Loyalty Solutions are everywhere

The “loyalty industry” is crowded. So crowded that store owners and investors are starting to blur the differences between each company. There seems to be anywhere between 3-10 local players in EACH major city that are trying to saturate their own neighborhoods.

And of course, why wouldn’t it be? When there’s a lot of gold somewhere, there’s bound to be a lot of gold diggers. And especially post-Groupon, stores have been more open to new technologies, investors are getting interested in the space, and entrepreneurs are all thinking about better experiences when they are sitting at a restaurant.

If it were eight years ago, and an entrepreneur pitched an idea to sell technology to brick-and-mortar stores, investors would have laughed in his/her face and point out that the new wave is on social networks and eCommerce. Offline is no longer sexy.

Today, it’s a very different story.

Loyalty Action is happening everywhere

Punchd got acquired by Google for a speculative $10M when they haven’t gotten any real traction yet. Tagtile got acquired by Facebook without accomplishing that much more. And most recently Belly raised $10M from Andreessen Horowitz after showing they have 1400 stores and 200,000 users in 6 cities.

Many startups see that, and are creating a “built-to-flip” model, hoping for the same wins quickly. On the other hand, while Belly’s numbers seem large, it is still minuscule compared to the market.

The challenge is, once you saturate your own neighborhood and try to expand into others, you hit a dead end when all the tech-savvy stores in the other cities are taken out by someone else. To me that’s like a game of Risk, where each square only has 1 solider on it, eventually getting no where.

In the meantime, companies like that are burning cash like crazy. They’re hiring foot soliders in more cities. They’re opening up new offices. They’re giving away iPads for free.  Belly already has 40 employees prior to the $10M funding. Ramping up might increase that to 100 employees. If each employee is conservatively paid $50,000 a year, that’s already $5M a year!

That along with a multitude of other costs and free iPads, money is burnt quickly while they still just have a very small % of the market.

Consolidation in this industry won’t happen with a strategy like that.

Of course, if a large player such as Belly raises $1B one day and starts to acquire all the local players for $10M here and $40M there, perhaps it can capture a bit more of the market. Now we just gotta wait for that $1B investor to show up.

Consolidation of the Loyalty Industry will happen through capturing Large Chains

I personally believe that consolidation in this industry won’t happen from the dozens of solutions that each have a thousand mom-and-pop stores in their own cities, but will happen to whoever has the ability to tackle the hard problem of capturing the large brands and chain stores.

That’s truly prime real-estate that is growing (in store count), can scale nationwide, and can be defended as a sustainable advantage. Yes, it takes longer to capture the chain stores at the beginning, but once you have it, a large chain like McDonald’s would use a solution because this solution is already being used by Carl’s Jr. instead of a ton of little burger stores.

Once a large amount of the large chains use a solution, that will trickle down to the mom & pop stores that aren’t even looking for the newest technologies, achieving true market penetration and potential consolidation.

This is the underlying thesis for RewardMe’s strategy – aim for market consolidation by targeting large chains early. RewardMe is not trying to be a quick-flip by selling door-to-door to hundreds of stores quickly and then hoping to be bought in a year, but we aim to be a solution that is the gold standard in the industry 10 years later with a proven ROI.

Scaling Prematurely is the #1 Reason for Startup Failure

A while ago, The Black Box Report started by the Startup Genome Project analyzed thousands of startups, and found that the number one for startup failure is premature scaling. In fact, we’ve gone down that path too.

RewardMe was probably one of the earliest companies to take an iPhone/Android App that scans QR codes and go door-to-door to sell a loyalty solution back in 2010.

We found that one person could quickly get 70+ stores to participate in 2 months. However, we also found out that our solution is not ideal and the value we create is fluffy at best. Instead of continuing to capture more stores with a faulty model (many players are doing exactly that these days), we decided to pivot and actually introduce something of lasting value.

Serving chain stores aren’t easy. Instead of less sophisticated mom-and-pop owners who don’t invest in much marketing nor understand deep analytics, chain store executives are completely focused on metrics, data, and ROI.

What doesn’t kill you make you stronger

Because of that, we were forced to create a product that not only sounds fancy, but delivers actual metrics. And with that discipline, we were forced to stay “small” until we created a product that performs more than 10X better than other “successful” companies.

We also became the only company that could measure direct ROI, instead of wondering whether user average growth increases are a result of customer segmentation or revenue lift causation.

All this has finally paid off, as we are getting deals from some of the largest national chains, charging fees up to $1000/mo every store.

A Barrier of a Thousand Cuts

And even though our “store count” doesn’t sound as impressive as some other startups, the work we have put in to satisfy chain stores both from a sales cycle front and a product front has become a very tangible moat that prevents others from catching up before we have meaningful market share that builds on itself.

In the past year, we have literally discovered thousands of little challenges and adjustments that made us the perfect solution we are today for chains, and most other companies don’t even know these challenges exist yet.

Over all, I think the plethora of loyalty solutions may become successful, especially when some bigger company just wants to buy a player in the press that has many stores. But I believe in terms of industry consolidation, they don’t have the right product nor the right strategy to tackle the market. And that’s what RewardMe is betting all our chips on.

You can also check out my analysis of the POS Industry and how I believe it will always be fragmented.

But what about Square?

A commodity with many players competing on price

A deep psychological fear

So what about Square?

RewardMe’s success is independent of POS systems

Culture Management is essential for growth stage companies

Our company has been through many cycles and products throughout the years, but it’s the passion and bond between teammates that have always carried on with us. That will continue to carry on no matter what size we grow to. We are a team, and we are a family.

This places an enormous emphasis on having the right Culture. Culture is something intangible but very impactful. It affects team morale, productivity, conflict resolution, decision-making, and hiring — basically everything that moves the company forward in the right direction. It is something that needs to be nurtured and maintained, as it could easily be diluted as the company grows.

Therefore, I spent a lot of time researching about companies that boast their cultures as a competitive edge, including Apple, Zappos, Netflix, Yammer and more (yes, I’m not pretending I came up with all this stuff. The giants get the credit and I get the shoulders). I also made a list on what most of my friends love about their jobs, and what they hate about their jobs to figure out how can we create a system that automatically generates the former and eliminates the latter.

It seemed striking to me that, everyone complains about their managers, but when these complainers become managers themselves, nothing has changed, as people below them still complain about their managers. Clearly the “bad manager” syndrome is not based on an individual’s capability, but an overall system flaw.

Culture is the system that either creates the right environment where everyone can easily be good managers, or where bad managers are kicked out, so good people do not lose motivation.

The RewardMe DNA

There’s a certain DNA within the RewardMe Team Members that keeps us all bonded together. We call it a DNA because it isn’t just rules that look nice, but it should be something that is ingrained deep inside every member, which is reflected upon daily conduct.

These are not just fancy statements we put on walls and badges, but all team member are evaluated (and rewarded) based on how well they have this ingrained into them. Hiring and firing should not only be based on performance output, but also environment output.

1) Put positive energy into the company

Bad attitude in the company is UNACCEPTABLE. Your responsibility in the company is not only to perform, but to make everyone around you better in every way you can. Don’t be the “Game over man!” guy you see in movies. Be that person who is always thinking positively and encouraging others. Always inspire hope and ideas to new solutions.

2) In whatever you do, be exceptional and over-impressive

Our competitors are filled with good people. That’s why we all need to be excellent. We believe the best people are 10x compared to the average, and we should always strive to be that 10x. You need to care intensively about outperforming expectations and getting more wins together as a team.

You need to maintain calm poise in stressful situations and be a strong pillar, especially when it takes many pillars to hold up a roof. We don’t care about being over-impressed with your hours. We want you to create WOW moments for the rest of the team. Do whatever it takes to achieve that.

3) Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit

Hangout with each other, and make it easy to hang out with you. We’re not just working, we’re on a journey together. Spend time helping teammates even outside of work with personal matters. Share helpful information openly and proactively.

Be Considerate and think from the other person’s angle. Say an extra sentence if it makes them feel better, but don’t take anything too personally yourself. Saying things like, “I understand your point. What I think differently on is…” or “Sorry about being so jumpy at you earlier” makes a world of difference. Celebrate personal and career wins TOGETHER as often as you can. In everything you do, make the Family better, but also remember: you are part of the family too, so take care of yourself.

4) Constantly show self-motivation, autonomy, and accountability

Be self-motivated and self-disciplined. Don’t wait to be told what to do, but be proactive like a leader. If you see trash on the floor, pick it up and throw it away. We don’t like to micromanage or be micromanaged, so behave in a way that is best for the team. Be clear on your responsibilities. If you are responsible for something, seek both expert and non-expert opinions, but let the expert decide – getting cross-department feedback is extremely important and necessary. When you need help, it is your responsibility to ask for help instead of other’s to wonder if you need help.

