Life of FBi | Non-Tech Start-up Founder

You are introduced to start-ups and entrepreneurship, you get recommended one of Guy Kawasaki’s books  or TechCrunch to read. You start to understand the difference between B2C and B2B, and if you’re really with it, the pros and cons of subscription. You start dropping start-up jargon the same way you would rap lines in the late 90s. As you read more you move beyond just start-up ideas and broader news to get into the meatier stuff. You start reading Steve Blank and learn customer development, you read HackerNews and engage in a tech community. You call yourself a start-up gangsta. Of course you haven’t actually started anything yet.

You slowly start working on a start-up, you’re lucky enough to be in the Valley, Boston, NYC or Colorado and you get access to advice. Without them knowing, you refer to them as advisors. You might even be foolish enough to call them your Board of Advisors. The advice is fairly high level, teaming, raising money, business model, where else you can get more advice. It’s mostly abstract but still more useful than reading books or blogs that by nature is even more general.

As you launch your product, more people are willing to talk to you. It’s actually pretty interesting how this happens. It’s like when you launch your product, you’ve suddenly been let into this club and you just got put on the list. Now you have more advice than ever, which would be good if it wasn’t all so contradictory. Marketing decisions, product decisions, you hear something on Monday and then the opposite on Wednesday. You start to realize that these are merely all just data points. Not all data is made the same but it still all goes into a melting pot that is your brain. F***, now you’re more confused than ever.

Being a non-technical founder in an online retail start-up means that I don’t actually do much ‘actual work’. I listen, to the team, to customers, to people who drop advice. This advice part is important, especially if you’re a first-timer, especially if your team is full of first-timers. What kind of advice you get is especially really important. The case I was trying to make above is that as you progress as an entrepreneur, you need more tailored advice, and more specific.

A signal of a really quality advisor is someone whose willing to look at your numbers. I’ll share a couple of experiences with Blank Label. Dan Marques, Director of Marketing and Analytics at Gemvara, has spent time helping us set up goal funnels in Google Analytics. He has made us think about search volume for key words we were optimizing around and which long-tail terms were worth going after and which weren’t. David Hauser, Co-Founder of Grasshopper has helped me think through traffic and sales metrics, where they were, how we thought they were going to change, where were we going to double down, which new channels should we invest in. James Reinhart, Co-Founder of newly funded ThredUP, has been incredibly focused on getting me focused on break-even numbers and gives me the most disappointed face ever when I can’t come up with the shirts per day we have to sell for the break-even spend that week.

We’re really, really lucky to have such great people helping us. And you can be too. How have we done it? Be incredibly humble. Even if you’re game-face and arrogant on the court, be incredibly humble off the court to your coaches. They just know a lot more about a lot more things that you. Don’t be afraid to ask. We’ve asked help from a lot of people, not everyone is willing, and that’s okay. Just hang onto the ones who are, and be extremely good to them.

What kind of help are you getting from mentors and advisors?