The wind kissed night of Friday April 5th 2013 saw the first iteration of Founderfeeds begin. Here, the small idea to bring founders together that might not have met before, to enjoy good food and conversations, saw fruition.

The idea

I looked at this night as my MVE (Minimal Viable Event). Find people. Find a venue. Get them there. Based on feedback and observed data I can refine the feature set and see if I can make it lean, repeatable and maybe even scalable. It does requires time and some effort but maybe there are opportunities to make it a white label to deploy in other cities but this would be devoid of a business model as it’s for the community by the community and not designed to make money.

The venue

Within a glut of factory buildings the restaurant sat in a maze of twists and turns which made it an adventure just to get to. It jutted out of a corner and peering in the windows it seemed quite busy. The venue was the Goudfazant in Amsterdam Noord. A little more of a trek than I initially anticipated but a great place none the less. It was a big open spaced restaurant that uniquely held stilted classic cars around the mire of denizens enjoying their food.

The people

An hour into the affair and everyone had arrived. 15 in total turned up. We sat at a long table, which proved a separation from the beginning to the end. I had invited quite a few, all founders (currently and previously) of startups and businesses within the Netherlands. The design was to invite 10 people and they in turn bring one founder to the dinner too. The goal of 20 people unfortunately fell short due to people dropping out at the last minute and lack of that extra founder that I had intended people bring.  This didn’t quite turn out as planned but I had compensated for that earlier on that day. The first rule of event management is ‘plan for all eventualities’ so some graciously joined at the very last minute.

The question that popped up from invitees that I hadn’t met before and some I had was who would be there? The nature of such a night meant that giving out the list would be meaningless as people dropped out and joined frequently up until the night itself. I decided not to tell anyone who would be there and this in the end proved worthwhile.

The learnings and feedback

• Firstly, people are immediate so keep the threshold low for commitment. Finding another founder to bring to the night means effort and most people just don’t have the time, unless the pay-off is just that good!
• Try and find more female founders. On the night we had two female founders and I would like to keep a healthy balance to the male to female balance. But as I found out this isn’t easy to accomplish. Where are all the female founders?
• Make the location a little more central. The restaurant I picked was wonderful, but the trip to and from needed a little forethought (especially if you didn’t have a bike). We also missed the last ferry home and had to quickly jump to the next ferry stop. This could have been very inconvenient if that handy little bridge over the canal hadn’t been there. So make the venue as central as possible.
• The feedback I received revolved around the number of people that attended and I would say 10 people would have been plenty so you can listen and get involved in a lot more conversations. 15 even was too many and I didn’t get to talk to the other end of the table (the Ideedock and Nouncy crew area).

Even after the night everyone was still very enthusiastic about it and it’s a great way to bring people together and if I can swing it I will try and keep the project moving forward. While I’m still in the discovery phase of the initiative, it can pivot in all kinds of directions it will be fun to see how people embrace it and whether or not it will actually have a positive effect on the community. But as always we live in hope.

If you are interested in breaking bread with fellow founders enter your email address at the website. Or if you want to take the mantle and organise a meal yourself please get in contact.

The tools that social media provide mean that you can virtually sit down with each customer and demonstrate your brand attitude through articles, actions, responses and follow-up. This is a powerful tool in the belt of any business trying to show the world why they deserve to succeed. The outward facing attitude of any company will demonstrate how they will be perceived using social media.

From startups to large corporate institutions these tips are appropriate since brand is molded over years of communication and consistency.

Establish your values

Make sure that your brand ideals are in place. Understand what you want to say and more importantly how you want to say it. Tone of voice is key to building connections with the target audience. Provide context. When you have established who you are and what you aim to do this will create a base to start unfolding your brand and communicating more effectively.

More than ever channels such as twitter, Facebook, Google + and linkedin are reflections of your company’s attitude towards your own users. Brands are built by delivering touch points over time for your users to interpret and it is through them that your brand is defined and built.

Be authentic

Authenticity is key in addressing any audience and will color how people react to new ideas/features or even mistakes that your business makes. Engagement using social media can demonstrate the openness that social media is specifically designed for. Users who communicate and feel they need to take the time out to praise or abuse are worth their weight in gold. The will to help your audience and build upon their contribution can be demonstrated using social channels and how you talk to each reaction.

