Fred Ducrot

What is it like to launch a startup?

I am heading to Ireland to launch Dokker.com at the Dublin Web Summit. Tomorrow the service will be opened and hopefully users will start registering to our service.

Being on a train (again! See my previous post!) is a bit strange. It is peaceful and quiet (French High Speed trains rock!!!!) and in complete contrast with the last few days.

I have read many blog articles which, very formally, declare that creating your own company was great because you could manage your time and reduce your work days to 6 hours if you wanted to!

Let me confirm to you that, frankly, it is absolute bullshit (pardon my French ;-) .

Let me tell you how it is like to be on the verge of launching a web startup!

• I have been working for the last 2 months between 10 to 14 hours every day.
•  Most weekends included many hours of work. Last weekend was no exception with probably around 15 hours of work.
• Sleep has become a scarce resource…It is very difficult to switch off at night…whether you like (want) it or not
•  Skype has become my best friend. I must have been clocking over 20 hours on Skype in recent days, talking to the team, consultants and business partners.
•  My eyes are hurting as I spent so much time on Twitter monitoring the impact of our communications and announcements!
•  My mail box is a mess. Between all the alerts we’ve set on the dokker.com site, the blog feedbacks, the Twitter notifications, the organization of the web summit, I must have received between 50 and 70 emails per day…
•  My brain cells are overheating: As well as talking to our testers, getting their feedback, checking new beta users and so on, we had to produce:

1. A complete and up to date slide deck in French for one of our Business Partners
2. A full presentation and demo video for the Demo Stage at the Web Summit
3. Write blog articles to keep the dokker.com blog rolling
4. Write short, quick hitting, catch phrases to send to the Social Media team
5. Finish up the legal side of the website especially the site terms and conditions
6. Organise the logistics for the Web Summit and ensure that I and my business partner are registered on every network event. You would not believe how time consuming this is!
7. Etc…

• Back office work never stops: On top of all the activities below, back office tasks have also been very time consuming. (I finished tax paperwork yesterday night at 10.30pm!!!).

Oh I am not trying to attract sympathy here. I have never been so excited about work in my life (is it really work???). Would I do it again? Yes sir! Would I recommend it? Yes sir!

My point is to say that if you want to do a startup, it’s not for the faint hearted. It needs guts and resilience. It is like an inner need that you can only fulfill by giving it a shot as hard as you can!

If you feel that this is for you then go ahead!!!

If you expect to start work at 10.00 am and finish by 4.30pm then you should probably look elsewhere!

What do you think? Please do not hesitate to comment! I’d love to hear from you!

Follow me on Twitter @FredDucrot. You can also follow Dokker: @Dokker_Live.

Linkedin declares war to Twitter and blogs with “Ability to Follow Thought Leaders” functionality

Today Linkedin announced a new functionality called “Ability to Follow Thought Leaders on LinkedIn” in a blog post.

This functionality is quite straightforward. You can follow worldwide influencers who will be posting articles on linkedin. 

The full list can be accessed here.

I have jumped on the opportunity to try the service. My news feed has been swamped by updates from these influencers but obvisouly the content is awesome.

What strikes me is how clever Linkedin is becoming. I was a bit surprised when they did not show any disappointment when Twitter cut their API access.

Now it all makes sense.

Linkedin is going head on with Twitter. The ability to follow these influencers will surely attract users out from Twitter and onto Linkedin.

Linkedin clearly wants to retain users on their website and move from the  ”once in a while visit” pattern that users got used to so that they could check news from their connections.

It’s a great move as it will surely enable Linkedin to increase its ad business, advertisers being willing to pay more if users visit more often and remain longer on the site.

More broadly, I guess that Twitter should get VERY worried.

Linkedin is a cash making machine. Having a company in such a dominant position trying to lure users out of your service is bad news for the 140 signs service.Especially when you consider that all articles posted by these influencers do not redirect users to a third-party blog or website but are published right inside Linkedin… On twitter you are always bounced around other websites…

What maybe more alarming is the move of Linkedin into the blogging industry. Clearly these influencers from now on will be maintaining a blog on Linkedin.

