Siberianfruit

What to do with fear

Because we regard fear as something that we have to deal with, we do not just let it be and it becomes empowered to stop us. The appropriate way to deal with fear is to be with it, to choose to experience it, and to be afraid. You let fear be and it lets you be. In the context of skydiving, you are afraid and you jump. Fear goeswith skydiving. 

http://www.laurenceplatt.com/breakthrough/obs8.html

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Wanelo is hiring! Engineers, designers

We are putting together a world-class team of front/back end engineers + visual/UX designers in San Francisco to continue building Wanelo into a product users want, need and love.

See details here: http://buildwanelo.tumblr.com/

Email deenav@wanelo.com to meet.

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Startup founders should eat Paleo

A few months ago I switched to the Paleo diet. My main reason for doing so was curiosity and the fact that I kept coming across smart interesting people who had concluded that Paleo was the best thing for their health and energy. 

The basic idea of Paleo eating is that our bodies are adopted to eating what our cave ancestors ate 10k years ago and that agriculture is a relatively recent phenomenon that our bodies haven’t fully evolved to digest. Note that I don’t claim to know whether these claims are valid. I do like the idea of questioning the status quo diet, as well as relying on my own experience of eating this way.

So a quick summary of what you eat on Paleo: 

• you cut out grains, beans, as well as most nuts
• you reduce your carbs to about 25 grams per day
• eat lots of fat and protein
• cook with coconut oil, gee or lard, rather than vegetable oils
• cut out all dairy except cheese and full-fat cream
• vegetables are fine, as are potatoes (especially sweet potatoes or yams)

The reason for this post is that I was just getting ready to leave the house when I realized that I will not have time to eat a meal between 10am and 5:30pm. In the past this would have been a problem, but one of the effects of eating Paleo is that you can fairly easily go for hours with no eating or minimal food. Since you get your energy from slow-burning sources like fat and protein, you can fairly easily last for a while. (And, don’t worry, I will definitely snack.)

Overall, my experience with Paleo has been very positive. In the past, I ate all the time, I ate too much and thought about my weight. Since switching to Paleo, I feel a lot less dependent on food overall and my weight just feels very stable - none of those ups and downs that I used to experience in a single day of eating really occur any more. Energy-wise, I’ve found that I’m a lot less likely to feel tired after a meal and my energy seems not too dependent on food. 

Paleo guidelines have some gray areas, and it becomes a personal mix of choices that work for you. My tweaks include:

• I eat a fairly large amount of very dark chocolate (it has lots of fat and not a ton of sugar).
• I did not give up drinking as some would suggest :)  My drink of choice is vodka-soda (especially with potato-based vodka if it’s available) and occasionally wine.
• I’ve found sweet potatoes to be very important for me on this diet. Without them I just don’t seem to get what I need from my meals. I eat them almost daily.

The best thing about Paleo is that you become a fat snob. You’ll find yourself going to a coffee shop and requesting full-fat whipping cream for your coffee. Trust me, that’s a request they don’t get often! It’s way more radical than asking for a double-soy-half-caf-moca-frappuccino-latte. Bacon and butter will become your best friends.

So why should startup founders eat Paleo? Because it seems to be the most sustainable diet for your energy and for going through an entire day without eating while meeting with investors, recruiting and running around :)

Oh, and here’s my favorite resource for learning about what real people do when eating Paleo: http://paleohacks.com/.

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The Cult of Done

My favorite part is that this was written in only 20 min! That’s just too great. 

via http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-manifesto.html

I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

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Favorite tip for contacting busy people

My favorite technique for contacting really busy people is to message them simultaneously via multiple mediums. For example, email and Twitter make a great combo. Linkedin is good re-enforcement as well.

The content of your messages doesn’t need to be the same, so you can send a core message by email and follow with unrelated reply on Twitter. They key is recognition via closely-spaced repetition as these people may be so busy that you literally have to earn their attention. 

Similarly, getting intros from 2-3 directions at once works magic and with some people is the only way you’ll get their attention. 

Have fun playing the game.

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How to choose advisors, mentors and co-founders

We’ve already established that startups are nothing but endless uncertainty. It’s natural for us to try to reduce the amounts of uncertainty we deal with by working with or talking to other people. 

It’s also no secret that you will get conflicting thoughts and advice any time you talk to someone about your startup. So what is a poor confused entrepreneur to do? How do you know who to listen to and what to do with it?

Here’s the deal. The reason there are so many opinions and so many different ways of looking at a startup situation is precisely that the situation can be seen and can go in any one of those ways (plus the ways that no one has even thought of yet). You can prove this to yourself by thinking of all the different success scenarios from the past. It’s actually possible to find proof that various ways exist to succeed and that some of those ways may even appear to be polar opposites. So it’s precisely the uncertainty of the situation that invites all of the opinions. 

