We spent the day in Iasi, Romania with the ThinSlices team working on a mobile version of the FastSell application.

Our visit to Iasi was radically shortened as a result of a snow storm leaving Denver. Unfortunately we only had 2 evenings in what can only be described as an enchanted city.

First mentioned somewhere back in 1408 when it was under Moldavian rule, it has been invaded and ravaged on a number of occasions by the Tartars, the Ottomans and most recently the Russians. Through all this it seems to have maintained its architectural beauty. Coming into the city, the Palace of Culture is an amazing site.

We took an early morning walk through the slightly sloping and winding streets, watching the early morning commuters head to work on trams that brought to mind inter-war images of Eastern Europe.

The city is the second largest in Romania and appears to be the cultural, economic, academic and technological centre of the region. The ThinSlices team have some of the best user experience folks that we have worked with from around the world and we look forward to a long term relationship with them and the city of Iasi.

This blog couldn’t end without a mention of the food and people, we ate out both evenings and had some of the best food ever. The borscht was brilliant, chicken liver and polenta made just like grandma would make it and super friendly people from the restaurant to Tarom airlines.

Can’t wait to visit again and spend sometime really immersing myself in Iasi.

Last night we stayed up until around 2.30am trying to sort out connecting flights. Eventually we had a multinational team on the case with friends in Romania, reservations in London and us in D.C. working all angles. Up a 6am we managed to get confirmation on Wednesday morning flight to Romania. Our Romanian adventure has been significantly shortened!

On a more interesting note, these 767′s have pretty large bathrooms, definitely the kind of aircraft you want to be on if your thinking about joining the mile high club!

We’ll get into Heathrow around 10pm this evening, going to be weird entering on a European passport. I’ve definitely been paying more attention to my new adoptive nation. News in the Wall Street Journal this morning is I’m part of the ‘Lost Generation’. Italy’s 40 something’s who are being taxed to the hilt. Now here’s the really funny part, election candidates include Berlusconi, who can be credited with putting the country in a shambles in the first place, not to mention bribery and sex scandals. Then we have Grillo, former comedian turned activist. If nothing at all they could charge an entrance fee to a circus.

I do seriously think that politicians are the real problem, take them out the equation and the world would be a better place. Then again, the whole economic downturn may simply relate to the last trip Jason and I made to London. All I recall is large amounts of vodka, table dancing and an Amex bill that could have quit possibly sparked the global meltdown.

Brace yourselves London, we’re here!

Just our luck! We had started thinking that this was the winter that never was. We’ve hardly had any snow the whole winter and when it does snow it comes while Jason and I are traveling. Not today, we awoke to a blizzard and today is the day we begin our marathon journey across the US, Europe and Africa.

The whole day we expected our flight to be cancelled, but it never happened. Got to the airport, everything on time, boarded and all was looking well. We pushed back, the de-icing started and the de-icing kept going for about 40 minutes! That’s when we knew we’d be spending the night in D.C.

So we’re in a hotel drinking martinis and eating steak, courtesy of United. We still have to deal with Tarom airlines and we’ll be lucky if we get to Romania by Wednesday. Keep the Borscht warm, we’ll be there as quick as we can.

Looking forward to a week of playing strategy with Lego, working with friends in Romania, doing some months to minutes with Dan and finally getting to Polana in Kalkbay for tapas!

A couple of weeks ago I attended Startup Grind 2013. This is the first time I’ve attended a Startup Grind event and it was at the Computer History museum in the heart of Silicon Valley. I want to share some of the lessons I’ve learned from some super successful people at Startup Grind. I really love that the presentations are short (between 10 and 30 minutes), and the message is clear and to the point. So here’s an important lesson from Day One.

Jared Allgood (@jmallgood) kicked off the morning telling “Wait! Don’t take the Money!” His message was that once you take that investment, everything changes. You actually have to start delivering on all the insane forecasts you made and, suddenly, six months in reality starts to become hell.

Mark Suster (founder of BuildOnline and Koral, and current venture capitalist) seems to reflect Jared’s message. Mark says a very common question he gets is: “I’ve gotten an offer from a VC, but they want me to do X, what do you think?” Mark states that X is always something non-standard that the entrepreneur knows in his gut isn’t right. His advice is to not to just take the money and run. “Trust your instincts – they will serve you well as an entrepreneur.”

