Aviel Ginzburg

Aviel Ginzburg: It's Sounder season here in Seattle, so I'm tempted to compare running a startup to managing a game of soccer. Each player on the pitch has a variety of responsibilities, but in the end must excel at their single specific position or the team won’t win.

Similarly, in a startup, there are a number of responsibilities that need to be taken care of on a daily basis (many more so than the actual amount of people), but still, everyone has to make sure that they’re addressing their core responsibilities with urgency.

In our case, our strengths come from Damon’s speed in development and my ability to rapidly pivot a product’s feature set. But there’s much more to running a startup than just the product itself… like customer acquisition, business development, accounting, marketing, and the list goes on and on.

For the first four months of our company, the two of us took time away from our core competencies to address everything else, initially executing relatively poorly on those tasks, with the expectation of ramping up our skills and efficiency as time went on. We’ve definitely improved measurably in those areas, but come four months in, they still weren’t second nature.

The improvement, though encouraging, had us evaluating how we were investing our time, and thinking about how we could redistribute our efforts to maximize efficiency. Over the four months Damon had gotten great at opening up communication channels and building relationships with people interested in using our products, but we simply weren’t closing.

On numerous occasions, I’d have to ask him to pick his head up from adding new features to follow up on potential sales -- and even when he did, the closer instinct was sorely missing.

On my end, my idea of business development still had too much designer and developer in it.

PowerPoint decks on strategies were overly influenced by thoughts on typesetting and color schemes; customer acquisition plans looked more like ETL (database extract, transform, load) processes than anything else. And while I’ve got meetings in person down to a science, I still hadn’t mastered the cold call/email.

All that being said, we were moving forward, starting to make some real money, and things were all around looking good. But just good, wasn’t going to cut it for us, especially knowing that we both have individual talents that can make us great.

Previous Installments:
Taking the startup plunge, and taking you along for the ride.

Who owns what? How to split equity in a startup company.

Learning how to rely on your co-founder at a startup

Going back to the soccer analogy – you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re making your star striker play half of the game in the midfield.

There’s definitely something to be said for being scrappy and making due with what you’ve got, but you’re not going to win the championship that way.

Our realization? Despite our ability to raise a round of funding and build kick ass software, our execution in the areas of customer acquisition and business development had been weaker than we’d anticipated.

More so, the effort being put into those areas was preventing us from maximizing our strengths. Recognizing our inadequacies in business development was especially tough.

For starters, we hadn’t been around long enough to really consider ourselves as being really unsuccessful at anything, and as two young entrepreneurs, we still wanted to believe that we could do all it.

As luck would have it, we didn’t have to struggle all that much in order to address our weaknesses. In the past few weeks, Adam Schoenfeld, former CEO of 20 Decibels, has joined Untitled Startup as a third co-founder and taken over business development and customer acquisition.

In the few weeks that he’s been with us, I’ve gotten to pour myself back into product development and Damon has been cranking away on some truly amazing features.

In addition to complimenting our existing strengths, Adam was a great fit with the culture and attitude that we're cultivating at Untitled.

Looking at the numbers, we’ve already increased revenues by 500 percent this month and are due to push out a new release of RowFeeder, now considered our core product, that doubles its feature set early next week.

The main takeaway from life at Untitled Startup the past few weeks?

Never stop evaluating yourself and your startup. Don’t wait until things are going south to address your problems, but instead manage risk by being honest about your quality of execution early on. It seems to be working for us so far.

Editor's Note: Startup Confidential is written by Aviel Ginzburg and Damon Cortesi. The series follows the ups and downs of the Seattle technology entrepreneurs as they try to get their new business off the ground.