We’ve let our advisory board lapse somewhat and I think it’s wise to put that together again with the hope of actually getting their feedback on big milestones (most notably the re-relaunch of the hosting and support program).
I did a bit of research last week on what startups normally do with their advisory boards. Fortunately, OnStartups Answers has a few really valuable threads on this topic. Basically, there are two directions we can go. One is to recruit a board of advisers that is volunteer, not necessarily required to respond to queries, and that we talk to occasionally. Two is to recruit a board of advisers that we compensate in some form and have a more formal relationship with. After talking this through a bit, it makes more sense to go with the former with where we are currently. Albert made a good point that if we are depending on the advice and input of any one person heavily, it would probably just make more sense to hire them as a consultant.
I see the steps as:
- Email the people we want to have as our advisers and see if they’re interested
- Put together a Google Group or some sort of mailing list for conversations
- Encourage them to subscribe to this blog and send the bigger things we want input on to the list serv
Related, there’s a really good interview with Giacomo Guilizzoni, founder of Balsamiq, that a couple of threads pointed to:
We don’t have any formal agreement nor do we meet regularly. Mostly I email them whenever I have a question I know they’ll be able to the answer, to or we meet on Skype once in a while (we try to shoot for once a month but somehow haven’t been able to keep a regular schedule with anyone. Things get in the way.) We all got together for a big crab-dinner feast in San Francisco in May, something I hope to turn into a yearly tradition.
It’s pretty informal, but every time I have some sort of contact with one of my advisers, I learn something. Or they say something that gives me an idea, or gets me unstuck. That’s what talking to smart people will do. I always say that one could do a lot worse than trying to be excellent, because “excellence attracts excellence”, and when you’re in that circle, even once in a while, magic happens.
He’s got an example letter for when we want to put together an advisory board page. I’m also very interested in his approach to transparency on the company blog, and want to reopen the discussion on how transparency applies to us in the form of a blog post when I have the time to put it together.
Email doesn’t work for everything and it’s nice to be proactive when we have the opportunity to do so. I think we should give a little thought before the first of the year to our communication processes.
At the moment, what I’d like to see the most is a tool for real-time group communication. The situation here is to have a chat tool that works like IM but can be many to many. You could have this with Skype obviously, but Skype takes up a lot of resources. It would be nice for this chat tool to also have presence indicators so you know when people are online and not online. Based on this, I think the needs are:
- Real-time communication
- Presence indicators
- Multiple people can be in the same room
We have a couple of other potential tools that include Laconia and Friendfeed but both depend on buy-in from the team to be worthwhile. Laconica is really cool in that it’s installed on our own server, integrates with both desktop and iPhone clients, and has nice features. We can aggregate team updates to the blog on a daily or weekly basis if we’d like. The character limit is both a blessing and a curse, however, and buy-in is again a limitation of its effectiveness although it looks like Andrew, Will, and Lauren have been using it in the past week.
Thoughts? I think this blog is working out really well for when I want to lay out longer thoughts but don’t necessarily want to make it a 20 minute conference call discussion. Email still works for direct conversation, and it’s nice to move all conversation that doesn’t absolutely need to be done via email to other time-delayed means. Also, are there other needs I haven’t identified? Thanks
Tonight I researched information on creating Wordpress theme frameworks. The Wordpress Codex actually has some really great information with links to example frameworks as well as some handy tutorials for creating a framework. There’s also this post which is a summary of 20 different frameworks; it provides a good overview of some of the options out there.
Justin Tadlock has written an interesting post about why he created a Wordpress framework. The post covers some of the basics about what some fundamental aspects to a framework should be as well as what the benefits are. It’s definitely worth a read and makes it seem as though we are definitely headed down the right track here.
The frameworks
In terms of code to look at for ideas, one of the more well known frameworks is Thematic. This is a framework created by Ian Stewart that has actually been developed into a business model as well.
