“I want to start a company, but I haven’t found a great idea.”

I hear this a lot. Even among entrepreneurs who have started companies, many of them focus on the novelty of the idea. Which is understandable, especially within the 140 character attention span we now live in.

Able to be summarized into elevator sized pitches, the misplaced emphasis on the idea results in entrepreneurs spending too many hours rewriting a handful of words, hoping people will ‘get it.’ Wanting the listener to acknowledge the huge potential, its easy to get paralyzed trying to justify why their idea is smarter than the next.

This is the wrong way to think about it.

The reality is that initial ideas are often irrelevant. Like clay being sculpted on a spinning wheel, it takes a lot of trying, learning, and adjusting to turn initial instincts into a masterpiece. It can even require starting over along the way, until you really understand the potential of what you are building.

As @benhorowitz reminds us, “the trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.“

So how do you generate an ‘idea’ that is strong enough to start a company?

Forget About Your Idea
The hardest part is to begin with an unbiased opinion. Starting this process with a pre determined idea shuts out your ability to really understand the essence of the problem. It becomes so personal that you can’t separate the true opportunity from your own desire to be right.

Being stuck to an idea results in mistakes like these…

• Your customer research is tainted with questions like, “would you use a service that does blah.” A yes makes you feel good, but doesn’t actually help you understand the customer’s problem.

• Your pricing is based on asking people if they would pay X for your imaginary product. A question that doesn’t truly gets answered until people pay you money.

• You raise too much money before your product sticks. Investor interest doesn’t necessarily mean customers will love what you build.

• You brand your company ‘the product’, wanting to make no mistake that people will know what your service does. Except when you have to change your product you then realize the name you spent months driving awareness for now has nothing to do with the final direction of the company.

Start With The Problem
Ultimately you want to understand the problem better than anyone else. Having a distinct advantage in customer understanding, enables you to deliver a solution that no one else would conclude. Peter Thiel calls this developing a secret.

There are a variety of ways to discover an interesting problem. Personally I first list what I’m passionate about and second explore problems within these passions. Starting with a pen and paper, I start building lists.

1.What Are You Passionate About?
These can be activities (i.e. being active), experiences (i.e. listening to music), tools (i.e. cameras), efficiencies (i.e. ways to save time). utilities (i.e. clothing), interactions (i.e. meeting new people), or even consumables (i.e. food). I find there are about 5-6 areas everyone is super passionate about and if they pick a problem to solve in one of these arenas they will be significantly more motivated.

The last list I personally built…
* enabling people to start their own business
* music
* staying active
* photography
* traveling
* local food experiences

Moment began from my passion for taking pictures.

2.A Day In The Life
A second way is to walking through your day, listing out all the things you do, where you do them, and what tools you use. If you want to solve a problem that every one has, likely the problem will be associated with one of these key parts of your life. As you build a list you can start brainstorming things that frustrate you, that you find broken, or that you would love to make better within each of these areas.

Map The Customer Journey
Picking one item from the list, you can start to explore the problems through the entire journey. Thinking about what happens before, during, and after you begin to identify interesting problems to solve.

As an example, my wife and I are passionate about traveling. We have found that discovering new places brings us closer together. Always trying to find local, off the beaten path locations, we have spent a lot of time in other countries.

Mapping out our typical travel experience, I list out the interactions before we travel, while we travel, and what happens afterwards. Starting with a longer list I’d reduce our travel routine down…
* Discover: finding new, inspiring places to visit.
* Travel: from coordinating to experiencing adventures.
* Remember: enabling us and loved ones to remember the trip.

Starting with ‘how’ we accomplish these tasks today, I can begin to find dozens of interesting problems to solve. Thinking about what is broken, frustrating, or a poor experience, I start sketching out potential solutions. This cycle can continue for weeks until I have a concentric circle that represents what I would build before, during, and after. And within that framework will be an initial problem that I believe I can solve better than anyone.

If I was to build a startup in the travel space it would probably be around enabling travelers with better tools to discover local, authentic experiences. Getting people excited about the vision of ‘enabling’, is a much easier than trying to convince everyone why my travel idea and its key features, are genius enough to join.

Frequency vs Pain
If you are building consumer based products I use a matrix that compares the frequency people have this problem (daily to never) against the type of pain (physical to emotional) that customers feel. The more frequent the problem occurs, the more important your product will become.

Here is how I break down the quadrants:
* Upper Left: a physical pain that doesn’t happen very often – i.e. a heart attack.
* Upper Right: a physical pain that happens daily – i.e. taking insulin.
* Lower Left: an emotional pain that doesn’t happen often – i.e. buying a car.
* Lower Right: an emotional pain that happens often – i.e. too many emails.

Most of the products that startups build fall into the bottom half of this quadrant. These solutions provide emotional and/or mental benefit to the customers.

Personal travel would fall in the lower left quadrant. Although personal traveling makes people happy, it happens so infrequently that its hard to build a sustainable business. Unless you focus on business travelers, the average person is lucky to take a handful of trips in a year.

Find A Passionate Niche
I’m a big believer in finding a passionate niche that you can own. Even though investors will want to know when your idea is mass market, it’s important to build creditability with an avid user base. Creating 1,000 true fans is really hard and if you try to move past this group too early, your company has the risk of becoming irrelevant.

Just look at…
* Apple with creatives.
* Sportscenter with tis 24 hour sports fans.
* GrabCad with engineers.
* Firefox with the open source community.
* Twitter with the tech community.
* Instagram with photographers.

