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Never do this at work:

The more I work with I team, the more we come to this challenge. The hardest thing for every startup team is to find what not to do.

Few ears ago, I worked as an consulting intern at KPMG. I really loved my job for the great feeling of accomplishment. The tasks usually looked like this: I got to do a Powerpoint presentation or crunch a spreadsheet. I worked few hours on it, submitted to my boss, fixed few minor things and  I was done. Then I got a next task. And so on and so on. That felt so good.

The never ending backlog

Now, our team has a huge backlog of ideas that we want to do. Our team at eHotel.cz is 16 people. I am sure that if we hired another 150 people, we would have enough productive work for them for a year. That is not going to happen, though. So the huge backlog remains for us.

We can try only about 10% of ideas we would like to do because we just have that much time for them. The big question is: How do we choose what to do? How do we choose what not to do?

If 90% of the ideas were crap, the choice would be simple. The problem is, that most of them are probably good things to do:

  • Add that feature for the product
  • Enter that new distribution channel
  • Create that amazing advertising campaign
  • Talk to those potential big customers.

How do I know what to choose? Every day, the backlog goes bigger and bigger. What not to do? That is the question.

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

Michael Porter

No more ideas!

My friends or former colleagues often come to me and say „Have you tried this or that?“ This is good, because some of the great sources of success emerged that way.  Deciding what to choose is the task that not so many people can help me with, though.

The decision

As a CEO, I am the one responsible for the ultimate decision. I sometimes direct what to do. But mostly it should be the team who propose what to do next and what to do later. My role should be to give the team as many information, training and support to come to the right decision. This is hard to do, but we are trying.

If you work for a startup team with similar challenges, how do you do that? How do you thing about the choice? Please comment bellow.

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A cheerful message to my younger self

When I was 7 years old, my parents gave my first encyclopedia for kids. I read the whole book page by page, as nobody told me that I don’t have to read it that way like other books. After that, I decided to become a scientist.

Things changed when I was 12 or 13 when I discovered the internet. It was 3 years before Google and the whole city had slower connection than each of our smartphones today.  Then I decided that the internet is my future field of work and I do keep it today.

Some of my friends started their own online business when they were 15 – 16 even earlier (Like Jan Rezab from Socialbakers, for example). I wanted to study university over building business. I never regret this decision.

1. ​Don’t give a shit

However, I always wanted to start a business. It was adventurous, thrilling. It was a way how to change the world, even just a little bit. I even started a small one while studying, but I dropped it few months later. I was scared. What if it did not work out? What would my friends, classmates and other people say? What if I failed?

There is a great talk on this:

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Steve Jobs

I did now that when I was on college, but I know now. Thinking about what others think is a waste of time.

2. Tommorow means never

I did not start any business during college. So I changed plans and became a management consultant for a „Big 4“ company.  I loved the job, but I know that this is not the final stop for me. I still wanted to do something more entrepreneurial. So I waited to get a business idea. And I waited. Some more of my friends started a business, but I waited. I asked myself: How do the people do it to get those great business ideas?

Adam Grant speaks about original thinkers:

The greatest Originals fail the most, because they’re the ones that try the most.

Adam Grant

I did not fail at anything, but I did not try anything. All the successful people failed. All of them also had doubts and their first ideas were crap. I wish I had known that few years earlier.

3. Tell what you want and let the people help you

After 4 years in consulting, my work shifted from the actual consulting to more corporate management role. I did less consulting and more corporate politics and boring operative work.

One Friday, I was at a wedding. Instead of enjoying the big day of my friends, I spend more than 3 hours on useless corporate conference calls. This was the turning point. I decided to quit.

Barbara Sher is the founder/inventor of life coaching. This is a video from TEDxPrague (read my article about it: Dreamers who dream, dreamers who do. ) Listen to her sure method how to get what you want (Interesting especially after 15th minute):

Tell people what you want and what your obstacle is. That make people want to help you even if they don’t like you. It always works.

Barbara Sher

I wanted to join a startup, but not in the seed stage, but a later stage, helping it to grow, but I did not know any. I told it to around 10 friends in the tech & startup world. 2 months ago, I got a call from Jan from Usertech. He wanted to invest in a startup, eHotel.cz, but had no one to run it. So I become a CEO of the company and live happy ever since.

My road from wanting to be scientist to the startup CEO was long and winding. If I could go back and send a message to younger self, I would show myself these 3 videos.

I have more dreams and plans. I know, that if I want to achieve them, I have to think through what I do every day. TED talks help me with that.

