This quote from Steve Blank (which I realize is taken out of context, but such is the nature of Twitter, I’m not sure where he was speaking today) definitely rubs the marketer in me the wrong way.  Why would you ever want to exclude marketing and sales folks at your startup from the launch party (or any of your employees for that matter), as if they had no part in it?

Treat Marketing as a 2nd Class Citizen, Get 2nd Rate Marketers

My first reaction was to feel at bit nauseous about all the startup founders and employees who are influenced by Eric Ries and his popular Lean Startup methodology for product and market development, and probably read this tweet.  I feel like supporting this attitude encourages one of the most painful, costly, and damaging mistakes that was made at my last startup — and after thinking about it for a couple hours, I can’t not say something.

This isn’t ultimately about Steve’s quote, or Eric’s support of it, which I see as symptoms of the problem. It’s something I’ve wanted to write about for a long time because I experienced it firsthand in my previous startup and it was very damaging to the product, culture, and IMO ultimately the company.

This mentality of “developers before everyone else” is poisonous in startups, and it’s on the road to dangerous levels of hubris, and “pivoting”, or changing the direction of the business multiple times, due to a disconnected view of the world fueled by a Field of Dreams mentality (“if we build it they will come”).

Here’s why…

• Sales and marketing are helpful to have before launch, to make plans for achieving goals
• The greatest insult to a great product, and the people who created it, is to market it poorly
• To grow the business, cofounders need to trust marketing and sales to focus on things that the technical co-founders can’t or shouldn’t have to deal with on a daily basis
• To make great early marketing and sales hires it had better be “our startup” together, in spirit not just in equity stake.
• It’s not about the launch party, its about launching

Order of Operations

When a startup is founded, ideally the entire team is technical.  There is probably someone who is the most business-minded, but not a dedicated sales or marketing person.  If there is a non-technical member of the founding team, they’re probably (hopefully!) very deeply engaged in the product development aspect of the startup, and have earned the trust and respect of the engineer(s) co-founders.

Depending on the product and other market conditions, it is possible that the founding team of engineers will launch without anyone in sales or marketing at all, and their developer design and active use of social media will help them spread the word.  This is exactly what happened with Twilio, which was launched in November 2008 without anyone whose entire job was to take the product to market.

If the product offering is compelling enough, or the cofounders are particularly interesting to the community, getting a TechCrunch story will require little more than a thoughtful email to the writers and a slide deck on Slideshare.  This is the best case scenario, and in my opinion indicates a very well-rounded founding team with strong awareness of their market (business savvy) — even if their primary focus is building technology.  However, after that initial burst of attention and activity there are many questions to be answered that have a more to do with building a business than building a product — like how to continue to gain and retain customers.  This is where sales and marketing are helpful to have before launch, to make plans for achieving these goals.

Getting Past Day Zero

The launch of a new product is just the beginning of what will hopefully be a lasting and happy relationship with customers, press, analysts, and the marketplace in general.  It is a moment of inflection and incredible stress for the entire organization, whether it is three people, thirty people, or three thousand plus.  It is gloriously terrifying, and its something teams bond over.

• There is no question that the vision and actual act of creating of the product is what makes it all possible, and that the people who build things that have never existed before are some of the most amazing human beings on Earth. The greatest insult to a great product, and the people who created it, is to market it poorly. This is the core of how I approach marketing.  Every day that I am spreading the word about Twilio, getting more people to signup, use, and pay for our product I’m honoring the ingenuity that created it, as well as the combination of intellect and execution that continues to make it better.

A Matter of Trust and Focus

When I interviewed I remember the exact moment I was sitting with Evan Cooke, CTO and one of three cofounders, and he offered me the opportunity to work at Twilio as their first hire.  I looked him in the eye and told him, “I can do this job, but we have to agree that marketing will never become a second class citizen to software development”.  I was actually afraid, for a moment, that I wouldn’t get the job but I told my husband later that I’d rather know right then what kind of company it was going to be than be miserable for the next year figuring it out.  That was 18 months ago, and I’ve never ever felt for a moment that there was a disconnect between the engineering team and the marketing team, which now includes a customer service manager and two developer evangelists, in addition to myself.