These companies anchored their brand and initial products within a passionate group of users, which were obsessed with using their product on a daily basis.

Look For A Wave
How big can this be, is the first question that investors will ask you. Even more important than team, hitting a market with avid customers at the right time is critical.

As Marc Andreesen says, “You can obviously screw up a great market — and that has been done, and not infrequently — but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. Market matters most.”

But trying to predict how big your company is going to be, especially early on, is a self actualizing process. Searching google for random market numbers doesn’t actually give you confidence that you have hit the opportunity at the right time. Instead I believe what Chris Dixon wrote a few years ago about sizing the market based on a narrative.

Being in front of a rising wave is the right place to be.

The action camera market is a great example. When Contour and GoPro started there was no wave behind action video. Myspace was just beginning, YouTube didn’t exists, and consumers weren’t carrying computers in their pockets. The initial market was reserved for adrenaline junkies who were willing to strap a lens on their helmet and spend countless hours downloading their footage on expensive computers.

All of that changed with the arrival of social media. The need to prove status, likes, and audience size created a tidal wave of demand for designated cameras that could capture the most amazing adventures. The more interesting the content, the more popular the users could become. Without social, it’s questionable if GoPro would be the $B company that it is today.

Examples of other waves…
* Stance Socks: differentiating ourselves continues to drive shopping decisions.
* Beats by Dre: the continued growth in mobile music and the subsequent need for better consumption tools.
* Box: the once in a lifetime shift in how people work.
* Instagram: the 1.2B consumers with cameras in their pockets need a place to share their pictures.

Start With Projects
It’s very hard to sit down and come up with a world changing, job quitting idea. The journey to what you ultimately build is an organic path that shapes over time. Even the tools to understand the customer, their needs, and the right market are merely guides. Ultimately you learn the most when you put a product in someone’s hands.

If you have a day job, start working on side projects with people you like. And if you don’t have friends who want to work on side projects, attend a Startup Weekend and meet dozens of people that share your same passion to build.

At some point this journey will lead you to an interesting problem that aligns your passion with a need that millions of people share. Focus on the problem, not the idea.

*Image Credit: Ramunas Geciauskas via Creative Commons.

Consumer hardware has a very simple business model: People either buy the product or they don’t. And although hardware has a very clear path to market, building a successful minimal viable product (MVP) is anything but obvious.

Thanks to Apple, the bar for consumer hardware is incredibly high. Even though you are a startup, everyone will compare your product to the phone in their pocket, which means you have to nail the experience right out of the box.

The enthusiastic flood of hardware startups are generally getting into trouble for three reasons.

1. They over promise and under deliver.
   Instead of selling a single feature, they sell everything their product will eventually do. They’re afraid they won’t be loved by customers or investors so they show a series of features they can’t possibly deliver on. The result is long delays, crappy product, or both.
2. They try to mass distribute their MVP.
   The first version is never amazing. Trying to mass distribute a product with average reviews and known quality issues is a fast path to irrelevancy.
3. They are too slow with version two.
   An MVP is supposed to be replaced quickly with a refined second version. Instead these startups spend so much time on everything else (customer support, distribution, brand awareness, raising capital, etc) they can’t iterate fast enough on their product.

Here is a short guide to help you build a hardware MVP that doesn’t suck.

Talk To People
In hardware you get one chance to solve the right problem. Even if you deeply understand the problem, it’s important to validate that others have the same struggles.

Customer interviews can be an informal process, but the key to them is to understand how people solve the problem today, why they chose the product they did, and what frustrates them. The goal is to gather customer insights by asking them questions and watching them use existing products.

If I was building an action video camera my interviews would go something like this…

Q: How do you capture action video today?
The goal of the question is to understand who is capturing action video and with what products.

Q: If no, why not?
Every time you hear a no, you want to understand why. You will either learn a series of problems you can solve or you will learn that your problem doesn’t exist.

Q: If yes, why are you capturing action video?
The goal is to understand the real reason they even record action video. This motivation is super important and will be the basis of your customer experience.

Q: Can you walk me through the experience you take from capture to share?
Ideally you watch people use the product from beginning to end, asking them why they took each action. If you can’t watch people, you can change this question to asking what frustrates them from capture to share.

If you skip this step you will create a product that either slightly misunderstands the customer or even worse, solves a problem they don’t actually have.

Map Out The Entire Customer Journey
Hardware is considerably harder than software because the problem is totally unconstrained. Starting with the customer need you have to first imagine a device that doesn’t exist today and then create software to make that device useful. To do this right, you have to understand all the customer problems from the beginning to the end of the experience.

A standard tool used in user experience research, a customer journey maps out the key interactions before, during, and after. Listing these key interactions at the top of the chart, you then brainstorm multiple ways to solve each problem, from easy to hard. Once everything is on the board you begin to draw a line from left to right, demonstrating what level of solution you will provide in your MVP for each core problem.

If done properly, a robust customer journey will provide you with a series of problems you can solve over time.

Only Ship the Core Need
Cash and time are your biggest constraints in building hardware. Cash enables you to hire large teams to make hard problems look easy, while time enables you to be patient as you craft and re-craft the experience.

Unless you can raise millions before you launch, your only option is to start driving cash by selling your product. Being forced to get to market quickly is a fantastic constraint that requires you to only solve THE most important customer problem.

To help you do this, you can borrow Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to refine your customer journey to what the product has to do really, really well. The bottom of the triangle represents THE basic (core) customer need. Any product you ship that misses the core need will result in poor reviews.

