Earlier this week, we had the opportunity to sit down with Brad Feld, a Director of the TechStars program and a great mentor to our company. At the tail end of our meeting, Andrew Hyde the Community Director for TechStars dropped by and posed a couple of questions to Brad about this year’s TechStars companies, and also asked us how the first three weeks have gone.

Check out the podcast, Brad Feld with Foodzie.

While I was churning through my inbox Monday morning, I was greeted by the UPS man with a hickory-smoked surprise. Benton’s bacon arrived early and my nose knew before I even read the label. I opened the box and even though the bacon was vacuum sealed inside the packaging, the scent started filling the air in the TechStars office. I brought the box over to Rob and Nik to get a whiff and I think I caught Nik trying to get a lick from the outside of the packaging (Nik’s a vegetarian who still has bacon cravings). Maybe that’s an indicator of how good it is, or… maybe just how much Nik misses the taste of bacon. As soon as I can pull away from meetings and all the work on my plate to actually cook, I’m going to be putting it to the test. I’ll be sure to report back as to whether it lives up to all the hype.

On a slightly different yet related note, if you read my initial post about Benton’s, you might have remembered that they gave me a 7 week lead time on the bacon. Although I was eager to get my bacon right away, they set the expectations before I added it to my cart and I was perfectly content waiting until August to enjoy a little slice of bacon heaven. But then a wonderful thing happened, it arrived in 1.5 weeks. Benton’s under-promised and over-delivered. Now there is a good chance they didn’t do this on purpose. They could have merely been too busy making bacon to update the site to reflect the true wait, but regardless, I think what they’ve done in managing expectations is a key ingredient to keeping customers happy.

I mentioned in an earlier post that Zappos, the king of customer service, does a similar thing. They tell you your shoes will arrive in 4-5 days and blow you away when it shows up the next day. I think when you are dealing with anyone, whether it be your customers, investors, parents or employees - exceeding expectations can be a very powerful thing.

Photo Credit: Wendell T. Webber

I have been a customer of Zappos for a few years and after just one experience with their service, I was a huge raving fan. I tell everyone about Zappos and won’t buy my shoes anywhere else. Just last week I bought some trail running shoes and although they say they will ship for free in 4-5 days, I ordered my shoes on Sunday and they arrived the next day. I’d say that’s scary fast.

Foodzie plans to have top-notch customer service and as with everything with our company we look to learn from the best. The best is Zappos. Several times when the conversation about customer service came up, we would say…”I wish we would just talk to someone at Zappos.” Recently I began following their CEO Tony Hsieh on Twitter. Last night I thought, what the heck, why not just send Tony a direct message and see what happens? Sure enough, first thing this morning Tony sends me a message back saying he’d be more than happy to help with our customer service questions and gave me his e-mail address. I was shocked at first that he replied to me, but then thought about it some more and realized…if any CEO were going to reply to a DM from some random follower on Twitter, it would the one from Zappos.

The 37Signals’ blog, Signal vs. Noise, has again explained one of the Agile principles that we try very hard to follow, patience. This was articulated outside of any mention of agile software development (or software at all really). It surfaced as a principle that Robert W. Langacker outlined in his new book, Cognitive Grammar; he tries to adhere to it throughout his work. This is a good reminder that Agile concepts can apply to much more than software.

Patience is an unexpected final principle. Being sure not to put the cart before the horse, it means withholding judgment on questions that are premature. As software designers, this means developing a “wait and see” approach that doesn’t indulge in too much speculation. Most feature ideas are speculative. “Wouldn’t it be cool if (x)” is very different from saying “for the last two weeks I’ve been frustrated by (y).” Having patience means putting speculative ideas on a shelf until actual life experience proves they have benefit. Launching a product with “too few” features is a kind of patience. Keeping your team small is a kind of patience.

We’ve often been coached that best way to start business is to find a solution to the “I’ve been frustrated by(y)” question, rather than the “Wouldn’t it be cool if (x)” question.

