Yesterday afternoon I had coffee with a local startup that is preparing to release the public version of their iPhone app. Almost four months ago the company was demoing their product to investors and was on the verge of launching. Today I got to finally see their app in person on the founder’s phone which still hasn’t launched. It has been four months and the company still has no data on how the market will receive their product and is still making miniscule changes to the app.

I sympathize with the founder, I was in his shoes months ago when we were building Holler. We spent months perfecting the flow, adding features, and making everything look beautiful. While you can read about the story here, we implemented a new policy once I started programming the iPhone app myself (after firing the original developer, etc): we were going to strip down all the features and push out a first version within five weeks come hell or high water.

The app launched with a critical bug that was quickly removed. We started testing things and adding features that we originally wanted to. We started perfecting some of the flow through minor changes and then hit a wall: we’d have to go through a reorganization of the app that would take months to push out (my guess was 6 – 10 weeks on the low end). That’s when I decided that this business was not for me. Coming from a world where you can develop and launch something in days (the web), spending months to test a hypothesis was absolutely unacceptable.

What I’ve since learned is that we could have performed numerous tests prior to investing so much time in building an app. As Vinicius Vacanti, Founder of Yipit, published the other day, performing small experiments to understand demand for your product before you build it is critical. In other words: stop living in your mind. We all do it.

We all experience the world through our own eyes and assume that others (or a lot of them) see things the way that we do. We then proceed to build a product completely around that vision in our head. It’s a guaranteed way to burn a lot of your money. Perform smaller tests that validate your concept before you consider making the investment in that genius mobile app idea that has been bugging you for a while. It will save you a ton of money and a ton of pain.

Additionally, ask yourself this question: could I build a web version of this first? If a web version would solve most of the pain point that you’re attempting to solve, build the web version first … it’s too expensive to jump right into mobile (unless of course you’re an incredible mobile developer, in which case: congrats!). Also, don’t ask yourself whether a web version would solve the problem, ask others as there’s a good chance you’ll want to build a mobile app right away.

I have a couple friends who run businesses and it’s pretty much the same trend over and over when I talk to them: they discover another need in the same market that needs to be fulfilled and they try to go after it. All the while they neglect to truly execute on the opportunity they were first working on (trust me I know because I’ve made the mistake).

Traders (and more specifically: arbitrageurs) are one group of people who know better than this. When there’s a price discrepancy in the marketplace, they focus all their efforts on taking advantage of the gap. Talk to any trader who comes up with a good trade (stock trader, advertising arbitrager, the list goes on..), they will keep milking that trade until it stops printing money for them. They won’t move on to the next trade until the first one is complete (unless of course they have additional capital to do so).

Many entrepreneurs suffer from ADHD-like symptoms and pull their business in different directions before they’ve fully exploited the original opportunity that they were focused on. I’ve written about it again and again, but it deserves additional attention because I still see this problem so often.

We all have our reasons for following the shiny object (new business ideas). Yes, there are a few excuses that are actually valid:

Valid excuses

• You’re passionate about something else – There’s more to life than money. Spending your entire life doing something because it makes lots of money is not a great way to become happy. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider the economic impact of all your decisions. If starting a business helped you discover your true passion though, awesome! Don’t spend your life pursuing something that you don’t love.
• There’s no demand – If the demand dried up or doesn’t exist, it’s time to pivot.
• You have a self-sustainable business – If you have a business that is supporting itself (and possibly even growing), there’s nothing wrong with expanding your operations beyond the initial product or service you were offering.
• Massive explosions – These are things that force you to question your purpose in life. A founder quits, you go broke after taking out three mortgages on your house (time to get a job), and other major events of this nature. Sometimes you are forced to step away. Often times that break will be exactly what you needed to regain your footing and go back at it.