One of the hardest lesson I’ve learned in business is that despite all my energy and intelligence, I can’t do everything by myself.  Talented people making tough judgement calls aren’t fungible, and in general human beings don’t scale very well unless we can find other people to help us achieve complex and long range goals.  The goal of a business is to organize a bunch of individuals to achieve a common goal, and properly celebrating achievements is a big part of keeping them organized.  Fortunately, if we recruit well we can come to trust marketing and sales to focus on things that the technical co-founders can’t or shouldn’t have to deal with on a daily basis.

This initial division of labor within the startup seems to be a painful transition for technical cofounders — especially those who have never managed other people before.  It becomes even worse because the cofounders are managing people who are experts in something the cofounder might not understand very well like sales or marketing.  For the executive, it is harder for them to validate skills and expectations or pass judgement firsthand when they don’t have operating experience with a particular kind of role.  This is where building deep trust, and fostering an open culture where the sales or marketing person is responsible for sharing and educating about how they’re achieving their goals is important.  It’s also a strong case for objective metrics everyone can agree on, such as adoption numbers or revenue goals.

“You Attract What You Are” – Warren Buffett

I often read about developers who feel they’ve been made into lackeys by some MBA with an idea who wants the software engineer to “just code my startup”.  It’s written with so much disgust.  ”How dare they undervalue what I bring to the table so much, or suggest that it’s their company and I’m just coding up the project?”  Followed by, “what kind of developer would ever sign up for something like that?”

Flip this around for a moment.  Do you think good, honest, hardworking non-technical employees are going to join your company if you tell them they’re there to “just market my startup” or “just do customer service for my startup” or “just sell my product”?  To be good at any of those tasks, and especially to be the first person to say “I’ll follow you, take less salary, some equity that might not be worth anything, and work 24/7″ you need to have ownership – it had better be our startup, in more than just an equity stake.  You better mean it, because these people will be the human embodiment of your brand.

I love this quote from Warren Buffett, “you attract what you are” and I find myself reflecting on it often.  I haven’t fully tested this, but I’d be curious to hear if it holds true — does a culture where writing code is considered the most important productive activity in the company attract marketers and salespeople who think their job is the most important thing in the company?  Do people with a disconnected view of reality attract other people with an equally disconnected perspective?  My gut says yes, although I could use some more data.

The corollary here is that if you are the kind of culture, or the kind of the founding technical team, that sees the launch of your first product as the groundwork for building a fully fledged successful business – you’ll attract early sales and marketing hires who want to be part of this long term vision.  Here are some things I’d suggest you look for in your first marketing hire.

• wants to know how the product works
• is endlessly curious, and isn’t afraid to ask a lot of questions
• never has to be told the same thing twice
• will stay up all night while the engineering team races to ship
• is always thinking about how to simultaneously increase throughput and ROI, while decreasing operating expense (definition of “lean”)
• loves customers obsessively, and doesn’t have a cynical bone in their body
• knows when to be a bulldog
• is humble – for example, they would clean the bathrooms when they can’t afford a janitor
• understands the tradeoffs of time vs. money, and values both
• someone who is a logical decision maker and isn’t afraid to argue for what’s right, or back down if it’s not worth the fight

Great Marketer or Great Generalist?

You might have heard the adage “every startup needs a great generalist”.  I’m not sure where it comes from, but it makes a lot of sense to me.  Some of the hats I wore early on at Twilio to remove workload from the engineering team included: customer service department, recruiter, office manager, shipping/receiving, project manager, sales rep, product tester, PR agent, etc.  That was so insanely fun, and we eventually hired people to take over these roles, but early-on it served two major purposes:

1. run the company like a real business, achieving strategic goals
2. make the dollars spent on non-engineering labor worth every penny, and more

The Company That Launches Together, Stays Together

To get back to the original comments that inspired this post, it’s not about the launch party, it’s about launching.

