Philipp Moehring

Author: Philipp

  • Startup Metrics

    Got asked about this twice in the past week – here are two very good videos about basic startup metrics and their application to your business.

    Dave McClure at Seedcamp 2009 about “startup metrics for pirates”, a talk he has given in lots of places. It’s a good and fun overview of what you should think about and look at.

     

    and the accompanying slides:

    Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp, Sept 2009)

    View more presentations from Dave McClure

    And Ryan Carson of Carsonified with a more direct, and very numbers-focused talk from last year. He goes through a very detailed example, explains concepts like CAC, churn, lifetime value, and will give you an idea what unit economics are all about.

     

    He talks about this spreadsheet, which you can copy and play around with easily, giving you a good idea of what your own numbers can look like.

  • I loved this city

    I moved to London a little bit more than a year ago, and I fell in love with it right away.
    In the beginning, I was intimidated when I walked from our office through Regent Street to the Oxford Circus Tube stop – I couldn’t stop being amazed by the expensively dressed, very busy and important people whizzing down the sidewalk, avoiding running into me. I was amazed by all the tourists, looking at all the fancy stores and buildings, looking in the air, not seeing where the “real Londoners” were trying to get to work, meetings, or home. Because, when you are at home in a city, you don’t look up.

    After a while, I walked faster, talked in shorter sentences, and was whizzing by the tourists to get to the Tube – I even figured out I should walk to Green Park instead of Oxford, as it was less littered with visitors and more conductive to fast walking, checking email, and getting my breakfast sandwich. Of course, I felt like I was at home. I accustomed myself to the town, got along with the weather, and with the people that were much tougher and more focused than anyone back home. I made some great friends very quickly, and felt like I belonged.

    After about three months, I started missing my home and everything I was used to (moving around a lot, I know that this is what happens every time). I worked incredibly hard and much, travelling a ton, and being busy all around. I still used to go back to Cologne quite a bit, and was always struck by how slow and peaceful things were. At the same time, I couldn’t enjoy that – I felt I was missing out on the action, and was fed up by the slow pace, and couldn’t wait to get back to London.

    That was last year. This year, I have made myself a home here. Isa moved over in March, we lived together in my small room for a while, and now we found a gorgeous little place in a quiet street that is just simply beautiful. I work less crazy hours, we go on cool weekend trips, and I am much more of myself again – thinking, reading, and writing, besides being at work and on email all the time. I fell in love again – this time with the beautiful, the quirky, the individual, the incredible London in all its variety.

    And now this crap happens. On Sunday, we saw it on the news, TV, and of course Twitter and Facebook. I heard the sirens, and saw the police vans driving around. I biked through a good part of London on Monday, and saw more police than ever before, but still, it was weirdly detached from real life. Then, on Tuesday, we all decided to go home early from work. I saw four big police vans near my bus stop. Nicolas told me how Upper Street, where I lived for a year, was the place for some (thankfully small) gangs to smash windows and steal sporting goods. Friends emailed me links to warnings about Islington (where I live) being the next target. I saw more violent videos, gangs rioting for no cause, setting fire to houses, shops, and family’s livelihoods. More police, more police, and more police.

    Today, it felt like it had calmed down a little. We met all of the participants for Seedcamp London, which is taking place tomorrow, and had a great afternoon getting to know their companies, their ideas, and visions for what they want to become. When we were having a beer in the pub around the corner (central London, mind you), two guys come sprinting down the road, followed by a shocked man, who was telling us how these kids had just kicked down his door, standing in his flat with a pair of bricks in their hand, threatening his family. It was so surreal, a bunch of international, good natured, and ambitious entrepreneurs, who couldn’t even understand what he was talking about. Once it sunk in a little, it left an eerie feeling with all of us, and the crowd broke up to go to their hotels and homes. When I rode home on the tube, the usual bumpy ride sent my elbow onto my seat neighbour’s arm (think of a passive aggressive armrest fight on the plane). He started to go off at me, and I of course didn’t want to take it – arguing him for the better part of my ride home. Since he got more and more aggressive, I just backed off – but the sour feeling remained. It was nothing, really, but it upset me. This was my tube, my way home, my city where I felt safe.