Final decisions and accountability should belong to you and not by a committee/consensus. Clear responsibilities allow knowledge sharing but not decision sharing. People who thrive on freedom are worthy of freedom. When you notice your team lead is exerting constant supervision for your daily work, you should be a little worried – for yourself or for the team lead.

5) Always trust your teammates and always be trustworthy

Trust your colleagues – they’re here because they are smart, capable, and working towards the same goal as you. There should be no blame games in the company. No one is perfect, and we function like one body. Only seek to help your teammates, not blame them. A body cannot be in competitive sports if the hands are always blaming the legs, and the legs are always blaming the eyes. If you blame others a lot, you also make it extremely awkward when it’s your turn to make a mistake, which is inevitable.

When a mistake is made, regroup quickly, find the solution and start executing again. In your work, always make sure that your team can trust you with everything in your abilities. Be accountable to your mistakes and always seek help when you may not be able to hit your targets. Delegate with confidence.

6) Stay focused, but always be curious for new solutions and have the confident to execute

With limited time and resources, we need to be focused and persistent. Stay on course but focus on the long run. In your work, always look for a better solutions to do things better, even if the problem isn’t directly in your area of expertise.

Be Agile-minded. When you have a new solution, have the confidence to try it out. If being deviated will allow us to stay on course for the long run, do not be dogmatic and squeeze out room for flexibility and innovation. 5 years later, everything will be different and we ourselves can’t afford to always stay the same.

7) Don’t be afraid to create fun and a little goofiness

Endorse your own uniqueness and exert that into the company. We recognize and celebrate each person’s individuality, and we want his/her true personality to shine in the workplace environment. Being at RewardMe is more like a LAN party than a soldier squad – you play the game intensively and seriously while pulling jokes on each other.

We make work fun when we can, and having a little goofiness in the system helps alleviate stress, brings people closer, and makes it easier for teammates to collaborate/confront with you. Of course, there is a line you shouldn’t cross, but it’s a rather squiggly one.

8 ) Encourage dissent: Argue with respect. If you are right, listen as if you are wrong

Listen well, instead of reacting fast. Make it safe to provide and receive feedback. Safety means that when feedback is delivered, it won’t easily sink the productivity or effectiveness of the entire team. The team has the open-mindedness to listen to feedback, reflect upon it, and avoid letting it destroy their motivation and productivity. Feedback is not a demand for others to change. It is simply a way to have a conversation about behaviors and mindsets in a way that brings greater awareness of each other’s motivations and boundaries.

Avoid the Tennis no-man’s land: The average of two strategies is usually not a strategy. Always remember that, despite our different opinions on how to do it, we all have the same goal – to make the company successful. So fighting internally is counterproductive to the mutual goal. Also, it’s more rewarding and profound when you thought incorrectly and adjusted your mindset, compared to just convincing people of your point.

9) Endorse our competitors as our best teachers

Competitors don’t kill startups. Indifferent customers do. Competitors are (potentially) smart teams and brains that are solving the same problems. We should take advantage of this external research lab, instead of feel threatened by it. The market is big enough for more than one player.

We only need to focus on 2 things: close deals and deliver value. If a competitor can teach us some tips on how to do those 2 things better, they are good competitors. Sure, we want to beat them, but just in the same mentality that we want to beat friends in a sports game. Maintain sportsmanship.

10) Do the Right Thing

Doing the right thing is often hard, and can be uncomfortable to you and/or others. But it is also essential for the long-term health of the company. You should always question actions that are inconsistent with our values regardless of the position of the person you are questioning. You should be egoless when searching for the best ideas and be non-political when there are disagreements.

Your actions and decisions should not be surprises to anyone – be candid and gently prepare people mentally for what you stand for. Be quick to admit to your mistakes. You are more easily forgiven if you take responsibility for your mistakes proactively. Be respectable and don’t do evil. Never harm our customers – actions are only acceptable if it will not degrade our customer’s current experience or harm their operations. If there are short-term pains to our customers, we need to be sure that the future gain will greatly exceed the initial inconvenience.

Anything in your company culture that is impactful?

If anything in your company culture has made it especially extraordinary and awesome, please share and discuss it here so we can work together to create better working environments for everyone!

2011: The Year of Foundation for RewardMe

2011 finally ended. It went by faster and slower than I expected. Slower because so many things happened in this year and we got so much done, and faster because it felt like an instant and there were still so much more that we wanted to do!

This is an email that shares a bit on the journey we took, what led us to where we are today, and why we are doing what we are doing. When our company becomes so big that employees no longer recognize the names of everyone in the company, there is something that everyone can trace back to and see what happened among the Founding Members that built the kingdom together through hard work, persistence, faith, and loyalty towards each other.
And this is the story that will be remembered as books and movies are made about us

Now that you are all excited and ready, here is the Life of RewardMe in 2011 (I omit some names for privacy and confidentiality considerations):

January 2011

Having conceptualized the idea RewardMe and pivoted from Viralogy 3 months ago, we finally launched our first QR Code Phone app product. We raised about $50K in the past year and are fighting hard to spread our product everywhere and raise more funding.

February 2011

We were quickly implemented in 50 stores in Mountain View and Palo Alto with our QR Code product. We got relatively few signups and check-ins (looking back) but we were all excited about it and a small base of iPhone/Android users loved us. We made the mistake of scaling up too quickly before making 100% sure there is product/market fit, especially with the merchants. It was also by impressive fate that Adam Gervin, an Entrepreneur with $1B in exits and now our dear teammate, saw RewardMe at the store that was actually classified as a “lost cause” between Jun and Me due to poor check-ins, and liked it enough to approach us about working together. Vincent Ng, our sales helper in Vancouver, also decided to invest his own money in the company to push us forward.

March 2011

We got our first 2000 check-ins! Adam also officially joined us. However, we were still tight on fundraising, especially after a particular investor giving us a blank check literally that got us into financial trouble. We pitched at many places and met with many investors, and most did the classic “show me more” or “come back later” stuff (and most of them regretted it heavily too…I’ve met a few of them )

April 2011

Ashwin our intern joined us. Earlier he turned down a full-time offer from Goldman Sachs after graduating from Northwestern University, and became an Intern on our team. Now he is our designer and doing a great job. Ashwin’s first day here was our huge discussion on whether we should abandon our QR Code product and transition to a “tablet” solution that fulfills the same value proposition in a MUCH better way. This solution would allow 1. EVERYONE to take advantage of RewardMe, not just iPhone/Android users, and 2. Stores to reward people based on order value instead of frequency. It would also open a whole world of Online-to-Offline to our platform. Excitingly, we raised $200K from Investor A and $20K Investor B, right when funding was getting really tight.

May 2011

We went to our first customer conference, the Multi-Unit Franchise Conference in Las Vegas! With our Chief Product Officer Steve’s demo with Brand A, we attracted many franchise brands, including Brand B and Brand C, with one being fully deployed with us right now and the other in deep discussions. We also officially moved in our new office, which was actually a 4-bedroom house that the team worked out of. It was an amazing upgrade from our subleased small office and the 2 Bedroom we worked out of and made the team extremely productive and working together. We also reiceived another investors’ $200K, as well as met with eventual investors like TeleNav, Auqeo, Investor C, and Investor D. Also, Patrick officially joins RewardMe and starts working on my.rewardme.com (now just regular RewardMe.com), and Gerald Fong (intern) joins us part-time and starts to work on Freshbook invoicing.

June 2011

Justin Warmkessel, a developer that worked out of the other startup that we were subleasing from, officially left that startup and joined us! We now have a pretty complete Dev team to pump out a bunch of new features! We also won 1st place at the AlwaysOn OnMobile conference, eventually giving us the title of “Top 10 Private Companies to Watch in 2011″. At this point we started to work with a product designer from Taiwan to create our customer stands. We also started to work with POS Hero to see how powerful our product can be when it is fully integrated. Also Investor C puts in $25K.

July 2011

Our team did a Root Beer Float + Worse Movie Competition Night, which was the best and agonizing night of our lives. We pitched many more franchises, including Brand D and Brand E. TeleNav gets onboard as an $250K investor, as well as received another $50K from Investor D. At this point, we started working on Cohiba the cigar shop in Santanna Row and completed our Data Warehouse and lossless communication within our product.

August 2011

We launched the first tablet product at Cohiba with full POS Hero integration! We also made a connection to Brand F, which introduced us to Brand G (the 5th largest theater chain in the US), and had our first meeting with a Brand H, which is a national chain and a public company. We received our first batch of triangle stands from the designer in Taiwan, which is the ones we used for Brand A. Two more investors also joined in the company with $80K, one of which had deep connections into our customer space! At this time, we completed our patent-pending technology that allows us to have a tremendous edge, shrinking a process of 10-20 months to just a few hours. Sadly, our intern Gerald started school and leaves the company

September 2011

Our Oaklahoma developer Patrick came to work locally in California for 3 weeks! Brand A, #1 in Fast Casuals “Top 100 Movers and Shakers”, decided to move forward with us. We also finished the Brand G Demo, which they liked a lot. This month we were mostly busy working on Brand A and settling stability issues with Cohiba.

