Adii Pienaar

I'm the "business" guy / co-founder over at WooThemes. Our business has 3 co-founders and over the years all 3 of us have evolved our roles to focus on the specific parts of the business of which we're most passionate about.

When we started the company, we were bootstrapping and as a result all 3 of us were hands-on-deck & in DIY-mode in terms of being involved in the actual production of our products, as well all the business & admin stuff. But as we grew the team and hired designers, developers & a support team, our roles changed quite drastically.

So at the moment, my role within the company would be generally regarded as being the "business guy". Most of the writing on this topic tends to agree that a triumvirate of co-founders (a designer, a developer & someone taking care of the business-side of things) is the ideal mix of skills in an online startup. Even though neither of us are exclusively responsible for one part of the business, there are obviously things that I do more and take more responsibility for as a result.

My Responsibilities

This is generally what I spend my days doing:

• I do all of the marketing & tracking of the campaigns.
• I do most of the blogging.
• Exploring potential business development opportunities.
• Networking with whoever.
• Managing collaborations.
• I try coordinate all of our daily / weekly / monthly efforts to assure that we're hitting our strategic aims. I tend to take a step back from individual tasks / projects and take a more holistic look at the stuff we're doing.
• Interacting with the WooThemes community across all channels.

Not a bad job, right? :) Well, whilst this is 100% what I'd like to do every day, it doesn't come without its own set of challenges.

The Challenges

Nothing in life is ever perfect. Remember that! :) Heck, if anything was perfect, life would be pretty boring in that we'd have nothing we could improve on.

These are the challenges of my job as the "business guy" at the moment:

• I haven't been designing or coding for ages, so if I have an idea or the team decides to put a little campaign together, I need to wait for one of the guys on the team to handle the design / code of the project before I can continue with my tasks on that project. This inevitably means that there is gaps between the conceptualization of a project and the execution thereof, which sometimes means it is tough to keep the motivation and momentum going for that project.
• There's a seemingly obvious list of priorities: bugs, products and then everything else. So guess what falls off the radar? Everything else. Guess what a big part of my job is? Everything else... :)
• As a result of the above two points, I generally have items on my to do list that takes ages to tick off. Either they're not top-most priority or I need to wait for someone on the team to "help me out". Neither is wrong, but I don't get the satisfaction of feeling that I've accomplished certain things by ticking them off.
• I obviously understand our products and wouldn't be able to market them without that intimate knowledge. But I don't understand the complexity and detail anymore, as I'm out of the development game. I don't understand why certain bugs are harder to fix and why it seems (to me) that all we do is fix bugs or upgrade existing functionality (instead of developing new, groundbreaking products). I need to take the queue from the rest of the team on this and I think we'd all agree that where communication is involved, it's always a bit of a challenge. :)
• I spend a lot of time trying to tie up loose ends & making sure everyone is on the same page. This doesn't deliver an actual "result" in itself, but does help in getting the work done indirectly.
• Some days I spend the whole day answering e-mail, yet it doesn't feel like I've been working. Self-doubt is a massive issue.

If you've read my blog you'll know that I don't mind being personal and sharing emotions - yes, emotions - in explaining my mindset and experiences as a business owner & entrepreneur. So I don't pretend to think that these challenges are the worst in the world, but I do think they're pretty significant and most co-founders in my position should share similar experiences.

What are your experiences in this regard?

Life changes so quickly...

I can finally (publicly) share that Jeanne & I are 9 weeks pregnant and expecting our baby later this year. We've known for a couple of weeks, but waited for our first doctor's appointment before sharing the news with the world.

Heck, to say that the last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind would be a complete understatement (as I still have some professional / business news to share as well). Along with the absolute joy & excitement of finding out that we'll soon be parents, it is just so obvious during times like these that one's life can really change in the wink of an eye. I do however expect that these changes will be the most rewarding experience I've been part of during my life thus far.

I don't intend for this to become a "daddy blog" during the next couple of months, but "parent" is soon another title that I'd add to my resume. So expect the odd update on how that changes my life as a "rockstar", business owner and entrepreneur. :)

I just finished answering a handful of WooThemes support e-mails and realized that one of the reasons for WooThemes' significant growth & success has been our focus on the minor victories.

See, I could've left those e-mails unanswered for a couple of answers and then Ryan (our Community Manager) would wake up and attend to those e-mails. But instead of making the customers in question wait for another 4 / 5 hours, they received a response much, much quicker and hopefully I was able to resolve their query. That's a minor victory.

In the big / significant victory is just the culmination of these minor victories. Every single time that we manage to help an user with a turnaround time of 30 minutes, instead of 6 hours (which is more than acceptable), we have a minor victory. Plus, we put that user in the position to tell the whole Twitterverse how awesome WooThemes is.