I wonder how long will we have to wait for Linkedin to extend this functionality to common users. I can easily imagine Linkedin enabling you to post full blown articles on their platform and having them sent directly into your connection news feed. 

Today, Twitter should be very concerned, Tumblr, Wordpress and the likes should keep a watchful eye with Linkedin. Their future may be at stake here.

PS: Being French I can only urge you to follow Jacques Attali as an influencer. This guy is a genius. 

4 startup lessons. Discipline and despair!

As I am on the train heading to FailCon 2012 in Paris, I am taking the opportunity of this three hours journey to reflect on the last few weeks and the imminent launch of Dokker.com.

Not surprisingly, we have been working harder than ever before to get to this point: Dokker is almost ready for its first general release, probably Wednesday 26th or Thursday 27th September.

What have we learned during this time? A lot as one would expect. But Jon (who works with me on the product build) and I should probably highlight the following:

1 – We efficiently managed requirements:

Managing requirements is key for any project. However, when you are the one expressing the requirements and building the product, it can become your doom!

We chose to maintain a very simple spreadsheet (I’ll post the the template on on Dokker very soon) and to be tough and bold in regards to the calls we were making every time we were checking our progress against it.

Basically, everything that was considered as the bare essentials to have a credible product from the start was tagged as priority 1. The rest was dutifully tagged as 2 (next coming releases) and 3 (nice to have). Despite the temptation of delaying the project to deliver “more”, we managed to stick to this priority list.

However, it needs to be noted that during testing we tried to listen as much as possible to our testers and integrated some functionality that was clearly missing otherwise! 

“More” is evil. Get rid of it!

2 – We have not undone or rewritten Dokker’s code since we started building it.

Right from the start of the project we decided to think before acting. We went through a very valuable few days of brainstorming and wireframing to define exactly how the solution would look like and work.

God bless wireframing! Really! It’s a cheap way of ensuring that you can visualize the final product without writing a line of code; it’s also been reassuring to revisit it from time to time and see that we did not depart from our vision.

We stuck to our guns and delivered!

3 – We messed up the list of testers and the naming convention of project test phase, barely survived it:

As soon as the product was coming off the ground, we decided that we would have to organize an “alpha” test phase with a handful of users. It took us time to come up with a list. Most of this list was made of people in our close network or simply friends. How wrong of us!

A significant number of our friends, relatives and close professional network connections did not look at the product. We had to stalk them and, in the end, turn to less emotionally involved people to ensure we would get enough feedback.

Why? I have been thinking about it carefully. My theory is that they don’t want to judge your work and be negative about it. It’s better to ignore the pleading requests rather than having to bring up (even constructive) criticism. I also believe that some of them were simply not interested.

Mixing up friendship and business is a bad idea!

Fortunately, in the end, we managed to get a bunch of awesome people (some clearly outside from our first circle of connections) who dedicated time to the solution and provided amazing feedback.

To add to the difficulty of motivating people to test, we called this phase an “alpha release”. This was a major mistake that we could have better anticipated when presenting the early version prototype. A couple of people told us that it looked more like an almost finished product than a prototype.

We should have called it “private” beta. Testers would have been more confident about the level of quality and readiness that they would have had in the solution. Communication is already key during testing phase!

4 – We underestimated the challenge of launching a product in different languages

Don’t get me wrong here. From day one, we defined our software architecture to support multiple languages. But, my god, how hard it is to get the translation work done. It is VERY time consuming.

First, you have to come up with meaningful text in both languages (for instance English and French). Then you need to ensure that the meaning is consistent across both languages. Finally, you need to put up with the opinion of everyone about your translation. …A very humbling experience for your self-esteem.

Language localization is challenging. Make sure you really want to put your startup through it first!

I hope this firsthand experience will help you go over some of these hurdles. Would you like to share some of your lessons learned? If yes, please do comment my post! Thank you.

You can follow me on twitter @FredDucrot. You can also have a look at the Dokker Team Blog here. 

An Exec's tale - real "life at work" story!

How to customise your LinkedIn Public Profile URL

Being able to promote its LinkedIn Public Profile (your personal page that everyone can see even if they’re not registered on LinkedIn or one of your connections) is becoming a key to your personnal branding strategy.

