I recently read an article about Nasty Gal, an eBay clothing retailer with nearly $100m in sales. Whilst those revenues are undoubtedly very impressive, it was this bit from the article that impressed me most:

“Instead, she quit her job and started an eBay page to sell some of the vintage designer items she found rummaging through Goodwill bins. She bought a Chanel jacket at a Salvation Army store for $8 and sold it for $1,000. She found Yves Saint Laurent clothing online on the cheap by Googling misspellings of the designer’s name, reasoning that anyone who didn’t know how to spell Yves Saint Laurent probably didn’t realize his value.”

Reading this, I could reminisce about my early days as an entrepreneur, where I tried a whole bunch of really whack ideas:

• I started an alternative music label, mostly because I really wanted to be cool and go to all the shows;
• I convinced female...

Ever since Google announced that they’d be shutting down Google Reader, I’ve been observing what’s been happening in the space of RSS readers / tools. What’s been interesting is that some companies / tools have been able to leverage this situation to their advantage by being an alternative option (to which ex-Google Reader customers could migrate to).

One of the companies that seems to have gained a lot of traction as a result is feedly (according to their traffic stats).

The thing about feedly is that I’ve been seeing it mentioned quite a few times in the Twitterverse in the last couple of months. It’s been touted as a great app, with a superior UI, and many of the people I follow (and regard as influencers to some extent) have adopted feedly (in favour of whatever they were using before).

Due to the work that they did until now, feedly was in the right place at the right time to...

When I wrote about being born an entrepreneur, I did so to communicate what I felt / thought in an effort to be validated. Because if I can be validated, if I can find others like me, then surely it means that I’m not crazy. Right?

The various tweets & affirmations that I got subsequently made me feel like I wasn’t alone. But then I read this article about entrepreneurs being soft-bipolar:

“In general, though, many believe that running startups can drive people to experience intense ups and downs. While this is true, it’s often the other way around: People in the bipolar spectrum are attracted to entrepreneurship. Building businesses can be a great way for hypomanic entrepreneurs to apply their energy and creativity.

Some people are more vulnerable to mood fluctuations and can also experience episodes of dark depression that may include feelings of hopelessness, irritability, fatigue...

So yesterday I got an e-mail from a WooThemes customer, which read:

“Thank you for your answer! This confirms your superior support reputation.”

My immediate reaction was to smile, because the customer was happy, and this is something that we proactively strive to achieve at Woo. But then, I realized how easily that could’ve worked out differently too if the customer didn’t have a great experience with us.

If someone heard that you were a great company to work with (and decides to use your product / service / app because of that) and they then experience the exact opposite, it’s not only a neutral outcome. Instead that customer has an exponentially bad experience, because their expectation was that much more / better than they got.

As a company, you weren’t thus competing on neutral footing; you had to deliver (at least) on par with your reputation and thus the expectation of that...

I’ve seen many odd e-mails from (odd?) customers over the years, but to this day, I’m always most surprised when I see e-mails that includes snippets like these:

• “Wow! You got back to me!”
• “Thank you for responding to my e-mail. I thought that I was just sending my e-mail into a blackhole.”
• “Thanks for helping me out & answering all my questions. My previous experiences trying to get help from software companies have been really bad.”

In an age, where every Tom, Dick & Harry are saying that their companies are offering their customers good service, I’m surprised to see customers with so many scars relating to previous experiences. I mean, I think we treat our customers well at Woo, but we’re in no way perfect; yet they really appreciate the experiences they have with us.

I don’t need to speculate on what other companies are or aren’t doing with regards to customer service; all I...

Over the years, I’ve been involved in hiring 30+ team members to WooThemes, of which 24 remains on the team today. If I had to distill all of that experience into one piece advice it would be this:

When hiring someone that you really want to join your team, it’s critical that the individual wants to join the team as badly as you want them to join.

My wife always tells me that her dad used to warn her about potential boyfriends when she was younger. He would always say: “Never chase after a boy or a bus.”

This resonates with my experiences of growing our team; when I’ve aggressively chased a hire and compromised on what exactly I wanted (i.e. salary, exact job description, benefits, etc.), it generally meant that our relationship started on the wrong foot.

Instead we’ve had most success hiring the individuals that would do everything in their power to be part of our team. On paper...

You’ll know from my writing in the past, that I’m a big advocate of making one’s customers pay (which is something I’ve become a little battle-hardened on over the years). I’m however also a firm believer in giving customers a superior experience & I’m more than happy to fight for my customers and defend their livelihoods when needed.

Somewhere within that landscape of differing views on what constitutes good customer experiences and how I / we should interact with customers, I’ve developed a tendency to fire customers when the situation requires it.

Taking a step back, I think it’s important to say that not all customers are created equally; in a very similar way to not all companies or products being equal either.

As such, I don’t believe that the customer is always right (instead I now believe that it was a rookie error to even think like this from the beginning). I now believe...

“The answer comes down to one simple question – relevance. Many entrepreneurs don’t want to just be successful. They want to be relevant. And they want to stay relevant.

Being relevant means people pay attention to you, care about what you have to say and talk about you.

Money alone can’t buy relevance.”

This is from a recent Michael Lazerow post & it reminded me a little of one of my personal needs.

In broad terms, happiness means success to me. But I’m also happy when I feel relevant; not just in professional life, but also my personal life.

I want to be heard, I want to be validated and I want the opportunity to just be me.

This isn’t some narcissistic thing that only a elite few people experience either; I bet if you ask yourself why you get up in the morning to work on whatever, somewhere within that reason there’s the need to be relevant. Everyone wants to be proud of...

On Saturday morning, I was attending (i.e. my 16-month old son can’t drive; so I was the chaperone) a first birthday party for friends’ twins and I got speaking to someone that I met there. The conversation quickly turned to entrepreneurship and how it can’t be taught; instead you’re either born with critical characteristics that makes you an entrepreneur.

I then read this, this morning:

“Startups, like professional football, are best done by the most desperate people on the planet. Products don’t just walk out the door on their own. Sooner or later, to ship something amazing, you have to dig deep and bring out your beast. A horse running wild is a rare sight, but it takes your breath away every time.”

This struck a chord with me.

Over the last 11-odd years that I’ve been building businesses (the initial attempts - when I was still at school - can’t really be called businesses and...

I’ve had quite a few Clarity calls this past week with entrepreneurs asking for advice on how they should go about building & branding their new startup.

My best advice at the moment: Don’t try compete on features.

Most markets that you can enter right now, are already quite saturated and you’re likely to face existing competition. Due to the very low barrier to entry to build a new SaaS / web / mobile app, you’ll also find that the competition’s offering is mostly the same as your solution.

This means that there’s simply no competitive advantage in trying to out-feature your competitors and such a strategy is very unlikely to get you the traction you need to build a sustainable business.

Instead here’s two alternatives to build a competitive advantage for your startup:

1. Branding. Tom Tunguz rightly says that branding is the next essential startup competency. In a crowded space...