Daan's blog

List of transactional marketplaces:

https://www.helpling.de

List of classified marketplaces:

https://www.deinschrottplatz.de

I have a secret passion. And it is looking at email spam.
There are so many clever little tricks that spammers use. Typically each little trick teaches us something about how the human brain works or doesn’t work (hence the email spam being successful).
A really nice little growth hack I saw today is below:

The spammer sent me emails and as a sent by email address he set my own email address. It turns out this simple trick is enough for making it straight to the top of my inbox.

And trust me, the above example is pretty harmless. Most of the mails had very explicit spam content.

Well done spammers :)

PS: this worked on web. de - not sure whether it also works for bigger provider like gmail or hotmail, but web.de is still one of the biggest email providers in Germany.

I admit, I became a paid member at Pando.com today. Why?

I used to hate articles written by Sarah Lacy. I purposefully ignored all articles written by her at techcrunch (literally checking whether she was the author before clicking on a link) because her sensationalism enraged me. It is something that generally annoys me about many media outlets, but she was a particularly bad offender.

Strangely, Pando has been different from the start and is getting better every quarter. Articles are normally interesting, reasonably well researched, come with a grain of salt and are not as condemning or sensationalist as other media sites (apart from when writing about uber or Pierre Omidyar).

I also love the Pando monthly fireside chats. Not being based in the valley they give me the  opportunity to look into the heads of people like Ben Horrowitz, Kevin Systrom and many others. Like all of Pando they try to provide an insight than is a little deeper than “Journalist: how is your startup XYZ doing?. Entrepreneur: Absolutely totally amazing, because we have soooo much traction which is validated by our crazy series A valuation, but really it is not about our valuation or being the next unicorn – we are just really successful because we found product market fit and are just really innovative”.

I also realized that 100$ per year is only $8 per month – so really worth the subscription even if you only read 1-3 good articles per month and learn something small – maybe Netflix has helped shape my perspective on this.

I also buy in to the vision of pando, but that alone wasn’t enough to make me subscribe in the past.

What event triggered my subscription?

The future of journalism really interests me and they had this piece about it today that I could only read half of – and I wanted to know the end of the story. The irony isn’t lost on me that a piece on the future of journalism made me buy my first ever subscription to an online blog…

Conclusion

How does it feel to be a paying member of pando.com?

The first 2 hours have felt pretty good. It is only $8 per month on an annual subscription. You should try.

PS: As an aside “Following Sarah Truman”

Not one of the reasons why I converted as a subscriber, but something that I have enjoyed very much about pando over the last 3-4 years is watching Sarah grow as an entrepreneur. Because she frequently writes about the status quo of pando it is almost like watching the Truman Show for entrepreneurs.

She has gone through all the typical phases (over confident and dreamy eyed at the outset), first false signs of success through pre-mature investor validation, realizing that it is actually quite hard to run a business. Thinking about giving up. Continuing anyway. This is where she currently stands.

Funnily enough I sometimes have the feeling that like Jim Carrey in the movie she isn’t aware of her own development and doesn’t realize that they are what every successful entrepreneur goes through. Despite this I have the feeling she is on a solid track. Hell, if she doesn’t’ give up I think she is about to discover the importance of customer development and target personas quite soon. For some strange reason this always seems to happen when entrepreneurs are about to run out of money for the first time :)

As a founder led media site Pando has something that Michael Arrington also always had for techcrunch: a coherent product vision. And that is really enjoyable.

We live in the post business card age. This means when I meet people at events I typically add them straight on linkedin.

E.g. today I attended an excellent event by AECAL in Berlin. I met a number of great entrepreneurs from India. Some really impressive stuff. I particularly liked TalkMore a mobile app that analyses your phone usage and then suggests which mobile plan is optimal for you, based on actual data. Particularly great for a market like India, where 95% of customers are on prepaid and therefore change carrier upto three times per month.

Now, I know that I will travel to Mumbai some time in the next twelve months. When I go I will want to ping some of the people I met today and that it will be a nightmare for me to find them among my 800 Linkedin contacts.

I would love to be able to add a tag “AECAL BERLIN July15″ to the people I met today, making it super easy to find them again.

How do you guys solve this problem? Any tips, productivity hacks or maybe this feature already exists and I simply haven’t found it yet?

Update: I’ll build it myself. Should be with you shortly ;)
Another update: apparently Linkedin deprecated the part of the API I was trying to use. So never mind. Will try using inbot now to keep track of my contacts ;)

This is a question that I get asked frequently by friends that are about to start on their first startup journey. How do I know whether my idea is a good startup idea?

When we founded Kinderfee we focussed on three main decision parameters.

1) We tried to do a negative selection. We tried to find the biggest problems / risks for each business idea we had. We then tried to understand whether we as a team would be able solve these problems or not. As an example, we were thinking of doing an online shop for bathroom needs (razor, toothbrush, etc). We identified the two main risks as a) need to raise a lot of money to build stock b) need to have excellent logistic processes, as margins are very tight for these products. We decided against this idea because we felt we didn’t have sufficient logistics expertise to operate the business successfully.