Just because you receive an offer from an interested investor does not mean it’s in your best interest. Taking VC offer does not mean your company or the product is successful…just yet. As experienced entrepreneurs will tell you, there can be many headaches that come along with the first offer to invest. Beware of the seagulls.

This bit of advice hit close to home for me, and brought back memories of my first entrepreneurial venture. In our first startup, at the height of the dot.com boom, we raised a couple of million in venture capital to develop our Web content management platform. The day we signed the agreement, we were ecstatic. Fast forward a few months, in and reality set in. We’d been growing slowly, being careful not to overextend ourselves. With the capital injection, we doubled our size and moved into new offices. But, we hadn’t properly understood how to monetize our product, our sales projections were way out of whack, and our product development team was full of ego. Reality set in and the pressure crushed the team. I’m not saying we would have made it without investment, but I do believe we would have stood a better chance of survival as a bootstrapped company.

This brings me back to Jared Allgood’s message. He makes a point of building value in your product, thereby building value in your company. Just because the VC is offering X amount of money doesn’t mean it aligns with the value of your product or your vision. Although a great startup rule is to focus on selling your product for profit, keep in mind that instead of having your end-goal be money, concentrate on building a valuable, must-have product. Focus on building the product the customer can’t live without.

When building a new product, Jarred suggested three success steps to ensure its value:

• Cold contacting is a great way of testing the value of a product with the target market
• Involve the full buying panel in providing feedback
• Ask the money questions upfront, in other words, “What would you pay for this product?”

Interestingly, but not unexpectedly as this is really close to our Emerge Studio philosophy, Jared found that products with a smaller scope brought a higher return. In his initial contact with prospective customers, the price people were prepared to pay for a feature-rich application was well below what they anticipated. On a second round of presentations to the prospects, with a more focused product, research found prospects were prepared to pay more for the product.

Lesson Learned: Smaller Scope = More $

Forget the value of the investor and concentrate on the value of your product. A smaller scope product with a more focused feature set gave a dollar value of 8-10 times than that of a product addressing a broader requirement and more feature rich.

The key message and takeaway from Jared Allgood is to avoid the false validation (taking investment money too early). If you fall into this trap, you’re going to get halfway through development before you realize you’ve lost your vision and it was a mistake.

Read more advice on building a successful startup:

Monetize, Monetize, Monetize: a discussion of Startup Grind 2013
Find some inspiration in some of Jared Allgood’s public presentations
Read more of Mark Suster’s entrepreneur advice for startups
12 Rules For Building Your First Profitable Startup

The past month was full of inspiring events—the Inc 500 early in the month, the M-Files conference, and (most recently) a Beryl passport event. It’s given me the opportunity to connect with some wonderful entrepreneurs and talk about the challenges that face all of us.

No doubt about it, times are still tough and business models have forever changed. There’s so much uncertainty you may feel like you’re rowing a leaky boat into the perfect storm. The thing is, with all this uncertainty comes new opportunity and it’s the right time to keep focused on your goals!

I heard a lot of people talking about mentors this month. We all have mentors in business, that person who shares their wisdom and acts as a sounding board for new ideas. In the absence of a mentor, it’s good to reflect on the wisdom of people who would make great mentors.

Some years back I created an imaginary board of mentors, surrounding myself with people who, when I’m faced with a difficult decision, I could ask “How would ____ handle that?” or “What advice would they give?”.  Sometimes I swap a board member out for another, right now here are my five board members; some I’ve held onto for a while, others are more recent.

1. Never give in: I have always admired the tenacity of Winston Churchill and the way he faced the challenges before his nation during the war. It makes our problems pale in significance.
2. You gotta wanna: Jack Stack passed on this piece of advice in his book The Great Game of Business. The truth is, if you set out to do something you really got to want to do it and not be motivated for the wrong reasons.
3. A group decision is dumber than a decision made by individual members: Commander Mark Kelly of NASA brought this idea up at the Inc 500 conference. The concept revolves around breaking the “herd mentality” that many companies practice (either knowingly or not). “Herd mentality” implies fear-based reaction to peer pressure, making individuals unwilling to voice their opinions for fear of being rejected from the group. In a typical company, oftentimes the CEO makes a decision (which may not be the best decision) and the group simply follows unquestioningly because it’s the CEO’s decision. To break this, Commander Kelly told us that NASA has an effective process of going around the group, starting with the most junior person and progressing to the most senior, to get their opinions of a decision before it’s made. This allows everyone, regardless of their position, status, tenure, etc. to weigh in.
4. Screw it, let’s do it: This has always been one of my favourites. What Richard Branson is really saying: stop procrastinating and get things done! We spend far too much time over-analyzing. Arron Levie has a core value that echoes this: “Get shit done!”
5. “There’s a million dollars under your shoe; you just have to find it.” I had an opportunity to get to know Norm Brodsky, who offered this advice. We are surrounded by opportunity, sometimes we just need to keep our ears open.