Build a playground

Companies channels can be a playground for customers to interact with each other to build connections, formulate ideas and potentially solve problems. This is a beautiful reflection of your brand. When the value proposition is clear to customers they will be your best proponents and will genuinely want to support you.

At 2012’s Paris leweb the Marketing Mind of a six store Domino’s Pizza Franchise in Chicago Ramon De Leon demonstrated the grass roots approach he took to using social media to bring the voice of their brand to their customers. He worked on problems people had on a ‘one on one’ fashion with apologies, humor and follow up. His big exuberant personality translated to the tweeting and the videos he took of himself with the customer. This ended up with the customers becoming ambassadors for the brand and selling the authenticity way more effectively than the company could ever do. Here is a video of Ramon’s presentation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Show accountability and transparency

Social media demands that you are live and contactable 24 hours a day and directly accountable to your customers and users. The true face of your brand is revealed when problems occur or mistakes are made.  Your public reaction and actions following this will prove your ideals. It is the level of clarity and accountability that will endear you to your customers and drive growth to help you get more a foothold in your chosen field.

You and your business are representative of your brand. Actions and sensibilities communicate how you want to be perceived by your target audience. Social Media can disseminate the word of your brand or can poison public image solely dependent on how you act and present yourself on this global platform. If you have clear brand ideals and an out facing authentically transparent attitude to your audience this will fuel your life as a potentially great company who’s customers really want to support and grow.

My 3^rd startup Favour.it just came to an end after just less than a year. We fully embraced ‘fail quickly and learn from it’. Having spent about a month talking about the our journey to this point and the issues that we faced, we all agreed to move on to other projects. We felt enriched by the experience and confident to take our talents into other fields. I wanted to share some of the learnings we took from our time at favour.it:

Learn who you are getting into bed with:

Know your team. You are building a new business with people you might have never worked with before, so you really need to create a working relationship to learn about each other. You will be spending a large chunk of your time with these people so finding a good balance is essential. Doing small prototyping with the new team will help to gauge strengths and weakness and teach you what work on.

Sit down, have a beer and get to know the people that will you will create your new business with. In my opinion a small but focused team will share and contrast qualities to help you deal with problems, ideas and people in a more thoughtful way. Startups tend to have an abundance of strong willed, purpose filled individuals who can be stubborn. This is a positive not a negative and you only need to find the commonalities of characters and recognise the areas where you might differ in direction.

Make the right conclusions

Validating your ideas through user feedback is an important function of a new startup. Quantitative and qualitative feedbacks are good methodologies at many points through the startup journey but make sure you come to the right conclusions and not what you would like the answer to be. This can happen by asking people who are not connected to your startup and can give you unbiased thoughts on the gathered information. This will help you set your direction well in the early days and not having to waste time months down the line reassessing data.

Find the right investors

Dependant on whether you are are revenue positive (we were not) and need investment to investigate the problem you are aiming to solve, find investors that will trust your experience and intuition. This is so important. Having investor’s on-board that support your decisions creates a backbone for your startup so you can build/design/test with a sense of confidence. When we decided to finish our startup our investors were confident that we were always working in the business and their best interest with every decision we made. They can be a resource and support network that will be invaluable.

Contract up

The minute you want to form the beginnings of your working relationship create a simple contract so you are all clear on what happens if various circumstances arise. Deal with equity immediately and make sure you budget for future employees and investment rounds. I personally am a big fan of a cliff built into the contracts but that’s not always everyone’s opinion.

Blog and socialize

Before favour.it I didn’t blog much and it tended to revolve around design, if it did happen at all. Regular blogging on your own platform and other sites is a great way to reach out to people with your advice and thoughts. You can never really appreciate the extent to which articles can be shared and appreciated. If you look at the Bufferapp team they went to 100,000 customers using guest posting so it does work. The power of tweeting can be powerful in connecting with people you have never met in person but also for people that share similar interests and goals. Business is built around networks so talking and building conversations is so important in creating a profile for you and for your startup. Your profile is representative of your startup. So be diligent and careful what you portray and how you talk to people.