Your launch party is for show, usually to bring attention to your new product and group together all your well-wishers and potential customers so you can say, “ta da!”  It’s a branding thing, and very different from that moment at 3am where you crack open a $4.99 bottle of sparkling wine you bought at Trader Joe’s and say to the team, “we’re live”.  Or that moment at 2am where you find a member of your customer service pouring over every last detail of the freshly written FAQ.  Or that moment at 11pm where you merge in your latest changes and your sales guy offers to run out and get pizza because the engineering team is starving but has hit on some nasty conflicts.

These aren’t the most important tasks, but they make launch just a little easier and they keep us human and connected through the exhaustion and struggle to build great products and companies.  They do honor to the people and products that make startups possible.

Practice Makes Perfect

I didn’t start out my career as a marketer, and I’m sure I don’t have it all figured out, but I can tell you how I try to live by this at the startup I’m working on today.

At Twilio we have a culture where everyone contributes to customer service and the majority of developers attend marketing outreach events, speak at conferences, create marketing materials like screencasts or how-to content for our website.  When we hire people for non-engineering roles, we require them to write a basic application using our API.  With regard to sales, we take pride in making money, and openly share our revenue numbers and balance sheet with the entire team at our weekly all hands, and celebrate big sales wins together.  We’re hiring.

The Changelog (Sort of)

I had updated the main page with this lovely style inspired by a cool piece of graphic art I bought on iStockPhoto, but still needed to refresh everything else.  Tonight I went through and tested everything again to make sure it is all working.  The signup process, phone number validation and listing of TweetToCall enabled friends have been reviewed end-to-end and I’m happy to report the code has aged nicely.  I think we might be doing some inefficient things with API requests to Twitter on certain commonly reloaded pages (really need pagination for those users who are developing a bigger phone book), but that won’t impact the majority of users at this point.  Definitely on the list though, since it drives me nuts when I’m testing.

As for the design update, all I have to say is CSS is amazing (there is knowing this and really KNOWING IT, I’m feeling the latter)… the time savings on this update after the previous were minimal.  I updated the header, deleted a couple divs, and bam.  While it’s still ugly (hey, I’m not a designer) it is a lot less offensive than before.

Other Improvement Plans

I’ve talked a lot about adding Facebook Connect as the next integrated social network, and now I’m thinking Firefox/Chrome plugins could be cool as well.  Ultimately, I think I will probably move this all over to DialSocial.com where it will be much less Twitter centric.   Other than a few media mentions from back when Jajah launched their @call feature almost a year ago, I don’t think I’ve accumulated much brand value, and having the Twitter account suspended endlessly makes it even easer to abandon the TweetToCall brand.

Another thing on my list is to get @tweettocall unbanned on Twitter, it has been stuck in that state for over a year now and I haven’t been able to get any responses to my support requests (this happened when my own Twitter account @daniellemorrill and @twilio got banned in a widespread block to try to control some malicious spam during the Gov 2.0 Summit in D.C.).

Why It’s Just a Side Project

Beyond the fact that I am super happily employed at Twilio (the voice API platform TweetToCall is built on), I just feel like there’s no point in really building this out and pumping a bunch of money into marketing it.  There is a big barrier to getting users to sign up – getting them to give their phone numbers.  Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, have all their users and this is really just a feature they could easily implement.  The one way I might be able to make it more valuable is to have more networks that you can hook into from a single place — but for now it just feels like a feature, not a full product and certainly not a company.  If you feel differently, please let me know I’d love to hear your thoughts.

• Startup Stuff No One Seems To Talk About – based on a trend I’ve noticed in my conversations with other entrepreneurs about the “unmentionable” elements of entrepreneurship that no one really brings up
• Twilio Quickstart with Ruby on Rails — port of the Twilio quickstart application from PHP to Ruby on Rails
• Understanding the Value of MVC Architecture — yep, writing it as I come to really understand it, so far the key point is the huge increase in efficacy
• Living Intentionally — stuff about career plans, goals, and some reflection on goals I set for 25 (which I turned in April)
• If I Were An Angel Investor (Part 1) — a list of early-stage startups I think are really interesting, and might be killer investments
• No Room for Tall Poppies — response to story I read via Hacker News about anti-intellectual culture of hiring
• Thoughts on Inception — movie review, thinking I will need to see it again (smart producers!)
• U.S. Government Requirement for 1099s to Stifle Small Business — activism post
• Finding Your Own Everyday Entrepreneur — seeing the scrappy awesomeness of everyday choices
• We Live in Public? — thoughts on Facebook, public/private life online and off, etc. — thinking this won’t go out until the Facebook movie hits theaters