It’s tempting to look for the one opinion that is correct. But, hopefully sooner rather than later you realize that the correct opinion simply doesn’t exist. Opinions are just that: opinions. And some of them may even come across quite convincing due to all of the impressive past experience of the person sharing the opinion. And although there’s some validity to the past experience, it’s actually helpful to look at the definition of an opinion here: A view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. 

Pretty dead on. 

So with all this in mind, how do you pick who to continue working with or getting advice from? Because we are dealing with uncertainty of outcome with numerous variables, no one opinion will be right. That actually means you get to choose. You may notice that when you work or talk with certain people, you feel empowered. When you work with or talk to others you feel negative and dis-empowered. Although this is not something that’s set in stone for any individual, most people will have a default way of operating in regards to uncertainty. For some people this default is about minimizing their risks, looking for safety, security and known ways of doing things. Others will seek out a way of looking at each situation creatively, looking for solutions, and looking to make the most of what’s going on in creating the future.

I have experienced this in a very literal way in getting recent feedback and advice on Wanelo and having many conversations with really great people about our future. I have noticed that people have varying responses to our growth with some people getting really excited about it and others responding with caution. Our growth is good, but not at a point when there’s no room for interpretation. In other words, it’s up to us to keep going and get it to a point where interpretation is no longer necessary.

Initially, I, too, was in a place of trying to assess our growth as being either good or bad. I have now gotten to a point where I no longer see it as that, but I focus on what we can do with what’s going on and how we move forward rather than seeing our current results as a final destination. 

Back to answering the question. The most helpful way to choose who to surround yourself with and who to take advice from is by paying attention to which conversations leave you empowered to move forward and minimizing the conversations that don’t. The second kind of conversations will actually drain your energy and, in the end, assuming that our goal is to produce results, will largely waste your time. Meaning, you will not get results from those conversations. Worse, if you take them for the truth, you might give up altogether.

When you do find those people who leave you empowered, especially in situations of high uncertainty, hold on to them. Those are the people who you want in your support network and who will help you build your business.

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Stop Reading Startup Advice

Startup culture encourages startup advice. Entrepreneurs want to write it. Other entrepreneurs want to read it.

You can read all sorts of things from people who know exactly what they are talking about. Don’t raise funding. Raise as much as you can. Build an amazing product and they will come. NO, don’t worry about your product, just figure out your distribution - it’s the only thing that matters. And so on.

This creates a temptation to learn by reading about other people’s experience. Now, I would venture to say that it’s unlikely that any of the people who are writing about their experience have gotten it from reading others’ advice. In fact, we are interested in these folks’ writing precisely because they have experienced the things they are writing about first-hand. They’ve made their mistakes and have put in the hours.

I started thinking about this because I realized that all this reading was actually slowing me down. It’s possible that this is highly personal and that for others reading is a good way to learn about various aspects of running a startup. Personally, however, I have started to see a negative impact in three ways.

1. Reading/research clutters up your digital workspace.
First, every day I would open and keep open literally tens of browser windows and tabs. It would not be unusual for me to keep 8 browser windows with say 10  tabs per window. And some of those, I would keep open for a week or more because I didn’t want to lose the valuable information that I haven’t had a chance to process yet.


As an entrepreneur, I’m working on several major aspects of my startup at once. So naturally, there is a lot out there that could be relevant for me to read. I would sit down at my computer and instead of working on the task I set out to work on, I would have to deal with all of the open windows/tabs, frequently getting distracted, or getting pulled back into my research. 

2. You’ll put yourself into the box of doing things the “right” way.
I noticed myself recently operating from the position that there’s some “right” way of doing things and that I should figure it out by doing all the reading I need, or talking to all the people I can or should talk to, and then I will know what it is. As soon as I started to let go of this desire to find the answer by reading, I have empowered myself to move forward with speed by being comfortable with NOT knowing the perfect answer, but instead by giving myself the room I need to try things on my own, to make mistakes and to learn from them.

3. The time spent reading or researching is the time spent not doing. 
Yes, sometimes you need to read and research to learn. But if you’ve done the work of identifying your highest value task for the day (I will write about this in the near future, but for now see my guest blog post at Women 2.0), it will rarely be to read or research. Most likely, it’s something about talking to people, designing, hiring, etc.

For the purposes of productivity, you can look at your time as a single track. You choose what the track is filled with, but there’s only one track, so you have to choose wisely. If you’re overdoing the reading or researching part, you simply don’t have the time to take other actions at the same time. So it’s a trade off.

