I've been doing a few pre-sales & account-related customer e-mails in the last couple of days & the one thing that still surprises me is the quality (or lack thereof) of English that a large percentage of our customers use in their e-mails.

I know that English is not the most spoken language in the world, but 56%-odd of the Internet's content is English and only Chinese users even closely rivals their English counterparts. When I think about this, I'd thus assume that most Internet users would need a better understanding of English to get around the web successfully. This is also reinforced by the fact that English is only my 2nd language, but I've had to refine it over the years to stay relevant online.

What further compounds my surprise though is that I'd expect the WooThemes customers I'm interacting with to have better English. They're at least somewhat-technical and know enough about the Internet to be comfortable with setting up their own hosting space & WordPress installation. (Contrast this to an every day, Chinese internet user who only socializes / reads news online and who I'd thus expect not to have great English.)

From my experience, the lack of quality is also not region-specific; I've seen bad English from customers in South America, Asia & most surprisingly, Europe. Mmm.

Am I just being pedantic? Or have you seen a similar pandemic (word choice on purpose & for added drama) around the web?

I recently had a conversation with one of my team leaders about some of our newest additions to the WooTeam (whom we'd not met, since they're based remotely) and realized that we didn't know how old these individuals are. We soon concluded that we don't know their age, because we don't care about that.

This reminded me of a sports-related cliché that I was brought up with:

"If you're good enough, you're old enough."

This specific cliché related to how some sports coaches question the merits of including a youngster into their teams, fearing that their lack of experience will be exposed by their opponents. Time & time again though, other coaches have shown that by including an individual based purely on merit (of their abilities) mostly leads to success. If you're good enough, nobody seems to care how old or experienced you are.

This seemed very apt in explaining our (obviously subconscious) considerations when hiring new team members. We've been successful in establishing such a great team, because the only determining factors have been their personality (how will they fit into the team?) and ability (can they get the job done?). Age has just never been something we've even checked (possibly because we tend to ignore formal, traditional CV's when hiring).

And neither do we plan on doing so in future.

This post reminded me of the aftermath we dealt with at WooThemes earlier this year when our servers got hacked and our business was almost destroyed. Whilst that was one of the most challenging situations I've ever had to deal with, I was absolutely astounded by the reaction we received from our community. Instead of complaining & criticising, they were totally understanding, supportive & loyal.

If isolated, the situation itself obviously would not have resulted in such a positive reaction, but instead it must've been things we did prior to that experience that caused our customers to be so fantastic. Money in the bank.

So in thinking about the various ways that we've put money in the bank with WooThemes, I'd like to highlight a few things we've done really well:

• We've spent a lot of time building a brand that communicates our core values: excellence, responsive, progressive & authentic.
• We've always tried to under-promise & over-deliver.
• We've never been afraid to (openly) admit our mistakes.
• We've invested in our team, as they are the custodians of our work and our brand.

How are you putting money in the bank in your startup / company?

One of the benefits of being based in Cape Town, South Africa - and thus very far away from any major tech hub - is that there's no mainstream trends or hype that has any significant influence on the way we go about our business. To this day, this has given us a huge advantage on so many levels; most of which is centered around jumping into the deep-end and just swimming.

Founding a startup is the obvious trendy thing to do these days. As with any other trend, "hipster entrepreneurs" have flocked to the online world, wanting in on the action. Naturally because this it is very cool to do so.

The problem with this "me-too" approach is that many startups aren't solving the best ideas or have sacrificed their creativity in favour of a landgrab within the startup space. If I look at AngelList or at the startups that get their funding rounds publicized on TechCrunch, it's normally 50-50 whether the idea will induce me rolling my eyes, because the idea is either just too generic, plain stupid or never likely to enable the building of a sustainable business.

Stop doing things just because they're trendy and mainstream media seems to reward it with publicity. It's not clever business.

Don't raise funding now if you can bootstrap. Don't implement lean startup methodologies just because Eric Ries says so; do so because it makes sense for your business. Heck, build your new web app in .NET if you believe that's what's gonna be the best for your startup. But for crying out loud, stop doing things that are just trendy.

Maybe my geographical "disadvantage" made me more battle-hardened in this regard, but because of it I had to figure out every move & decision based on the merit.

And if you're into being part of mainstream trends, you should be reminded of at least one other: most startups fail. In my opinion, you're thus better off figuring things out in your own way and failing / succeeding on terms that actually make sense (compared to those dictated by trends).

Buck trends.

I'm proud to announce that Jeanne & I have invested in our latest venture: Lunchbox. We've teamed up with good friends of ours to make this a reality and we're really excited about what the future holds.

But then again I'm probably biased about this... See, photography is probably the only "hobby" that I practice enough to even classify it as a hobby. My work takes up most of my days, which means that something that was a hobby in the past (technology, the internet and even reading) has now become more of a chore. Photography however remains.

So I'm very excited to be part of a new startup that will hopefully make photography more fun and help thousands / millions (?) of people take better photos. Check it out if you have a minute!