Entrepreneur Sun Ling shares 30 practical tips for entrepreneurship (Part 1)

Try to be radically candid

Kim Scott's entire career has been centered around one goal: to create a work environment and atmosphere where employees love working together well. Later, while working as a team consultant at Google for a long time, she learned how Google's leaders created an environment where employees could feel happy at work. The atmosphere of happiness was so strong that you could see it at a glance. While serving as a senior instructor at Apple University, Scott learned that Apple has a different style, but the original intention is the same: to create an environment where people can realize their full potential and enjoy their work. Now a senior consultant at Twitter, Shyp, Rolltape, and Qualtrics, Scott has distilled his years of experience into a few simple words: radical candor. All company founders can use it to help their employees love their jobs and do their best work.

The horizontal axis above represents "direct challenge", or in Scott's words, "daring to provoke the other party." It is difficult for many people to directly challenge others because saying something unpleasant would appear rude. However, once you become the boss, it is your responsibility to know which employees are doing well and which ones are going wrong. From the above figure, we can see that "radical candor" comes from a combination of "personal concern" and "direct challenge". There is great benefit in being radically candid, being objective and not personal.

"In my opinion, it is not only your duty to criticize employees when they mess up their job, it is also your moral obligation."

Leverage user feedback like Slack does

Slack has the best product marketing experience, and almost everyone who has used Slack will become its loyal fan. How did Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and his team do this? Before the product is officially launched, they will conduct a period of testing to fully understand user needs, collect information data, and provide necessary user data support for research and development. "We use user feedback from various channels very carefully. We carefully organize, proofread, input and collect all the information data sent to us by users. In this way, we can truly focus on users and develop and optimize the features they really need and care about. In addition, we also conduct quantitative statistical analysis. For example, we found through statistics that once a team sends more than 2,000 messages using Slack, they will become loyal users of Slack. After understanding this, we introduced a new user experience mechanism to allow users to send more than 2,000 messages using Slack as soon as possible. It turns out that this method is indeed very effective.

Learn to authorize

Learning to delegate is something Quip COO Molly Grahan has learned from experience. In the early stages of a startup ’s development, every employee is excited and everyone has endless work to do. But as the company grows and its headcount increases, a very interesting thing happens: people become more and more nervous. When a new employee joins, you can’t help but wonder: Will this newcomer take my job? What if they don’t do their job well? What should I do? When new employees join the company, they will inevitably take over some of the work you did before. At this time, you may feel like a child who has to share his Lego toys with others, which is very unpleasant. As the company grows in size, you must learn to delegate authority and delegate power, which is the only way to build a great company.

Make speed a habit

"All else being equal, the fastest company will always win. Speed ​​is a critical trait for a company founder to have, in any industry. I also believe that like exercise and healthy eating, speed can become a habit." This is a truth firmly believed by David Girouard, CEO of Upstart. Advice: When you make a decision is much more important than what you decide. Before beginning each decision-making process, consider how much time and energy the decision is worth. In my opinion, some decisions are worth spending days debating and analyzing, but most decisions should be decided in 10 minutes at most. No matter what you do, ask yourself this question: "Why can't this be done faster?" If you can ask yourself this question frequently and let it slowly develop into a habit, it will have a profound impact on the execution speed and efficiency of the entire company.

"It's better to have an imperfect plan that can be implemented immediately and vigorously than a perfect plan that can't be implemented until next week."

Beware of the problem that angel rounds are easy but A rounds are difficult

Josh Kopelman, managing partner of First Round, found a phenomenon in Series A financing: the number of startups that received seed round financing quadrupled in 2015, which made them habitually believe that Series A financing would not be difficult, so they set better expectations for the amount of Series A financing. However, what they don’t know is that it is the abundant funds in the angel round that make future Series A financing more difficult. Why do I say so? Because the total number of Series A financings has not changed, if the number of companies that successfully raise seed round financing increases by four times, this also means that the number of competitors competing with you for money in the Series A financing will also increase by four times, and you can imagine how difficult it will be to raise funds. If you ask me, the key to addressing this trend is for entrepreneurs to stay absolutely lean and thoughtful after they get that initial round of funding. I recently worked with a talented young founding team that had no trouble raising seed funding. Six months later, they started to raise Series A funding and finally realized the horror of raising funds. They raised money, but not the expected amount. It was much more difficult than they had thought, and it took several months to close the deal. In the words of the CEO, “Seed financing was super fast, and then when we entered the A round, our performance data began to be interrogated. It felt like going straight to college after graduating from elementary school. You can imagine how difficult it was.”

Your team's capabilities = your ability to execute

After co-founding two startups and selling them to Oracle and Dropbox, Jessica McKellar has become a rising star in the tech world. Among the many things she has been praised for, people admire her most for her efficient technical management. As someone who has been immersed in coding for many years, it is actually not easy to do this. In the process of technical management, she learned this truth: “You need to help improve the capabilities of everyone in the team at all times, so as to build strong execution capabilities.”

