more about ali asaria
There is a negative correlation between the outside temperature in Toronto, and the number of orders we get online.
I.e., when it’s colder, more people go online to order at Well.ca.
I think I can blog about this now that everything is fixed.
I was poking around with the registration form for the Canadian Innovation Exchange this morning (don’t ask). That’s when I noticed, quite obviously, that the webpage allowed me to preview my submitted application without logging in.
So I tried changing the ®istration_id= variable in the URL when I noticed that it was possible to view every application, simply by modifying the URL string. You could also edit them.
Yes, that’s right, for a while this morning, it was possible to view every business plan submitted to the CIX. Financing plans, customer lists, strategy, everything — all open to the public with some simple URL rewriting.
Maybe I am over strict about security, I have to be — but this, to me, this is irresponsible.
They were responsible about my input: I contacted the CIX, and they promptly wrote back to say that they’ve fixed the problem.
I think it was safe for those who submitted their applications to assume that their data would be secured appropriately, so my lesson of the day is to those collecting confidential data: if you don’t understand internet security, hire someone that does. If you are a developer and think that having a random 2-digit number in the URL is security, ask for help.
Message to whomever was responsible for this:
<angry face>
Startup Tips for the Early, Early Days
pure, distilled advice from OnStartups
In the last couple months, two of Canada’s most famous startup founders (and media darlings) have been called out for over-hyping their previous accomplishments.
First was Tom Williams, who was called out by the Toronto Vancouver Sun in a three page article.
Second, and more recently was Albert Lai who was called out by VC Rick Segal on Rick’s own blog. Albert is famous for being the founder of MyDesktop. Rick responds by saying:
I spoke to the founders and know the founders…. You were not, have not, and never will be consider a co-founder of MyDesktop
Yikes.
The writers were definitely being harsh. However, from what I can gather, both founders have stretched the truth when it comes to their previous accomplishments (when I compare the facts in the articles with what I’ve heard from their own mouths)
I think it should also make us all reflect about how we as startup people present ourselves. It should also make us second-guess anything we hear about “super-founders” — from their mouths or from the media’s.
Work hard, be nice, don’t lie, admit you’re just like everyone else, be nice to your loved ones, water the plants.
We’re all gong to be okay.
In the last two years, I have met more than ten startup advisors, each trying to convince me that I need their service.
During a Deloitte Fast-50 networking meeting, I met the CEO of BlueCat Networks, Michael Hyatt. His only advice to me went as follows:
If anyone ever asks you to pay them as a startup advisor, say no. If you need help, call me and I will help you tell them to say no.
Michael hates startup advisors.
(I am not talking about people on advisory boards, mentors, or advice-givers, (from which I have personally benefited greatly) I am talking about people that have fishy-sounding company names whom you did not approach and that want to offer you advice for money and/or shares — usually large sums of money).
Maybe not all advisors are evil. I dunno. But I do have advice for advisors and the entrepreneurs that are approached by them:
Advisors: Stop making entrepreneurs feel inadequate
The last two advisors that approached me began their pitch to me by telling me that my business sucked. I called other startups that also spoke to the same advisor and they were told the same thing.
You see, bad advisors begin by trying to make the entrepreneur feel inadequate. There are two reasons for this, I think:
As for the latter reason… whatever. But as for the former reason, I have a message to the advisors:
Relationships based on this kind of need are not healthy. If you really want me to use your services, it would be smarter to earn my respect, rather than break down my confidence. Instead of coming to a meeting giving me vague statements of how you think I don’t know what I am doing, come with suggestions for how you think we could improve.
Startup Entrepreneurs: Don’t believe Advisors when they tell you you’ll fail without their special advice.
Fellow entrepreneurs, you are being approached because you are successful. If you are really going to fail without this specific coach, then you shouldn’t be doing this job. You may not know all the answers, but as a startup in a brand new field, no one does.
I don’t understand how any random advisor whom nobody’s ever heard of thinks that their advice is worth X thousands of dollars per hour (a frighteningly common rate) when you can go to the library and find books by the best business women and men in the world for $19.99. Free blogs offer even better advice.