 

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Overwhelmed? This will help you feel better

I remember that when we were kids, there were these moments: Everything I had to or wanted to do was finished. Clear table. Last time I had everything done was about the age of 12. Isn’t that crazy? Now when I’m 30, I have a task lists for 3 to 4 lives. The work never stops. We are all overwhelmed. Yesterday, I dig trough my old notes and find those 4 quotes that can be helpful not to loose our minds:

On todo lists:

If your todo list is finished, you’ve given up or are dead.

Yes. It is never ending. It is hard to say who said this quote. (Maybe Melanie in this Lifehacker article)

On complaining on being overwhelmed

This one is so truth!

Never tell your problems to anyone…20% don’t care and the other 80% are glad you have them.

Lou Holtz

On problems and solutions

If there is no solution to the problem then don’t waste time worrying about it. If there is a solution to the problem then don’t waste time worrying about it.

Dalai Lama

On everything

I especially like this one:

Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

John Lennon

I like tha last one especially. Have a great day and do not let things overwhelm you!

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The power of Exponential: Your math teacher never told you about this

Last fall on a cloudy Saturday, I attended a talk that changed how I see certain things. Why nobody showed me this thing before?

Every Tuesday, I post  a new story for this blog. If you read it regularly, you know that I am obsessed in finding how to make things work better and faster.

On that Saturday talk, the speaker showed us this formula:

1.01^365=37.8

If you make something 1% better every day, it gets 37.8x better ain a year. Isn’t that fascinating?

The Instagram story

Let’s look at Instagram. They launched the app in October 2010 and started with maybe 10-20 users at day 1. In December 2014, the app had 300 million users. Is this some crazy rocket-speed growth? No. The compound daily growth was just 1.09%. Yes, that’s right. Instagram grew only 1% a day.

My story since then

Wen come to work, I ask myself these questions: „What can I do today to grow the company 1%?“ „What can I do to improve 1% in something today?“

Yes, I admit that this principle is not 100% applicable to real life. But it helped me understand one thing: The growth is usually driven by small and persistent improvements rather than big jumps.

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6 things I was horribly wrong about when I started an online business.

When I joined the eHotel.cz team more than 2 years ago, I thought it would be a piece of cake. Huge market. Product almost ready. We’re smart guys. That sounds like imminent success, doesn’t it? In reality, things work differently. I was horribly wrong.

#1: Lets get a tiny part of this huge market. It should be easy.

It should, but it is not. If you build a hot dog stand in front of a McDonalds, you probably get enough revenue to keep going. It does not work like this in competitive online markets. If your product is not a superstar or a great niche player, you get nothing.

The good thing is that we figured this out soon enough and starte working. Currently, we are already gaining market share.

#2: There is competition, but we’re smart guys, we’ll be ok

The competition is hard. Much, much harder than I ever expected. We need to play an A game in all the aspects to keep up: Product design, UX, SEO, Advertising etc.

Many authors and mentors discourage startups from entering competitive markets. For example Peter Thiel in his great book „Zero to One„. However, look at Uber, Tesla, Apple and the other superstars. They all entered a very competitive market and were able to transform it.

#3 If you can grow revenue, you can grow profit

No, you can’t. Getting evenue is easy. It is just a function of money your going to invest into your product and advertising. Getting profitable is a completely different game. This is the hard part.

#4 Online retail is great because you do not have to deal wih the customers

Oh God. Online bussines is a fiction. The barrier between online and offline business is gone. The website (online hotel booking engine in our case) is just a tip of an iceberg. There is a huge amount of customers request that cannot be handled automatically. People call you, e-mail you and you have to have a big enough team to deal with it. The good thing is, the better the product is, the less request we have to handle by hand. But still. The difference between an online booking site and a physical travel agency is much smaller than we thought.

#5 You can easily say what campaigns will work 

If it was that easy, all hollywood movies would be blockbusters. Still, there are a lot of movies with millions invested and zero success. The same goes for advertising campaigns. It is impossible to predict what will people like and engage with. The only thing we can do is test many ideas in small batches.

#6 People will remember us and like us

Until you get big and famous, nobody gives a shit about your company. Nobody trusts you. Nobody remembers you. It is not possible to use the same marketing techniques like lovebrands use. If brands like Apple, Google or Uber say something, everyone listens. If a „no-name“ company says something. Nobody listens. Until you build your brand name and authority, you’re nobody.

It is challenging, but we love it