4. There is absolutely no end to how much you can read or research.
I have long been comfortable with saying no to push sales. If you’re a marketer or a sales person who tries to call me, you will get a straight and simple no. I will not even give you a chance to speak because it’s clear to me that this is not how I want to find out about services under any circumstances. I know that when I need a service or a product, I will seek it out, do my research, call the right people and so on. The push approach to sales does not work in my world. 

I have realized that I can and should apply the same thinking to the reading/research I do. ENDLESS amount of startup reading comes my way on a daily basis. I’m coming to terms with the idea that it’s not possible to read it all, save it or organize it all and that, on the flip side, it is possible to seek out the specific information I need exactly when I need it. I may not be able to find that perfect source that would come my way in the previous approach, but -hey - that approach is simply unworkable. 

Entrepreneurs are known for inventing new ways of doing things. And yes, learning by reading can be good. But at best its role should be supplementary to your experience from doing. The focus and prioritization should always be on doing first.

As I became aware of all this, I have started to consciously pull back from the desire to read or research and am using the following guidelines:

• I no longer allow myself to keep browsers open unless they pertain to the specific task I’m working right now. I have on a couple of occasions simply shut down all of my open windows without worrying about going through them. It can be uncomfortable, but the benefits outweigh the costs.
• I consciously give myself permission to make mistakes. I’ve found this liberating and empowering and in tune with my natural way of learning. As soon as I do this, the pressure to be perfect goes away, and instead I’m just having fun doing what I love doing and learning from it.
• I am adopting a pull approach to reading and research. I tell myself that I will find this information if and when I need it. I first consider ignoring it, then, if it seems worth reading, I save it to my Instapaper account for possible future reading. I make an effort to not read it now because that would take me away from the task I’ve set out to work on. 

Of course, the irony is that if you’ve made it this far in the post, you’re reading. But, hey, that’s your choice :) 

Happy doing!

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You Choose What You are Good At

We constantly assess our own abilities against those of others. I know I do. What strikes me as incredible is how freaking random, self-created and only supported by facts after-the-fact these assessments are.

Here’s what I mean. For the second time in my life, I’ve started working with a life coach, this time on a much bigger commitment. 

(As a side note, read about Mark Pincus’ dedication to using life and other types of coaches: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/06/mark-pincus-farmville-201106 For me, reading this was an external validation of something I’ve always believed in - which is giving myself the best tools I could possibly get to succeed).

With the encouragement of my coach, for the last couple of days, I’ve been consciously going through my beliefs about what I’m good or bad at. Initially, going through this exercise, it appears as though these beliefs are facts. But, after a close look and some helpful guidance, you can start to see your own BS. You’ve made most of it up!

Our beliefs are likely either unsupported by facts, or are a result of us acting on those beliefs in the first place until they come true. My so-called facts have included the following: I’m a natural entrepreneur. I’m great at product design. I’m great at operating independently. I’m bad at marketing. My independence is also my weakness and, I’m bad at bringing other people into my game. (Keep in mind that this being a public post, I’m keeping these observations on the safer side of things. Gotta maintain my awesome public image :-) ). And so on. 

Now here are the facts I’m beginning to collect. I can think of multiple instances when people have come to me and asked how is it that I’ve managed to do what I’ve done. Specifically, start and run a successful user experience design consulting company (http://dynamikagency.com/ - a company I put on hold to focus on my startup), finance and launch a startup (http://www.wanelo.com/), become really good at product design. 

People like to ask if I’ve gone to school for these things. The answer is a giant NO. There was no school involved. I simply did these things because I wanted to do them and I had an irrational, unsupported-by-anything belief (which I really can take no credit for) that I can do those things! It’s that simple. I believed that I could, that they were mine to claim and I did them.

We all know those people who think they can and those people who simply think they can’t. Some jump forward with zero preparation, make mistakes, learn, adjust, while others take classes, read books, read and research endlessly, feeling overwhelmed by the necessity to be “ready” and to build up slowly before starting on a task. 

Here’s some simple proof. When Wanelo first launched, the design was just plain bad. There’s no other way of putting. It was utterly horrible. And, in retrospect, I really didn’t care about how bad it was. I wanted to design it. I thought I could design it well. I liked the problem I set out to solve. And I decided that I loved designing enough to figure it out (i.e. make mistakes, learn and fix them). So I did it. But the reality is that I was not good at it and I had no idea what I was doing. 

On the flip side, looking at the things I believe myself to be bad at, it becomes obvious that the starting conditions for my strengths and weaknesses are actually nearly identical. In other words, I don’t know sh*t to begin with and it’s my beliefs about what I can and cannot be good at that is determining my ability to become good at that thing.

