Adii Pienaar

"eCommerce" is one of those pre-2000 Dot Com bubble-related words, that lost most people a lot of money. And whilst the concept of buying things online have continued to grow + evolve in recent years, it seems that eCommerce itself has never been able to shake that pre-2000 bad vibes & stigma.

In the last 8 years, search traffic is down drastically and doesn't look like it has quite recovered. News mentions are however steadily on the rise, which seems to mirror the success that eCommerce platforms have been experiencing of late:

Square is revolutionizing the way retailers accepts payments and have managed to obliterate the gap between online & off. Shopify continues to lead the way with some impressive stats from 2011. In the last couple of months we've seen some even simpler platforms launch (Gumroad, InspirePay, Goodsie) - some of pockets full of VC backing - to make the process & experience of selling stuff online even easier. Going into the WordPress vertical, I can also say that within only 6 months, WooCommerce have become a significant part of our business & overall revenue.

If I had a few eggs left, I'd put it in this basket.

Not much apparently.

Consider some of these trends:

• We're generally in agreement that the value of an idea resides in the execution of the idea.
• Pivoting within startups is so in-vogue at the moment. How many startups are still working on the same (original) idea 6 / 12 / 24 months down the line?
• Y Combinator is considering taking on founders / founding teams regardless of whether they have an idea or not. Sure they say it's an experiment, but how much truth lies in their notion?

In principle I agree that execution is ultimately keen for any idea. A shitty idea with brilliant execution > a brilliant idea with shitty execution. Always. But that perception does devalue a good idea and ultimately the effort & brilliance required to make a shitty idea work, makes for a much riskier journey.

Given how easy it is to "have an idea" and get funding for that idea these days, I fear that too little emphasis is being placed on the value of the foresight that a true visionary offers when they have a really great idea.

Good ideas will also be a viable business. If you can generate good ideas, you'll always find yourself there or thereabouts.

I read Paul Graham's latest essay - "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" - over the weekend and found myself wondering how many prospective startup founders were lapping up his every word. Heck, I found myself thinking nostalgically about solving some of the world's biggest problems and making billions from it.

But when the initial excitement waned a little, I realized that a case needs to be made for the "not-so-ambitious" startup ideas. Founding a billion dollar company sure is an exciting prospect for any entrepreneur worth the title, but the law of averages dictate that only a handful of us will be able to do that in every generation. That however doesn't rule out that you can build a company that is worth a million dollars.

I can tell you that WooThemes is neither an overly ambitious startup, didn't possess the sexiest startup idea when we started and we'll in all likelihood never get remotely close to a billion dollar valuation. As far as things go, we're a pretty run-of-the-mill type startup.

That has however not deterred us from building a great business that has paid our salaries (and then some) for more than 4 years now and we're still going from strength to strength. On top of that, our success has spawned a whole bunch of other opportunities across the board.

My advice: Don't be blinded by chasing the frighteningly ambitious startup ideas. It's definitely not a bad idea to pursue a lesser idea, smaller opportunity and less profitable / significant market.

I'm a firm believer that perfection doesn't exist and even less so for a new startup. When it comes to startups, I think the "Done is better than perfect" mantra fits perfectly. And if a startup holds that mantra close to heart, it should result in something that resembles Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook's "The Hacker Way".

WooHacking

I can remember when we were working on WooThemes V1 (back when the mothership was still easy enough to handle & we could DIY everything), we had to create a membership & payment processing backend. This wasn't something that we could create from scratch (we didn't posess the skills), so luckily we weren't tempted to do so.

This meant that we had to look for alternatives, which lead us to using aMember instead (aMember wasn't so sexy back in 2008). We ended up hacking this into the rest of our installation and over the years, we kept the hacking going, adding more & more less-than-ideal code to it.

We kept this going for about 3 years, until we ripped aMember out completely in August last year and replaced it a brand new user dashboard (which we developed from scratch). The problem was that the new user dashboard took us 16 months to complete and as things stand now (6-odd months later), the dashboard isn't 100% what we'd like for it to be. Yet.

This is however already enough validation for our initial decision not to pursue a custom-built backend when we launched: it would've resulted in us delaying Woo's V1 launch by 16 months.

Don't reinvent the wheel, go open-source, hack & stop looking for perfection.

