Episode 10: Sept 1 to Sept 30

(This post is a continuation of my prior posts on the transition from Riya 1.0 to what comes next. The previous episodes are:
9 , 8 , 7 , 6 , 5 , 4 , 3 , 2 , 1 .

Episode 10 – Sept 1 to Sept 30

I believe in a darwinian resource allocation strategy. Two hours after the results were in, we had an exec meeting and reallocated all of our resources to shopping. Now a 100% of the company was allocated to it.

Not only was user testing pointing to shopping, so was business development successes. Mark Moran our new VP of BD and Ann (who now works for him) had knocked the ball out of park and had signed up almost 100 merchants who were willing to pay Riya for shopping leads. In contrast, despite lots of meetings not one dating advertiser had signed up for face similarity. Mark had really hustled and in the span of a month had achieved an incredible feat given there was no product to demo yet.

Mark was the first executive we had hired and I was naturally tentative. Why? Because of what I call the Commando, Infantryman, Policeman issue (known by many names in silicon valley).

At the beginning of a startup you need a Commando who will just take the beach-head. A Commando will break all the rules and just execute. He will never say this is not my job. He will just take the hill. Later as a company grows you need infantrymen: they will build supply lines and they will set you up for large scale growth by making processes repeatable and predictable. On the downside though infantrymen effectively pour cement on your business plan so if you need to change it or need to be low cost they are not the people for you. Finally once you have a successful venture you bring in the policemen who will make sure nothing is broken and will optimize things on the margin. Policemen may still make the company $100M by tweaking some efficiency by 1% because the scale of the company is so large at that point.

They key to running a startup is to hire the right people at the right stage. Hire an infantryman before you have traction and suddenly you’ll spend 3x more because they need a team to get anything done or you’ll iterate the product 1/3 slower because planning and measuring will add tremendous overhead. Hire an infantryman too late and you’ll see outages and crashes. The biggest trouble with executive hires is that usually most big name executives have only learned to be policemen or at best infantryman. They don’t like to be commando’s and are frequently not very good at it. The best hire of course is one that can behave differently in each stage.

This is rare but not impossible to find. The biggest mistake most entrepreneurs make is to hire big name VPs who add credibility to the company but are a misfit given the stage of the company. Some times this can be disastrous as the VP of Marketing you hire then needs 5 more people before anything can get done and the costs of 4 VPs doing this kills you in terms of cash burn.

Hence I interviewed 15 people before finding Mark. Despite this, I was still in a wait and see mode. However, he quickly proved he was the 4th founder we were looking for (and yet another Stanford guy ;-). He worked tirelessly to make this happen, was creative, smart, and (what I liked most of all) he was as argumentative as the rest of us.

So all the jets started firing. Now all 45 employees were focused on shopping. The bulk of the month was spent crawling merchants, gather feeds, and porting all of our research to the production environment.

In mid-Sept we had a board meeting. I thought we’d get walloped for the failure of face similarity, but I let the board play with both products and in the end they said, shopping looks great. Peter said, “This is great – so it ships tomorrow?” So the date was set – we would launch before Thanksgiving.

Now it was time to worry about marketing.

Enter Beth Kirsch. Mark Hubble the great recruiter we used to find Mark Moran, led me to Beth Kirsch. She was Dir of Mktg for LowerMyBills and had a ton of experience in search engine marketing and affiliate programs. More importantly she was also a blogger with www.revenews.com. After one conversation I realized that she was the right blend of someone who understood the blogosphere, understood what Advertising 2.0 needs to be, understood how to build a team, and was just wickedly smart.

In a matter of two weeks, Beth did the impossible. She determined that women aged 20-30 who made $60K-100K were our target market for the categories of products we were going to launch with. . She hired Laura Beck and her team in Austin to do PR to reach the girly magazines. She and Mark, identified the top merchants to go after. She decided (with me) to launch this under a different product brand name.

We picked the name after much deliberation and then found the domain name we liked. However, it was owned by a guy who just wasn’t returning any emails.

So Mark decided to take him a bottle of wine and a Riya t-shirt. However, his house was behind a gated community. So Mark hopped the fence and left the bottle on his doorstep. The next day we got a call. Within three days we had the domain name. That’s what I call hustling… you go Mark!

The name was not cheap but Beth showed me just how much organic traffic this URL would give us and how it would be worth the price in a matter of months.

Beth hired Pedro Sostre and in a span 5 days (working day and night) he redid our UI and gave a fresh new look while maintain the one part of Riya was loved (the star).

All of this is what led Peter Rip to write what he did here

On a personal side: By September end I was running 6 miles a day and ran my first 5K race in 22:59. I had lost 20 pounds and I was feeling the healthiest in my life.

Comments

[Adam Lindemann]

Well done Munjal and Good luck.

[Dr Nic]

Interesting overview of "Commando, Infantryman, Policeman". I like it.

[Pooran Prasad]

Way to go .. Really impressive guide on hiring right people :)

[Best Internet Affiliate Marketing Programs]

Excellent article and commentary!