue. The tool is available for both Android and iOS.
Mention Mention works on a simple concept – it shows you mentions of your keywords from all over the web in real-time. Your keywords can include anything including your company’s name, niche, industry etc. You also get notifications in real-time for profile mentions. One of Mention’s most useful features is the anti-noise feature, which analyzes mentions for sentiments and priority and weeds out the unimportant ones. You can also respond and react to your mentions right from the app itself. Customized analytics are also a huge plus. The app is a paid one but it does have a 14 day free trial period so you can see its impact first hand.
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IFTTT
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IFTTT app is great for automating mundane, daily processes and for simplifying complicated tasks. For social media managers, it has a ton of built-in ‘recipes’ to put their daily lives on fast-forward. These ‘recipes’ are simple IF statements that can be modified as you please. Once you’ve connected all your accounts, you can automate tasks like posting your Facebook status updates as tweets or updates on Tumblr, post Instagram posts as Twitter photos, and much more. Depending on the accounts and apps you’d like to connect you have endless possibilities with this app.
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Flipboard gets you articles, videos and news from the best sources from around the web. Once you’ve downloaded the app, all you need to do is pick a handful of topics and start reading all the great content. You can start off with their Cover stories, which features content from the most reputed sources including the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post and more. You can keep track of hashtags or Twitter handles to stay up to date on the latest trends and events. You can also get hand-picked general news stories of the day by using The Daily Edition. Social media managers can create digital magazines with everything they like and share it on multiple social media accounts. The app is available for Android and iOS.
Trello
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A key factor of social media management is organization and Trello is one of the best tools for it. The app takes note-taking to a whole new level and you can create boards for different topics with images and videos. You can add notes in the board and color code them according to your requirements. Boards can be shared with colleagues to encourage team involvement or used privately. You can add checklists under your board as well to help you keep track of your progress. People can add comments to boards to give pointers and feedback. Your social media presence will increase drastically by collaborating on boards as everyone on the team will be on the same page. Files can also be added from Google Drive and Dropbox as well. The app is available for Android and iOS.
Facebook Pages Manager This app is created by Facebook and lets admins manage multiple pages in a single place. You can add posts and photos on the go. Comments and private messages on your pages can be monitored and replied to. You can enable push notifications to get all the notified on all the updates as they happen. The app also provides analytics like new page likes per day, the number of people your page reaches and many other such stats. Social media presence can be increased greatly with timely responses and constant posting. The app is available for Android and iOS.
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Cyfe
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Cyfe is an all-in-one business dashboard that lets you track your social media efforts. You can monitor anything from websites and social media to departments in your business. The app comes with pre-built widgets that can be customized to give you the information you want right on your homescreen. You can also share your dashboards with peers and customers to improve integration and transparency. The data on your dashboard is archived forever and can be downloaded or shared through email in multiple formats. You can create multiple dashboards. For example, you can create a social media dashboard that has Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter Analytics combined with other demographic information. It also features a number of customization options to make organization and viewing more pleasant. This app is currently available on web and as a widget for iOS.
Getting It Right You can use all the apps on this list and still fail at amplifying your social media presence. There are a few important things that you have to remember while using these apps: • Choose the right time to schedule posts. If it is likely that your target audience will be offline, schedule content for the next day. • Always engage with comments and replies to your posts. In the beginning phases, comments will be scarce but engagement is key to growth. • Add a personalized touch to every post you share. Don’t be a robot that shares for the sake of it as this will turn readers away. • Visual content is important and you must share
both text and images as often as possible. Apps that can extract and use images from links are the best for this. • Do not share 20-30 pieces of curated content in a single day. Sharing 5-10 pieces is recommended. • Employee advocacy can be tricky and you must train your employees to understand different platforms and rules for sharing. • Curated content must always be balanced out with original content. Your social media presence is dependent on what and how you share. Keep the above points in mind before sharing anything. All the above apps have their own benefits and downfalls, try them out and understand each one before sticking with 2-3 permanently.