Foodzie strives very hard to adhere to this both in our business concept and implementation/execution. We’d much rather have a functional core without 10 features you want, rather than a functional core with 3 features you won’t use. 

This is difficult, and we find ourselves wrestling with it on a daily basis. By nature, we want to solve every problem small food producers encounter, but we know we don’t have all the answers yet. We know that trying to solve problems without patience is a waste of time, energy, and a recipe for failure. 

If you don’t know what my passion is yet, here’s a hint. When I tried to write a blog post about being passionate, all I could think about was passion fruit. Yes, I am sort of obsessed with food.

When I was a junior in high school, I came home one afternoon and caught an episode of Oprah that was all about finding what you’re passionate about. For some reason it flipped a switch in me and I was determined to find my passion. At the time I was in AP Chemistry with an incredible teacher who fueled my love for science. I was interested in chemistry, I was good at it - so for the next 3 years, chemistry was what I was passionate about. I went on to go to school at Virginia Tech and studied chemistry for the next year or so, until I thought about turning chemistry into a career. I wasn’t very excited about any of the opportunities that were ahead for me. And now looking back, the “passion” I thought I had for chemistry was really just more of an interest. Passion, I found out, is more than just being interested.

Someone once gave me a good piece of advice, “Pay attention to the things you look forward to doing when you get out of work or school and maybe that’s the thing you really should be doing.” I put off my homework to spend time in the kitchen cooking, reading food magazines and tasting new things. Something told me I should be doing more with food. I thought food writing sounded like the right path, so I quickly jumped into Communications, grabbed a minor in Food and Nutrition and started my own food column at the school paper. It wasn’t long before I realized I was truly passionate about food. With some advice from an editor named Kathy Kitchens (yes that is her real name!) from Cooking Light Magazine, I went and took some culinary courses. She said if you want to be a food writer, you need to be an expert in food and know how to write, not the other way around. So I went and took some courses and continued to do some freelance work and in the process realized that I loved food, but needed to be doing more than just writing (I like having my hands in many things). I went on to work for a gourmet grocery store chain doing brand management and eventually e-commerce. All along the way I was involved in tasting panels and was always very closely tied to the food.

Today I am the co-founder of Foodzie and of course it is all about good food. I’m passionate about sharing great products with other foodies and I’m passionate about helping small food producers grow their business and sell more of their wonderful products. The days are long as an entrepreneur, our days average around 16 hours, but I really enjoy every minute of it because this is the stuff that I love.

Earlier this week, Todd Vernon, the CEO and Founder of Lijit and a TechStars mentor, asked us if we would come do some “Reverse Mentoring” for his daughter Darby and her friend Emily. The two of them are working at the Lijit offices this summer and Todd is trying to immerse them in the startup culture at an early age. I hope that the insights I provided them on how we got to this point with our startup was somewhat helpful (I am completely a rookie at the whole mentoring thing…). But hopefully if they remembered just one thing, I hope they think about finding something they’re really passionate about. As cliche as it might sound, when you embark on a startup, where there’s tons of work, lots of risk and long hours, being passionate about what you do makes the process a whole lot more fun!

Term sheets. Reading Feld’s series makes my head want to explode. At the same time, it makes me feel like a student. Of course, I’m learning throughout Techstars, but the mentor relationships feel more like an apprenticeship more than the regular professor/student relationship. Not that I feel like Brad is my professor… even though he does hold office hours. Nonetheless, the comprehensive documentation on the investment process makes me want to study, understand, and internalize much of what is there. Kudos to Brad and Jason for writing this (and anyone else that worked on this). The Foodzie team thanks you :-).

Read this post listening to “I got rhythm” performed by Ella Fitzgerald. Or not.

A small piece of advice that our mentors have given us on more than one occasion is to develop a rhythm. It can be a huge boon when starting a company. It can help track progress, it helps create an flexible structure that will stick with you longer than you might imagine once it’s established. This advice really resonates with the Foodzie team.

