Adii Pienaar

I'm typing this as WooThemes prepares to roll out on of our biggest projects to date and I can't help to remind myself of all of the articles that suggests rewriting one's code is like committing startup suicide (more here, here & here).

So we're rolling out a completely revamped and re-written user dashboard, which includes a new payment processor, new checkout-related features, major UI / UX overhauls and a brand new user admin backend. That's amongst other things. This is literally the foundation on which WooThemes has been built for about 3 years now, so we're changing a lot of history and a shitload of code.

I know this overhaul isn't product-related (which is what Steve Blank's article suggests would be suicide), but it still feels massively stressful rewriting the core of our business. As I sit here typing this, I'm both thrilled to finally launch a project that has been in the works for 18 months and that will greatly propel WooThemes forward. But along with this excitement, I'm stressed, anxious and I've never doubted any project this much.

Why?

At this stage you might be wondering why we decided to go through this re-write... When we eventually set up WooThemes, we used a proprietary platform (to get set up in the most agile, cost-efficient way possible), which we've been hacking and hacking as our needs & user base has continued to grow. This has meant that we now have a very workable platform (we wouldn't have grown this far if we hadn't), but without further hacking we've become very limited on a load of fronts.

We've also been absorbing a lot of recurring support requests, because there just hasn't been a way to fix those within our existing system. Yep, 18 months of 10 - 20 e-mails a day that could've been solved by a fix. (This another reminder of how "boring" it can be running a company.)

It's not been an easy road getting here; partly due to outsourcing problems, bad project management and feature-creep. I'm just so glad that the day (feels like judgement day) has finally come and that we can unveil all of the hard work that has gone into this. If you're reading this, the roll-out has been a success (albeit not bug-free), which means our attention is now fully focused on powering our way to the next 3 years.

We've seen so many online industries being disrupted in the last couple of months (think AirBnB for accommodation & Hipmunk for traveling). In fact, I think "disruption" (using the current "trendy" definition) has become a business model in itself: just change things around completely within an industry, offer a superior product / service / experience and you're good to go.

The one industry that really needs some disruption badly is online payments. Sheesh, with more online businesses being started than ever before, I can't believe that something as completely shit as PayPal is still the #1 go-to for most of these startups. Payment processing is the lifeblood of these startups and yet we still have a variety of inadequate solutions available.

I think online payments fail for a couple of reasons (individually or in some cases, a combination of these):

• The best solutions are almost never available to anyone outside of the States. The startup economy is truly global now and there's no excuse why payment solutions haven't been democratized across the board.
• International and cross-country money transfers are still a mess, doesn't matter which service you use. Surely our politicians / reserve bank officials / economists / whoever can come up with something that's even 1% better.
• Customers don't just trust any payment processor and rightfully I don't think they should.
• Oh and did I mention PayPal, with its robotic support and complete inability to ever resolve a dispute fairly, is from the devil? I don't trust PayPal with more than $100 of my money. Ever.

I could probably go on, but these are the main reasons I see for the below-par experience with the solutions we have available at the moment.

With this at the back of my mind, I recently pulled the trigger on my first angel investment with InspirePay (where I'll also be an active advisor). The thing I liked about InspirePay was that they were actively trying to make things better and I especially think that there aim to democratize superior payment processing globally is fantastic (albeit ambitious).

Maybe it's just me... I'm from South Africa and as a result we've been excluded from using some of the better payment solutions out there. Maybe if we were based in the Valley I wouldn't have felt this way... What do you think? Got similarly frustrating experiences to share?

I got an e-mail notification this morning from Kiva to let me know that my account had automatically sent out the balance to a new loan. Usually I just archive these notifications immediately, but this morning it reminded me how much I actually loved this feature. Let me explain...

I love everything about Kiva and I try to increase my lending on there every other month. In the past, I would lend out the money and then wait for it to be repaid. But I didn't always keep up-to-date with that repayment balance, which meant my account would accumulate for weeks (to $200 / $300) before I would send the money out on loan again. Essentially that meant that the funds I had earmarked as donations were just sitting - inefficiently - in my account.

A couple of months ago though (along with their redesign if I remember correctly), Kiva added an auto-lending option. What this does now, is that as soon as my account reaches the minimum loan amount of $25 it is sent to lenders in the demographic that I've specified (out of interest, I have a soft spot for food-related projects in Africa). In my mind, this is the perfect solution, because it doesn't even require me to log in, yet Kiva is getting the most out of my (passive) engagement as I'm still re-lending the money at a much more efficient rate.

Set & Forget

User engagement is one of the leading metrics that startups are using at present and is much more accurate than - for example - total amount of users. Leading VC, Fred Wilson, also published a great article a while back on how you shouldn't be excluding your logged out users.

So in a world, where user engagement is everything (especially since it may just positively influence Customer Lifetime Value), it's these kind of "set & forget" features that can increase user engagement easily. Low-hanging fruit basically.

This same logic can apply to monthly subscription plans that are cheap. I know of a couple $5 subscriptions that I forget about every month, even though I barely use the service. Sure, this doesn't drive user engagement, but it brings in some passive revenue.

Just a few thoughts... What do you think? Does any of the services that you use have these "set & forget" features?

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

Towards the end of my first year at varsity (2004), I created Akkerliefies (translated to Acorn Lovelies, where the "acorn" was symbolic of Stellenbosch University campus where I studied), a website which featured a few pretty girls from campus in the type of "girl next door" photoshoots that were (and probably still are) popular back then.

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.