With all this in mind, I am now deciding that I am born to be ridiculously good at marketing and at bringing others into my game. Watch out :)

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8 Lessons for Making the Most of Your Facebook Ads

We have been successfully using Facebook as the main user acquisition tool for my startup Wanelo.com. I’ve been finding myself in frequent conversations with entrepreneurs about how to get the most out of Facebook ads and fan pages, so I thought it was time to summarize my experience and advice. 

Note that I’ve decided to not share the specific numbers behind our ads, such as the cost per click, our daily budget and the specific ad that works really well for us. I’m happy to share this information, but would rather do it over email or Twitter. Feel free to send me a private message or email me if you want to know our specific numbers.

1. Expect different results. 

You should expect different results from Facebook depending on the nature of your business and your target audience. “Shiny” mass consumer offerings, such as anything related to fashion (shoes in particular do great) or home decor, do much better on Facebook. If you’re looking to capture busy enterprise decision-makers expect to pay more. They are likely to be less interested in clicking on ads than a college student looking to pass time on Facebook while in class.

2. Drive traffic to your Facebook page, NOT your website. 

There are a couple of important reasons to drive traffic to your Facebook page over your website. One important reason is that it’s less effort for the user to “Like” your Facebook page, rather than sign up for your web service or fully explore your site. Once you acquire the “Like”, you now have a relationship and a tie to that user. You can now continue communicating and offering little bits of value to your fans, hoping to build the relationship over time until they have enough interest in what you offer to convert to using your site. A continuous slow building of a relationship makes a lot more sense than a sudden love-at-first-sight connection. 

3. Experiment until you find THE ONE.

It’s been my experience that finding the one ad that works is really worth it and can make a huge difference in how much you pay per click. In our case, this came down to finding a photo of a product that people find so appealing that the click-through rate is pretty high and the cost of the ad is much lower than anything else we’ve tried. The text of the ad matters as well, but seems to be less important than the image. The image is what grabs the attention initially. 

One thing to keep in mind is that Facebook allows you to create multiple versions of an ad withina  campaign, but then what happens is that if the Facebook algorithm finds an ad it thinks is performing well, it won’t even give enough impressions to the other ads for you to see if those could be more successful. So it’s ok to start with a handful of ad versions within a campaign, but utlimately you’ll want to test out your favorite versions in separate campaigns to ensure they get an equal chance. 

4. The effectiveness of your ad is likely to go up over time. 

Another important reason to focus on collecting “Likes” is that over tme your ad will become more effective as it builds up the social juice. As people “Like” a page, their friends will start seeing text that says “Deena and 12 other friends like this” and will be more likely to check the ad out and possibly “Like” your page.

Another reason this may happen is that people are likely to click on an ad after seeing it for a few times, rather than the first time. Actual Wanelo users have told me that they clicked after seeing our ad several times.

Lastly, and I don’t really have a good explanation for this, I’ve seen an ad really spike all of a sudden after running for more than a month. I don’t know why this may happen - perhaps it reached some sort of critical mass? - but it’s possible to see an ad become significantly more effective after some time. 

5. Create a landing tab. 

Facebook lets you choose where people go from your ad, so that you can send traffic to your Wall, or to a landing tab. I recommend using the landing tab as the first page new visitors land on. This tab should tell people what your site is, have something fun and visual to look at and explicity tell your visitors to click the Like button at the top (designs with arrows pointing to the Like button do well). One of the reasons this works, is that direct calls to action (“Like this page”, “Buy this,” etc.) are frequently more successful than indirect ones. 

6. Maximize the visual appeal of your Facebook page.

Even if you send new visitors to the landing tab first, many of them will check out your wall first to see if they want to connect to your page. This is why it’s important to have a fun, visually appealing page that shows recent content and an active community. 

There are different types of content you can post on your page: links, photos, text. In our experience, photos as content do best, even if you just want to send people to a page on your site. There are several reasons for that. Photos result in the largest images in your Facebook page stream. Links give you images too, but they feel more spammy and they are smaller in size. Photos feel more like you’re providing a value to the user because you aren’t looking for them to immeidately go somewhere outside of Facebook.

I recommend organizing photos into thematic albums to reinforce the consistency and the categorization of your content (on the Wanelo page, we have albums for Home Favorites, Fashion Favorites and Valentines Day Gift Countdown). If a user likes a particular photo, he or she can browse through all the other photos in that album as well. Make sure to think through all the relevant pieces of information accompanying each photo as well, and, of course, include a link to the content on your site.

