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Take a second to be nice to yourself

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It’s a cliché to say that founders flounder, but unfortunately, that’s usually the case. Wild exceptions like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Dell aside, executives who start a business or project fizzle more often than not once they’ve gotten their venture on its feet.

Entrepreneurs actually show their inability to switch to executive mode much earlier in the business development process than most people realize, as my stories will reveal. But the reasons executives fail to “scale”—that is, adapt their leadership capabilities to their growing businesses’ needs—remain fuzzy. It’s simply assumed that there’s an entrepreneurial personality and an executive personality—and never the twain shall meet. I don’t think that’s true. I believe most executives can learn to scale if they’re willing to take a step back and admit to themselves that their old ways no longer work.

Over the past four years, I’ve worked closely with more than 100 entrepreneurs and seen them struggle to adapt as their companies grow beyond a handful of employees and launch a new product or service. In the process, I’ve observed that the habits and skills that make entrepreneurs successful can undermine their ability to lead larger organizations. The problem, in other words, is not so much one of leadership personality as of approach.

I’ve identified three tendencies that work for leaders of business units or small companies but become Achilles’ heels for those same individuals when they try to manage larger organizations with diverse needs, departments, priorities, and constituencies.

The first tendency is loyalty to comrades—the small band of colleagues there at the start of the enterprise. In entrepreneurial mode, you need to lead like you’re in charge of a combat unit on the wrong side of enemy lines, where it’s all for one and one for all. But blind loyalty can become a liability in managing a large, complex organization. The second tendency, task orientation—or focusing on the job at hand—is critical in driving toward, say, a big product launch, but excessive attention to detail can cause a large organization to lose its way. The third tendency, single-mindedness, is an important attribute in a visionary who wants to unleash a revolutionary product or service on the world. Yet this quality can harden into tunnel vision if the leader can’t become more expansive as the company grows. And the fourth tendency, working in isolation, is fine for the brilliant scientist focused on an ingenious idea. But it’s disastrous for a leader whose burgeoning organization must rely on the kindness of customers, investors, analysts, reporters, and other strangers.

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Be True to yourself. Be real. Basic Instincts involve 2 main things as well
1. Being true to yourself and being very transparent and honest with yourself
2. Being true to others and making sure to be complementary with others. Ego can last for a short while and then dissipate into an oblivious scenario that has no ending or rather a bad ending. 

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The sexual instinct aims to fuse chemically with another, this fusion transforming both parties. In a sense, this need for fusion on both parties can be objectifying. It is not a caring social fusion, but rather a chemical essential to infect and be infected, to have the other person grow inside you and alter you, thus each person transforming into something else. Achieving this fusion via seduction and display manifests in two ways:

This is part of the Concept of Adversarial Excitement that gets you the fast win. The Partnership Excitement wins you the War.

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It is often said that “humans are social animals” without really thinking what that implies. Many creatures are social in the sense that they live in groups. Still, there are wide differences in what ‘social’ means – from the simple semi-chaos of herding for cattle or deer to the elaborate, regimented, division-of-labor society of the termite or the honey bee.

Human social scientists (sociologists and anthropologists especially) have traditionally spent most of their time searching for differences between human societies and often assuming that the wide variety that exists is somehow infinite and has no, or few, underlying patterns, laws, or theories explain its myriad diversity. One is tempted to think that a non-human social scientist might take a rather different view, seeing clear patterns at both the macro and micro levels of human social organization, just as we find it easy to recognize patterns in other social species.

Social Instincts

It is not true to say that social scientists have had no idea of the nature of human sociality: – there have, in fact, been two competing visions of individuals' inherited social instincts. Neither view would probably admit that they were, by implication, theories of inherited human characteristics, i.e., theories of human nature.

The first and most obvious is the neo-classical economics notion of the “rational utility-maximizing” human individual. Rather obviously, the idea that everyone, regardless of context or culture, is a "rational utility maximizer’ can only be due to human nature. Most neo-classical economists would be very uncomfortable with discussing their micro-economic ‘simplifying axioms’ actually relating to real-world human nature, but it seems difficult to avoid.

The second is called the “standard social science model” of the infinitely malleable “blank slate” individual. Social scientists who hold this view would even more vehemently reject the idea this was a view of human nature, but of course, it is. For everyone, everywhere, to be ‘blank slates’ means we all must be born that way, which is, of course, a view of human nature. Having no ‘hard-wired’ social instincts is just as much an assumption about human nature as ‘rational utility maximization.

These two basic approaches have been associated largely with the two principle wings in the democratic political thought of the past century and a half – free-market capitalism and liberalism (rational utility maximization) and socialism or social democracy (‘blank slate’ adaptability).

I want to argue that both these models are partly right and also wrong because they are incomplete. There is an alternative, which is still a relatively simple picture of human social instincts but accounts for contradictory human behavior.

Let me first set out some definitions.

What do I mean by “instincts”? I use the term in the same way it is used in Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct” – that is to say, an ‘instinct’ combines an innate desire to acquire something (language) with an innate ability to assimilate it. Pinker argues that humans are normally born with an innate desire to acquire language and an innate ability to do so. This is not at all culture or experience-dependent but is ‘hard-wired.’

Which language people acquire is determined by the socio-cultural context in which they grow up. Take a child of American English-speaking parents at birth and have it adopted by Mandarin-Chinese speaking parents, and it will grow up speaking Mandarin like a native, and vice-versa.

Thus, human facility with language includes elements of inherited, fixed, motives and abilities and an acquired cultural component.

By social, in the context of social instincts, I refer to how humans seek to interact with other humans in ‘their’ and other groups (not just their immediate family). Most evidence suggests humans evolved in groups of about 150 (the famous “Dunbar’s Number”), and social instincts refer to how we seek to interact with the members of this social group.

According to the supporters of ‘relational models theory (RMT), a surprisingly small number of social instincts – just four – can explain a great deal about human social behavior. I have changed the terminology slightly from RMT usage for reasons I will explain elsewhere in my explication of these four basic social instincts. The four basic social instincts are:

– Community seeking – the desire for group membership, group sharing, and group identity.

– Authority seeking – the desire to identify leaders and followers for security and order imposed by authority relations.

– Equality seeking – the desire for equality and equity in the treatment of individuals, for justice and fairness, and for rules that apply to all.

– Advantage seeking – the desire to secure, through the group and the exchange, self-interested advantage, personal autonomy, individualism, property rights, etc.

An obvious question is how much, to some extent contradictory, social instincts could have evolved? The simple answer to that is group selection. It is now widely accepted amongst many evolutionary biologists (but by no means all) that selection can operate at several levels: individual genes, the whole genome, and groups of individuals (in social groups). In a previous book (The Paradoxical Primate 2005), I have outlined why group selection might favor groups composed of individuals with contradictory levels of, for example, altruistic and selfish behavior rather than groups made up exclusively of altruistic or selfish individuals. I have now applied the label ‘Homo Janus’ to this approach, signaling that unlike ‘Homo Economicus,’ humans have contradictory social instincts.
Several points need to be made about the above four basic social instincts.

First, the cultural expressions of these underlying social instincts – as for the language instinct and actual languages – may be extremely diverse.

‘Authority,’ for example, can be attached to elected representatives, professionally qualified individuals, religious leaders, and autocrats. Both Nelson Mandela and Adolf Hitler were authority figures to many, but it is hard to imagine two more different individuals regarding their values and actions. So the ‘authority seeking’ social instinct can have morally antagonistic expressions and very varied bases.

Similarly, ‘community’ seeking can be a positive force or, in the case of xenophobia and racism, an extremely negative impulsion.

Second, the proposition is that all individuals have these social instincts to a greater or lesser degree. The balance of expression of the four social instincts may well vary – in fact, almost certainly do – between individuals based on nature (inheritance) and nurture (cultural experiences). This means that any extreme social system that seeks to suppress one of these social instincts completely is almost certainly bound to fail. So though there may be a great deal of variation in social systems, this variation will exist within certain limits.

A useful analogy here is the basis of life on earth itself – DNA. DNA is composed of just four bases: adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T), and some sugars and phosphate. ACGT can produce an enormous diversity of living forms, all from just these four bases. But within this incredible diversity, there are also obvious intrinsic and extrinsic limits to the forms available.

Third, as already noted, these social instincts are in tension with each other. ‘Authority’ is in tension with ‘Equality,’ ‘Community’ with ‘Advantage,’ and so on. These tensions provide the individual and the group with adaptive advantages if the balance and appropriate deployment of instincts match environmental challenges. Of course, they can also lead to destructive conflicts, both within individuals and groups, if not deployed appropriately.