Now let me list the reasons that are most common (and not great excuses):

Weak excuses

• They’re shiny – We all love shiny things! We also often have this false perception that there’s a business model out there that we can put in little effort and generate huge returns from. Here’s the reality: all businesses take an immense amount of work to support. That other business you see is going to take just as much work (or more) than the one you are working on.
• Entrepreneur gets tired – Oh are you really tired of working day in and day out for something that isn’t paying you really well? Go cry on someone else’s shoulder because you have got to hustle to make businesses work. Less vacation, more work, more hustle, more focus … that’s the only way.
• Family or lover to support – This is actually a great source of motivation: if you don’t hustle people who are relying on you will suffer. You are going to have an incredible amount of stress from this though. My suggestion: go to the gym and work it off.
• There are serious hurdles – At this point I feel like I’m beating a dead horse: either you are an entrepreneur or you aren’t. If you are going to complain about the challenges of staying focused, you shouldn’t have signed up for entrepreneurship in the first place.

If you have a business that is performing and growing, you have a duty to that business: continue to water it and help it grow. Don’t go watering another one when the first business is still thirsty (pardon the metaphor)! Seriously, don’t do it. I’m tired of hearing about entrepreneurs that make this fatal mistake. Get someone in place who will stop you from doing this: a girlfriend or boyfriend, a parent, a friend, whoever. Otherwise you are at risk of killing your business.

It’s part of a more common trend that falls in the same vein as “StartupWeekend” and any post that references starting a business in under 48 hours. If these people are going to claim that they started a company, then I’ve just one upped them with the “30 second startup”. Oh, how’d I build it that fast? Easy. I came up with an idea and I tweeted it. I then linked back to my blog and said I’d build it at some point. Beat that sucker!

No, these things are not businesses. A lemonade stand on the corner that generates revenue one day is not a business (although I’ve heard some cops will tell you that it’s an illegitimate operation and try to arrest you). A business is a well defined concept that you spend all of your time building and executing on. If you took that lemonade stand and set it up on a regular basis (daily, weekly, whatever), possibly even reinvested the revenue into the business, and maybe even invested in some marketing, then I would say it’s a business.

Some people come up with clever ideas that generate revenue. Take the million dollar homepage for example. That guy made a million dollars. Is it a business? Not really. He has no sustainable revenue from the site. I’m working on a new company right now and I think it’s a brilliant idea. I also always tend to think that I can build my ideas (like the one I’m working on) in a matter of days or weeks. Three weeks into it I suddenly realize my projections were way off.

That’s always how it goes. The real test is finishing the product, getting it to revenue, and making that revenue sustainable. I’ve started dozens of projects. Nobody’s handing me any trophies for the projects I didn’t finish though. The ones that you get rewarded for are the ones you stick to. I’d much rather congratulate someone who has been grinding away on a project that they can support themselves with.

Next time you see that post about how somebody started something in minutes, hours, days, think twice about congratulating them as a weekend is no where close to what’s necessary to build a lasting product. It’s just enough time to convince yourself that you can.

I have gone throughout much of my life not planning anything. In fact I’m so bad at planning that I figured there had to be an easier way and we came up with Holler. When we started Holler we had three things: a vision, an idea of what the first version of our product would look like, and money. We also were able to put together the beginning of a team to execute on the concept.

Lesson one: a vision is not a plan. I can tell you what the future looks like. I may or may not be right but one of the motivations on creating a product company was to help build that future. O.k., team assembled, company incorporated, money in the bank, “FORWARD MARCH!!” Off we went. With sheer persistence and determination we successfully got an iPhone app out the door. It wasn’t easy but we pulled it off.

That flood of initial users that you’re hoping for in the back of your mind didn’t come. While we’ve done fairly well at acquiring users, we wanted to simply see how the product as it existed would perform. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t great. I then spent a couple weeks making some changes to the system and released the upgrade. The flood of traffic still didn’t arrive. Plan A went something like this:

Step 1: Build app
Step 2: Profit big time
Step 3: Hire other people to do the dirty work

Plan B, that didn’t exist. Let’s be honest as well, Plan A kind of sucked. Another piece of irony is that the last company I started didn’t really have much of a plan. All I knew was that I wanted a large blog and the rest would work itself out. As it turned out that reality came true and I managed to piece together other parts of the pie and build a business. It was almost an accident though. Again, I had started and eventually built a grand vision, but the plan behind that vision was never put in place.

Had I planned more effectively, I could have built something much larger. So now I’ve realized why it has been so hard to get to the next phase of our company: we hadn’t planned the next phase. Or another way to phrase it was that we didn’t have a long roadmap. Why am I sharing all this with you?

