Bake fitness into your startup culture

Startups are hard work. Long hours for low pay, high stress and a lot of uncertainty.

They’re also associated with late nights in dark rooms, junk food and beer.

Smart people often say that a startup is a marathon, not a sprint – it’s something that might take 3, 5 or 10 years to build into a successful business. And for this reason you need to bake fitness into your startup, no matter what you’re doing.

Living for three years on little sleep, poor food and no exercise is a recipe for disaster.

At Tweaky we’ve baked fitness into our culture from day zero. We knew we were in for the long haul so we needed to get our acts together.

We make time to exercise

We have a work in progress meeting every morning at 9am where everyone details what they’ve been working on and what they’ll be working on that day.

We also all announce what exercise we did the previous day and what we’re doing that day. It’s not a forced activity, it’s more a chance to share things we’re struggling with (my shins) or what we’re excited about doing (squash) just as we do with our work.

This also works for our remote team, with Robb in Canada regularly signing off early for ice hockey training in winter and volleyball in summer.

We never discourage exercise

We’re a fast growing startup and sometimes it gets busy and stressful. There is a lot to do. But no matter what we don’t discourage anyone for taking time out for themselves to exercise.

Occasionally we might ask someone to reschedule their gym session or run to accommodate meetings or a push, but if someone has a gym session scheduled in for the afternoon we can plan around it rather than pushing this out to “out of work hours”.

The reality is that for our small team we’re often working all kinds of hours, so why shouldn’t we exercise at any hour?

We exercise together

We’ve all got different abilities but we try to find time regularly to exercise together. It might be a game of squash or a run around the botanical gardens and usually happens a couple of times a month.

It’s fairly ad-hoc but is a good chance for us to get out of the office, stretch our legs and talk about things other than work.

Over the course of a year we’ll have exercised together between 12 and 24 times – it’s an awesome way to build the team.

The results

PJ and I have been working together on Tweaky now for 18 months with the rest of the team joining in the last 9 months. I’ve personally lost about 6kg in weight, dropped a pant size and had to tighten my belt. I’m also a lot fitter and healthier than I was prior to starting Tweaky, it’s amazing how much more motivated you are to eat well when you’re exercising a lot.

PJ on the other hand has gone through the most dramatic change, going from a chubby lad to a fairly buff guy who has had to add three extra holes to his belt. Not bad at all.

How to bake fitness into your startup:

• Actively encourage your employees to take time to exercise regularly
• Announce your own fitness activities
• Incorporate company-wide activity into your schedule

I’m keen to hear about other peoples experiences in fostering healthy lifestyles in an early stage startup and keeping your team fighting fit.

Stop talking about your startup idea

Aspiring startup founders need to stop talking about their brilliant startup ideas.

Nobody cares about your idea.

It’s an idea backed up with action that counts.

Initially nobody cares because nobody gets it.

It takes time to be able to concisely articulate an idea; it takes work to build something to test its boundaries and its opportunities; it takes energy to explain why it should exist.

Better than a well articulated idea is an idea that comes with evidence of its brilliance: market validation.

Stop talking to your friends about your ideas. 

If they grok the concept, they will ignore its many flaws. Just as they do for your own flaws.

Your friends are ultimately not your target market. You will either get a false sense of market validation if they like the idea; or a deflated ego if they don’t get it.

Stop talking to customers about your ideas

Your customers are people who will buy and use your product. To do either of these things there needs to be more than an idea, there needs to be something they can see, touch or interact with.

To show them something tangible that they can use shows that you are serious. You need to build something.

Stop telling me your ideas

I don’t want to hear about your startup idea. Don’t ask me for advice or introductions or investment.

When I hear a great idea I want to know everything about it – How does it work? What did you launch with? How are you selling it? How many have you sold? Who are your customers? What are your distribution channels?

If you can’t answer those questions then I’d prefer to wait to hear about it when you can.

If you can answer those questions then I definitely want to chat and more.

99% of ideas are vapour, let’s talk about the 1% of ideas that are in a state of progress.

Talk is cheap. Take action. Put ideas into practise.

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This post originally published on Shoe String.

The man in the arena

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

- From Citizenship in a Republic by Theodore Roosevalt

Goodbye burner, hello iPhone

It’s been a week since I moved on from my former life as a man without an iPhone and not all that much has changed.