People stood and clapped, but I left the room wondering whether they realize this isn’t just something that a small set of us need to do. Activism, in small and large ways, is something all of us can help with.  As much as I wish there were enough people who held the right ideas where I could hide behind “division of labor” as my argument, and just go on building businesses and being productive, here is the harsh reality: if you want to see the world change in your lifetime, you have to live in the future today.

In the most basic terms: it’s time for each of us to do SOMETHING.  I’ve been relaxing at the pool today with Trey Givens, Earl Parson, and Mark Wickens and I asked them to help me brainstorm some ways you can get involved.  If you’ve been helping advocate Objectivism for awhile, this might seem self-evident but please take a look and see if there is anything here you can add to your own playbook.

Activism in…

5 Minutes

• vote up news stories and bog posts you like on Digg.com
• add Objectivism and/or capitalism to your online profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, etc.)
• republish content that you think is good (e.g. link to an ARI op-ed from your Facebook back)
• make yourself or your car a moving billboard for Objectivism (with a shirt, bumper stickets, etc.)
• check out out the free articles on The Objective Standard (or subscribe!) and follow them on Twitter

10 Minutes

• comment on items posted on Facebook, blog posts, etc. – encourage people to keep blogging
• donate money to ARI
• contact ARI about donating money to buy books for your local high school campus club

• comment on items posted on Facebook, blog posts, etc. – encourage people to keep blogging
• comment on news stories, or even blog a full response to a news story

30 Minutes

• subscribe to other blogs that forward ideas you agree with
• call into radio shows, or television shows (or at least email them)
• write a letter to the editor
• write a letter to local or national government etc.

More Time & Other Ideas

• distribute the Undercurrent to your local schools
• share your values with non-Objectivists — for example, art at the Cordair Gallery (not just Atlas Shrugged, the Fountainhead)
• start your own blog (lot’s of good free platforms out there)
• donate money to the Undercurrent, to your local campus club
• join local organizers that you’re interested in, and influence the outcomes of their decisions
• telling stories about your own success or people that you know – about how Objectivism has helped you
• meet up with people in real life to reinforce your ideas, sharing your values, finding people you can relate to, learning new things
• join groups like Toastmasters, where you can speak about your ideas to a captive audience

More check out post from Burgess Laughlin about “in-line activism” -about being an activist within your profession

One of my less public, but very personally significant, interests is philosophy — and I’m particularly interested in the philosophy Objectivism, which was created by the late Ayn Rand.  You might remember her, she wrote the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which are required reading in a lot schools.

I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the conference, the ideas discussed there, and other goodness tomorrow through July 10th.  I hope you’ll find some of it interesting, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

We got to New York, and due to last minute planning we didn’t actually have a place to stay yet. Fortunately, our friend David Lifson from Postling connected with us on Twitter and he and his girlfriend met us over at Dogpatch Labs to drop our backs and grab dim sum. $4 per person dim sum in Manhattan – amazing!

We parted ways with them after lunch (they were headed up to the Apple store to get their iPad!) and headed over to the conference location to get ready for the hackathon. New York is so awesome, jump in a cab and we’re there. So the hacakthon begins, we have a little table for Twilio and try to chat with as many people as we can. Its so amazing having people walk up saying they already use Twilio, and even more incredible when they gush about how much they love the API. By late in the night, a handful of the hacks being created were using the Twilio API (including the Mr.Stabby robot from NYC Resistor!) and everything was going well, but the one problem was we still didn’t have a place to sleep.

Fortunately, the AirBNB folks were at the event too and offered to help us with our search. I had been working the website all day for an affordable place (hotels were coming up on Priceline for a minimum of $600) and around 10pm we got a message back letting us know we could get a 1 bedroom apartment in Soho for just $190 per night ($95 per person!!). I razzed the landlord bait about he bad reviews he got for cleanliness to make sure he would take care of it before we arrived, and we headed out. All in all, when we got there it was clean enough to fall asleep and thats all that really mattered.