What are your best nuggets of advice?

Last week, along with nine other Small Giants, I was given a backstage pass to Beryl Health and the opportunity to experience their unique culture first-hand.

Paul Spiegelman, the founder and CEO of the Beryl Companies, is passionate about creating a people-centric culture at Beryl. Paul believes that a CEO’s most important responsibility is setting the culture of his/her company. I got to know Paul through Small Giants and, having read his books, was really excited about the opportunity to visit Beryl. I have to say that the experience exceeded my expectations!

What really inspired me during my visit to Beryl is that you could feel their culture—everyone is smiling, while folks are working they’re also busy decorating their workspace for Halloween, as you walk past a desk you’re included in their conversation, etc. The atmosphere was genuine and the leadership team was humble.

The question that immediately pops to mind is: “Can all the time spent on culture actually provide a competitive advantage?”. Well, at Beryl, it really seems to be working and Paul offered some statistics on how it has contributed to the success of other companies.

In David Wolfe’s book Firms of Endearment, he chronicles the experience of a number of companies that put employees and stakeholders first—companies like Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines and Harley Davidson. Over a 10-year period ending in 2006, these companies returned 1,026% of the original investment to investors. While in the same period, the companies in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great experienced a 333% return and the S&P returned 122%. If these numbers are anything to go on, it would seem that companies putting real effort into building a great culture are bringing stakeholders a significant return.

Given enough time and money, your competitors could likely duplicate anything that is considered a competitive advantage. Take Paul’s business—there are call centers all over the world and Beryl provides a premium service. They haven’t focused on trimming expenses and boosting sales, they’ve focused on building and maintaining a great culture. Perhaps it’s easier to focus on sales and expenses because the culture around you involves a long and painful look in the mirror.

Paul’s family-style approach to Beryl resulted in adopting the Circle of Growth™ corporate philosophy. If you invest in the workers they become loyal and committed, customers see how focused workers are and they become loyal, loyal customers results in higher profit, profit is invested back into the workers. If you’re really interested in building a great culture and a truly engaged team, here are some things I took away from my time at Beryl.

• Start with a look in the mirror: You’re going to need to admit to yourself, and to your employees, that your company culture isn’t what you want it to be.
• Then engage and include all employees in shaping and executing the change to create a new culture. I enjoyed listening to how Nick Sarillo worked with everyone from busboys to management at Nick’s Pizza & Pub to create the core values that they all live by every day.
• Settle down for a long ride, you need to realise that this is not going to be a short journey. But it will be fulfilling, and a cultural shift requires serious commitment from the Chief Executive Officer.
• Culture has to be owned by each individual in the business, not by a small group of executives. Find some of the “drivers of spirit” and bring them together to create a culture committee.
• It doesn’t cost much to get started. The Beryl team only had $46.25 when they got started and had to hold a fundraiser to collect money for events.
• Be consistent in your approach: Create traditions and celebrate them regularly.

What impact has culture had on your business?

Is your marketing strategy really working? Brian Halligan of HubSpot suggests that the standard playbook no longer works and is likely a waste of company resources, and annoying for customers and prospects.

• Caller ID protects customers from cold call campaigns;
• Google priority inbox protects customers from email campaigns;
• Pop-up blockers protect customers from online ad campaigns; and
• Your static website has little value as a sales megaphone.

The traditional outbound marketing strategy is annoying and destroying your brand. It’s time to change the way you think about marketing and build an inbound strategy.

The good news is that it’s not about the width of your wallet anymore. It’s about reorganizing your resources to create a hub that draws people from your industry to your business. Here are five things you can do to get started on your inbound strategy.

