To achieve anything or to grow in any way, you need to be prepared to face uncertainty. In fact, if you think about it, all the big life changing things you do have a fair amount of uncertainty attached to them – starting a business, having your first baby, moving to a new city or job, going back to study etc.

“The quality of your life is directly related to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably live with.” – Tony Robbins

Meaning that if you don’t like uncertainty at all, you won’t take any risks in an effort to keep your life safe and contained. And that sounds like a recipe for mediocrity (and boredom!)

Sometimes uncertainty can get you down or send you into a negative spiral and make you unproductive. If this is happening to you, either there is too much uncertainty in your life all at once and/or the uncertainty is feeding off negative beliefs, that you may not even realise you hold, that are undermining your confidence.

The good news is that we can increase our tolerance for uncertainty. And it starts with how we think about it.

Personally, I was going through a period a few months ago where a lot of things were up in the air. There seemed to be a few of those life changing events round the corner (not the baby one though! ) I found myself feeling really overwhelmed with it all and thought I would share the process I used to deal with it.

Action: Overcome  Uncertainty

The value in this exercise is in thinking through it and writing down your thoughts. So stop now and grab a piece of paper (or your favourite electronic device). Don’t save it to do later (you never will.) Do it now. It will take you 2 minutes.

1. Identify what you are feeling uncertain about:

Make a list and write down everything that is bothering you, no matter how big or small

2. Identify the underlying fear:

For some things there may not be a fear, it may just be something you need to handle. But for many things you may be surprised to learn that there is some level of fear behind them. It doesn’t have to be rational (or even seem very importance), just write it down anyway because it could be subconsciously holding you back. If you do this exercise with a few different situations, you will probably discover a few common underlying beliefs that influence the way you think about different situations. Realising that you apply the same unhelpful thinking to many situations is great. You can replace it with a more helpful belief which will make a big impact for you in lots of situations.

3. Identify any assumptions you have made

Also identify whether the assumption is true, incorrect or needs more information to validate it. If it is incorrect, give yourself a counter argument. If you need to validate it, what action can you take to do that?

4. Create new (more helpful) beliefs and actions

It’s important to  replace the unhelpful beliefs and fears we identify with new beliefs and actions to take that will allow us to move forward. So what new (more helpful) beliefs can you take on and what actions do you need to take? Consciously repeat these beliefs to yourself as you tackle the things you are feeling uncertain about.

 Join the Conversation:

Let us know in the comments how you did with this process. Or tell us about your strategies to overcome uncertainty.

This post was originally published on www.readysetstartup.com and is the copyright of Susan Jones, 2012.

Having great content on your site is key, but it’s worthless if it doesn’t feature great keywords as well. Let me explain why it is so important to find the best keywords for your website.

After spending entirely too much time on the internet looking at how people are formatting their sites, it’s surprising to see how often businesses, especially new businesses or small businesses, fail to highlight the keywords relevant to their business.

The point of a business’s website is to turn traffic into customers, clients, or at least subscribers, but you need to generate traffic in the first place and one of the top sources for traffic is from search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is so important, and featuring your keywords is a vital part of SEO. That’s why finding and using relevant keywords is crucial to making sure people will find you in search engines.

On the web, the saying “if you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply. If your site is not showing up in search engines, people won’t know you are there.

How to find the best keywords

To find your best keywords, look at what product or service you are trying to sell. The keywords you use should be relevant to the focus of your website and should be featured throughout all of your pages.

The best tool, in my opinion, for finding relevant keywords is Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If you have an idea for a keyword, you can fill in the “word or phrase” box to find related keywords that you can implement. Or, if you’re not sure, you can find keywords based around your URL or the category you’re operating in.

Google Adwords then gives you list of related keywords along with how competitive they are, the global monthly searches for them, and the local monthly searches for them. These numbers help you to avoid a few pitfalls and help you find keywords that are more likely to lead to conversions.