The rest of the New York trip went smoothly, including many highlights:

• new friends from SimpleGeo
• Catching up with Jeremiah and the MediaTemple crew
• Awesome app demos from 6 hackathon projewvts using Twilio
• camping out at Fedex off for 5 hours to make sure we got collateral to our friends at TechCrunch by 3am
• A walking tour of parts of New York with Tim from Foursquare, followed by several games of shuffleboard
• delicious steak dinner at Quality Meats, courtesy of Bradley from 2tor
• meeting Cyan, founder of Zivity.com
• extending my streak of awesome iphone photos of the Empire State building to 3 trips in a row (link)

On Tuesday afternoon, with Disrupt still in full swing and the rest of the evangelism team headed to Colorado for Cloudcamp and Gluecon, I hopped my short flight to DC to meet up with my husband and get us all set up to represent at O’Reillys Gov 2.0 Expo at the a washington Convention center. Major discovery: the JetBlue terminal in JFK has these little counters where you can sit and order food to be delivered to you. I didn’t use it this time, but what an awesome idea!

Connected with Kevin at the airport after a three hour wait and we headed to a place i had booked us, a 2 bedroom townhouse within walking distane of the convention center. We arrived in a neighborhood that was pretty rundown (the house next door had all the windows busted out) and were greeted by our host and a friend of hers (a woman) carrying a gun – turns out she is a police officer but i am just not used to that i guess. We were only getting a room, turns out there was a long term tenant in the place and airBNB had listed it wrong. $149 per night for a room in. A house in a crappy neighborhood we couldn’t walk around in at night seemed lame, so we spent one night and switched to a hotel for just $10 per night more and lucked out and got a huge suite because things were slow! Two days of tradeshow goodness, which pretty much amounts to education people about Twilio and cloud technologies in general, collecting businesss cards, and dreaming up new uses cases. I spent Friday in the hotel room catching up on work and that brings me to today, where we worked and went to the National Gallery to check out the sculptures (my favorite medium) before heading back.

And there you have it, links and typo fixes coming later when I’m not on the iPad. Happy to be bak and hope to see many of you soon

Hacks Using the Twilio API

Adam and I arrived early yesterday to set up a little table and then find out what people wanted to build.  We hung out with a lot of different teams, and tried to offer our help and brainstorming skills. Originally, we had been thinking of doing our own hack project but wound up never starting it because we were in so many awesome conversations.

I’ve been liveblogging the demos that involve the Twilio API on the Twilio blog, including snapping quick videos of them with my HD Flip Mino.  Congratulations to Groop.ly, NewsCred, FBcall, Phonzy, and Mr.Stabby for successfully creating your projects and demoing on the big stage here.

Mr.Stabby Video!

Check out the videos here, and my blog post on Twilio.

The Winners

The winners will each get to demo on Wednesday to a packed house

• Future Mario
• Twitter Demographics
• WorstPhoneEver

Honorable Mentions:

• iPad Safety Strap
• Mr.Stabby

Now onwards to see which of the 100 startups presenting wins the TechCrunch Disrupt cup during the conference this week!

We wandered the store, discussing colors and motifs that would work with our post dot com crash modern pad.  A lot of birch was in order, and in fact we were getting a little burned out on the uber-Malm look.  After looking at the piece I really liked, we realize their might be more furniture in the unique grey-brown color that we hadn’t considered, so I resorted to a quick scan of the Ikea store on my iPad.

I never realized how useful the Ikea website is for in-store experience before! Before I knew it, I was constructing a shopping list and checking the availability of items in the colors I wanted in the store’s stock.  I even found things I didn’t realize the store had at all, which we then went and tracked down in the store.

Overall, we ended up spending 3x more than we had planned because we found a lot more of what we were looking for than we had bargained for. I remember over a year ago I helped pull together a “Future of Retail” meetup group in Seattle, as a market research for my previous startup, and we discussed how technology could be used to create special in-store experiences.  I think that was early then, but is becoming more and more relevant now with a device like the iPad that I can reasonably carry in my purse and pull out at a moment’s notice.

