Three Pieces of Advice for Solo Entrepreneurs Getting Started

1. Find an area of the world that you are instinctively excited and curious about. Even better if it is a unique intersection of interests that you and your team share. Music analytics was not something people were asking about or searching for several years ago, we were creating a new market.

Each day at Next Big Sound, rather than getting more routine, it gets more interesting as we go down the rabbit hole gathering more data, signing on more customers, understanding their questions better, and providing answers which lead to more questions. This is only possible because of our innate curiosity and excitement about finding the Truth in this arena.

2. Start talking with as many other people as you possibly can about your idea and the part of the world you are most interested in. You never know who has a cousin/friend/classmate who shares a similar fascination and you want to expose yourself to as much serendipity as humanly possible. The famous saying is “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” I don’t think that’s entirely right. I think it’s more about who knows you. If you are the guy or gal always talking about bitcoin 10 years before it’s all over Techcrunch or the person obsessed with photography 5 years before Instagram’s sale makes headlines, opportunities will find you.

3. Once you’ve found the sector and others who share your enthusiasm it is time to run as fast as you possibly can. This means real validated learning with customers and users. In the early days don’t be too obsessed with A/B testing (since you have no users this will take weeks to run and provide questionable data) – build product, put it in front of people, get their feedback, rinse and repeat. At Next Big Sound we are 25 people and still trying to speed these cycles up no matter the cost. We moved the entire company from Boulder to New York City to be able to put new product in front of end customers in the music industry in half the time from when we were in Boulder. These cycles can never be fast enough.

Writing Your Own Offer Letter

There is a surreal exercise almost every venture-backed founder/CEO goes through at some point along the journey. Writing your own offer letter.

Imagine filling in the following Mad Libs at 22-years-old:

Dear Alexander White, we are pleased to offer you position as CEO of Next Big Sound. Your compensation will be ______ and you have ______ days of PTO per year. Sincerely, Alexander White.

That was me, writing and signing my own offer letter in the Fall of 2009 right after our Seed financing. I remember working with Mike Platt and our law firm, Cooley LLP, on the offer letter template (which we then submitted for board approval).

The idea of getting a salary to work on Next Big Sound was incredibly foreign to me and almost felt like cheating. Especially after the previous year where NBS had only raised $40k total. You mean I will get paid, have equity upside, and get to work on our company?!

It wasn’t until a year or two later that we finally put offer letters in our own NBS letterhead. Offer letters seemed like really serious legal documents at the time and we were afraid of tampering with them at all.

One thing we never got to do was rewrite the offer letters in plain English. We’d still have needed our attorney and PEO to sign off on it but I think it would have set a great tone for new employees and been another touch point of our culture and what’s important to the business. Conveying all the critical legal language while still making it feel like a Next Big Sound experience.

I’d be curious to know if anyone has done this?  

The Next Big Sound Is Not The Last Big Sound

The next big sound will, by definition, be some combination of previous styles, recombined and re-imagined. Elvis Presley and rock and roll. LL Cool J, Run DMC and hip-hop. Skrillex and EDM. The biggest artists in history were the ones who crossed and combined genres, influences and styles in a way that resonated with millions of listeners.

Artists like this are hard to understand at the beginning of their careers because nobody knows what to do with them. They don’t fall into the pre-existing genres, radio stations don’t know which format to play them on, record stores don’t know where to stock them, parents don’t know what to make of them, and the press doesn’t know how to describe them. This is one application of my theory of intersections, that the most interesting things happen at the intersection of previously separate fields.

The artists that are simply following the sounds of the day are playing a long game of catchup and likely never to have the crossover and timeless appeal of the early trailblazers. That said, most trailblazers die in obscurity. And here lies the paradox.  

By the time a track like Omi’s Cheerleader or Magic’s Rude is number one, it’s too late for that exact sound. If you are only listening to the current top of the charts, you miss the months and years that have built up to that point. You miss the years when Magic! and Omi were writing, performing, recording, and finding their own voice that didn’t sound like what everyone else was currently listening to. If you try to mimic their style or sound, without authentically combining it with your own voice, you won’t get very far.  

I see the same thing in startupland. If you just watch the type of companies getting funding on Techcrunch, written about in the press, and think that you should start another gaming company (2009), mobile app (2010), big data company (2011), daily deals site (2012), Uber or AirBnB for X (2013), bitcoin company (2014), food delivery startup (2015) etc. you’ll just be chasing a mirage. The successful entrepreneurs are usually the ones who have been focused on this area for years, obsessed with the problem area since long before it was in the spotlight. The ones just there chasing the headlines and tailwinds are quickly weeded out (sometimes not quickly enough).

It’s okay to listen to the top charts, watch the startup news and learn about financings and exits, and read about the titans of business, just make sure you’re using them as inputs into your own kaleidoscope and not trying to chase their exact colors.