However, Jeffrey Bussgang recommends that these are the kinds of questions you should ask yourself:

• Do you have an idea that no one can talk you out of?
• Do you have a partner you trust with complimentary skills?
• Are you prepared to endure with modest or no salary for a few years?
• Are you bored with your current work environment/life situation?
• Do you perform best in the absence of structure?

If you can confidently answer these, why not apply for Pollenizer’s Startup Bootcamp 2011 (Sydney)?

There are two parts to our application process.

The first is a quick survey.

The second is a brief video pitch – Once we’ve received your quick survey information, we can email the link the video pitch.

Although the book mostly markets itself to workers keen to stand out within an organization, there are important transferable messages for entrepreneurs.

In Linchpin Seth introduces a new way of thinking around artistry. An artist, he says, is not just someone who creates works with paint, clay or photos. An artist can be anyone, in any industry. What makes them an artist is the passion and ambition with which they work. If you adopt this artist mindset and approach, you eventually become a linchpin (and, as Seth argues, successful).

Entrepreneurs are, in many ways, artists by definition – wanting to create something new and different. But as we know, there are successful entrepreneurs and unsuccessful ones. So what’s the difference? Seth discuss some fundamental attributes:

Artists ship their ideas out early and often
Successful workers don’t get to where they are by being perfectionists. They launch early, fail fast and learn even faster. They aren’t afraid of getting laughed at.

Artists say No to the Resistance
The Resistance (image below) is the little voice in the back of your head which talks you out of doing something. Successful people have the guts to say no to the resistance, and take the leap.

Artists choose to do the work
Artists have control over their work. They’re the ones that put in the 10,000 hours. They’re the ones who decide to make sacrifices in order to get the work done.

Artists give gifts
They know it’s the little unasked extras which make the difference between a good service and a great one. People like extras. They’ll come back wanting more. And one day, they’ll pay for your services, and even wait in line.

Artists do things differently
Artists aren’t cookie-cutter compliant. They respectfully challenge the rules, and dare to live outside the square.

And in the end, this is Seth’s main point. He urges you to stand out. Don’t be scared to be different – from your friends, your colleagues, your family. Give your startup its best chance of success, and put it out there. You never know, you might just succeed.

Have you read Linchpin? What are your thoughts?

And for more on this approach, download Seth’s manifesto Brainwashed: Seven Ways to Reinvent from Change This.

Pollenizer’s ability to access in-house expertise to service a broad range of client demands was evident in our work with consumer comparison website Getprice. It also made it the prime and only contender vying for the work.

Getprice CEO Chris Hitchen explains why it is important having specific skill areas available for hire within one company.

“You don’t want to have too many consultants or suppliers to whom you have to explain your business model,” he says. “You are also opening up your business and sharing very confidential information so limiting that to one supplier where you can get a range of expertise was pretty important for us.”

He maintains the web presents a variety of challenges and there aren’t that many businesses around who can consult at the level Pollenizer does.

There are plenty of people who have good processes and good analytical skills that can take you through various problems and get you to an outcome, but there aren’t that many consultancies that live and breathe online as Pollenizer does.

Managing Rapid Growth

Pollenizer’s first brief was to find a better framework for Getprice’s development processes. “We were growing very quickly, with a lot of projects and we needed a really tight framework around managing those projects,” Hitchen explains. IT infrastructure assessments flowed from there, asking the question: Do we have the vehicle that can carry us to where we want to get to, in terms of hardware, software and bandwidth and is our development process optimal?

The second area of expertise focused on the marketing and the consumer proposition and asked: Are we doing enough to meet consumer needs and how can we better engage consumers on Getprice?

Pollenizer also engages with the clients it works with. “Because they are coming in, typically not just for an hour or two but for days at a time, often over several months, they are very engaged and often have skin in the game as well,” Hitchen says. “They also bring an international perspective and part of that is an international network, which would be important for many businesses.”

Getprice is a comparison shopping engine which aggregates pricing information from more than 600 retailers in Australia and also provides information about service levels for different retailers, covering warranties, delivery time and charges, and product and service reviews. This service is available via an iPhone application, as well as online.

Getprice is all about helping someone to make the last few decisions about where they want to buy a product. Shopping anyone?

I want to share this with you guys not as a finished thing because it will always be moving, but as a first stab at describing the structure of a Pollenized project. We’d love to get your feedback on it.

