Even though he worked for some of the most dynamic tech companies — including Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, and Mint — Noah Kagan felt unchallenged. So he went off to launch his own startup.
The company he started is only about 2 years old, but he already made enough mistakes to nearly shut it down. I invited him to Mixergy to talk about those mistakes and what he learned.
Before you hit the play button on this interview, you should know that Gambit more than survived all those mistakes. Noah says Gambit, which offers payments solution for online games and social networks, is set to do 8 figures in sales this year.
Andrew:
Hey everyone, it’s Andrew Warner, Founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious up-start. I forgot to do this– home of the ambitious up-start! And by the way, the reason I say, “home of the ambitious up-start” is because I am targeting a specific kind of person, somebody who has wanted to be in business almost from Day 1.Somebody who’s not just in business to be in business but to leave a legacy, to leave a mark on the world, to build something, to do something that they’re passionate about, not just sit in a cubicle somewhere, but do something in business.
And, man, there is no greater force in the world today, I think, than busine
Alright, so let me get off my soap box and introduce the interview that you’re about to listen to. This is an interview with a guy who has made a ton of mistakes, no different than any businessman, no different than any entrepreneur in the sense that we are all going to make a ton of mistakes, mistakes...
Edited Excerpts: 2 of the mistakes we discussed
They didn’t take enough money from investors
They started out developing Facebook apps. Noah said they “were a top five developer with seven million users, so we actually started having investors come to us. We had our current investor come to us at an indian dinner. He took out his credit card at the dinner table and he kind of like, let me see if I can do this on camera, [whips out a credit card] ‘How much do you want?’
“And that’s one of those things you read about it books. I was looking at my business partner Chris and I was like, ‘I don’t know, a hundred thousand ($100,000)?’ And he’s like, ‘Done.’
“And I said, ‘Damnit, we should have asked for more.’ We ended up taking a hundred fifty thousand ($150,000), but the real learning from that is that you need to figure out what you’re going to do with it and why you’re taking it. You want to have an objective with that. And so six months later we were almost broke.”
They tested too much
“My problem with testing is I do too much of it,” he said. “I want to track their age. I want to know when they had sex. I want to know their birthdays. And all these different things. But you need to reduce it to two or three different things that are the key metrics.”
“When I worked at facebook, Zuckenburg, or ‘Zuck’ has everyone calls him, he had one priority for the longest time. He would say our only priority is growth, nothing else. And so I would come to Zuck and say, ‘Zuck you know in events, we should sell tickets in events,’ He’d say, ‘I don’t care.’ He was very strong about having one focus.”
“And so all your objectives and your analytics and the testing should come back exactly to that. So you should say, ‘Okay what are the things for growth that we could be measuring? Invites per day? Conversion on invite? How many people registered?’ Whatever it is. Just limiting the amount of data that you actually consume will help you make better decisions because you’re focused on less things.’