Highlights Included:

• Joe Gebbia of Airbnb talking about their years-long trough of sorrow. Rather than “fail fast”, they stuck with their vision for years before finding product-market fit.
• Travis Kalanick of Uber talking about his previous startup, which dragged on for something like 9 years – with no pay until exit.
• Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures talking about failure. Favorite quote: “My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed”.

Having recently launched a startup and entered the trough of sorrow, this event’s timing couldn’t be any better. Entrepreneurs need to know that the trough of sorrow is normal, and that it typically takes years to get to product-market fit. Ideally, entrepreneurs should know this before they get started. I worry that it’s not clear to many people getting started that, even in today’s market, their startup is likely to take 3-7 years to succeed, and is even more likely to fail.

While the average attendee probably assumed they were dealing with college students, almost everyone I met was an entrepreneur. After all, that’s why I was there. As the co-founder of a bootstrapped startup named LazyMeter, I decided to volunteer and save myself the $2,000+ for a badge or table. And clearly I wasn’t the only one who thought of this. I met a 16-year-old from Chicago with a growing startup – his ability to position himself backstage and approach anyone he saw put my networking skills to shame. I met a partner in a fund in Utah who brought his portfolio out as volunteers to save money. I met a senior at Brandeis University in Boston who won a business plan competition at Harvard and had the foresight to check out the startup scene a year in advance of graduation day. I shared passionate conversations with other volunteers about seeking independence and a good life for our families, the sacrifices we made, and why high salaries at corporations have no appeal.

As you walk down the hall at a conference like Disrupt, the crowd doesn’t look at your face – they look at your nametag. When they see “volunteer”, they keep on walking. This is a mistake. Don’t underestimate the people in green shirts. For all you know, they may be building the next big thing. All the volunteers I met had one thing in common: they had a vision, and they did what’s necessary to make it happen. If you can get backstage at TechCrunch, anything is possible.

Sometimes data points to an obvious direction that may be incorrect. For example, I believe the quality of movies has deteriorated since studios started making changes to movies from audience surveys. The data is used to convince directors and writers their instinct is wrong. But what people say is the best ending may actually leave less of an impression – the result is less memorable movies, and ultimately people not wanting to go to the theater any more. Meanwhile, the studios look at data showing a decline in theater attendance and attribute it to home theater systems. And so, they turn to surveys even more.

While data is key to the success of any startup, it can also lead you astray. When we launched the alpha of LazyMeter, reviews were mixed – while 50% loved it the other 50% couldn’t figure out how to use it. The data told us that an analogy to a music player we were using didn’t make sense for a to-do list. The clear suggestion was to change from iconography to text; for example, to change our play button to the text “Today”. We resisted because the iconography is the point of the product – it’s what enables us to make task management faster than pen and paper. Switching to text also would have made us appear like the many other task managers we sought to replace. We followed our gut, not the obvious action suggested by the data, and went about finding another way to improve the experience for new users.

We added documentation. We played with tooltips. We tweaked the active and inactive states for the navigation buttons. All efforts improved our adoption rates, but they still left much to be desired.

And then we realized something. The problem was not that people didn’t understand how to use our product. The problem was they didn’t understand what the product was doing for them. We weren’t explaining our product on our homepage. ‘Play means today’ makes a lot more sense if you know LazyMeter is your to-do list, one day at a time. We did a simple redesign with a wordpress template, focusing primarily on messaging. And we haven’t heard from a confused user since. Responses immediately went from “I don’t get it” to “this is simple and intuitive”. Registration and adoption rates went through the roof – without any major changes to the usability of the product.

While it was critical to have data showing us where users were getting stuck, the obvious suggestion to change the usability would have been a mistake. It’s important to realize data can paint the wrong picture. If it feels wrong, dig deeper.

It’s natural to feel like the goal of meetings is to make everyone excited about your product. But I’ve recently learned the goal at the beginning should be to find one more person truly passionate about your topic. Someone as excited about the problem you’re solving as you were when you took the plunge. Someone so excited that they want to jump in with you. This is true whether you’re talking to a potential advisor, investor or user.

Move forward. As you share your vision more openly, don’t be disenchanted by meetings that go nowhere. It only takes a single meeting to change things. A single person can change everything for your startup. Suddenly, the less productive meetings make sense, and don’t matter. Remember that even the best pitches will often be ignored.

