Adii Pienaar
financials
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Startup Growing "Pains"

When you’re within an ambitious startup, you want to tackle so many different things at the same time, but due to the size of your team it is simply not possible. This leaves you with two choices: 1) invest further and increase the size of your team; or 2) be content to prioritize everything you tackle.

The first option is generally too risky for me and the second is largely frustrating i.e. I’m between a rock & a hard place.

Branding
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Personal (E-mail) Branding

Every time I get to sign off on an e-mail using ‘Adii’, I value that as an exercise of personal branding. The more prominent I can make my own brand and the wider the audience that gets exposed to the brand / word ‘Adii’, the more valuable my personal brand becomes.

Not trying to be narcissistic, but to an extent my personal brand is the most sustainable business plan I have at this stage.

p52
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Idealistic Check-in

With last week’s reboot of Project 52 - which I had been participating in (by publishing at least one blog post per week since 1 January 2010) - I wanted to have a look book at the ideals that I set myself at the beginning of the year.

Here’s a bit of a summary of the things I think that I’ve been making the most progress on…

Writing, Blogging & Rockstar Business. It was important for me to start writing again, as I experienced somewhat of a writer’s block in the 2nd part of 2009. So I’m happy to say that I’m doing quite a bit of actual writing i.e. on pen & paper, I’ve been blogging one significant blog post at least once a week since the beginning of the year and I’ve also finished the draft of my upcoming book, Rockstar Business, which is with my editor at the moment.

Photography. I purchased a shiny new Canon 7D DSLR for my birthday in January and I’ve been using it quite a bit and I’m also learning more and more about both my camera & photography in general. My Flickr profile is proof of this.

Personal Health & Excercise. This has probably been my biggest achievement to date, as I’ve lost 11kg’s since the beginning of the year and I’m also just about ready to participate in my first half marathon next weekend. I feel great and the improvements in my weight & fitness is really a massive personal victory for me.

Everything WooThemes. It would be an understatement to say that WooThemes is firmly on its way to hit all of the goals that we set out to achieve this year. On average, the business has great momentum and I’m confident & certain that we’ll exceed our own expectations for 2010.

And a few goals that could definitely do with some attention (i.e. these are the things that I need to improve on in the next couple of months):

  • I set out to read at least one new book a month and whilst I started out well, this has come to a grinding halt. So I definitely need to start reading again, even though I find it really difficult when I’ve been in front of the computer all day.
  • I’m not spending enough time away from the office yet. I set myself the goal of getting out of the office more and working remotely either from home or from coffee shops. At least it seems that I’m hitting my target of spending at least one weekend away from home every month.
  • Both Radiiate & The Rockstar Foundation has slowly been making progress, but neither of them have sustainable models just yet, which means I need to spend more time to firmly establish those projects as well.
  • I still haven’t gotten back into video blogging and I’m not sure whether this is realistic / viable at this stage.

So that’s a bit of a check-in from my side. How are you progressing with your goals?

happiness
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Life Alignment

In recent months - especially since the beginning of the year - I’ve found that the more I align my passions & the things that generally makes me happy in my life, the more I tend to be productive, inspired, motivated & just content. Now this probably seems obvious & trivial, but I’ve learned (about myself at least) that there’s a little bit of a different angle to this if you look closely.

Before I get into it, I need to mention that a lot of this thinking and the tweaking & tinkering in my life is a result of the idealistic goals that I’ve set myself for this year. So on a regular basis, I’ve been referring back to those goals and making sure that I’m making appropriate progress in achieving my aims.

One of the changes that I wanted to implement in my life, was a healthier & more active lifestyle, which means beyond changing to a healthier diet, I’m also training to run a half marathon in April. On most days I would thus go for a 5 - 8km run in the afternoon in preparation for the race. But to get back to how this influences my overall “life happiness” (beyond the obvious result of feeling healthier & more fit than I have ever felt), I now go running for two possible reasons:

  1. If I had a great day at the office, my afternoon run is a perfect way to almost celebrate that day; and
  2. If I had a shitty day up until that point, the run is a great way to clear my head and just feel refreshed by removing myself from that shittiness.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but even though I thus go running for two very different reasons, it has exactly the same result: I feel much better afterwards. In a similar vein, when I’ve had a great day I get to celebrate it with Jeanne (with whom I got engaged last Friday), but when it hasn’t been the best of days, I can talk to her about it, which allows me to get it off my chest / mind (family & friends can do exactly the same thing).

What I’m trying to say here, is that the different spheres of our lives all has an influence on each other; so if you’re not happy at home, you’re more than likely not gonna be happy at work. And if you’re being challenged & stimulated at work, you’re more likely to feel refreshed & happy when socializing with friends & family or pursuing personal hobbies.

So there’s most definitely a case for making sure that all of these things are aligned. Consider that the energy (and good vibes) generated in one sphere automatically gets transferred to the next sphere as you move between the different spaces in your life; to an extent it should thus be obvious that you need to setup those spheres in such a way as to where they can fuel each other.

business
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First to Market

In the extremely agile online world, there seems to be a premium placed on getting to market first with a new feature or product. But I’d like to contest the viability and probably the suitability of that premium, since I don’t believe that it’s crucial to be the first to the market**.

Getting to the market first, gives you the bragging rights and all of the hype / publicity that goes along with that. This is obviously great and I’m sure this is every marketer’s dream, since the marketing angles are pretty easy; it is undoubtedly much harder to hype & market something when it already exists, but when you’re game-changing this is a massive advantage. It is also considerably easier to create & build your own share of the market, when no competitors exist.

So all-in-all it would seem like a great idea to get to the market first. This does however not mean that you need to make this the be-all & end-all of your strategy.

I believe that you have just as much space & just as many angles to market your brand & offerings when you aren’t first to the marketplace. You may need to be a little more unique (both in terms of your offerings, which need to solve problems in an unique way *and* your marketing efforts), but it is 100% possible.

In fact, sometimes I actually prefer this approach, as I have a lot more information available to me before having to commit to a specific strategy. When we first launch the club subscriptions on WooThemes (for example), we were heavily influenced by some of Joomla theme developers (most notably RocketTheme), who were already offering similar services. We may have not been first to market and club subscriptions definitely wasn’t a groundbreaking idea at the time, but we did bring our unique thinking to the business model and today it makes up a considerable chunk of our monthly revenues.

If you can do something better or in a more unique way to your competitors, you’ll always have a chance to gain market share and build a business from your efforts. So don’t be too focused on getting to market first; rather do something unique in your own personality & time.

**Note: This applies in most cases, so I’ve used a good dose of generalization here.