At Contour the core need was to capture action video, which meant the product had to be robust, easy to use, and capture amazing video. Except our first version wasn’t anything like you see today. It wasn’t even a stand-alone camera. Instead we combined a CMOS security lens, battery pack, and AV cable to create an accessory lens that plugged into your existing video camera. Sold for $250 we quickly built a $400K business doing one thing: Turning your camcorder into an action camera.

Even our competitor started small. The first GoPro cameras strapped to a person’s wrist and only captured pictures of the ride. But it didn’t stop them from selling thousands of cameras long before they could capture HD, and millions before they could even connect to a mobile phone.

Driving positive cash flow as quickly as possible is incredibly important because with that cash you can re-invest in the product to make it better. If we hadn’t created a $400K accessory lens business, we never could have paid a firm to design the iconic Contour product you see today.

Build On Your Foundation
Once you launch your MVP you should iterate quickly to introduce your next version within 12-14 months. It doesn’t mean version two should add a bunch of new features. More importantly it should perfect the features you already shipped, making the product robust enough for millions of customers.

Nest is a great example. Even though they raised significant amount of capital they were diligent about introducing version one, iterating quickly on the software, and introducing version two within 12 months. They could have added a lot of new features, but they didn’t. Instead version two did exactly what version one did, just better.

No matter the device, it takes a lot of work to bring the whole system (engineering, design, testing, packaging, supply chain, certifications, documentation, logistics, etc.) together into a product ready for mass consumer adoption. Starting basic and adding one feature at a time, is incredibly important.

• Fitbit started with a single pedometer that wasn’t wireless and didn’t have subscription revenue.
• The iPhone began as the iPod with up/down/left/right buttons.
• Skullcandy started with black headphones that didn’t have color until the supplier accidentally shipped the company a set of red headphones.
• The Kindle was first an e-reader that every editor blasted because it didn’t have a color screen, couldn’t browse the internet, and wasn’t a tablet.

Don’t be afraid to break up the system and ship one piece at a time. Despite being a hardware startup, the guys at SoundFocus launched their software first as a stand-alone mobile app. And now with thousands of customer downloads they are ready to take the next step, introducing hardware that makes their software better.

Just remember, every new feature multiples the level of complexity so think hard about what comes second, third, and fourth in your product.

Conclusion
A Minimal Viable Hardware Product is not about searching for a business model, smearing features on the wall until people buy the product, or promising something you can’t execute.

A true hardware MVP is about quickly delivering a simple, but amazing product that customers will pay for.

Because driving positive cash flow is the most important ingredient to making your product better.

Image Credit: Eigenes Bild via Creative Commons

Most people in the startup world don’t understand brand. They think it’s something you check off the list, as if it’s a one-time job to be outsourced to the lowest bidder. Having a cool logo, catchy tagline, and differentiated features have nothing to do with building a real brand.

Because it goes much deeper than your external facade, defining your brand is hard. Not that it’s hard to understand what you believe in, but the process of defining your brand runs counter to the energy of the fast-paced startup world, where quantity is valued over quality.

Even if you hire a professional firm to create your brand, it doesn’t mean you actually understand it. Creating a final presentation that wows your Board and gets your team excited has no connection to being able to live it everyday. It’s like putting values on a poster and then never mentioning them again.

I only know this, because I followed that same path.

Creating an authentic brand takes time. Like a fine wine, it starts with your most basic ingredients and over time matures into something people can feel, smell, see, touch, and even taste. You are providing an emotional connection that can’t be described with words, only memories.

As a startup founder, you probably know nothing about brand. Other than a handful of articles, your reference to brand is from the outside in. Wondering how amazing brands are created, it’s easy to buy into a creative pitch that has a bunch of logos you admire, as if those agencies created the soul of those brands.

Although you will never gain the 10,000 hours Gladwell says is required to become an expert in the field, you do have to understand this: You are creating a brand.

No matter what type of product you are building, or how disruptive your technology is, or how much money you have in the bank, the most important metric is your brand. Don’t be fooled, size doesn’t mean better. Just ask Sony who has fallen from a premium brand to irrelevancy, losing trust along the way with cheap product, security meltdowns, and a “me too” mentality.

So before you blindly hire an agency or send your marketing person on a wild goose chase to create the wrong brand, here is a framework you can use to help you answer the question, “How do you define your brand?”

Start With the History

“Study the past, if you would define the future.” ~ Confucius

The only way you know who you want to become is to understand where you came from. Digging deep to reveal the reason you started this company requires you to be vulnerable, talking about feelings you never verbally expressed before. The best brands are connected with the company’s purpose, and anchored in the emotions of the beginning stages of the journey.

Even to this day, Nike never lets us forget about Coach Bowerman and Phil Knight. Iconic black and white photos capture the emotion of the sport and the pursuit for improvement. Despite evolving to neon shoes, crazy social campaigns, and memorable advertising, Nike is clear about its past.

Beyond understanding the motivations of the original founders, you need to study the history of your product category. Everything has been done before, which means there is a tremendous wealth of inspiration around the original culture, products, and brands.

At Contour we studied the origins of filmmaking and the artistic use of perspective. Because we didn’t understand this early enough in our history, we struggled for many years to define the clear voice of our product against the 90-second action videos that GoPro produced. Outside of our iconic design, we failed to consistently tell our own story, bringing film making to the digital world.