Don’t get too broad

It can be tempting to focus on a broad keyword that has tens of thousands to millions of searches a month, thinking that you’ll generate loads of traffic. These broad keywords are very hard to rank on the first page of search results and if your site is buried on page 5 or 6 (or further) it is highly unlikely you will be seen by the majority of searchers.

Also, typically, the broader the keyword, the farther away the searcher is from making a purchase. An example of a broad keyword, also known as a “short tail keyword,” might be something like flowers. Ranking your flower delivery site for this search term will probably be next to impossible without some serious muscle, but the search term flower delivery in Sydney could be doable and drive high quality traffic to your local business.

Find the right balance

So as you can see, long tail keywords (that is keywords of 3 or 4 words) are more specific and people searching for them are typically closer to the buying.

An example might be “size 12 mens shoe” which gets 1,300 global searches a month. This should be much easier to rank for than trying to rank for “mens shoe” and should drive traffic to a page selling size 12 men’s shoes. However, long tail keywords can easily become too focused. This means that a low amount of people are searching and, while it’s easy to rank well for these keywords, it’s usually not worth your time since the amount of traffic you’ll get from them isn’t worth the effort.

Optimally, your site should be ranking for a healthy mixture of short tail and long tail keywords to bring a steady flow of different kinds of visitors in.

Don’t overdo it

Once you find the best keywords for you, make sure you feature them on your pages, but don’t stuff them in willy-nilly. The keywords should appear naturally within your content. Remember, people as well as web crawlers will be reading them and if it reads like an infomercial script you’ll turn people off and get penalized by search engines.

The amount of times your keywords show up in content on any given page is known as keyword concentration which is measured as a percentage. For example, let’s assume that the target keyword for this page was “keyword.” The concentration in this article would be about 4%. Now, depending on what you read on the internet, this number might be way too low, too high, or right on the money when it comes to SEO content. Honestly, don’t worry about keyword concentration. As long as you are aware of what your keywords are, you’ll naturally fit them into your content without sounding like a late night infomercial.

Keeping with the theme of not overdoing it – it’s important to realize that Google (and most search engines) rank the individual pages of a site, not the entire domain. This means that you don’t have to try and fit in your keyword into every page of your site to get the entire thing to rank. Focus on a keyword for each specific pages that you want to rank well in the search engine results rather than trying to fit the same ones in on every page of your site.

Action:

Implement keywords on one page of your site today:

• Pick a page
• Use the Keywords Tool to decide which search terms you should optimise the page for
• Go for it!

Susan’s note: If this is all new to you and your site is in WordPress, I recommend the WordPress SEO plugin by Joost. It makes the whole process much easier.

Further Reading:

• More information about how Google Adwords can help with SEO.
• Another good keyword finding tool by HubSpot.
• Some great tips for choosing the right keywords at Inc.com.

When Thomas McMahon isn’t writing, he can be found fly fishing or trying to remember what hobby he started last week. He works for Page One Power, a relevancy first link building company.

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This post was originally published on www.readysetstartup.com and is the copyright of Susan Jones, 2012.

I devised it originally because I was having so many ideas, all the time, that it was causing me to get distracted and I wasn’t using my time productively. I needed a simple way to narrow my focus and concentrate on what was really important.

I decided to only allow myself to focus on 3 major outcomes for each 3 month period.

Here’s how I did it:

Why set a 3 month focus?

The reason I use a three month focus is:

• It’s a short enough time frame that I can set goals and see them achieved as well as feel the required urgency to get them done.
• It allows me to evaluate my direction and adjust if necessary every three months. Therefore I can take advantage of new opportunities while remaining focused.
• It narrows my attention so i can make progress in the most important areas. No more than 3 main outcomes/projects at a time
• I also have a 3 month evaluation to make sure the rest of my life (apart from work) is on track too, but more of that in another post

How I choose what to focus on

I’ve developed a template I use every 3 months that asks me the important questions I want to evaluate. You can download it here.

I start off by listing all the projects/opportunities that are currently floating around in my mind including those I am already working on and new ones I have been thinking about. (You could apply this to different business opportunities or different projects within your current business.)

