Adii Pienaar

A couple of months ago I was listening to the Emerging Music Chart (by We Are Hunted) on Spotify, in an effort to discover some new music. I can remember the second song on that playlist: Some Nights by Fun.

When I first heard the song, something immediately struck me about it. It wasn't that it was perfect in my taste of music, and neither did it sound like a masterpiece. It was a bit different to what I had been listening to at the time perhaps, but on first listen and in terms of my logic reasoning, the song was unremarkable.

Yet I listened to it over & over again, which eventually lead to listening the entire album. A couple of full cycles through the whole album later and I was really into Fun.

The remarkable thing was that this happened about 8 months ago. Fast-forward to today and Some Nights - along with a couple of other songs by Fun. - have been on mainstream radio charts worldwide for quite some time.

8 months ago, I was sucked into Fun., because the song had obvious hit qualities despite it being recognized as such (by myself, my peers or music critics). Subconsciously my mind had made a decision that this song (and then the album) was really good, even before I could logically & objectively come to the same conclusion.

Startups, Ideas & Greatest Hits

Months after this realization first dawned on me, I kept coming back to what had happened and how I had discovered a hit song before it was a hit.

I tried to look at the history of great hits, but couldn't necessarily find any examples that would help me explain this (especially since musical hit creation has become more a robotic art of marketing, than the art of creation itself).

The only thing that I could really pin-point was this notion that the greatest hits were obvious.

This notion immediately had my entrepreneurial mind considering how this would apply in the world of startups, where ideas are a dime a dozen, yet so little startups actually succeed (due to bad execution, a bad idea or both).

I've seen so many startups eventually launch, which make me say to myself: "Shit! I should've thought of that! It's such a brilliant idea."

Does that reaction tell us something about ideas & how we spot the truly great ones? Maybe. Yet in my experience, that reaction is been one mostly born out of hindsight, which we all know eventually becomes an exact science.

I also considered the early days of WooThemes, where the Founder & Managing Director of my firm (to this day, my only corporate gig) declined the opportunity to bring WooThemes in-house as they didn't think the idea was that great. Fast-forward 4 years and it's a multimillion dollar business.

So maybe WooThemes wouldn't make a Greatest Hits list, which would probably include the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. But surely it wasn't an idea that should've been marked as spam?

Judgement by Pop Culture

Getting nowhere closer to actually quantifying why some ideas become greatest hits and others get marked as spam, I cycled back to Fun. & what eventually made their song(s) Greatest Hits.

Fun. became popular, because they were acknowledged & listened to by millions. In the startup-world, this would be the equivalent of having thousands of revenue-generating customers. They didn't write the song knowing it would definitely become a hit, because there is no recipe; just like no startup - regardless of how great the idea is - is guaranteed to succeed.

So if there were no logical, objective and conscious way for me to judge whether Fun. would ever get the traction they eventually did, there's only one thing that could've influenced my decision-making: intuition.

Intuition is the sum of many things (amongst others): preference, knowledge, experience & personality. Intuition is the occurrence where your mind is making a decision based on all of these inputs and stored "data", before our conscious is even sure what's going on.

In Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, he suggests (with enough data to drive a concrete argument home) that that split-second decision made on intuition and your gut feel is more often right than it is wrong.

Doing It Wrong

And it's with this realization about ideas and how I've been judging them, that I think I've been doing it wrong. Or at the very least, I could've been doing it better.

Instead of relying on intuition to gauge the merits of ideas, I've focused on using external validation techniques: Customer Development, data analysis, determining product/market-fit, determining the size of the market / opportunity etc.

Data-driven decision-making. No intuition, no dreaming; just cold-hard facts that I could use to validate any notion that I had.

The reality is that I've not had that "Aha!"-moment about an idea, where I think that idea is truly fantastic, in quite a while. Yet, based on my validation techniques I've pursued many of those ideas that my sub-conscious had dismissed.

My track record reads something like this:

• WooThemes continues to grow and we're getting better every day. The success rate of new products are however still closer to 50% than it is 100%.
• I had sunk $250k into Radiiate, because we were tackling "obvious" gaps in the market. None of them had enough traction to build a business.
• I've made a couple of promising startup investments, none of which are mature enough to gauge success.