Pick an Archetype
Archetypes have existed throughout the history of storytelling. Dating back to the ancient and Roman times, archetypes formed the bases of myths, in which they were depicted as gods and goddesses.

One of the best books I have found, “The Hero and the Outlaw,” talks about 12 different archetypes and how they apply to building your brand. The book helps you transform a lifeless idea into a real character that you can picture, describe, and imagine. Broken into sections focusing on the four human drives of stability, mastery, belonging, and independence, the book does an amazing job of explaining the different archetypes that exist and the brands they represent.

At Contour we focused on the Creator. Found in the artist, the innovator, the musician, and the dreamer, the creator was inspired by any endeavor that taps into the imagination. Trying to sit at the intersection of engineering, design, and sport, our archetype was in stark contrast to GoPro’s depiction of the Hero, an individual on an action-packed journey that always ended with a conquering feat.

[Download a free pdf version of the book.] (http://ravantahlil.com/Files/Contents/40/the%20hero%20and%20outlow.pdf)

Define Your Attributes
Defining a brand is like defining a person. No different from how you would describe a friend, brand attributes are the adjectives you choose to define the personality of your brand. It’s helpful to stick to single words with short descriptions, as these attributes help your team understand the values your brand stands for.

Although the words you use might be simple to pick, you want to think about how these adjectives can come to life in everything you do. From the products you make, to the out-of-box experience, to the service you provide, these attributes have to be abundantly clear with everyone involved with your brand.

Anchored in the Creator archetype, at Contour we created attributes around being personal, creative, connected, empowering, and authentic. Using words with simple descriptions, we tried to paint a picture that everyone across the organization could understand.

Create Stories
Stories aren’t marketing campaigns. They are simple descriptions of what you want people to feel when they interact with your brand. Connected to your history, archetype, and attributes, these stories can change over time as you create a deeper understanding of your brand and what it represents.

Born in Encinitas, California, Nixon does an amazing job of telling stories. True to their Southern California roots, Nixon has successfully turned a boring category, watches, into a +$400M brand. Consistent in who they are, Nixon tells rich stories through words, athletes, imagery, product design, and retail selection. Infamous in the action sports community, Nixon even concludes every retailer contract with “I am stoked to open this door.” Because Nixon understands something that most startups miss: They are building a brand.

“We make the little shit better. The stuff you have that isn’t noticed first, but can’t be ignored. We pay attention to it. We argue about it. We work day and night to make the little shit as good as it can be, so when you wear it, you feel like you’ve got a leg up on the rest of the world.” ~ Nixon

Bring It to Life
Now you can hire someone to bring your brand to life. Whether you hire a designer or an agency, you want to find people who have taken a brand from a piece of paper to reality. Polishing existing brands is nice, but creating them is so much harder.

Remember, the brand framework you create will never leave your company’s walls. It’s simply a guide to make sure the tag lines you create on top of it, or the crazy marketing ideas you come up with, are consistent with your brand.

Constantly Be Inspired
Admiring other brands is a healthy thing to do, especially as you think about what you want your brand to represent. I’m passionate about great brands and here are a few of my favorites.

• Nixon
• Chrome Industries
• Red
• VSCO
• Arc’teryx
• Nike
• Travis Rice

Conclusion
Defining your brand takes time. It requires you to dig deep, making yourself vulnerable in ways that make you uncomfortable. Great brands create beliefs regardless of the competitive landscape. They are clear about who they are and more importantly, who they aren’t. Especially when everyone wants to change your brand, being consistent is worth more than being fresh.

If you think that brand is as simple as hiring an agency to create your logo, you have a very long road ahead of you. Understanding that brand is everything you represent, is the first step towards a long journey in creating something that matters.

Craftsmanship seems to have skipped a whole generation.

Especially in a Lean Startup hyped world, where throwing code against the wall and iterating until people use the product is promoted as the way of the future. No doubt, the movement towards small teams, quick iterations, and listening to your customers is part of building a great product.

But to believe this is how you craft thoughtful experience with a clear purpose, is wrong. It’s like telling an artist to smear colors on the wall until people buy the painting.

True craftsmanship has a purpose.

Originally called Artisans, these builders spent their life time shaping experiences with their hands. Perfecting each product, they weren’t afraid to take their time. And although the tools have changed (keyboards for pens, power tools for hammers, mass production for sewing machines) it doesn’t mean the art of the craftsmanship has to be lost.

So in a startup paced world, how do you embrace craftsmanship?

Understand the History
Everything you are doing has been done before.

Humans have been communicating, building, eating, making, working, living, and reproducing for a very long time. The only thing that has really changed are the tools we use.

And the best artisans understand this. They understand the history of their products and the intent behind them. They understand how they were made and how they evolved over time.

Facebook is the modern day coffee shop.

Twitter is a faster way to send a telegram.

Rain Shadow Meats, a butcher in Seattle, makes it clear they understand the history of being a butcher. Their fresh meats, open kitchen, big chopping blocks, simple language, and amazing smells take you back in time. Even if you only read about what butchers used to be like, you instantly feel comfortable.

Chrome Industries, famous for their seat buckle messenger bags, knows its history. Started 17 years ago, they still use military duffle bags as their inspiration, sewing machines to make their products, and American factories to hand craft. Despite the pressure to grow, they have stayed true to their purpose of utility and mobility. And you can feel it everytime you touch their products.

