Founder Insights: Wins, Fails & Learnings of 2019 — CEO Edition
By Klaus H. Wilch (Co-Founder/CEO Black One Entertainment Group)
Happy new year and welcome to 2020!
The best way to eradicate any last-year fatigue and to perhaps also escape any new year tiredness is definitely by not only striving directly forward but also taking a few days to re-cap what happened the year before and here we go!
First off, being an entrepreneur by founding a company and growing it step-by-step is one of the hardest and yet rewarding things you could do. And it is one heck of a rollercoaster. And if you are in it simply for the money, you will not last for long since for sure there are easier ways to “simply make money” but perhaps almost none similarly rewarding. Greed is never the right motivator for why you should be doing something :)
Before diving into the recap of 2019, make sure to also check out the first part of our entrepreneurial journey from late 2017 till 2018, in this featured article on The Startup (Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +435,000 people).
But now without further ado let’s give you a look into what I learned during 2019 and you can also cross-reference more major events of our company by having a look at Black One — The Genesis (still in construction), a visual timeline of key events, because in this piece we mainly talk about our professional and personal insights than giving a pure chronological recount of events.
And stay tuned to our Twitter Newsfeed since my co-founder Maxim will also release his Founder Insights Piece next.
Index:
Chapter I: The Wins & Fails
Chapter II: The Learnings & Methods
Chapter I: The Wins & Fails
First off, entrepreneurship and building a business is nothing more than a constant array of problem-solving (for yourself and others). Every day you are solving expected and unexpected trivial, small to even bigger problems: “We got another even higher invoice than expected”, “We still did not get a reply back”, “The video material on the external hard disk is not accessible”, “year-end bilancing is due”, “What should we do next in terms of product”. “We need someone that can design xyz”. “xyz can not come in tomorrow due to xyz” etc.
So better enjoy this game, and if you see it also as a learning experience it is quite rewarding in the long run, especially if you see all these small “wins” over countless problems actually adding up and start building a foundation of knowledge, a network of people and slowly form a business.
But the devil is in the fact, that there is no time to rest because business is a never-ending competition unless you know how to create unfair advantages and also unfair products. And leveraging music, content & media are very powerful weapons to win in the war of business. And every day you are being faced with decisions that could either turn out negative, turn out plainly nothing or turn out positive. And I like a bit of healthy “aggressiveness” in business and metaphors and principles found in army speak or martial arts since a startup has to operate and function likewise like a well-trained SWAT Team, a Spartan “300” Force that is able to take it up with entire armies of thousands and ten thousands.
Quick Book Recommendation: The Art of War
And all that you have to keep in mind is:
It’s alright if you lose a few battles, but as long as you win the war, that’s all that matters. — Joe Teti
So overall, if there are more wins then fails you might assume you are on the right trajectory but never ever lose vigilance because the saying above goes also the other way around: “Winning a few battles, does not mean you win the war”. This is also how startups sometimes overthrow long-term incumbent companies because they drooled too long in fake security.
And most importantly from all the wins and fails, try to distill “Learnings and Methods” that will help you to increase meaningful longlasting wins and minimize the time till failure is recognized as one. By now it is also common knowledge in the startup world: fail fast. Not the entire thing. Rather in finding the right method and product/market fit without doubling down all your chips on the wrong product and methods e.g. marketing, production, etc.
So without further ado, let’s recap the most vivid wins and fails from 2019 from my standpoint.
The Wins
Win #1 — Perseverance & Belief becoming a reality
There is nothing more rewarding than if a plan you have prepared for long starts to work out in the direction you wanted. Especially if it was a high-risk high-reward gamble.
Some might wonder, how on earth did Black One end up on Neufund and is now the second company to be running an ETO on this great platform?
Backstory: I discovered Neufund a rough two years ago in late 2017, on a very cold winter day at a small tech event where CEO Zoe was part in a panel about the future of blockchain and its use cases. It was a short panel and Neufund was at that time it seems more an unfinished, very early idea.