Aditi Prakash is a blogger at Godot Media, a leading blog writing services firm. She writes extensively on content marketing and social media marketing. She also has numerous guest posts on various other blogs.
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RECOMMENDED BOOK
Joe Pulizzi is an entrepreneur, speaker, author, podcaster, father and lover of all things orange. He’s the founder of multiple startups, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the leading content marketing educational resource for enterprise brands, recognized as the fastest growing business media company by Inc. magazine in 2014. CMI is responsible for producing Content Marketing World, the largest content marketing event in the world (held every September in Cleveland, Ohio), as well as the leading content marketing magazine, Chief Content Officer. He began using the term “content marketing” back in 2001. CMI also offers advisory services for innovative organizations such as HP, AT&T, Petco, LinkedIn, SAP, the Gates Foundation and many others.
A pioneer of content marketing, Pulizzi has cracked the code when it comes to the power of content in a world where marketers still hold fast to traditional models that no longer work. In the book Content Inc., he breaks down the business-startup process into six steps, making it simple for you to visualize, launch, and monetize your own business. These steps are: • The “Sweet Spot”: Identify the intersection of your unique competency and your personal passion • Content Tilting: Determine how you can “tilt” your sweet spot to find a place where little or no competition exists • Building the Base: Establish your number-one channel for disseminating content (blog, podcast, YouTube, etc.) • Harvesting Audience: Use social-media and SEO to convert one-time visitors into long-term subscribers 42
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• Diversification: Grow your business by expanding into multiple delivery channels • Monetization: Now that your expertise is established, you can begin charging money for your products or services Pulizzi walks you step by step through the process, based on his own success (and failures) and real-world multi-million dollar examples from multiple industries and countries. Whether you’re seeking to start a brand-new business or drive innovation in an existing one, Content Inc. provides everything you need to reverse-engineer the traditional entrepreneurial model for better, more sustainable success.
“EVERY PROBLEM HAS A SOLUTION. YOU JUST HAVE TO BE CREATIVE ENOUGH TO FIND IT” Travis Kalanick Uber
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Work on one task at a time. Multitasking is a myth, and trying to do it only splits your focus.
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STARTUP JOURNEY
HOW I BECAME AN ENTREPRENEUR BY PAYAL LAL
Creator of Social MOOC Taker At 16, I already loved startups. So two years later, when I found myself doing law at the national law university of Delhi, I was naturally quite unhappy to not be pursuing my love for startups. After four days in law school, I dropped out and started working on my first startup.
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“Startups are thrilling. They’re also challenging and require a certain level of maturity, which I’ve learnt over time.”
Fast forward a few years – I’m back at college, this time in Singapore. On a backpacking trip to Cambodia, I started thinking of the ideal education system I would want for myself. I decided that I wouldn’t want this system of classes and grades that I’d found myself in time and again. I’d like the ability to learn when I want and what I want. That would allow me to be a digital nomad and work on startup projects with more flexibility. Two years ago as a law school dropout, I had done something along these lines with online courses on Coursera and EdX, also known as MOOCs. BUT the lack of a peer group and community had been a major downside. The amount I was learning from my peers at college was irreplaceable and there was no way I could learn that from any online course I took. Also, I couldn’t imagine not having a few mentors to guide me. By this time my daydreaming had reached a point that I wanted to actively do something to make it a reality. What made me even more motivated was 45
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knowing that there were tons of places in the world gaining the internet but still no quality schools. If we could build such a system, they wouldn’t necessarily need brick and mortar schools anymore to learn and get educated.
What was the initial reaction? The vision caught a lot of people’s interest. I listed this on angel.co so that I could attract potential co-founders to work with me. Mind you I still didn’t know exactly what I was creating. But before I got ahead of myself, I wanted a tech and design co-founder to compliment by business skills. I got tons of interest, and a few were people I ended up working with. We also saw a great response from the e-learning community when we started the customer validation process – they were very friendly and very helpful in giving us suggestions and keeping us informed of e-learning trends and behaviors. I loved my users from the onset.
