A Few More Gems from Rory

After our group session with Rory earlier in the week, our heads were reeling with book recommendations, poignant questions, and telling quotations. Here are a few of my favourites.

1. Queuing for a nightclub is a good thing, queuing at the airport check-in is a terrible thing.

2. Pay the price of imperfection for the sake of clarity.

3. Our behaviour is not the product of our attitudes; our attitudes are a product of our behaviour.

4. Bright-line rules have their place in society, especially concerning tax evasion. 

5. All human choice is path dependent.

6. Everyone should read Nate Silver's book 'The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't'.

7. TripAdvisor is an example of a reputational feedback loop, where the consumer can only benefit as service gets better.

8. As the banking system has proven, you can't trust people who can't get hurt. We need a means of retaliation to develop any sort of trust.

9. Changing one little thing can have a hugely disproportionately effect, such as the $300 million button from a  large e-tailer.

10. The SCARF model, as shown below,  is a summary of important discoveries from neuroscience about the way people interact socially. The internet has the potential to tell us a great deal more about human behaviour.

Are Product Days Productive?

Sometimes you just need to knuckle down and get some work done. But what's the best way to do this? And what about all the other stuff you need to do before you can even start? Well, yesterday Seeker had a Product Day, and so I decided to catch up with the Founder and CEO, Daniel Wilson, to see how (and whether) it works.

1.       What is a product day ?

A product day is a full day when we step out of our regular roles to understand what we’ve got in the product, where we are as a business, and what we want to do over the next 3-6 months.  It gives us a chance to think about our tech and our customers at a higher level.

2.       Why did you arrange it?

The main point was to stop any silos of purpose and knowledge building up, as we’re all working semi-independently because there aren’t many of us.  We need to all be working on the same plan, or we won’t make the right sort of progress.

3.       What did you want to achieve from it ?

We took an inventory of features built, we planned the next 3 months major features to build (develop, or dev), everyone knows our goals around sales and investment

4.       What methods did you use and which ones work best?

We used lots of brainstorming, and we had bits of cardboard and sticky notes, which allowed us to move our ideas around afterwards into more logical groupings.  We used the important/urgent matrix (which is one of my very favourite things) to prioritise our work.

5.       What did you actually achieve?

A sense of purpose and a to do list.

6.       What's the next step?

Today the tech guys are sizing the dev work and planning iterations, and I’m starting to work on more heavily on our sales website, because we realised it was a major blocker to a lot of other work we wanted to do.

7.       Any advice you'd give to startups now in hindsight?

Do more prep than you were going to (My section on “state of the nation” was harder to talk through off the cuff than I had thought), and expect to go through fewer items in the agenda: This is really the time to have those discussions that normally get glossed over, e.g. what’s more important, a new feature or fixed bugs, or sales collateral.

Colliding with Rory Sutherland

Yesterday Rory Sutherland paid our startups a visit to share his wisdom, experience, and humorous (yet informative) stories. We decided to turn what would have been a private session into a very public, and live, Google Hangout. Rory spoke about a wide range of topics, including a $300 million online button and why airports compel us to buy Toblerones. You can watch the whole 2 hour session here, and as this was such a successful experiment, we will definitely be hosting more Hangouts (with even better recording equipment). 

Check back tomorrow for some of Rory's key topics, book recommendations, and tips for startups.

Collide With Rory

Tomorrow, Collider12 and the startups are having a group session with Rory Sutherland at Ingenious Media.

What makes this session a little different is that you'll be able to join in too, as we're hosting a Google Hangout. From 11am on May 1st, you'll be able to put your questions to @Rory with the hashtag #CollideWithRory, or by joining the hangout at 11.30am. It will be broadcasted on Google+ and YouTube. This is a pretty special opportunity, so get thinking and get asking.

Workshop with Matchbox Mobile

Last week the Collider12 startups had a workshop with Andrew Farrell, co-founder and CEO of Matchbox Mobile. He shared a few of tips for startups based on his experiences during the last eight years.

Sales and Relationships

• In order for any business to grow, you need someone selling your business, making a decent sales team essential.
• You need to have people speaking for you and about you at every opportunity, and this can only happen by meeting lots of people
• By building rapports you can create a mutual understanding and genuine friendship that could take you anywhere in the future.
• People can transcend companies and so one relationship could be your key to many different opportunities.
•  Never turn a meeting down, you never know where it may lead.

Maintain standards and Reputation

• The individual values behind the reason you started need to be maintained and shared with employees and customers. If you lose this vision, you’ll lose direction and your principles.

Hire the Right People to Build the Right Team

• The single biggest challenge I have ever faced is trying to hire the right people. Perhaps it’s a bit simplistic, but I've always found the pub test to be the best way to decide. If you could go and have a beer with them and happily chat for a couple of hours, 90% of the time they’re going to be the right fit for you. You need a rapport that goes beyond their skills and talents, as a time will come where you need to depend on them.
• I don’t think it is cheating to hire friends, as long as they have the skills you need.
• If you have to offer them an incentive to join your startup, they aren’t the right person to join your startup. You need people who are committed and that have the passion and interest already there. Once you start offering incentives, you have to keep it going which is a commitment you cannot make.
• How you manage your mistakes with the customers (as, trust me, everyone makes mistakes) is can be incredibly important. We have made some of our strongest relationships by handing our failures very well. You have to share your successes and failures with your customers as well as your team.

Adapt to Change

• There will always be multiple and rapid changes in and around your business that you will need to adapt to.
• There will also be changes to how your product is used, what your product is, and changes within your company. If you cannot evolve with these changes, you are going to fail.

Make Decisions

• The worst thing you could do is to make no decision at all. It is far better to make a wrong decision as that’s all part of the process to the right decision. By recognising your mistakes you can correct your course to get on the right path to success.

Being the cleverest person in the room counts for nothing if you’re unable to manage your business:

• Taking care of the business is your number one priority.