Elliot Jay Stocks has also written a framework of his own called Starkers. It takes the premise that a framework ought to provide nothing more than a code base, not even any visual styles. Interesting concept and Stocks is a stellar designer so it might be a good basis for inspiration and ideas.
Carrington is also another framework. This one is interesting because they have also built in a mobile interface for the sites. This could provide an interesting basis for developing mobile versions of client sites we create.
Tutorials and Miscellaneous
There’s also this tutorial which is part of a series that covers how to create and structure your own framework. Some good background information.
Secondly, I researched some information on creating a Wordpress child theme. Since this is how we’ll be handling client-specfic themes we will want a solid understanding of how to accomplish this. First, there is this tutorial which takes the Basic2Col framework as a starting point and walks you through how to build a child theme off of it.
Finally, this post looks at why child themes are the future of Wordpress. It also includes a solid list of example frameworks and articles about frameworks and what they can do for development.
That’s a quick highlight of some of the most popular frameworks and posts to give a quick introduction to creating our own.
I put together a new intro for our phone number this morning and, as Greg commented, I sound like a robot. The cool thing about Phone.com, however, is that you can create your own recording, upload, and shazam. Therefore, I formally declare a contest to one-up me and come up with a better introduction. For the time being, we’re going to have the first option go to support and then the second option to be general inquiries. You’re welcome to use music, singing monkeys, etc. Let the games begin!
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From the persistence paid off file of start-up stories:
Our first big retail break was landing an account with Stew Leonard’s, the four-store Connecticut grocery chain. For months we bugged the buyer via phone. He ignored us. To get his attention, we decided to bring him breakfast one day.
We woke up at 6 a.m. and dressed in Bear Naked T-shirts. We borrowed china from Kelly’s mom, which we used to display fresh fruit, our granola, and Stew Leonard’s brand of yogurt. We were the first car in the lot at the chain’s headquarters. After we climbed the stairs to the office, the receptionist told us the buyer was on vacation. We were deflated!
But then, as we were walking away, we recognized Stew Leonard Jr. “Stew!” we yelled. “We brought you breakfast!”
He seemed impressed by our youth and enthusiasm and asked us into his office. He said he was used to brokers pitching 55 products at a time and that it was refreshing to meet young kids so eager to sell a bag of granola. After talking with us for two hours, he said he wanted to help us out. He decided to place our granola in his stores.
The full Bear Naked story is over at CNN Money, it’s full of great insight into the reality that sometimes pure enthusiasm and excitement can be enough.
We now have at least one school transitioning to new web staff and it’s something that we’re going to run into frequently in the future. As part of our efforts to keep knowledge from vanishing into the ether we’ll need a process of getting the new staff up to speed.
While simply having the incoming staff members fill out a survey is certainly the easy way to get a sense of their abilities I have a couple ideas as to how to make it a more engaging and active process.
- Have the outgoing staff member write a blog post about their experience – This would cover what they learned, what they wished they had known going in, and perhaps get into the technical side of things as well. It’d provide a resource for not only that school’s incoming web staff but would be a model for others as well.
- Talk with new web staff – This would not even have to be an orientation to Wordpress. I’m thinking it could almost be a good idea to treat it like an interview that they would go through as part of working for the news organization. We’d just talk over what they know, their past experience and projects and then discuss what they hope to learn in the next semester/year.
Those are just two ideas that I have right now. Basically I’m looking to find a way to transition new staff so that the information remains somewhere that is public and searchable (i.e. more than just a survey submitted to us). Thoughts?
Read in full. It’s full of important observations and insights that you’ve probably realized before but are refreshing to revisit. Ones that stuck out to me:
- It’s an emotional roller coaster – In a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next.
- Don’t worry about competitors – Companies that seemed like competitors and threats at first glance usually never were when you really looked at it. Even if they were operating in the same area, they had a different goal.