October 2012

First Brand A locations setup (as well as a Quickly store)! Our product showed amazing numbers and we prove to achieve product market fit. After a few days of piloting, Brand A wanted us to implement at ALL their locations. Brand C signed a 5-year contract with all their locations too! We also got our meeting with the national coffee chain Brand H. Both Brand B and G wanted to move forward. We became a Top 3 Finalist as Best Commercial App at the first LBS Awards called The Locals. October was a very good month with flying colors.

November 2012

All our Brand A locations got implemented! Brand I the Frozen Yogurt store also signed. We also met with a few VC firms and a potential acquirer. We Moved forward with other locations, especially Brand G and Brand I. Brand H gave us a soft commitment to do a pilot. This month was mainly on making our product more stable for all the Brand A Locations, including the support work involved. Our product became a ton better and we created more systems.

December 2012

We recruited 3 more interns into the company! Arica, Raj, and Shine. We moved forward with Brand G and especially and a sub-brand. We streamlined our implementation, support, and product stability, and added many more useful functionalities. Now we have a ton of users/check-ins everyday (20% of a store’s daily customers are checking into RewardMe). We also have many investors and customers setup for Q1 of 2012.

2012 and beyond!

As you can see, we’ve done so much in 2011. I believe we will accomplish exponentially more in 2012. We no longer need to pivot. We’ve done most of the preparation, trial & error, and foundational work. 2012 is the year where we take that foundation and grow. It’s the time to make that mark in the industry and finally bring online services into the store.

I’m blessed to have such a great team, and I’m excited to work with everyone to create legacy together.

This is the talk that I did at Stanford University on April 19th, 4:15PM at the NVIDIA Auditorium.

The topic was focused on working on startups for entrepreneurs that came from Asia.

How to be influential within your existing friends

There are many people who are not interested in becoming powerful and impactful in the world, but almost everyone wants to be influential and respected among their friends and peers.

However, the majority of the people do not become that, mostly because they are so comfortable with their existing social statuses in their groups that they don’t know how to make it different.

Here are some guidelines to help you become more influential within your circle. Your circle could mean anything from your small group of friends, your class, your department, or your entire organization.

1. Become the best

This is the most straight forward but most difficult way to become influential. It simply means being the best at whatever your group is doing. In fact, most respectable and influential individuals from a group are the ones that have mastered their skillsets the most, whether it be basketball, sales, programming, or just video games.

The way to do this is simply match talent with hard work and become the best. Nothing fancy. Interestingly enough, a lot of people who become extremely successful later on in life still highly respect their childhood friends who were remarkable in a game they played, even if the friends are not very successful themselves.

One key to note is that the activity you excel at must be shared by all the people in your circle. If you are the best at chess in a chess club, you will be respected as everyone is doing it. But if you are best at sales but your circle does operations and finance, then it wouldn’t have the same effectl. Finally, conduct yourself in a manner that minimizes jealously (elaborated in another post)

2. Become useful

If you don’t have the ability to become the best at what you do (by definition the majority of the people), another way is to become useful. This means that you are always there to help everyone out, and always have the right resources handy when it’s needed.

This is much easier to accomplished because you do not need to be the most talented at something. You just need to be the most prepared and most available out of all. If you are the one that brings something when no one else thought it would come in handy, or you remembered a piece of information that suddenly was needed, people will start to trust you. Eventually, as you are there for everyone and people start to rely on you more and more, you start to gain in respect and influence.

One key to note is that you want to make sure you don’t do it in a manner that suggests people can simply take advantage of you. You want to make sure you maintain a strong core and are only helping because you want to help so don’t feel like people can trample over you. Learn how to say no when you have to.

3. Become audacious

This is something interesting, but people usually respect others who can overcome their own fears. Most fears are not encountered on a regular social basis, but stepping out of the norm, being an uncomformist, and approaching new people in public is something that most people are uncomfortable with.

If you are always taking initiative in contacting people, organizing events/hangouts, talking to strangers in the group’s behalf, you usually earn a lot of respect from the group. It’s a strange social energy that displays that you are confident and know what you are doing. Sometimes this translates to charisma, which can be obtained without really being good at anything else besides being audacious.

Again, how you do this is essential. You need to do this in a very positive and sociable light. Anything else can make you seem weird, obnoxious, or creepy. Just like hitting on girls, there’s only a thin line between smooth and sleazy.

4. Become a maven

Another way to develop influence in your circle is to be the trusted advisor of this group. This means that even though you might not be the best at what you do, you are the most knowledgeable in the field and have a passion in sharing your knowledge.

To be a maven, you do need to be passionate about the topic and are constantly updated on the latest news and developments on that topic. You need to know a large amount of relevant information, it’s sources, and how it is comparable to similar products. Once you have that established, even the top performer will come to you for the best and updated information. Now you are respected like a coach, or Yoda.

5. Become a connector

Finally, the fifth way of becoming more influential in your circle is to become a connector. This is probably the easiest as you don’t need to have any skills of your own, but simply the enjoyment of making new friends and helping them out with your existing friends.

Whenever someone in your circle has a need, you know the friend who can solve the need, and you make a connection. The first helped person now owes you a little favor. You can then use this favor to help someone else, and that someone else also owes you a little favor. As time goes by, everyone will owe you a little favor and you have become very influential as your network grows. People then need to maintain a good relationship with you because you are their window to all the resources out there in the world.

If you have seen the movie, you’ll notice that the Godfather actually is not the best at any skill, he isn’t necessarily “useful” or a maven, he is not more audacious than many others, but he is a connector that everyone needs to depend on. His influence comes from his network and how he is able to leverage that for himself and his friends.

Summary: Be Remarkable, Provide Value, and Be Proactive.

Everyone has different styles, and not every guideline above fits you. If you do all of them, you are bound to be extremely extremely influencial in whatever circle you are in (charismatic and confident leader who is the best at what he does, shares tons of knowledge, there when people need him, and connects people to tons of others), but depending on who you are, sometimes you just need to do one and you will become more respected and influential amongst your peers. Most of them are not too hard. It just takes a little heart and a little action. Always try to Be Remarkable, Provide Value, and Be Proactive.

It’s time for you to share your ideas or destroy mine. Lets have a dialogue in the comment section below.

I’ve had the honor of being invited to be a guest lecturer to talk about Social Media at a Stanford CS course on personal branding. Many of my Twitter friends wanted me to post a video, so here it is

A few things:

1) My friend who taped it couldn’t get the camera to work at the beginning, so this is about 10 minutes into the talk.
2) The camera ran out of batteries, so this video ends 20 minutes before I actually finished (but I think that’s okay because who wants to watch super long videos?)
3) I’m more used to setups where my laptop was in front of me, so for this one I kept on looking at the side, which I somewhat awkward.

Besides that, enjoy!

Chou Notes

Printers suck.

I’ve had some decent successes in my life in a variety of tasks/hobbies/work that I do. I cut out a bunch of it in the video just because it is too long and it sounds braggy (but I needed some credibility for “almost anything”)

The three things that can get you to do something well:

1) Confidence
2) Concentration
3) Condition

Also, for preparation work, you need to

1) Always be self-reflecting
2) Always be strategizing (or optimizing)
3) Always be learning from people who do it better

If you master these things, this can help you SIGNIFICANTLY boost your level at anything you do, from playing games, doing a hobby, personal skills, to even getting girls

I used to suck at almost everything I do until I figured some of this out. Now I’m good at a lot of things (not everything), or at least I quickly get good at the things I’m serious about. It’s not really about being smart, but it’s about mastering a system. The key is “Doing it well” so the way you do it is more important than your intelligence.

Hope this helps and more tips will be awesome in the comment section!

In my past 4 years in Silicon Valley, I’ve been to MANY startup entrepreneur events. I’ve seen a ton of startup presentation conferences…heck, I’ve been to many myself, and after a while, they all blend into a similar experience.

Not so for the Founder Showcase, run by Adeo Ressi. The setup is the usual: prestigious keynote speaker, 5-10 entrepreneurs pitching their lives off for a few minutes, a panel of critical judges etc. However, what makes these events different, is Adeo’s kirky but vibrant personality. He creates a ton of laughter and conversation among the judges, the audiences, and the entrepreneurs mostly because he would randomly grab the mic and just start contradicting the judges/speakers and put them on the spot.