Then for each project I ask myself:

• MUST I do this? ie. Is this something I am compelled to do? I check for this compulsion from inside. Compulsion from outside is not so healthy. I want to be internally motivated, not just doing things because I should do them.
• CAN I do this? This is a check to see if the opportunity is currently open to me right now. Sometimes I may not have the resources or connections. Sometimes the opportunity will partly depend on someone else’s decision.
• Do I WANT to do this? This question forces me to check in with my wishes and desires. Will this project give me life? Is this something I really want to do?

I then look at how many ticks each project/focus has and choose the three with the most to focus on that quarter. Ones I don’t want to do or can’t do inevitably get crossed off the list.

This process leaves me with three clear areas of focus for the next 3 months which I think is plenty. I try to define each specific outcomes for each so I am clear on what I am shooting for.

How to implement your 3 month outcomes

Planning my goals is one thing. Implementing them is another.

I am visual, so the more I can see my goals, the more likely I am to stay focused on them. So I put them in places where I can see them often; in the front of my diary, on the white board on my desk. Sometimes I tape them to the front of the notebook I am currently using.

I read my 3 month outcomes each morning before I start work. I use them when planning my week and my day.

And when I get to the end of the quarter, I evaluate how I’ve gone and then start the process all over again.

Action: Plan some 3 month goals

If you think this process could be useful for  you, download my template here and give it a go. Be sure to leave a comment and let us know how it goes.

Image used courtesy of Reportergimmi under Creative Commons license.

This post was originally published on www.readysetstartup.com and is the copyright of Susan Jones, 2012.

So it makes sense to look for a good business idea in places where you are likely to find them. Here’s 9 areas where you can find ideas that are likely to become a viable opportunity:

1. Find a specific problem and create a solution.

Buffer is a great example here. They identified a specific problem that Twitter users had – they couldn’t easily stagger the RTs of interesting tweets they found. Buffer built an app that neatly solves the problem and is massively growing its user base as a result. (If you use Twitter and haven’t used Buffer yet, you should check it out.)

2. Find an area where further improvement or development of an idea could be valuable.

This is the “build a better mousetrap” strategy. The key word here is valuable. You can improve something, but it only becomes more valuable if the customer cares about the improvements and is willing to pay for them. This really depends on finding the right target market.

For instance, personally, I don’t really care that much about what kind of car I drive as long as it’s reliable, comfortable and doesn’t cost me too much money. The car companies could make all the improvements they like, but my response would be “Meh. Nice to have but I’m not paying extra for that.” But for someone who really loves cars and who values their performance, those improvements may be valuable and hence they would be willing to pay more for them.

3. Find a fault in a product or service and remove it.

This is the classic case where a company comes in and removes inefficiencies and disrupts an industry.

An example would be when Google first entered the market with their search engine. At the time, other search engines would throw up a lot of irrelevant results as well as results that were what the user was looking for. Google worked out a way to fix that fault in search and the rest is history

4. Find an area where there is something missing in a product or service and supply it.

This is essentially the opposite of the previous technique.

5. Find a perceived gap in the market

This could be as simple as starting a business in a geographical area where there are no competitors, such as an organic produce shop  in a suburb where it is hard to otherwise access organic goods. It could also be creating a new product or service to fill a perceived need. Examples are co-working spaces that are popping up all around the world, or the hundreds of baby products that seem to be invented every day. The trick with this strategy is validating that there is indeed a need for your product or service before you spend too much time or money on it.

6. Find an area where the current way of doing things imposes a high cost.

The internet has spawned thousands of businesses who take advantage of this kind of opportunity. Examples here include udemy.com and learnable.com who have brought down the price of training and professional development by delivering courses online.

7. Find an area where there is a need which is not being met.

This need may be something that people are unaware of. An example here is the development of the iPod by Apple. Until they launched the iPod, no one realised they needed to carry their whole music collection around with them, but as soon as it was released, it was a must have item.