    Whatever it is, a disconnection of environments, a lack of communication between people, or just plain reality, I liked it much more before I felt this way. I hope it will come back, but I think we need to work a lot on what we have before it will be that way.
    At least I include myself in the We, which makes me think I care enough to help bring about that change. Whining like this won’t help, but being aware is the first step, as they say.

  • What if my local startup scene is lame?

    I got several emails after Seedcamp Ljubljana from entrepreneurs who were looking for advice and mentoring. Apart from direct advice, the most common question was “where can I get mentorship and advice in my home town?”

    I copy pasted this 3 times, and I think it’s a great, if not the only real way to get things kicking off if your local startup scene is lame:

    • I’d check local meetups, open coffee, hackernews meetings, conferences, meet other entrepreneurs and founders, hackers, and bloggers.
    • If that doesn’t exist – build it yourself, get some entrepreneurs together, start a movement, share insights, tips, learnings, travel to places (some slovenians did a cool trip to the silicon valley with 20 people and crashed startup parties), everything else you can think of.
    • Check out university programs, talk to professors, students, guest lecturers, researchers, they often have insights of what is going on. Throw a local event to get cool founders from other places to your town
    • The upside: If you can make yourself the leader of that movement, you will open lots of doors, meet investors, and other, travelling entrepreneurs that come to your area. You are now the boss of your new, cool, local startup scene.
    I am sure you have more ideas than I have. All in all, this should only take about 5-10 years.

    Update from the comments: I still think that travelling to technology hubs, conferences, and meetups in other places is crucial to build your personal and professional network. If you are in Europe, you should go and spend a week in London, Berlin or Paris every now and then to be part of what’s going on there. The energy and connections are hard to beat.

  • Me, talking.

    Boring, i know.

    Thanks a lot to Manuel Gruber for the interview – was a lot of fun. I am looking forward to the final movie.

  • A follow up to the email Ninjaing post

    You need to assume several key realities about the target of your email.  He has received 300 other emails that day.  He has temporarily forgotten how you met.  He has temporarily forgotten everything you’ve already talked about.  He has 20 seconds to spend on your email before deciding to handle it later which may mean never. He probably won’t click any links or open any attachments.All of this is irrespective of the fact that he may indeed care about you and your startup.  But email is such a burden on his life that he just can’t be accomodating when it comes to triaging hundreds of emails.

    via How to Email Busy People – humbledMBA.

  • Email Ninja-ing

    Email is all the rage – both Fred Wilson and Brad Feld wrote about the necessity to properly use email as a re-call to action for web service users. I agree, since your email inbox is what your work life often revolves around (yes, this sounds sad). If you have someone’s email address, and you can write a halfway personal text, you’re bound to get a response.

    The downside of all the services we are now using is the incredible surge in email volume. Whenever I catch a glance at someone’s inbox and see it overflowing with GroupOn emails and Facebook message alerts, I cringe. Some people wear an overloaded inbox as a badge of honour, but it’s really not practical. So, here’s my short list of how to make email bearable when dealing with craptons of emails (like I unfortunately do).

    First – three facts:

    Inbox “0”…

    …is a nice concept, but not the holy grail. If you try to get that number down to zero and nothing else, you are haunted by a special case of ODD – and it will not make you more productive at all.

    Email as todo list…

    … is a terrible concept, but unfortunately a fact of (working) life. If you have a boss, investors, or a coworkers, they will give you stuff to do via email. As they also wait for an answer, your inbox essentially becomes your to do list, and sending a reply ticks a task off the list.

    Rules and training…

    …are necessary to make this work. My system won’t work for you, probably, but at least it contains some nifty ideas on how to avoid overload.

    Three easy steps to eliminate crap from the inbox

    Separate addresses for ham/spam

    Use a separate email address to sign up for stuff like web services, newsletters, and non-essential things. This is the blanket solution to keep annoying stuff out of your inbox.

