Being Physically Prepared is the first post in a five part series called “Enjoying the Ride.” Comparing a start-up to surfing, this is a simple guide to turn your grueling start-up battle into a more soul fulfilling experience by helping you battle the sets and pick the right waves so you can enjoy the ride.

“…I get them in excellent condition….Knowing how the mind is and the tricks it plays on a person and how an individual will always look to avoid a confrontation with something that is intimidating, I remove all possible excuses they’re going to have before they get in there. By getting them in excellent condition, they can’t say when they get tired that they’re not in shape.”  ~ Cus D’Amato

Legendary boxing trainer, Cus D’Amato, recognized early on that being in excellent shape was the most important factor in helping a fighter overcome their mental fears of entering the ring. No different than when you enter the water to surf or jump into a start-up company it takes incredible mental fortitude not to give up.  A start-up can be an incredibly satisfying journey, but at the same time it can physically crush you like a powerful wave pounding you back into the sand.

To make matters worse founders and start-up employees don’t recognize the incredible forces they are up against. Instead they take pride in under-sleeping, overworking, and pushing their bodies to the brink of exhaustion.

When running Contour I came up with every excuse in the book about why I wasn’t taking care of myself. Even though my wife was a personal trainer, I still managed to justify why my physical being was second to the needs of the company. Constantly saying I was too busy was my way of using brute force to survive, even to the point of physical exhaustion. My approach seemed justified at the time, but in retrospect was never going to last.

In contrast, when I started surfing my approach of using brute force to battle the waves didn’t work. I tired out quickly and in turn I began to panic, especially when the waves increased in size. The physical and mental strain I was under led me to pick the wrong waves, which in turn shifted my focus from enjoying the ride to worrying about my survival. It wasn’t until weeks later when my physical shape improved that I figured out how to manage the sets so I had a chance to even think about picking the right wave.

Building a great company can take years. It’s like a surfing session that never ends. The waves don’t stop so you can catch your breath, instead they only get larger as you become more successful. This is consistent with the reality that there are few overnight, Instagram-like successes. Instead most companies were started years before you ever heard about them. Therefore, in order to survive long enough you need to be in incredible shape.

Here are some things you can on a weekly basis to better prepare you for the physical requirements of the journey ahead.  If you aren’t in great shape you will never enjoy the ride.

Sleep Matters
You should pride yourself on the hours slept and not the hours missed. There are dozens of research articles on mental performance and a lack of sleep, but the bottom line is that you are thinking about really hard, stressful problems all day long. You need more sleep than the average person, not less!

You may think you do your best work late into the night. Unless you are going to sleep until noon, the truth is you don’t. You also can’t transition from work to sleep just because you close your eyes. There are hundreds of nights I didn’t sleep and generally they started because I went from work to lying in bed without any transition. I found that completely disconnecting from the computer, phone, and internet, two hours before going to bed meant a world of difference.

If you really want to sleep well, learn to meditate. I used to mock this, but laying on your back with your butt up against the wall, putting your feet together straight up the wall, and taking slow, deep breaths can help your mind make that important transition. I know it feels like just watching TV is better, but it’s not. Watching TV means your mind keeps going, taking in more inputs. To sleep you have to turn off the inputs.

Exercise Everyday

“I believed then, and I believe even now, that no matter what amount of work one has, one should always find some time for exercise, as one does for one’s meals.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

This is a little secret, but you actually control your own schedule, which means it’s up to you to block out time everyday for exercise. I understand your free time can vary dramatically when you are on the road, but I recommend a minimum of 45 minutes everyday. It’s a non-negotiable block of time.

Even if you are on the road, it doesn’t mean you can’t exercise. Pack the running shoes and stay in a hotel with a gym. If you can’t afford a hotel with a gym then I highly recommend working out in your room when you wake up. A round of sit-ups, push-ups, squats, dips, burpees, etc. are better than nothing. You can also drop in on local classes, like yoga, for as cheap as $10-20 almost anywhere in the world.

If you can afford it get a personal trainer. They can be great at motivating you, holding you accountable, and making sure your workouts don’t get stale.  Remember, you are no different than a world class athlete. The best athletes in the world don’t workout on their own, they have plenty of help. You should too.

Another way to go is to buy one of the dozens of health trackers on the market. I haven’t tried them all, but so far I like FitBit the best because it gives you a complete picture of your day including your sleep and your activity levels. Wearing a device is a great reminder to get up from your desk and get some exercise.