Going to meetups and conferences will give you the opportunity to keep in tune with trends and expose you to new ideas and individuals who could reshape how you think about aspects of your startup. Nearly every time we each went to a conference we came back with new ideas and thoughts about how we approach our community. Luckily we balanced these conversations so we didn’t just have a ‘knee-jerk’ reaction to new ideas.

Manage expectations

Creating goals and time-lines for you and the investors will help you set a trajectory for the business. Set out weekly user growth, revenues and  a development plan on deployment releases.  These are more guidelines to create a roadmap for your success or in our case failure but they will really push you towards being able to track your progress during the lifetime of the startup. The investors will also be able to understand your journey and you wont be dropping a bombshell on them 10 months into the project with ‘sorry guys we are out’. Everyone’s expectations will be kept inline with the startup team.

Understand technologies

This for me this was a revelation. The development side and especially server technologies were always black hole areas for me. I just trusted our CTO would  look after what we needed to get done.  The benefit of hindsight has lead me to the conclusion that if the whole team was involved in the development side a greater understanding of the technological leaps we were asking for would have been realized. Problems could have been shared and arguments would have been avoided. I involved myself in every other part of the company except the development and I regret not tackling this.

I write this so any other startups can take note and maybe not make the mistakes that we made and hopefully their pathways to success will be easier with the collective learning’s that have been made with the failure of our business.

“Technology frightens me to death. It’s designed by engineers to impress other engineers. And they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers — which is why almost no technology ever works.” John Cleese

Have you ever seen those shots of one guy standing still while traffics of people are sped up around him. It seems as if this one guy is outside of the hustle and rush of daily life. The reality is that doesn’t happen.

I don’t stand in the one spot and shut out everything around me. I can’t. So why does my mobile technology think that is this is my context at near all times?

Reconfigure and make my tasks easier.

From the break in the morning I get up I check my emails, I eat, I leave the house, I get on my bike and I make my way to the Metro. I put my headphones in as I cycle and I get to my Metro stop. People move around me and information lights up on displays to tell me oncoming trains. I check my phone and see what apps and information is available to me quickly and easily while I have a few minutes to spare, standing and quite frankly a little cold and maybe not very awake. But the context of my apps, the ease of how I get the information hasn’t changed since I woke up and it won’t change no matter what my context is.

If you think about it behaviours are modal. I need to put my head into the context of what I need to get done. I am fluid. My behaviours switch from ‘home mode’ to ‘travel mode’ to ‘office mode’ and other variants. I wish for technological systems that anticipate and respond to my immediate needs. Learned behaviours are common place in apps. The app Path claims “Path should learn about you as time goes on. It should help you see interesting patterns in your life, and the lives of your loved ones. It should learn to write itself, and require less effort from you over time.”

Make my content easy and skimmable.

One of the side-effects of this mobility is that I can’t give any one thing focus. but the content I am looking at doesn’t care that I am in transit. It doesn’t truncate the info I am going through. It doesn’t care to make apps available to me as needed. It waits dormantly until called by me and then I summon the information.

I feel let down by my mobile technology and the integration of software. Is the fact that its portable the sole reason we call it mobile? It isn’t responsive, it shows me the same information whether I am sitting at my desk perusing through reams of content or moving through hordes of people trying to find the right platform to get my delayed train.

I want my mobile technology to be responsive to my mobility. I want to work in conjunction with my technology so it provides me with opportunities. Show me the path less taken when I travel, show me the advantages of all this big data being accrued all around me. The revolution of ‘the quantified everything’ is in full swing where sensors are attached to the most unlikely items so we can use this data and make my life easier and possibly more fun.

Push me usable and relevant information.

Currently my interaction with my iPhone or my iPad is that I go and I take data from the devices. Usability and clarity within the design of phones and apps are decried but to present a clear structure and steps to get to a defined payoff, we are happy to do it. So control falls to whom here?

When my apps communicate with me it’s when it is pushing notifications telling me that Maire checked into my local coffee hangout, but this does not aid me in my daily life, only providing a distraction from the goals I’m trying to achieve. How is it helping me?

Technology can break boundaries.