Make your goals achievable, and keep moving. Start with 1, and then seek 1 more. If you can get 1 advisor, you can get 1 more. If you can get 1 fanatical user, you can get 1 more. If you can get 1 customer, you can get 1 more. Forget the dreams of overnight success. You’re doing a startup, and that means you’re building from the ground up.

For most startups, finding this harmony is a tremendous amount of work. Fortunately, there’s a recognizable moment when your vision and product click. Suddenly your whole startup falls into place. The vision leaves your head, and the product becomes its voice. With each deploy, you immediately know what to build next. Your marketing goes from wordy and disjointed to short and sweet. Users respond positively, some fanatically. It’s a beautiful moment, especially if it takes you months to get there.

At LazyMeter, getting from “we’re building a task manager that doesn’t suck” to “the cure for your overwhelming to-do list” didn’t happen overnight. It may seem like a small leap, but it’s brought laser-sharp focus to our product development. We’re still at the beginning and we definitely have our work cut out for us. But fortunately, when it clicks, the product takes on a life of its own, and the whole team knows exactly where it’s going. It’s as if you’ve been lost at sea, and finally spot land in the distance.

The experience made me think about who I’d be without the internet. In college, almost all of my plans were made by instant message – I’ve never liked using the phone, and I was lucky enough to live in the first generation that could get away without it. I found my first job out of college, at a startup in New York City, through craigslist (along with a sublet, an apartment, furniture and a mover).   I even found my job at Microsoft through craigslist. The job was in internet advertising.

The internet has shaped my life as far back as I remember. As a shy teenager trying to figure out life, I realized I probably wasn’t the only one, so I started a website called Teen World where I gave others advice. Over time, it grew into an interactive community for young adults called CheekFreak. Around 1,000 users visited each week to escape the real world and be themselves, and it was a huge part of my identity. I only made a few hundred dollars before I went to college and shut it down, but I don’t regret all the work. I still smile when I read emails from visitors, including several who said they were considering suicide before visiting.

When you get knee deep in your startup, you get lost in topics like fundraising, usability and dashboards. But let’s not forget why we’re really here: to shape lives. While many think task management is a boring subject, I’m excited by how it directly ties to people’s quality of life. What if I can increase your free time? What if I can help you feel better at the end of the day? The spark that gives birth to most startups is a selfless realization that you can help others. Making it sustainable is secondary, and it’s only here that most fail.

When you read that 90% of startups fail, remember that the definition is strictly financial. Don’t forget that you originally set out to help people. You’re only a true failure if you don’t improve 1 user’s life. Of the 90% of “failed” startups, I wonder how many founders consider themselves failures. I wonder how many have a letter from a user that still makes them smile. I wonder how many are proud of the lives they shaped. And I wonder how many wouldn’t say their startup shaped them.

The best PR is held back to coincide with a product’s release. I have seen several cases of eager startups generating a blast of coverage well before their launch. While there’s nothing wrong with building awareness, the problem is news sources often won’t cover you again. Plus, the passionate early adopters that tried to use your product before probably won’t return. While you can capture traffic with a mailing list, it’s a problem if you can’t bring such a large group back when the product is actually ready. This issue was experienced by Freshdesk when they had 25,000 visitors from a post on Hacker News. In a blog post, they said “We had 150 new signups – too bad we didn’t have the product ready. I think we could have had much more if we had the product ready instead of having people signup and wait for the beta.”

One of my favorite startup blog posts is How We Knew When to Launch Our Startup by Vinicius Vacanti, co-founder of YipIt. He clearly explains why startups should not seek PR until they retain users and (preferably) they refer others. He says “You are a fisherman, your startup is your net and your goal is to catch as many of these fish as possible. If your net (your startup) isn’t well-built and ready for them, the fish will swim right by you and they’ll never come back.” First impressions are critical, and you only get one. Robert Scoble recently wrote about why “first experiences matter and are mattering more every day” in response to the launch of Color.

People ask for access to LazyMeter every day. While we diligently track each request, most are still waiting for their invitation because we’re obsessed with their first experience. Instead of letting everyone in, we grant access to cohorts that are the smallest size needed to monitor first experience and gather detailed feedback. After seeing how the users respond, we improve the product and then invite the next cohort. This strategy has worked extremely well: we collect very actionable feedback and focus our attention on improving the product versus supporting many more users. While we regret that some have had to wait months for access, we prefer they have a better first experience – both with the product and individual attention – so that they’re more likely to become loyal users. We will launch and seek PR when we see our new users returning, and asking to bring their friends. Call us old fashioned, but we don’t put out until launch day.

