You're sales

I want to reframe my post You’re product and community. 

Product and community are the two most important parts of my business (other than technology, which I can’t actively work on). 

If the most important part of your business is selling your product or services directly to customers, don’t outsource sales.   It’s fine to outsource everything else.  If the difference between success and failure is your ability to close sales with ad agencies, spend 80% of your time understanding your customer, engaging them, and closing the deal.  Spend 20% sleeping.  Have other people do the rest (website, marketing materials, taking out the trash). 

Don’t hire a sales guy so you can make sure the trash gets taken out.  You are the best (and only) person to tell the story.  Tell it.

You're product and community

When I was first starting work on Loosecubes, one of my friends and trusted advisors said to me, “You’re going to need to be the product manager and the community manager for now. You can’t delegate these early on.” 

I had no idea what a product manager was and had some idea about what the community manager might be.  I’d run a nonprofit after all. 

For those of you who don’t know what a product manager is, check a great post by Colin Nederkoorn (Product Manager for Challenge Post and generally awesome person): http://bit.ly/b0nwfO 

If you’re starting a company on your own, start thinking about how you balance manager time (community) with maker time (product).  These are two very different ways of thinking.  I found doing product (wireframes, user flows, reviewing comps) at night and on the weekend and doing community during the day (emails, marketing materials, meeting with people, talking to users) the best way to balance both.

This is why it’s hard to find time to exercise when you’re starting a company.  Hang on, it does get better (I hope).