In this regard, the paid advisor business model doesn’t work. It can’t work.
Entrepreneurs: You want full time people
Many advisors will tell you that since you can’t afford them full time, they will work one day a week at a salary that is twice what you pay a new grad to work full time.
The myth is that startup’s are about brilliant ideas and minimum work. The truth is is that it only 2% ideas, and mostly staying up at night, answering as many emails as possible.
Do you really believe that, no matter how experienced the person is, that an advisor can do the same work in eight hours as two people working full time? Absurd.
If advisors really want to do the day-to-day work, they should apply as staff. If they do, you will say “I can’t afford you” and the conversation will be over. As it should be.
And if advisors want to get paid to whiteboard ideas but have others do the work, you should be smart enough to realize that you’ll get by without that.
Startup Advisors: Don’t ever, ever tell me that stocks are free currency
I have been told, over and over, “don’t worry, you can pay me in stock. Stock for you is like printing new currency, so you shouldn’t worry”.
Um, no.
Shares are all we have as entrepreneurs. You’ve been here so you should know that. Entrepreneurs, if you really want to prove your merit as a CEO, protect the one thing you have ultimate control over: shares. Advisors, nothing is free.
What are you saying, Ali, are all advisors destined to fail?
Well, as long as there are unconfident entrepreneurs out there, no, I think you’ll do fine. But I really think most startup advisors need to look long an hard at what they are doing.
Advisors: Why are you working with startups? Why don’t you work with larger companies, offering them advice and know that they can afford it?
Wrong Answer # 1: “Working with startups is my passion. I love startups”
My response: working with startups is a great honour. I agree. But the cost of the ticket to get in the party is taking less pay, and higher risk (with the potential for larger end payoffs). So if you really love startups, give up your expensive life and take the same salary as the rest of us. And if you can’t handle that risk, then move on, you’re no longer startup material.
Wrong Answer #2: “I see so many startups that need my advice with their business plans and meeting investors. I can offer so much to them”
My response: the implicit relationship you are building with startups is “startups are immature, and I can help”. This is a formula for a bad relationship.
So where are you going here, Ali?
Well my advice can be boiled down to two messages.
Entrepreneurs: like Michael Hyatt, my advice is to say no to any unsolicited advisor that wants you to pay them. If you need staff, hire staff. If you need advice, read. Talk to the many, much more qualified people out there that love to give free advice. If you feel like you’re getting nowhere and you’ll do anything to get help, realize that we’ve all been there — be patient.
Advisors: close up shop. After closing your startup advisory business, you now have two choices: work for big companies as a consultant, and ask for big company money. Or… work for startups as an employee or contractor, and ask for startup company money. If you think startups can’t afford you because you’re so valuable, then congratulations, you’ve graduated from being a startup company employee. You can now a) start your own startup or b) work for larger companies.
After reading this post by StartupNorth I decided to finally write out this article on a related subject.
We tested out a new revenue generator yesterday, and the preliminary tests are wonderful.
Joy.
This is the greatest rush in innovation: you try something new — a neat little trick that is just beyond obvious — you test it out, and it works. Holy macaroni, it works! Why doesn’t everyone do it? Shh.. don’t tell them.
One of my most wisdom enhancing experiences this past year was at the Founders & Funders dinner organized by Jevon and David. I spent the entire night sitting with Mark Skapinker, one of the bestest and inspiring guys in the Canadian startup scene.
His biggest lesson to me came in the form of an observation he made about a strategy that startups must take in order to be successful. Startups must be agile.
We live in an age, Mark told me, unlike any before with regards to the ease at which we can invest small amounts of time and money into tests for the marketplace. We can spend a day building a prototype of a new site and seeing if people will go for it, we can change the colors on our site, or build a new login mechanism — all with minimal investment. Do it quickly, cheaply, and see if it works.
The best startups are doing this constantly — testing the waters until they find something that works. Set success criteria and measure your results.
From watching startups present their business plans, one of the things that scares me most is when I see startups making guesses, requesting huge sums of money to see if they work, and doing it without shame. You need how many million dollars before we can even be sure this is a real business? Huh?
