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.

The title to this post probably sounds a little cynical, considering the well-travelled business mantra that “the customer is always right”, but I’d really like to challenge that point of view in the business environment.

As a company grows, the user- / customer-base normally grows as well and the increased number of people that requires your attention, leads to added strain on your customer service functions. So during this growth period, it is important to streamline one’s policies & activities in such a way to allow you to scale the energy & resources required to service an ever-expanding number of customers.

What I’ve found though, is that some customers are just simply more difficult than others, which is probably an indication of the varying personalities that one encounters in business. This isn’t a problem in itself, since most of the “difficult” customers actually have valid points and they just require a little more attention than average to feel as happy with your company as the “easier” customers. But even though I can objectively say that, I have also encountered the type of customer that is being difficult purely because they want to be difficult. It is also this kind of customer that simply doesn’t trust your company from the get-go, calls of your actions into question and becomes offensive & insulting when they don’t receive an e-mail response within 5 minutes (if this seems like I’m exaggerating; I’m not).

Pulling The Plug

I recently made the call with a customer that I just wasn’t interested in working with them anymore, after they had become extremely insulting and called my character into question. Whilst I’m always willing to deal with any seemingly difficult situation on merit, I draw the line when it becomes unprofessional, as that is normally a clear indication that someone is being difficult purely for the sake of being difficult.

So what did I do? I simply recommended a competitor’s product instead, refunded the customer’s purchase and noted that I don’t think it would be possible to continue a professional relationship in this regard.

This may be a tad radical, but I’m not telling the full story here obviously. Instead I’d like to point out that I was trying to avoid a 20/80 situation whereby the 20% of customers who are difficult will drain 80% of the energy & resources devoted to customer support. I’m not suggesting an exclusive approach here whereby only the “easy” customers gets your attention, but I am suggesting that your good customers should receive the same amount of attention.

By eliminating the odd (really) bad customer, you are thus freeing up resources to invest in your best customers who don’t necessarily request / demand customer service, but are actually most worthy of your time.

“Right to Admission”

Ultimately this comes down to the standard “supply & demand” argument, whereby just as much as a customer may choose a company, a company may also choose its customers. Service companies regularly chooses which clients they’d like to work with, so why shouldn’t a retailer be able to do the same? Just because you are selling to the general public, you don’t necessarily need to accept every single customer as your customer and even less do you need to accept them being difficult without rational reason.

This however becomes more complex when you consider how much customer service resources is spent entertaining difficult & irrational customers; so this behaviour is almost endorsed in a way where companies are saying “it’s okay sir / madam, you can be irrational and we’ll offer you the best customer service available and make you feel better”. To that, I’d like to say: Bullshit!

Back to supply & demand. When customers purchase from a company, they enter into an implicit sales agreement whereby they agree that they are paying X and in return they receive Y. That’s the bottom line; it’s normal supply & demand. Customer service operates on a different level (probably marketing and / or public relations), which means that no customer is *entitled* to being difficult and even less should they be allowed to demand a company dealing with their irrational / offensive / unprofessional behaviour.

If the company handles those situations really well, then kudo’s to them. But when you’re looking to scale a business, you’re gonna find that you can’t entertain 100’s or 1000’s of difficult customers every day, unless you increase your overhead expenditure on support resources significantly.

So I’d throw my hat into the ring for companies to stop entertaining difficult, irrational customer behaviour and instead fight fire with fire in an objective & professional manner. The sooner that customers realize that the company-customer relationship is a two-way street, with equal “power-sharing” amongst the parties, the sooner we’ll get rid of difficult clients.

Most entrepreneurs seem to be keen to develop & establish their brands as umbrella’s for a whole business empire, in that they grow the company both horizontally & vertically. Whilst this may not be on every startup’s radar, the more established a business becomes, the bigger the need seems to be for diversification & increased sustainability (whilst you wouldn’t be too surprised if you found that every second entrepreneur was a ruthless, greedy business person).

A great example of what I consider to be an “empire” within the online spaces that I move is Envato. Not being content with only having one content-generating website or one marketplace, I think Collis & co should be lauded for really building a massive business with different, yet related, arms & vehicles.

So whilst this is all great, here’s a bit of a proviso of sorts…

Making it seem like you’re building an empire is relatively easy, when you’re creating projects that definitely seem much cooler than they are actually profitable or viable. So the trick is in ensuring that you continue to fuel the mothership (the main / umbrella brand) [with all these cool projects], whilst obviously blowing the “look at us building an empire over here”-horn.

See, when it comes to publicity, the profitability of individual projects / departments aren’t that important, as they were never destined to be considered as an independent vehicle. Instead they should be geared towards fueling that mothership, as that is the cash cow; not necessarily the shiny new idea that you are implementing.

The main brand also has a longevity that far surpasses the lifespan of an individual project. Whilst some of your newly introduced projects may be great enough to be the next cash cow, their first aim should be to contribute to the building of the brand.

That way they’re also indirectly contributing to the profitability of the business as a whole. It may seem irresponsible to allow one side of your business to operate at a loss, but this is where you need some balls and you need to view the situation from a holistic point-of-view. Don’t let isolated situations impair your judgement. Focus on the mothership, as that is where you will find the greatest value, sustainability and hopefully profits in the longer term.

I’ve been shopping around for bigger office space (since both WooThemes and Radiiate has been growing immensely) in the last couple of days, when I came to a realization that I was trying to be too fancy here.