- Luck is a big factor – “When we started our startup, I had bought the hype of the startup founder dream: that this is a game of skill. It is, in some ways. Having skill is valuable. So is being determined as all hell. But being lucky is the critical ingredient.”
- Persistence is the key – Everyone said how determined and resilient you must be, but going through it made me realize that the determination required was still understated. [...] If you are persistent, even problems that seem out of your control (i.e. immigration) seem to work themselves out. [...] I’ve been surprised again and again by just how much more important persistence is than raw intelligence.
- You get no respect - “It surprised me that being a startup founder does not get you more admiration from women.”
I spent some time this afternoon researching how we should split up equity. Here’s a dump of links and notes:
Equity distribution amongst startup co-founders ? | OnStartups Answers – The options seem to be 50/50 or distribution as a function of contributed value. People answering the question lean more towards the latter and offer some suggestions as to how to do it best.
Dividing equity between founders | cdixon.org – chris dixon’s blog – Variables to potentially consider include: past and future contributions, career success, and who had the big ideas (and whether those ideas have any technology or intellectual property associated with them).
Equity-Split Results, Part 1: When Do Teams Split Equally? | Noam Wasserman’s “Founder Frustrations” blog – Interesting chart comparing different situations. An equal split is more likely amongst smaller teams coming from similar backgrounds that divide equity at the start of the project or company.
Calculating Partnership Equity Splits | Journey of a Serial Entrepreneur – Potential formula for equity distribution: break down money to be invested, time to be invested, and experience of partner into percentages, and then determine percentage contributions of each partner. This breakdown then determines overall split of shares.
Startup Equity Distribution | Force of Good – It’s all about the K.I.S.S. approach. Lance argues against equal equity distribution and for dividing it based on contributions of time and expertise. One approach is to determine the valuation of the company, and then use a function of proposed wages and time contributed to divide up ownership.
My goal is to have a draft proposal for how we’ll do this by this weekend with the process completed by the end of next weekend. We’ll do the final negotiations at the team dinner on Friday night in Austin and loop team in by conference call as we need to. If you have opinions about this process, now is a good time to start helping me with research and speaking up 
The overall intent of this document is to provide a set of goals for CoPress to steer itself towards in the last three months of 2009. These goals presented as milestones encompass the entirety of our operations, and will give us more specific criteria for determining whether we’re scaling like we’d like to. In short, benchmarks to determine whether we’re on course with where we want to be. At the beginning of 2010, we’ll be able to look back upon this, critically reflect, and define plans for the first six months of the new year.
Managed Hosting
Scaling Managed Hosting, currently our primary business and project for expanding the market, is a top priority for fall 2009. We’re shooting for 75 Managed Hosting clients launched or signed and started with sandboxes by the end of fiscal year 2009.
Getting potential clients to commit to switching during the school year might present some difficulty. One strategy will be to convince them of the merit of working on the redesign for a couple of months, and then relaunching their site over winter break 2009. Most student newspapers should be able to make the transition successfully in that period. With adequate planning, the launches will be within the scope of our abilities and we’ll be able to handle their archives as they come and as our resources allow.
Continue reading ‘Strategic goals and benchmarks for last quarter 2009′
A couple quick updates from the call that Daniel and I had this Tuesday about all things hosting.
- New client information doc – We’ve condensed all information into a central Google Spreadsheet so that now the information for billing, hosting setup, and contact information is all in one document. Hopefully this will help us know where we’re at with everybody as we expand.
- Client outreach letters - Because of some unexpected work for that thing called school I wasn’t able to get letters out on Thursday, but a batch of 5-10 outreach letters will be going out first thing Monday morning. The revised letter is on Google Docs and is shared with the team if you have ideas or critiques.
- Education Sessions – Daniel and I will be brainstorming and drafting up some initial sessions to run clients through starting the week of October 7. We’ll be capping these at around 10 people but will be open to doing multiple sessions on a topic if there’s the demand for it.
That’s all for now.
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