Fourth, this immediately leads to another conclusion – there is no ‘one right way’ in which these social instincts, and the balance between them, are best expressed. What is right or ‘best’ will change depending on context. It is possible to say that certain forms of expression are more or less likely to be appropriate in the long run. Still, even some extreme forms of expression – for example, extreme ‘Authority’ – may have survival and reproduction benefits in certain extreme or crisis circumstances. Societies and groups that have gone to extremes in the direction of one or other of these social instincts generally haven’t survived.

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Sex is one of the biggest drivers in life; it is a cornerstone Of our decision-making, life path, and whatever we do. I want you to think of one time, one moment when in your life where you fully dissociated yourself from this; I doubt you will find. Not saying, though, that it is the ultimate goal; it does shapes the way we do things. I remember I was around 12, and we went on a summer trip to Cyprus with my parents, and we had friends there we would always hang out with. We visited a woman called Yanoulla, an old lady friends with my grandmother who worked at the fish market. This family was just so welcoming, warm-hearted, and caring. Her husband Harris was a huge fan of Liverpool FC, and we would tease each other, me being an avid Manchester United FC Fan at heart. So we arrived at her home, a ground-floor apartment, and the balcony was the street overlooking Limassol’s sandy beach. I started running around and playing with small things like all kids until Soulla [Her daughter] arrived with her children Chris and Harris Jr [Girl]. Chris was, to my brother and me, the coolest person ever; he started talking about how he went clubbing and met so many girls and was all fit and stuff. I remember my brother and I were in Awe to his stories, and this is where my interaction with puberty began. We started talking about girls, and one night we went into Chris’ father’s room; he showed us actually Cassettes; Not CDs, Not MP3s, Video Cassettes. It was porn.

While reading, I am sure your brain will take you through these small experiences that shaped your puberty; you will remember the small interactions, the small secrets, the rooms, skin interactions, warmth, and passion. You will remember these people you interacted with, discovering and exploring when the unknown was just an increased heartbeat. As we grow, we always want to continue being sexually relevant and play the seduction and attraction game. I discuss this in my concept of relationship 2.0. I analyze our physical needs and urge to remain relevant and how it impacts Monogamy turning it into a “Monogamish” concept. For business, it is the same; understanding attraction and seduction makes you understand ideation, product creation, customer support, and scaling your business.

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The self-preservation, survival instinct is the instinct of physical self-protection. As a living species, our bodies are the catalyst for our lives. It's the most basic, ubiquitous survival instinct. If our bodies fail, we cannot live. This instinct is concerned primarily with one's own physical body and its health, stability, protection, and ultimately that it continues to live. 

1. Physical Well-Being
   The self-preservation instinct is focused on the body itself and its well-being. It includes health, strength, diet, fitness, and endurance. This facet of self-preservation is like a management system for your body. It seeks to find a root cause for problems in the body, and it can seek to test the body's endurance to harm or stress. 

Possible examples of thoughts:  Is this food healthy? Why do I feel so tired today? When can I get back to the gym so I can feel more energetic? Could I climb to the top of this mountain? Could I survive in the forest for one month?

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Humans all have three primary survival instincts: Self- Preservation, Sexual, and Social. Our Enneagram type is a strategy used to meet the needs of these three instinctual drives. Our personality tends to have an imbalance with the three rather than use them equally. Which one do you think you most identify with? Before understanding how our particular type interacts with our particular instinct, it's crucial to understand what each instinct is in its natural state.  

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Three Reasons why I decided to write this book

1. I felt I needed to close a chapter and open a new one. I felt that I reached a time in my life where I realized that compromising is just a big "NO".
2. I wanted to help Startups and Entrepreneurs launch their business and grow, and I believe it is the best time to do so.
3. I know that Post Covid is going to be a new era and I think that it is the best time to reflect on what would come next.

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Kudos is praising and Compliments. For a very long time, I was praising startups and entrepreneurship without knowing. Later, I was privileged to join the startup world through different ecosystems and I was proud to launch Lexyom [www.lexyom.com ] a legal tech startup that aims to disrupt the way people deal with legal and with a vision of making "Legal the most spoken language worldwide".

This podcast is based on my book " The Startup kudos " which relates the steps towards building your startup. Chapter 11 is about "relationship 2.0" and chapter 12 is about politics, a topic I love to discuss.

In this episode, I talk about the importance of verifying what you have learned and checking the things you have done to deliver a better result.

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Almost nothing great has ever been achieved without passion. Think of Winston Churchill in the darkest days of WWII, Lincoln in the Civil War.

Great writers and artists have passion. Performers, too, Edith Piaf being an outstanding example. Our most innovative business leaders, people like Steve Jobs, have it.

But what is it? I looked up the word passion in several dictionaries and nearly all of them focused on romance. Then I came across The Urban Dictionary and there it was:

“Passion is when you put more energy into something than is required to do it. It is more than just enthusiasm or excitement, passion is an ambition that is materialized into action to put as much heart, mind, body, and soul into something as is possible.”

Business people with passions can be like magnets, attracting supporters, helpers, enthusiasts, devotees.

Of course, success requires a lot more than a passion: intelligence, hard work, common sense, leadership, honesty, and courage help immensely. Sadly, a lot of passion can be misguided, especially when people think passion is enough. It is if you want to be a voice crying in the wilderness, otherwise, it isn’t.

So come on pick up your energy, trust yourself, and Move forward.

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Stages of Negotiation
In order to achieve a desirable outcome, it may be useful to follow a structured approach to negotiation. For example, in a work situation, a meeting may need to be arranged in which all parties involved can come together.

The process of negotiation includes the following stages:

Preparation
Discussion
Clarification of goals
Negotiate towards a Win-Win outcome
Agreement
Implementation of a course of action

1. Preparation
   Before any negotiation takes place, a decision needs to be taken as to when and where a meeting will take place to discuss the problem and who will attend. Setting a limited time scale can also be helpful to prevent the disagreement from continuing.

This stage involves ensuring all the pertinent facts of the situation are known in order to clarify your own position. In the working example above, this would include knowing the ‘rules of your organization, to whom help is given when help is not felt appropriate, and the grounds for such refusals.

Undertaking preparation before discussing the disagreement will help to avoid further conflict and unnecessarily wasting time during the meeting.

1. Discussion
   During this stage, individuals or members of each side put forward the case as they see it, i.e. their understanding of the situation.

Key skills during this stage include questioning, listening, and clarifying.

Sometimes it is helpful to take notes during the discussion stage to record all points put forward in case there is a need for further clarification. It is extremely important to listen, as when disagreement takes place it is easy to make the mistake of saying too much and listening too little. Each side should have an equal opportunity to present their case.

1. Clarifying Goals
   From the discussion, the goals, interests, and viewpoints of both sides of the disagreement need to be clarified.

It is helpful to list these factors in order of priority. Through this clarification, it is often possible to identify or establish some common ground. Clarification is an essential part of the negotiation process, without it, misunderstandings are likely to occur which may cause problems and barriers to reaching a beneficial outcome.

1. Negotiate Towards a Win-Win Outcome
   This stage focuses on what is termed a 'win-win' outcome where both sides feel they have gained something positive through the process of negotiation and both sides feel their point of view has been taken into consideration.

A win-win outcome is usually the best result. Although this may not always be possible, through negotiation, it should be the ultimate goal.

Suggestions of alternative strategies and compromises need to be considered at this point. Compromises are often positive alternatives that can often achieve greater benefit for all concerned compared to holding to the original positions.

1. Agreement
   The agreement can be achieved once an understanding of both sides’ viewpoints and interests have been considered.

It is essential for everybody involved to keep an open mind in order to achieve an acceptable solution. Any agreement needs to be made perfectly clear so that both sides know what has been decided.

1. Implementing a Course of Action
   From the agreement, a course of action has to be implemented to carry through the decision.

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1. Involve Your Users

Users naturally gravitate to websites they like. To best determine what people want in a website, just ask them. When you involve your users in the design process, you organically create a better UX. Though intuition is often a useful tool in a design project, what is intuitive to a site designer might not be intuitive to your customer base. Reaching out to users will give you design ideas that you can count on.

How you choose to communicate depends on your customer demographic. Create a Twitter survey, start a Facebook quiz, initiate a survey after purchase, or ask Snapchat users for a snap of what they like/dislike. Not only will this help you develop insight into your users, but it could also boost your business’s social media presence. Find them where they are, get their advice, and offer an incentive for their help. A 10% coupon or first access to sales may be just the reward a guest needs to spend a few minutes explaining how you can improve your UX.