Now imagine what happens when 40 000 users experience these minor wins...

I have often wondered what defines me as an entrepreneur: Is it the fact that I've managed to co-found a genuinely successful and profitable company (WooThemes)? Or the fact that I've tried my hand at quite a few other projects and ideas along the way?

Can I be considered successful if my failures outrank my successes? At least in terms of the amount of failures I've had, versus my own - albeit very significant - success?

I've always been very critical of myself and in that vein I'm constantly tempted (yes, in that very emo way) to feel like I'm more of a one hit wonder, than a serial entrepreneur (something which I aspire to be... I think...). See, I'd love to believe that WooThemes was no fluke and that I could use the skills, knowledge, experience I've acquired via WooThemes and apply this to a new business venture in future.**

Until now that hasn't really been the case, with most of the side projects I've been involved with either stagnating or not really growing in the desired direction.

I've been toying with the idea of becoming an angel investor and at least repurposing parts of the wealth (experience, knowledge, connections, as well as financial capital) I've accumulated to diversify my business interests. I'm keen on this only partly for financial returns, with the determining consideration being that I love being involved with awesome projects. This however doesn't solve my feeling that I might be a one hit wonder... But then again, how many entrepreneurs have really gone on to found multiple companies? (I'm not talking about those that have simply become financial backers of a great idea; I'm talking about getting involved in the trenches of a startup all over again.)

Heck, shouldn't I even be concerning myself with these questions and self-doubt?

** I don't intend on leaving WooThemes for the foreseeable future.

I just read this great post - "When you want to quit because it’s just not worth it" - about how it's generally pretty shitty being an entrepreneur if you consider all of the emotional ups & downs you have to endure. As I was reading this post (by an entrepreneur whom I have loads of respect for), I realized that I've had so many such situations in the last 3-odd years and if I had to tell an upcoming, sparkly-eyed entrepreneur about all of that, being an entrepreneur is probably the last thing that they'd want to do.

What is even more appalling - even to myself - is that during most of the down periods, I'm totally emo & irrational. (I think it takes big balls to admit that, so am hoping for some kudo's for that at least... :))

Let me tell you about one of these recurring emo episodes that I experience every other month...

I'm a very impulsive guy, which means that momentum and adrenaline are the things that generally keeps me interested in projects. So in business and in my daily to do's I always try to make sure that there's as much momentum as possible on all fronts (of which there are multitudes), because this is the only way I know how to work. This also means that I've taken all of my time and dedicated it to as many projects as possible, because I avoid being in limbo like a plague. Let me explain...

The bulk of my to do list compromises stuff that I need to get done for WooThemes, where we are always working on multiple different projects at any given moment in time. The WooTeam compromises of 10 of us, which means that I need to have a hand in a bunch of different pies as the "strategy guy" making sure that we're all working in the same direction. All of this is just dandy, because obviously that means that some days my time / energy is quite stretched in trying to get to all of these to do's.

Yet I found a way to complicate that even further: create even more projects. Along with WooThemes, I also founded Radiiate where we're working on a variety of different other projects. Then there's also the Rockstar Foundation of course, which is purely a passion project considering that I'm definitely not involved in there for the profit. :)

So now most of my days end up being a juggling act, whereby I try to figure out what's the most pressing to do and to get to as many of those to do's as possible. I might add that I've become really, really good at this too in the last couple of years.

But what's the problem then?

Every other month I become a tad emo and I start to question everything I'm working on; especially the projects that either don't have enough momentum at that stage or simply aren't growing in the direction that I'd like. Questioning myself turns into massive self doubt and eventually turns into utter denial, where I simply want to drop everything that I feel is causing my emo-state at that point in time.

My logic generally sounds something like this: eliminate the things that is causing me unhappiness, free up my time / energy and then be happier. But cue my inherent personality: I'd just find something else to fill up my time again, causing the same old cycle of questioning, self doubt & denial.

I think I'm genetically incapable of sitting still (in terms of being an entrepreneur), which means I'll always be chasing the next idea. I can't not have ideas suddenly. This obviously means that there's no way for me to serve both gods here and I'm thus destined to become overly emo and irrational once every couple of months as I try to figure out just what makes me happy (I think that's it).

At the moment I'm dealing with these episodes in a very simple way: I ride out the storm and then I continue as if nothing ever happened (normally after a pep talk and a proper slap from my wife). And everything has been working out just fine.

But that doesn't detract from the fact that - as an entrepreneur - these emotional rollercoasters are part and package of my job and I have to deal with that.