Instead of just a “Look how smart I am. I know that Mobile is the future” talk from a brandname you heard of, it is now Adeo Ressi debating with this brandname, putting him on the spot and pinning him to the corner. And instead of doing in a way that increases tension and cut-throat-ness, Adeo always does that in a fun manner that keeps the speaker interesting and wakes the audience up.

And of course, at the end he always offer closure by saying, “I love you man.” followed by “Ladies and Gentle, give our honorable speaker a hand!” That’s when everyone, after watching the speaker working to defend himself the entire time, give a huge applause that last 2-3 times longer than the keynote clap.

Another thing that was unique and interesting I saw earlier was the demo booth for InTheDoor. Apparently, they had some last-moment incidences that prevented them from being all the materials. The Founder was very quick in thinking, and she ordered a bunch of In-N-Out Burgers! That completely got a ton of people to go to her booth, pick up a brochure, and politely ask “so…what do you guys do?” before snatching a burger and running off with it.

It’s this type of resourcefulness and out-of-the-box thinking that I love among entrepreneurs and startups. I definitely look forward to more events to come!

In most people’s minds, the hardest part about being an entrepreneur is starting. That’s actually not true. Starting is the easiest part and it just requires you to get off your butt and start doing things. You only think it’s the hardest part because that’s the part YOU are stuck on.

For that reason, here’s a little guide to help you get over that “but I don’t know how to start!” hurdle, so you will have no excuse not knowing how to start your company.

Days 1-5: Decide to be an Entrepreneur and learn as much as you can about it

This is the day that you finally decide to take that leap of faith and begin a real life. Some people start this day by being laid off, but hopefully you came to this conclusion on your own terms.

This doesn’t mean you have to quit your job immediately, but it means you need to start thinking like an entrepreneur. You need to train your mind to think creatively, to discover opportunities, to become a leader, and to become an explorer of life.

You should also start reading about what does entrepreneurship entail and to learn as much as you can about it. I recommend reading Paul Graham’s Essays, Guy Kawasaki’s Blog, and Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership Series.

Spend as much time as you can everyday reading up on these materials and listen to these podcasts everyday because sounding like you know what you are doing is very important in the startup world.

Finally, find people who have been there, done that and learn about their experiences. Ask them to become your mentor or advisor. They can seriously prevent you from running into some walls that they ran into when they were doing it.

Days 6-10: Find your Passion

This is the time to find out what you are truly passionate about. Running a business is tough, and to survive through all the beatings and destruction, you MUST be passionate about what you are doing. Or else you quit and die.

There are many ways to find your passion, and none of them work 100% of the time. I recommend you to think about the past years and write down EVERYTHING that made you happy. Write down things that you spent the most time on. Write down things that made you feel meaningful about life.

Your passion can be as broad as you want: fashion, helping people, making better technology….anything, but just know that it is something that can make you happy.

Days 10-20: Identify a large problem in the field you are passionate about and find your co-founder(s)

Once you know the field that you are most passionate about, try to identify problems and pains in this field that have not been solved yet.

Since this is a field you care a lot about, you are hopefully part of the target market, and you know what are the things that just have to have a better solution to them.

Make sure you focus on Aspirins instead of Vitamins. One solves a real PAIN, while the other is just a good-to-have. With EXTREMELY good marketing, you can do well with Vitamins. However, if you already have that brilliant marketing ability, it would only be more successful if you were selling an Aspirin.

You don’t need to stress about thinking up the solution, but at least list out all the problems that you potentially want to solve.

Then you want to find co-founders who can fight with you on your journey.This Co-founder should have the same passion but with complementary skills to you.

Co-founders are exceptionally important because they help you go through the tough times and alleviate some of the loneliness of entrepreneurial life. As an entrepreneur, your family and friends will not understand what you are doing, and the only people that you truly share your pains with are your partners.

The order of these two can be switched. You can choose to find co-founders first and identify the problems in that field if you like. However, you should definitely come up with the solution to the problem together.

Days 20-30: Find a Solution to the Problem you Identified

With your co-founders, you should meet up everyday and brainstorm about potential solutions to the problems you identified.

Be as creative as possible. Think inside, outside, and inbetween the box. And then pretend there is no box.

Don’t be scared to yell at each other. You will be yelling at each other throughout the startup process, so might as well start now. Just don’t take things personally.

Also, make sure you are market focused instead of product focused. Make sure your solution/product is not something that’s just “really cool” but something that actually addresses the need in the market. Also make sure your product is economically viable. You won’t find enough buyers if you solve a small problem with twice the original price.

Finally, create some Milestones, Assumptions, and Tasks for your business.

Days 30-40: Assign Roles, Tell ALMOST everyone about your new business idea

At this point, you and your co-founders should identify the roles and responsibilities everyone has in the firm. Rolls should be assigned based on the person’s abilities and expertise, which should end up being obvious if you truly picked people with complementary skills as you do. Make sure everyone is accountable for his/her tasks.

Also, almost at all times, the original vision of a startup ends up being completely changed. That’s a good thing, because startups need to be adaptable. You as an entrepreneur need to talk to as many people as you can to get feedback.

Keep in mind that most of your friends will tell you that your idea is great, even if your idea was a samurai sword that makes the noise of a rooster crow whenever you draw it out of the sheath. (Btw, one day I will make this product. Trust me.) Pay attention to the people who raise problems and issues so you can truly increase your chances of success.

Now there are some people who just tell you that your plans will never work without giving you any real reasons. Ignore them. These are people who wished they were doing something extraordinary but ended up hating their life. Don’t let them bring your spirit down.

Don’t be afraid of people stealing your ideas. Most people are too lazy to even do their own brilliant ideas, let alone yours. Plus success is all in the execution.

I would say the ONLY people you need to be concerned about sharing your ideas with are companies that are already doing something similar. If that is the case, it would be very easy for them to just tweak their products to make it like yours.

By the way, at this point it is good to have a company name, but don’t kill yourself over it. It is up to you to get business cards but first focus on tasks that make your actual business more valuable, like developing the product.

Finally, don’t bother wasting time registering for a legal structure. No one will sue you yet, and your stocks are worth nothing.

Days 40-60: Recruit necessary talents and talk to potential investors

Now that you have obtained a lot of education from your field, learned about your market, and bullet-proofed your product idea (not!), you should know by now what are your lacking resources.

For almost all startups, the resources that are lacking are money and people.

Spend most of your time selling your vision to people who have the production skills, perhaps in the engineering or design field, instead of investors. If you convince them that your startup has huge potentials and could make their lives more meaningful, a lot of people are willing to work at least part-time for free or for some stock. You can pay them too if you have the cash.

The reason why I say don’t spend too much time on investor is because a lot of the times they’re not worth the effort. It takes a lot of precious energy and time to pitch to investors, especially in a down economy. This holds true even more so when you don’t even have a product yet, and are an unproven time.

Plus, where would all the money go to when you raise the money? Probably paying people anyway. You might as well focus on getting people to help out and have them share part of the company instead of the investors.

With that said, you should still probe around to raise a little money from the 3F: Friends, Families and Fools. They might put down a little bit just to get you going, but don’t waste time on an entire business plan just for pitching investors. Have a power point deck and possibly an executive summary and you are good to go.

Days 60-70: Build a website, Develop key partnerships, and Brand your company

At this stage, you should start branding yourself everywhere, even before you launch your product. Everyone should be waiting for your product when it launches.

One of the most important things nowadays is to have a website. Nowadays people judge your credibility by your website. If you don’t have one, no one will do business with you.

If you don’t have a lot of resources, you can set up a simple Wordpress site with a template design that talks about your company. You can also find some good wordpress designers that can create a cool site for a low fee.

At the same time, start building relationships with key people in your industry so you can establish partnerships that will help your business. Depending on your line of business, this could be either helpful or essential.

Utilize the power of Social Media and Search Engine Optimization. To brand your company well, you should start blogging about topics in your industry and build followship on Twitter. You should also make sure your website is key-word optimized so people can find your company without you marketing it with money.

Days 70-80: Get the legal stuff out of the way

If you have survived to this point, you know you are committed enough to function like a real company. Now is a good time to establish your formal legal structure (earlier you functioned as a Partnership), whether it be a S-Corp, C-Corp, or LLC.

This is an important step but I just want to make sure you don’t waste the money and effort before your company has any value developed.

Days 80-90: Focus on your product and launch as soon as possible

After almost 3 months of hard work, your company is finally ready to flow into Phase 2 of a startup. You need to make sure that your product is launched as fast as possible because markets change very fast and you can always improve it later on. Market validation is extremely important for both your business and investors

Make sure whatever you make comes out with a good design. Think about cars. A company could make a car that is 20% more efficient and 10% faster than any other car out there, but if it looks UGLY, all that brilliant engineering is wasted because no one will buy it.