Even software makers are thinking about the history of writing code. [The Pragmatic Programmer(http://pragprog.com/book/tpp/the-pragmatic-programmer) and the Software Craftsmanship relate software engineers to original artisans.

Before you can craft, you have to understand the artisans before you.

Pick a Metaphor

Metaphors are a powerful way to bring the past to the future. No more evident than Apple’s use of Dieter Rams’ design as a source of inspiration. It’s no mistake that the iPod looks alot like an old radio. Because when you see it, you are instantly familiar with the shape, size, and expectation.

Outside of designers, what a lot of people don’t realize is that you subconsciously recognize familiar experiences the minute you see them. The sights, smells, and the smallest of details instantly become comforting.

To make history clear to your team, pick a metaphor they can understand. Something in the past that is directly connected to what you are doing in the future. Not easy to do, the right metaphor will help make your brand, design, and customer experience authentic.

Contour’s metaphor was a movie camera. Especially when GoPro was a picture camera, it was important our product and brand went back to the origins of film making. Where perspective was important, the shape was long (not square), and you could feel the quality of the materials.

Take Your Time

“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?” ― John Wooden

Building a masterpiece requires incredible patience. It requires you to prioritize quality over quantity. Less over more. Simple over complex. Even worse, it requires you to be consistent, even while the pressure to ship grows like a tidal wave over your head.

Don’t be confused. It doesn’t mean you perfect your work, void of feedback. The Lean Startup methodology of iterating with people is right. And although Apple doesn’t iterate in public, they do spend years internally crafting and recrafting until it is perfect.

I missed this at Contour. The financial need to ship with the fear of falling behind in the technology race created unnecessary illusions that shipping was more important than crafting. Easy to critique after the fact, there were times we shipped when I knew the experience wasn’t even close to perfect. Saying I wanted to create amazing product experiences, my actions spoke louder than my words.

It took almost nine years to get the experience right, but Contour Roam2 finally delivers on the original promise, to make action video easy. A compact, single button, bulletproof action camera. A nearly five star product, I’m incredibly proud of this work.

Conclusion
The hardest part of craftsmanship is being vulnerable. Pouring your soul into your work is like opening your heart to be broken multiple times over. A necessary experience in finding true love.

Recognizing they will spend their lifetime building, true Artisans aren’t in a hurry to move on. They are willing to open themselves up against the struggle of failure until finally they get it right.

Image Credit: jfeathersmith via Creative Commons.

Solving the wrong problem, sucks. You spend all this time thinking you are building something everyone is going to love, only to find out no one gives a S@%#.

Uh, so what happened?

This past weekend I had the fortunate opportunity to coach at Startup Weekend. A first time attendee, I left the weekend impressed with how Startup Weekend (a non profit) is changing the way entrepreneurship is taught, inspired by what you can build in 54 hours, and amazed at how much time people spend building a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.

A 54 hour time constraint makes it painstakingly clear that you have to understand the problem, and quickly, if you want any chance of building a real product and a presentation that wows the judges. Banging your head against the wall as you constantly pivot is a recipe for disaster.

The following is a short guide about how to nail the problem, so you can build the right product in a 54 hour Startup Weekend style blitz.

Start With Why
Friday night of Startup Weekend is speed dating of ideas, personalities, and skill sets, turning a room full of disconnected people into 15 weekend projects. Of the 50 ideas that got presented on Friday night, almost all of them started with “my idea is….” Very few started with the problem they wanted to solve and even fewer talked about “why,” which left the audience with little information to decide which projects they believed in joining.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” ~ Simon Sinek @ Ted Talk

Almost everyone has seen Simon’s Ted Talk. Most people like it, share it, and the go back to building products that have no purpose.

At Contour, I built stuff. Beautiful stuff that thankfully customers loved, but it didn’t have a purpose other than stuff for our customers. Yes we had values, but those weren’t ever tied to a deeper purpose about “why” we were all there, other than the camaraderie of building a company together with easy to use products.

Understanding “why” doesn’t have to be a painful process and it doesn’t mean you have to build a non-profit. It’s true that not every product can be given away for free, like a pair of Tom’s shoes, but every product can be started because of something you believe in. Tom’s purpose is simple, “We are in business to help change lives.” You can build almost anything under that purpose.

To find why, start with what you are passionate about. List out what you love to do and more importantly, why you like to do it. Generally, your motivation comes down to basic needs: happiness, improving, changing, making better, loving, feeling, or any emotion that makes you feel good. Even if the purpose is just to have a lot of fun, be clear about that. Tie everything you do to ensuring everyone is having fun.

With a clear why, you can inspire the best people who also believe in your same purpose.

Finding Real Problems

“The problem is we don’t understand the problem” ~ Paul MacCready

Visiting with teams on Saturday afternoon, with only 24 hours left to go, it was scary to see the different discussions being had. Some were clear about what they were building and others were still on the white board trying to get a group to agree. The most frustrated groups weren’t clear about the problem they were solving and instead were pivoting around their ideas. An exercise that rarely goes well when you mix 5-10 people.

One of the original “ideas” was an app to help you remember what you learned from the digital content you consume. It was a fun idea that was interesting enough to gather 10 people on the team. Borrowing this idea, lets see how you could have discovered the problem.

Customer Journey: In order to discover the most important problems to solve, you would start by mapping out a customer journey, from beginning (finding the content) to the end (remembering what you learned).

Identify the Problems: Within the customer journey you start to recognize patterns, i.e. insights, based on what is hard to do or could be done better. Making some assumption you might discover that you are inundated with too much information, you are consuming content on multiple devices so you are using multiple systems to remember what you consumed, you forget what you learned, and when you want to recall it there is no single place you can go.