I guess the above line sums up perfectly. Here's some advice on bootstrapping the technical side of your new startup:

• Stop searching for perfection and forget about being idealistic. It doesn't exist in startups. Getting to 99% is easy, but finding that last 1% somewhere is incredibly hard.
• We live in an age where there are so many great open-source or cheap, paid alternatives available for everything: jQuery library, stock graphics, Twitter Bootstrap etc etc. Don't try to reinvent the wheel, when one of these solves 90% of your problem. You're wasting time & money (neither which a new startup can afford).
• Hack stuff together. Your code doesn't need to be pretty and you can worry about scaling later on. It just needs to work for launch.

Looking back at the WooThemes journey, these are things that are still evident today. We're 4 years old, boast more than 150 000 users and have more than enough revenue to throw money at our imperfections. Yet somehow none of these imperfections have impeded our business significantly. And that's important.

Imperfections are just that and most things in a startup can be better. Imperfections are also mostly inefficiencies to an extent and that's probably where WooThemes have felt the pain of our imperfections most (it generally translates to an increased demand on support). But again: it hasn't prevented us from growing the business.

Would you rather have a perfect or profitable / growing business?

WooThemes has become a Mothership. A team of almost 20, more than 150 000 users and revenues / profits that most business owners would approve of. This is fantastic of course until the engine breaks, because I'm not necessarily able to fix the engine and neither are my co-founders.

See - as WooThemes has grown in the last 4 years, we've become this specialized unit and well-oiled machine. We've built out what started as a little (cyber)spaceship into an ominious mothership. We shaped & moulded the mothership according to our own strategic notions, market forces and popular demands from our users. The mothership is unrecognizable from the spaceship it was when we first launched it into space in 2007.

How Things Change

When my co-founders & I founded WooThemes, it was representative of our personalities, ambitions, personal cash reserves and of course: our skills.

4 years later, WooThemes only represents our personalities and ambitions (individual & combined). Our personal cash reserves aren't necessary anymore (as the business has its own now), but the important thing is that the WooTeam has grown to such an extent that the collective skills now eclipses our own as co-founders.

I remember and can identify 4 stages in this regard on our journey:

• Founding WooThemes: As co-founders, we were all hands-on-deck and our DIY approach meant that we did everything ourselves.
• Hiring our first team members: When we added the first members to our time, we did so to add capacity. Their skills mirrored our own, which meant that if they weren't around, one of the co-founders could still handle things.
• The second wave of hires: Similarly to our first hires, these were focused on extending our capacity as well. But we were starting to add individuals that could offer us a little bit extra ito their unique skills. Still though, 90% of what was going on in Mothership could be handled by the co-founders.
• Today: We're a specialized unit; internally & externally. Our products are more advanced and the glue that holds it all together takes some skilled maintenance. As co-founders, we can't do everything ourselves anymore and have to rely on individual team members to fix the engine if it's broken.

Managing Chaos When You're Out of Your Depth

Fred Wilson has been publishing a fantastic, series of posts on ["The Management Team"](When You Can't Fix The Mothership's Engine Anymore) in the last couple of weeks. This has caused me to spend more time thinking about what our management team looks like and how we've applied that within the context of not having all the skills to directly address every part of our business anymore.

These are the things that we've focused on:

• Surround yourself with great people. Hire only the best / most promising individuals and never compromise on that mantra.
• Trust in your team's individual & combined skills. Empower them to apply those skills whether you are around or not.
• Create a culture that fosters initiative, failure and learning. Rather have a team member take initiative (based on the trust you put in them), then sit around waiting for you to give the go-ahead to fix the server that's been down for 6 hours already. If they fuck up, move on and make sure that they (and you) learn from the experience.
• Create an environment where team members want to do their best. Whether that means buying them the best tech gadgets or painting the wall another shade of blue, just do it. People do more when they feel they belong.
• Give individuals ownership, meaning they get all the praise & criticism for the project / task that they've taken ownership for. People are bound to work harder for themselves than they would for any boss.

Lastly… As business owner, learn to sit back, relax and realize that even if you wanted to fix the engine yourself, you either don't have the time or the skills. The only way for you to do so, is support the team that you hired to look after the engine in the first place. :)