I immediately liked the massive potential of the idea and it made me an avid believer in the concept, and I am kind of proud to say that I discovered them a 12–14 months earlier before the investment of Frank Thelen / Freigeist Capital came in and was made public. Perhaps my “VC search instinct” helped me on betting on the right horse. So I consequently researched and tracked the progress of Neufund and visited other events where we ran into the Head of Ventures Agnieszka and did the famous “1-minute pitch”. And when Neufund opened a Google form asking for applications we also sent over our full application among more than another hundred of companies.
And then the long wait began, since Neufund themselves had unexpected delays. See also my Learnings in the next chapter “It always takes three times the time and double the money”.
And we ran into each other again at TOA (Tech Open Air) in July 2018, which Neufund used to announce the public opening of their platform and which was surprise, surprise hosted on the grounds of Funkhaus Berlin (our HQ and big supporter/going to be investor). And we got to say “Hi” to many of the Neufund team and were also invited for a more serious 1:30 hour-long “getting to know and diligence” meeting at the Neufund HQ in the next weeks. Neufund does their diligence definitely right.
And then the wait over the rest of the year till spring next year began again, which we, of course, used to progress our main business further. We hosted a big online Vocal/Rap contest where we also collaborated with the biggest mobile singing app Smule with more than 50M+ monthly users. And we made sure to give also small updates on our progress to our network as well as Neufund.
And when we got the call from Neufund in late spring 2019 “We would like you to have you next on our platform, since we have also tracked your progress over time and have received also positive endorsements from our network”, we were excited and started after the summer break 2019 to prepare for this ETO.
It is an honor but also a burden, but we are doing our best and hopefully many will see the sincerity, preparedness and potential in this business case.
And as we also stated in the press release, banking on Neufund was the right thing to do.
With a professional background in venture capital myself, it was clear to me that finding “traditional investors” in Germany would be an uphill battle for this project. In particular, investors with enough expertise and understanding of the media, music and entertainment worlds at our early stage. This is why from the start, I felt drawn towards the idea of an Equity-Token-Offering.
Now thanks to Neufund, we are able to legally accommodate investors regardless of size from all over the world. This is a great benefit, as the Asian regions understand our business case with ease.
Personally, I find this to be a revolutionary step for young companies and investors alike. There is definitely a huge mismatch between (venture) capital / private equity markets and innovative companies outside of typical (mostly oversubscribed/overhyped) technology markets.
Fortunately, the blockchain-enabled “digitized equity” could finally overcome many of these shortcomings found in traditional finance and (institutional) fundraising.
Win #2 — It is getting serious
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mahatma Gandhi
I love this original quote and guess what, it seems we have already come to the stage between where people laugh and start fighting you.
Even if never intended or even though we never used derisive, aggressive marketing speak by talking bad about “competitors”, we are already starting to piss off people from potential competitors in the media, music and even investor field.
And we are definitely an underdog. But trust me, every startup is until it succeeds or lands its “hits” products etc. when everyone is like “Yes, of course, I knew they would make it”.
And every business is a “hit business” after all. This is also directed at those typical investors who have the prejudice “content business is luck and a hit business” and “technology, on the contrary, is not”… could not be more wrong.
And I actually would like to stay longer under the radar and officially an “underdog” until it is too late for the big ones, but ok, we are already getting their interest, ridicule and “hate”.
And you are definitely then on the right path because if your business was too ridiculous or amateurish they would just ignore you and waste no time at all at you.
And rather have five people that really love you out of 10 then having 10 thinking nothing special about you. Also, later, success polarizes where you have die-hard fans and haters. It is not possible to make everyone like you and think like you, and this also good.
And we can play that “polarizing” and direct aggressive way too, for sure, and we will do this more and more in the future, so I am saying it aloud also now:
“It is only a matter of time before even established top talent will flock over and will put big labels in a bad place”
Because we have patiently put some close to inhuman effort into building the ultimate ecosystem for top talent in music, with our bare hands and lots of smart wits, that will enable top talent and the best producers, creatives and talent from marketing and business to build together an exciting and powerful world of content, products, brands, and experiences.
Because we are combining:
Systems x Physical Space x Brands & Businesses
All this is not provided by a single label, a manager or an agency. We can provide all the functions they have and even more in a more streamlined, cost-efficient, elegant and even fairer way.
And this is for sure going to piss off the incumbents mainly labels since they will see valuable talent thus their assets floating away in the long run. Because it can not be easily copy-pasted but needs extreme efforts to make it work right.
