Marcelo Calbucci

    First and foremost, I'm just guessing that focus is important because I still don't have a successful startup, either by a successful exit or by a tremendous cash-flow positive (aka profitable) business. But since I keep hearing about it from successful serial entrepreneurs, from successful investors and from my own core believes, I say that focus is extremely important for a startup success and the converse is also true: lack of focus leads to startup failure.

    But you probably heard that before!

    Well, when I started Sampa I heard many times to focus, to be good at the core of the business, to avoid distractions, yada, yada. But what does it mean? What it means to have focus? Gosh, most people will say they are focused on what they are doing, but that's because it's hard to define focus. I think is much easier to define lack of focus.

    So here is your...

Guide to startup failure by lack of focus

Diversify your product very early

Hey, are you creating a photo sharing site for teenagers? Why not let them share PowerPoint presentations as well? Why not let them share their Address Book? And since you are sharing address book, it makes sense to use this feature to expand into Small Business... What about enterprise?

Meetings and consensus are important

Achieving consensus amongst all on the team is important. That's why you should have each employee give an opinion on each other employee work. Actually, you should have each employee contribute to each stage of each other's work. Meetings are a swell way to achieve that, but don't forget to use email as well and always send it to the entire team. Also try to get the opinion of your accountant, lawyer, designer, UPS delivery guy, your spouse, etc.

Do more, not less

A big mistake is to think that you can only do 2 out of 3 features on the next month. You should do all 3, in parallel. If you are not good at multi-tasking you shouldn't be an entrepreneur, right?

Plan for the long run

It's important to really plan to when you'll have 17 million users on 32 countries accessing it on 6 different types of devices.

Fix all the bugs

Nothing bother users more than bugs, so you got to fix all of them. Yes, that might delay shipping by a few weeks, but it's important. And if you find a bug that cannot be dealt with on the current architecture, you must change the architecture to support this corner cases. Let's not discriminate: All cases are important!

The plan is fluid

You set out to build a company for musicians to share song concepts and the idea is not getting a lot of traction? The core technology will be the same, so why not explore sharing pictures by dog owners? It's ok if the original idea is not finished yet or not even in beta. Let the plan and each one on the team change the plan every other week. At one point you'll find something that works.

Did I miss something?

    Something is very strange on Alexa since the mid of October. The graphic below indicates they probably change the way they compute Reach for Widget companies.

    I continue to try to keep political posts to a minimum, but it's just too hard not to say something during major elections.

    This year I became an American citizen, so I'll take the time to vote. I don't know much about elections in the rest of the world, except Brazil which went through some Democracy learning on the 90s after almost 20 years of military dictatorship.

    Amazingly enough, the US government keeps talking about "spreading democracy" throughout the world, but the reality is that US democracy is quite broken in many aspects. Here are 7 things that *I* think are very broken and should be fixed.

#1 No Popular Vote

You know the difference between Russia's indirect voting system and the US electoral college? None, really. The people are not voting for the president. No excuses. The Electoral College is indirect election and should be abolished.

#2 Only Two Parties

It's pretty hard to believe that people are either Democrats or Republicans. Yes, there are a few other parties, but they are irrelevant. What about a fiscal conservative, but social liberal? The system in place has been setup and manage in a way that prevents new parties from forming.

#3 Judges Election

Now that's just screwed up. Voting for Judges is an awful thing because it forces them to associate themselves with political parties (wrong), to raise money to run for office (wrong) and to take sides without a case ("I'm against big oil"). Judges should move up based on merit on their career. Maybe a panel of Judges decides who gets promoted.

#4 Manual Voting System

About 12 years ago Brazil held an all-electronic election. The voting closed at 5:00 PM and by 5:15 PM the name of the new president, all new congressman, new senators, etc., were known. Yes, you can have fraud proof electronic elections. The core of the problem in my view is that states are left to do voter registration and to manage the voting process, what end up happening is a lot of duplicate efforts by 50 states to figure things out, while a single federal agency could make it much more efficient. And I'm not even going to mention the people managing the election process from each state were elected officials w/ party affiliations.

#5 Single Stage Voting

A president (or any other elected official) should not be considered the winner until he gets 50% + 1 of the casted votes. This means that if Obama gets 49.5% and McCain gets 48%, with 2.5% going to other candidates, another election should be held just between McCain and Obama. Yes, this is how it is on a lot of countries. It's a two-phase election, where the first phase eliminates all but the top 2 candidates. This would prevent an extreme left-wing or extreme right-wing candidate from taking votes of a left or right candidate, respectively.

#6 Allow Money to Buy Votes

This might be a socialist statement, but what if all the candidates of any party had exactly the same amount of money to spend? Better yet, what if, instead of money they had the same exact amount of TV time, radio time and print space. The fact that individuals or corporations can give money to candidates feels wrong because it gives a better chance at candidates that have "rich friends".

#7 Voluntary Voting

The fact that part of a strategy of a candidate might be to "un-motivate" people from voting says it all to me. Voting should be mandatory for every citizen of the age of 18 or more (if he/she is able to). Anyone that doesn't vote would have to pay a fine of $10. Having only 50% of the population decide for everyone is wrong.