It all began when Mick scribbled something on a whiteboard in Sydney. Eventually it turned into this in Zurich with Amir:

And now it is this:

If you know us, does this describe what we do? What is missing?

If you don’t know us but you run a web business, are we speaking your language?

I just wish they’d care a little bit more about the story. It would make the listening and getting pumped up about it even more enjoyable.

What’s the issue? Mainly that it’s a rolling essay more than an exciting tale of opportunity. It often starts in the middle, jumps back to the start, goes to the middle again in more detail. More detail. Another feature. And often forgets the ending all together.

I often joke that it takes 100 cups of coffee to get a new startup funded. Not because the investor is 1 out of 100 but because it takes a long time to get the story good.

My quick tips;

• Tell the story a few times to people who get you and see what parts excite them and what parts confuse them.
• Take that story and put it in a single page, like our executive summary. If you can’t tell it all in one page, then you haven’t thought it through enough.
• Start telling it again with a 5 minute limit. Ask people to repeat it back to you and tell you what they heard. If it’s not simple enough and clear enough then you’ll get Lithuanian (or Chinese) Whispers back to you.
• Go to networking events or trade shows. Not to find money, but because that’s where people ask you “So, what do you do?” You’ll fumble over it and they’ll ask lots of crazy questions, but you’ll hone your skills.
• Revisit your one pager.
• Make up a simple presentation following Guy Kawasaki’s rule of pitching. Don’t break any of the laws. None.
• Line up the coffee. Get a list of people you want to pitch to and start with those that you (a) don’t care about their response AND (b) have a good chance of good feedback. So don’t start with Sequoia, Ron Conway or Morten Lund.

It takes patience and it takes a very very very rare skill of being able to listen to people and ignore them at the same time. Why? Because their feedback is real, but people’s feedback can also disuade you from building something amazing just because they couldn’t see it OR it could distract you from what you can see by adding some stupid twist that is more about them than it is about you.

Tough. But welcome to the job.

Enjoy! And try not to have all 100 cups on the same day….

Photos:
Sarah McCans
Mike Schinkel
Spyndle

The picture of his taskboard is absolutely fantastic! It conveys an enormous amount of information in an aesthetically pleasing way, has all the metrics up there, on plain sight. I think we can learn a lot from it and from there, see how we can apply it to our work with our partner X-Minds and our clients. Remote working is very different and we can learn and do something new and innovative :) It’s a completely different ball-game when your team is widely distributed and finding out what works in co-located teams is a very valuable experience on which to build.

Sometimes in the startup phase of a business, you’ll wrestle with the big issues for months at a time until you think you’ve nailed them. You feel like you’ve finally solved one of the great problems of our time. You get the big issues implemented in your front-end, announce it to your users, and sit back and wait for the world to change.

And it doesn’t. Argh!

Then, one day you’ll mostly have your mind on something else, when a little tiny change will pop into your head. Seemingly of no great importance, you’ll add it to the list of a hundred things you need to implement, and one day, perhaps because you just need to do something simple for a while, you’ll push it to production. You might not even think to mention it to users, colleagues or investors. It’s no big deal.

Except that it turns out to be a huge deal. And you’re almost trampled to death in the rush to declare you a genius. What happened?

Creating successful new web businesses means addressing a mixture of big issues and small issues in equal measure, with equal attention. Because sometimes, it’s addressing the little issues that nudge your business over the line between OK and wildly successful. I was reminded of this reading how Jared Spool changed a single button on a client’s shopping cart checkout process. In doing so, he fixed a hidden problem that was affecting users so often that the client made an additional $300 million that year.

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?

What really strikes me about the story is not that the change of a single button can make a $300 million difference (some online retailers are vast) but that Jared’s usability testing didn’t set out to solve that problem, and nobody had any idea that a small change would make a 45% difference to sales. The form as originally designed was identical to many other online checkout processes, it wasn’t like this was bad design; it was merely “not-good-enough” design.

I have my own (vastly less valuable) experience to draw on, working on improving with an online business I co-founded. It taught me an unforgettable lesson on the importance of small things.

We had a free trial offer on our product which cost us a lot to maintain because the product was expensive to deliver and we’d charge you nothing for it for 30 days, just so you could try it out. There wasn’t much we could do to reduce the cost of the offer, since our competitors all did something similar. We’d bill you at the end of 30 days if we didn’t hear from you first but too many of our new customers were leaving, either during the trial period or immediately after they’d noticed the charge on their credit card statement.