Picking a Single Problem: Now that you have identified a handful of problems people have in finding, remembering, and recalling content, you can narrow the scope to a single problem you want to solve. Especially at Startup Weekend, your product and pitch will be way more impactful if you solve one problem really well, even if you plan to solve the whole journey after the weekend.

Validating the Problems
Startup Weekend prides itself on getting out of the building, a philosophy I completely agree with. Talking to people is a fantastic way to validate the problem you are solving, even before you build anything.

Many people don’t understand the point of customer interviews. People generally ask questions about their theoretical product hoping to hear positive comments that maybe, if they build it, they would buy it. Answers that make you feel good, but are irrelevant to building the right product.

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” ~ Steve Jobs

The real goal of the interviews is to validate the problem you are solving. Talk to enough people and you will hopefully find insights that are consistent with the journey and problem you already mapped out. If they aren’t, then you missed the real problem they have.

When interviewing random people on the street you only have a few minutes and therefore enough time for only a handful of questions. No easy task, but it can be done.

Continuing with the same app example, here are some questions you could ask.

Q: On a weekly basis how many hours of digital content do you consume with e-books, articles, and videos?
The intent of this question is to understand the profile of your potential customer and to get a sense of how much content you need to be worrying about.

Q: Do you take notes, highlight, or save the content in any way?
You want to understand what percent have an existing behavior to bookmark or save what they are consuming.

Q: If no, why not?
The answer to this question will help you understand what is preventing people from attempting to save what they read.

Q: If yes, why?
Validating why they are saving all or part of the content is super important. Assuming they save the content to remember it is a dangerous assumption you don’t want to make for the customer.

Q: How do you currently save and recall the content you save?
We will get a variety of answers, but here we want to hear the different ways people solve this problem today. This begins to tell us what solutions already exist, the process people use, and potentially what is/isn’t working today.

Notice, none of these are leading questions or anything about your solution. They are strictly focused on trying to understand the customer so your team can go back and figure out the best solution to solve the problems you have now validated.

Don’t be fooled by the variety of answers you receive. Finding an incredibly narrow, but passionate group of people with the same problem can be a fantastic way to get your company off the ground. Sometimes having a lot of people NOT fit your profile is exactly what you need to narrow your focus and keep your product simple so it gains sticky traction with a single customer type.

Conclusion
Nailing a real problem is hard. It’s why a lot of entrepreneurs build products based on problems they are passionate about because it means they know the issues, inside and out.

Understanding the why, helps you make it through the moments you want to quit in frustration. Mapping out the customer journey opens your eyes to a series of interesting problems to solve. And validating those problems with real people, makes sure you aren’t building something that no one needs.

Startup Weekend was an amazing experience that validated just how hard it is to nail a single problem. There were plenty of ideas being thrown around when the weekend started and by the end there were only a handful still standing, solving a real problem.

Thanks to @Zacharycohn for the help on this post.

Picking a co-founder. It’s as personal as picking a spouse and as financially binding as picking an investor. Co-founders are the pillar of your company and a relationship most entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time thinking about. If you get it wrong, ending the relationship is incredibly difficult.

A rare few will marry someone within weeks of meeting, while most people spend months getting to know someone before they ever pop the question. Yet when starting a company you often don’t have years to spend dating before you can decide if you want to take the leap.

My being back in the founder dating world is an awkward transition. No different than when I left a long term relationship, I’m out meeting people. Thankfully this time around I know myself a whole lot better.

Looking back at Contour, like anyone in their 20’s, I spent most of the last decade discovering myself. Subconsciously I was figuring out what kind of entrepreneur I wanted to be, what kind of companies I wanted to build, and what type of people I wanted to work with.  My quest to better understand what makes me happy is helping me think through who I want to work with next.

As I go through this process I have put together a simple guide of how you can pick your next co-founders.

It Starts With You
Before you can date someone you have to know yourself. While being honest with yourself can be hard, it’s necessary if you want to be a great entrepreneur. If you can’t understand what makes you happy, you will start and run the wrong company.

To discover this I like to ask myself a few questions:

1. “What am I passionate about?” – This can start with big subjects like “music” and as you think about each thing you are passionate about in life try to define it further, so for example what exactly about music are you passionate about and why.

2. “What am I passionate about in a company?” – This comes back to what traits or values will be the anchor of the company you start. It doesn’t need to be a long list, but a few items that are so important that if they do not exist you will not start the company.

3. “What am I strong/weak at?” – knowing what things you like to do in a company, what things you hate, and what things you aren’t good at is important. You are looking for people with complimentary skills and ideally people who are strong where you are weak.

4. “Does size matter?” – (insert joke here). Often times you don’t know how big of a company your idea can turn into, but having an understanding if you want to change an industry (build a massive category leading company) or if you want to keep it small and build more intimate products is important. These are completely differently lifestyle choices.

Chemistry
The same chemistry you looked for in finding a significant other is the same chemistry you need in finding a co-founder. The attraction aside, you either click with the person or you don’t. It’s okay if you don’t, but you are looking for the basic signs that you like someone. Remember you are building a very long term relationship, which means you are looking to build inseparable trust.

A good way to figure this out is spend time with them. And not just a coffee meeting. Spend time with them for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the bar. Figure out if you like the person in the morning as much as the evenings. Spend time talking about ideas, business philosophy, family, food, interests, life, etc. Just like when you date you want to find out if you have similar interests. You can only do this if you spend time with that person.