For example, at Dokker, we have decided to print our LinkedIn Public Profile URL on our business cards. You could also choose to add it to your email signature for instance or at the top of your resume.

As standard, once you’ve created your profile, LinkedIn randomly generates a URL of your public profile. Most of the time, the URL is far from being meaningful and ends with all sort of characters. 

Would not it come handy to have a URL with your actual name in it? This is possible! Mine for example is:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/fredericducrot

Sweet no?

Now how do you do this? This is quite easy! Follow the steps below!

Step 1: Go to your profile and click on “edit” next to your current Public Profile URL entry

Step 2: Once in your Public Profile, locate Locate the box “Your Public Profile URL” and click on “Customize your public profile URL” 

Step 3: Enter the value you want at the end of the URL (I recommend FirstNameSurname). If this extension is available a green tick will appear. Then click “Set Custom URL” et voilà! You have now you’re very own linkedin URL!

I hope that this very short tutorial helped you. Don’t hesitate to leave me comments or to follow me on twitter on @fredducrot!

“It’s the cashflow, stupid”. 10 real life tips from a startup founder

When I started this blog I thought “great I’ll be able to write about my experience at launching a startup”. Obviously I did not find the time and the goal was so far that it seemed in the end a bit irrelevant to talk about it.

Now, the situation has changed. We’re edging closer to the launch date of our alpha release so I will try to make up for this time of silence.

In this first posting I will introduce my experience as startup founder, then in subsequent posts I will explain a bit more in details what dokker really is.

I got the idea of Dokker back in June 2011 while working as a Director of Integration at a consulting firm in France (after many years spent in the UK and more or less travelling all around the world). After much thinking I decided to leave my job at the end of November 2011 so that I could solely concentrate on this project.

Despite people usually saying “never leave a paying job to start up your company” I still think that I took the right decision! Indeed, the amount of work needed requires full-time commitment.

I decided to build a proper business plan to validate all my assumptions and face the harsh reality. As I was doing pre-sales in a previous life this was also a great opportunity to come up with a set of realistic estimates (bordering sometimes on the pessimistic..). 

I started presenting my project to close friends and family circle which attracted positive feedback. What reassured me most was that the feedback I got was not: “Yeah great idea Fred” (which can mean nothing and everything at the same time) but was more like “Yeah I could use a service like that”. In my opinion, this was already a first real test of the concept!  

As my project caught the attention of friends and family, it became clear to me that it would be unrealistic to go for it on my own. Two reasons for that:

- From the start I have been a firm believer that if you have a great product that works then you have a competitive edge.

- To come up with a great web service requires money. Money to build it with web experts. Money to lay down the right IT infrastructure. Money to be able to market it properly.

Consequently I endeavored to raise sufficient funds to kick start what would become OUR startup. This is how with the help of Hubert I met Albert. The three of us cofounded Dokker.com.

Beyond being cofounders, each of us brings a set of skills that complement each other. Here again, this seemed important to me so that we could split the workload while not stepping on each other toes! 

In parallel, I did start searching for a great web developer to take on with me the challenge of building Dokker.com.

These days I have read many articles dealing with the value of Professional Social Networks in the recruitment process. So there you go, I am the living proof that as a startup founder you don’t need to go to all the startup events in Silicon Valley or in London to find the right guy.

Thanks to Viadeo (Europe’s #1 Linkedin competitor) I successfully managed to contact and interview a bunch of great guys in Bordeaux, South-West of France where Dokker.com headquarters are based!

Picture: Le Cap Ferret near Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast. Picture is my own so no copyright issue!

This is how I came across Jonathan who is now leading the technical development of the site. I also managed to get hold of Eric a young and gifted graphic designer who created our awesome logo! 

What I did not expect is how slow this process would be. In fact, since I started to work full-time on the project in December 2011, we only started building the site in  May 2012!

Now the four of us are in full delivery mode, working hard to come up with the great product we all want Dokker.com to be. So that professionals “don’t reinvent the wheel” all the time (and on the side get the much needed sleep they deserve. But more on that in my next post!).