So not having any proof that my intuition is good at spotting a greatest hit (except obviously for recognizing that Fun. were gonna be great months before they hit the mainstream), I'm left with this: Great ideas remain great ideas. And the greatest ideas are obviously great at first sight.

I may be right in that notion or I may be way off the mark (in which case, I'll be back to the drawing board, figuring out better validation techniques).

But in a battle of head vs heart, I'll have a lot more respect for my intuition when I consider new ideas.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and it's come up in so many conversations I've had about anything that even remotely sounds like a freemium model.

At WooThemes, we have quite a few free products which is some kind of freemium incarnation: the free products help us with distribution, but there's no obvious paid plan or product to which you can upgrade. As such, we've always limited the amount of support we're willing to give to users of our free products, but we've never just said "No!" completely. The reason being that we'd hoped that by going over-and-beyond and actually helping those users a little bit, we're giving them a great, first impression of Woo, which means they hopefully spend money with us in future.

The only problem is that this doesn't work. We've seen a very small percentage of free users ever pay us anything. And obviously, once you've helped them a little bit, they expect that favour over & over again.

So I say, fuck it! I've personally stopped helping these users on technical issues (pre-sales questions are fair game obviously) and have also instructed my Support Team to be more ruthless in this regard.

When I get these help requests, I send out a generic e-mail:

Thank you for your enquiry.

Please note that we do not provide support for any of our free products and that our support resources are only available for paying WooThemes customers.

You can gain access to our support resources in one of the following ways:

1) If you are using one of our free themes, you can purchase any of our other themes (Standard or Developer Package). This will automatically give you access to support for our free themes as well.

2) If you need support for WooCommerce, you can purchase either one of our WooCommerce themes or any of our WooCommerce extensions. Once you have done so, we will be happy to provide you with support for WooCommerce core as well.

3) If you need support for WooDojo, you can purchase any of our paid products. We provide support for WooDojo to all WooThemes members, regardless of what they have purchased from us.

I've not become a heartless, bottomline-driven dick, but I have decided to draw a line in the sand.

True customers WANT to spend money with you. They want to spend that money, because we (as humans) are inherently wired to reciprocate the value that we receive. True customers also understand that you have a business to run here, with bills & salaries to pay. Heck, they understand that they are running their own business, making money off your product / service and as such they should most definitely be paying you.

This is just the standard barter / trade agreement that we've seen in society for decades. We're not suddenly bucking a trend by asking our customers to pay us.

So make your customers pay.

And if they're not willing to pay you, then they're not your customers.

I stumbled onto a new Vanity Fair article by Randall Stross, in which he shares some behind-the-scenes insight into Y-Combinator after he followed the 2nd class of 2011 during their 3 months with the incubator. Whilst it was generally a fun read, one specific section left me appalled:

The most successful start-ups, Graham says, are the ones that completely remove distractions: “They just sleep, eat, exercise, and program.”

The Zenters were in Y.C.’s winter 2007 batch. “They got this apartment together a couple blocks from here,” says Graham, “and just got a bunch of Lean Cuisine and put it in the freezer, and they programmed and occasionally played tennis and ate Lean Cuisine.”

Standing to the side of the room, Jessica Livingston calls out, “They each lost 15 pounds!”

To distill the advice given to new Y-Combinator startups, Paul Graham & Jessica Livingston basically advised startups to spend most of their time working, exclusively eating frozen meals and occasionally going outside (probably just to confirm that the rest of the world is still turning). Reading between the lines, this is what I read:

• Work-life balance isn't important and it's okay to pour everything you have (every day) into your work.
• Frozen meals are a great way to allow you to work more, regardless of whether it is nicer / healthier to get a fresh meal.
• Losing 15 pounds because of your new "work-as-much-possible" routine is fine and we can all chuckle about that afterwards.

I don't agree. I don't think it's okay to compromise on a balanced life in the pursuit of a startup; and even much less so when you could be jeopardizing your health (to whatever extent). The potential reward just isn't worth that compromise.

But what bugs the shit out of me though, is that this advice is coming from people whom we - the startup community - regard as idols. Heck - how many tech startups entrepreneurs are out there that don't know of or actively follow / read Paul Graham? And this is even more true for Y-Combinator who has become the holy grail for all tech startups to aspire to; their popularity perpetuating a broken and one-sided mindset.