8. Listen to your hunches.

You may have a feeling that the payoff on a particular idea will be large. The more practice you have coming up with and validating ideas, the more on the money your hunches will tend to be. Make sure you do some research to validate your hunch before you invest a lot of time and money.

9. Make a wish come true.

These are the ideas that start with “Wouldn’t it be nice if…”

• Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go into space on holiday – Virgin Galatic
• Wouldn’t it be nice if when I bought a pair of shoes someone in the third world could have some too – Tom’s Shoes
• Wouldn’t it be nice if we could provide clean drinking water in poor communities – Thankyou Water.

Spend some time brainstorming through these 9 areas and see if you can come up with a good business idea that may also be an opportunity.

Thanks to Bill Jarrard and Jennifer Goddard of Mindwerx who originally outlined these 9 areas.

Images used courtesy of Adrien Leguay and United Nations Photo under Creative Commons license.

This post was originally published on www.readysetstartup.com and is the copyright of Susan Jones, 2012.

However, there are plenty of awesome women founders out there but they are more likely to beavering away on their startup or juggling life at home than blowing their trumpet.

Aspiring women entrepreneurs need to hear stories of other women who’ve done it before them. It’s encouraging and helps us believe it can be done. I don’t think there are enough of those stories around.

So let’s start to change that right here – together. I need your help to create a great list of female entrepreneurs, those awesome women startup founders who inspire you. It would be great to have a really comprehensive  list  so journalists and conference organisers canfind inspiring women entrepreneurs and give them opportunities to tell their stories.

Here’s what you can do:

1. Add female founders to the list. Just click the pink “Add to List” button. Founders can be from any country and in any industry. Tell us what they’ve done and what you admire about them, and link to their twitter handle if you can so we can connect. You can also comment within the list on any of the founders.
2. Vote for the founders you think have done an awesome job.
3. Share the list with others so they can add to it too.

Plus, a giveaway to encourage female entrepreneurs…

In addition, I’ve decided to offer a complimentary enrolment for the 30 Day Business Idea Challenge to a female entrepreneur. If you’d like it, share this page and leave a comment below telling me why it should be you. Winner announced on Saturday 13th April.

Here’s the list I’ve put together to start us off:

Who can you add?

This post was originally published on www.readysetstartup.com and is the copyright of Susan Jones, 2012.

This is a post that is long overdue. The formula in the picture summarises my whole philosophy about what is needed to create a successful business. I probably don’t need to say any more – just leave you with the picture. But for those of you who like details, I’ll expand below.

The startup formula

Having said that this is a formula, I want to emphasise that starting and building a business is not a series of steps that you just follow and then you are good to go. That’s the problem with those pro-forma business plan guides and software. They just don’t fit most situations.

Instead, starting a business is about using a series of fundamental principles that you apply to your particular idea and market context. How they apply and the insights you gain and the order that you use them will be slightly different for each business and will lead to unique solutions. You need to use your head. But if you know what the principles are and you apply them, then you can be confident in the decisions you make for your business.

Step 1: Have a good business idea

These days, ideas are rubbished a lot in the startup world. We’ve all heard things like, “It’s not about the idea, it’s about having a great team and great execution,” or “I’d rather have a B-grade idea and an A-grade team than an A-grade idea and a B-grade team.” Personally, I’d rather have both an A-grade idea and an A-grade team.

When people quote these comments, they are trying to emphasise that it’s not just about your idea. And that is correct. You need much more than an idea to start a business.

However, you do need a good business  idea. If you start off with a mediocre idea, you are handicapping yourself right at the beginning. For instance, starting another café in an area full of cafés is probably not a good idea. Just like another mummy blog or online children’s clothing store or another app is maybe not a good idea.

You can’t tell if an idea is good because you’re excited about it or that your friends and family like it or that someone else is doing it successfully (or not.) A good business idea has certain characteristics that are independent of how you feel about the idea.

All the business ideas I mentioned above could be good ideas if they fit the definition of a good business idea. So here it is, my definition of what makes a good business idea:

You can read about some of my other personal criteria for good business ideas if you like.

