Friday, May 23, 2008
Guest Speaker Series: Haroon Mokhtarzada
Haroon Mokhtarzada, founder of Freewebs / Webs.com, stopped by the LaunchBox offices earlier this week to share his experiences and lessons learned with the LaunchBox08 teams. The successful Maryland-based web entrepreneur took a brief detour, completing a law degree at Harvard Law School while growing Freewebs into the massive website creation platform that has today served over 20 million users. Through sharing the story of his own personal journey, Haroon offered several main pieces of advice for young entrepreneurs:
1. "Launch early and quickly," Haroon advised the 8 LaunchBox startup teams. He emphasized the concept of conducting a "minimum-valid test" - just enough work product to see whether an idea is going to work or not. There is great value in receiving feedback at a very early stage, and in particular, user feedback is tremendously helpful in order to prioritize the addition of new features.
2. "Have a general analytic framework." One of the worst mistakes you can make as a new startup is to experience a sudden change in growth without understanding why. A great starting point to evaluate new concepts is to conduct an "A/B test" - using analytic tools like Website Optimizer and Google Analytics, it is possible to simultaneously test two different concepts or variations against each other.
3. "Your job as a leader is to inspire people to work towards that vision - and to make everything else look really small." There is always a challenge when working with a growing staff that has imperfect information, and so it is critical to get other people to believe in and want what is best for the product.
4. "Go longer on drive and intelligence, and shorter on experience." Haroon cautioned the LaunchBox teams about the potential risk of settling on satisfactory hires. The criteria should be simple: hire incredibly smart people who can get along with others, and who don't have an ego.
After providing insight into the beginning stages of entrepreneurship, an invigorating discussion followed and set the stage for the development of the innovative new ideas that will come to fruition at LaunchBox08.
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