1. Add something collaborative to your website, like a blog, that makes your web presence an interactive, constantly changing hub for your industry.
2. Become a content factory by creating lots of compelling content that draws followers to your website. You need to be creating blog posts, videos, ebooks, white papers, reports and calculators. Get your sales team involved in these kind of initiatives instead of spending their days irritating prospects with cold calls.
3. Make sure your value proposition is truly remarkable. This means becoming as unique and valuable as possible to a segment of buyers. Question whether your focus is too broad because this makes your value proposition mediocre at best. Think outside the box to find the alternatives, don’t just look at what competitors are doing.
4. Employ the right people—you need digital natives and analytical geeks to help you build a digital moat around your business. Whole Foods has done this with their blog “Whole Story” and 37Signals with their blog “Signal vs. Noise“.
5. Set goals, for instance, attracting five times the number of visitors to your site this year. Use  a tool like website.grader.com to improve your site traffic, leads and analytics.

Start giving back to your customers and industry instead of spending your day annoying them in order to build a brand like charity:water, Zappos or Apple. These companies believe they are in the business of delivering happiness, not just a product or service. Zappos, charity:water and Apple sell people on the work they are doing to deliver happiness. None of these companies could have built the brand they did without learning to focus on what matters to the people they serve or without genuinely caring about the people they serve.

Each of these companies fosters a specific culture that emphasizes not just customer service but the whole customer experience. Zappos’ philosophy is that your culture is your brand. Tony Hseih states, “At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff — like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers — will happen naturally on its own.”

Take a walk in your customers’ shoes to determine what they really want. These companies truly believe their purpose is to please the customer. Passionate employees deliver superior customer experiences, allowing customers to be engaged and earning a loyal following. Concentrate on what your brand does instead of what your brand is. Believing and living your company’s core values can define your company.

Remember to tell your story. Robert McKee once said, “Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.” Don’t underestimate the power of storytelling for brand awareness, attracting new customers, and keeping current customers happy. People love reviews, testimonials and referrals—customers and potential customers can learn how others have benefitted from your products or services through your stories. By telling stories you let your customers identify and connect with you.

I’ve just read an article about a software company that allowed their staff to pack up office and relocate to Brazil for six weeks!

This got me thinking, as the Internet and cloud computing  become ubiquitous, do our people really need a static office?

The Dimagi team, who are based in New England, where the winters are really cold, decided that come the next winter they would pack up and head for a warmer climate. After all, all they needed to crank out code are their laptops and a good Internet connection.

I started to draw a parallel between Dimagi and the way we work at Emerge Studio. Last year we packed up and headed for Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean, for a development week away. This year we took off for Denver to get a feel for working in the US. How different are we and why not extend our week away to six weeks away?

Like us, Dimagi has people working for them around the world including in South Africa and India. I feel that our Nomadic work habits are actually bringing us closer together. Our communication has never been better and there are strong friendships in the team.

Emerge Studio is still in that start-up phase and it’s kind of like a lab where we can experiment with ideas. Reading about Dimagi made me realize that our idea of combining work and travel can be a reality and it brings some great benefits:

• Working in a foreign location brings the team together, creating stronger bonds between team members;

•  Living in another country gives the team a whole new perspective and helping to stimulate ideas and innovation;

• Our communication has improved, we religiously have our stand ups and planning sessions;

• Focus, by being out of the office the team is less likely to be dragged into toxic meetings;

• For a small company or start-up this is a great recruiting initiative.

The Dimagi team chose their location, found an office (a team member’s aunt lent them her flat) and they paid for their own travel. Paying for their own travel ensured that people who couldn’t go didn’t feel like they were missing out. Because the team chose the location, they had ownership and wanted the adventure to be a success.

How’s everyone feel about six weeks in Romania next year?

We finally got to Red Rocks! Since I arrived in Denver, everyone I know has been telling me to get my ass to a show at the Red Rocks Amphitheater. Red Rocks is a rock structure near Morrison, Colorado, where concerts are given in the open-air amphitheater. The earliest notable rock-and-roll performance at Red Rocks was by The Beatles on August 26, 1964, during their US-tour. Red Rocks seats over 9,000 people and is one of those places you have to see a concert before you kick the bucket. That concert, if at all possible, should be these guys…Mumford & Sons!

It was Orange Sunday in Denver this past weekend, the Broncos took on the Texans at Mile High stadium! This was my first taste of American Football, what an experience! Watch out for the Navy fighter jets at the end…

Unfortunately, it didn’t go that well for the Broncos, the Texans won 31 to the Broncos 25 not to mention that I didn’t have a clue what was going on most of the game.  I will be back and next time I will take somebody along who can explain the in’s and out’s of American Football! (Sorry about the finger…working on those camera skills)