Two things are required to come up with this kind of good business idea:

1. Personal rigour and honesty in thinking through the idea.

For example, not just, “my café will be different because it will have a funky vibe” but “my café will be different because it will have space for strollers and a play space for children.” Note that the second statement has encapsulated in it

• a problem (how to keep your child entertained when you want to go to a café)
• a target market, (mums with young kids) and
• a solution.

This solution would only be valid in your area if other competing cafes didn’t cater to this market in this way.

It’s easy to persuade ourselves that our idea is great and be less than objective, so this kind of honesty with ourselves is hard. It often helps to have feedback from people who understand what makes a good business and who you can trust to be honest with you.

2. Lots of practice in coming up with good business ideas.

Coming up with these sorts of ideas takes lots of practice in identifying opportunities and creative problem solving. Occasionally a great idea will hit us on the head, but if we want to think regularly in this way, it takes practice. You will likely need more than one good business idea to find a valid one for you to implement. Some ideas you come up with may be great, but you don’t have the skills and resources to implement them. The idea has to be a good fit for your skills, passion and experience as well as being a good solution for your target market’s problem.

So, step 1 on your way to a successful startup is to make sure you have a good business idea.

This post was originally published on www.readysetstartup.com and is the copyright of Susan Jones, 2012.

Building a business is full of creative tasks that require really hard thinking, unfamiliar tasks that require us to work and boring tasks that we would just rather not do.

What we tend to do when faced with these tasks is procrastinate. A little creative  procrastination can be okay – you know, when you need to do something in order to let your mind turn over thoughts. But procrastination that is unchecked and unaware and uncontrolled is a death knoll for a business. The problem with procrastination is that we can keep doing it until the day is gone, until opportunities pass us by, until we die.

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone” 
― Pablo Picasso

So it’s really important for us to avoid procrastination.

Action: Avoid procrastination

Here are some steps you can take to avoid procrastination:

• Become aware of your procrastination habits. (How many of those mentioned in the video do you do? I found this funny and sobering because I related to it.) Techniques you can use to increase your awareness include:
  • Keeping a record of what you are doing every 15 minutes during the day. You will be more aware when recording, but also you will uncover lots of your procrastination habits.
  • Write down everything you have achieved at the end of each day. If the list is looking a bit light on you can look back and decide why
• Write yourself a schedule or routine and stick to it. This is especially important if you work from home or by yourself.
• Just start the hard work, rather than checking emails & social media sites first.
• Go somewhere else to work where there are less distractions. The local library, cafe or coworking space all work for me.
• Know what your goals are, keep clear about them and revise them everyday. When your goals are front of mind its much harder to waste time
• Have a compelling reason for what you are doing. If you don’t find your work compelling, then maybe you are doing the wrong thing.

Further reading:

This great article by Scott Berkun has a few ideas about how to be more creative.

Join the conversation:

Confession time: What are your procrastination pitfalls? And what do you do to keep yourself on track.

This post was originally published on www.readysetstartup.com and is the copyright of Susan Jones, 2012.

Just over nine months ago, armed with a few beta users and a short wait list, we launched Teespring to the world. The concept was simple: Kickstarter for custom t-shirts. Instead of dropping thousands of dollars to get your tees screen printed and trying to figure out how to get them to your buyers, all you had to do was come to Teespring, design your tee, set a goal (the higher the goal, the cheaper the price per tee), and launch the campaign. Buyers could come to your campaign and pre-order your tee, and once you reached your goal we’d handle the production and fulfillment and send you a check for the profit.

The original Teespring platform

We had big dreams of Techcrunch articles and explosive growth. We’d poured ourselves into this, people were sure to be blown away and it wouldn’t be long before they’d be sharing it with their friends. It was only a matter of time.

The reality was far less exciting. No one was interested in covering our launch, only a small percentage of the waiting list opened their invite email, and traffic was the same as it had been the day before. It was time to face the truth: There would be no overnight success for us, we’d have to grind it out.