People often get confused that you need to be best friends with the person, I don’t think you do. But you have to really like the person and want be around them. You will be spending a lot of time together.

Sharing Similar Beliefs 
Give your potential co-founders the same questions you answered and see what they say. It will tell you instantly if you believe in the same things. If you don’t, end the dating. You CAN NOT compromise on what you believe in or you’ll end up the cliche spouse in the relationship admitting you gave up on your dreams when you got married.

You need to be able to talk about your answers. It’s one thing to write them down but you have to be able to talk about them openly. Talking about your feelings can be hard, but you have to. You have to ask questions that make both of you vulnerable. If you can’t do this, you will never be able to have the type of communication you need down the road.  A co-founder is like a spouse, you have to be able to talk about everything.

Knowing They Won’t Give Up
Building a company will test you in ways you can never imagine. It will push you emotionally, drain you physically, and challenge your soul. Coming to work everyday is a choice and you want to make sure the person next to you will do it no matter how massive the challenges are in front of you.

An easy solution is picking a fellow co-founder who has also started a company. Joining one early is nice, but finding someone who has been through hell and back as a founder is an invaluable experience. It doesn’t mean their company needed to have been a success, but you want to know they didn’t give up.

If they haven’t started a company you want to go back to their roots and understand what tragedies they have faced, what set-backs have they had to overcome, or what challenges have they beat. This can include a variety of life experiences from a rough childhood to losing someone to excelling at sports. You are looking for experiences they can talk about that took incredible personal commitment to overcome.

Conclusion
When you are in the dating phase with your potential new co-founder, BE OBSERVANT. Looking at small things can tell you a lot, such as how do they talk about other people, are they positive or negative, do they follow through, and/or are they on time? Small clues tell you a lot about the person, signs you want to pick up as early as possible.

Getting to this point in the relationship is the most important part. If you have the same beliefs, a strong chemistry, totally open communication, and you know the person won’t give up, you can figure out the rest. Determining roles, ownership structure, which idea to pursue, etc can be worked out. In fact, working these out together will better confirm your choice to take the co-founder plunge.

Good Luck!

Photo Rights: Costin Thampikutty (http://www.flickr.com/photos/costinthampikutty/8043415014/) via Creative Commons

There has been a lot of discussion in the media over the past year about Kickstarter. It has ranged between love for its disruptive potential to hate when companies fail to deliver on their promise, to analysis on why products on time is so hard.

Although this makes for great press, it isn’t the interesting story for an entrepreneur. I think the more interesting question is to ask: “Should you sell your product before you make it?”

As a start-up you have no idea if people will buy your product. You may spend countless months researching your customers. You may even get dozens of customers to say “Yes, I would buy that if you made it.” But until you ask them to put real money down you have no idea if it will sell. And without paying customers you don’t have a business.

To provide a little background, long before Kickstarter existed and long before Contour was a fast-growing company, we were thinking of ways to launch our first VholdR camera. Like most start-ups we were short on capital so we needed a way to verify the market need, prove to investors this new product would sell, and ultimately generate cash to buy the product from our supplier.

Keep in mind there were only two of us back then with a collective manufacturing experience of zero years, so naturally we thought our new camera was mere weeks away. Never expecting our plan could be derailed we decided we would announce the VholdR camera and begin taking $50 pre-orders on the product with the remaining $300 due when we shipped.

Because Kickstarter didn’t yet exist, Twitter  was just getting started, and Facebook was years away from fan pages, we put the product up on our website. We proceeded to tell the press about it and thankfully they told all their readers about our new camera. To our surprise the response was overwhelming, especially for two kids in a cold warehouse. Within a month we had over a thousand customers who put a deposit down. In Kickstarter terms that was over $50K raised with up to $350K in total revenue once we shipped.

At this point we had spent almost a year making this product and overnight we validated that real people wanted our product. We were by no means ready for what would happen next.

Like a lot of Kickstarter projects, before they changed their rules, we showed cool CAD drawings of the product, made great-looking marketing materials, and put it out there as if we were ready for prime time. We assumed we would be shipping in a matter of weeks so we didn’t even think to create a plan in case there were any issues.

We began taking pre-orders in August. By the end of September we knew we had a problem, our supplier was nowhere near ready to produce the product. Not familiar with how production cycles work, we assumed they were on time with each of the phases they drew on the schedule they provided us. For a variety of reasons, they weren’t. Many of our challenges were consistent with what Twine faced in shipping their product, we had no idea what it took to ship a high volume consumer product.

October quickly became December. Christmas quickly slipped by and before we knew it we were into January with no VholdR cameras to ship. We wanted nothing more than to make a really great product, but now our supportive community of early customers had rightfully become an angry mob wondering if they would ever see their 50 dollars again or their camera.

Eventually we made it through and started shipping VholdR cameras by late January. By the end of Q1 we had fulfilled all the initial demand and began filling retailer orders we had been sitting on for months.

Fast forward six years and the world looks totally different. Massive social platforms have emerged, we have computers in our pockets, and crowdfunding has become a buzz word. Even with these new platforms and even with the tighter Kickstarter rules designed to protect its users, the same core problem exists for a start-up: You have no idea if people will buy your product until you start selling it.

And to make it even more challenging these social platforms have made the consumer voice so powerful it can catapult or tank your new product in a matter of days when it finally does come out.