1. Consider the Cognitive Load

The UX will be poor if someone has a difficult time interpreting what you are asking them to do, so consider what is happening in your customer’s mind when you design UX. One way of approaching this is through science. Consider cognitive load, which is a psychological term that describes the amount of thought a particular task requires of its doer. One of the most significant types of cognitive load is intrinsic cognitive load, which refers to the difficulty with which a user completes a prompted step or instruction on a website or application. Knowing what to do next should come naturally. If users struggle to understand how to take the next step, you have lost them. Keep the instructions short and easy to interpret, but most of all, make sure they are intuitive.

Another type of cognitive load is Germane cognitive load, which focuses on processing information and constructing schemas. On websites and applications, there are often discernible design patterns that a user can recognize. The UX will be better if the user can recognize the schema of your website or application, as they will understand it faster than if you use an entirely new design pattern.

1. Keep Things Simple

No one wants to feel dumb when he or she approaches a site. If your users do, they will bounce. People tend to have little patience for situations they cannot understand, but that can be doubly true for technology – where their fuse may already be short. When designing for streamlined UX, it is essential to keep things simple. Overly complicated wording or overwhelming decorative touches will not do your site any favors.

People tend to make choices online fast, so give them the space to do that by offering clear options. Omit excess attributes and focus on the most crucial part of your website or application so they can make a quick and easy decision. Confusing UX can make users feel like they are the problem. When a consumer feels like the design is too smart for them to navigate, they will find a site where they feel more comfortable.

1. Be Consistent

Being consistent is one of the most important rules of designing an effective UX for your website. First, it will make your website clearer. If a user can get a feel for your style and not have to adjust their thinking, it will be easier for them to navigate. If they can quickly navigate your site, they are less likely to bounce. More than increasing UX, developing a clear style will strengthen your brand and make it easier for people to recognize and remember your organization.

1. Design Intentionally

Though UX should feel familiar and intuitive, it should not seem dull. Insert some unique or creative elements into your website or application design to attract users and make them want to spend time on your site. Be intentional with your creativity; too many unique moments may make the site feel inconsistent and frustrating. Break with convention just enough to make your website memorable.

Additionally, be intentional with your site’s overall design style. There is an endless number of design conventions, but they are not all interchangeable. If you choose the wrong style, your website or application could be less appealing to users. Having a strong UX for your digital service relies partially on your overall style fitting your brand and pleasing users.

1. Focus on Function Over Aesthetics

Though it is essential to make your website or application visually appealing, it is more important that it functions well. Before investing large amounts of time making your website or application appealing to the eye, ensure that it functions quickly and easily across interfaces.

1. Know Where You Are in the Design Process

UX design is an extensive and complicated process. It often takes a long time to achieve the stellar UX that everyone strives for. Because the process is long and complicated, it is easy to get caught up in each small step and forget to look at the overall project.

If you are looking for feedback from users, it is especially important to have an idea of your overall position in the process. Feedback will be far less useful if you have extensive details about one small portion of the project and only a vague description of the overall goal. It also helps you determine which questions to ask when trying to get user feedback. Instead of asking questions about each step individually, ask questions that analyze the overall effectiveness of the design. Because each step is working to get your website to the end goal, information about how the design as a whole is functioning is the most important thing to get from users.

1. Personalize the Experience

People are exponentially more likely to connect to a website or application design if they can get a sense of the person behind the screen. Developing a connection with users strengthens their experience with your platform and leads them to build loyalty to your brand.

If your website or application looks like every other one online, it is likely that it will be quickly forgotten. Lifeless, impersonal designs do not appeal to potential clients or customers. If you can design your website so that the user imagines a group of people behind the site instead of a machine, you will attract more users and improve the UX on your website or application.

1. Leave Room for User Error

Design your digital experience so that it still functions when someone makes a mistake. Consider how some search engines autocorrect for spelling; if they did not, many people would not get far in their online searches. Designing empathetically may help you circumvent problems your user will make, but you cannot foresee all errors. When a box pops up telling the user there was an error, be sure to include instructions. Instead of merely saying “an internal error occurred”, say that an error occurred and provide directions for the user about how to fix it. If your website or application becomes unusable after a user error, you will end up turning away many people.

The FITTS LAW = Time to acquire a Target = Distance to the target + Size of the Target

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Why is a Positive Attitude Important for Entrepreneurs?

A positive attitude and outlook are a must for successful entrepreneurs. The mindset of the head of the company sets the tone for the rest of the company and influences corporate culture.

Negative thoughts undermine forward motion and the progress of the company, not to mention the management’s ability to lead staff and motivate employees. Part of what gives entrepreneurs the fortitude to weather business downturns is positivity.

Cultivating a positive attitude is not about sticking your head in the sand and ignoring things that could go wrong, but about learning how to mentally reframe your response. There is no point in wallowing in mistakes.

One way to change your outlook is to look at a negative pain point and ask “How can I actively correct this?” By exploring your reaction and response to a perceived problem, you’ll soon learn to cultivate a positive approach to change. Positive people look to challenges as a way to improve and learn, so you should try to focus on this skill.

Why is positivity important for the overall work environment? When you’re the boss, a positive attitude influences others in a similarly positive way. Research indicates that happy employees are better overall workers. Psychological research has made a correlation between higher productivity and positive work environments. Moreover, positive work environments have been linked to higher business profits, fewer sick days, and higher staff retention rates.

Part of relinquishing negativity is realizing that your own negative thoughts as a company leader waste energy, time, and money.

Being positive is something that, like all life skills, can be learned. Becoming an entrepreneur is not for the faint-hearted. The long hours and erratic demands of heading up your own company can negatively impact both your personal life and mental outlook.

One of the easiest ways to cultivate a positive attitude is to focus on the things you can control. You can control your diet, amount of sleep, and ability to exercise. Each of these factors will help you stay focused, healthy, and positive.

One of the most important keys to success in entrepreneurship is to never give up. Perseverance will get you through the tough times. Be tenacious about working toward your dreams. With determination and grit, you’ll achieve them; it just may not be overnight!

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Ways to Manage Failure

1. Recognise and accept your emotions

Failure hurts, at least in the first instance, and you need to accept that. Trying to minimize your feelings or distract yourself can be counter-productive in the longer term. Just recognize your feelings for what they are and allow yourself time to hurt a bit.

Don’t, however, dwell on it for too long. That, too, is counter-productive, especially if you blame yourself.

Take a few days for the pain to lessen, and then start to move on.

1. Don’t make it personal

One reason why some people find failure devastating is that their identity is tied up in succeeding. In other words, when they fail, they see themselves as a failure, rather than perceiving that they have experienced a setback. Try not to see failure or success as personal: instead, it is something that you experience. It does not change the real ‘you.

This comes back to Kipling’s point: Success and failure are not intrinsic parts of you. No part of your identity should be ‘I am a success’ or ‘I am a failure.

1. Don’t worry what anyone else will think

Sometimes our views about success and failure are tied up in what other people will think about us, or about how we think they will judge us. You cannot ever control what other people think. Nor should you ever do something simply because it will please other people.

It is easier to accept both success and failure if you define them in your own terms, and do things because you want to achieve, not because you think other people will be pleased.

1. Take the right amount of responsibility

We have all met people who are always ready to blame others or events for their lack of success.

“The referee was biased!”

“The teacher doesn’t like me, that’s why my mark was so low.”

“If only I hadn’t been ill last summer, I wouldn’t have missed several weeks of training.”
It is important to recognize when other, external factors have affected your success. You don’t need—and should not try—to blame yourself for everything, particularly if it is outside your control.

It is, however, also important to recognize what you yourself could have done to improve matters. For example, could you have trained or worked harder? Was your revision really all that it could have been? Did you really prepare for that interview in the best possible way?

Take responsibility for the factors over which you have control, and don’t be tempted to hide behind excuses.

1. Use failure as a way to improve

Don’t think of failure as failure. Instead, think of it as life’s way of showing you that you need to improve, and how to do so.

In particular, ask yourself what you could have done differently to achieve a better result. Then consider how you could put that into practice to help you to improve for next time.

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Balachandran from MD Andersen suggests ways to get better sleep.