Ultimately it’s in the hopes that maybe you can learn something from our mistakes. Fortunately, we are now putting the finishing touches on our plan and continuing to execute on Holler. I’m looking forward to sharing some of our next steps in the near future. What’s your plan?

When I built my first startup, Frusic, I basically combined the design of Orkut, Friendster, and a couple other sites, plus my own little flavor.  The site probably didn’t look that great, but at the time, 1 pixel borders with square corners was the standard. Designers now debate over rounded versus square corners but back then photoshop was used for editing photos, not designing websites. You could release the world’s ugliest looking website and get millions of people to visit it.   This was what most sites looked like:

Then someone with some common sense and a basic eye for design realized that an easy-to read font and a clean user interface could make things a whole lot better. That’s when the whole 1 pixel border around tabs exploded and Verdana became the go-to font (now it’s helvetica). Take a look at this interface and you’ll remember what I’m talking about:

Nowadays, you can’t get away with your developer designing your site (unless of course they’re one of those super-talented do-it-alls). You need a talented designer. It’s become so hard to find them, that a great designer can even be considered a competitive advantage as this Venturebeat post highlights. However visual design alone is not what’s needed.

You need someone who can understand interface design. I remember someone at Techcrunch Disrupt walking up to me to say that Holler looked great but they had no idea what to do with it. Ouch! He had a valid point though and what I quickly realized was that you can no longer sneak semi-completed products out in the open. The users aren’t all going to stick around for you to figure it out.

Designers and developers are both responsible for making a product great. Not only does it need to function (development), but it must look great and feel great to use (design). It’s not exactly breaking news that design is important and can provide a competitive advantage, but at this point in time it’s not even an option to avoid it as it once was. Design is the core of product development. Without it, you can’t have a successful product.

The Importance Of A Name

There is no doubt in my mind that the name of a company is critical to its success. If Apple had gone by the name, Incredibly Beautiful Computers Inc., I’m not sure it would have performed as well (although a shortened IBC, probably could have worked). I have subjected my own businesses to an arbitrary rule: no name should be longer than three syllables. This has been based on my own review of the world’s largest brands, most of which fall within three syllables or less.

The goal of finding a “good” name is to make it as easy as possible for your customers to find your product, remember it’s name, and understand what you do with as little effort as possible.

What You Don’t Want In A Name

It’s easy as hell to come up with a name that you perceive to be clever but nobody understands. They either can’t spell it or its just not memorable. Ultimately there are plenty of things you can do to mess up a name but most of them are pretty common sense:

• Don’t make it hard to remember
• Don’t make it hard to spell – When you say it, you should know how to spell it. However I’ve seen this backfire somewhat as people have come to understand that not all internet sites are spelled properly. Flickr, del.icio.us, and many others have violated this rule and in turn, made their name somewhat more memorable.
• Irrelevant names suck – If there’s one thing you want to avoid, it’s a name that has nothing to do with your business. Since most internet startups pivot before they figure out a successful business model, picking something that’s relatively generic is always a safe bet.

A Name Alone Is Nothing

Just like people who enjoy picking stocks like to think their model is best, entrepreneurs who invest heavily in a name believe the name is critical to the company’s success. Personally, I love having a powerful name. I spent tens of thousands of dollars on Holler.com. Was it worth it? Only time will tell. I remember that I was able to acquire AllFacebook.com for $10. At the end of the day, a price is not determinant of the value.

The effort you put in to building a brand around that name is what ends up determining its value. Clearly AllFacebook is also an exception as it takes advantage of an existing brand name. SocialTimes.com however was focused on its own name not related to any other company. From all the companies I’ve spoken to in the space, names have always been important for creating mass-consumer products, however the name alone was worth very little.

LivingSocial was called Hungry Machine LLC when they first brought in funding and they eventually switched their branding to build lasting value. For them, just like any other startup, execution is ultimately the most important thing. The name is simply one tool in the entrepreneur’s toolbox of brand building.