With that in mind here is a quick guide about why you should sell your product before you make it, why you shouldn’t, and what to watch out for.

Why You Should
A direct relationship with your customers is the most valuable relationship you have. Using retailers to launch your product has become an unnecessary and expensive layer between you and your customer. Some of the hottest product companies today (e.g., FitBit) started as internet-only brands.

The solutions available to you today like Kickstarter or Self Starter can make it incredibly easy for your customers to learn about your product, learn about you, and make a conscious decision if they want to be involved. The publicized successes of brands such as Lockitron, Lunatik, Pebble, Elevation Lab,  and Ouya are proving that customers want to get involved with your brand, even before your product ships.

A few reasons you should:

• You want lots of customer feedback during the development process.
• You need to validate that people will buy your product, which can decrease your burn rate and increase your company valuation.  Oftentimes investors, retailers, and even suppliers won’t believe you until they see real sales.
• You want to know the customer demand before you spend money building it. Production costs are not cheap and spending money making the wrong product can kill you. Additionally you will learn what your early customers love, hate, and want in your product.
• You want to build community around your product. Having people cheering you on gives you a running start into the market. The large players will eventually copy you so the strength of your customer community matters. Assuming you have limited marketing dollars when you launch, you need every advantage you can get in reaching customer mind share.
• You believe in an open culture, customer relationship, and development process. If you want to build a totally open company there is no more open you can be, than allowing the world to watch as you create your product.

Why You Shouldn’t
Letting the world know about the product you are making is not for everyone. It’s an incredibly vulnerable way to come to market, requiring you to share with the world the good days and the struggles you are going through. Especially if your team does not have years of experience bringing a high-quality consumer product to market, it can  be a humiliating, multi-month experience.  Take Pebble for example, they have had to be incredibly transparent during their production process, while navigating negative press and managing over 11K comments.

The momentum you may have already built with your investors, team, suppliers, etc. can come crashing down if your project flops. The response may not even reflect true market demand, but it will make you second guess what you are building and why. There are dozens of products that weren’t even accepted onto Kickstarter, but on their own were a huge success.

A few reasons you shouldn’t:

• You don’t want to be open. If you want to keep new product ideas away from your competitors or large companies who can either copy you quickly or create a lot of distracting noise. Apple protecting itself from fast followers is an extreme example.
• You have an existing product in the market and the news about a next version has the risk to tank sales of your existing model.
• You just raised a significant round of capital and already set big expectations for your yet-to-be-released product. Every investor is different, but negative momentum before you ship can be a big problem, especially if your revenue plan and burn rate will be significantly different.
• If you don’t understand what it really takes to make the product you’re showing. If you don’t deeply understand the open items and you don’t have a supplier on board who you have validated can make this product, you could promote a product that can’t actually be made.

Best Practices
Getting the product up online and telling everyone about it is the easy part. If it’s unique enough the word will spread quickly for you.

Once people give you money your product is real and the relationship changes from fans to customers. As a customer they expect great service, accurate information, and to be dealing with a reputable company. If not done right, you can turn thousands of potentially happy customers into an angry mob.

Some best practices:

• Be very honest upfront about how far you are, what is left to do, and how long it will take you to finish. Take the most conservative schedule you have, add 50% to it and use that as your initial timeline. People are happy when you ship early, but never understand when you ship late.
• Share both good news and bad news along the way. No news is bad news. Remember your customers are following your journey so post photos, videos, and write about what is going on. You don’t need to make it a status update, but instead walk them through the process. Pebble has done it well, using the Kickstarter platform and also, I’m sure, periodic email updates. If you don’t do this, they will publicly have this conversation on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Also see Elevation Lab, Ouya, and Lunatik.
• Have a plan for when things go wrong. Unless your team has done this multiple times before things will go wrong. You should have an internal plan about how to handle it as well as a communication plan both with your customers and your retailers.
• Build a real team or hire firms that have brought high-quality, high-volume products to market. Just because your friend’s friend makes products in Asia doesn’t make him/her qualified. You might want to ask other entrepreneurs who have had success on Kickstarter who they are using. Here are a few firms who are doing it well:
  • Dragon Innovations 
  • MNML
  • Fuse Project 
  • PCH
  • Elevation Lab 
• Don’t ship crappy product. The longer customers wait the more you will be judged when it finally ships. You CANNOT ship a half-baked product. Even if it means cutting the features in half you are way better off to ship a product that does a single feature very well then shipping a product that barely delivers multiple features. Remember your customers own iPhones, which means they will compare your products to what is in their pocket, even if they are completely different. Customers have very high expectations and you don’t want to do what Jawbone had to do in recalling V1 of the UP, especially if you haven’t raised serious capital. *To Jawbone’s credit they handled this incredibly well. Admitting you have a quality issue and taking the product back is amazing customer service.*
• Have an idea of what you want to do after the Kickstarter haze fades. Do you want to build a mega consumer brand like Jawbone, do you want to raise serious capital like Turtle Beach, or keep it small focused on selling direct and making awesome product like Minimal? There is life after Kickstarter and you want to have a plan for how this will jump start the next phase for your company.

If I were to do it all over again I would have sold our initial camera before we made it. As two guys in a garage it helped to validate we had something real. But at the same time I would have done things very differently. I would have been more upfront with what we did and didn’t know and I would have given ourselves a lot more time to bring the product to market.

Without selling our VholdR camera before we made it, we never would have gotten Contour off the ground.