See, when I started out (with Premium News Themes, which became WooThemes and freelancing before it became Radiiate), I was working out of a student apartment with a crappy broadband connection. Even when Cobus & I moved into our current offices in July 2008, there wasn’t much here beyond our two desks, a couch and a broadband connection. So why the sudden need to upgrade?

At this stage, we have 8 people (comprising of the WooThemes, Radiiate & Rockstar Foundation teams) in our Cape Town office and admittedly we’ve just about maxed out the space. Realistically we could stay here for the foreseeable future or until our needs really change, but I’d still prefer a slightly larger space. The decision to purchase instead of leasing like we do now is purely a financial one, as it makes more sense to spend money on the down payments of my own assets, compared to leasing and helping pay someone else’s asset (with capital growth being the carrot we are after).

So upgrading isn’t an overly radical idea; in theory at least. But when I put those “wants” into the context of where I had come from, I realized that I don’t really “need” to upgrade at this stage or move offices at all. Hell, I’ve bootstrapped everything we’ve done until now, so why now suddenly heap bucketloads of overheads to our monthly bill?

The decision is a straightforward one in terms of pure financial considerations: upgrade away, as both revenue & profits allow for it (unlike Twitter who has no revenue stream to justify their fancy new offices). But that still doesn’t necessarily mean I should, because we don’t *need* to do so just yet.

Screw the fancy. I’ll keep my money in my pocket and bootstrap for a little while longer.

DISCLAIMER: I may still purchase office space if I can pick it up at the right price, because it is a great investment vehicle. But I will only do that when it makes much more sense than it does now.

I constantly get this feeling that other people tend to think that what I have achieved has been a fluke of some kind and that I have thus been extremely lucky to have gotten as far as I have until now. This is even evident in my own dad’s opinion that I have been extremely blessed and that I should feel very privileged to have these blessings. In short, I realize that I’ve been very blessed until now and I could seriously not have scripted the growth in my own reputation & following and that of WooThemes (which seems to go hand-in-hand with my own & vice-versa) any more beneficial to myself. I also know (and believe) that the lucky aspect of some people’s opinions are only true if you consider that I was at the right place, at the right time AND I had the guts to pursue my ideas within that opportunity at all costs. So whilst there is an obvious element of “luck” or being blessed, I will never discount my own contributions in pursuing my dreams & ambitions.

The Hard Work

I’m a firm believer in hard work and I can remember my dad telling (when I quit my corporate job to pursue & grow WooThemes) that “there would be no harder boss, than the boss you’ll be to yourself” and I didn’t really understand what he meant. Almost two years down the line now, I can say that I’ve experienced day-in & day-out what he meant with that. When you work for yourself, you’re on your own and you take responsibility for your own career, income & life. There’s no one that’s gonna give you a pay cheque at the end of the month, if you were a lazy during that month. But this bit of freelancing or being a business owner has been publicized many times over already and I’d prefer to focus on another angle: working hard, because you want to.

See, I think I’m an extremely ambitious guy and new ideas (some of them pretty good; others pretty shit) come to me easily. Combine these two and you have an overactive brain that never really stops working (hence why I’ve needed to force myself to go offline) and the only way to fuel that line of thinking is to put in the hours. This means that I spend a massive chunk of my day in front of my computer and it’s pretty much routine for me to work until 11 / 12 at night (this after I start working at 6:30 / 7 in the mornings). I’m sure some people will say that working this hard is ridiculous (in some situations they’d be correct, but more on that just now), but working hard at achieving your goals & dreams is the only way to really influence whether you are gonna be successful or not (as individuals, we definitely can’t control / influence everything and being lucky / blessed thus helps a bit, irrespective of working darn hard).

The Mistake Many Make

I’ve encountered too many people (online & off) who think that success comes easy and that a great idea is the only ingredient needed to guarantee a successful business. I’m however willing to bet that an individual / company with a lesser idea, but a better work ethic will trump the geniuses and their groundbreaking ideas every single time. I recently finished reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, in which the author explores the reasons for success. Throughout the book it is evident that there are a little bit more at play in terms of being successful and that natural-born talent is only one of the many ingredients that can bake you a successful cake. Anyway, you should read the book yourself, but I wanted to quote a Chinese Proverb from the book:

“No one who can rise before dawn, 360 days a year, fails to make his family rich.”

When I first saw the proverb, I read and re-read it, as at first glance I understood it was powerful, but I wasn’t sure how I related to this. The more I read it though, the more I could see the power of this mindset in my own life. I’ve never been afraid to work hard and I believe that what I’ve achieved in my life is a direct result of the hard work I’ve put back into it. I don’t think that WooThemes is the most special company with the most groundbreaking ideas ever, but when I look at myself and the team around me, I know that we are for sure one of the hardest working companies you are gonna find anywhere in the world. And it’s exactly that mistake that most that people make when starting their own business: they just don’t work hard enough.

Entrepreneur via hard work

There is absolutely no substitute for hard work when you’re trying to build your own business. Not only will you fuel the growth momentum of your business via hard work, but your customers will also see the effort that goes into the business (and the benefits & kudo’s of that should be obvious). In my opinion, this is how you “earn your wings” and the right to call yourself an entrepreneur; just having a great idea isn’t good enough. Ultimately: if you don’t like hard work, then rather don’t go into business for yourself.