The opportunity that these technologies provide is astounding. Individual apps can learn and process what I do and to an extent how I do it. They can provide insight based on friends’ learning. They can offer suggestions for places to eat and drink more suited to my tastes. They provide an array of chords for me to choose from. Right now they are all chords within a disharmonious concerto called the operating system.

When I run, run with me, when I read, read with me.

But imagine that it was a reality unburdened by the idea that we would be inundated with irrelevant information. Imagine that I got up in the morning and my computer realised there was movement and quietly booted itself up and had my emails to hand. Imagine that I decided to go for a run and my Nike+ or Human app tracked my movements because it realised my actions. I didn’t need to worry about having the setting right or even if I remembered to turn the app on. Wonderful, quiet and enabling/quantifying my daily routine.

When I sit down to read in the comfort of my home extend the information to realise i’m looking for the same kind of information just not as bitesized. I can enjoy a video, I can read extended articles. So offer me all the content I said i was interested in while I was travelling but now in a more open format. Wonderful.

What I look for is simple. I don’t want static technology I want fluid behaviours to enrich mine. Help me achieve my daily goals through relevant apps that arrange to suit my condition at that time. The platform of mobile operating systems don’t really want this, but why not?

We are in the future right? If we can’t have flying cars let’s have mobile phones that present us with modal, relevant, contextualised information as and how we need it to make help me enjoy my life.

It’s a thought at least.

First things first; the logo.

Altruism was my interpret for favourit. This was what i felt should be the Arctic icebreaker attached to the bow of our proverbial ship. ‘Altruism is a concern for the welfare of others. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures, and a core aspect of various religious traditions, though the concept of ‘others’ toward whom concern should be directed can vary among cultures and religions. Altruism is the opposite of selfishness.’ Wikipedia. But in practice the percieved truth is that altruism is akin to perfection; unattainable. The quest for altruism is where the meaningfulness could be achieved.

What if you could use a product to position itself to enable this want to help your fellow man in simple ways. Not every act need to change the world but just to help can be just as much of an effect when passed on from one person to another. Unselfish behaviour spreads through society in a way that most benefits the “hubs” in the network.

The research i took for the basis of the logo favourit employs is this:

“Akio Iwagami and Naoki Masuda at the University of Tokyo have simulated the way upstream reciprocity spreads through a network when the behaviour gradually dies out. It turns out that the type of network is crucial for ensuring the spread of the behaviour. In heterogeneous networks like those that most societies seem to form, upstream reciprocity seems to spread successfully.

So the moral of the story is that if you want to benefit from altruistic behaviour, do two things. First, trigger altruistic cascades by performing many acts of unselfish behaviour. Second, become a hub with lots of links to other individuals.”

The visual keys came the hub pattern of diagram E from this image:

To me the connective tissue that this image evoked was a great direction to start putting the foundation in place to where we can build the identity and lay markers to hopefully evolve a brand. So the research pointed a way for me and then the decisions of fulfil the journey.

The gathered the data on our potential target demographic, looked at competitors and what conventions lay in the current platforms. Thresholds low and returns high seems standard but the contrast was that information seemed trivial and meaningless until pared with people we assigned credentials to. The one thread focused the meaning of the visual metaphor.

This is a young startup with strong feelings and a definite vision. The colours needed to be vibrant, energetic and warm. The tone had to be playful and engaging while countering the almost aggressive shape dynamics that the altruism matrix allowed the logo. This would be a chance to work at complexity in logo design and whether the visual construction alone was enough to make this not just another logo failure.

Visualising the right form on whether this would be a graphic with text or whether i would set myself the task of pulling a font form from the matrix became clear from the outset. The logo was demanding, it wouldn’t let itself be diminished to a graphic that served to work in unison with the textural component. The name Favour.it was the communication and it needed to be said commandingly and confidently and this was only going to happen if it was said through the voice of the altruism matrix. So that’s what happened.

When I was confident I had the story right in my own head. I brought the thinking and design to the rest of the team. The reaction was a slow burn. The discussions resolved around the topics that i thought would arise. “Is it too aggressive, too feminine, too masculine or too construction-like” After some time and looking at how i thought about different colours and softening the approach we came back to the original design.