Finally, keep your product as simple as possible. You only want that KEY feature that solves the PAIN you identified at the beginning. Bells and Whistles only delay your launch time and distract people from using and remembering your product for its core features.

The Journey Goes On

Since every business has unique needs and tasks, I won’t be able to tell you what lies ahead for you. Fortunately or unfortunately, at this point all sorts of tasks and problems will pop up for you to solve, so you will not need a guide to tell you what to do.

The last thing I want to remind you is that always focus on things that are important instead of urgent, maintain passion, don’t give up, always keep your integrity, and watch your business grow.

The world needs more entrepreneurs. Start today.

Living the life of an entrepreneur is tough. You work your butt off and get paid almost nothing for years, and the chances are you will fail at the end. Living the entrepreneurial life is definitely not the “easy” life.

However, in my opinion, it is the most fulfilling one.

I believe that being an entrepreneur is the best way to make sure you live a life of passion and adventure – a life that leaves you a legacy and stories to tell your grand kids.

The corporate life story

Lets look at a regular corporate life person. This person graduates from college, finds a job, gets married, possibly gets an advanced degree, has kids, advances in her job, gets old, and then there’s goodbye. That just sounds very unfulfilling to me, especially when you are working at a job you hate like most people are.

Sure, some people love their jobs, and I’m all for that, but most people settle for a job that they don’t like just because they are afraid of change and and slowly wait for their midlife crisis.

That’s when they buy their fast car.

Even for those of you who say you love your jobs, if you suddenly had $10M in your bank account, how many of you will choose to quit your job this week?

Yes, you might say that this question is unfair as you could say that about anything. However, I can tell you as a sure fact that lots of successful entrepreneurs who HAVE over $10 Million in their bank accounts keep going back to the torturous startup life because it is just too exciting and addicting to stay away from!

Live for adventure instead of for self-sustaining

Lets say you do have a six digit high-paying job. How many years can you afford to stop working and do whatever you want? Probably not that many. You have to continuously work for decades at that job until you finally saved up enough money in your 401(k) when you are 65 and retire (hopefully!). That’s when you can start to fully discover your passions and go traveling/golfing all day. In this way, you spend 40 years of your life just to sustain it for longer before doing the things that you are passionate about.

The life of an entrepreneur is more dynamic and more exciting in my opinion. When you are young, you have a dream and a passion. You gather some friends and go through tons of struggles, mistakes, disappointments and some victories together to create that world-changing business. I usually say that running a startup is not really a career. Its a lifestyle. For instance, if you were doing a Lord of the Rings journey, you wouldn’t just say “I’m just going to travel 40 hours a week and watch TV for the rest of the time.” Of course not! You will be constantly dealing with problems and evil creatures while counting the hours that you can afford to sleep.

People don’t join that LOTR journey because it is luxurious or they can get a fancy car. People join because they 1. believe in the mission (destroying the ring), and 2. they like the people they are traveling with.

I believe living a life like that is way more meaningful than just living a comfortably sustained life in The Shire. I would rather die poor doing the mission I believe in than live richly without ever pursuing the things I’m passionate about.

Being an entrepreneur creates an opportunity to truly be financially free at a young age after a great ride.

Now the other side of the story. You could be trying and failing for fives years or ten years, but WHEN you hit that big home run, you will earn enough money to do whatever you want to do for the rest of your life. This is dramatically different from a normal high paying job, because this allows you to possibly take full control of your life at a young age.

You could literally retire before 30 and live the life you want to. Yes, I agree the odds that this happening is low, but that is fine because the pursuit of your dreams is what makes life worth living, not necessarily the obtaining of it.

Also, as Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad author) says, “Nine out of ten startups fail. That just means I only need to create ten businesses and one will become successful!”

After you make it big, you can then go golfing, traveling, do philanthropy, or create more companies! Many successful entrepreneurs choose to do all of them.

Successful or not, entrepreneurs take control of their own lives.

Notice that in this case both phases of being an entrepreneur (struggle and success), you are doing what you want to do and free to choose how you want to do it, whereas in the corporate world you can only choose what makes the shareholders more profitable.

I would rather live a purposeful and adventurous life that “could” fulfill my dreams socially and financially than live a life just to sustain my existence for longer and buy cool stuff.

The best time to start a business for you just passed. The second best time to start a business is NOW.

Yea, most people want to start their own businesses, but always feel that the right time will come “later.”

Guess what? As time goes by your external responsibilities in life will only increase as your energy level decreases.

The best time is to start as early as possible (even in college!). Later on you will have a mortgage, you’ll have a family, your kids needs to go to college, and then you will need to save up for retirement while dealing with some new financial crisis. The best time to start a business will never arrive to you (actually lots of people become entrepreneurs after they get laid off so I take that back).

Just remember that you want to take the most risks when you have the least to lose. And that’s when you are young (or younger).

Every once in awhile I hear some naysayers challenge me by saying, “well if everyone becomes an entrepreneur, then there will be no employees and the world will not function!” I think this argument is bull because even though I agree with the logic, the truth is that even if I told the whole world to become entrepreneurs, only 5% will make real plans to become one, and only 0.2% will follow through and actually start a business.

So I think that’s not an issue anyone really needs to worry about. Its just a feel-good excuse to stay in the comfortable cubicles and not do anything different. All you have to worry about is to make sure you are part of that 0.2% who decides to take a leap of faith and make your life into an epic adventure.

I invite you to join the Real Life, where you actually have control over how you live it and what you do with it. It is yours completely, and the legacy is for yours to win or loss.

There’s always going to be people smarter than you and people dumber than you

Everyone wants to be successful in life. However, not everyone has what it takes to get there. Life is competitive, and to constantly keep up and excel over your peers is a tough and struggling battle.

Sure, some people believe that they can dominate everyone based on their natural abilities and intelligence, but you would be a fool to deny that there isn’t someone smarter and stronger than you out there (if you happen to be that one person who truthfully qualifies for that, email me and I’ll apologize to you personally). For most of us, gambling that you are the ultimate genius is a risky way of winning any battle.

The only way to win is to spend more time more efficiently on it

For everyone who is not the ultimate genius, the only way to beat the genius is to spend more time more efficiently on that activity. You’ll have to spend more time practicing, doing, failing, and learning than the born natural.

In his often-quoted book, Outliers, Malcom Gladwell talks about how in order to become highly successful in something, one needs to spend 10,000 hours on that specific task. To put this into perspective, this is like practicing a specific action four hours a day, seven days a week, for seven years. (speaking of which, how many hours did your last “social media expert” put into his expertise?)

Needless to say, spending more time on something is not enough, as HOW you spend your time on it matters a lot too. I used to play chess on Pogo.com a lot (until Snow Leopard doesn’t support their java anymore…), and I’ve seen people who have astonishingly played 14,000 games but still plays like a beginner. These people lack the fundamentals of chess and a good player can literally beat them without looking at the board .

Obviously, if you practice the wrong way, spending more hours doing something will only make you suck more. If you don’t learn from your experiences every step of the way, you might as well not do it and die.

Take advantage of the Slacker’s Gap

Now the problem with spending more hours against others is that everyone has a limited amount of time on a given day. Since most people have to spend time sleeping, eating (and some even have friends and family!), whatever you do can only be highly marginal.

If your average competitor spends 4 hours a day improving himself, it’s pretty hard to three-times his effort and beat him that way. If you work your butt off, you probably practice 6 hours a day trying to get some kind of advantage. Yes, it works, and I encourage that if your goal is to become powerful in your field, but it’s definitely an uphill battle.

In that case, the best way to outcompete is to wait for what I call the “Slacker’s Gap.” Basically, this is a time when your competitors are taking days off and relaxing. When they are active, it’s incredibly hard to have a 40% advantage over them. But when they are doing nothing, you immediately gain immense ground since any progress you put in closes your difference by the same amount.

Am I telling you that in order to win, you need to be a workaholic and have less/no work-life balance?

I actually am. If you truly want to become powerful and influential in your field, you have to do more than what others are doing. Sure, there’s this thing about working smarter, not harder, 4-hour-work-week and all that. But to become highly competitive, you need to work smart AND hard. You need to do the 4-hour-work-week, 80 hours a week.

If you want to accomplish uncommon things in your life, you need to live everyday of your life uncommonly. If you spend your day like everyone else, you will end up like everyone else. It’s that simple.

Starting early allows you to stay competitive and become successful the easy way

But there’s actually an easy way to take advantage of the Slacker’s Gap. Lets say instead of working 50% more than everyone else, you started a year before everyone. That means for an entire year, your competitors are zero, and whatever hours you put in will be more than infinite times what they are doing. This is not just a Slacker’s Gap, this is a Slacker’s Valley. No one is there to challenge you until they realize they should start too.