    On August 1st of this year, the domain sampasite.com had 128,000 indexed pages on Google (if you use the "site:sampasite.com" query). by October 3rd, we've grown to 349,000 pages. Seven days later (last week) it dropped to 74,500!

    I wonder if anyone is keeping track of how many pages Google indexes of your website and if you saw any change last week. Have you?

    Does anyone knows if Google has changed their algorithm to decide how deep they would index each website?

    Interestingly enough, our Search traffic has actually increased over the same period, so I don't know if it's just a "display bug" on Google's website.

    Seattle 2.0 was created about 18 months ago and at the time I knew it would be a resources for entrepreneur, because I couldn't find resources for myself like that on the web. I guessed there would be more people like me.

    On its first year, the Seattle 2.0 grew very rapidly to more than 600 subscribers and 4,000 visitors a month, mostly due to the very popular Seattle Startup Index.

    Then life got really busy (new baby) and I somewhat neglected to write new content on the Seattle 2.0, limiting mostly to events and the SSI. Readership started dropping.

    After a lot of promises to myself to write more, to add more features, to do this, to do that, and not have executed on those promises, I decided to take into a different direction. Can I create a somewhat self-sustaining blog?

    The answer was two-part. First, you can bring more people to contribute. And that's what I did. I was surprised at how excited people were to be part of this, proof they have something valuable to say, wanted to do it and thought the Seattle 2.0 was a great way of doing that.

    The second part of the answer was to create a completely automated technology to find and surface the most interesting blog posts from around the community that would add value to startups.

    Now, there is one big vision change from the original Seattle 2.0 to the new Seattle 2.0. The old Seattle 2.0 was about entrepreneurs (like me). The new Seattle 2.0 is about Startups and people around startup. It's a subtle, but important difference. It means that we want to be a great resource for everyone involved with startups, not only the founders and executives, but also investors, VCs, service providers, consultants, employees, the press, etc.

    I hope you enjoy it and support it.

    I've started Sampa in February of 2005. Like on people's life, startup's life is also marked by a few big milestones. The first employee, the first investor, the first customer, the beta launch, etc.

    Today, I'm very excited to announce a tremendous milestone for Sampa...

    Our first paying customer!

    That's right, we didn't force him to do anything. He voluntarily upgraded his Sampa site from a free plan to a premium plan. That's about 36 hours after we shipped billing.

    "It took you 36-hours to get your first customer! What's the matter with Sampa?"

    Well, that's a great question. We decided for a very different strategy on when to allow customers to upgrade. We didn't want the "paid" part to affect our current conversion rate. Every time you give options or ask one more thing you are turning away a percentage of users. So, we don't talk, don't show, don't give you the option to upgrade when you sign up.

    At the current moment you'll need to dig a bit to find the Premium accounts. But, we will present customers with an option to sign up at the moments we think they are most willing to do so.

    The "Premium" part of "Freemium" is something that we are just learning about and there will be many mistakes, many hits, and many new (and exciting) business strategies that we'll learn.

    Like many other entrepreneurs, I was resistant at working with recruiters on two basis: First, the most obvious one being their high price tag. Second, I thought that whatever the recruiter does we can do better.

    Well, turns out that I had a change of heart. Recruiting is a very (did I say *very*?) time consuming task. Just to enumerate a few things that you need to do to recruit the right person:

1. Write a job description
2. Publicize that job in job boards & website
3. Ping friends and former co-workers
4. Filter through a gazillion resumes
5. Schedule interviews
6. Do "informational interviews" (your first talk)
7. Do formal interviews w/ multiple people on the team
8. Send yay/nay responses to candidates
9. Negotiate comp

    If you add it all up, it's pretty intensive when you hiring even just one person.

    A lot of people will tell you that Hiring the right people is the best thing you can do for your startup, and they are probably right. The disconnect comes that you don't have to do all the 9 things above to hire the best people. In fact, most of those things on the list are tasks that you are probably not good at or doesn't add the value for the cost of having you (the CEO, CTO, VPE) not working on something else.

    Just the filter that recruiters do on top of resumes they receive is already a huge gain for you. They will probably eliminate several candidates based on their resume or a phone screen, which is a wonderful thing. You can easily spend 16-24 hours per week just managing your recruiting efforts and that can't be good for your startup. Now consider this for 3-4 months. How much time you "wasted" that could have been canalized to other efforts?

    The other aspect that I really liked working with recruiters is that they will poach people at other companies that are not actively looking, so these candidates would never find your job post and they could be a perfect fit.

    The bottom line is that instead of discarding recruiters as an option to hire team members you should seriously consider a cost-benefit analysis.

    I suggest you engage recruiters from the day one, work with 3-4 recruiters and make the price a 20-25% of the first year salary of the person. Finding the right person faster will certainly pay off over the long time.

    Oh, wait! You are an entrepreneur and you think you can do all by yourself and save $20K...