Our first failure
But if there’s a high, there will certainly be lows. Our first low was when we received lukewarm traction and very few sign ups on our first set of features. Trying to test an idea, we created wireframes and put them up on a website to see if people would sign up. The idea was a platform where people could come find other e-learners to do real world projects with. E-learners wanted to have real proof that showed employers their skills. We envisioned that e-learners who had complementary skills could come together on our platform to put their skills into a real project. People learning to code could meet with people learning design and business to create a website or app. But within a few days of putting up the landing page, we learnt that this wasn’t a real enough problem.
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“E-learners had too little time to pursue a project alongside their course and full-time activity”
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STARTUP JOURNEY
The importance of asking your customer’s want So we pivoted and as they say, went back to the drawing board. This time, we just asked e-learners what they wanted. I know that the customer rarely knows what they want – but after speaking to more than 50 e-learners, we were surprised to find most of them asking for the same thing – small study groups. They all wanted to learn with people online in small groups. Over the following months, we created a product that enabled group learning. Our product used an algorithm that would connect e-learners to a fitting study group.
The go to market Looking at fellow competitors, we realized that a lot of them were failing to gain traction. So while my CTO developed the product, I tried to figure out a better go to market than just posting on social media and e-learning forums. We quickly learnt that B2C in edtech is most often a path to failure, so we started considering working with universities or professors. I cold emailed 10 professors who were teaching online to see if they’d be willing to recommend the tool to their students. To my surprise, three of them responded with a yes. It became increasingly clear that educators loved group learning and were more than willing to use it in their online courses.
Beta testing Fast forward a few months and we were testing on an online course on Digital Marketing. It was really good to work with the professor teaching the course, but our product, being a prototype was buggy and had some UX issues in the beginning. However, the 46
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beta testing was enough for us to understand that there was definitely potential here, though. Sign up rate was high and users (i.e. e-learners) clearly wanted to use it. Now, we continue to iterate and work closely with online instructors to create a product that makes e-learning more engaging and social. Our vision remains the same. We want to make it possible for people to rely on online learning instead of brick and mortar school by giving them the community and support they need to self-learn.
every morning was never this easy. About: Payal is the creator of social MOOC Taker. Apart from startups and edtech, she also love psychology, travel and writing. She can be contacted here.
Ask GrowthMonk
My favorite part about edtech I LOVE people in my industry! Unlike a lot of other startup industries, it’s not purely driven by revenue – a lot is driven by the genuine will to improve learning and make the world a better place. Also, e-learners are arguably the most inspiring group of people you’ll meet. They’re driven and curious and are constantly trying to better themselves.
My least favorite part about edtech We continue to struggle with our B2B approach – while working with professors is an excellent way to acquire users, working with professors, universities or an educational institute is a tedious and slow process. It takes time to figure out who the decision maker at an educational institute is and the product they want to pay for changes often. Regardless of the ups and downs, I’ve really enjoyed my startup journey so far. Apart from learning a lot professionally, I’ve grown a lot personally and met the most amazing people. Getting out of bed
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THE WAY I WORK
HOW TO
GROW YOUR EMAIL LIST FAST & CREATE WINNING CAMPAIGNS
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A
THE WAY I WORK dam is a big fan of email marketing as it is a personal and easiest way to get your content or product in front of someone.
He says that with an email list of 1,000 people, you could probably drive more traffic to your website than a Twitter account with 5,000 or even 10,000 followers. He, however, cautions quality of email content should be very good.
Adam’s secret email list building strategy
Adam Connell
Adam is the founder of BloggingWizard. com where he shares actionable tips to help people grow their blogs faster. In addition, Adam is a partner at UK Linkology. An agency that offers ROI driven inbound marketing services. They specialize in link building and SEO. In a candid interview with ScaleUp Magzine team, he shared his best tips on growing an email list and planning a high converting email campaign.