1. Set a consistent sleep schedule. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time.
2. Create regular bedtime rituals. Do the same thing every night before bedtime, like take a warm bath, read or listen to music. Your pre-sleep activity should be relaxing so your body knows when it’s time to go to sleep.
3. Get regular exercise. Make sure you exercise at least two hours before bedtime though, or it may be difficult to fall asleep.
4. Keep a healthy diet. Meals just before bedtime may make it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep. But, a small snack just before bedtime tends to promote sleep.
5. Limit caffeine and avoid nicotine. Caffeine and nicotine are stimulants that interfere with sleep. Regular users also may experience withdrawal symptoms at night, leading to restless sleep. Limit caffeine intake to less than two servings per day, and don’t drink afternoon. Tobacco users who break the habit usually are able to fall asleep faster and sleep better once withdrawal symptoms subside.
6. Avoid alcohol. Alcohol is a sedative that slows brain activity. While it may induce sleep, it interferes with sleep during the night, causing you to wake up frequently and have nightmares. It’s best to not drink alcohol four to six hours before bedtime.
   Keep naps short. During the day, you build up a “sleep debt” that helps you fall asleep at night. Naps during the day pay off that debt, interfering with your night sleep. If you need to nap, limit it to less than 30 minutes.
7. Use your bedroom for sleep only. Don’t eat or watch TV in bed. Don’t use electronics – laptops, cellphones, or tablets – in bed. Make sure your bedroom is dark, quiet, and cool. If you use it only for sleep, you’ll associate your bedroom with sleeping rather than activity or stress.

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The most successful startups never had it good when they actually started. In fact, for most of them, the product looked completely different, served a different need and market!

Now, if you’re looking at building your app with a custom software development company, check out the software requirements document template to request proposals.

These are the 10 most successful startups today. They all began with a simple idea and look where they are.

1 Airbnb

This is a story of 3 guys and how they went from renting mattresses to a $10 billion company. In 2007, designers Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, couldn’t afford the rent on their San Francisco apartment.

There was a design conference coming to San Francisco and the city’s hotels were fully booked, so they came up with the idea of renting out three airbeds on their living-room floor and cooking their guests breakfast.

They set up a simple blog and got three renters (two guys, one girl) for $80 each.

After a small success and product-market fit, they enlisted a former flatmate and a computer science graduate, Nathan Blecharczyk, to develop the website and join the venture.

2 Instagram

This is a story of two guys who made an app in flat 8 weeks. Kevin Systrom, a Stanford graduate who worked on Google’s Gmail and corporate development, spent his weekends building an app that allowed location-aware photo and note-sharing, dubbing it Burbn.

That’s how Kevin met Mike Krieger, an early Burbn user, and Instagram’s co-founder. Later, Burbn was reduced to photos only and dubbed named Instagram.

3 Pinterest

Raised by doctor parents, Ben Silbermann assumed he would follow the same path. He attended Yale University starting in 1999 and soon realized that he didn’t want to be a doctor. After a consulting gig in Washington DC, working for Google, and a failed app, he came up with another idea.

In 2009, Ben and a college friend, Paul Sciarra, along with Evan Sharp, started working on a site on which people could show collections of things they were interested in, on an interactive pin-board format.

Ben personally wrote to the site’s first 7,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting with some of its users. Over Thanksgiving dinner, Ben’s girlfriend thought of a name for it: Pinterest.

4 Angry Birds

Just how many times the founders of Angry Birds tried to build a successful one. Moral of the story is that even if you fail 51 times, you only need to succeed once!

5 Linkedin

In late 2002, Reid Hoffman recruited a team of old colleagues from SocialNet and PayPal to work on a new idea. By May 2003, Reid launched LinkedIn out of his living room, inviting 350 of his contacts to join his network and create their own profiles.

The business started with slow growth at first—as few as 20 signups on some days—but, by the fall, it showed enough promise to attract investment from Sequoia Capital.

6 Uber

After a conference in Paris, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp were complaining about the many crappy things we all have to deal with in life, including finding a cab. The next thing you know, the two were already brainstorming, thinking about ways to find cars at the right place, at the right time.

7 Snapchat

Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy, three friends from college were testing out their entrepreneurial skills. During a casual chat, Reggie said, “I wish these photos I am sending this girl would disappear.”

Soon after, Evan referred to it as a ‘million dollar idea.’ They worked on the app and launched in the name of Picaboo. But later after a clash between with Reggie, Evan and Bobby asked him to leave and changed the name to Snapchat.

8 WhatsApp

Jan Koum and Brian Acton, two friends and colleagues from Yahoo were frustrated with the idea of having so many advertisements on any page. In 2007, both left Yahoo and took a year to decompress. Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook.

After a lot of ups and downs, they launched WhatsApp in 2009, with a clear purpose that their service would definitely not carry any advertising and would maintain a relentless focus on delivering a gimmick, reliable, friction-free user experience.

9 Twitter

Twitter’s origins lie in a day-long brainstorming session held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo.

Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.

10 Facebook

A 19-year-old lad and a second-year Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg launched an internal social networking site for Harvard students.

Soon after the site got popular among students, it expanded its reach to other universities. In 2004, the site moved its operations base to Palo Alto, California, and received its first investment from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

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The primary artifact in Scrum development is, of course, the product itself. The Scrum model expects the team to bring the product or system to a potentially shippable state at the end of each Scrum sprint.

The product backlog is another artifact of Scrum. This is the complete list of the functionality that remains to be added to the product. The product owner prioritizes the backlog, so the team always works on the most valuable features first.

The most popular and successful way to create a product backlog using Scrum methodology is to populate it with user stories, which are short descriptions of the functionality described from a user or customer's perspective.

In Scrum project management, on the first day of a sprint and during the planning meeting, team members create the sprint backlog. The sprint backlog can be thought of as the team's to-do list for the sprint, whereas a product backlog is a list of features to be built (written in the form of user stories).

The sprint backlog is the list of tasks the team needs to perform to deliver the functionality it committed to deliver during the sprint.

Additional artifacts resulting from the Scrum agile methodology are the sprint burndown chart and release burndown chart. Burndown charts show the amount of work remaining either in a sprint or a release and are an effective tool in Scrum software development to determine whether a sprint or release is scheduled to have all planned work finished by the desired date.

Even if you are new to Scrum, you may have heard of a role called the ScrumMaster. The ScrumMaster is the team's coach and helps Scrum practitioners achieve their highest level of performance.

In the Scrum process, a ScrumMaster differs from a traditional project manager in many ways, including that it does not provide day-to-day direction to the team and does not assign tasks to individuals.

A good ScrumMaster shelters the team from outside distractions, allowing team members to focus maniacally during the sprint on their selected goal.

While ScrumMaster focuses on helping the team be the best possible, the product owner works to direct the team to the right goal. The product owner does this by creating a compelling vision of the product and then conveying that vision to the team through the product backlog.

The product owner is responsible for prioritizing the backlog during Scrum development to ensure it’s up to par as more is learned about the system being built, its users, the team, and so on.

The third and final role in Scrum project management is the Scrum team itself. Although individuals may join the team with various job titles, in Scrum, those titles are insignificant. Scrum methodology states that each person contributes in whatever way they can to complete each sprint's work.

This does not mean that a tester will be expected to re-architect the system; individuals will spend most (and sometimes all) of their time working in whatever discipline they worked in before adopting the agile Scrum model. But with Scrum, individuals are expected to work beyond their preferred disciplines whenever doing so would be for the team's good.

One way to think of the interlocking nature of these three roles in this agile methodology is as a racecar.

The Scrum team is the car itself, ready to speed along in whatever direction it is pointed. The product owner is the driver, ensuring that the car is always going in the right direction. And the ScrumMaster is the chief mechanic, keeping the car well-tuned and performing at its best.

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Product/Market Fit is a common concept in the startup world. While widely applied in conversations around new high-growth companies, it doesn’t seem to have caught on in the rest of the business world yet.

It deserves to be more widely understood because it’s a useful Mental Model for the interplay between a business, its products, and its customers. Learning about Product/Market Fit will help you see the world differently, and inspire new ways to create value for your customers and growth for your business.

Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.

And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it.

Myth #1: Product market fit is always a discrete, big bang event
Myth #2: It’s patently obvious when you have product-market fit
Myth #3: Once you achieve product-market fit, you can’t lose it
Myth #4: Once you have product-market fit, you don’t have to sweat the competition

In a Nutshell, This is a product-market fit.

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Branding

Branding gives greater meaning to a company's name and its products. Through effective emotional appeals and market messages, your business can help the market identify your brand and differentiate it from competitors based on benefits such as better quality, services, or tools. Companies build brands using memorable names, symbols such as logos, and other images and phrases. Catchy slogans, for instance, sometimes become strongly connected to your brand so that people easily recall the brand from hearing the slogan.

