Life of FBi | Non-Tech Start-up Founder

First I have extremely limited experience in hiring. When it comes to startups I’m a first-timer and I’ve only brought on 3 people to the team. But when I went looking for simple advice on startup hiring, it was mainly targeted at bringing on people for start-ups already established, or had advice that was over-the-top and sometimes convoluted.

This is a simple checklist that has worked for me.

1. Are you going to work harder

2. Are you going to be proactive

3. Are you going to get out of the way of your ego

4. Are you going to take chances

Beyond functionality fit, most good people have the first two. But for some reason having the first two also seems to conflict with 3. And you have to be a special person to have 4. By definition, more than most people don’t.

If you’re an early-stage startup and you’re thinking about bringing on your next person, what do you think about?

Soundtrack whilst blogging this article – The Postal Service: Give Up

To get me back into blogging, I’ve decided to put some pressure on myself by stating some regularity. A series no less: Finds of the Fortnight or simply #FotF. Now it seems many of my American friends are unfamiliar with the term fortnight (collective now = two weeks). It’s a truly awesome word, which is not archaic, and is still used in the “rest of the (English-speaking) world”. I love that term, always puts a smile on people’s faces (for two different reasons depending on whether you’re American or not).

Anyway, to my Find of the Fortnight: SnapABug, a proactive chat client built into your website. After first reading about it on Chris Cameron‘s ReadWriteStart column, it immediately appealed to me, I jumped on their site, and after 60 seconds of browsing, an IM popped-in on their page. I was chatting with the co-founder, Jerome. I “pitched” our developer that this was a must-have. He amazingly agreed to prioritize it above the week’s development pipeline (it was only a 30 min integration incl testing). And after the first day, I think I tweeted that @SnapABug was going to change how e-commerce did customer service.

There are two primary benefits. After the first fortnight, I spoke with some 100 live users of our dress shirt application, in real time. Think about that. This is like user testing combined with analytics, in real time. People tell you all sorts of things about your application or website that you’d simply never know because the friction point of sending an email to sayhi@blank-label.com is WAY WAY higher than typing it in chat right in-front of you. Continuing on, the second benefit is that it actually helps you close sales. We noticed there was a marked change to our CRO the days I jumped on SnapABug. Everyone I was speaking to was a prospective customer, and not only where they helping to make the site better for others, I was helping them with their questions and getting them closer to a sale.

The other interesting thing about SnapABug is that it’s proactive, i.e. you can set it to pop-in the browser after an allocated time; e.g. we found a drop off after 90 seconds on our app from GA, so we set up our proactive IM to pop-in at 75 seconds. There is a concern that it’s distracting to the UX you’ve built but I find it to be a clean experience, and it integrates beautifully into my gChat on the backend. Whenever I want, with a single click in my gChat, I can choose to have the chat function available on our site. If I’m not looking to be distracted, I simply turn it off and no-one’s the wiser. We’re on the standard plan for $19/mth, there’s also a free version and a start-up plan for $9/mth. I’m pretty sure we made our money back after the first day.

If anyone has used it or uses it after they read this, I’d be interested to hear your experiences. Please share them in the comments below.

Soundtrack whilst blogging this article – Lady GaGa: The Fame Monster