2) We discussed whether we would be willing to spend the next 5 years of our life working on this idea, even if it was not successful. Building a good company takes time and we wanted to make sure we were truly passionate about the idea, to make sure we would also continue working on the company if we encountered problems on the way (which you always do). And hey, you only live once.

3) We tried to collect as much initial data for the business as we could prior to launching it (trying to figure out market size, doing customer surveys and interviews, etc.). Is this a big opportunity? What drives the buying process? How can we win the first customers and would our friends buy this product / service from us?

What do I do to test my startup idea, once I have decided on one?

1) Just test it

I hope the above was helpful. As always looking forward to your comments and or own ideas. Thanks to Darja Gutnick for pushing me to write this post ;)

Market places are so insane hard to get liquid.

So last month at TOA13, we held a chicken / egg workshop for marketplaces to discuss different techniques for overcoming the chicken / egg problem.

You can find my full presentation below, but the key learning that I wanted everyone to takeaway is to FOCUS on a subsegment of your total addressable market at first.

The magic (simplified) formula for market liquidity

In a 2-sided marketplace the liquidity (or percentage happiness in your marketplace) behaves analogous to the formula:

a*b/n²

where

a =  number of different supply side offers (in your marketplace)

b = number of different demand side requests (in your marketplace)

n = total number of potential different needs

A simple example

If you run a marketplace for shoes:

a = number of different shoes on offer (e.g. 3 types of shoes, each available in 5 colors, each available in 5 sizes), a = 3x5x5 = 125

b = number of different shoes your customers want (e.g. 100 customers, each looking for a different combination of shoe type, size and color), b = 100

n = total number of shoes that exist in the world (for simplicity lets assume only 100 shoe designs existed, each available in 10 colors and 10 sizes), n = 100x10x10 = 10,000

In this example your liquidity would be:

a*b/n²  = 125x100 / 10,000² = 12,500 / 100,000,000 = 0.0125%

Key takeaway

This trivial example shows how valuable it can be to focus on a subsegment of the total market at first. If you focus on a 1/10th of the total market (say jogging shoes only) your n would be 1,000 and your n² would be 1,000,000. Hence by improving your focus by a factor of 10 your liquidity would increase by a factor of 100x to 1.25%.

The above explains why most marketplaces have a hard time at first, but grow exponentially once things start to happen.

As always, looking forward to your comments below and your tweets / facebook shares if you found this little blog entry helpful.

You can find my full presentation, including practical tips for gaining liquidity, below.

Working at a young company offers so many great advantages, from self-fulfillment, joy, amazing energy and an opportunity to work in a great atmosphere with friends - only to name a few. On the flip side it also comes with a high degree of uncertainty, pressure and at times an incredibly intense emotional stress. It often feels like going at 180 mph with about 5 yards of vision.

Everybody has their own way of handling this stress. Here are some of the tips that have worked for me. Hope to learn what works for you in the comment section.

1) Get your shit done

Nothing stresses me out as much as having a long and growing to do list that seems to grow over my head. The only thing you can really do about this is prioritize harshly and make sure to get the most important things done first. One of the best books I ever read about this topic is: Eat that Frog - it is a two hour read and has some excellent tips on prioritizing and getting the important things done.

2) Pace yourself

In the first year of your startup everyone constantly burns the midnight oil and I think that is what you should be doing right at the start. There are so many tough challenges for a young company and if you don’t put in the extra effort it is unlikely that you will ever get the first version of your product shipped. Once you’ve passed the first mountain I think it is important to pace yourself. Everyone has a different maximum number of hours they can work in a week without going insane. Personally, I try to stay at least 20-30% below my own maximum threshold, because I feel this is a tempo I can keep up on a sustainable basis. You can still do the intermittent sprint, but think more about your average speed over a long period of time. As they say: Most overnight successes took several years to build.

3) Release the stress every once in a while

Nothing like going out with friends and getting hammered to forget about your business every once in a while. What also helps me is going to the gym or playing football. Really powering myself out in the gym typically keeps me stress free for at least a couple of days - it also seems to make me more productive.

4) Focus on the positive and the long term

At a startup you typically work as  problem solver. This means that you work on a problem until it is solved and then move on to the next problem that needs to be solved. While this makes complete sense from a getting things done perspective it typically means that you spend 95% of your time looking at things that aren’t yet working the way they are supposed to work. This can give you a negatively skewed perspective of your own business. What I try to do on a regular basis is look back at the things we achieved in the last 6 months. It always surprises me how far we’ve come. We also have a culture of celebrating every success as good as we can. Every bug we fixed or feature we’ve pushed gets posted on our huge DONE whiteboard (1.5 x 3m). We also regularly open a bottle of wine or champagne in the office if we had a good sales week or a good month.

5) Digital diet

Apart from sport this is probably the trick that helps me relax best. Whenever I feel really fried I turn of my phone and leave my laptop off. No email, no twitter, no facebook for a weekend and my stress level plummets. I recently read that the number of times you check your emails in a day is an excellent indicator of how close you are to a burn out (couldn’t find the link). I notice this in myself and I have found that if I reduce the “noise” in my life it typically takes me another 2-3 hours to completely wind down.

I hope the above was somewhat helpful. Please feel free to post your own stress reduction techniques in the comments. Also please feel free to tweet or reblog this article if you found it helpful.