Adii Pienaar

Being an entrepreneur, I've really had an exhilarating ride until now. And I don't expect that to end any time soon...

I do however agree with Eric full-heartedly when he says that entrepreneurship isn't quite as glamourous as it is sometimes made out to be. Heck, most days at the office are a tough slog, instead of a comfortable cruise. Having to make tough decisions daily requires a kind of focus and energy that is tedious, meticulous and not just adrenaline-driven.

True entrepreneurs will find the "fun" in these tasks at hand and for those pure souls, the entrepreneurial rollercoaster will always be exhilarating. But to deny that it requires a bucket load of tedious inputs would be ignorance of the highest degree.

I believe that one of the biggest reasons that I've been successful at a relatively young age as an entrepreneur, has been my determination in simply knocking on as many doors as possible, until someone actually opens the door. Gary Vaynerchuck would call this "hustling your face off" and that's basically what I did back in the day.

I've got a story to tell in this regard, but first I need to say that life is hard for a young entrepreneur; it's hard to find the trust, capital or partnerships needed to launch a business. I only knew one way to get a leg up in my entrepreneurial journey and that was to beg and borrow. :)

The Story of *the* South African Pin-up Girl

This was in the days before WordPress & social media, so none of the "easy" tasks existed back then; the site was hand-coded with text files used as databases and the only distribution / marketing channels available where a handful of South African bloggers that had built up a bit of a following. Yet I managed to run the site for 2 years, having built up quite a cult following on campus. Heck, I wasn't the most popular guy ever at varsity, but I was well-known on Campus for being "that Akkerliefies" guy. Maybe that's due to those incredibly awesome parties that we threw...

During the 2 years that I ran Akkerliefies, I begged & borrowed my way to the following:

• I never paid $1 for hosting the website, which was admittedly quite bandwidth heavy with all the high-res images.
• We got Red Bull to sponsor some insane parties with loads of freebies and a massive bar tab to boot. Who is going to say no to that?
• I managed to convince some really pretty girls to get into their bikini's & allow us to take pictures of them. We never paid them, normally required them to pay their own transport and use their own make-up etc.
• I wasn't into my photography as much back then and if I remember correctly, I wasn't responsible for one shoot. Instead we got some really talented (and established) photographers to help us out for free (they could use the photos for their portfolio too) or we simply borrowed proper DSLR's from people we knew and I then got friends to take the photos.
• We got loads of big name clothing & accessories labels to sponsor clothing, accessories & make-up for our shoots. They sometimes trusted us with stock worth more than $3000, which I would've never been able to pay back had something happened to the stock.

Heck, this was an awesome period of my life. I loved every single moment of the 2 years that I tried to grow Akkerliefies into a profitable & sustainable, but eventually decided to sell it in the last year of my Bachelors degree (it was either Akkerliefies or passing and finishing my degree; I couldn't handle both anymore).

Akkerliefies was never profitable, but I broke even after selling it. I learnt though that by knocking persistently on as many doors as possible, you're increasing the likelihood that your efforts will be rewarded. Someone is bound to open a door some time.

I meet too many younger entrepreneurs who aren't willing or interested to be this persistent and show the determination needed to establish a new business. Having to cold call someone or beg for something when you know you can't offer reciprocal value is helluva embarrassing, but I needed to do that to survive.

Moving on from Akkerliefies, this same "knocking on doors" mentality has served me incredibly well. The initial doors that got opened accelerated my personal development as an entrepreneur and I've met some incredibly people along the way (I first my WooThemes co-founder, Mark, via Akkerliefies when he was one of the bloggers to give us some publicity).

To this day, I still believe in firing off the exploratory e-mails, knocking on doors and hoping that someone responds. Most of the time this hasn't panned out as I would've hoped, but I've had just as many favourable that has contributed to the big success we've had. Keep knocking on those doors.

The Lean Startup approach to creating new business has become massively popular amongst online entrepreneurs for one reason: it works. The Lean Startup methodology with regards to customer development (broadly) dictates that we can create better products (and thus business) through continuous learning via being in constant contact with our customers.

I believe that this approach works well, but only after you actually have a first version (whether it's MVP or more extensive) out in the wild. I've got a couple of cautions (which I've listed below), but it is summarized well by this well-known quote from Henry Ford:

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses."

