Adii Pienaar

So as I’ve mentioned before, I’m really keen to do some angel / seed investing (via iincubate, which will also fall under the radiiate umbrella) in the future and as a result I’ve been following quite a few influential peeps in that space as a way to build up my own knowledgebase.

Up until now, I have zero experience with angel / seed investments and the bit of theory that I do know, I picked up during my graduate studies in Business Management. That being said, I don’t think that angel investing is overly hard to grasp, as it is not much different to any other form of investing (imho as a newbie).

I’d think that it would be possible to make a solid investment decision based on the following two factors:

• Does the idea make sense? Irrespective of how speculative the idea is, if it makes sense and it’s possible to turn it into a sustainable & potentially profitable idea, then your investment should be fine.
• Does the business / revenue model make sense? How dependent are those on external factors & assumptions? What percentage uptake / number of customers do you need to cover overheads?

As far as I understand (and this is my mentality with regards to angel investments), the idea is to take a small percentage of a startup at a conservative price level (so you need to get in early). Based on that, it is thus possible to limit one’s risk exposure with great potential in terms of earning a proper ROI if the idea & business model does gather traction.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, as these are just the thoughts that I have been playing with in my head… I still have a lot to learn obviously and most things I’ll only end up learning with future experiences. In the meantime though, my plan is (as it has always been) to simply wing it and learn on the job…

When I flew out to the UK on Friday I made the decision that I was gonna give Gowalla a full go whilst over here, as it had more spots & users compared to the relatively slow uptake in Cape Town. But to be honest, I just can’t get into it…

For one, it’s quite a mission to check in at every place; not in terms of the process, but more in remembering to do so. And secondly, I don’t see the value thereof for either myself or my followers.

Gowalla has an amazing interface and I can’t (and won’t) knock them in any way, but the service just doesn’t seem to be able to entrench it into my natural ways (as to some extent Twitter has done).

Anyone else feel this way?

First off: I’m a massive believer in growing one’s own ideas and it would thus be a very hard decision for me to ever even consider selling one of my companies. We had concrete interest in WooThemes in the past for example, but to this day we have decided that we’d rather continue to grow our own baby, instead of selling.

This article on TechCrunch goes on to explain why FourSquare should not be selling out to Yahoo. I however have an unique take on this…

1. At a valuation of $80m+, I sell my startup today; especially one that is reliant on technology. Whilst you are relevant & trendy today, this may not be the case tomorrow; so I’d rather sell for a ridiculous amount of money now and start up something new.
2. A valuation of $80m+ is ridiculous to say the least. FourSquare isn’t even making any money; so wonder what that valuation is based on? Potential? Forecasts? Pfff…
3. The author has gotten his point of having an entrepreneurial spirit spot on by saying “But there’s a reason why you became an entrepreneur and didn’t just stay a mid level developer grunt at a variety of large organizations. You have the fire to change the world. So go do it.”. Fact of the matter is, that approach is always a risky one and sometimes you need to take some money off the table and out of the equation (i.e. looking after one’s longer term needs).
4. Personally I’d rather sell completely than have to take VC funding and answer to a bunch of suits. But that’s probably just me.

I will always be an entrepreneur at hard and even at silly valuations, I will be reluctant to sell any business I’m currently involved with or may be involved with going forward. Reality however is that even entrepreneurs need to be realistic at times; so selling your startup should always be an option.

Having that as an option, doesn’t mean you are selling out, but it does mean you are considering every possibility and every opportunity. In my mind, that is more entrepreneurial than just ignoring a possible sale because you are afraid of selling out.

One thing that I’ve learned over and over again of late is that there is absolutely no space for compromise & complacency when dealing with customers. These are the people that makes your business a success and they ensure that you are able to pay the bills; so never - ever - stop short of pulling out all the stops to please your customers!

Ever since WooThemes established itself to such an extent that I could earn enough money from it to make a living thereof, I (Magnus & Mark made similar decisions with regards to their freelance activities) decided to call it a day for doing client work (which is why more than a year later, radiiate - a boutique web design agency before - is only making a comeback now).

As a result, we have a pretty strict “no custom design or development work” policy at WooThemes, since we choose to rather focus our attention on internal projects / ventures / activities that furthers & growths the business / brand. Yet, we still get a bucketload of e-mails from people (I’d assumed they’re fans of our work) requesting a custom quote for a designing / developing a site with X, Y & Z specifications. The answer is always the same however: “Sorry, but we don’t do custom design & development work.”

Considering the sheer amount of requests we get for client work though, has lead me to at least re-think our approach & more important our mindset in this regard. I mean - are we just ignoring the cash that is being put on the table right in front of us?

So I’ve gone back and forth about how we could potentially handle this situation (which is an obvious contradiction to our decision of not doing client work) and maybe maximize the potential profit or value from the opportunities that are presented. I’ve also decided that I need to take emotion out of it and I can’t thus justify my decision (not to engage client work) on the fact that I don’t like to work with clients, since that is completely subjective and based on bad experiences (neither of which makes for a good basis in making the *right* business decision).

In the end (i.e. after this epic conversation I had in my own head), I decided that this quote by David Heinemeier Hansson (from this video) summed up how I felt:

“If you’re not working on your best idea right now, you’re doing it wrong.”

What I’m saying is WooThemes’ best “idea” at this stage is to ignore the short term benefits (profits) of doing client work, as it is more profitable & sustainable to focus on building great products which would pave the way for the company in the longer term. I’m also 99,9% sure that if I actually did an extended financial analysis of this, it’d show that the ROI that client work would deliver in the short term is far outweighed by the magnitude of continuing to build our products and brand.

So that’s our decision in this regard. I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible to actually make this model work whereby internal projects / products are used for marketing (more on this in a future post) and to thus generate leads for client work. I am however saying that this is not a road that WooThemes are exploring at the moment…