Here one of those out of the Neufund German Telegram group (Translated by deepl.com):
Well, I’m starting to think that Neufund is gonna be a flop… Bafin works against neufund… BLACK ONE ENTERTAINMENT GROUP is a scam, I work in the industry and what they want to do doesn’t work … that’s why companies like SONY, Virgin and BMG failed.
Simply not true. Lol. None of those above ever tried this and that is why K-Pop is now leading in many aspects with their model and has provided us with an entire proven playbook, almost a manual of how to do things differently in the modern age than antiquated labels.
And the “(fast) follower model” is a legit business method with high probability of success, profit, and company survival, because applying working things onto different markets and innovating from there is what made also Asian countries also successful in the beginning and they never stopped innovating from there.
And we are ready for it, give us all your hard comments, we can counter with facts and evidence, but we might just ignore this after some point because someone who does not want to be convinced can not be convinced :)
And here another shocking yet entertaining example of one of these incidents. Even though I was first shocked, kind of in a bad mood at first, and also woke up at night and thought for more than an hour, this is actually a positive thing.
Background Story: This a quite “high” person from the financial and film world who sounded extremely enthusiastic when we connected on LinkedIn in summer, gave me his personal number and I now invited this person to our Telegram Investor’s chat and suddenly this person starts writing things like:
As an Entertainment company…I would be very careful who to spam via Telegram. — — . but if the founder of “VIVA Media” is your only quote recommendation there is no beef anyway. Did not see any of you guys at any show, red carpet, filmball, music award or anywhere close to the business you want to be in. Have fun and burn investors money…..
The easy way would have been to leave the group, but instead, the person started writing completely irrational messages and it was clear fast this person seems to hate us now for the above-mentioned and other non-obvious reasons and also openly supports ICOs (of “friends”), so there is also a conflict of interest with the mission of Neufund.
And I will gladly write next a big analysis piece on “ICOs vs STOs vs VC investing — Where is real value and where is the scam?”.
And that person kept on rambling even more in the 1:1 chat, here for your entertainment.
Read the German to English Full translation by deepl.com here. BTW, deepl.com is by far the best translation engine out there.
So here we go and we will make this win bigger over time:
Let’s piss them off together. And make them envy and fear us.
But overall #spreadlovenothate :)
And here for more entertainment and your insights, we are already connected quite well in the “music world” here in Europe and are being asked to represent, share and lecture, but we chose to not put too much importance on it or to use this to “brag” anywhere. In the end, this is NOT what makes a really successful company. But for some people, this is apparently very important :)
Win #3 — “The Black One Effect”
In statistics, there is correlation and causality. And by now we have now enough statistical data that everyone who worked with us either as (scholarship) intern or for a project suddenly experiences a boost in their own endeavors.
Here are some:
- Got hired to big sports startup to Social Media Team (age 23), first real job after university, after completing an internship with us
- Got a full paid gig from a social media company at (age 21) in NYC and intends to stay thereafter, after working with us as a designer and videographer since he was 19
- Got hired to big classical music startup (designer who really did not like her previous job after one side project with us)
- Videographer (did not get a full-time job for more than 2 years) did one project with us, was coached by us in how to network and present himself and was hired into a full-time position at TV network after
Apparently, among employers, we have some “cred”, or the name resonates well and most likely, what we also like to think is, that all these people may have learned something along the way during their intensive time at Black One and these skills actually help them. We are definitely no easy bosses and we drive people to be better, more creative and more detailed.
And all of those above have mentioned that they would love to stay in touch with Black One and even want to return once we are funded, that is some great recognition for us and many of those who had an experience with Black One are now at different interesting positions and this is also our mantra of “leaving people in a better position before they have met us”. This can and should be applied to many areas in life.
Later we want to have this “Black One Effect” not only for the creatives we work with but all the talent that works with us. And it will then become “Black One Certified”, like the Black Belt being the highest grade and recognition you can get in martial arts (I am a black belt myself, but left Taekwondo after many years due to injury).
Win: When people are developing in positive ways and when a good reputation precedes you as an effect, you know you are on the right way.