Marketing Mix

Also known as the "Four P's" of marketing, the marketing mix includes four controllable strategic areas used by companies when making and implementing marketing decisions. Product is the actual product or service you provide. Place, or distribution, refers to the physical location of touchpoints available to customers and the order fulfillment processes that take place following sales. Price involves pricing decisions related to your value proposition. Promotion involves the specific marketing strategies used to deliver your brand and messages to its markets.

Market Segmentation

Market segmentation means breaking down a larger target audience into smaller, more homogeneous customer groups. This helps companies maximizing marketing effectiveness and improve efficiency by targeting more profitable customers with messages. Demographic, geographic, psychographic or lifestyle, and behavior are all approaches to market segmentation. Demographic segments are developed based on shared individual traits such as age, race, and gender. Geographic segmentation means targeting markets by location, such as local, regional, state, national or global. Small businesses often target local geographic customer segments. Psychographics means targeting customers with similar lifestyles, interests, or hobbies. Behavioral segmentation is based on usage rates.

Positioning

Positioning describes the way in which a company differentiates itself in the minds of a particular market segment. A company may try to brand itself as the highest quality provider of its product to a particular market, for instance. Other businesses position themselves as top service providers. Saying you are a highly trusted brand or that your business provides small-town friendliness and personal attention are other positioning approaches. Customer perception of your business, brand, and messages are key to effective positioning.

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A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. You’ll start the design process by conducting user research—building empathy with your target users and identifying exactly what they need from the product you’re designing. A persona is generally based on this user research and incorporates your target audience's needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns.

Whether you’re developing a smartphone app or a mobile-responsive website, it’s essential to understand who will be using the product. To solve a real user problem, you need to have a clear problem statement in mind; to write this problem statement, you first need to understand your users and their needs.

Knowing your audience will help influence the features and design elements you choose, thus making your product more useful. A persona clarifies who is in your target audience by answering the following questions:

Who is my ideal customer?
What are the current behavior patterns of my users?
What are the needs and goals of my users?
What issues and pain points do they currently face within the given context?

Understanding the needs of your users is vital to developing a successful product. Well-defined personas will enable you to identify and communicate user needs efficiently. Personas will also help you describe the individuals who use your product, which is essential to your overall value proposition.

Personas help with strategizing and making smart design decisions. They make real users memorable for the product team, helping to focus efforts and build empathy.

In a nutshell, user personas are crucial if you want to design something useful, desirable, and valuable to your target audience. A solid user persona is your northern star, guiding your design decisions from start to finish.

Not only that. Most designers work in multidisciplinary teams where it’s important to communicate your findings from the user research stage. Personas encompass all the essential details about your users, presenting them in a memorable way that everyone can understand—not just designers.

A well-defined user persona contains four key pieces of information:

• Header
• Demographic profile
• The end goal(s)
• Scenario

Before you create a persona, conduct plenty of research to make sure your personas accurately represent your users. After you gather an adequate amount of qualitative and quantitative data, organize the information into persona groups representing your ideal customers. Remember to focus on the most important user groups' major needs—you can’t be everything to everyone, nor should you try to be!

Once you’ve got your user groups, you can turn them into user personas. Let’s take a look at the four steps that go into creating a user persona.

Step 1: Add a header

The header includes a fictional name, image, and quote that summarizes what matters most to the persona related to your product. These features help improve memorability, keeping your design team focused on the users they are building the product for.

Let’s imagine you’re designing a travel app. The foundations of your user persona could look like this:

Name: Mariam Kenorabi
Summary quote: “Take me to undiscovered holiday destinations away from the tourist traps.”

This first step might seem simple, but these features ensure that your persona is memorable, keeping the design team focused on who they are designing for.

Step 2: Add a demographic profile

While the name and image can be fictional, demographic details are factual and based on user research. The demographic profile includes four main sections: personal background, professional background, user environment, and psychographics.

Personal background

The personal background includes age, gender, ethnicity, education, persona group (e.g., working moms), and family status (e.g., single, married with children, widowed, etc.).

Mariam’s personal background might be described as follows: Mariam, 52 years old, a divorced mother of two, has a Master’s degree in chemistry.

Professional background

The professional background includes details such as job occupation, income level, and work experience. Here we might add that Mariam works full-time at a pharmaceuticals company and earns around $65,000 per year.

User environment

The user environment represents the physical, social, and technological context of the user. This section is used to answer questions like What technological devices do users have access to? Do they spend most of their time in a corporate office or a home office? And how often do they collaborate with others? So, Mariam's user environment could be in her office, mostly on a laptop, but also on her iPad when commuting to and from work.

Psychographics

Psychographics include details such as attitudes, interests, motivations, and pain points. Creating a psychographic profile enables you to understand better why your user behaves in a certain way—including why they use your product.

Let’s continue to imagine you’re designing a holiday-booking app. Some useful psychographic information to include in your user persona could be:

Mariam
- Enjoys luxury spa retreats, hates tourist traps
- Appreciates an element of exclusivity
- Enjoys trying authentic local cuisine
- Prefers to travel alone or with one other person
- Tends to favor quality over economy
- Overall, the demographic profile adds a layer of realism to a user persona, boosting empathy when exploring user needs and goals.

Step 3: Add end goal(s)

The end goal is the motivating factor that inspires action and answers the question: what do users want or need to accomplish using your product? End goals are your users' main driving forces and determine what the persona wants or needs to fulfill.

In Mariam's case, her end goal when using your holiday-booking app is to discover and book luxurious, off-the-beaten-track holiday destinations.

Step 4: Add a scenario

A scenario is a “day-in-the-life” narrative that describes how a persona would interact with your product in a particular context to achieve his or her end goal(s). The scenario usually defines when, where, and how the narrative takes place. They are typically written from the persona's perspective and describe use cases that may happen in the future.

For example, Mariam's scenario could start like this:

“At least once a year, I like to go away on a luxury holiday. I try to discover places I’ve never been to before and to stick to destinations that aren’t yet overrun with tourists. I work full time, so I don’t have that much time to browse and book each holiday's individual element. Ideally, I’ll find some package deal that comes with local restaurant recommendations…”

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Facebook Made it because founders understood their users and could scale swiftly and organically.

In May 2005, TheFacebook received more money. This time investments of $12.7m from Accel and $1m from venture capitalist Jim Breyer's personal fortune. People were really paying attention now.

In August, the ‘the’ was dropped, and the company officially became Facebook (the facebook.com domain cost $200,000). The following month high school students are admitted, along with employees of Microsoft and Apple. The company was now ready to move beyond its student base.

Then in November, Zuckerberg took an important decision about his own life. Having taken the semester off from Harvard, he announced he was leaving entirely, returning briefly to hire some new employees. After significant investment and growing membership, Zuckerberg was ready to fully dedicate himself to running his company as a CEO rather than a programmer.

Did you hear of this thing called Facebook?
With Zuck at the helm full-time, Facebook continued its expansion plans. In December, Australian and New Zealand universities were included, and high schools from Mexico, the UK, and Ireland. That meant there were now 2,500 colleges and 25,000 high schools with access to Facebook.

It wasn’t until September 2006 when the platform became open for everyone (well, anyone over 13 with a valid email address). Facebook had now gone fully global. We also started to see the rate of membership growth:

December 2006: 12m
April 2007: 20m
July 2007: 30m
October 2007: 50m

In May 2007, Facebook opened its Marketplace, which lets users post classifieds to sell products and services. It also saw the launch of the Facebook Application Developer platform, opening the gates for developers to create their own applications and games integrated with Facebook.

The platform was also looking beyond personal profiles to how businesses could use the site. By the end of 2007, over 100,000 companies had signed up, with Facebook launching Pages for Businesses to support this. Already they’re making plans to build on existing ad revenue to make advertising on the platform accessible to even the smallest of businesses.

Then in 2008, we see a huge release from Facebook. April 2008 saw Facebook Chat rollout, allow us to annoy our friends and family more instantly. Essentially, the concept is no different to ZuckNet. We also see the People You May Know, Facebook Wall, and Facebook Connect released in the same year.

Meanwhile, the user count continues to grow:

August 2008: 100m
January 2009: 150m
February 2009: 175m
April 2009: 200m
July 2009: 250m
September 2009: 300m

We also saw one of the big Facebook games appear. Farmville was released in June 2009 and, despite being a rip-off of a game called Farm Town, became a huge success. By August, it had 10m daily active users. So, so much virtual corn.

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When doing their market analysis start-ups often refer to TAM, SAM, and SOM but what do these acronyms mean, and why are they useful to investors when assessing an investment opportunity?

TAM SAM SOM definition

TAM, SAM, and SOM are acronyms that represent different subsets of a market.