A little over two years ago I gave up my iPhone 4 and switched to a burner – the most rudimentary Nokia phone you can buy. The idea was that without access to the a steady stream of apps, interruptions, push notifications and internet I could be more present in what I was doing.

The reality was that I was already tied to a screen for upwards of 12 hours a day, missing out on a few hours while I was out with friends or in transit was probably not a bad idea.

While I really enjoyed the disconnect that having a burner gave me, the limitations had started to wear a little thin. Simple things like not having a convenient device to capture moments in text or images; running late and not having the contact number for the person I was meeting; having to pull out my laptop to verify travel details.

Two years without a smart phone definitely helped me in many ways. I learned to focus on the people with me in a room far better than I did before. Instead of being drawn back by a push notification or by checking in while they went to the bathroom I was just there, occupying that space with them and my thoughts. I didn’t feel the need to occupy every waking minute of my life with activity, I could sit patiently and just be.

My return to the world of the smart phone has been very measured and deliberate.

The only push notifications I allow are sms.

Between 10pm and 7am I have the “Do Not Disturb” on and you can’t call or text me.

I do have email, both work and personal, but it’s for emergency use only. Thankfully almost none of my correspondence requires up to the minute response times and if it does I’ll get a phonon call.

No Facebook or Twitter though I’ve allowed Instagram.

At the end of the day it’s about increasing my utility over a need to be constantly connected or to bathe in procrastination.

The main benefits I’ve gotten out of the first week back in the world of modern technology:

• ability to check time sensitive information like when is the next tram coming or do I need an umbrella.
• ability to use emoticon. How did I ever emote before?
• ability to write and this blog on a tram

- Ned

Uber is the new Uber

A great quote from Uber CEO Travis Kalanick at Startup School 2012 about competitive response and tackling the high end and the bottom end of the market.

“We had this high end thing. It’s cost about 50% more than a cab.

And everybody goes “I’m going to do a low cost Uber”.

And they clone our app. They flatter us by stealing all of our pixels and copying them over to our app.

FYI Uber is going to be the low cost Uber.”

Watch the video here.

Why we’re not drinking until we’re profitable.

I recently launched Tweaky.com with my co-founder PJ Murray and together we decided to give up drinking until we’re profitable.

It’s a ritual I started when I took over Native from Nick Crocker. We took three months off drinking to focus on producing great work and it became one of the most productive periods of my life up until that point.

I’m not generally a heavy drinker, though I’ve had my moments, but like a lot of people I’ll have a drink or two on a Friday night or after a particularly challenging day.

So why are we not drinking until Tweaky.com is profitable?

1. To bring the team together and create healthy rituals

One of the big reasons for us to be sober until we’re profitable is that it means we’re all focusing on a common goal of building a successful company.

Not drinking is a tangible manifestation of our commitment.

Not drinking when I’m embarking on something new has become a ritual for me and something I want to pass on. Creating tradition and ritual brings tribes closer together.

2. To focus on the work at hand

We’re trying to build something important to us and that takes a lot of time and energy. Coming into work with a hangover or slowing down on a Friday at 5pm when the beers roll out is not something we feel like we can afford right now. We’re playing to win.

While having a few drinks of an evening might only slow down our performance by a few percentage points we want to be operating on 100% at this critical stage of the company.

3. To have more quality time outside of work

The little time we have outside of work we get to spend with our friends and partners – quality time that has become a lot more intense without booze.

We’re already turning down a lot of social engagements and spending less and less time with friends and partners, we don’t want to have to turn down more because we’re hungover or tired affected by drinking.

Everyones different and perhaps we’ve taken a somewhat extreme approach to starting up but for us not drinking as a founding team has brought us closer together and closer to achieving our goals.

If you’re a founding team taking a similar line we’d love to hear it in the comments.

If you’re a small business looking to tweak something about your website you should check out Tweaky.com: the marketplace for customising websites.

“As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“…when you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple with all these simple solutions, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don’t work. Then you get into the problem, and you see it’s really complicated. And then you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for awhile. But the really great person will keep on going and find, sort of, the key, underlying principle of the problem. And come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works.”

-Steve Jobs

The Whisky Rule

The Whisky Rule is pretty simple. If you cancel a meeting less than 10 minutes notice, or if you miss it completely then you owe your counterpart a bottle of whisky.

Everyones time is important but sometimes mistakes should happen.

