On building great products with awesome people
Startup founders should learn from Gospel choirs
Whitney Houston, Whoopi Goldberg, Beyonce – these are the names you probably connect with gospel music. Joy, clapping rows of people bouncing on a stage, long robes, drums and piano, and the thin border between the choir and audience. The story is about being yourself and building a great product with awesome team. This is what I’ve learnt during a few years singing in gospel choirs.
Practice what you preach
GOSPEL: Be yourself. There are gospel choirs and totally commercial choirs performing gospel music. Gospel choir is not about skin color or robes. You can’t cheat your audience. Have power to stand for what you believe in, take a mic and express what you feel looking at people’s eyes.
Have courage to sing it out. Each next concert, solo, worship evening will be different. You have to start with something remembering about being real. Don’t pretend somebody who you are not. You don’t have to sing like Whitney Houston or Tye Tribbett. Just be yourself and know why you are singing.
BUSINESS: If you don’t stand for what you do, how can a user trust you? It’s like lying to a small kid pretending that they won’t notice. Making things happen is a lot of fun if you practice what you preach. The news spread faster when the speaker is self-aware, honest, transparent.
Don’t please everybody, reach only those that matter for your product. Don’t hide yourself beyond the wall of a fake unattainable brand. Marketing is all what you do, not just what you call a marketing task, department, or campaign.
Going beyond the scenes, showing who stands behind a product, and being self-aware — all of these differentiate your product.
User’s experience starts much before you notice a user on the horizon.
Don’t pretend a company that you are not. Be honest with users, they’ll appreciate this. Be the first to announce both awesome and bad news, don’t swipe things under the carpet. Hopefully, you don’t have to talk about the latter too often.
The shapes at the dark huge audience are the most important
GOSPEL: Look for touchpoints with the audience. Find their eyes in the crowd. You sing and worhsip to do it with them. You don’t do it just for yourself. Sure as a choir member you benefit a lot. You are super-excited before each concert, love fun at rehearsals, pray the way you love, and feel total freedom and joy while singing. Your goal is to glorify, bring emotions, provide awesome experience, share joy, and empower people around. You can’t achieve your goal just only being in touch with the choir, your conductor, or musicians. You are on stage to communicate with the audience.
You have to materialize the black shades in front of you. The tiny wet eyes and the sparkling shiny ones, the stamping feet, the rising lip corners showing awesome smiles. You have to gather it all into a person who has needs, anxieties and problems. You are to help, to make the people feel powerful and simply happy with the music.
You have to understand the audience and serve them. They differ from concert to concert, from person to person, have the target group you want to reach. You do it differently each time despite singing the same song. Listen to what people tell you, how they react, check the audience before the concert. Communicate. Gospel music is not only about sounds and beat.
Have bigger ears than mouth.
Listen more than you speak. It’s not just about notes and singing the right voice from the harmony. It’s about making people comfortable to express what they think and what they need.
Respect variety of opinions both among your choir members as well as concert audience. Not everybody has the same amount of time to practice at home, not everybody likes the same version of a given song, not everybody can move to the beat. Some need additional help to catch up, others can inspire and become teachers. Do everything to help, connect the dots. Know your choir.
Be prepared for different opinions from the audience. Make sure you know who’s your target audience you want to listen to. There will be a person who says: too long, too short, too bouncy, too calm, too dark, too loud, too quiet, too protestant, too catholic, etc. Make sure you know the people you are aiming at and what you want to offer.
BUSINESS: The product you launch is to be great in the eyes of your users. Design it with them. How? Take a step forward and make the shapes from the audience become real human faces. Get to know them. Listen to them long before you launch your MVP. You can do it only by being in touch, experiencing how they feel and what they need. Don’t look in the crowd, look at your users’ eyes. Co-creation is powerful. Asking and having the ears open is the key. Sometimes users are wrong but that’s why YOU are the founder and have the final voice which way to go.
Say no but be sure it’s ok with the vision. It’s like being a parent of your young kid. You know what could do better for them even if they suggest huge ice-cream in a windy fall day. Iterate on your primary idea. Great product is never done. Think about the product a bit like about a good friend.
Make it reliable and exciting to spend time with. Value useful solutions over being cool for a moment.
Use in-person demos to learn not to shout how wonderful your product is. I believe Jason Fried explains it great in the beginning of this video
You do stuff for users. Your business exists because of them. Without them you can’t make money. Without having ears open you may create a product that’s perfect only for you. If you haven’t listened to your users during designing the product, nobody will listen to you. You don’t have to agree, disagreeing is sexy as long as you can support your no and it doesn’t deny your mission.