BTW, we are also officially working with Erasmus (Host Entrepreneur) and also different public and private organizations that provide us with paid professional talent / mostly interns. And being chosen and vetted by those organizations to be an official training ground for young professionals is also a high recognition for us. And even though HR is hard overall (see learnings), we have had more positive experiences than bad ones along the way, which counts already a lot.
Win #4 — Tax & Audit
Tax & audit are important and surprisingly many CEOs do not have too much knowledge about it and try to put it as far away as possible.
Same for me in the beginning, but now I am proud to say that I was able to do the entire year-end balance for our three companies with minimal professional guidance/overwatch and learned a massive amount about these topics.
Reason: the tax accountant who was recommended to us wanted to charge close to 3000 Euros for doing those three companies, even though in its entirety the accounting cases that had to be booked first into a software were in total less than 30 incidents. Accountants charge by the number of those cases and on top a flat fee for a year-end balance.
So, I got annoyed and put up a seeking on 11880.com, where you can find any professional you want and after more than 10 lengthy phone calls I found the perfect fit with a young auditing and tax company, who right off the bat offered fair prices and since we are a startup a 50% off discount till we are funded. One of the accountants and auditors there also has friends in the music industry, and could only confirm that the industry sucks from the standpoint of artists and that our model makes sense a lot. It is rare to find those here in Europe who understand what we do so easily.
At this opportunity, I would like to show my gratitude to both our lawyer Dr. Moritz Mentzel and our auditor Tobias Wagner, who both saw the potential of our business and gave us huge discounts.
And in the case of our lawyer, we could pay the invoice more than a year later. And funnily, he also plays himself in the company band and was a band member in his youth, so he also himself knows too well the inner workings of the industry.
Because, in the starting phase, of any business, every cent saved is a huge help and those who helped when there was not much we will make sure to reward royally when there is much :)
Same principle, of course, applies to investing. High-Risk High-Reward. Low-Risk No-Reward.
But beware, tax and audit, especially in Germany are highly complex, riddled with thousands of exemptions and regulations etc. so to get this done legally and correctly I spent close to hundred hours in tutorials, reading through forums, assembling information and learning a new software: Lexware Tax Premium, which was a great helper.
And we set up a “workcamp” in the countryside at my girlfriends’ place where for five weekends in total we worked straight through from Friday till Monday, on top of the regular days, because otherwise, all that workload would have not been do-able.
So as a result, we did not only save 3000 Euros, learned extremely important stuff and also found very good tax auditors and tax consultants along the way. Next year I will gladly leave the heavy lifting to them :)
Win #5 — All these great experiences & the 10.000-mile journey
The biggest win for yourself is the journey. Enjoy the process and we certainly do despite all these challenges.
And we are literally working our asses off.
Entrepreneurship means lots of sacrifices.
You work 60–80 and more hours per week (count in that you think about the business all the time), have no real social life left and do not get paid for it at all the first years, but on top are paying your own money into it only with a small chance of making it, sounds lunatic right?
But the journey is so colorful and rewarding in terms of learning, meeting interesting people and being challenged to grow in many aspects.
So you as an investor, you can make your capital comfortably work, since the entrepreneur will be doing the footwork. But for sure some investors earned also their capital with the same footwork and thus understand the process and also have enough patience.
And thus the optimal investor is also the investor who invests in the team, the journey so far and the upcoming journey. Because the journey and story are what is most rewarding. But for sure also the ROI. And we are well-prepared to deliver that ROI.
But the only thing everyone should keep in mind is one thing: respect. Respect for whatever work that was accomplished. Because doing things, even small things, right, is extremely difficult.
Investors should respect entrepreneurs and vice versa, especially if you have not experienced one side directly yourself.
Glad that I can say now, that I have quite an amount of experiences from both sides of the table by now.
And we invite you to visit us if you are in Berlin, and we might also arrange for a general offline event in February.
The Fails
Fail #1 — CEO Tales
We had the plan to give you a transparent insight into the daily work and behind-the-scenes of Black One and who we are and had the idea for a monthly video format that would resemble also in a very self-humorous way HBO’s Silicon Valley.
But this failed.