Once you’ve had a head start like that, when your competitors start, they need to work their butts off, while you simply need to maintain steady pace to keep your lead. Life is easy and non stressful that way, obviously until some workaholic competitor surpasses you while you are in your Slacker’s Gap.

Three Steps to start early and become successful

Everything is easier said than done. HOW do you actually start earlier? If it was that easy than everyone would be doing it already! Here I lay out a few steps to help you gain an early bird advantage.

1. KNOW where you want to be, not where you are

Most people just focus on the present and their needs right now. You shouldn’t do that. You want to think about exactly where you want to be years from now.

Have you ever met people who are “lucky” because they knew what they wanted to do at a very young age? Most of them did not become “lucky” because they sat on their butts. They probably actively tried out a lot of things, got exposed to a variety of interests, and finally found out what they are passionate about.

In the same way, you need to spend a lot of time trying different things and really envisioning yourself 5 years later. Instead of handling the tasks at hand, really spend time figuring out what does success mean to you 5 to 10 years later. Yes, it could be daunting, but if you want to become successful, this gives you an immense advantage that is too precious to not take advantage of.

This is actually the hardest part of taking advantage of the Slacker’s Valley and requires a lot of initiative, speculation, outside advice and soul-searching. The rest is a lot more systematic.

2. Understand the metrics required to to get there

Once you know where you want to be many years from now, you have to figure out what are the metrics that matter verses the ones that don’t.

For instance, if you are a dental student who just wants to be a General Dentist, passing dental school is very important, but getting top grades is not (it is if you want to specialize). Of course you want to make sure you nailed down all your dental skills in order to treat patients well, but you don’t have to kill yourself over classes like Biochemistry or such.

However, what does matter for a successful dentist is how many people in your practicing city know about your service and thinks positively of you. A dentist’s success is not measured by how well how he did in school or even how good he is at dentistry. It’s measured by how many patients he can attract and retain to his practice. That’s why established dentists have an advantage over younger dentists, even if some of them may not have done better in school nor are they necessarily better at what they do.

This immediately means that networking and building a personal brand to a future patient-base is much more important for a dental student than getting perfect scores in school. It’s really important to identify what are the metrics that matter verses the ones that seem important at the moment.

3. Pursue the success metrics that matter in the longrun and go easy on the insignificant ones

Once you realize what metrics truly matter, you need to start preparing for that immediately, no matter how many years later would it start to matter.

Most dental students would only focus on studying and hanging out with other dental students when they’re still in school. The FD student on the other hand would spend time networking with others and establishing herself as a future dentist to all sorts of demographics in her target city.

That way once she actually starts a practice, people already know about her practice and would contact her whenever they or their friends are looking for a new dentist. Even better, while in school she should probably network with those that don’t have a personal dentist yet but would be looking for one a couple years later, like those still in other professional schools.

As you can see, in this example it is also very important for the dental student to know exactly which CITY she wants to practice, since for a dentist it only matters that people who are local know about what she does.

If the city the dental students wants to practice in is not the city she is studying at, what she needs to do is instantly network with people in that city via online methods. Use social networking sites and tools like Twitter or Yelp to establish relationships with people in that city while constantly letting them know she is an aspiring dentist might yield great benefits later on when you update them, “I’m finally a Dentist now and am opening a practice in Orange County!”

She can even start a blog that targets the local audience there like a food/restaurant rating blog (would need some research or a friend’s help) to get locals to read her stuff on a regular basis, while having a “About me” section that talks about how she will become a dentist.

All in all, when you know what are the future metrics that matter, you need to immediately get off your ass and start building that foundation while others are oblivious of this.

This “lazy” way to become successful is HARD!

Now at this point you might be contesting, “Didn’t you say that this was the LAZY man’s way of winning? This is SOO much work!” It’s true. In order to become powerful in your field, you have to put in tons of work. There’s no way out of it.

But some people spend their entire lives working hard and never get to where they want to be. This post is more about using a realistic and doable way to get an advantage over others without killing yourself.

Based on how ambitious you truly are, by no means should you really just get an early start and chillax from there. Remember that the difference between 95 and 96 is not 1. If everyone else is a 95 and you are a 96, you are the winner, and the winner gets all the opportunities. In a winner takes all situation, it’s the difference between 0 and 100. If you truly want to become the best at what you do, you need to start early and constantly make sure you are on top of your game.

What if I’m already behind?

You’re screwed. Haha, not necessarily. Since most people are still slackers and don’t take much action, you actually have a huge chance of catching up in most fields. All you have to do is after you read things like this blog or some other self-improvement book, actually convert it to action and DO SOMETHING. Most people read this kind of stuff just to feel good and agree with things, but only the 1% of the people who actually follow through and make it happen are the winners. The key to winning is not starting early, it’s being proactive in empowering your own life however way you can whenever you can. There’s a reason why “Be Proactive” is the first chapter of the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.

Everyone else is still sitting in the sidelines. Be a winner and start now.

7 Tips to make your blogpost go Viral

Everyone wants to write content that goes viral and spreads like wildfire. However, it doesn’t always happen. Mostly by luck, I was able to create some content that went viral.

The blogpost I will refer to here is: Seesmic will Destory Tweetdeck

1. Say something controversial in the title (but use the best objective and logical statements to support it)

People love controversial stuff. As long as you truly believe in what you say and can back it up, throw up a controversial posts and give people a reason to click on it. If you just say something like, “Seesmic Desktop emerges as an alternative to Tweetdeck”, people won’t care, and they won’t share it.

2. Include at least one name that people have heard of in the title

People will only click on your post if they recognize what you are talking about. In this case, most people on Twitter knows about Tweetdeck, and Seesmic has a strong brandname in general on the internet. When you include something that people know and care about, they will check it out. If I said, “FriendTweets will destroy Qualiky”, people won’t pay attention because they don’t know the competing parties. (I have both domains btw if you are interested )

3. Support people with a high VScore, or with influential power on the internet

You want to write posts that make influential people look good. You want to write something so good, that they want everyone in the world to read it. No matter how awesome they are, it’s more lame to say, “Yea, we’re the best and you should use our products.” But if SOMEONE ELSE writes, “Yea, they are the best, and you should use their products” it suddenly becomes a lot more compelling. I just happened to support Loic since I truly believed he had the better product for me.

Because of this, when the post was published, Loic tweeted it out multiple times and wrote a blogpost about it. That helped tremendously (this post itself was retweeted almost 100 times).

4. Write an extremely elaborated post that includes as much details and analysis as possible

A lot of people talk about writing short, crisp posts. They say people don’t have the attention span to read long posts. I completely agree with that. However, after chatting with Andrew Warner from Mixergy (one of the BEST sources for entrepreneur education btw!), we both agreed that people read short posts, but dont’ share it, whereas with long posts people just skim, but they bookmark it and share it with others.

Think about those posts that give you 100 links to something. No one’s going to click through all 100 links. They’re not even going to read all the anchor texts. But they save it and share it with others.

5. Tweet relevant people and ask them to retweet

Everything that goes viral needs a starting point. Twitter is a good tool to find that starting point. A good tip is to go on Twitter and search for everyone who is talking about the topic you are writing about. In this case Seesmic Desktop. I could do Tweetdeck more, but they are less targeted because everyone could talk about Tweetdeck for anything. However, people who talk about Seesmic Desktop are either people who are thinking about using it, or the early adapters of this new app, and they would care about any literature that explains the great things about it.

Also, if you have space, politely ask them to Retweet it for you. For those who do retweet it, make sure you send a thank you tweet and try to help them out if possible.

6. Include social media influencers and let them know about it

This is KEY. A few days before I wrote the blogpost, I saw Zaibatsu (super awesome Social Media Maven…yes, one of the VERY few people who mean it when they say it. For more social media mavens, check here [smirk]) tweet out his frustration about using Tweetdeck. I thought it would add some colors to my post if I included it. After I published it, I tweeted Zaibatsu and asked him if it was ok that I have an old tweet there, since it also had an abbreviated cuss word.

My tweet was actually really sincere and just wondered if he would prefer me to take it down. However, he didn’t respond to me but merely retweeted the post. Immediately afterwards, dozens and dozens of people started retweeting that post too. It went wild and crazy, just because Zaibatsu decided that it was good content.

This is actually another lesson about Twitter: follower count does not matter. Authority through engagement is what truly matters. It doesn’t matter if you have a million followers if no one cares about what you say. Zaibatsu has built up a reputation where people trust his authority and trust his selection of content. I believe many of them didn’t even read the post before retweeting it.

If you are a company or looking to build a personal brand, don’t just amass numbers. Get people who care about and trust you.