While we haven’t adopted all the agile practices, we do have a scrum every morning at 8:00 am. We each get 5 minutes to talk about what we accomplished the day before, we talk about what we will get done today, and we also talk about anything that’s holding us up. We all get on the same page. Our priorities are shared among all three of us, and we help each other whenever possible.

We also celebrate. Each day we celebrate when someone gets something done, even if it’s little, such as writing a certain number of blog posts.

This keeps our confidence up, our goals in line, and keeps us accountable. I’m not sure how we’re going to scale this out, but I’m sure we can find some people to help us when it’s time. For now, it’s working great.

It’ll be interesting to look back in a year and look at how our rhythm has evolved.

Last night, I talked about some of the most solid advice that I’ve heard here at TechStars about hiring top-notch employees. I also wanted to share some seemingly contrarian advice on how to ensure that you’ve found “the best available athlete” from the folks at Zappos.

When Zappos hires a new employee they put them through the rigors of a 4-week training program that familiarizes each employee with the Zappos culture of service. After about a week of intense training, Zappos gives what they call “The Offer.” The company actually tells each new employee “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.”

Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh (well known for being tremendously innovative), began by offering a “quit-now” bonus of $100 and has continued to raise the ante to ensure that all employees share in his unrelenting dedication to the customer. If the new employee takes the offer he knows that they didn’t have the dedication required of a Zappos employee in the first place.

Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit

As an entrepreneur this advice seems invaluable in filtering out potential bad hires, but I think the notion of the “quit-now” bonus is helpful to just about anybody. If you turn the “quit-now” bonus around on yourself, consider whether you would take an offer to leave your current job. If your answer is “yes”… maybe it’s time to consider what you’d be more passionate doing.

Oh, and by the way… how much would it take for you to leave your job?

Although we’re not quite ready to start hiring, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to mentor discussions on the topic. Some of the best advice that we’ve heard up to this point came from Dick Costolo, Founder and CEO of FeedBurner.

Dick talked about hiring the “best available athlete,” and used a football draft analogy. The premise states that a team may be looking to draft a wide receiver, but if there are no really great wide receivers left… you look for the best available athlete that can be molded into a dynamite wide receiver. This is good not only to pull the best talent available, but also gives you a super star that may be better suited to help in a range of different roles as your company grows.

Dick Costolo’s Advice on Early Hires:

• When you have under 10 employees you want well-rounded skilled people

• Ensure that the person fits within the culture and uses the service that you are developing

• It’s ideal if the person has thoughts on the future of the industry that you are in

I recall Mark Zuckerburg sharing a similar sentiment about the founding team that he assembled for Facebook. Mark mentioned that one of his first three developers actually had no background in computer science at all. He knew that his good friend was a brilliant engineer, and could very quickly learn what was necessary to be a brilliant web developer.

 

One of the things that appealed to me most about participating in the TechStars program was the opportunity to work directly with some of the most proven and successful business and entrepreneurial minds around. As such, we have spent much of our first week (I’d dare say 70% of our time so far) seeking out and engaging mentors with applicable experience to what we’re trying to develop.

The interesting thing that we found is that when you talk to 10 different mentors, you’re likely to hear 11 varying opinions about how you should structure various elements of your business. Initially we were drawn as to what we should do. Many of the things that we were being told seemed to make a lot of sense and yet the advice was still very dichotomous.

Finally, yesterday morning we came together as a team to discuss and make sense of all the data (advice) that we collected over the past few days. One thing that we found particularly helpful was to establish exactly what our core principles entail without regard to business-model specifics.

I partially attribute our desire to create a common set of principles to a book that we recently read as a company. Let My People Go Surfing is a great story of an unconventional company (Patagonia) with an unwavering sense of principle and a profound unwillingness to accept the status quo.

After quite a bit of discussion and soul-searching here is what we came up with…

Foodzie Core Principles:

• Offer the largest selection of artisanal food

• Make it easier to buy and sell on Foodzie than anywhere else

• Enable food producers to imbue their character and share their unique story

It may seem trite to come up with “guiding principles;” however, I believe that if you’re resolute in your core principles, any decision that you make will align with your values as a company.