Why? Because:
a) the videographer turned out to be simply a fraud who had forged details in his CV and turned out to be even an uncoachable alcoholic (which he admitted later), see Learning “Hire Slow Fire Fast” in Chapter II of this article for what we learned from this.
b) video work is way harder than expected, see also the next “Fail #2”
c) with no real skills from the videographer and no real directing it took too much effort from my side, and I shut the project and fired the person from the Guest Entrepreneur Scholarship he was visiting us with (1000 Euro/month tax free for 1–2 days of video work per week with no tangible results after 3 months is basically overpaid…)
And it had been planned out quite well, I feel from my side. We had a topical episode guide, which also resembled lots of what the HBO series “Silicon Valley” would show.
A nice sub-page built by Maxim Boelter within a few hours, that again featured the trailer, which the videographer needed 8 weeks for…and 25 iterations because so many errors, typos, and negligences were in there.
And throughout the entire city (see map below) we shot so many interesting things and all data now (1.5TB) is unsorted on an external hard disk.
So let’s put this into one of the far drawers, and perhaps someday we might re-invigorate it, but likely not, since this is also not our core business but another nice-to-have. More likely we will shoot the BLACK ONE — Diaries, where all the daily happening at Black One Campus will be shown and how the talent trains, gets better and how powerful music is produced on a daily basis.
But without further ado, a look at the trailer:
Fail #2 — Video Work is incredibly hard, complex & expensive
Video is one of the most powerful things but to do it right it is incredibly hard and also expensive. And having the right team to pull it off is even more difficult. And explaining what you want to video professionals is like one of the most challenging things that exist. Video folks are very special folks, you will have the total “gear heads” or over-ambitious “Quentin Tarrantino” wanna-be’s, the list is long. And unfortunately, most creatives are not good project managers and vice versa. So having both is the hard part.
And ironically, we are getting applications from so much video talent from all over the world on a daily basis, but it is clear most are not up to the job. After being funded we will use mainly vetted professionals who have optimally shot already with for instance K-Pop or US entertainment companies and with whom together we will start developing a unique European visual and DNA for our music videos, products etc.
But we are getting better and better with also communicating with video professionals. So by now after spending lots of hours, money and frustration with video projects we have come finally to a point where we feel now confident enough in this regard to also give strict orders because just trusting into the “creative lead” of a video professional will backfire way too often.
Like with so many things in entrepreneurship you will be forced to become mainly by self-study almost a semi-professional in the topic to be able to communicate with the full professionals to prevent miscommunication but also simply avoid being ripped off. This also applied to the topic of taxes & audit which I already talked about.
The most current video project which finally worked out quite smoothly was the shooting with the Vocal coach from the UK, with whom we are going to launch a first online product as well as an offline product. Stay tuned since we are releasing more information on the status at the end of January. And this was also noted on our product roadmap and stay assured we are executing along with it.
Facts:
- Shooting for 3 Days: 8am to 1am = 16–17h Days
- No real time for lunch or dinner (you just forget if you are really busy lol)
- Transporting rented gear worth 15K Euro around town in rental cars
- Incredibly cold Berlin mornings so rental cars would not start due to battery, and walking around for kilometers till finding one which works
- Close to 1TB of video footage and 100s of minutes of high-quality audio
- Overall cost: Around 1K (Flights for Coach, Accomodation AirBnB, Rental Cars, Gear, Studio Rental, Videographer) since we were smart with renting from someone we knew and having lots of discounts also at Pirate Studios.
So if we now launch the course and offline product in Q1 / 2020 and produce revenues this will have a very nice input-to-output ratio.
Fail #3 — Social Media / Conversion is Hard without paid budgets & Youtube, in the end, kills them all
Social media (Instagram, Facebook) has become by now a very skewed game, where you need to have paid budgets otherwise the algorithms of the biggest platforms will plainly ignore you. This is especially true for Instagram.
We had our biggest learning with Instagram throughout the last year during the Vocal Rap Contest which was held entirely online.
Even though we had Smule, the biggest singing app in the world on board (with more than 770K+ Instagram followers) and also different big Instagram pages, we created lots of views at the end but the conversion at was terribly unexpectedly low when they were sharing our content.
We really tried to find out why, since the content was more than fine, and it is because of the algorithms.