I wanted to learn more about what was causing trial customers to abandon our product so I worked on adding a new process for deleting your account that asked you to fill in a quick exit survey on your use of the product and your reasons for leaving. I wasn’t hoping to do any more than learn a little that I could apply to a new free trial offer.

But I got a small miracle instead: the abandonment rate dropped the day we introduced the survey form. I had expected to collect some data; I hadn’t expected to make a dent in the numbers. Intrigued, we spent some time over the next few weeks tweaking the number and the kind of questions included in the exit survey. A free text field that had to be completed in order to finish the exit survey actually decreased abandonment rates by about 5% all on its own.

Here were users trying something new and big and significant, and then deciding they didn’t want to pay for it, yet I was persuading them to pay for another 30 days’ service by just asking them why they didn’t want to be a customer anymore. It was the simplest thing we implemented in six months yet it led to a big change on our business metrics.

I learned that the line between OK and wildly successful is only visible in hindsight. You can never see it as you approach it, or even as you cross over it. You must look backwards to even know it is there. “Ah yes!” You’ll say, “That was clearly the point at which we crossed the line. How could we have not seen that coming?”

You never will. Instead, focus on a mix of the big things and the little things every day. The author of ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff” wasn’t writing about starting an internet business. You need both the big stuff and the small stuff working for you until you figure out what this new business of yours is really all about.

One of the suggestions I have is to try and solve the problem your business will solve manually first, and then automate it. This is not always possible, but where it is, you can save significant amounts of money, equity and time.

What I mean is to do it by hand. Do it yourself. Use text files, free online forms, a blog, phone calls, door-to-door sales and whatever it takes to show that you can make a customer really happy and preferably get them to pay for it. Once you’ve done that, a few times, you are in a much better position to both build the technology and raise the funds if needed.

When you do it manually, like Bart said, you get creative and you use what’s at your disposal to get the job done. You can also much more easily change things on the fly.

• Sales pitch not working? – try another one.
• Target market not interested? – find another one.
• End product not packaged up nicely with a ribbon? – repackage.
• Price too low? – raise it up (yes, raise it up)

You’ll be more experienced in your new field both generally, and from a product and sales perspective. The product you build after you have done it manually will be much better than any product you could have brainstormed up before hand.

It’s rare that the technology is the hardest thing to solve. Don’t get me wrong, technology is hard, but it’s more likely to be an iterative, user experience issue not a ‘can we actually build this’ issue.

Build better. Do your startup manually first, then automate it.

However, these executive summaries have varied from average to amazing, and average just isn’t good enough. So to help these entrepreneurs out I have shared with them an executive summary template. It’s a template we use at Pollenizer to help our clients raise funds and for our own projects. It’s clinically proven in real-world testing.

Instead of giving it out one-on-one, I thought: why not give it out to the world? Very happy to.

Download The Pollenizer Executive Summary Template for Startup Capital Raising

Updated – May 2009

Now, this is only our base template and you will need to customise it, perhaps a lot. Plus, you should do what we do and get a designer to make it look pretty. But the bones are all here and they have good structure.

Some things to remember about executive summaries;

1. The person you’re giving them to may have seen lots of them before, possibly hundreds. They know what they are looking for and you’d better give it to them. This also means you can’t BS them. Chances are, they know more than you do.
2. The investors have very little time (they’re the ones with the money to blow on hats) which is why ours are never longer than one page. It should also read like a newspaper. Give them a decent heading so they know what to read first and make sure it’s hot, so they keep reading.
3. The objective of the executive summary is to secure a meeting. It’s not to get a cheque. It’s a promotional tool. Get them excited. Whet their appetites for more and make them want to call you.
4. Be open. Tell them everything. It’s going to come out in the wash anyway. And everything is negotiable later.

There is plenty of good reading on executive summaries for raising capital.

1. Guy Kawasaki and the Art of the Executive Summary
2. More links here

There is no one best way to do a great executive summary, but hopefully this template can give you a good start. If you have your own ideas, feedback on how we can improve it, please let us know.

Get it done!

PS: I have to shout out a big thanks to DK from Zapr for introducing me to the discipline of writing one page summaries for all occasions. DK was brutal with content, getting the messages down so they were so short, simple and clear but holding onto the excitement and passion of the business and its founders.