Rather than any sense of ill will being generated the mistake should be settled. The party who was left waiting should be compensated in some small way for their time.

The Whisky Rule.

I’ve been using the whisky rule for a couple of years. I’m generally pretty punctual and keep a close eye on my calendar but from time to time I’ll slip up and completely forget a meeting or get stuck doing something else that I can’t get out of. In those situations I’m more than happy to sling a bottle of whisky to my counterpart as an apology and a sort of olive branch, hoping they’ll forgive me and we can make it up the next time we meet.

Likewise if someone cancels on me or just doesn’t show up I don’t get too hot and bothered by it. Instead I let them know about the whisky rule – if they really want to meet up again they should come bearing a Laphroaig or some obscure small batch Japanese whisky.

It keeps things honest.

So far the whisky rule has worked out pretty well for me. I’ve been given about 4 bottles of whisky and I’ve given 6 away. I just bought a desk calendar and I hope I’ll make up those 2 extra bottles and get beyond the break even of the whisky rule.

Ned

New Website Design

I’ve just relaunched my new personal site. You can check it out here.

The idea was to create a central place for people to find out about me without taking the whole “personal branding” thing too seriously.

Building the site was a truly collaborative effort. The site wouldn’t have come together nearly as well as it did if it weren’t for everyones effort.

I came up with the original idea and wireframes for the site which I’d been thinking about for a while. Ben Patterson from Native suggested the lasers and then worked out a way to build them in CSS + Javascript with a fallback for Firefox.

After a quick chat with Daniel Wearne and Christian Varga we all decided we needed to add explosions to the lasers to push the tongue-in-cheek nature of the site to the next level.

Within a few hours Dan had made the design that you see now and Christian had chopped the design in Compass. Ben Patterson then nailed the most important parts of the site – the lasers which follow your cursor, the sprites and hover state on the photo of me and the explosions.

I’m really happy with how it all turned out and the response online.

What do you think?

Ned

You can follow me on Twitter here.

My failings

I’ve run 8 different businesses over the last 10 years. Some have been successful, others have failed.

You can read a lot of blog posts out about successful startups, projects or campaigns but few people post about the ones that sucked. Here is a list of some of my failed projects.

360Desktop (2008)

What was it?
An angel-funded startup building a Windows application that extended your desktop into a panoramic display giving you (in theory) more screen real estate. I joined as the marketing manager.

Why did it fail?
A range of issues but I think the biggest red flag was when I was hired with the view that they would launch the product the following week. 6 months later and with the launch nowhere in sight I left the company to do something actually productive. I think it took them another year or so to launch and not long afterwards the company folded leaving a bunch of employees out of pocket.

What did I learn?
Know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. I also met some incredible people, particularly user experience designers Benson Low and Adam Schilling.

Mr Chop (2009)

What was it?
A music-centric blogger advertising network I started in part to monetize my own blog. http://electrorash.com

Why did it fail?
The network made a bit of money but nothing significant. It certainly didn’t get much beyond ramen profitable, and not consistently.

That said, over the last 12 months I’ve revived the business as a service we offer through Native. With a stronger client base and a better understanding of media buying it has definitely been a good addition to our bottom line.

What did I learn?
A great idea is nothing without the right networks or distribution. Also ad sales isn’t hard when you’ve got a good product. Also sometimes a good idea needs a couple of years to work – for me I needed to learn how to sell media and manage client accounts well before this business made sense.

Orgnition (late 2009)

What was it?
An organisation management system for not for profit organisations, specifically those like Rotary or Lions clubs.

Why did it fail?
We underestimated the strengths and overestimated the weaknesses of our competitor. We also massively underestimated the sales cycle. It’s not an easy task to sell a technical product to older organisations, especially when their existing solution doesn’t completely suck.

What did I learn?
It’s better to do something you know than chase a dollar. Also working with non-profit organisations is not an easy task. I still believe in the solution that we had but think that it will be some time before I step back into this space.

There are plenty of other ideas I worked on but didn’t go anywhere with. I have notebooks filled with ideas, research and sketches. But the above are ones I spent any considerable amount of time on.

During this period I also made the conscious decision to treat each failure as a learning experience, to resign myself to failure as if each project were another semester of study into how to build a company.

I didn’t start any of these projects wanting to fail but I always went in with the idea that it was about the process, “the journey” rather than the end result.

Ned