The biggest IG page for singers with more than 1M+ followers also gave us the shocking insight in a phone call that you can expect max. 1000 new followers when they share things for you actively for more than four weeks! and do even a post about you, because Instagram is not showing the content to most of their followers, only if you pay Instagram directly. And the same is with Facebook…they belong together after all.
A big thank you goes out to StarsUncovered, a very well run Instagram page for singers (based in Australia) and they helped us a lot during the Vocal Rap Contest and gave us lots of insights into the difficult IG area. And we will for sure, come back and collaborate again.
But overall, this is some bleak outlook, and this also turned many Instagram pages dead even if they have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers.
You are forced now to buy the engagement from Instagram / Facebook directly. Obviously they want you to do “paid marketing”.
But simply “buying” conversion, followers etc. is also dangerous and will backfire in the long run since it is not sustainable at all. And it makes more sense to have rather 1.000 true fans than a bought but not engaged 10.000 people “audience”.
And overall, we have been confirmed in a very simple assumption which we will simply also come true for ourselves in the next years: the best conversion vehicle on earth is Youtube to X.
Youtube to Instagram. Youtube to Facebook. Youtube to SEO. Youtube to Sales.
Youtube is killing them all, and gladly it is still the best “discovery” and “conversion” platform that still exists out there, where content quality still is favored much into if a video goes viral or not.
And what is the best content on Youtube?
It is music. And K-Pop also became globally big because of big parts due to Youtube. So the circle closes again.
Another thought: It is kind of the eternal cycle in the digital app realm. Build a product. Ship it for free. Build a big audience. Start monetizing (ads or paid marketing) and then often slowly the core fanship may start looking for a new alternative.
Happened with Teamspeak to Discord. The list is long.
And it may happen with Facebook and IG at some point too. Because technology is blatantly copiable and in the end, the users are what drives the value and if they leave you will lose very fast your competitive edge. Technology without users is worth nothing. So good to remember what comes first :)
Chapter II: The Learnings & Methods
These learnings and methods will for sure help anyone also in business, entrepreneurship or also in your private life.
Learning #1: It always costs 2x and takes 3x the time
Rather more a confirmation of already what we knew but you encounter this everyday day in running a business. Stay patient. Unforeseen costs like laptops breaking down after years of good usage (both MacBook Pros of mine and my co-founder died after 7 and 8 years of extended usage with upgrades in between).
Learning #2: Shoot for the Stars and Reach Mars
Set your targets always in a hyper-ambitious way, because if you only reach half of it you still reached damn much. And also set tight deadlines, so if you extend those deadlines twice or three times you end up at the normal, like stated with “It always takes 3x the time”, so whatever the initial deadline was, you end up there, so better set it ambitious anyways.
But to get there you have to divide these huge goals into many smaller SMART goals.
And we are using Asana to manage all our projects and break them down to the tiniest little detail. A separate blog post on how we work will actually follow soon.
Learning #3: The 3 Iteration Rule, The Magic Number 3 & The last 20%
And why does it take always longer and cost more?
Most of the time it is because of “over-perfection”, “over-iteration” and “not pushing for the last 20%”.
So, I introduced the “3 Iteration Rule” to the team, where any medium-sized task, for instance, should be roughly be done in 3 iterations within a maximum of 3 weeks.
- Quick draft within max. a week whatever the work (business/video/design). Get OK from the team/executive to advance or go back to the draft board.
2. Close to finished version: see how it looks almost finished (best within 2nd week)
3. Last polish and finish: in last and third week and all finished outcomes and assets should be uploaded into management tool and cloud for all to access
Smallest tasks should be done within 3 hours. Medium Tasks should be done within 3 days, and very big tasks within 3 months, all within three iterations, and the bigger the project obviously the more in-between reporting/sharing of progress should be done. You see the Magic Number 3 here. It also resonates in negotiation (end it in three phases: your first offer, counteroffer, final offer or leave it) and also trying at least 3 times in sales, before you know if a person is interested or not.
Common rule: There is no over-communication but there is over-iteration. If you have to do 100 versions of a thing, you have missed the briefing/intention/goal from the get-go.