    • Get a short, anonymous, easy to remember (and spell) gMail address. *
    • Change all your web services to send to that address (takes forever but is worth it – I got mine about 6 years ago, and am now exclusively using that to sign up to stuff).
    • Set it up as a subfolder in your main gMail account (you use gMail, right? You better). Set it up via IMAP so you can also send and reply from within your main account using that address.
    • Make a filter in gMail to skip your inbox and apply a label that you set up in your sidebar.
    • If you get tons of emails from services like Twitter/FB, consider setting them up to be marked as read automatically. You will still see them when you glance through the label folder.

    Bam. You probably just eliminated 50% of your inbox volume. Rinse and repeat.

    Archive religiously

    Archiving will not delete your mails, instead you keep everything in “All Mail”.

    • Add the “archive” button in gMail and use it for everything you get done. Keeps the original inbox light.
    • Use the “send and archive” button (in gMail labs) to skip an extra click. Use keyboard shortcuts for bonus points (“e” archives current, “[” archives and goes to next, “]” to previous email).
    • To archive your current inbox (you kinda have to), go to the last page of emails, ‘select all’, and gMail will ask yuo if you want to select your whole inbox. Do it, and ‘archive’. Your first whiff of inbox zero. Then go and ‘move to inbox’ whatever you still need to work on.

    Set up filters and tags

    The extra email address is the first filter, but you can get many more working for you. Especially if you are on a few mailing lists you don’t want to miss. I found it worthwhile to use filters and tags:

    • Group / task / job (admin, expenses, travel) – filter to apply tags and color code them. I.e. an automatic expense tag (using a +expenses@ address, see below) is very convenient so i know what to print when i do expenses once a month.
    • In private, use it to set up your different personas – for companies you deal with, your projects, and maybe groups of people you mail to. Makes it much easier to find stuff.
    • Make sure to clean up tags once in a while so they don’t clutter your sidebar.

    That’s all you need – you won’t miss stuff and you will be much more efficient in finding things. Priority Inbox does some of it automatically, but setting it up custom made lets you tailor what you want to see or not much more easily.

    I usually end up with about 3-5 emails in my inbox at the end of the day, and have a pretty good email response time. You?

    * An alternative to a separate email address is a Yourname+Something@gmail setup. gMail allows you to set unlimited +anythingyoulike and will deliver them straight to your inbox. It works, but is much more filtering and still gives out your real email address.

  • My talk at The Next Web / LeanCamp2011

    I was fortunate enough to be invited by Salim Virani, the main thinker behind the LeanCamp movement in London, to join a LeanCamp session at the NextWeb Conference in Amsterdam last week. Salim promised…

    a fast-paced, multi-faceted conference track, emulating the Leancamp unconference experience, exploring the world of Lean, Agile and Design-led business.

    …and so it was delivered. I think this was one of the most fun and engaging speaking gigs I’ve ever done, even if the group of attendees got smaller towards the end (announcement of the startup rally, a 3-day conference, and the dutch sun outside did their part). The speakers were great, and the amount of input for myself was so useful that I would have been happy to just watch.

    Covering ground with short interactive talks

    The setup was great for such an intense topic: the set of talks that would have lasted a day at other conferences were condensed into a swift 2-hour session with lots of interaction and quick turnaround. There was a short introduction into lean startup thinking from Justin Pririe, who told us how SaaS juggernaut Mimecast (well above 20 million in revs) is using lean startup practises to stay fast, and by Salim himself, who talked about identifying the right business models for specific markets (for extra points, he talked about Garmz, a Seedcamp company). Patrick, one of the heads behind the great business model generation book talked about the ways the team used different approaches to selling the book, building a company around it, and how he sees classical business plans (spoiler alert: he doesn’t particularly like them).

    Personally, I found the more technical talks on feature injection (by Chris Matts), UX and UI (titled “don’t forget the humans” by Ian Collingwood), and A/B Testing (interview with James Gill from GoSquared) surprisingly interesting and learned a ton. Thanks for keeping it light, guys. Rob Fitzpatrick rounded the whole session off with a primer on metrics and measurability – great stuff for startups, I hope we’ll see the slides.