Eat Good Food
You may think it’s cheaper to eat fast food than healthy food, but it’s not true. Fruit, brown rice, eggs, and basic meats are examples of inexpensive healthy options. Most popular metropolitan grocery stores (like Trader Joe’s) even carry items like these ready-to-eat and at affordable prices. Even though professional athletes are in McDonald’s commercials doesn’t mean they actually eat there.

Along with eating healthier food, take the proper time to eat it. You aren’t competing in a hot dog eating contest so you don’t have to eat your lunch everyday as if you are competing for the world championships. Take 30 minutes, without your phone or computer and enjoy your lunch. Another trick I found was to bring small snacks to work that I could eat between meals. Foods high in protein are excellent like hard boiled eggs, nuts, and edamame.

Get a Weekly Massage
Everyone carries their stress in different ways. A weekly massage is an excellent way to relieve that tension. If your company doesn’t have medical insurance you can belong to places like Massage Envy, which offer multiple locations and relatively affordable massages. Getting a massage is part of the weekly cost of running a company. It’s worth the expense.

Being in a start-up is a personal choice, so if you’re going to make that choice, taking care of your body is key to your success. No different than trying to be the best athlete in the world, your body is the most important tool you have. Take care of it!

Image Credit: By Fort George G. Meade Public Affairs Office http://www.flickr.com/photos/ftmeade  via Creative Commons

Running a start-up is incredibly exhilarating. Especially when things are going well, the momentum the entire organization feels is amazing. And as an entrepreneur you’re taught to believe that your success is all about how fast you go. The more you get done, the better you feel. The more you accomplish in a quarter, the better your board meeting goes. The faster your numbers grow, the more valuable your company is.

It’s true, speed is important.

But that doesn’t mean you have to miss the entire experience because you are overworked, under-slept, and under-appreciative.

Even as you read this article you’re probably cramming it in between meetings, or while eating lunch, or into some other small window of time.

I used to do this when I was running Contour. I thought the faster I went, the better. The more I checked off the list, the better I was doing. The more hours I put in, the higher the probability the company would succeed. Nine years later, I realize there is a lot that I missed. A lot went by that I can hardly remember now, because if I had tried to fit one more thing into my head it would have exploded.

I’ve recently learned to surf, and found so many lessons in surfing that also apply to running a company. You spend most of your time paddling against the break (learning to navigate the currents of the business world and pushing through at all odds), some of your time waiting for the right wave (thinking about the business), and less than 8% of your time surfing (enjoying the ride).  This ratio is even worse when you are learning because you spend most of your physical energy paddling against a current you haven’t studied well, you are hardly patient enough to wait for the right wave, and your riding sessions last a matter of seconds before you get tossed back into the water. To make matters worse, you spend most of your mental energy trying not to give up.  The actual wave riding (the whole premise for surfing) becomes secondary to just surviving the onslaught of the waves in front of you.

Contrast this to the experience of seasoned surfers who understand that navigating the break is part of the process to get you to those few seconds of bliss. They have trained their bodies to handle the pounding waves, they have spent hours studying which waves to take, and when they ride one they can feel it deep in their soul, even if it only lasts a few seconds.

Running a company can be a soul-fulfilling journey, especially if you learn how to navigate the sets, pick the right waves, and enjoy the ride. While I was at Contour I kept telling myself the onslaught of waves would subside, at which point I would have time to think about the business and enjoy the ride. But the waves never stopped, they only got bigger. And my time to think and ride diminished.

From what I’ve learned I put together a five-part series called “Enjoying the Ride,” a simple guide to a more soul fulfilling experience.

Post 1 – Be Physically Prepared
Before you can even enter the water you have to be physically in shape. Sure, you’ll get stronger as you battle the waves, but if you don’t take care of your body you’ll never get to ride the wave.

Post 2- Staying Mentally Fresh
Getting past your fears is only part of what you need to stay mentally sane. Learning how to keep yourself mentally fresh and emotionally stable is critical for long term success.

Post 3 – Doing Less
If you break down your day you will find there are only a few hours you can apply your most creative energy to doing great work. No different than surfing, you can’t ride waves for 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

Post 4 – Enjoy the Relationships
If you strip away the business the only thing you really have are the relationships around you. Learning to appreciate and enjoy the people makes the ride so much sweeter.