Domain Negotiations

While I’m not going to broadcast the amount I spent on Holler.com, many people ask me about it on a regular basis. “How did you get Holler.com?!?!?”, they ask. The response is always the same: “I paid for it!” Depending on who you speak to, I got a good deal on the domain. Others, who have a long history with buying and selling domains may claim I paid too much (although I’ve only heard that from one person).

As Fred Wilson recently wrote, spending upwards of $50k on a domain is not unreasonable. That’s for startups that are VC funded. For all startups, the domain is a small part of their company’s story, but it’s definitely an important part. But how do you go about negotiating a domain? How do you get the best price? Here’s my list of tips in getting a great name:

Find A Name That Isn’t Taken
This is the most obvious one but most people don’t think it’s possible. How on earth can I secure a great domain name that hasn’t already been taken?!?!?! Believe it or not, there are plenty of names that haven’t been acquired. I regularly come up with business ideas and start brainstorming names only to find that there are actually a few legitimate names that are still available. Yes, the obvious names are gone, but there are still plenty of names to be had.

Honestly, for 99% of people, there is no reason to continue beyond this step. You are fooling yourself by believing that the name alone is going to be the answer to your problems. However if you have some cash to spend and you’re serious about building that killer brand, nobody’s here to stop you so continue on!

Ask For A Price
When you find a name that you can’t live without, you should feel comfortable asking the owner for the price. However, don’t give away your personal information. That means setting up a separate email account that you use just for domain negotiations. If you happen to be successful or simply someone who’s serious about building a business, you don’t want to give the domain owner any leverage in the negotiations. They want to sell their domain.

For the most part, if the domain is not one or two syllables and an english word, it doesn’t deserve a 5-figure price. The only exception to this rule is domain names that monetize well from SEO. NewLawnMower.com might be worth $20,000 because the domain generates a ton of affiliate revenue each month. While I doubt that’s the case for NewLawnMower.com, specifically, there’s plenty of domains out there that can convert on direct customers with no brand-value at all.

Let Them Know You Are Serious
Sometimes people will come around and try to pick up a domain for $50. There’s no way that will work on a premium domain name. However if you are willing to spend some money, let the seller know by making a legitimate offer. For a serious name, like Holler.com, or Flyer.com (random name but has a purpose), you need to at least offer a couple grand. However if the seller isn’t getting many offers, starting with a couple hundred won’t hurt you.

While you want to let the seller know you are serious, you also need to keep in mind that they aren’t getting offers every day (let alone every month). Just make sure that the seller knows your serious by either increasing your bid once after they reject your offer, or literally indicating that with your email inquiry.

Don’t Sound Desperate
If you really want the domain, make your offer and move on. If the person rejects the offer, wait a while to reply. There is rarely a need to rush a negotiation. The only person that wants to accelerate the negotiation is the seller as they’re the one who stands to gain something from the discussions in the short-term. They’re not in the business of building brands for the most part, they are in the business of selling digital assets.

They are here to sell you, not the other way around. Keep in mind that there are an unlimited number of words and phonetic combinations in the world and you do not need to attach yourself to one domain. You are the one in control of the conversation, not the seller.

Close The Deal Or Walk
You have the ultimate power: the ability to leave. When you are ready to negotiate a serious price on a domain, that seller wants nothing more than to close the sale. That’s because there are very few people in the world willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on domains. $5k, $10k, or $50k … all are in a different league than the average domain buyer. If you don’t like the price, move on. If you feel comfortable: close the deal. After some back and forth, state the number you want firmly and then move on.

Wear Your Name Proudly

Hopefully after some luck, negotiations, or both, you’ve acquired a name that you feel proud of. It’s time to wear that name proudly as you are now your business. Your new name is your brand name and that’s pretty much what you should go by since you’ve invested so heavily in it Whether you want a t-shirt with the name, an email address with the domain, or anything else related to the name, it is your duty to own it proudly.

Now that you’ve gotten a name you have begun a much greater journey. For most people, they stop at the name and never get much further with their business. That’s because getting a name is actually one of the easiest parts in the grand scheme of things. Yes, coming up with a compelling name requires some creativity and thought, but let’s be honest, building a business requires an obscene amount of dedication, persistence, and luck.

