As a mentor, your job is not to dash the dream, but add realism to the endeavor. Don’t tell them they cant be astronauts, tell the entrepreneur that they have to study math to be an astronaut, and give them the direction to determine if they even like math.
Due to the extreme pace and environment of my little startup-life these days, I have had a chance to recognize how much poor communication bothers me. Especially under-communication. A.K.A. the expectation that I should somehow get your drift and immediately comprehend what you are trying to communicate.
Obviously, as soon as I convinced myself this is about everyone else, I realize that, no, this is about me and what I need to work on to improve my communication.
So, I made a couple guidelines for myself:
Everyone else hasn’t been reading the same emails, or articles, or overhead the same conversations. So, let people in on the context of where I am coming from.
I know whether I am stating my opinion, or citing facts. (Um, usually.) But, that doesn’t mean anyone else does. Unless, I explicitly tell them.
Don’t you hate rhetorical questions?
Reduce unnecessary duplication of information, or needing to have the same conversation multiple times.
What would you add to the list?
Evan Hamilton published a article on the UserVoice: Understanding Your Customers blog, “Launchrock gains one million signups during beta by saying no to customers.” As I was reading it, I realized the one thing that might be missing, is an understanding of how hard it can be to say no.
I posted this as a comment there as well, but wanted to share it with you here.
To completely over-generalize I think engineers are very good at saying, “no, unless you justify it.” So, they might have a tendency to say no to customers TOO much. But, CEO’s and bizdev, and sales people love to say, “yes of course we can do that, and it will only take two weeks to give that to you, now give us money…” Then, they get all disappointed when they find out their team cannot deliver on their promise in time.
But, the type of no I am describing here, is different from that set of yes or no. This is more like the Apple no. The–how can we create the most simple things that works without too many buttons and menus–no.
That kind of no can be very difficult for startups who are still trying to find their product/market fit. And when you are in the midst of that, you’ve got to get out of the building and talk to your customers.
And, ironically, the best way to understand your customers is to say, “no”.
“Yes, that is on our roadmap.”
“Yes, we’re already planning that.”
“Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.”
These are all ways to kill a conversation. There is nothing more for your customer to tell you, and you’ll have no idea whether you really understood their request. But, by saying no, AND keeping the conversation open, you give your customer a chance to justify their need and explain why it would make such a difference to their business.
Then, that is a perfect time for a, “maybe.”
A friend in the community space asked me a great question this morning, and I realized I have never written about this.
Why do you say, “A community manager should never use the word, ‘thanks’”?
In my experience, when someone reaches out to a company, they are most often already in a place where they feel unheard or misunderstood. So, when they read your text based reply (where it is very difficult to express tone and emotion), their baseline assumption is that you will be dismissive or annoyed. So, in that context, it is almost impossible not to hear ‘thanks’ as “ugh, yeah, thanks a lot, whatever” but it is much harder to hear ‘thank you’ as anything but “I thank you for your question/idea/input”.
It might just be stupid semantics. But, it is one of those little rules I live by for the sake of the other.
Do you have any little rules like that?
I originally posted this on google+ but wanted to capture it here as well. You should check out the conversation on the original post as well.
For my non-startup friends and family, who want a peek into the startup-founder life,
Current status:
Sitting at a cheap IKEA desk, in a cheap IKEA chair, on a piece of cardboard for a rug, in a room in Oakland with no other furniture besides an inflatable mattress. (p.s. my wife of 11 years will be moving out here soon. Fortunately for her, she doesn’t have to put up with my decor. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have her here with me to share in my joys and pains.) The fridge is empty, except for a couple left over PBRs and some tortillas.
Our webhost decided to just go-down, so I’m talking to a ton of our customers over email and twitter about why their sites don’t work right now. And, I’m chatting with my team on sms, GroupMe, HipChat, and e-mail.
We have a shared doc open in Google, writing a plan to resolve this solution in a way that hopefully prevents our customers from experiencing this kind of downtime again, even if things happen outside of our control.
Meanwhile, between the chats and email, I am still trying to get product notes out of my head and documented so our contractors and other team members can work on the next version of our site. (The future of our business is still very important, even while the present is blowing up.) And, I am also jotting down notes about our market sizing research we are doing right now–not because I need another distraction, but simply because the ideas pop into my head, and if I don’t capture them, I might lose them.
This is all happening, right now.
Oh, and I’m loving every minute of it.
Working on a little project and ran across a photo of my contribution to the book, “The Age of Conversation 2: Why Don’t They Get It? (amazon affiliate link):
I believe this even more now, than I did when I first wrote that down 3 years ago.
Persistence isn’t just key — it is everything. Getting in the ring is hard, but staying in the ring is even harder, especially when you feel beaten down, tired and alone.
/via Justin Kan
Seth Godin is brilliant, and I deeply appreciate every book he publishes and everything that he shares on his blog. Even his post this morning, In praise of programming, is a great contribution. But, it ends with,
You also need to figure out how to program for your audience, even if the audience is only one person.
I am not saying Seth is wrong, but I do disagree at a core level with what he is proposing. Or, I should say, I do not want to live in a world where I am simply an audience of every person I encounter.
I am a person. I want to be in a relationship with you. I do not want every conversation planned, structured in a content calendar, scheduled and delivered in a strategic order with a pre-planned story arch. I want to have messy conversations, that don’t always make sense, that are difficult to ‘consume’ but have a lasting impact.
Can we please have messy conversations again?
A question I am passionate about came up today in namesake.com:
“I’ve got a TERRIBLE memory. I believe it might be due to the inability to concentrate. I usually can’t work on one task for too long. Any suggestions on how to improve my concentration and my memory?”
I am trying to get back in the habit of writing here, so I figured I would take this opportunity to share my answer here on thomasknoll.info as well.
There is an interesting issue I just learned about through the sfnewtech newsletter. I checked with Myles about simply reposting the message in full, because I think he superbly describes the issue and the steps you can take to influence the result.
Learn more by reading the full post…
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