7. Engage with the community and respond to all comments

After the blogpost started getting a lot more attention, tons of people started to comment on the post. Many companies make the mistake of just letting people comment but do not engage with the commenters themselves. However, it feels good to have a writer respond to you, so I strongly recommend engaging everyone’s comments, whether they are compliments or simply saying how ignorant and disgusting you are.

Hope this helps, and I look forward to one day stumble upon your viral post! Contact me if you ever need help with anything, anytime!

Chou Notes

1. Being happy and positive often is a talent, and it actively makes your group stronger. Create value by being happy.

2. When you get criticized for your work, as long as the person is not trying to personally hurt you, don’t take it personally and thank them for pointing out how you can create the best result. Your goal is to create good results, not get approval from others.

(Note: the deployment of our equipment will happen next Monday November 24th, 2010. Please don’t download the App and use it before then!)

Hey guys,

It’s been a while since I updated on my startup life. Some of you found out what I’m doing outside on your own (very impressed!) but I’d still like to update those who only see me on my blog so readers know what I’m up to.

Update of our older model

In the past 6 months, we’ve had moderate success with our social personalization engine for ecommerce sites, gaining some small wins here and there. After we switched to a high price, low volume mode we converted a few clients at a decent rate. However, the entire process was a bit slow for our quick-moving personalities, especially factoring in the slow sales cycle, 2 months implementation time, and then a free trial. We saw this as a good business but not a way to change the world.

Starting RewardMe

Then about 2 months ago, our team started to experiment with a side project called RewardMe, specifically a mobile app that uses gaming mechanics to get customers addicted to brick-and-mortar businesses. We realized that the flaw with deal type apps like Groupon is that they focus on the one-time bargain hunters (people who may not come back until you give them another 50% off), and the real sustaining money is in getting customers to return often and refer their friends (what FarmVille does very well in the virtual space). So we started working Rewardme in September. We finished the iPhone version of our app in a month, as well as our hardware design we give businesses.

Setting Milestones

Based on the Customer Development process, we decided that if we could convince 10 local businesses to launch with us and adjust their operations before we had anything tangible to show them, that would be enough validation for a viable business. Most of the ideas we had in the past took for ages for us to get a handful of business buy-ins since businesses don’t want to waste their time on unproven products. So with a goal of 10 in mind, we started to talk to businesses.

Huge Success

Surprisingly to us, after 1.5 months of customer development (part-time), we signed up 40 businesses to launch with us and 50+ moving forward in the pipeline. The places that signed up with us include Wahoo’s Fish Taco, Denny’s, Coco’s, Post Bagels, Chef Chu’s, and Coupa Cafe next to Stanford. We also have Togo’s, Johnny Rocket, Noah’s Bagels, and Extreme Pizza in the pipeline. That quadrupled our goal! That’s when we realized we potentially have a big hit in our hands that could change the industry.

Raising Money

We wanted to expand aggressively so we took this to the Band of Angels to raise a $600K round. We’ve already made it to their due diligence process (3 out of 100 startups) and we thought it’s a good time to reach out to other investors to see if anyone is interested in this potential big hit.

If you own a brick and mortar store, or are an angel investor who would like to participate and add value to this exciting startup, let me know!

Last week I went to Los Angeles and did a pitch at the TWiST – LA event. I won first place out of 10 Startups and got the chance to chat with Jason Calacanis, who is very influential in the startup world and blogosphere, on his live show about Viralogy. Pretty awesome.

Well, just wanted to do a quick update on my life. For more details about the actual pitch, you can check out the post on the Viralogy eCommerce Blog

Chou Notes

Some comments I have about Jay Chou’s concert. I’m not a big fan, but I do think he’s super super talented.

The 3 Qualitative Metrics of Traffic

A lot of websites out there just measure traffic. Traffic is a quantitative number that is easy to measure and helps you see important trends and how successful campaigns are. However, especially for sites that need some kind of conversion like signing up or buying a product, undifferentiated traffic can be misleading.

A visitor is a real person

Traffic is the amount of visitors on your site. When you say “visitors”, these are actually real people, and everyone has their own personalities, their motives, and their own wants. Yes, sometimes it’s just a numbers game where a small % of your traffic will convert. However, wouldn’t you actually want 100 people on your site that are looking to really buy things than have 1000 people who are just surfing?

Stumbleupon gives high quantitative but low qualitative traffic

This misconception in traffic-success is most obviously seen with StumbleUpon. When you get “Stumbled”, your traffic that day will increase gigantically. However, chances are your average time on site will decrease dramatically. That is because Stumble can get you a lot of traffic, but not a lot of quality traffic. Even if people did read your post or article, they’re in a pure surfing mode and will likely not signup or buy your services.

In that sense, I came up with three qualitative metrics that is important to consider when driving visitors to your site. These metrics are: Relevancy, Timing, and Trust.

1. Relevancy

Relevancy is whether this person is actually part of your target market. If you own a sports site that is looking to get subscription and merchandise purchases, but the visitor on your site is not really that interested in sports and never buys anything online, this person is not relevant. It doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 people like that on your site. You won’t convert anything.

Obviously when people are on your site, they are hopefully already somewhat relevant based on how they got there. However, some people are more relevant than others, such as a hardcore sports fan compared to a guy who is curious about his girlfriend’s favorite sports team.

2. Timing

You might have very relevant people on your site, but the timing is not correct. What that means is that this might be a hardcore sports fan, but he is not looking to buy any merchandise. He might not even be looking to subscribe to a new service. All he is doing is looking for quick stats about the last game.

When that’s the case, this is not the right timing for you to convert this visitor. In the long run, he might be more aware of your website and may come back again, but you won’t have any conversions up front.

Sometimes you have potential customers going onto your site just to do research and compare prices. These people are highly relevant but it is not the right timing. Maybe they will come back two weeks later to make a purchase.

3. Trust

Sometimes you will get visitors on your site that is highly relevant, and they are looking to buy or sign up to something, but they don’t really know much about your site and they don’t really trust you. When that happens, people will be highly interested, look around a lot, but end up not converting.

Trust comes from branding, mindshare, and most importantly, recommendations. If a customer walks into your store because her friend recommended it to her, you are likely to have a sale. Similarly, if people refer their friends to your site, then you will get traffic that trusts you.

Search Engine Marketing is great with Relevancy and Timing but not with Trust

So given this model, Search Engine Marketing, whether it be through Adwords or SEO, does a GREAT job in finding people with high relevancy and good timing. It’s given them what people are looking for, WHEN they are looking for it. If someone is searching for plumbing services, chances are this person is interesting in converting into a plumber customer.

However, what SEM forgoes is the trust factor. When you find a website through a search engine, you do not trust the website other than what you see from the website itself (that’s why sites need to put up all these testimonials from their siblings).

Since search engines take an automated process, it is very difficult for traffic from that source to develop really strong trust.

Social Media Marketing fulfills that Trust gap

This is where Social Media Marketing comes in place. If I followed Guy Kawasaki’s blog for 6 months, and he suddenly says, “This is a great product. All Social Media Entrepreneurs should use this,” that’s trust established. Now I trust the brand and when I go onto the site, I have a much higher chance of converting.

If I was looking for an executive search service and I have been tweeting with someone that does a service for months, I will think of him and approach him before searching it on Google. And if my friends need the same service, I will refer them to this Twitter friend that I have. Trust again is established through social.

From a company standpoint, if your firm has a blog that constantly updates the latest news and insights on your industry, you can become the go-to place for people who care about your industry to check out and learn. If a person has been reading from your company blog for years, when he suddenly needs a service like yours, he is not going to find a random company on Google. He is coming to you.

Study shows Social Media Marketing has a strong ROI for companies

Previously I created a video about the ROI of Social Media, saying that Social Media is like branding build and networking: no immediate ROI but indispensable for business (actually you can generate immediate ROI if you do the right techniques).

A report by Wetpaint, a social media platform, and Altimeter Group, a digital strategies consulting group, shows that companies who are highly engaged in social media on average increased their revenue by 18% last year, while companies who do not engage in has a drop of 6% on average.

The study actually takes the world’s 100 most valuable brands as measured by BusinessWeek/Interbrand “Best Global Brands 2008” rankings and breaks them into four categories based on how engaged they are in social media. The chart in their report shows that there is a pretty strong correlation (note: not neceesarily causation) between the engagement on a platform and revenue growth.

Blog banner ads have a stronger ROI than measured

Another interesting thing I noticed is that the 125×125 banner ad on a blog actually has a lot higher ROI than the click-through data suggests. The reason for that is readers care about how bloggers they follow are monetizing their blogs. If you have been following a blogger for 6 months and you suddenly see a 125×125 ad on their site, you begin to wonder, “Wow, this person has ads on his blog now. I wonder how much are they paying him. Is it something super spammy or something that the blogger actually supports.”