So, it sounds like a lovely story bordering the fairy tale…However these last 6 months have taught me great deal that I will share with you below:

1. Don’t listen to what people say. If you want to leave your job and start your company, do it! You are the only one to be able to know if it is the right decision or not.
2. Find great cofounders. I thought I could do it on my own. Wrong. Being part of a team is much better.
3. Have the harsh conversation with your cofounders right from the start. It’s better to iron out the contractual details of your working relationship then than later when money is short or on the contrary when investors start circling around your company.
4. Hire a lawyer. Setting up a company involves taking on huge responsibilities. A good lawyer will help you shape your company while protecting your personal and financial investment.
5. Write a business plan. You need to face reality and define your budget because a startup is not a hobby. It costs serious money. You need to budget for it. James Carville coined “Its the economy, stupid” as a strategist for Bill Clinton 1992 campaign. In the case of a startup, I’d say “It’s the cashflow, stupid”!
6. Get the best accountant you can: No, the accountant living on the third floor above you is not the right person. No, budgeting a few hundred bucks for an accountant is not real. A good accountant like any other expert is being paid good money. Check if he’s got business like yours in his portfolio. Check that beyond accounting he can also do salary slips, taxes and knows all the tricks to get financial support from governmental organisations (tax credits, grants, temporary tax relief, etc). A great accountant will relieve you from some of your back office work so that you can concentrate on building an amazing product.
7. Use professional social networks to hire people! There are dozens of great people near you waiting for an opportunity to work in a startup and live the dream. It takes only a bit of time and reference checking. Easy and cost effective!
8. Get on Twitter and follow the hastag #startup: Get to know the startup world not from the glittering angle of multi-million dollars acquisition but from a feedback angle. They are great entrepreneurs on Twitter sharing their insights!
9. Don’t despair because you’re not in the Valley or New York or London: The web enables you to follow live - from the comfort of your own office - most web and startup related events. Get on it and watch it! So yes for the networking it’s not great but twitter and Linkedin groups like “Startup Specialists” offer a good way of remotely getting to know awesome people.
10. Use all the awesome free web services to get started and be efficient: Hootsuite and Bufferapp for your twitter, Dropbox for storing and sharing your files with your team, Skype to avoid having to travel all the time (if you have to travel then use startupstay.com),  Evernote to save all your ideas, articles, websites that you get inspiration from, Linkedin and Viadeo to grow your network (and soon dokker.com ;-) ).

If you want to follow what dokker.com is going to be, please get in touch with us on www.dokker.com. 

You can also follow me on twitter: @FredDucrot and follow dokker’s very own twitter feed: @Dokker_Live

Startup funding!

Mon.Ki - A great app to enhance your twitter reach

For a few weeks now I have been testing mon.ki (@getmonki), a great twitter app that brings twitter live into your web surfing habits.

So what is mon.ki? (pronounce “monkey”).

Mon.ki is a google extension that enables you to see what are the tweets related to the page you are currently seing in Google Chrome. It does not only bring you a view of who tweeted this page but also tweets that are related to the content of the page.

Of course mon.ki enables you to reply, retweet and set as favorite any of the tweets listed in their results.

Mon.ki also presents you with a list of twitter profiles that are relevant to the web page you are currently on.

In addition to performing an analysis of the relevant tweets, Mon.ki provides a search functionality that enables you to refine your search. In this example, I have refined my search on the word “game” still linked to the relevance of the page I was in.

It also analyses what are the tweets that are popular in your twitter community.

So beyond the cleverness of this app, how useful is it?

I often use mon.ki to check who tweetted articles that I found interesting during my daily check of the tech blogs world. This has enabled me to find very interesting profiles and enrich my twitter feed. It also prevents me to tweet articles that are already being published all over the place on twitter.

I also like to use it to bounce to intriguing links returned by mon.ki. This has already led me to interesting links that I would probably have not found via my usual websites surfing sessions.

Last but no least, it must be said that mon.ki does not run permanently in chrome  everytime you open a new tab. You need to trigger it with the nice “monkey” icon that sits in your chrome toolbar

So all in all, I like mon.ki very much. I think that having an integrated app in Chrome that links twitter to the websites you’re browsing is a fantastic added value and a great way to discover and expand you twitter community. 

However I think that these guys could even go further by providing a dashboard with key indicators like # of tweets related to this page. #of tweets related to this page that have been RT, etc…Surely that would help tracking the hot and fresh “news”.