Finding a better way

About a week ago, I saw a tweet (which I wished I saved, so that I can attribute it accordingly) that touched on a personal nerve. The tweet read:

"Entrepreneurs are the only people in the world that are willing to work 80 hour weeks in order to eventually - hopefully - work 40 hours a week."

This reminded me of one of the core characteristics of being an entrepreneur (and the one that's appealed most to me since I started out on my entrepreneurial journey): Entrepreneurs make their own rules. Put them inside a box and they'll just build a bigger, better, different box.

Whatever your goals as an entrepreneur and regardless of your reasons for wanting to be an entrepreneur, I will bet that no entrepreneur does a startup for the exclusive reason to work 80 hour weeks.

So why are we all agreeing that it is okay to compromise on our lives in the pursuit of a supposed holy grail? Are we just wrongly worshipping workaholics? Maybe a 4-day work week isn't something all of us can do, but surely there's a more balanced way to do things (compared to 80 hour work weeks)?

And from reading about the experiences of self-made millionaires, the pot of gold at the end of that 80 hour work week doesn't seem to be all that it's cut out to be.

Startups will always be hard work

One of the first things that I tell young entrepreneurs is that they need to work harder than anyone else. Because I'd lie if I said that I've never pulled 80 hour work weeks and that I didn't believe that this is one of the reasons why I've been successful. But maybe it's not about working harder and simply about working smarter?

Ultimately it comes down to going back to our entrepreneurial roots, which is to question everything and make our own rules. 80 hour work weeks, work-only lives and shitty Lean Cuisine is only one option and even though this is being endorsed by our idols, doesn't mean it's the only option available to us. We shouldn't be taking that option just because Y-Combinator has made it popular.

I don't have the perfect recipe for the alternative, but I do know that my ideal life looks a lot different to that: I want to work hard and I want to succeed professionally, but I don't want to compromise on the other important parts of my life (my family, my health, having fun, creating new memories, experiencing new things etc.). These ideals just seem less broken to me.

Just because something is being endorsed by our idols, doesn't make it ideal.

Last night I started playing NFL Kicker 2013 on my iPhone, having previously been addicted to the 2012 version. The new version however only had one new feature: you could buy various power-ups / upgrades that would allow you to perform better or accelerate your progress in the game. Whilst the game was still fun, it felt lame that the game pushed so hard for me to pay for upgrades, instead of just earning them.

I've never been a massive gamer, but I remember a time when your progress in any game came down to your skill, execution & time (read: patience). I loved games like Railroad Tycoon, Age of Empires & Football Manager, because the only way to excel in the game, was to put in the time. I couldn't pay to actual money to do better.

I remember a couple of months ago, I really got stuck into Tiny Tower & I just absolutely had to build the biggest tower in the fastest way I could. So I spent about $30 chasing that pipe dream. The fun only lasted a week, before I realized that my attempts for instant gratification were futile.

In-App purchases in games just feels dirty. Why would I want to beat my friends in a game purely because I can outspend them? Where's the fun in making this a "my d%$k is bigger than yours" competition? Too superficial for me.

The best games will not need in-app purchases to "enhance" the gamer's experience and will rely on the tried & tested methods of engagement: make the game challenging & fun enough that I want to pour hours into perfecting my skills & execution.

I've been doing a few pre-sales & account-related customer e-mails in the last couple of days & the one thing that still surprises me is the quality (or lack thereof) of English that a large percentage of our customers use in their e-mails.

I know that English is not the most spoken language in the world, but 56%-odd of the Internet's content is English and only Chinese users even closely rivals their English counterparts. When I think about this, I'd thus assume that most Internet users would need a better understanding of English to get around the web successfully. This is also reinforced by the fact that English is only my 2nd language, but I've had to refine it over the years to stay relevant online.

What further compounds my surprise though is that I'd expect the WooThemes customers I'm interacting with to have better English. They're at least somewhat-technical and know enough about the Internet to be comfortable with setting up their own hosting space & WordPress installation. (Contrast this to an every day, Chinese internet user who only socializes / reads news online and who I'd thus expect not to have great English.)

From my experience, the lack of quality is also not region-specific; I've seen bad English from customers in South America, Asia & most surprisingly, Europe. Mmm.

Am I just being pedantic? Or have you seen a similar pandemic (word choice on purpose & for added drama) around the web?