Instigator Blog

The hubbub over Jason Calacanis’ post How to save money running a startup is completely absurd. Congratulations to Jason for causing a colossal sh*t storm where none should have existed.

He provides some great suggestions for things you can save money on. I’ve made plenty of suggestions on stuff you shouldn’t spend money on when starting a business but he’s got a few tips I hadn’t thought of.

What people seem to have reacted so negatively to was Jason’s point about hiring workaholics. He had so much negative feedback, he actually changed the item in his list:

Fire people who are not workaholics. don’t love their work… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it–go work at the post office or starbucks if you’re not into it you want balance in your life. For realz.

And what exactly is the problem with that statement? Nothing. You should hire workaholics. They should also love their work and be passionate about what they’re doing. Workaholics alone are useless, because if they don’t love what they’re doing, their work will suck. All they’ll be doing is producing more of it…

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I’ve been involved with SaaS businesses (Software as a Service) for just about 9 years. My previous company to Standout Jobs was a SaaS vendor. And in many respects, so is Standout Jobs.

Byron Deeter from Bessemer Venture Partners recently published his 10 Laws for Being “SaaS-y”. Ten rules to live by when startup a Software as a Service business. Incidentally, not everyone agrees. Martin Snyder wrote some competitive arguments worth reading. If you’re in the SaaS space or thinking about it, you should get the full picture.

Extending and responding to Byron’s 10 Laws, here are some lessons learned & thoughts from my experience in the SaaS business:

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I was very glad to see that someone recorded the recent Blitzweekend presentations. Stephane Daury did a great job recording everything, and I’ve enjoyed watching the presentations I didn’t see.

I gave a presentation at Blitzweekend about starting a company. It was a mixture of a few things including:

• how Standout Jobs started from within the Montreal tech community
• my personal history, and use of blogging & social media to build a reputation locally and beyond
• raising capital - the difficulties, tips, etc.
• my current struggles with balancing the 20,000 foot strategic view and day-to-day issues

The presentation is a bit longer than I intended it to be, but I’m pleased with the results. A bit more practice would have helped, and more point form notes instead of what I had written up to use. But I hope people enjoyed the presentation and got something out of it. Anyone?

Anyway, if you’re interested in learning more about Standout Jobs, where it came from and some of the lessons learned so far (and you want to see me “in action” - after all, who wouldn’t?!?!) please check out the presentation and let me know what you think.

How do you maintain a 20,000 foot strategic view of your startup and business, while frantically managing the day-to-day efforts?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because it’s something I’m dealing with now. Immediately after launching Standout Jobs, things accelerated incredibly. And that should be the goal of every startup. Prior to launching you’re focused primarily on product development, but after launch there are a million other issues to deal with. Acceleration is good. It’s certainly better than the alternative! But how do you manage that - most of which involves day-to-day issues (like acquiring customers, customer support, managing the team, handling bugs, etc.) - while still keeping an overall eye on your strategic vision and goal?

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Are you interested in social media recruiting? Do you want to understand how to leverage social media & social networks to reach a higher quality, targeted candidate? Are you curious about how to leverage marketing and sales principles to hire top-talent?

If so, come listen to me and colleague, Chris Russell speak on Thursday, March 6th @ 12pm EST on BlogTalk Radio. It will be our inaugural Social Media Recruiting Show.

You can just listen in, or participate by asking questions.

The show will go for an hour. We’ll start by each talking about a couple different items of interest, and then hopefully, we’ll have enough people calling in with questions. It should be fun, and I encourage you to come listen in and get a feel for social media recruiting.