Business & Tech

Startups Learn to Get Their Hustle Con On

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs learn from experts tips about how being more assertive can pay off.

Nearly 200 people gathered at Intuit's Mountain View headquarters Tuesday to learn how to make their startup a success.

The speakers at Hustle Con 2013, on July 9th, included a who's who of successful founders—Scott Cook of Intuit, Jess Lee of Polyvore, Kris Duggan of Redwood City-based Badgeville among others—who gave practical advise to attendees on how they must hustle, and learn to engage with potential organizations, to grow their business.

"Some people think I'm annoying," Duggan said, about the weekly follow-up emails he sends when he's working on a sale. "I call it being persistent."

Everything from how to get someone's attention via an email subject line, to setting a price for your product—nothing was off the table. 

"First time entrepreneurs think that if they get in [a meeting] and 'wow' them with the product, magic will happen," Duggan said, who reminded engineers that they should also read business books to learn about the customer acquisition side. That's why the meetings shouldn't include product demos. Instead they should "think about the amount of questions they could be asking."

"One of the things I liked was the contrarian approach. It's not just about rising money, but about building a business," said Hai Nguyen, Co-Founder of Palo Alto-based Appfluence.com, a startup that builds project management software for businesses. 

"You have to have the line in the water," he said about Duggan's analogy to fishing—having the right equipment, technique and being in the right spot. "That's the difference. For a sales process you have to be calling customers and learning. You have to keep on engaging."

Polyvore's Lee wanted to help the entrepreneurs get through the lows of starting a company after great highs, in particular how to test the consumer market.

According to Lee, Mountain View-based Polyvore uses a lot of "fake-door" testing, where they purposefully add bugs or change the names of links to items on their user interface—website or app—to measure click-through rate. 

"It's like if you wanted to open up a candy store at a mall," she said. "Instead of building the store, put a door with a handle and a sign that says 'Candy Store,' and measure how many people try to open the door."

At Polyvore—a style, social commerce company where users mix-and-match outfits into fashion-page collages—they tried their hand at e-commerce. So they set up a fake-door test on their homepage to see if users would purchase directly from Polyvore instead of a retailer. They tested for three-months and fulfilled orders for users who purchased from their site. When they realized that it wasn't for them, they stopped.

"We hadn't made a huge announcement," Lee said. "So we just stopped."

Lee also gave the entrepreneurs more advice that emphasized setting clear metrics and measurement tools and not to betray their users' trusts. 

Like, "don't have an ax-murderer behind the door," she said.

But she led and finished with suggestions that go to the heart of the culture a company wants to build. 

"You have to be tolerant of failure," Lee said. "You have to build a culture that values the trying and not just the winning."

And then she concluded with "fake door testing does not replace a vision."

"It's a way to test an experience that you are already passionate about," she said. 

Other speakers included attorney Danielle Naftulin of Cooley LLP, who gave the entrepreneurs practical legal advice from get things in writing, spend a little to save a lot later, ownership matters, make IP assignment to protect your property rights, and being careful how you hire and pay. 

But to her the most important being to get "all the legal stuff done right at the beginning."
 


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