Adii Pienaar

I was a guest on the WordPress Community Podcast last night and had a lot of fun with the show’s hosts, Joost de Valk & Frederick Townes.

We discussed a lot of the strategies & “policies” that we have implemented with WooThemes; especially with regards to customer service, creating loyal & evangelistic users, as well as our development cycles & processes around that.

Definitely worth a listen if you have 40-odd minutes to spare.

I recently stumbled onto the Second Startup Syndrome article by Ben Horowitz and whilst reading it I realized that I was going through exactly the same thought processes, emotions & ideas as was described in the article.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working on getting my original company - radiiate - out of hibernation, since I didn’t want the brand or the initial TLC that went into the company go to waste. My biggest problem though has been to find the time to devote to what can essentially be called a startup all over again, as WooThemes was still taking up the majority of my time, whilst The Rockstar Foundation was also beginning to demand more and more of my mental energy & ideas.

So during the last 6 months I have taken shortcuts. I didn’t trust the same, bootstrapping advice & strategies that I blog about here and didn’t apply the same thinking as we did when building WooThemes so successfully.

In fact, this only recently changed when I came to the realization that I needed to be less idealistic about what I wanted for the company and almost needed to go back to square one if we wanted it to succeed.

The 6 months also didn’t get wasted, because as a team we learned a hell of a lot during this time and if we only learned one thing, it’s that there are models & ideals that we definitely won’t be exploring in future… :)

I’ve often wondered whether anyone else considered why I would be involved with a charity such as The Rockstar Foundation, as perhaps the business / entrepreneur persona versus the charitable / giving persona weren’t as obviously aligned. So I figured that I’d share a few reasons for my (personal) involvement in the Foundation…

1. I have an absolute passion for kids and helping out kids that are talented, are willing to work extremely hard & as a result have the ability to become the leaders & game-changers of tomorrow.
2. Every time I get to see Mariana & Okuhle (this doesn’t happen often), my faith & investment in the Foundation gets confirmed. I love these two, amazing girls to bits and since joining the Foundation they’ve done incredible work.
3. South Africa is an amazing place, but the country needs every little bit of help it can get to eradicate the not-so-great things. I believe that education is a great way of enabling a better future for all South Africans, which is why we are targeting such talented girls to be history makers going forward.
4. I’ve been incredibly blessed as an entrepreneur & as an individual. I have so many great things going for me in my life (on all levels) and the Foundation is a way of giving back and saying thanks for all the privileges that I have been allowed thus far.
5. I also share the exact same passion, ambition & drive for the Foundation as I do with my business ventures. For me, the Foundation also represents a challenge & a massive learning curve; both which I love embracing as I continue to evolve & develop as an individual & entrepreneur.

After reading this article about Airbnb’s success, there was one bit from the article that really got me thinking:

“…a company that creates immensely more value than it extracts from customers…”

Reading & re-reading that phrase really got me thinking about how other business models work in terms of the margin between value created & value extracted.

I’ve not read Tony Hsieh’s Delivery Happiness yet either, but I kinda suspect that it’s gonna come down to the same principle: create & offer more value than you are necessarily being paid.

This doesn’t mean you should cut profit margins or stop earning a profit all-together, but you should consider adding non-financial value to whatever it is you are offering clients. So how can you do that in your business?

I wanted to elaborate on my thoughts about creating a business model by firstly solving a problem for yourself. Whilst this is an incredible way of building a business, there’s a few thoughts that I’d like to share on the matter:

• If you are solving a problem, it is likely that someone else may have that problem as well (and subsequently they may opt for your solution). If your problem is however very unique to yourself, the likelihood of widespread adoption of your solution becomes much less likely.
• The bigger and more generic your problem; the more potential profit & significance your business may have.
• The problem you’re solving may be more unique / niche / specific, but your solution needs to be simpler and more generic.
• Your idea has a greater chance of success if you are being sincere in solving the problem i.e. solve the problem first & foremost and then figure out whether it’s possible to commoditize & monetize that solution.