Every time I bite into a great sandwich, I notice the bread. When you order a gourmet sandwich, the bread is the last thing on your mind. Yet any great chef knows a great sandwich cannot exist without the perfect bread. A great sandwich can exist without the perfect ingredients; some bread is so good it doesn’t matter what you pair it with (if anything).

If you’ve ever been to Paseo in Fremont or Ballard for a Cuban sandwich, you know what I’m talking about. You can’t go wrong ordering any sandwich on their menu. Not to undermine the perfection of what goes on inside their sandwiches, they just wouldn’t succeed without the Macrina bread. And they know it: the bread is so important, they stop selling sandwiches when they run out instead of sending a runner to another bakery. If you think the meat is the most important thing, order the onion sandwich and thank me later. Likewise, bread is (part of) the reason so many people eat the mystery meat at Subway.

In contrast, I was very disappointed when I went to Salumi, Mario Batali’s father’s restaurant famous for its artisan cured meats. While I’m a fan of their meats, I would never order a sandwich from them again. The bread is so thick and dry that you can’t taste the meat. Great ingredients do not a great sandwich make. Sandwiches fail when the focus is on what’s inside, and the bread is an after-thought.

When you build your product, start with the bread. It’s easy to get caught up in the ingredients – the wonderful features – and overlook the importance of the structural platform that ties it all together. Yes, that BBQ brisket may be delicious, but if you put it in-between wonderbread you’ve failed.

At LazyMeter, we’ve already logged 100 features for task management, but we also know that those features are useless without a workflow that actually helps people get things done. There are countless task manager products with every feature from SMS alerts to collaboration, but there’s a reason most people don’t use one – none offer a workflow requiring less time and providing more satisfaction than pen and paper. They’ve ignored the bread.

My advice: start with the bread.

Since leaving Microsoft, I’ve been surprised that it’s so difficult to find part-time work. Especially in this economy, I’d expect more businesses to be open to part-time employees. It’s understandable that companies want to invest in employees they know will stick around, but with a shortage of talent, part-time employees get the work done and are likely to grow into full-time employees, either directly or indirectly.  This alternative is also a great opportunity to move away from 40-hour weeks; some employees will be just as effective in half the time.

Part-time jobs are at best an effective recruiting mechanism, and at worst a way to support the local startup scene, whose progress benefits everyone.  It allows startups to test employees, and employees to test startups.  If startup and employee get along, it’s likely they will find an opportunity to work together gain; at the very least, they will provide referrals – for free.

Aaron Franklin is co-founder of LazyMeter, an application designed to end procrastination and forgetting. He works as a part-time consultant to support his startup.

• Extra Motivation: Having users adds purpose and urgency, so our pace has increased significantly.
• Better Prioritization: Instead of guessing what to build next, we listen to our users. Our top priorities have changed, and we’ve discovered important features we hadn’t planned.
• Validate Usability: What you think makes perfect sense can be completely misunderstood. The sooner you solve usability challenges at the core of your design, the better.
• Improve Messaging: Beta isn’t just a test of a product – it’s also a test of its messaging. Beta helps you fine-tune your messaging so users get hooked on their first visit.
• Data: Beyond user feedback, there’s a lot to be learned from monitoring usage patterns.

Some lessons we’ve learned from our beta:

• Set realistic expectations. Many outside the industry will not recognize the meaning of the word ‘beta’.
• Encourage negative feedback. Especially if your users include friends and family, you need to make them comfortable providing negative feedback. Ask “If you’re using it, what can be improved? If you’re not using it, why not?”
• Don’t just ask for feedback – hunt it down. Speak with the users who aren’t responding to your requests feedback – they’ll have some of the best insights.
• Listen. It’s easy to respond to feedback by explaining how something works, or why you did it that way. Don’t just respond to feedback – seriously consider if something should be changed.
• Find patterns. If you get the same feedback or question more than once, take serious note.
• Parent-proof your product. The user interface needs to be natural, and also backed up by detailed documentation from day 1. If your parents can figure out your product, your target audience will have an even better experience.
• Beta is just the beginning. We have a lot of work to do.

We are making improvements based on the first group’s feedback, and then we’ll open up to a second cohort. Thanks to those who have been waiting patiently.  I’ll share more details about LazyMeter as we approach a more broad release.