Month: February 2018

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In The Startup Way, Eric Ries’s sequel to his best seller The Lean Startup, he raises a key question to entrepreneurs and startup founders. As these founders tell him how much they hate big companies he asks:

If you hate big companies so much, why are you trying to create a new one?

I get it. I’ve been there and have the same feelings about the red tape, politics and endless meetings that you see in big companies. But if you peel back the onion, the underlying issue isn’t the size of the company.

I’ve talked to many people about this sentiment – from both sides, the founders and the big company employees – and have discovered that when an entrepreneur says they hate big companies, what they’re really saying is, “I hate the culture the comes along with big companies.”

To help articulate this clarification, Ries creates much better labels for the startup and big company. Instead he refers to the two company cultures as the modern company and the old-fashioned company, where modern companies are innovative and growth-oriented, while old-fashioned companies succumb to the innovator’s dilemma.

In my conversations, I’ve found that the differentiator between these two company cultures is the ratio of what I’ll call talkers to doers.

  • A Talker is a paper-pusher, a middle manager, someone who measures output, and thus success/value, by the number of things done (ironic!).
  • A Doer is a problem solver. They measure output, and thus their success/value, by the size of problems they solve.

12 Characteristics of Doers VS Talkers

The cultural change that startups go through as they transform into a big company is that the number of Talkers, and more importantly the stated value of Talkers in the organization (through title, salary, etc), grows at the expense of Doers.

So to counter the strong corporate forces that push your company from modern to old-fashioned, here are 12 characteristics of Talkers to avoid.

1. Meetings – Talkers measure value in the number of meetings they attend; Doers measure value in the number of meetings they skip because they don’t need to be there.

2. Email – Talkers check email at all hours of the day and humble brag about how full their inbox is; Doers close their email, going hours without checking.

3. Code – Talkers measure value by the number of lines of code they write; Doers measure value by how few lines of code it takes to create a solution.

4. Decisions – Talkers don’t want to make a decision without statistical significance; Doers are comfortable making decisions with imperfect information.

5. Deliverables – The result for a Talker is a deliverable; the deliverable for a Doer is results.

6. Poking Holes – Talkers try to poke holes in other people’s hypotheses and solutions; Doers try to poke holes in their own hypotheses and solutions.

7. Documenting – Talkers always document, and do that before doing; Doers do first, and only document afterward when needed.

8. Scaling – Talkers worry about building a solution that scales; Doers worry about getting enough customers that scaling will ever matter.

9. Edge Cases – Talkers account for all the hypothetical edge cases that will likely never occur; Doers focus on lessons from past problems they’ve experienced in real-world scenarios.

10. Knowledge – Talkers’ knowledge comes from reading about others’ experiences, which typically only highlight the “happy path” scenarios; Doers’ knowledge is based on lessons learned from their own, often failed, experiences.

11. Failure – Talkers make excuses when faced with failure; Doers look for validated learning and opportunities to pivot when faced with failure.

12. Success – Talkers celebrate trivial increments and items crossed off the project plan; Doers celebrate validating their leap of faith hypothesis.

This is not to say that Talkers don’t bring value to the organization. Talkers play a critical role in helping manage the growth as your startup gains traction.

However, to ensure your company remains a modern, innovative and growth-oriented company, make sure your company culture continues to celebrate these characteristics of Doers.

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Awhile back I discussed some of the flaws in the business model for online news subscriptions. Namely, where sites like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and HBR require you to subscribe to their site to access content.

The reason subscriptions work in an offline content world but not online is that The Long Tail principle of the internet significantly (exponentially even?) increases the amount of sources individual readers will read content from. And this is a good thing!

And while you could argue that most of these sites give you a few free articles such that only dedicated readers would subscribe, it can still lead down a path we’ve gone down before. Managing multiple subscriptions leads to bundling multiple providers, where all of a sudden you’re subscribing to and overpaying for 194 channels of which you only watch and want to pay for 5…oh wait, were we talking about cable TV or web news subscriptions?

Micropayments as an Alternative to Subscriptions

One alternative to a content subscription model is to allow micropayments.

Here’s how micropayments would work. Instead of a small % of users paying a large, recurring, subscription fee (e.g. $10/month), the theory behind the micropayments model is that you can make this up by extracting a very small, optional, one-time payment from a very large % of users for individual articles they like (e.g. < $1/article). To be sure, this hasn’t worked well to-date, but improvements in online payment systems and even the rise of cryptotokens might make this more feasible.

(I also think micropayment models will eliminate clickbait, as content providers will only be able to make money on good content, not manipulative headlines.)

The Guardian’s Approach

Recently reading an article from the Guardian, this footer caught my eye:

Support the Guardian from as little as $1.

They’re acknowledging the problem and offering a solution, “Support the Guardian from as little as $1.”

Clicking the link I see that the Guardian quickly falls back into old habits, enticing you to sign up for a monthly subscription:

However, look closer.

One-time payments!

Yes, the Guardian doesn’t appear to be interested in “micro” payments, however the structure is now in place.

I’d love to see data on the revenue generated and the number of users who opt into either payment option (monthly vs one-time).

Until then, I’ve gone ahead and supported the Guardian with my first content micropayment in the hopes that it is not the last. If you also have concerns with online content subscription models I encourage you to do the same!