Number One Startup Killer

Today we had a lunch session with Stanley Feld, Brad's Dad. So, I have to admit at first I thought to myself, what is this old guy going to know about starting an Internet company? Well, it turns out that we deal with the same issues that he dealt with, just in a different context.

Dr. Feld started what became the largest endocrinologist group in the country so he knows quite a bit about starting a company. He brought up several issues that I hope to cover in future blog posts, but for now, I thought I'd discuss "teams". His view on partnerships is that they are very difficult to manage and the only way that they can work is through open communication.

What do you think the number one killer for a startup is (for a hint read the last paragraph)? Funding? The idea? Competitors? It turns out that almost everyone here at TechStars would agree that most startups fail because the founding team falls apart. It's not easy working with other people 24 hours a day; and interpersonal issues, deviations in the vision of the company, or ego can really break a team apart.

At Zemble / MadKast, we've found that bringing up issues early and honestly saves a lot of grief in the long run. In fact, the one time that Zemble was in real danger was when one of the founders (who's intentions were good) made some fairly serious decisions without communicating with the rest of the team. Luckily some outside forces helped us out, but it could have been a disaster.

Wow, Sharing made easy!

Today is a pretty big day for MadKast. See that little icon to the right of this blog title? The one that says share? Yeah, that's us! Basically it's the easiest way to share blog posts. Try it out. We are still working on the distribution method, so if you want to add an icon to your blog, send me an email and I'll email you a snippet of javascript. Remember that we are still in beta, so we'd love to get feedback.

You can also read more about madKast on our madKast blog.

Once they're sold, Shut up!

We had a very informative meeting with Texture Media, a very successful online brand building company, this morning. They gave us lots of branding and marketing advice related to MadKast, which we will be implementing in the next couple of weeks.

After about five minutes of explaining what our product is, they were excited about it. You know someone really likes an idea when they start brainstorming new ideas for how it can be used and actually suggesting clients of theirs who would love the service. During this brainstorming, one of our team members excitedly explained yet another benefit of our service over our competitors. In my opinion this actually hurt us. It interrupted their excitement and didn't really gain us anything because they were already sold on the idea. The lesson I learned is that you don't need to oversell a product. Once someone likes it and begins to sell it to themselves, don't interrupt.

Get another meeting!

Yesterday, a group of guys from TechStars, including myself, attended a CTEK meeting in Broomfield, CO. It was an interesting experience which I think Josh Fraser summarizes really well in his blog post.

I think Josh left out one important lesson from the meeting. Before we started, Gary Held explained that the goal of the pitch is to get another meeting with one or more of the Angels. You can't expect anyone to write you a check after an eight minute presentation, but if you pique someone's interest enough, you could get another meeting.

Interestingly enough, this happens to be the exact same advice that Todd Sampson and Eric Marcoullier of MyBlogLog, which is now part of Yahoo, told us last week regarding meeting with Venture Capitalists. They said that the only goal of your first meeting is to get another meeting. And the only goal of your second meeting is to get another one. Once you reach the point where you are meeting with a panel of Partners from the firm, then you can start to think about getting a check.

Happy Birthday Tony!

Today is Tony's birthday. He doesn't like when I tell people that, so I thought write about it in my new blog.

of Tony is an amazing developer and has done a fantastic job as CTO of Zemble, Inc. When he first started, he was one of the best MS SQL database developers I've ever worked with; now he can add javascript / front end guru to his resume. Zemble and our new product, MadKast would not be possible without Tony. On a personal level, I've become good friends with Tony and I don't think I've ever worked with someone with his dedication. Whether it is to cycling or Zemble, Tony always gives 200%.

Of course, I have to offer a sincere thank you to Apple for giving us so much of Tony's time. We really appreciate you putting up with his 12 hour days and then coding from home!

Meeting, Meeting, Meeting --- all fantastic!

We had three really great meetings today.

For lunch, Tony, Josh and I drove to Denver to eat with Darren Crystal, co-Founder / CTO of PhotoBucket. We first met Darren a couple of weeks ago at a TechStars open house. It was towards the end of the open house and we just got to talking about his experience starting a company, and more specifically scaling his servers and bandwidth. For today's meeting we ate lunch at a the Rocky Mountain Diner -- a great choice, I'd really recommend the Tacos Al Carbon -- and we spent over an hour going over a new idea and hearing more stories about his experience building PhotoBucket into a $250 million dollar company. Darren had some great feedback for us and offered his help when we had questions about scaling our infrastructure and navigating the VC waters.

Our second meeting was with Don Loeb, VP of Feedburner. Don probably knows the space that our new product is in better than anyone we've talked to. He worked on Yahoo's RSS alerts, and then did RSS stuff for Feedburner. He gave us some great advice and offered to put us in contact with an ad network that he thinks might be able to solve our mobile advertising issues. The best advice that he gave us: "Focus on the publishers and be laser focused".

Our last meeting was a Techstars group session titled "Blog or Die" with Alex King, Don Loeb, Brad Feld, and Dave Taylor. As usual, these meeting were invaluable. Brad and Dave argued about a few things which kept it entertaining, but in general they all agreed on these points (the first two are related to blogging, the last two to startups):

• Stay focused, be consistent, and have a tempo
• Remember that everything you write is forever
• Get Freedback, but filter the irrelavent
• Participate or die

After the meeting, Brad gave us relationship advice, specifically for entreprenuers, which may have been the most valuble advice I got today. More on that on a later post.

Intro to my startup blog

In the past 10 months, I've learned more about starting a company that I ever thought I could learn. This was accelerated three weeks ago when Zemble.com moved to Boulder, CO to become a TechStars company. This blog will be my place to write down the lessons I've learned through success, through failure, and from other people.

As with any Startup, there have been many ups and downs, and I'm sure there will be many more. In future posts I'll explain how Zemble has:

• bootstraped our operations
  
• raised money from friends and family
• lost and gained key members of our team
• changed our product several times in response to consumer's needs
• moved our headquarters across several states
• found a global top level law firm willing to work for free
• expanded our customer base
• changed hosting companies
• launched too early
• got written about on Mashable, RedHerring, Wired, and TechCrunch

I'll also write about meeting with top VC firms, entrepreneurs, Angel investors, and other really bright people who have helped us focus our product and even create an entirely new product line.

More to come.