Sample Big Fail Case with an external freelancer where enforcing this was harder than usual and neglected from the beginning:
So this video guy was working on one important video for one entire month for the first draft since he always made up some reason/excuse why he needs more time for the first preview and when he was showing us that draft, it was totally unusable, but we had lost ONE entire month and then it went into 10 iterations and the output was sub-optimal.
We should have gone back to the draft board as fast as possible, but it was impossible to get a look at the draft beforehand, and since lots of sunken costs had arisen by then we also fell into this common psychological trap: “ok now that we started with this like, let’s simply finish this, it only can get better from now.”
But it did not, of course. The “sunken cost fallacy” had hit us.
The problem of over-perfection, paralysis, delay and people not wanting to show previews within the first week can be especially often seen with creatives who often say “Please wait, I am still embarrassed, I will show once it is ready (close to perfect)”.
So never let this trap hit you but enforce early previews. This may happen also in any external agency scenario etc.
But this is a big trap and waste. So, if you are working with creatives educate them about the “work-in-progress” idea.
And the problem with too many iterations is that it exhausts everyone involved and the “It is finished but not finished” problem appears, where 80% have been done in 20% of the time, but the rest 20% need now suddenly 80% feeling like an infinite amount of time.
This is simply also the all too well-known Pareto rule.
So the goal is to be within 3 iterations already at 100% because then this whole process is as painless as possible. And you will have fewer projects/tasks in your backlog that all remain at an 80% finished but not finished state.
And most people, especially creatives do not like to start again at the 80% because the last 20% feel boring, uncreative and already kind of finished. But it is far from finished.
But this is also exactly how you can distinguish a professional from a non-professional. Professionals always push through the last painful 20% and have a painstaking level of attention to detail until the last 1%.
They do not stop at the easy 80% but know that the last 20% are the most important and painful.
This is what you could also call perhaps “the last mile” that so many people do not take in whatever area of life etc., but this exactly is the secret for success.
Learning #4: Kill Heuristics
Or re-think the simple & obvious, because it is not as simple and obvious as our brain likes to give us the illusion of.
Because as humans we (need to) assess the world with its potential risks and outcomes in so many different situations, and to make this easy and fast, we make lots of assumptions and often use “heuristics” which are like shortcuts.
Because our brain likes to save energy and to be lazy, so it uses lots of these shortcuts which are often not driven by logic.
Learning #5: “The Bullshit Method” — Or how to avoid “smartshitting”
A little method which we invented throughout. We say brainstorming is just “smartshitting”, because in this context everyone feels pressured to sound smart and come up with expected and (socially) acceptable, safe arguments.
A simple example out of reality: “What should we do for marketing next?”
You will always hear the same: “Ah I read somewhere that social media / influencers / XYZ are big, we should do something with them”. And what? “Ahem no idea…let’s brainstorm and research next?”
Doing it like this you will never come up with something radically new, fresh or unconventional.
But rather encourage everyone to “bullshit” as much as possible, to come up with fast associations, word-plays, funny and wild ideas, throwing around whatever comes to their mind and build on top in a chain reaction what the previous person said.
And suddenly you have for instance a “gecko-green new swag lime juice” that could be a cool product to hit the shelf. And the gecko is wearing sunglasses etc. etc.
We have used this method lots of times successfully, where we came up with unconventional ways to certain things/ideas or suddenly had the megalomaniac idea “Let’s go and pitch XYZ” as a result. If you let your mind roam freely and playfully it works wonders. But to make use of this method you need though some moderation/facilitation skills because most people are subconsciously scared of being judged and do not want to make fools of themselves. But for us in contrast, we actually LOVE to make a fool of ourselves within this set context and method.
Will write a book later at some point about this, sounds like massive fun to me :) and I did a short Google search:
“”If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit!
— W. C. Fields
Bullshitting is, in a way, an art form. It’s not exactly lying as when you’re bullshitting you may in fact be telling the truth in a completely slanted or useless form, or you may simply be saying nothing at all.
Source: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bullshit
And there is the famous: Bullshit/Buzzword Bingo. But that is all. So this method does officially not yet exist.
Learning #6: Hire Slow, Fire Fast
HR is terribly difficult. Even though we get thousands of (unsolicited) applications from creative and marketing talent from all over the world, filtering is the hard part.