TAM or Total Available Market is the total market demand for a product or service.
SAM or Serviceable Available Market is the segment of the TAM targeted by your products and services which is within your geographical reach.
SOM or Serviceable Obtainable Market is the portion of SAM that you can capture.
Still, confused about TAM SAM SOM? Let's take an example.

Let's say you are starting a fast-food chain. Your TAM would be the worldwide fast food restaurant market. Potentially, if you were present in every country and had no competition you would generate TAM as revenues.

Sorry but that's not going to happen!

Let's be more realistic. You are starting your restaurant chain in two cities where the demand for fast food can be estimated based on the population, their food habits, and the revenues generated by fast-food restaurants in other cities having similar demographics.

That is your Serviceable Available Market: the demand for your type of products within your reach. In other words, if you were the only fast food in town you would generate revenues of SAM.

Now you are probably not the only fast food in town...

So realistically you can hope to capture only a fraction of your SAM. Most likely you will attract fast-food aficionados living or working close to your restaurants and a fraction of the people located further away that are willing to give your chain a try for the sake of fast food diversity. This is your SOM.

Ok, now let's look at why and when they matter.

TAM SAM SOM, when do they matter and why?

Put yourself in an investor's shoes. You need to deliver a target return to your own investors which implies both de-risking the investment early (i.e. figuring with the minimum possible of capital if the start-up has a market) and investing in opportunities that offer substantial upside potential (i.e. huge market size).

The SOM and SAM help de-risking the investment while the TAM enables to assess the upside potential.

The Serviceable Obtainable Market is your short-term target and therefore the one that matters the most: if you cannot succeed on a fraction of the local market chances are that you will never capture a large part of the global market.

As an investor, I expect you to have a realistic objective and I will judge you on your ability to deliver that objective.

To be realistic your SOM needs to factor in: your product: people will want to buy your goods your marketing plan and the identified distribution channels: you have a clear plan to reach a large portion of your target customers your SAM and the strength of your competition: chances are that you are not going to take 50% market share within 6 months. Therefore your SOM needs to be a reasonable fraction of your Serviceable Available Market.

For the investor, the ability to reach your SOM means that he will not lose his shirt. In that context, SAM acts as a good sanity check to assess the likelihood of achieving the market share implied by the Serviceable Obtainable Market and as a proxy for the short-term upside potential of your business.

If you can deliver SOM in time then you are capable and credible, and you might be able to increase the market share and reach a more important penetration of the SAM which would deliver a good return on investment.

And then comes the Total Available Market.

Once you have demonstrated your ability to penetrate a local market and de-risked the investment, the investor can start looking at how you can expand and increase the company's penetration within the TAM.

Let's illustrate this with a numerical example. You come to pitch an investor who has a target return of 10x. You are seeking a £250k investment in exchange for 20% of the start-up's equity.

Based on your market research and business plan we can reasonably assess that:

TAM = £2bn
SAM = £100m
SOM = £5m within 2 years and £12m within 4 years
EBITDA margin = 25%
Valuation at exit = 8x EBITDA based on the value of listed companies within the sector

What happens if you deliver your plan?

Well, once you deliver £5m in revenues the EBITDA is £5m revenues x 25% margin = £1.25m and the company is worth 8 x £1.25m EBITDA = £10m. The investor return on investment is £10m x 20% ownership / £250k investment = 8.0x.

When you reach £12m of revenues the EBITDA is £12m x 25% = £3m and the company is worth 8 x £3m = £24m. The investor return on investment is £24m x 20% ownership / £250k = 19.2x.

Clearly here if you can capture your SOM the investor will meet his target return and he is then left with a company that has achieved 12% market share on a segment that represents 5% of the TAM of £2bn (£100m SAM / £2bn TAM).

If you decide to expand the company and scale internationally, the company revenues potential (assuming you can reach a similar market penetration at scale) becomes 12% market share x £2bn TAM = £240m. Which would imply a £60m EBITDA (25% margin) and therefore a potential valuation of £60m x 8 = £480m. The investor could therefore offer to invest up to £48m in the company in year 4 in order to meet his target return on investment of 10x.

As you can see TAM SAM SOM have different purposes: SOM indicates the short-term sales potential, SOM / SAM the target market share, and TAM the potential at scale. All play an important role in assessing an investment opportunity and the focus should really be on getting the most accurate numbers rather than the biggest possible numbers.

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The only expertise you need is not the industry-specific one. It is expertise in your customer. The startup game is all about knowing your customer, understanding their needs and wants, and making sure you are in sync with what they want. You are the result and consequence of this relationship.

To get your first customer, you need to be able to identify their pain points. Pain points are the specific issues or problems they're currently facing that your business could help them with.

If your brand doesn't provide a solution for its customers, then they'll find another business to invest in. Before marketing, research your customer base front to back to ensure you give them what they want.

Like many first-time business activities, finding your first customer becomes easier when you ask others how they've managed to do it. Join networking platforms to connect with other entrepreneurs, many of whom may have valuable connections that could boost your business growth.

It's helpful to post about what you can do and how you can help your customers. If you take the time to network and reach out, you'll land your first client.

Another excellent source of sales leads is the digital channels your ideal customer uses -- Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. Start with one platform and building a solid community there.

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As we are going to a new age in the economy, we are moving towards different choices and different models. Young entrepreneurs are faced with new choices, new opportunities new challenges. Here are 5 major options to go through:

1. Employment at a major company, startup, multinational.
2. Talent Career
3. Financial trading [NEED TO LEARN]
4. E-commerce shop
5. Startup

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Your best friend, spouse, or family member is the least likely candidate, so don’t start there. Take a hard look at your own business strengths and weaknesses, and write down what partner skills and experiences would best complement yours. Seek input from seasoned investors and peers.

No matter how equal you all are, there is only room for one at the top to make the final decision on hard issues. Especially when everything feels good today, don’t be hesitant to ask the hard questions of each other. There can be only one chief executive officer.

For the success of your startup, finding the right co-founder is one of the most important things that a new entrepreneur needs to do. There are so many challenges in a startup that no founder should try to go it alone. When you find someone that works, I’m betting you will be together on your next startup and the one after that. Great teams persevere, and success breeds success.

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" Startups are very counterintuitive. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just because knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet. But whatever the reason, starting a startup is a task where you can't always trust your instincts.

It's like skiing in that way. When you first try skiing and you want to slow down, your instinct is to lean back. But if you lean back on skis you fly down the hill out of control. So part of learning to ski is learning to suppress that impulse. Eventually, you get new habits, but at first, it takes a conscious effort. At first, there's a list of things you're trying to remember as you start down the hill.

Startups are as unnatural as skiing, so there's a similar list for startups. Here I'm going to give you the first part of it — the things to remember if you want to prepare yourself to start a startup."

http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html

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The Entrepreneurship Mindset is all about 3 main traits
1. Adaptation
2. Listening
3. Creativity in Organization

An entrepreneurial mindset is a set of skills that enable people to identify and make the most of opportunities, overcome and learn from setbacks, and succeed in a variety of settings.

It’s not a big idea alone that paves the path to ultimate entrepreneurial success. Oftentimes the success or failure of a business comes down to the characteristics of the entrepreneur themselves. It takes a unique aggregate of characteristics to meld one big idea into a fully functional thriving business. Is there a certain amalgam of skills and traits which allows some entrepreneurs to become wildly successful?

Suffice it to say that there is no magical formula to succeed in business (if so, Harvard Business School would have patented it). However, there are certain characteristics that all aspiring entrepreneurs should cultivate to dramatically boost their own odds for success. An entrepreneurial mindset, if you will, may mark the difference between a lucrative business and one which shatters the doors before the first year is over.

So what ARE these all-important characteristics aspiring or new entrepreneurs should cultivate? What attributes tend to tip the scales in favor of heading up a booming business? Read on, as we share our experts’ opinions on the matter.

1. Positive Mental Attitude
2. Creative Mindset
3. Persuasive Communication Skills
4. Intrinsic Motivation and Drive
5. Tenacity and an Ability to Learn from Failure

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So, this is important because, obviously, you should know what state your business is in at all times. So, setting the right KPIs and goals will objectively tell you if you're doing well, just okay, or bad. So, nothing keeps you more grounded, humbled, and realistic about where you are than a bunch of numbers because if you interpret those numbers correctly, they don't lie. It'll also actually act as a feedback mechanism for whether your current strategy like user acquisition, launching new features, and so on and so forth, are actually working. So, if you do something and things go up, that's probably good. If you do some things, some things go down, that's probably bad.