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• Give your visitors a better reason to join your email list (e.g. exclusive information, a coupon etc). He says “I offer a bunch of free downloads on the blog to subscribers with the aim of providing as much value as possible”. • Make it easy for people to join your email list – if you make them work for it, they’ll probably lose interest. He has added clickable pop-overs to his top posts to offer another way of signing up to receive a free download. • Make your copy (or better yet, your entire offer) as relevant to what someone is reading as possible. For e.g. he says “we use ThriveLeads to display targeted opt-in forms. If users land on link building category, they’ll see a sidebar opt-in form that offers a link building guide or a pop-over offering a link building related offer. Similarly, in the social media category, we offer a social media engagement checklist”. • Use content upgrades - If you can put together an exclusive download that ties in with a single blog post, you’ll see great conversions because again, this increases relevance. With it being a follow on from the exact post they’re reading, they’ll be more likely to subscribe. Check this blog post where Adam shares more details on his list building tips. • Put your ideal customer at the heart of your list building efforts. Spend some time getting to understand the challenges they face and build your list building strategy around solving those challenges. But it’s important to ensure that you don’t give away too much free information that it devalues your product/service. • Identify and focus on the traffic sources which convert better than others. Elaborating on this Adam says “I find referrals from other blogs to convert far better than search engine traffic or social media traffic”.
THE WAY I WORK
Tools Used • Mailchimp is a great starting tool - free tier makes it easy to get started but has no auto responder. • GetDrip.com for more lightweight automation - the features of this tool can go head-to-head with the likes of Infusionsoft, but only for a fraction of the price. • Thrive Leads for opt-in forms. • LeadPages or Thrive Content Builder for landing pages. For a more comprehensive list visit this blog post. Adam is proud to share that “the combination of these tactics has resulted in close to a 300% increase in email subscribers. Our site-wide conversion rate now sits at around 4%. Not bad at all, but we could definitely improve this with some split tests”.
from within ConvertKit which provides better open rates. • Unsubscribing inactive user from the email list. The idea behind it is that there are some folks who signed up to your list but don’t really want your emails. They wouldn’t consider your emails spam, but they’re unlikely to engage. This has the potential to negatively impact deliverability and in turn, open rates. Hubspot some time back unsubscribed 250,000 emails in order to fix this. Adam tracks few metrics like email open rates, click-through rates for campaign success. He, however, keep focusing on singular metric for a certain time period. He also does split testing of opt-in forms, landing pages, headlines and send time. Most of these A/B tests are made simple by tools used by him, especially list building and landing page tools.
a short amount of time we’ve had an almost 300% increase in subscribers”.
Adam’s Advice on Planning & Sending Email Campaigns • Choose a simple email template with no images, buttons or other such elements - this helps you land emails in Gmail’s primary tab. • When emailing to the list, limit the desired actions. Adam says “If possible I’ll aim to limit each email to having a single goal because when you ask people to do too many things, they’re more likely to do nothing at all. This is based on the paradox of choice. It’s like that feeling you get when you walk into a restaurant and open up the menu – you’re often faced with so many options that you struggle to decide on what to order”. • Write a short email to build interest and encourage readers to click through and read the post. Focus on a copywriting formula to help frame the intro and keep it as benefit focused as possible (e.g. before, after, bridge). • Create subject line focusing on the benefit of the content.
Lead Magnet On BloggingWizard.com
He, however, points out the following challenges he has been facing with email marketing. • Improving email open rates. Gmail’s promotion tab has made things more challenging. However, he has found some relief in basic email templates 49
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Citing an example, he says “on UK Linkology we knew we wanted to grow our email list faster to increase the reach of our content & generate more leads. After focusing on that metric for
• Find your own best time for sending emails. For Adam, it is morning PST. Although for him it can vary for the different projects he works on. It also depends on the day of the week and his objectives.
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55 SCALEUP ISSUE 5
THE WAY I WORK