Vivek Ravisankar has a nice post about this, where he explains how he stopped asking users which features they wanted to see in the product and instead asked them which problems they were facing. Doing that, he has enabled himself (or his team) to solve the problem in their own way. For Henry Ford this meant designing the Model T Ford, instead of trying to create faster horses.

Here's a couple of reasons why I'd suggest avoiding customer feedback prior to releasing version 1.0 of your product:

1. Confusion. Imagine this: you have identified a big problem and have an idea of how to solve this (which you've validated with your potential target market). Now you start talking to users about the features & specifics of your solution and they are just brainstorming like crazy, spewing out the one suggestion / request after the other. Problem is all of this is theoretical and based on assumptions, which makes your task of figuring out what should go into 1.0 very confusing. (This same process has much more value when you have a 1.0 out there and users can base feedback on actual, existing features.)
2. It distracts from your core strategy / vision. You're the entrepreneur & visionary here, which means you're in the best possible position to execute your vision. Trying to combine your vision with those of hundred other potential users is a challenging task at best, because you're likely to get 100 different visions. I'm not advocating naivety by just trusting your own vision and gut, but I'm suggesting caution here. Early criticism is like kryptonite to most entrepreneurs and this is likely to halt your motivation to get 1.0 done.
3. Users generally don't know what they want; much less so before version 1.0. This may sound incredibly condescending, but unless your users are experts in the same field as your product, they likely don't know what they want. I say this, because many people are like sheep when it comes to features: "I've heard I absolutely need X, Y & Z for my new website". But the truth in most of these instances is that someone is trying to make money and thus peddling superfluous features that most users won't ever need. Don't discount what your prospective users have to say, but do your own due diligence on every feature request and make sure you're not the one peddling the superfluous features.

I hate feeling like things are in limbo; especially in business. I guess this is a natural consequence of the fact that I'm not the most patient guy you're likely to ever meet.

At the moment, it feels like we're working on 4 / 5 of the biggest projects ever at WooThemes. And with release dates being very unclear, even though they're imminent, we're holding off on announcing the details of these projects to avoid having pie on our face if we miss promised launch dates.

These are the kind of projects that will change WooThemes and it will greatly influence our strategies moving forward. These aren't just the announcement of a couple of new features or just the addition of a new business segment. These truly are the kind of things that - as an entrepreneur - you get incredibly excited about.

The problem is that whilst we're "secretly" slogging away at wrapping up the final tasks before launching these projects, everything else seems insignificant and in limbo. We're still handling the routine stuff as well and making progress beyond just these projects, but it feels like announcing those things feels so inferior to the bigger fish that we are frying behind the scenes. The whole of WooThemes feels like a slow news day at present, even though it's probably the most exciting period of our history thus far...

How would you handle this kind of limbo?

I recently ran an extensive user survey at WooThemes to get some validation for ideas that we were toying with for a new marketing strategy. One of the aims of the new strategy is to increase customer lifetime value (and related metrics such as user engagement & user retention), and so we set out to gauge how happy our customers were at the moment (happier customers are more likely to spend more money with us).

To our satisfaction, almost 10% of our users actually completed the 5-minute survey and of those that completed the survey, 92% said that they were very happy with our products, technical support & customer service. 92% obviously means we're doing something right.

But I wanted to delve in deeper and I've slowly been getting in touch with every single user from the 8% that said they weren't very happy with us at the moment. I wanted too figure out what exactly we did to make them feel that way in the first place & how we could potentially rectify their situation or at least improve it for other customers in future.

In addition to speaking to the customers that actually responded, I also "investigated" the customers' records and the history of their interactions to get a holistic view of what happened in the past. From this, one thing stood out for me: most customers don't give you a second chance.

To elaborate, I found that most of the unhappy customers had one bad experience via our ticketing system / helpdesk and then just left. They didn't keep hammering on the ticket where they had the bad experience, heck they didn't even respond again. Neither did they e-mail us to "escalate" the matter.

This means that, that one shitty experience for the customer was never highlighted on our radar and we thus didn't know that the customer was unhappy. It also means that we never had the opportunity to prioritize that customer and fix the situation (in which case we possibly had a chance to keep them as a customer).

I know that we shouldn't have created an unhappy customer in the first place, but no company is perfect 24-7. Things slip through the cracks and off the radar every now & again...

What I know now though is that there is a small percentage of customers that will never give you an opportunity to rectify their situation and they will likely never be your customer again. 8% may not seem significant, but that's 8% that I'm not happy to lose.