Post 5 – Celebrate the Small Things
It’s easy to recognize the big wins, but how can you understand, appreciate, and enjoy the small things? Being a great surfer or an entrepreneur can take a lifetime, so if you wait until you win you will miss all the progress you are making.

*Note: If you are looking for some inspiration there is a movie called Chasing Mavericks, which is based on the life of surfer Jay Moriarity. It chronicles his quest as a teenager to surf Mavericks in Northern California, and Frosty Hesson, the local legend who takes him under his wing in order to train him to survive it. My surfing buddies tell me the film was criticized by core surfers as a dramatic hollywood rendition of surfing, but nonetheless I found the film inspiring.

Image Credit: By 2010_mavericks_competition.jpg: Shalom Jacobovitz derivative work: Brocken Inaglory via Wikimedia Commons

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

Saying goodbye is hard. Saying goodbye to a relationship you care a lot about, is even harder. Today I’m publicly announcing that I have left Contour.

My first start-up love, I never imagined the journey we would take. When Jason and I started the company we had no expectations and hardly a grand vision for changing the world. We were just passionate about making video simple and building our own company. And personally, my only goal was to learn a lot.

It’s hard to believe that over nine years has passed since we began in my parents’ house. I can still remember nervously asking my uncle to co-sign our first loan of $50K so we could start the company. I had no idea if we would lose it all or become a meaningful business.

Our first office was in Mountlake Terrace. It had no heat, carpet over a concrete floor, and no sign on the door. It wasn’t much, but it was ours. Even though our salaries barely covered our own rent it was a start. It was something we could be proud of, even if our own parents didn’t believe we would succeed

Over the years we experienced incredible highs and terrifying lows. I remember the swing from surviving the worse economic collapse anyone had ever experienced where we reduced the company from 19 to 12 people to 18 months later being #7 on the Inc500 and Washington’s #1 fastest growing company. Winning products awards, like the Red Dot Design Award was humbling, but my favorite moments were talking to customers who loved their product. Whether it was on the mountain or at a trade show, it was amazing to think that real people actually bought something we created. It’s what kept me inspired for so many years.

These are all experiences I will forever be grateful for.

Of course there were a lot of things I wish I had done differently. There were a lot of experiences I wasn’t prepared for as a 20-something running a company and although I made the best decision I could at the time, it’s hard not to look back and second guess myself. Ben Horowitz has always said “The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.” I couldn’t agree with him more.

Fast forward to today, the market for wearable cameras is very different than when we started. In the beginning wearable video cameras wasn’t even a category. At its infancy it was a bunch of hardcore sports enthusiasts strapping cameras and cables to their bodies to capture their exploits. Being pre-iPhone, Facebook, and even Twitter when we started, it was hard for people to imagine that someday millions of people would be wearing cameras, recording their active lives, and sharing it with their friends online.

It turns out, that is exactly what happened.

One of the most difficult decisions in my life, the company needs fresh legs and a leader with a different set of experiences. The category has exploded. GoPro has raised a truckload of money and large players (e.g., Sony) are trying their hand at wearable cameras. The company’s core challenge now is competing on a brand, marketing, and sales front, which is not consistent with the experiences I bring to the table.

As I reflect on my time at Contour I feel incredibly blessed to have led such an amazing group of people. It’s hard to appreciate what you have until it’s gone and although I will miss everything about Contour, I am proud of what we accomplished. I’m also incredibly grateful to everyone who helped us along the way. To all of our customers, retailers, partners, investors, and former employees…thank you.

I have come to believe that if you let it, life will unfold itself in ways you can never imagine. Moving on from Contour is the first time I can really let life take me wherever it wants. Being able to reflect on the last ten years of my life and what I want to do next is something I know I will look back on as a defining point in my life. I’m incredibly excited about whatever comes next.

For now I’m traveling the world and helping other start-ups. And although I don’t yet know what my next company will be, I have learned that I am a creator. Being an entrepreneur is my passion and building great companies is my destiny.

I look forward to the next decade of my life, I believe it will be my best yet.
Photo Rights: Kullez (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kullez/) 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.

I recently read a great post by Seth Levine from Foundry Group about Shifting From a Product Company to a Sales/Marketing Company.

He was asking a question that I thought a lot about at Contour, “How do you shift your company from a product one to a sales/marketing one?”

Seth sees a lot of companies, which tells me there are probably lots of CEOs who have struggled with this same transition. Although Contour made physical products, I don’t believe this transition would be any different for a software company. Whether your product is virtual or physical, eventually you move beyond your initial customer base and begin spending a lot more time thinking about how to get more customers.