It’s not that I mind that you’re probably going to waste a lot of other people’s money. It’s your family, significant others, and your children that I really care about. Please don’t do this to them.
You need to build a plan that is nimble — one where you can do multiple experiments for low cost until you find the one that works.
An example — when we were first pitching the idea of Well.ca, people asked us how we were going to market the site. We could have come up with ideas: we’re going to spend 500K on Facebook ads, and another 500K on making fake blogs that point to us. But as long as these ideas are unproven, you might as well spend 500K on magic beans.
What we did, instead, was to allocate tiny amounts of money to specific testing grounds, and we set up metrics right from the start to see if they’re working. We can test out the university market, for example, with $100 student newspaper ad with a special URL in a single chosen university. If it works, we can do this for every student newspaper in Canada. If not, we’ve only lost $100.
If you look at our site, you can see this in different places: we spend minimal amounts of development effort testing out some new ideas, such as customer reviews, and sat back to see if they work. If they work, we’ll fix our prototypes and make them into full-featured products/features. If not, we just wasted a couple of hours of AJAX scripting.
The strategy of quick prototyping with assigned metrics is also the greatest way to win arguments in a startup. Let’s say someone has an idea that you think won’t work. The ultimate response is: “find a way to build a prototype in half a day, if it increases sales, I’ll believe you”
If you’re right, you’ve only wasted half a day of dev time. If you’re wrong, well you can use the new revenue to buy jewelery engraved with the words “I’m sorry for ever doubting you.”
It’s also a great way to get funding. Instead of pitching an idea, you can show that what you’re saying already works. (And all you need funding for is the Aeron chairs).
My experience with this kind of business model is that the end result is that you will discover one thousand new business practices that are lousy wastes of money. For every thousand, however, you will find one that works magically — usually the one that you thought was too simple to work. I try to spread the same philosophy to new people at Well.ca — sometimes I let people work on projects I am pretty sure will never work (when it’s their idea) but I make sure to say “Yeah, we can try that, put X amount of time into for a week, then we’ll try it out for two weeks and we can say whether or not it is successful only if Y or Z happens”. This teaches people the philosphy of being agile. It also teaches people to focus on achieving results, rather than implementing ideas (which is really the point of this entire post).
Multi-faceted, agile, iterative strategy:
My other experience with the agile strategy is that many ideas will only work for a certain amount of time. Someone will copy your idea if it’s great, and they will have the advantage of not having wasted time on all the failed experiments.
An example: at one point in time, Well.ca dominated the (Canadian) health market for Google Adwords. It was a new service that I learned right as it was released, and I used every tool available to make sure we used it to its full extent. Our campaigns were designed with two stages: we would have big groups of test adwords and then we would promote them to a different group if they did well. Budgets were small, but if things worked, we would increase them. We did well.
But after a year or so, everyone who was anyone was paying for adwords and our positions went down. Adwords are paid for based on an auction model, and it got to a point where competitors with higher price margins (i.e. competitors that were charging customers too much) could push us out.
The market got saturated. We’ve moved on.
This happens with all new markets.
Friends, your glory days wills soon be over.
So my advice is to continue being agile, always looking for the next thing. Design a business model that sustains continual agility and experimentation.
As Jevon puts it:
Build the product, test the market, sell. GOTO 10
A robotic razor blade that works like a Roomba. You put it on your face and, in the morning, you are clean shaven.
Next StartupCamp is starting now — sign up this very second if you want to go (tickets will sell out immediately)
Have you ever seen the ads on Canadian TV called “Brand Power“?
The first time I saw them, I was amazed at how cheesy and simplistic they were for modern television. In an age where shampoo ads have CGI kangaroos with attractive women playing volleyball all with a remixed hit single playing in the background, these ads create such a stark contrast.
Brand Power ads have ugly music, a normal-looking woman host, and no psychological “catch” to them — it’s basically a woman saying “you should buy this” and she clearly works for for a biased company (it’s called Brand Power® for gosh-sake).