How things started

During our senior year, Brown’s legendary dive bar (The Fish Company) was shut down following underage drinking violations. Notoriously easy to get into (I once saw someone get in with a Pokémon card for ID), it had been the bar of choice for crazy nights as long as anyone could remember. The whole campus was talking about it, on Facebook, Twitter and in the Brown Daily Herald.

Seeing the explosion of interest, Evan Stites-Clayton (my soon-to-be co-founder) and I decided to see if there was anything we could do to harness some of that momentum (and hopefully make a little money while we were at it). T-shirts seemed like an easy option, so we gave our local screen printer a call to figure out the logistics.

It quickly became apparent that selling t-shirts, and merchandise in general, isn’t as easy as it seems. In order to print t-shirts we’d need to know exactly how many tees (and what sizes) we’d need beforehand, we’d need to front thousands of dollars to get them printed and it would be a couple weeks before we had the tees in hand to sell. None of those conditions worked for us. We had no money, no idea how many t-shirts were going to sell, and in two weeks the buzz would have long since died. We looked at services like CafePress and Spreadshirt, but they used digital printing – a technique that avoided the setup costs of screen printing, but actually ends up being higher cost (and lower quality) at anything above 10-15 shirts. A tee we were quoted $7 on started at $20 on CafePress.

Frustrated with the lack of options, we decided to build something ourselves. We started coding at 5pm and by 11pm we pushed freefishco.com live (it’s still up if you want to check it out). The premise was pretty basic: If we could get 200 people to pre-order the t-shirt, we’d have them printed and individually ship them to buyers. If we couldn’t reach that goal of 200, no one would be charged and that would be that. We ended up breaking our goal in less than 24 hours and walking away with over $1,000 of profit. More interesting than the money, however, was the number of emails we received from groups, clubs and causes who wanted something similar for their t-shirt idea. That was the point at which we knew there might be a bigger opportunity lurking.

First steps

Tees starting to stack up in June

The first thing we did was talk to as many people as we could. Evan and I had worked together previously on a project that we’d built to solve a bunch of problems that it turned out nobody actually had, and we didn’t want to repeat that mistake. We talked to charities, fraternities, random people with awesome tee ideas – anyone who’d reply to an email or pick-up the phone. We talked to screen printers, fulfillment houses and shipping providers.

We also picked up an important partner, Bill Cesare. Bill was a local angel investor who had been an advisor to us on previous projects. Bill wrote us our first check (which allowed us to drop our side jobs and focus on Teespring full-time), but more importantly he joined the team to head up our operations and logistics. If I had to pick a moment in our history that had the most impact in terms of getting us where we are today, Bill joining the team would be it.

Sell sell sell

Development took about twice as long as we had initially hoped (as it always seems to). We got particularly held up on the t-shirt designer tool – which we rebuilt from scratch a grand total of three times before arriving at the iteration we launched with. During that delay period we were talking with potential customers, such as non-profits and online communities, and launching as many beta campaigns as we could.

Awesome Pycoders Weekly tees

Right away we could see that it wasn’t as easy to sign up new customers as we’d hoped, especially without a design tool. While people seemed sold on the concept, nobody wanted to take the time to create their own design or launch their campaign. We ended up providing hours and hours of design consultations to groups that would only sell ~50 t-shirts, it was hugely unprofitable and there wasn’t a chance it would scale – but it created happy customers and that was what we needed.

One of the early breaks we got was from two members of the programming community, substack and pkrumins. They launched a series of awesome tees based off of substack’s art including teespring.com/nodejs,teespring.com/oaklandjs and teespring.com/hjkl (which pkrumins created for an article he wrote on the history of vim keys) which not only sold well but also connected us to the hacker community – which has been a huge source of referrals, connections and feedback for us. HJKL introduced Teespring to veb (the author of “How I made money with Teespring”), who then introduced Teespring to the good folks at TWiT - who now hold the record for the most items sold in one campaign with 2,677 tees on www.teespring.com/twit.