In implementation the logo doesn’t easily fit in my own designs. It almost intimidates me on how it should be placed and where and how much spotlight it gets. “‘When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, the, a monster, a blot upon the earth from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?’”

In my mind a logo needs to be worked with and it is only then do you realise it’s greater potential or its complete failure. I believe that it is here that our logo sets it’s master plan into action. It demands attention that only youth can do through form and energy and it taunts the aesthetic layer over a body of given substance. The balance and counterbalance will be tested over time. In the form of the business cards, the letterheads, the website and all the other media that need it’s stamp of approval it’s true worth will be shown.

Whether or not the logo endures… I hope so but my crystal ball has never been as clear as it should be. In the end it is through the exploration process, the learning and  expression of an idea that the field is borne where I can let loose my inner demons to blend and shape the visual. The birthing of the idea is a solitary process but seeing the visual form grow over time takes the gratification to another level.

In the manic first year of a startup you quickly realise you need help to move forward. Being equipped with a balanced team is great but if you want to keep on iterating after your first round of designing and testing you need more hands to get the site built. We came to this epiphany in the fourth month of our business. So starts the journey of finding: ‘The first employee’.

There are some telling articles out there on hiring an employee and keeping them motivated, but where are the practical tips on actually finding that special type of person that just fits with your team, is highly experienced and super motivated. The chances you find them are quite low. But maybe with more of a level headed approach a compromise can be met, right?

We as Favour.it started optimistically and joyfully, thinking that this ‘tech unicorn’ would swarm to us, hammering down the door trying to work for us. Yeah, that didn’t happen. So we dedicated more time on our own networks and social media channels looking for a frontend developer or later as we retitled to be more open, ‘developer’.

When first approaching the problem you have to work out the motivation of why would someone come to work for a startup business with a small team working long hours, stressing, iterating and pouring their souls into their idea working?

We hope the answer is passion. Being a startup is a mindset. It’s something you are drawn to because you can’t imagine being just another cog in a large scale machine. We need someone that wants to help us break technological and interaction boundaries and we hope that this challenge is our beacon. Of course we are willing to compensate our employee and build more of a culture within the company and if the fit is right eventually look at shares in the company. The team is everything.

Now what devices can a startup use to find a bright eyed employee you ask? Here is what we are doing:

1/ Talking to our networks:

Targeting a ‘frontend developer’ we had put together pdfs for sending to friends, contacts and investors who might have some leads for us. At all the social evenings we slipped in the key that we were looking for our first employee to anyone that hadn’t heard our song before. People are always willing to help, which is great, but alas nothing came to pass from it. I personally tried my network of companies in Amsterdam and the startup community in which I take an active role. Wouter utilised his connective people in Utrecht and Amsterdam getting us some suggestions and that did translate into interviews.

We immediately heard from developer friends that we were in for a tough time since good developers are grabbed up by large companies with high promises and alot more resources than a startup has. This didn’t deter us.

2/ Talk to Groups/communities:

We sent our CTO Niels to meetups of different developer communities. Communities like the startup weekends in amsterdam, lean startup machine weekends, Node Js meetups, Fronteer meetups and also Hackers & Founders, anything where we could start talking to people and come across recommendations for someone that could be interested in joining us. To this day we continue with this strategy from Amsterdam to Rotterdam wherever the winds guide us.

3/ Talking with Students:

Another approach was to look for students coming to the last year of their education and would be looking for some experience in the ‘real world’. Even though they might lack the experience we need they should compensate with strong problem solving skills where they could learn on the job also. This seemed like a promising way to move, so we started by putting posters (Wouter spent quite some time doing this) up on as many campuses as possible around the Netherlands. We talked to departments on how we might be of use for some work placement or with specific lecturers on what would be a good approach to take. The initial posters didn’t pay off in the short term and the other connections are indeed taking their sweet time.

This brought us to the topic of an internship and maybe bringing in someone that could spend a few days week with us and see if they could be someone that would be a nice fit for the future. We used the universities for this and also another startup called Social Intern based in Amsterdam. We wait for this to pay off.