If you’ve got a great name, you have a great start. Now it’s time to move on to the hard stuff! What are your thoughts on naming companies? Anything I missed?

Read the rest of this post on the Holler blog.

That view is that all of these incubators serve an important role in teaching the most important lesson for any entrepreneur: your dreams truly can become a reality. That business idea that you question every night you go to sleep, and even consider quitting after spending months (or even years on), can actually be turned into reality. You see, while the tech publications celebrate the large funding rounds of startups, the huge exits of a select few, and the pivots of countless others, there are few publications that celebrate the pain that every entrepreneur feels.

The nights that you can’t sleep because you realize how crazy it was to pursue the dream you dreamt, or the days that you think another path would be a hell of a lot easier and honestly consider taking it. None of these days are covered or celebrated. This is where the incubators become valuable. We need more entrepreneurs in the world. We need people to know that ambitious dreams are actually possible to accomplish. In order for that to happen, we need more people to get a taste of success, no matter how big or small.

So how do they get there? In short: cheerleaders. The incubators help push these entrepreneurs along a path and encourage them to follow their gut instinct. “No, you aren’t crazy, you’re probably right”, mentors will tell the entrepreneurs. Right after your most terrifying moment when it seems like everything is about to collapse is probably when you’ll have your greatest breakthrough. In order for entrepreneurs to get through the steep drops that startup life brings, incubators serve an invaluable service: teaching entrepreneurs that if they dream it, they truly can create it.

I believed my own bullshit multiple times before I finally had a success. But after all those failures, all the pain that blew the wind from my sails, I learned that I actually wasn’t so crazy for believing. More importantly, that one success has given me the confidence to dream even bigger. If we can have one more believer in the world that they can create change, that they can turn a vision into a reality, and if incubators can help teach that lesson, I’m all for them no matter how many there are.

At those moments where you’re cursing yourself or feeling like you may have taken on something that’s too challenging, it’s helpful to have someone there to say “keep at it”! Whoever that may be, make sure you assign someone even if you don’t have a significant other to help you out. It could be one of your parents, a good friend, or anybody else.

Starting off with a long-term vision makes it way too easy to quit early on. Break up the project into chunks and then set reasonable goals. Eventually you’ll create your vision

The $10 Million Business Plan

When I met the IdleWorship team back in May, it was for a story on AllFacebook that I was doing. The company had yet to release their game, but they had already received a ton of attention thanks to the executives involved and the technology they were developing. They showed off their game to us, but throughout the conversation I couldn’t help but wonder how the CEO of the company had convinced Rick Thompson (Co-Founder of Playdom which sold to Disney $760 million) for millions of dollars in funding without launching anything.

I asked him and he showed me a guide which was larger than a full-length motion picture screenplay. It was comprehensive documentation of his ambitious vision to create a new type of God game. The plan was ambitious but more impressive was how the company was methodically testing the product that had already been in production for over a year. They had a beta group that was actively testing the product but they had yet to formally launch. In other words they were approaching testing the right way, not the way many people will advise you in Silicon Valley.

Launching The Right Way

For the entrepreneur, one of the greatest fears is having a bad launch. Internet entrepreneurs have startups like Color engrained in their mind as examples of launches gone wrong: lots of hype and a failure to deliver. For most, the fear is that if you don’t get it right the first time, you’ve lost your opportunity. It’s a legitimate fear. However the pressure to launch should actually be about the pressure to test. Launching an untested product is a recipe for disaster.

You get your product out the door, get coverage in various publications, see a surge in traffic, and then watch all of it disappear as the product fails to meet the expectations of its users. While you were able to get some tests completed, you’ve now done some damage to your brand by delivering an incomplete product. Don’t abuse your brand name by releasing untested products into the wild. At Holler, the strategy that we’ve begun using is developing products under different names, some of which will be in verticals completely unrelated to ours.

The result is that we’re able to test various components of our product without putting the Holler brand name at risk. While there’s still a risk that your product won’t meet expectations on the day that it launches, you’ve mitigated some of the risk by completing a lot of tests and adjusting. No, we haven’t done everything the right way, but our newly adopted approach is something I feel a lot more comfortable with. Do you think this safer, more methodical approach, is an effective way to launch?