For those who missed it, here are the earlier parts of the story:
Flashpoint at Georgia Tech
Tim Ferris, in The Four Hour Workweek, states that
A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.
If this is true, the four months spent Flashpoint will move you ahead in life by four or more years.
To kick off our time at Flashpoint, we (and the other teams in our batch) were told to go out and do some (10? 15? 20? I don’t recall exactly) customer interviews, which we would report on later. OK, so that’s uncomfortable for me, self-professed geek, but I can do this. Mike and I set out across the street to the Atlanta Technology Development Center, knocked on a few doors, and asked a few questions. We were proud of our “mad customer discovery skills,” and more convinced than ever that “Big-data analytics yielding actionable insights to help optimize your digital marketing” was a winning idea. Then we presented what we learned.
To say that Merrick Furst (founder of Flashpoint) was unimpressed would be an understatement. Of course, he was unimpressed with all of the teams, equally. But Mike and I, we figured we were really smart and thus not subject to the requirement to learn the hard way. But the truth is that to get into Flashpoint, you’re already really smart, you know you are, and Merrick isn’t going to waste his (or your) time telling you how smart you are. He’s going to tell you what you’re missing, what you’re blind to in the market, and the whole host of cognitive errors you’re making. I don’t remember exactly the feedback that Merrick gave us, but to give you a flavor, here are some of the things that were directed at our team from time to time:
I’ll stop interrupting you when you say something that doesn’t sound like you just made it up.
Please sit down. You have nothing of value to share with us tonight (in front of a room with all the other teams, mentors, and investors)…. Actually, please stand back up; let’s deconstruct why you didn’t make more progress this week.
I know it’s hard. Do it anyway.
It sounds (and feels) brutal. But the process is necessary. Illusions are being shattered, and that just kind of sucks. You have put your life outside this business on hold because you’re convinced you have a world-changing idea. And you just found out that your idea is almost certainly a loser. Eventually you learn that all the ideas start out as losers. It’s not a loser because you’re dumb; it’s a loser because you haven’t done the work yet. Merrick has added a bit more nuance to his feedback over the years since our batch, but the overall journey for teams still visits the same emotional peaks and valleys today; they’re just eased into it a bit better.
Over the course of our time at Flashpoint, Merrick made countless contributions to us and the other teams, but what always stands out to me is his rare (unique?) ability to put himself into a state of utter skepticism as a way of helping teams. He watches you work, present, and pitch, and focuses on finding the flaws, never being drawn in by the story. And he tells you that it’s exhausting, that he wants to buy into your story, and that he’s telling you you’re full of it because he actually wants you to succeed. (You start to actually believe that a little bit around month 2.5/4.)
“Pivot” Time
So Mike has various business & family interests in Romania, and he takes trips there from time to time. He was on one of those trips when I had office hours with Merrick. Alone. I tried to talk about how we were going to do digital marketing optimization, starting with email, and it was going to be awesome. Somehow, though, the fact that it was me telling the story and not Mike made it a bit less plausible. Ok, it sounded completely implausible. Lesson? If you need the guy who invented the idea to tell the story convincingly, it’s not a good story.
So I would say something, Merrick would push back, I would restate, more pushing back, and all the while I was wishing Mike was here to have this fight instead of me. Eventually, I said something to the effect of “Fine. We have a business idea that solves a known, urgent problem with ready buyers who we can serve effectively at scale. But it has competition, and it’s not that interesting.” So I described email validation (i.e. removing undeliverable email addresses from marketing lists without actually sending to the list – which is what we actually do today), why it’s important to email marketers and email service providers, and the fact that we even had a little micro-product that could do it. His response, as I remember it, was something like “Then just do that.”
So I kinda betrayed Mike’s vision for marketing optimization in that meeting, but things in the business started to pick up. Eventually, we would acquire the domain DataValidation.com from Mike’s old company and the stream of customers that came with it. By the time we left Flashpoint, we had an actual business with revenue that could actually support me full-time (Mike was still doing other things to supplement his income.) We would hire 6 people by the end of the 2013, raise a bit of money from angel investors, and be on the path to profitability. Of course, the story is never quite so simple, and for the next chapter you’ll have to check out part 5…