4/ Recruitment agencies:

When we started to look for our employee we immediately started getting emails and calls from recruiters who had promises of big databases of perfect employees for us to use. We were greeted with various kinds of packages from charging us crazy sums of money to see potential employees CVs to remunerations packages of 25-35% of the new employees annual wage (including all benefits) when we start their contract. We kindly told them that this was really not in the best interest of our business to start with this arrangement.

5/ Working at distance?

Another style of Recruitment agencies came to us with employee bases in Macedonia and the Ukraine. They laid out a plan to have developers in those countries, who we would look on as our employees in every aspect. They would sit in an office in the respective countries and do the work we laid out for them within the working week and we’d communicate using Skype. With the promise of great quality and a very competitive salaries we explored this possibility. Because working at distance demands that the experience level needs to be quite good we have yet to receive a CV that tells the story we need. Obviously the word ‘senior’ means anything over two years experience in Eastern Europe. Who knew?

Obviously we want short lines of communication and at distance tends to be most successful when you have isolated jobs that you give to the employees located at distance. Iterating as fast as we do and making ‘off the cuff’ changes to strategy can be complicated with employees in other lands. But we aren’t ready to give up on this just yet.

We also thought maybe appealing to expats coming to the Netherlands was a good tact to take. This was a longshot. We knew that. But we got the most entertaining emails from applicants on Craigslist advocating their abilities as “we do computers” and another entry stating that they were anxious to move to Germany even though we are based in the Netherlands.

On our journey we have had interviews with Dutch developers to expat female developers, who on paper seem like an attractive proposition. We sit them down, introduce the team and try and show the dynamic we have as a team and see how they react to it. Our CTO Niels then takes them into a separate meeting room and talks over 5-6 questions on a white board based on the programming language they are most familiar with. We are assured that the questions are very basic to anyone with fair skills. But we have not had much success with the people that have been tested to date.

6/ Push online possibilities:

We put information up on our website for that one special potential employee who wakes up one morning and thinks “Yes today is that day that I want to begin my new startup life with a young fresh company”. We kept putting the basic requirements out through Favour.it’s social media such as Twitter and Facebook, through articles and asking people to retweet/share this for us. We pushed it to other suitable platforms like Linkedin also…

Our thinking was that Linkedin should be a good place to find CV’s of employees working in big systems who would be eager to break some digital boundaries and work with a thriving startup right? This tactic we were very careful with and paid attention not to be seen to be poaching employees. We had some interviews with people who wanted to expand their network and weren’t interested in a new job, which I personally found a bit bewildering and a slight waste of time for us.

We paid for a Linkedin job post to which we predominately received replies from Northern Africa, India and Eastern Europe. This was unexpected since we tried to target specifically our region in the Netherlands. We still receive emails from at distance applicants, who really want to work with us, but are not interested in moving here. Not really what we are aiming for with this campaign.

There aren’t really alot of conclusions to be made from such a fluid process like this apart from Europe has a shortage of talent. Finding more innovative ways of attracting the hot resources that are developers and making the company somewhere you love to work at is definitely a must, this is a startup, so culture is everything!

While we haven’t found the right ‘first employee’ fit yet we do recognise that as long as we continue the drive for another member of our team, it will happen when it needs to happen. Things happen not when you want them but when you need them. So our journey continues. Wish us luck.

Working with a dynamicly strong team we created the brand elements, twitter/website and ipad demo during one weekend and received a very positive response to the idea and the visual interface. We are now developing the platform to be a robust music discovery engine that creates a valuable and visual experience for the user.

During start-up weekend Amsterdam (swAMS) our team developed this first iPad prototype of Fuzzle.fm. It is a music discovery service that constantly gives you 3 recommendations based on your favourite music friends that are in your facebook friend list. Besides the social algorithm we add the usual linked artist and song recommendations. Liked music can be automatically exported to a dynamic spotify playlist.

The tone, aspiration and inspiration for this project is at the heart of moving forward for GRI and for us also. Working with the Ministry of Media we have developed alot of key ideas and structures of integrating all their content into a concise, clear and especially user-centric design. The full roll out is not for a few months yet but we look forward to cracking a bottle of classic champagne to the full deployment and the awe inspiring goals of integrated reporting in business and beyond.