And it will not only help you prioritize your time but also course correct. So it follows if you do this incorrectly. If you set your KPIs and goals incorrectly, you can direct your startup into a bunch of circles. Or if you do it for too long on to the wrong path, it'll lead to its unnecessary demise. So, what are the right KPIs to set? I'm going to break this down into two pieces, primary metric, and secondary metrics. And most of this is going to be focused on the primary metric.

One, so your primary metric should quantify how much value you're delivering to your customer. That is, you obviously want to build something that people want. Now, how much do they actually want it? And users often indicate the value through either training you through money or time. So, revenue is always the best metric. I pay you $100 to use your product, your software, I must at least value that $100. Active users using the product once a week or once a day, we call that weekly active user or daily active user, is a weaker, but another good decent indication of whether you're delivering value or not. The second one here is your primary metric must capture whether your product has recurring or enduring value to your user, or it should anyway. So, for example, in a SaaS tool, most SaaS tools use MRR, monthly recurring revenue as their primary metric. I commit to forking over 100 bucks a month, continuously every month, because your product demonstrates to me every month that it has value to me. Another example is if you're building an online digital daily newspaper, then obviously DAU, a daily active user is a good one because I expect to be delivering content to you that is valuable to you every single day. So, hopefully, you'll come back every day.

The third one here is your primary metric should be a lagging indicator for its success. So, a common trap that founders do to trick themselves is by picking a primary metric, let's say, something like email signups. Because one, it's easy to move. But while it may eventually influence revenue or actual usage, it actually doesn't represent the real value the best. So, the best indication is when the value has already been delivered, it's already occurred. So, when someone has already forked over their time or money, to use it, then that is what a lagging...that's a definition of what a lagging indicator is. So, if revenue increases, it's because more customers have already paid for the product's value, versus a potential customer who came to your site, gave you an email, and maybe they'll sign up one day or maybe they'll use your product one day to buy something.

And lastly, your primary metric should be usable as a feedback mechanism. That is it helps you prioritize strategies and make decisions quickly. In a start-up, one of the key things to be to being successful and getting past the product-market fit stage is to iterate very fast, right? So, while you want it to be a lagging indicator, you also don't want it to lag too much. So, for example, a lot of people pick MAU, the monthly active user. But this is usually not a great metric because it takes time to understand the impact of movement, especially in a startup this early as in your startup. And so, many things can happen within a month. And also, another reason why I don't like MAU, generally, is because if your user only comes back once a month, they only value something that you're building once a month, I really question actually, if you're solving a real problem.

All right. So, you may have guessed from me talking about these four characteristics of a primary metric that there are really two primary metrics to pick from. So, one is either revenue or active users. Ideally, you're picking revenue because nothing tells you more about delivering real value than people forking over, handing over real hard-earned dollars to you. And even better, is picking revenue that people keep giving you over and over and over again, like monthly recurring revenue, MRR. It's the best test for whether people really want what you're making. So, that being said, some people do pick revenue, but a common trap they fall into is that they don't actually get paid. And usually, I hear something to the variant of, "Oh, I have these 1000 users not paying me anything. I just want to get their feedback and see how they're using the product and make it a little bit better and then eventually, I'll get them to pay, or the next 1000 users, I'll get them to pay." That's a trap because free users will give you different types of feedback than users who are actually paying you. Paid users are just more serious about the product, and hopefully, will be more serious about giving you feedback.

So make sure you set your Goals, KPIs, and move forward

Make sure to check the guide on www.startupkudos.com

IG @ramialame

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So let me go through an example. Let's say I'm a founder of a SaaS software, generic SaaS software company. My goal for the next week and I just kind of launched and my goal for the next week is just to get five new paying customers. So here's just a sliver of things I can do to reach that goal. At the top, you'll see that the most impactful thing I can do is go to the offices of 10 potential customers who were actually insured to me by friends or whoever, and I know that if I show up at the office, I have a very good chance or some experience. I have a very good chance of convincing them to buy my product and so that's why that's at the top of the list. The next year is of meeting impact because they involve me filling up my pipeline which is one step away from landing new customers, but necessary to do. I also have the second thing here, I also have video demos I can do which for me aren't as effective as doing in-person, but worth doing as well because they do lead to some new customers. You'll notice that there are a couple of items at the bottom of this that involve programming. So a very common mistake technical founders make is to build things first and then go talk to users. And according to this list, to meet my weekly goal means they would be choosing the least impactful thing to do for that week. But with this method, if they're honest about it, they have no choice, but to get off their butt and go talk to users instead. So along with the impact that it might have on helping you achieve your weekly goal, we also need to consider our second dimension of how complex the task is. That is how long would it take for you and your team to complete it. Because there are many tasks within each category of impact, for example, there's like, four of here in medium and three in low. And sort of the question is how do I stack rank those within that category. And so this dimension of complexity helps. So we can grade complexity in three ways, easy, medium, and hard. So an easy task is something that you can do in less than a day. That means you can do a bunch of easy tasks in less than a day. A medium task is something that takes one or two days for you to do and a hard task is one that takes many days to do, and you may not complete it within the week.

So once you go grade all of them you'll have again the second dimension here where you have impacts and then also complexity and so now you can easily stack rank all the tasks in your list, and it's pretty easy to choose what you should prioritize. So giving the objectives to hit your weekly goal, the obvious choice is always to go something with the...to go for the combos of high easy combos and high medium. That is something, a task that has a high impact and is easy to do. You should always do those first and then go to high impact in medium complexity. And what you really don't wanna do is focus on these bottom things here, right? Something that has probably very low probability of helping you achieve your goal and it's very hard to do. It takes a long time to do. There's really no point in doing any of those things. So just as important as selecting the right task to work on is making sure you don't try to do everything at once. Pick enough tasks that you can complete and do well. Doing too many things means you won't be able to complete much of the task with much conviction and it makes it really hard to show progress from week to week.

So how do you know you are prioritizing? From the results

Make sure to check my guides on building your startup on www. startupkudos.com

IG @ramialame

Be Organized, Be Passionate, Be Structured

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I know you have a lot on your plate in starting this company, but what you need to do doesn't take a whole lot of time. For the most part, it's just some conversations with your co-founder. And so I came up with a list of six things that you can do now to help you or to help the likelihood of you building a strong and coherent culture. First one, be proud of the problem you're solving. Kind of seems silly to say, but you need to, right? If you don't have the problem yourself, you need to identify with the people that do have the problem. And you need to be really proud of the fact that you're solving it for them, right? Because as I'm sure you've heard already, and you'll continue to hear, you know, building a company is hard. It's a long process and there will be some really difficult times. And if you're not proud of what you're doing, it's really hard to maintain the level of energy and enthusiasm you need to sustain the company, right?

Sometimes where we see founders go wrong is they choose an idea with their ego. They choose an idea because it sounds good to tell their friends at a party, right? And when times get tough, you know, it's really hard to maintain that level of energy. And the reason energy and enthusiasm are important, not just for sustaining the company, but everyone around you will see how you feel about the company, right? And to a large degree that will set the tone for your culture.

Make sure to check www.startupkudos.com for guides on how to build your culture.

IG: @ramialame

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A vision is crucial for your business it has many facets, many variables, and can impact on so many levels in your business.

What is the Vision for Tesla?
To Accelerate the world's shift to sustainable energy

Why?
1. It was an entry point to the market especially in California and the Tesla Roadster was an amazing social message that people bought to show their willingness to move to sustainable energy.
2. It is a magnet to attract the specific people you want to attract
3. It is the roadmap for product development.

Tesla, "To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy." Pretty inspiring, right? No mention of an electric vehicle. You know, if you said, "Oh, we're building the world's best electrical vehicle," that's good. You'll inspire a handful of engineers who implicitly understand kind of the technical challenges that come with that. But if you're gonna build a big company, you need to attract kind of a broad array of people. This does that. Another example, Microsoft's original, "A computer on every desk in every home." It's kind of laughable now, but in the early '80s, like this was crazy talk, right? Computers were only for businesses and hobbyists. But this vision, you know, laid out by bill Gates and Paul Allen, attracted the right type of people to their company, right? The hobbyists that had the capability to help them build the type of company they needed to build saw this and were excited about it. It attracted and allowed them to kind of build the type of culture that they needed at Microsoft.

Last one, one you're all familiar with, "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Again, no mention of the product, it doesn't say, "We're building a kickass search engine." All right. So once you're able to come up with kind of an inspiring vision to attract the right people to your company, the next thing you should do is have a conversation with your co-founder about the types of values and behaviors you wanna cultivate inside of your company, right? Ultimately, the purpose of this at this stage in your company is to use it as a filter for the hiring process, right? It should be a shortlist. And at this stage, it's fine that it's informal. If you're lucky enough to move on and grow, like ultimately, maybe this list becomes a more polished corporate values list, this is probably the seed of that, but at this stage, it doesn't need to be polished, right? You don't need to publish a blog post on it. It's just a shortlist, less than five things.