If you have already switched from writing code yourself to being a technical manager, then you should stop thinking about writing code yourself, even though it will make you feel like you are not doing anything practical. It’s important to remember this: if you can help everyone on your team improve quickly and reach their highest value, the amount of work you can accomplish in this way will increase exponentially. You need to develop high-impact and high-impact projects for your team members to do, while ensuring that they are in line with their respective interests, the value they expect to create, and the growth paths they desire. If this can be achieved, everyone on the team will be motivated and passionate about their work. In addition, experienced employees and less experienced employees should be properly matched at work, with the old bringing up the new, and experienced employees should be invited to share their experiences regularly to help young comrades grow.

Forget GPA when hiring

Under the influence of existing recruitment rules, it is actually very difficult for startups, especially technology startups, to recruit suitable and excellent talents. Some applicants look perfect on their resumes, but in reality they are not suitable for working in a startup company. Kristen Hamilton, founder and CEO of Koru, believes that people who want to apply for a job at a tech startup should have these seven qualities: resilience, personal influence, teamwork, ownership, curiosity, pursuit of precision, and elegant behavior. Hamilton also summarizes a set of methods to identify whether the interviewee has these qualities by asking clever questions during the interview. These seven qualities apply to all recruiting, but every company is unique and each job requires different talent. Each startup needs to combine these seven qualities to create the most suitable recruitment system and strategy based on its own company type and actual situation.

Four Steps to Growth

Growth does not only refer to user acquisition. User acquisition is actually only the first step to achieving sustainable growth. Meenal Balar, a growth hacker at Facebook, summarized growth into four key steps:

User acquisition: How to get users in?

Activation: Once users come in, how do you get them to start using your product?

Retention: How do you keep them using your product and make them willing to come back?

Virality: How do you get those sticky users to actively help you invite others to use your product?

Each of the steps above is multidimensional. Taking user acquisition as an example, product exposure, app occupied capacity and price factors will affect user acquisition. User acquisition has a lot to do with understanding how your target audience discovers and shares your product with others, and you need to align your product’s user acquisition strategy with people’s habits. By the same token, “activation” means responding quickly to irregularities in the product’s user experience to minimize user discomfort. For developers, once you understand how users interact with your product and why they like it, activating users becomes a natural progression. She suggests that product teams can prioritize the most popular features in their interaction design.

How to become a technical manager

How can R&D personnel successfully transition to becoming technical managers? David Lofteness has plenty of experience with this. He has led many R&D personnel to successfully transform into technical managers. From his work practice, he has summarized a systematic theory: a 90-day transition plan for newly appointed technical managers. The 90-day plan is divided into three phases:

Phase 1: Learn relevant knowledge on your own (Days 1-30);

Phase 2: Finding your own work rhythm (Days 31-60);

Phase 3: Evaluate yourself (Days 61-90).

Lofteness's 90-day plan is not only applicable to the R&D department, but employees in other departments of the company can also use this method to find their most ideal career development path. The final results will far exceed most people's expectations. Loftenes said that technical manager is a brand new job, and don’t think that you can call yourself a manager just because you know a little management knowledge and do some management work. When you become a manager, everyone's work happiness and work efficiency depend to a large extent on you. You have direct leadership responsibility for work results, but you do not perform the work directly.

Make performance reviews a priority early on

Since 2013, AltSchool CEO Max Ventilla has been on a mission to redefine education. To achieve this goal, he drew on his many years of experience working at Google and learned and borrowed from Google's performance evaluation system, which is highly respected in the industry. His experience at Google convinced him that all companies, at any stage of development, could benefit from formal performance reviews. So Ventilla made some adjustments to Google's performance evaluation system to make it more suitable for startups. He believes that annual evaluation is not practical for startups because everything changes too quickly in startups, so annual evaluation is basically useless. In order to better iterate their products, startups need to obtain timely feedback from all parties, so he changed the annual evaluation to a quarterly evaluation. Doing this may seem too complicated to others. All things are difficult at the beginning. What they consider is not the immediate interests, but the long-term goals. He personally verified that the performance evaluation system was iteratively updated in each quarterly evaluation. He has currently led more than 10 performance evaluations. By collecting a large amount of data from the evaluations, he continuously shortened the time required for each evaluation to ensure that the performance evaluation can keep up with the company's development.

APP Top Promotion (www.opp2.com) is the top mobile APP promotion platform in China, focusing on mobile APP promotion operation methods, experience and skills, channel ASO optimization ranking, and sharing APP marketing information. Welcome to follow the official WeChat public account: appganhuo

[Scan the top APP promotion WeChat QR code to get more dry goods and explosive materials]

This article was written by @创业者孙凌 and published by (APP Top Promotion). Reprinting this article requires the consent of Top Promotion , and please attach the link to this article!