Growing

One thing we noticed after we launched was that very few people were using our product organically. We had a hand in almost everything that was on the site, whether we had contacted the person directly, created their design for them, written the description, etc. It was a scary realization, because it went against one of our fundamental growth assumptions: If we introduced people to Teespring as the backers of campaigns, there was a chance they would come back as campaign organizers in the future. It also cast a dim outlook on our future. Why weren’t buyers converting? How many leads could we continue to reach out to before the sources dried up?  Had we built something no one actually needed after all? For three or four months we managed to grow slowly, usually taking one step back for every two we struggled forward (and I have to give every ounce of credit for that early growth to Matt Hayes and Mike Cesare – and later Sean Peninno – our scrappy marketing team).

And then, after a dismal August, something changed. I don’t have a great explanation for it, it’s as though we had been pushing a boulder up a hill and the slope was finally easing off. Perhaps we’d reached a tipping point in traffic, perhaps it was all those emails and cold calls finally paying off, or perhaps it was just blind luck. Campaigns started popping up organically and selling hundreds of t-shirts, TWiT launched their first campaign and sold almost 3,000 tees, we finally got that article in Techcrunch, we flew past $1M in sales with over $250k in December and, above all, we’re finally profitable.

There’s still a long way to go, but it feels like the top is finally in sight and, hopefully, there’s a downhill waiting for us on the other side.

Defining your core values

From the day we launched we always said we wanted Apple quality with Amazon’s customer experience. It’s something that’s core to us. I’ll always remember ordering a Bluetooth Headset from Amazon that was marked as delivered but was nowhere to be found. I contacted Amazon not expecting more than a “sorry” and phone number where I could call UPS – but to my amazement they offered me a full refund or replacement. A problem that was by no stretch of the imagination their fault, and yet they were going to make it right. From that point on I’ve always been loyal to Amazon, whether I need office furniture or new hardware – I’ll always go to Amazon first. Those are the types of relationships we wanted to build.

As we grew it wasn’t always easy to maintain that philosophy. Like most startups, we’ve made more than our fair share of mistakes. Orders don’t arrive in time for events, shipments get lost, designs are printed in the wrong color, etc. We pretty quickly figured out that there was no way to completely eliminate errors, but we could control how we reacted to those errors when they did pop up. We adopted a blanket no-questions-asked refund rule for anyone who is unhappy with their purchase, we rush out replacements for misprinted t-shirts, and we issue full refunds for packages that are significantly delayed. We’ve even refunded or replaced tees for a few people whose packages were marked as delivered. I believe those values are part of what helped us maintain a generally happy customer base despite our fuck-ups

Don’t forget how to celebrate

Jake, Evan and Nic (from left to right) hacking away in Mountain View

One of the things that has surprised me most is that there hasn’t been a huge shift in the way I feel about most aspects of the business since we were a quarter the size. There are still days where problems seem unsolvable and it feels like we’re teetering on the edge of failure (and maybe we are – who knows). Profitability always seemed like this imaginary finish line, the place at which we could maybe take a deep breath and relax a little, but now that we’ve made it, it’s been replaced by a never ending quest for growth. Even during our best months, a part of me can’t help but feel terrified at the fact that next month the race is going to start all over and we’ll have to not only reach that same level, but exceed it (and, if you want to keep those investors excited, exceed it by 40%).

Entrepreneurship is a game of extreme highs and devastating lows, and it’s been important to our sanity to try to celebrate our victories and keep the bigger picture in mind. Cake is our weapon reward of choice, and it’s been super effective.

Walker Williams has been working on startups both as a founder and on the programming/ux side of things for the past 7 years, graduated from Brown University in 2011 and founded Teespring a couple months later. Want to get in touch?  Shoot me an email at walker@teespring.com.

This article has been republished from its original source with the permission of it’s author, Walker Williams.

This post was originally published on www.readysetstartup.com and is the copyright of Susan Jones, 2012.

Creativity and Ideas tend to get a bit of a bashing these days in the startup world. This tweet I received the other day expresses the sentiment well.