And this will help you during the hiring process to make sure that you're getting the right type of people inside the company, right? This is in addition to that skill list that you'll need, you know, job description, the skills that person needs. This is, you know, above and beyond that. So let me take you through a couple of examples. And I apologize, these are actually more corporate value lists. They're a little more polished. Yours won't need to be this polished.

Make sure to write your vision even if you are going to change it later on.

Check the full guide on Vision, Mission & Goals on www.startupkudos.com

IG @RAMIALAME

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What is ideation? It is the process of creating ideas to implement. This is the Most F..... up Concept out there, because there is no standalone ideation. An idea starts
with a problem, with a concept with a “pain”. This pain is what will take you forward and what will make you generate these crazy ideas and crazy concepts that can turn into solutions.
A lot of people ask me how do we start? How do we get an idea? And my answer always is: You can create many ideas but the Billion Dollar idea is within you, within your past, your experience, and the things you went through.
Now if we talk about Design Thinking, it is a different story because this is one of the most amazing underrated fields you can discover. There are many frameworks that derive from design thinking and designing ideas and problems that work.

Some of the Frameworks:
1. Unmet needs
2. Juxtaposition
3. Unbundling
4. Bundling
5. Tech for Legacy Business
6. Going to Science Fiction

We are looking for one of the following:
An important new disruption that can be matched with
An unmet need that you realize can be solved.

Check out the full guide on: https://startupkudos.com/products/ideation-pitch-deck-guide

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If you are feeling the pressure of being an entrepreneur, this episode is for you. Yes, there is no urge to be an entrepreneur or to be a startup founder. With the new disruptions, more and more companies are changing their cultures, the way they do things and are adopting more and more the startup vibe.

You think you can work less. ...? You work more
You think you can work whenever you want. ... No you work all the time
You're not willing to financially cut back. ... You will cut back
You're not willing to do the stuff you dislike. ... You will do a lot you dislike
You have an entrepreneurial spirit. ... Yes you can implement that in your team member position.
You want to be your own boss. ... Yes, it is possible in certain companies that give you that.
You like to learn. ... You can learn anywhere.
You're bored at work.... Yes, you will have some boredom as well.

You do not do become an entrepreneur for these reasons, you become an entrepreneur to make a difference, you have a huge urge to change and disrupt the world.

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I have added content related to the United States but these concepts apply wherever around the world relative to the laws in place. Read the concepts and PLEASE understand this is in NO WAY LEGAL CONSULTATION.

Moonlighting is a term used to refer to holding a second job outside of normal working hours. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, about 7 to 8 million Americans -- about 5+ percent of all workers -- work multiple jobs moonlighting while working for a private employer is governed by the policies of the employer. Public employees seeking to hold a second job may be subject to federal laws and agency regulations, depending on the position and classification.

Outside employment policies vary by employer but typically define a certain amount of time spent devoted to other activities, which may be compensated or uncompensated. Outside employment policies may require disclosure of outside employment or approval of outside employment. Such policies are promulgated out of concerns regarding conflicts of interest, a distraction from job performance quality or scheduled work hours, misuse of employer's resources, the appearance of impropriety, and others. Misrepresentation or confusion of others may be a concern. For example, when an employee runs their own accounting business, there may be a concern that his/her accounting customers think the work is performed by the employee under the auspices of the company.

Outside employment is generally defined as 1) employment or consulting in outside work or activity, 2) receipt from an outside source of a regular retainer fee or salary, or 3) regular or periodic involvement with a business or company in which the employee has a principal interest or a non-profit organization in which the faculty is an officer, board member, etc.

In federal government employment, employment essentially includes any compensated non-federal employment or business relationship for providing personal services. Compensation may be direct, indirect, or deferred (actual and necessary expenses not included). Different federal agencies have their own policies, so the outside employment policy of the particular agency needs to be consulted to determine applicable requirements.

Outside employment regulation also depends on the classification of the employee. For example, special government employees (SGEs) generally don't have to obtain prior approval. An SGE is appointed to perform temporary duties on a full-time or intermittent basis, with or without compensation, for no more than 130 days of any period of 365 consecutive days. Full-time, non-career presidential appointees (generally presidential appointees with Senate confirmation) may not receive any outside earned income for outside employment. E.O. No. 12674. Full-time, non-career SES employees may not:

Have outside earned income exceeding 15% of the annual basic salary for level II of the Executive Schedule, or receive compensation for:

providing professional services (e.g., legal) or allowing their name to be used by an entity providing such services; serving as an officer or board member of any association, corporation, or other entity; or teaching, without the prior approval
Members of a Uniformed Service (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, etc.) on active duty may not receive pay from another government position, except during terminal leave, or unless specifically authorized by law. Enlisted personnel may be employed part-time during off-duty hours in the Department of Defense non-appropriated fund activities. Members of the Armed Forces Reserves and members of the National Guard may receive military pay and allowances, in addition, to pay from another Government position.

Federal civilian retirees will have their salary reduced by the amount of their annuity unless an exception is approved, and retirees under age 70 may have their social security check reduced if their annual earnings exceed the established limit. Most retirees under the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) or the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) will have their hourly pay reduced by the hourly rate of the annuity when reemployed by the federal government.

Generally, federal employees, civilian and military, are prohibited from receiving payments from more than one federal government source. This prohibition applies to agencies in the executive, legislative and judicial branches, corporations owned or controlled by the government and non-appropriated fund organizations under the jurisdiction of the armed force. However, there are exceptions, such as agency approval, U.S. Postal Service employment, and emergency services relating to health, safety, protection of life or property, or national emergency.

The most fundamental ethics-related rule of governmental service is that the employee's focus in taking any governmental action is doing what is best for the public. This is known as the "public trust." This means that if the outside employment could affect the employee's financial interests, they should not take official action, even if they know that their intentions are good and noble.

Some of the prohibitions typically applicable to federal employment include:

1) DON'T REPRESENT OTHERS BEFORE FEDERAL OFFICIALS OR ACCEPT COMPENSATION DIRECTLY RELATED TO REPRESENTATIONS MADE BY OTHERS TO FEDERAL OFFICIALS.

This would include:

Acting as agent or attorney for prosecuting a claim against the United States, or receiving a gratuity, share, or interest in such claim in consideration for assistance in prosecuting the claim.
Advocating, irrespective of compensation, the interests of your outside employer, your private corporation, or outside clients, to or before any Federal official, whether in person, by phone, or in writing.
Being compensated for work you do in support of another's representations before any official of the Federal government.
Lobbying a federal agency for your outside employer.
Submitting, under your signature, a grant or loan application on behalf of your family corporation.

2) DON'T USE NONPUBLIC INFORMATION, GOVERNMENT PROPERTY, OR OFFICIAL TIME IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR OUTSIDE EMPLOYMENT.

3) DON'T USE NONPUBLIC INFORMATION, GOVERNMENT PROPERTY, OR OFFICIAL TIME IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR OUTSIDE EMPLOYMENT.

4) DON'T SERVE AS AN EXPERT WITNESS OTHER THAN ON BEHALF OF THE UNITED STATES.

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When employed what do you do to start your business? You do not leave your job before having:
1. identified the pain
2. Started the ideation process [Check the guide available on www.startupkudos.com].
3. Do surveys with family & friends
4. Prepare your pitch deck

Once all of this is done, add them on google drive and add a list of investors, incubators, partners you want to contact. Prepare a financial forecast for your funds to last you for at least 8 months after you leave your job so you have the time to raise capital and grow your business.

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The Startup Kudos became an initiative aimed at sharing content, guides, ideas, tricks, and news related to Startups from around the world. It is a community of founders, entrepreneurs, and innovators sharing and interacting. On startupkudos.com you can find guides, books, and material to help you start, grow and scale your business. On Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNQ99egUh7y3iAFkQNC51MQ you can find videos, news, tips for startups. The Akylles Program is the program that helps startups start and build their startups from scratch, raise funds and understand all concepts related to startups as they are building their ventures.
The World of Startups is a very exciting, enriching world that joins thousands and thousands of enthusiasts looking to make an impact, a change, a transformation in previously undisrupted concepts.

In this podcast, we discuss concepts related to startups, entrepreneurship, and the journey to raise funds, and scale internationally. There will be 3 types of Podcasts: The lectures, the talks [Interviews], and the Tips & Tricks episodes.