    Note to all conference organisers: This is a great way to give attendees a deep dive into a relatively new topic and is a safe way to avoid the boring speaker trap while keeping up the momentum. After all, I only talked for about 15 minutes.

    Lean Startups and Seedcamp

    It’s a bank holiday in London today, so I can make this longer: why was I actually invited to this session, being all VC-y and boring?

    I collected a couple of examples of the newest Seedcamp portfolio companies to show how the learnings of the lean startup movement can be applied and used in very practical ways.

    5 Reasons we love lean startups

    1 – Validation is possible

    Lean Startups are all about validating hypotheses, and from an investor’s perspective, this means one thing: No need for large sums of money down the drain before a product-market-fit is established. I gave the example of Robot Media, who had some pretty incredible traction in the Android market even before Seedcamp decided to invest. If you can show that a market exists for your type of product (with only a fractions of a finished product), you will be liked – because you already de-risked large parts of your business plan.

    2 – Capital efficiency

    One more recent addition to the portfolio is vox.io, the dead simple “telephony for the 21st century” provider. Tomaz and his Slovenian team built a great product with very limited ressources – this was possible because of singular focus on the goal to build the most simple phone for the browser. Obviously, location is a plus here, and this is where many of the Seedcamp portfolio companies excel: a cost-effective development base in the home country (often eastern Europe), with management or sales in London, New York, or even the Valley (also see Brainient, Zemanta, and Profitero).

    There was a discussion in the audience about outsourcing product (to cheaper locations), and there’s a big difference: as my colleague Carlos wrote, you should have the tech ability in your team, as it will make you faster, more efficient, and of course independent. This approach is perfect for the Seedcamp teams who have cost-effective development at their home base: they get all the benefits of a technology hub like London without the nagging problems of extremely costly development talent. Also, you can only build a product-centric culture when you have the knowledge in your own team, ‘eating your own dog food’.

    3 – Existing tools and ressources

    GIScloud built a very powerful platform for professional geo-information systems in the browser, and are able to develop new features incredibly quickly. Do they have more engineers than for example Bing Maps? No, but because they rely on open source technology, existing frameworks, and widely tested solutions, they can do what they do quicker and cheaper. Almost none of our portfolio companies work with costly licenses or develop everything from scratch – speed and efficiency, again.

    4 – Measurable success

    A powerful product exhibiting the right kind of metrics can show you very early on if and why a product is used in a certain way. This is a powerful pointer when deciding on the right monetization strategy (or refinements thereof). Nuji started with an incredibly simple product, allowing you to simply tag products on the web that you like. By measuring user data, it was clear how the usage pointed towards a curation method, and how a business model could be developed around the specific user actions.

    5 – Scalability

    The ultimate quest for a startup is to develop a scalable business model with tested assumptions. This is part of a more formal business plan (sorry, you will really need one), and will be asked for by any serious investor before your series A.

    When I met Tamas and Andreas of Garmz for the first time (way back when I worked in Germany), they had a great idea and some bold assumptions about the fashion market and its customers. There were many parts of their business model that needed to be verified and de-risked (do designers care about having their own garments produced? Will people let us know about what they want to buy? Will they accept unknown designers? Will they give us their credit card details before the production is done? How many items will be returned?). Two years later, they can finally prove their thinking around their ingenious model*, because they have tested these assumptions in the market and are ready to scale.

    Get this to London!

    So, a great conference in general, and a great group of speakers in particular. Maybe this will be repeated in London – reach out to Sal @leancamp, and he will surely put it together. I will choose new examples, promised.

    *Garmz’ ingenious business model hinges on another lean startup method: customer development and the pre-sales establishment of product-market-fit. By getting designers to feel out the market with their fashion designs, the team knows which products are most liked. If these are then mocked up as samples, and people leave their payment details, not much can go wrong.