While I agree that a great team is important, what tends to be forgotten is that a great team are people who have expertise in particular areas as well as the creativity to apply their expertise in new and innovative ways. Great entrepreneurs are truly creative people. They are able to manipulate the elements of business to create new solutions to business problems in the same way that a composer manipulates the elements of music to write a great song.

So, over the next month, I will focus on writing about creativity here at Ready Set Startup because I believe creativity is an essential part of the entrepreneur’s toolkit.

Here’s four reasons why it’s worth valuing and working on your business creativity:

If you truly want to build a great business, you need to apply creativity to it.

Creativity is one of several factors that distinguish a small business from a startup. Take the field of graphic design for example. A graphic designer who starts advertising their services and working for clients is a small business, even if she is brilliant and even if she grows her business  to employ many other designers. Apply business creativity to the field of graphic design and you have a startup like 99designs.

As an entrepreneur, you are paid to solve problems and you need business creativity to find and develop solutions that no one else has thought of yet.

For example, you arrive in a new city and don’t know anyone. How are you going to find sympathetic souls? Or you want to start a business, learn more and meet other aspiring entrepreneurs and potential co-founders. Where do you go?

Now the solution is obvious – you go to Meetup.com. But in 2002, the solution wasn’t so obvious and it took considerable business creativity to develop it.

A little creativity will keep you sane and might just save your butt in the crazy life of a startup founder.

You need business creativity to come up with an idea in the first place, but don’t check it at the door when you start implementing. You’re going to need it!

What do you do when your product isn’t selling? Create a new marketing campaign? Pivot? Both those things require creativity.

What do you do when you are running out of cash? Coming up with a workable financial solution that allows your startup to stay alive and keep focused  requires business creativity.

How do you work out how to keep your life partner happy as well as spend time on your startup? You guessed it! Use a little creativity.

The more you can develop your creative edge, the more of a competitive advantage you give yourself.

Most entrepreneurs are creative types to some degree (whether they see themselves that way or not). However the thing that will set you apart is your ability to come up with creative & practical solutions and your ability to implement them. The more you hone both those skills, the more likely you are to, firstly, come up with a good business idea and secondly, do the hard yards needed to implement it.

So find a way to build your business creativity muscle everyday.

This post was originally published on www.readysetstartup.com and is the copyright of Susan Jones, 2012.

Success stories on TechCrunch often give us the impression that startup founders are super confident super heroes who don’t make startup mistakes. (After all would you admit to mistakes on TechCrunch?) However, these guys were honest (and courageous) enough to admit they are human, to the encouragement of everyone there.

These are their words, as I heard them:

 “It’s not true that you can’t start a startup because you don’t know what to do next.

Really no one has a clue what they are doing.

When you are in the middle of a startup, you feel like a total fraud.

A startup  is a series of mistakes that you make, until you stop making them and are successful.” [Tweet this]

- Fenn Bailey @fennb – Ycombinator participant and co-founder of Adioso

“Don’t worry about what you don’t know – just get shit done.”

- Alan Downie @alandownie  - Startmate participant and co-founder of Bugherd

And I love this response from Bowei Gai @Bowei – (500 Startups participant, co-founder of Cardmunch (sold to LinkedIn) and now founder of World Startup Report.) When asked “What would you do differently next time?” he replied,

“I wouldn’t do anything differently because its okay to make mistakes and every mistake you learn from. So keep on making mistakes.” [Tweet this]

Action:

The key takeaway here is that it is most important to keep doing stuff as quickly as you can and not worry too much about making mistakes. After all, so much of the startup journey is stepping into the unknown anyway. So embrace it!

Keep on doing stuff and making mistakes!

Join the conversation:

What mistakes have you made in your startup journey? What did you learn from them?

Please come and join me on Twitter or Facebook.

 Image used courtesy of bentsai.com under Creative Commons license.

This post was originally published on www.readysetstartup.com and is the copyright of Susan Jones, 2012.