But here’s the crazy part: the ads work. Anytime a Brand Power ad starts on TV, we at Well.ca see a big, noticeable spike in purchases of that product. There’s no other external advertising that I know of that creates such a spike on a specific product line.
People see the cheesy, corporate Brand Power ads and buy the stuff.
For me, this is a lesson in advertising. I think, sometimes, television has gone so far in advertising that I sometimes see ads where the entire goal seems to be to create a psychological association between the product and some desirable notion. This can be a good thing, sure, but should probably be done in addition to making your proposition.
The Brand Power ads are not a sales pitch. They are not a subtle psychological advertisement. They are a simple idea: “I am a biased spokesperson, but I am not here to play mind games: there is this product, it does this.”
And, crazy enough, it works. It works so well it makes me crazy.
Maybe consumers are sick of having their minds played with. Advertisers often feel that people don’t want to see advertisements, so they must disguise their ads as entertainment, sneaking the ad inside.
The lesson I am sending to you all you dudes who think about ads is to try this revolutionary new idea:
What if you tried making simple, low budget ads that don’t pretend to be anything but an ad? Be polite, clear, and don’t make crazy promises.
The lesson from Brand Power is that this seems to work better than the high-budget ads we’ve become used to. People will buy. Don’t just accept the common belief that ads must be complicated.
Honestly I find this difficult to accept — were it not for our stats…
?????
In an effort to get free travel, I used to volunteer to work at the booths when Research In Motion would participate in mobile device or Java conferences. I took pride in how much I knew about our product, the road map, the internals, and everything else. I was a RIM guru at the age of 19. Or at least I pretended to be.
At conferences, people would grill me trying to get information about the future of Blackberry. Would they go color? Was the move to Java really going to happen? When will they add an MP3 player?
I would smile and dance around the questions.
Until my boss overheard me.
He was mad.
“Why are you answering questions about confidential information?”
“Don’t worry, I never gave anything away,” I shyly responded. You see, I would read press releases to make sure what was public and what wasn’t — I practiced weaving around the questions, mimicking what I saw from RIM’s PR.
I thought I was being smart.
Until my boss told me to stop. Stop being smart. He also told me the secret to how to answer information regarding confidential information in a technology company. It’s something I want to share because it may be something you want to share with your co-workers.
You see, in smaller, emerging companies, the employees take pride in being on “the inside”. That’s awesome — this reinforces ownership and teamwork. You’ve all met with a friend who works at Google, Facebook, or Microsoft that brags to you about the secret things going on. People are proud when they can answer questions others can’t. So when someone like myself back then at RIM — a 19 year old kid who knew stuff that reporters were begging to know — was asked about stuff I knew not to talk about I tried to shy away from answering the questions while still implying that I knew. This is a mistake.
Here’s what my boss clearly taught (okay, ordered) me to to do:
SAY YOU DON’T KNOW.
For example:
“Hey is RIM going to come out with colour devices?”
Bad answer from non-PR employee: “Well, as mentioned in our press releases, RIM has been testing colour devices and may move to a colour LCD platform pending changes from the blah blah, but whether or not we are doing so is considered confidential so all I can say is blah blah”
Good answer: “I don’t know, I don’t work in that department.”
You see, although it often makes sense to have a delicate PR-spin answer to questions about confidential matters, the people that work with you must be told that this task is exclusively the job of your PR and Executive teams. Others should just say they don’t know. Saying you don’t know is much more polite than “I am not allowed to speak about that” or “That’s currently confidential” — because otherwise you sound like you’re hiding something.
In a small company, many of our jobs cross over into different departments: so your customer service people might know things about your confidential pricing policies, for example. You’ve got to explain to your customer service people that they can say they “as a customer service person, that isn’t something I know or deal with” without being dishonest.
Most of us startups are good about making employees of the company sign non-disclosure agreements. That’s not enough. Here are my tips for your company in order to protect what’s confidential:
are especially secret!
Another thing you might worry about is gossip. People will tell their significant other about how much money your company just raised, who will in turn tell their parents, who will in turn tell…
Honestly there’s not much you can do to stop that — So plan accordingly!