I agree with Seth’s points that early on companies are focused on their product, initial customers, and proving their business model. It’s true, a lot of founders are really great at building the foundation of the initial vision, product, and team. I also agree that at some point the focus begins to shift from proving the viability of the business to growing it faster. And as an entrepreneur that shift can often be a steep learning curve. He’s also right that the best companies find a way to make a smooth transition, creating tight feedback loops between departments.

Having lived this, I think there are three things you can do to help make this transition smooth:

1. Make A Clear Definition of Success

Early on, often before you raise venture capital, you want to create a clear picture of what the future looks like. That picture can include a range of things such as how you define your culture, values, employee morale, size, revenue growth, market domination, etc. Equally how you define success could range from world domination (e.g., Square) to building a small company focused on great products (e.g., 37 Signals).

Whatever the definition for success is, the best companies know this early on. They are already thinking about how they transition from their initial customers to growing the business. So when they do raise venture money they are clear about what the money is for and how they are going to use it to complete their ultimate vision.

At Contour we weren’t clear early on about what we wanted to be. At the core we were always focused on building great product, but along the way we didn’t shift our priorities from the best products to reaching more customers. We weren’t sure if we wanted to lead the market, follow the market, just make the best products, be a niche brand, etc. Instead we invested a little bit everywhere, never recognizing when we should shift from satisfying our early customers to a focus on how to reach a lot more of them.

2. Every Company is Building a Brand

Just because you are a product-focused or technology-focused company doesn’t mean that you aren’t building a brand. You are.

No different than Apple, your brand matters. The name, what it stands for, what it feels like, even what it smells like. Some of the best technology companies have built the stickiest brands. Look no further than Google, who through Marissa, was obsessed with its brand. I’m sure there was a lot of tension within Google about what was considered on brand, regardless she was consistent in protecting its image. Another great example is Intel. Technology at its core, they spend serious dollars to brand “powered by Intel” at a consumer level to make no doubt consumers wanted their technology.

If you recognize early on you are building a brand, it helps to lift your head up above the product/technology and begin thinking about how you are going to scale your platform.

3. Don’t Divide Your Organization

A traditional way to see the world is to divide the company between the functions: sales, marketing, product, finance, operations, etc. This is consistent with how we are taught to run a company and with how people view their roles within the organization. This is even consistent with how Seth phrased it, shifting from product to sales/marketing. I have come to believe it’s the wrong way to lead a company, especially early on.

It’s true your company will have specialists that can handle customer relationships, design things, write code, etc. But it doesn’t mean all of these people have to be working on different objectives.

If we remove the functional titles for a minute and talk about what the company is trying to accomplish it becomes much clearer. Early on you are finding your customer and building a product to satisfy them. As Seth says you are constantly cycling between customer feedback, improving the product, and getting more feedback. This process can sometimes take years until you have built a great product that your customer can’t stop using with a business model you think is sustainable. To do this well you often hire designers, engineers, and product managers. Before you know it your team is great at understanding the customer need and building a product.

Skipping forward you decide you want to really “grow” the business. If we forget the traditional functions of “sales/marketing,” and rephrase the objective, we’d say the goal is to get more customers. The more customers, the more revenue, and hopefully the greater the profits. There are a variety of ways you can grow your customer base. Getting new customers could be through adding new features (product), hiring people, traditional marketing efforts (social, advertising, SEM, etc), or even traditional sales efforts (sales teams, distributors, affiliates, new channels, etc). The important shift here isn’t the shift in hiring more sales people or more marketing people, it’s the shift to recognizing the most important thing is to get more customers. If the whole organization is thinking about this, including engineers, I bet you would come up with a variety of ideas and priorities to meet this. And instead of just the sales guys thinking about sales, you involve the whole team.

I believe the best companies focus the whole organization on a few priorities and therefore get the mind share of every employee towards the same goal.

Lastly, don’t rule out the need to shift the mix of your team mix, especially if your business isn’t generating enough cash flow to support the people you hired and your new growth objectives. At least by making these changes it would be clear to the whole organization that you are focused on growing your customer base.

In the end if a company is trying to make a hard shift, it’s a difficult place to be. It’s true the market can move on you and sometimes you are forced to make a quick pivot you didn’t expect. Evolving your focus from the needs of your initial customers to gaining more customers to support your growth, doesn’t mean you have to shift the soul of the company.