Bottomline: iPad was very helpful

At 20, I wasn’t nearly as self-assured or confident in what I was doing, but I did know that I would be an entrepreneur.  In fact, I new I would be an entrepreneur when I was 17 working at McDonalds to pay for garage band gear, and when I was 15 working for the family business, and when I was 12 and visited my Dad’s startup in the Maritime building (heated with steam pipes) or when I was 9 and figured out how to get all the Moms on the block to contribute lemonade to our lemonade stand.  At each age, that idea of what I might do in the future took on different forms and when people asked, “what do you want to do when you grow up?” I would grasp around for the words to describe it.

Growing up I wasn’t taught that work was something to dread about adulthood, from my viewpoint it was an exciting adventure that I couldn’t wait to be a part of.   A place where applying your mind to problems earned you more than just a good grade, and more than just money, it earned satisfaction and personal fulfillment.  I always knew I would do work that I loved, because I never did anything I didn’t love.  The second the smell of McDonald’s Egg McMuffins became too disgusting our the dread mounted in my chest about spending another day helping people ship freight, I made the choice to move on.  Often I moved on without knowing what I would do next, fully confident that I could figure out how to make money paying the bills (building random websites, training old people how to use their computers, pulling espresso shots at the neighborhood coffee shop, etc).

I have extraordinary parents, who have stayed married in the face of plenty of challenges from rebellious kids (especially me) to financial hardship (multiple failed companies and near bankruptcy).  They’ve taught me so much about love and commitment.  I criticized them for staying married when I was younger, because I couldn’t see or understand their romance, but now that I’ve been married to Kevin for almost 3 years it makes a lot more sense.  Relationships with human beings are fragile, beautiful things to be treasured and appreciated – and my parents loved me even when I was behaving terribly, when I was their heart walking around in the big bad world they couldn’t protect me from, and they watched in fear as I danced with danger from time to time.  Fortunately (miraculously?) I kept on being right about decisions they thought were insane, from attending my senior year of high school part time to pursue my band (I was so ahead on credits) to dropping out of college to join the workforce at a Fortune 500 company, to quitting that kick ass job 2 weeks short of my wedding to join a tech startup.

Beyond my parents, I have the kind of marriage I never could have imagined.  Kevin proposed to me when I was 21, and we were married when I was 22.  The divorce rates for people married our ages aren’t great (37% chance for me, 22% for him) and a lot of people were skeptical when our on-again off-again relationship turned serious after 2 years of dating.  Getting married young is probably the riskiest thing I’ve ever done, and the one agreement we came to was that I needed to have the space and freedom to fully discover who I am – outside the marriage.  We weren’t going to be a hyper co-dependent couple, and I wasn’t going to have any kids for a long time (right now the plan is to revisit the topic when I’m 30).  Instead, we would travel, live abroad, take turns doing startups, and development independent circles of friends.  All the things we saw married couples NOT doing, and then complaining about as they filled out the paperwork for divorce.  Not a guarantee of happiness, but certainly helpful.  Since our marriage, I’ve worked on 3 startups and Kevin left his long-time role at Microsoft after living in China for 6 months.  We’ve lived in separate states and/or countries for 50% of the time we’ve been married, made countless friends, founded a company together and travelled a ton.  In short, my marriage is my grandest ongoing adventure.

Looking into the future…

I’m more open about my past, and guarded about my future.  The future for my company is probably the most clear, and everything else follows from there.  I know that when I leave this startup there are 2 things I will do: 1) take a trip to the remaining continents I haven’t been to with my best friend D’Laina 2) catch up on sleep.  Then I’ll probably found a company of my own, I’m ready.  Will we continue to live in the Bay Area – probably, since the heart of the tech industry is here.  Will we ever move back into our blue house in Kingsgate – probaby, when we’re older?  I’d love to have kids there, if I have kids at all.  Will my life continue to be full of passionate, adventure and people I love – definitely.  And being certain of that is enough for me.