By now we have come to the conclusion, you should always give an unpaid 1-month test task to prospective candidates. Otherwise, you will “buy the cat in the sack”. (German Saying)
Because you will see first how motivated that person is and what real skills they bring to the table and if they will be still in the game if there is an unpaid test task to it. But overall, luckily we have had more positive than negative experiences.
But the bigger we get the more applications we get, already now at a crazy level, and now we slowly are being also approached by “frauds” who when we asked for references suddenly stop communication. Listen to your gut feeling. A CV is just a piece of paper so better test the people for their skills first, before doing any hiring at all.
Learning #7: Give only what is asked from you
Also in this context and a good tip from our lawyer:
“Give only first what is asked for but do not give more right from the beginning because it will not be appreciated.”
We thought that we should incentivize people by talking about e.g. stock options, but:
a) most do not know what they are (at least in our industry)
b) thus they would not appreciate it
c) you are hindering yourself in the long run with it
d) less is more in the beginning because you can slowly increase
e) people just wanting financial rewards are not in it for the sake of the game
So in short, make sure to understand what people really want. Many favour an open, real company culture, creative freedom etc. much more than just a simple higher paycheck or stock options. And this is actually good because you actually want those who are talented and “in the game for the sake of the game” and not just in for the money or the prestige attached to the industry. We get those vanity applications on a daily basis anyway.
And we have been putting exactly so much emphasis on company culture and the realization of an immense physical space in form of Black One Campus, who will make it easy and seamless to create the right vibe and atmosphere where high-quality content creation becomes the norm and not a coincidence.
Learning #8: Sometimes better do and ask for forgiveness than asking for permission before
Do not fear to polarize. Do not fear what others will think. Similar to the quote in the very beginning, where most will plainly “ignore you first, then laugh at you, then fight you and then lose”, most other people are just not interested in what you do, so do not always ask for permission for whatever you do, but act with confidence!
But keep in mind to not spread false truths whereas exaggerating a bit for marketing purposes is always fine.
In business, this is key, because being timid will bring you nowhere, plus being scared of all potential repercussions of your actions will bring you nowhere. Most of the time, there are none, and if you do it with respect and while staying charming, you can go a long way and earn the permission without never ever having had to ask or negotiate for it.
Learning #9: (Self-) Humor is everything
And whatever you do, never lose the ability to laugh about yourself and making others laugh. A day without laughter is a wasted day for sure :)
Stay human, and also your team members will feel more relaxed and a connection with you, because funnily, alone given through the relationship: after all, you have to be a “boss” at the end of the day, people will always have a bit of subconscious fear and anxiety about you. So make fun of yourself and never about others. And I am proud to say, that my co-founder Maxim Boelter and I have by now become quite good at respectfully dissing ourselves and each other in front of others just for the entertainment, and we enjoy this, too :)
Learning #10: Free-Time, Health & Family
Living for your work can be great but also dangerous. And we are enjoying ourselves so much that we actually need to force ourselves to plan in “free time”. This is a common problem for entrepreneurs or anyone really passionate about something, that you will neglect other parts of your life without noticing.
So, even it sounds so mundane, try to keep a healthy balance and invest time and effort into your own health, family and personal relationships.
And this is difficult because we easily feel guilty about not being fast enough and not being able to reach all our goals/workload as fast as we always imagine. It is all about time management and priorities in the end, also for this blog post, I chunked out lots of quiet time on weekends from the mid-of December, since during the week I am too occupied with the core business.
Time chunking is also actually a productivity method, which I by now have mastered to quite some good extent.
So feel no guilt, stay patient, because work will never end and stress is self-made. And many “problems” can actually wait another day or two, or pooled with other problems, because they will sometimes not only solve themselves but you will have a better solution to them if tackling them with a bit more thought time.
And after the most intensive building up phase, I want to get back to regular exercising and also trying out a new sport. There was literally no time and also spare money for this the last two years.
Life is short, so better enjoy it and be grateful for it. And I am very much looking forward to what 2020 and the new decade of the 2020s will bring to my life and the lives of all those who are in some way or the other connected to me.
Thanks for reading and keen to hear your thoughts, comments and also recommendations :)
Yours sincerely,
Klaus H. Wilch
