So, it is 11pm. My day is done and it has been a good one. Startups are as my friend says, smoke and mirrors and I shit you not, nothing could be closer to  the truth. Looking back on today, I realize yet again that it is a certain type of person that does startups. It has lows, but when you pull it out and the planets align, the highs are what make you do it and keep doing it.

Let me explain:

NanoGIANT needs to get to the next level. We have been stealth, done a lot of validation with our nanospheres with various universities across the US and the time came for us to take it to the next level. The next level means, attracting a leader, building revenue paths and going to get the funding to make all of this happen.

The leader…check

We convinced the ex president of Volvo worldwide to advise us and then come on board as our CEO when his citizenship papers come through. He said yes. He and I built the strategic roadmap that we can then present to people with money. Today I presented to the first of them.

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I woke up stressed as I had the preso to build before 2pm which was when the money guys/enablers were arriving to listen to my pitch. The presentation was done, I just needed to assemble the slides, discuss and refine with our CEO and off we go. But oh no, business cards. I had business cards with an east coast address as I had been building and talking with east coast people but now we were talking to west coast people so I needed cards with our head office address in Phoenix.  At the same time (today), we  had the bright idea of giving a little gift of a test tube of nanospheres as a take away to the meeting participants.

This was 10am.Here we go.

Plugged myself into some really banging house music and built the presentation, delivering it to the CEO prior to his arrival at 12pm. We grabbed lunch but in the back of my mind I knew I still had to get over to the lab, find some spheres we can give out and then print some business cards if we had a color printer which I wasn’t sure we had at head office. Stress level rising as 2pm loomed. Went over the presentation and I consider myself very lucky that this behemoth of a man had the same vision as me in terms of what we were going to say to the money people at 2pm. We nailed the preso with minimal changes and headed back to the office.

12.45 – Headed over to the lab for some particles I could give to the people in the meeting. Steve, our lead scientist just shone and not only pulled out particles we didn’t have but also gave me a couple of vials of pure opal and some liquid I call PFM – Pure Fucking Magic. “Pour this stuff onto the opal spheres and leave it 30 minutes and watch their faces” he said. Trust comes in strong here. We are an exceptionally tight team of colleagues and friends and I would trust this guy with my life. I left with my bag of tricks.

1.30pm – Walked in the door of our office and immediately downloaded a template for some business card sheets handed to me as I walk in. I have to point out that I know dick about making business cards but I pulled it out and printed a couple with a color printer I never knew we had.

2pm – I made my intro along with everyone else and cool as a cucumber, rocked the presentation to the point that these people stopped the meeting midway, called another even bigger money guy and said “You need to come and see these people ASAP”.

When I handed out the business cards out at 2.03pm, the ink was no more than 12 minutes old.

It was stress like I have never felt in a normal job but I tell you, I wouldn’t have this life any other way.

Smoke and mirrors. You simply do what needs to be done, day after stressful day.

Same thing. Different money guy tomorrow.

I love this!!

Reposted from venturebeat.com

Therapists don’t tell you what to do. Rather, they ask probing questions that get you to discover for yourself what is true for you, your situation, and what you want.

You’re smart. You’ll make good decisions. But you also get bogged down in daily minutiae and putting out fires, meanwhile missing the big picture. That’s where this piece comes in: To splash cold water on your face, forcing you to face reality and continue to defend or change the important choices inside your business.

What follows is your startup therapy session. Having to think through and answer these questions forces you to identify what you need to do today to seek profits and growth.

In one sentence, what does your product do and who buys it? And in one sentence, why does someone buy your product?
These are surprisingly difficult questions. The shorter and more precise your answers, the more you understand why you exist. If the answer is: ”I honestly don’t really know why people give us money,” that’s something to remedy immediately.

If you have an answer, is it because you have hard evidence that this is how your customers perceive you and why they give you money, or just because you believe it? “Evidence” means emails and Tweets and testimonials that use those words exactly; otherwise you’re likely interpreting their feedback to match your expectations. (I find myself constantly guilty of this disconnect.) If you don’t have evidence, it is OK to have a hypothesis but you should be concerned about collecting proof and disproof.

If you do know the answer, these two sentences should drive your marketing efforts. If these sentences aren’t on your home page, why the hell aren’t they? Is there anything else more compelling to potential customers? At the least, these represent the themes that drive your marketing campaigns.

What one thing is most responsible for preventing sales?

Do people not know you exist? Is it pricing? Not enough product features? Unorganized sales strategy? The look-and-feel of website? Something else?

Most little companies aren’t honest about this, yet it’s possibly the most important question you could ask. For example, I’m an engineer, so my first answer to “Why don’t you have more customers?” is almost always: ”Because we need this feature.” You hear some potential customer say, “we will buy if you do XYZ” so you conclude that if you implemented XYZ people would start breaking your door down.

But is that really the case? If you added one feature and maybe satisfied that one customer (assuming they wouldn’t ask for a second thing – which, in my experience, they usually do), would that get you 100 more sales? For those hundreds of people who downloaded your software, but never bought — is the reason “not enough features?”

For the hundreds of thousands of people who never came to your website in the first place, or hit the front page and left after three seconds, is the solution “more features?”

When you honestly ask yourself this question, it will naturally lead into things you can do right away to get more people to the site, into a trial and/or into a sale. Don’t just rest on what comes easiest.

What’s one thing you could do to get more feedback from customers, potential customers or sales you’ve lost?
You already know that external feedback is the only way to empirically determine how to build products people want to buy. Maybe you can’t drop everything to solicit feedback (although folks like Eric Ries say you should), but surely it’s worth one day every month to go out of your way to collection information from the field.

To get the ideas flowing, here are eleven ways to get more feedback, most of which take less than a day to implement.

If you had zero revenue from now on, on what date would you run out of money?

The first thing this does is force you to nail down your monthly expenses and accounts payable. Second, you know the length of your fuse even in event of disaster (if you have revenue) or if you never manage to land a customer (if you’re just starting out).

More than that, knowing your “padding” as I used to call it is helpful in making decisions like “Can I afford to try this Risky Expensive Thing,” such as making your first hire or trying a $20,000 media blitz. Whenever you’re contemplating a new expensive idea that could be awesome but could be setting money on fire, your fuse date helps you know how much time you’re risking — time to recover if your bet doesn’t pay off.

Finally, knowing “the day my business could die” helps focus your attention on activities that bring in revenue.

If someone handed you $100,000 today, how would you spend it to maximize future profits?
This gets you to crystallize what cost-centric activities would most help your business. We get caught up in free-but-takes-tons-of-time marketing and development activities — and most of the time that’s a good way to think — but sometimes it’s still true that “you have to spend money to make money.”

Sometimes the “thing you could do” is so compelling, it might mean you should raise a small angel round or consider debt. Typically it’s best to get by with minimal debt and investment, but if the “thing you could do” is transformative, you might reconsider.