Focus on work and be a doer
GOSPEL: The choir are the people. I’ve never met a group of people that meet together and sound perfect together from the first song. There is always something to polish. Big things happen because of hard work and collaboration. Teamwork effort and commitment make big things happen. Everybody works in a group. No matter if you are a freshman, a leader, a musician, a conductor, or a manager.
If you want to make people work, give the example first. It’s easy to complain, then ask what do you do about it? In Gospel Sound we’ve encouraged everybody to take a doer test. We wouldn’t have survived the choir’s growth if people hadn’t taken things in their hands. You have to try change a thing you don’t like instead of complaining about it. You don’t have to do it on your own, you can look for a person who can change it with you and make the whole choir happy. Be a doer, people from your team will follow you.
BUSINESS: Leader is a name written with hard work. Managers of one (as called in Rework) are the people I love working with. Together we can do a lot, yet everybody knows what’s right to do and can execute the idea from the beginning to the end. We meet to work, not to discuss stuff without executing them. Sure, we can be friends and meet extra to have fun but this is a separate story. Working with managers of one you don’t have to plan each next move of a person, they know what to do.
If you want to make people follow you remember that your actions speak more than words. You can’t expect people to do the work for you while you are busy with managing them. Inspire by what you do. To give you the example, have a look at Gero. I had a chance to work with him for a while. These are the people you remember, recommend, and follow.
Team, next to timing, is essential for your startup success.
Support creativity in people
GOSPEL: Support in a team gives the ground for creativity. You are willing to experiment in your solo performance if you feel the supporting group of people at your back, no matter if you are newbie in music or a professional singer with years of experience.
BUSINESS: We are all creative by nature. Kids are the best proof for that. Sometimes people just need some support to get more self-confident. Take away fear of judgement and a let your product benefit from amazingly creative team. Tim Brown, founder of IDEO, explains perfectly how to boost creativity in this TED talk.
Think also about your product users. Support them to discover numerous uses of the product/service you sell. Make it fun. We like creating when other people notice it. That’s human nature. We like collaborating with other users, learning, and getting useful feedback.
To get awesome results you need to provide support and no fear to create environment. Appreciate the creative efforts your users make. Make their stories count. Maybe it’s time to employ gamification in your product if you haven’t tried it yet. Take benefit of common practice but customize it.
Leave users a place to inject their personality in what they create.
Make it easy to customize the content people work on in your app. Take benefit of whatever gives users freedom to feel the product as theirs and doesn’t introduce chaos to your product. Make sure the profile and any content they create is completely theirs, whenever they want to access it. Let users express themselves to motivate them to come back often and share the news willingly. People don’t buy a product, they buy better version of themselves.
Trust, don’t delegate but share roles
GOSPEL: You won’t manage to lead all the events on your own. You have to put trust in people. You can check them e.g. during a rehearsal. You can’t conduct, meet the guests, sing, play the piano, take photos, shoot a movie and answer the phones at the same time. You have to trust. You have to share the roles. To be effective you can’t make people do stuff they wouldn’t like to do. The person doesn’t have to be perfect in something, more important is the attitude.
BUSINESS: People require 3–10 years of experience before even considering the person. Isn’t the will to learn and attitude equally important? Look around for attitude first. Skills can be learnt.
Know your team and stay up to date with them. Maybe some will help this time working on something totally new and just serve as a mentor to those who wanna wear this role? Variety is the driving force. Make sure your team and finally product can benefit from role taking, not only task division.
Don’t put labels on your team only because of the so far experience. Give a place for experiencing new, learning, sharing roles not strict duties. Give effort to know the people you are working with.
Don’t copy, get inspired and have your voice
GOSPEL: Gospel music is much about patterns, traditional songs, inspirations. Majority of the choirs interpret the same songs. You can go to a different country, join a new choir and you should know at least half of the songs they sing. The difference is in how you sing them.
The real power of choirs is that when they meet together they can unite. Each of them is unique but together they can share the stage and make the audience astonished.
The video below is a part of the final workshop concert. The people meet for a weekend in one place coming from different corners of Poland and various choirs. Some of them stand in the choir for the first time. During two days they learn 8–10 new songs in 3–4 voices and during the second day of workshop in the evening they come on stage to sing all they worked on during the 2 days together. They become one workshop choir sharing the same mission.
BUSINESS: Great product isn’t about idea, it’s about execution. You can have a patent, trademark, whatever, it won’t protect you from being surrounded by similar products. Feeling fear of being copied isn’t healthy.
Don’t overdo, find your voice.
Find your gap on the market. Inspiration is the key, not copying. You can’t focus on your voice if you try to follow each step of your competition. There will be always somebody with a bigger team and more money. Sharing the market can be more powerful than being the only unicorn on the planet. As DHH says curb your ambition. Being the only player isn’t healthy for the product, neither for its users.
Startup is business. Business is human so look for inspiration around.
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