Against-the-Grain Business Advice 
The entrepreneurial lifestyle, especially for startups, is replete with long hours, hard work and sacrifice. Before the private jets and big house, Bay Area entrepreneurs must navigate the hyper-competitive business world, especially in the tech industry. But whether you’re creating a new software, launching a law practice or starting a financial consulting firm, the struggle is the same. To help you, we found advice from a successful tech entrepreneur who created one of the world’s coolest companies.
Rand Fishkin, CEO and founder of Seattle-based Moz, a company that creates excellent internet marketing, analytics and SEO software, shared 7 business tips that helped him find success. But they’re not the typical tips you’d expect to hear. This blog features three of them to help our entrepreneurial friends and corporate clients find that next level of success.
1. Marketing First, Product Second
Fishkin acknowledges that this piece of advice “goes against every piece of wisdom you’ll find in the startup world”, but he has seen it work and has lived the experience at his own company.
His reasoning is quite simple: If you build a great product but find that no one cares, you’re in trouble. It can be quite disheartening and even discouraging when you invest in countless hours, emotions and finances on something that’s not gaining traction. And if you’ve already maxed your budget on development, you may not have be able to produce the robust marketing effort needed to boost your product.
But if you begin by building a solid marketing effort, you set yourself up in a good position. Fishkin writes, “even if your early products don’t take off, you have a captive audience that’s returning again and again because you’re producing something of value (usually content, thought leadership, educational resources, unique data, or free tools).”
Fishkin’s company, Moz, was built on the back of a blog. For the first year and a half, Moz (SEOMoz, at the time) had very few tools to offer consumers. But because they had a large audience of 10,000 daily readers (in 2007), they were able to iterate their products, grow and evolve with their help.
“By late 2008, we had a unique product that was pulling in subscribers far beyond just our community of blog readers,” Fishkin writes. “Without that ‘marketing first’ approach, I’m skeptical if we ever could have gotten a product off the ground.”
2. MVPs Suck
In a world where ideas are born, evolve and get executed at lightspeed, the best way to compete is to create something small and minimal and then iterate, iterate, iterate on it. But there’s one caveat to this process, according to Fishkin: Minimum Viable Products kinda suck.
“The problem with Minimum Viable Products is that they are very rarely worthy of dramatic praise, very rarely produce exceptional value, and very rarely earn the attention of the influencers & amplifiers (or at least the early adopters) critical to getting traction,” he writes. “And yet, that’s exactly what a startup needs.”
Instead, Fishkin says you should aim for an EVP, or Exceptional Viable Product.
“Too many startups build mediocre products because they’re trying to stay lean and deliver MVPs,” he writes. “Don’t deliver mediocrity – put in the time and effort required to be remarkable.”
His advice is to keep MVPs in house and test with select customers, but don’t release them. Keep iterating until those beta testers or customers start calling your product “amazing” and feel really impressed by it.
If you sell services, you could translate this as a call to sharpen your skills with your initial clients and avoid growing too quickly. Growing quickly spreads you thin and puts you at risk of a decrease in the quality of your service. Once you’ve mastered your skills, you’ll find that you’re working more efficiently with more bandwidth for new business.
3. Aptitude Is Great, But Attitude is Better
You know the story. A startup spearheaded by an entrepreneurs with an elite pedigrees -- Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Google, Apple, Vox -- that crash and burns. Or worse yet, never takes off the ground. According to Fishkin, a “shocking number of startups fail” despite these credentials.
On the other side of the coin are those self-made success stories about people with nothing more than a burning passion, hard work ethic and an attitude that keeps them going and grinding day after day until they emerge on top.
Give me a team of people who share the same values, beliefs, and mission and who care far more about those than they do about who funds them and how they’re going to get acquired for enough money to buy a house in Silicon Valley,” Fishkin writes.
When hiring, he says, “Don’t be stymied because you can’t find a resume that fits the startup world’s preconceived notions of ‘quality’. Meet and interview people whose passion for their craft and excitement about your project intersect with shared values & opinions on how a company should be built.”
For 4 more unlikely tips for entrepreneurs from Rand Fishkin, read his full blog post here.
photo credit: StockMonkeys.com via photopin cc