7. Post content frequently and regularly.

As I mentioned above, people will evaluate your page based on the quality, quantity and timing of your content when deciding whether to “Like” your page or not. What they see at the top of the page is important because it makes the first impression. 

Think of your Facebook page as a micro-newsletter. Train your fans to expect entertaining content from you on a regular basis. You don’t want to overwhelm your users with content either, so keep your posts at least 3-4 hours apart. Our rule of thumb has been to make 2-4 posts per day.

8. Provide consistent positive reinforcement and encouragement.

Make sure people who post on your page understand that someone is listening to them and appreciating what they say. Not only should every single comment get a response, but you can “like” almost every comment made a by a user on your posts. Your fans should feel that your page is a safe and positive environment for them to share their thoughts. 

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You will never feel 100% ready when an opportunity arises.

I came across this great little passage from this blog post that strikes a chord: 

The number one thing I persistently see holding smart people back is their own reluctance to accept an opportunity simply because they don’t think they’re ready.  In other words, they believe they require additional knowledge, skill, experience, etc. before they can aptly partake in the opportunity.  Sadly, this is the kind of thinking that stifles personal growth.

The truth is nobody ever feels 100% ready when an opportunity arises.  Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow emotionally and intellectually.  They force us to stretch ourselves and our comfort zones, which means we won’t feel totally comfortable at first.  And when we don’t feel comfortable, we don’t feel ready.

Just remember that significant moments of opportunity for personal growth and development will come and go throughout your lifetime.  If you are looking to make positive changes in your life you will need to embrace these moments of opportunity even though you will never feel 100% ready for them.

via zackgilbert  

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The Big Secret Of Behavior Change Is…

… that it’s all about the little things!

A friend shared this really simple, but awesome presentation that points out our misconceptions about what’s involved in changing a behavior. Intuitively, we think that behavior change is all about big radical informed decisions. In reality, it’s all about starting small, setting small short-term goals and ensuring that the triggers in our environment are working to encourage the new behavior.

Go through the presentation (included below) - it’s highly worth it! To learn more, explore the Stanford Captology webiste: http://captology.stanford.edu/.

Here’s an excerpt that seems to summarize the overall philosophy from the above site (emphasis mine):

1. We humans are lazy. BJ Fogg has mapped out the six elements of simplicity that account for this reality. With this new insight, we can pinpoint why many designs fail to achieve results. Simplicity matters more than motivation when it comes to influencing people.

2. Hot triggers change people. Many people would argue that information matters most when designing for behavior change. Not so. Hot triggers are the most powerful element in changing behavior.

3. Daily habits are powerful. In fact, daily habits are the most powerful of all behaviors. While technology can help people create good habits most attempts fail. Why? Few designers understand the psychology of long-term behavior change. We know what it takes to create a habit – in yourself, a customer, your dog.

I know that this rings true because it matches up with my own experience in trying to change any of my behavior. I have long ago assumed that I’m not one of those strong-willed people who can change their behavior at will. (Whether those people actually exist is a whole other question.) My solution to improving various aspects of my life is to look for ways of setting myself up with the right environment and the right triggers so that willpower is eliminated from the equation completely. Here are some examples that I think demonstrate this approach:

1. We got rid of our TV because we felt that there was a gravitational pull towards it in the living room. When your TV is in the living room, it seems to become the default behavior and staying away requires willpower. My goal in removing the TV was to be more conscious in selecting what I am going to do at any given moment without having to rely on my willpower at all. It’s worked! We have stopped watching TV (with the exception of an occasional Mad Men episode on the computer) and we don’t miss it!
2. When I quit coffee I did it by telling myself that I was only going to try it to see what it’s like. I know that thinking that I was quitting permanently would make me very unhappy and cause a lot of internal resistance. (Full disclosure: after a reasonably long break from coffee, I have since started drinking it again. The jury is still out on whether or not I want to continue with it.)
3. How many people do you know who have a gym membership and don’t really use it? I know that to get myself to exercise it was important for me to go to a nice gym - ideally a gym that makes me feel like I’m visiting a spa. My theory was that if the gym was not nice, I just wouldn’t go. This worked well and I enjoyed going!
4. More recently, scheduling pilates workouts has worked great as well. The reason this one works is that once it’s scheduled, all I have to do is show up! Once I’m there the instructor tells me what to do and I really don’t have to think about it much. 

What I would love to work on next is applying this thinking to figure out and improve my morning routine which is currently too haphazard and random. One of my problems is that I roll out of bed and feel the need to check into my online world immediately. The first step for a better morning for me is probably just not checking my work, email, etc. until I’ve figured out some essential things about the day to come. Work in progress!

Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change

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