Startup Tips: From Software Engineering to PR and More!

ReadWriteWeb has a very good article that anyone starting or heading a Startup should read… see 36 Startup Tips: From Software Engineering to PR and More!

Below I have added some Startup-tips of my own that complements the ones above. The list quickly grew to 50. Some of these tips are from a founder’s perspective, others from a manager’s perspective, while others from a product development perspective (not in any particular order):

Keep the company small for as long as you can. Keep it small yet effective.
Delay funding as much as you can. Bootstrap if you can. This is hard. Make sure you have a working product and customers, and maximize your valuation first. But get funding, and be prepared to be diluted.
Be good at build vs. buy/partner; do not re-invent the wheel.
Know your stuff. Trust your team members. Be positive. Follow your common sense.
Be prepared to make sacrifices, many, of all kinds.
Be prepared to deal with change. Lots. Be prepared to do what needs to be done to pay the bills (and the payroll) — reselling other people’s products, consulting services, dilute, other.
Do not outsource your core IP development. Protect your IP.
Use a lawyer.
Build a strong management team: from business and sales, to finance, to marketing, to technology. Delegate. Concentrate on what you are best at, use your team for what they are best at. Keep an open communication channel.
Be very clear about things, and have employment agreements. Very early and pre-funding stage, this doesn’t matter as much, as long as you trust your partners. If you don’t trust them, you shouldn’t be there in the first place. For all employees, regardless of company phase, an employment agreement an NDA must be in place.
Egos can kill a company.
Be prepared to give up your position if that is what is required to run the company (for example, to receive funding, or just because you found a more experienced person for the position). Giving up your position not necessarily means giving up control or your position of influence.
Make sure your business is scalable: from its people, to the business and revenue models, locally, across-regions, and at the right time, globally.
Hire right. I can’t emphasize this enough. This means hiring A+ people. Hire Startup people. Hire people who can deal with change. Hire people who love what they do, and want to make an impact. Try to hire people who are smarter/better than you; create a balanced team. Hire people who you can trust. Hire people who can extrapolate (and fill in the blanks) from you what you say or intend.
Having A+ players in your team means more discussions, more convincing to do, more disagreements, and more agree to disagree to do — it is the way it is when having smart people around you. Be patient.
Understand your limitations and hire the right folks to address those limitations.
Hire students if you can.
As a company, contribute, give back, and help minimize the digital-divide. This doesn’t have to be with cash: your personal time/touch is worth more than money.
Running a business is not a democracy.
Fire/let-go people when you have to. This is not easy, but is a must. Don’t be an ass when you have to do it and treat people with respect.
Document everything.
If you are a technical person, like I am, find the right business folks for your team, ones who gets it. Find an A+ business development / sales person. Unless you have met A+ sales people before, you really won’t know what an A+ sales person is. So leverage your network, your investors, your friends to find that sales and business development person who gets it, and who comes with better ways of positioning and selling the stuff you are developing.
Move fast, always. Fast understanding of issues, problems, pains to solve, the industry you are in, the people you are dealing with. Make fast, intelligent decisions. Go fast to market. Fix it or make it better/prettier later. Consider building your products in phases.
Make sure requirements are produced (by business-side) and captured. Be prepared to hand-hold business during this process; they will have critical input and will/must “own” the process, but may not know how to capture it. Be prepared to “own” this process with them to ensure requirements are properly produced/captured. Be prepared to deal with changes. Use an iterative and interactive and disciplined approach. Schedule a weekly meeting for this. Be prepared to decide and negotiate what makes it by when.
Validate everything with business folks — if it can make money directly or indirectly, and it doesn’t distract from the main vision, go for it.
Educate the business folks. Learn from the business folks.
Have a design that allows you to put demos together fast: for example, quickly changing the look/feel/branding (UI) of your product.
Use proper abstractions and separation in your design. Leverage web-standards and best-practices.
Have a planned infrastructure with development, test and a production environments.
Keep growth, scalability and availability in mind. Do capacity and deployment planning.
Use a fast/agile/realistic development process. Use source control. Use a Wiki for internal use. Use bug-tracking. Do project management. Have weekly meetings on this (or more or less depending on phase). Be flexible. Use an iterative and interactive approach. Be disciplined. Deliver!
Make beautiful designs. Write beautiful code.
Document, and use clean diagrams, and document the code itself.
Don’t write evil code/functionality. Respect privacy. Don’t SPAM.
Use a graphic designer/artist — first impressions do matter.
Innovate. Create cool things. Make meaning.
Build your product as a platform. Use/publish services-on-the-web. But keep it simple.
Measure, collect, analyze, apply lessons-learned.
Support mobility in your product.
Run a Pilot. For this you must have working code and a working end-to-end system, and potential clients or end-users who will help you validate the product concept and business model. Also, define ahead of time the goals for the pilot (both technical and business), and how to capture/measure the success of the pilot. Also, you will need to have some money put aside to run the pilot itself (for the infrastructure). If all goes well, then go for funding.
Yes, leverage the community for PR purposes!
PR-wise, keep the world abreast of how your company is doing. Make (meaningful) announcements about important milestones, product and partnership, and your people.
Be a good leader. Be a good coach. Delegate.
Listen, don’t interrupt.
Empower your people. Let them be.
Promote your people. Have them participate and contribute to the industry (such as an open source project), allow them to speak in conferences, write papers, and lead. Announce their accomplishments in your company news page and weblog.
Create a working environment that is open, communicative, research-like, fun and flexible.
Budget for prototyping for new ideas — encourage new ideas.
Block bi-weekly time for one-on-ones for your employees — this is their meetings, not yours. If they don’t want to meet, that’s OK, don’t meet. But the time must be blocked/available anyways.
Recognize your people, internally (and externally when appropriate; see above)

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