Daily Dispatch 31 - Some Startup Advice I Can Actually Give

So, it's been a while, I'm thinking of writing more on Startups and business, and on finance.

But instead of talking and summarizing things, I think it's more useful for you all if I actually live through my own advice and share what has really been useful so far.

Pitching

There's been a lot of pitching from my previous posts on Next Level Presentations, especially the third part called Next Level Presentations - Delivery.

But the key thing is to practice enough that you can summarize what you know in less than a minute. What they call Elevator's Pitch.

I can speak about this after winning two Entrepreneur's competitions back in 2009, which you can read more about here for the end story.

Building

Now I haven't built my own thing just yet, but I've seen some issues that new founders make, and I've got a great friend Wenderson who was my tech lead and a CTO at his startup. Here's what I noticed he did right and I saw others make mistakes when he didn't.

First thing, put people you trust in leadership roles. Wenderson is a great guy and very trustworthy, so this was a given for the other founders.

Second, your CTO should be able to handle himself/herself well with the technology you are developing. The CTO should be able to code the app and understand most of the application, even if not on a deeper level or with "Clean Code". The CTO should be a McGyver, knowing enough to get the project live and in front of an audience.

Now with hardware startups, the technical skills of a CTO should be even greater, he/she should be an expert on what you are building, or else you'll make mistakes along that way and pay a much heavier price than with a software company.

With software, you can test it and change the whole project every month or week.

With hardware, it might take months to be able to get a workable MVP.

Marketing

"Any marketing that goes beyond a mere description of a product is desperate" - Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I'm not so sure I agree with him on this, because in the case of a Startup, yes, you are desperate, but must keep the hype long enough for your vision to materialize. And the marketing of your idea can come off as confident.

You need the buzz in the beginning when people think "WOW THIS IS GOING TO BE AMAZING".

I've lived through some terrible projects, and really, there were a lot of bad things going on, but people believed the company would show improvements on the product.

Their marketing was "we already make another product you love, just wait and we will deliver another". But it wasn't out on outdoors and social media posts, it was just word of mouth, clients knowing that the bugs would be fixed and things would be great for product 2.

That's it so far. I couldn't think of anything else for today, but hey... Great things are coming!!
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