I can tell you that right now I don’t need to get any type of credit, but when I do, the first name I would think about is credit-land. The reason? They were the first to put a banner on my Co-founder Jun Loayza’s Young Entrepreneur Blog. They didn’t get any click-through from me, hence from a data standpoint, their banner was a failed campaign towards me. However, they were actually very effective and I might just one day find them through Google or type in their direct traffic. That’s the value of brand, not a click-through.

Similarly, when Viralogy grew to the point where we didn’t think Bluehost was the right solution anymore, it was an automatic response, “Alright. Time to move on to Media Temple.” How do I know about Media Temple? I consistently see their 125×125 banner on Tech Crunch. Not once have I ever clicked on the banner, but they’re now making hundreds of dollars from my company and will continue to do so for years until they piss me off.

I actually remember reading from Neil Patel’s Blog that there was a study showing that companies who put on banner ads on blogs generate more revenue, even without a lot of click-thrus. That’s all consistent with what I observed in the social media plane.

The best internet marketing strategy

So with all the tools, methods, and different types of marketing techniques out there, what is the most ideal? How do I get tons and tons of people onto my site who are relevant with right timing and who also happens to trust me? Well, this takes an entire blogpost that is longer than this to answer, but here are some of my suggestions for anyone who has a company:

1. Always be aware of SEO and make sure your site is friendly to search engines in a white hat way.
2. Build a blog and focus on creating value to your readers. Give news and insights about your industry and update once a week without talking about yourself
3. If you have a budget, utilize Adwords to drive traffic. Since this cost money, make sure you are driving high quality traffic to your site that has a high chance of converting.
4. Build relationships with bloggers. Use tools like Viralogy.com to locate the top influencers in your niche. Comment on their blogs, link to them, and learn from them. If they like you, then you got part of the trust factor
5. Engage in Twitter. Just like blogging, create value for your followers. Tweet about insights and news in your industry mixed with personal notes and feelings. Don’t just promote your product.
6. Create a Twitter Search Stream that constantly updates you when people talk about your industry, your product, your company, your competitors, and the pains you solve. Whenever someone says, “yourcompetitor.com is so frustrating!” or “I am in such painyousolve!” then you should tweet back immediately, saying, “Hey! We solve your problems and it’s free to try out. Let me know if you need help with anything!’
7. Create email marketing lists. As unsexy as it sounds, email marketing still works, especially when it’s Permission Based. Some marketers call their email list their ATM machines. They send out something, and ka-ching comes out.

There are obviously a lot more ways to do internet marketing, but if you do the tips above and do them REALLY REALLY well, you’ll be attracting the right traffic for both shortterm AND longterm gains. You generate sales and build a brand. With social media, you are in a new era of internet marketing. Take advantage of it and do it right.

We need to become babies

Everyone wants to be successful. Unless you are sick and perverted, you do not like failure. However, in order to grow and learn, you must not only be tolerant of failure, you must welcome it.

And when you do fail, you must learn to pick yourself up as fast as possible and carry on. The world only cares about what you have accomplished, not how hard you tried or how mopey you are. Every successful person in this world has one thing in common: none of them gave up.

Imagine if you gave up the first time you tried to walk as a baby. Where would you be today? Even though you fell again and again, and even though it hurts when everything else in the world is all about cushions, food, comfort, and care, you chose to stand up and walk again.

And you fell again.

And today, you have the ability to walk great distances without even thinking about it. What happened to that persistence you had when you were a child? Did we all regress as we grew older?

Everything hard and worth pursuing in life requires persistence.

The genius of being stupid

There is a saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. I completely disagree with this “definition”.

Instead of insanity, I call it practice. Do basketball players shoot at the hoop again and again, while expecting better results every single time? Practice is the only path to increase in your skills.

The reason why people are called insane when they do the same things over and over is because they don’t understand the concept of failure. They don’t understand that what they are trying to do does not work out. However, excluding the social inabilities and lack of empathy, I think not understanding failure is a type of genius.

Again, little kids have that genius. An infant child can build a toy brick house for a longtime, and when it accidently breaks down, you don’t see any frustration on her face. She just curiously picks up the toy bricks and starts again.

Psychological studies showed that if you were to cheat and beat a kid over and over in a game, and then ask, “I wonder who’s going to win next time?” A large majority of children will raise up their arms enthusiastically and say “ME!!!”

It is just that “stupid” attitude that helped us grow up. It is also one of the key factors that can help us accomplish our dreams.

A lesson from Chinese History

Since I’m Chinese, I thought I’d include an example from Chinese history so that you can tell your friends and seem knowledgeable in other cultures.

Towards the end of the Qin Dynasty (when the Great Wall was built), there were two major armies that were fighting to take over the power from the emperor, one led by Liu Bang, and the other Xiang Yu. Xiang Yu grew up in a rich noble family and was trained intensively in the high arts of leadership and military strategy. He had a large army following and the entire China thought he was the most appropriate force to take over the reign.

Liu Bang on the other hand, grew up being a nobody and sometimes was seen as a little peasant gangster. Because of his background, a lot of peasants liked his vision and he was able to recruit some helpful generals. However, it was very grassroots and unimpressive compared to Xiang Yu’s army.

Unsurprisingly, whenever there is a showdown, Xiang Yu would obliterate Liu Bang’s force, forcing him to escape into the mountains and recoup his army with new peasants in that area. It was pretty sad.

But Liu Bang never gave up.

He fought again and again. And finally, he defeated the overconfident Xiang Yu.

Xiang Yu at that point had the option to learn from his opponent’s persistence. He was given the opportunity to escape and quietly regroup his troops again. With his reputation and abilities, it was not impossible.

But he did not do it. Xiang Yu felt so ashamed by his lost he laughed and said “Heaven wants me dead, why should I go back?” He then committed suicide.

After Xiang Yu’s suicide, Liu Bang became the prestigious founder of the Han Dynasty, a Dynasty which lasted almost 400 years (Up to 220AD). Even to this day, many Chinese people call themselves “Hans” because of what was established during that era.

Imagine if Liu Bang decided to give up in one of his defeats. History would be entirely rewritten. Truth be told, the winners in history are not those who won the most, but are those who won at the end. And that requires staying in the game all the way until you win.

Applying to Entrepreneurship

No dream is easily obtainable. If it was easy, it would not be called a dream. It would just be a plan.

Creating a successful and impactful startup is a dream, and failures are a dime a dozen. However, persistence is one of the strongest weapons in an entrepreneur’s arsenal.

One important thing entrepreneurs should know is that word of mouth is not instant. Every entrepreneur thinks they have that viral product that can reach millions overnight. I can tell you that if you are betting for those odds you rather write a business plan to raise $1M to invest in lottery tickets.

What’s the last product you have used that when you used it, you became SO excited that you had to tell all your friends in the next minute? And how many of those friends told all their friends?

When a consumer uses a great product, they will tell a couple of their close friends that day. After that, they get distracted by other things in life. Maybe a month later, when something relevant pops up, they would tell a friend about how great your product is again.

The truth is that, things take time to spread virally If you launch your product and it hasn’t been viral a month later, that should not hurt your team morale. You should continue to push it until the people you reach 3 months ago start to mention your product to their friends.

Even Gary Vanerchuck did WineLibrary.tv for 2 whole years before he became more reputable. What if he gave up six months down the road, thinking that it wasn’t as “viral” as he thought it would be. Jun Loayza blogged hard for an entire year with very few people reading it before he established his internet brand.

If you look at sites that have 30,000 plus traffic on Compete.com, none of them started last week. Almost all of them had over a year of trucking and trying. So what makes you the one that succeeds in 2 months? Again, you have to stay persistent to your goals and push towards success.

How many of you beat an entire video/computer game through the first time you played it? Probably none of you. Now imagine if you quit the game the first time, or even the 5th time you died. Would you ever beat the game? You would probably just be on stage 2.

I’m sure whoever beats these games took the first 10, or 100 deaths as an normal process and continued on it until s/he got better and better. You need to treat failures in your real life the same way.

I love that attitude when Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, says that “9 out of 10 businesses fail. That means I just need to create 10 companies to have a successful start up!”

Again, I want to remind everyone that, if there’s one thing in common between all the successful people in this world, it’s that they did not give up.

Don’t give up.

CrowdBooster is one of the best Twitter Apps that analyze how your Twitter account is doing and how to make it even more effective. It’s the perfect balance between not having overwhelming statistics on every little ratio, and having enough depth that it actually becomes useful. A lot of tools out there are more like info-porn, where it’s fun to watch all the time, but you don’t really get anything out of it. CrowdBooster actually allows you to make info useful and do better with your campaigns.

The Interview

In this interview, I talk a lot about the myths and misconceptions about Social Media, how to do social media marketing correctly….and how I got so many followers.