It has to be said that with Flipboard, Bufferapp, Hootsuite and IFTTT, mon.ki sits nicely with the twitter apps that I use on a daily basis to manage my twitter feed. 

So why don’t you give it a try?

5 Awesome twitter free apps to manage your social networks

With the rise of the importance of twitter as part of your professional and personal branding strategy, using the twitter native web interface is not the right way to go.

Instead, you can use great free to use apps that will make your life so much easier.

So here are the tools I use on a daily basis to manage my tweeter feed. Hope you like them as much as I do!

1. Flipboard: 

I already had the opportunity to write about flipboard. If you own an ipad, it is the perfect tool to read your tweeter feed in a pleasant and relaxing way as you have a preview of all urls included in the tweets you receive. Perfect for a sofa twitter session!

2. Bufferapp: 

Bufferapp is a FANTASTIC app. It has extensions that fit into Chrome and Firefox.  One single click automatically generates a tweet that will be scheduled according to your favorite timetable. This is so clever that I cannot work without it anymore. Two further comments:

• The bufferapp website enables you to organise by simple drag and drops the schedule of your tweets. You prefer having a great tweet sent at the best time for your followers? simply drag the tweet up or down your list. 
• I would also strongly recommend  having a look at the analytics tab that bufferapp  offers. It’s interesting to see the number of clicks, retweets you got! 

Last but no least, bufferapp is managed by two really cool guys very active on Twitter. I shall recommend you to subscribe to @joelgascoigne and @leowid. They regularly send some great articles and links.

3. Socialbro:

Oh my god. How did they do it???? This app is a chrome extension or a desktop program (available on every OS). Basically, this is the ultimate business intelligence tool for twitter. These guys have achieved what most large BI companies cannot do these days. A simple but rich, instantaneous but detailed BI tool. This app will dig deep into your twitter data and present it to you in a super easy to read and manage collection of graphs and visual indicators. 

It also must must be noted that it integrates with bufferapp by if you wish so. In short, it automatically defines in bufferapp the best timetable for you to send your tweets so that you reach a maximum of followers.

Socialbro is, you understood it by now, a must have

4. Hootsuite:

Hootsuite replaces the usual twitter interface. This is a very useful twitter editor to check your tweeter feeds and write tweets of your own. Its graphic interface is super slick and very customisable. You can also integrate your linkedin feed if you wish to. This is a great app. I used tweetdeck for a while (now owned by twitter) but I must say Hootsuite is so much better. 

It must be noted that Hootsuite has some great apps for Android and Ipad.

5. Itweetlive:

I have been trying this app for a few days now. If I find it sometimes slightly confusing to use, it has an amazing and simple functionality to search for topics on Twitter. These guys have developed an awesome search engine that queries twitter on the fly and enables you to dynamically refine your search by either adding new words or clicking on suggested words.

I wish I could have had such a search engine during my corporate years. I also wonder why Google is not looking at it. The google algorythm and this funtionality would make it the killer web search engine!

I strongly recommend you to have a look at it!

Do you have other ones to recommend? Please feel free to contact me at: @fredducrot

Flipboard: The ultimate tool for an entrepreneur?

I am fortunate enough to own an Ipad. I use my ipad to check my twitter feed as I monitor the startup and tech world as part of my day-to-day activities. Knowing what’s going on in the tech and entrepreneur world is a must when you are launching a web startup!

I have been using Flipboard (http://flipboard.com/) on my ipad for three weeks now and would like to share here why I believe it is the ultimate tool for an entrepreneur.

My linkedin and twitter feeds send me dozens of news per hour. Even when you use an app like hootsuite, it is difficult to see what article you should read.

To overcome this difficulty of sorting out the great stuff from the noise, flipboard is a game changer.

If you don’t know how it works here is a summary:

Flipboard organises and displays your various feeds (twitter, linkedin, facebook etc..) as an interactive magazine.

Where it makes a huge difference is that it resolves all the urls included in the posts you receive and presents the first few lines. Thus you can choose to read the rest of what becomes an article. This is such a huge time saving app! No more time wasted clicking on the url and waiting to see what comes up. In Flipboard, it’s real time!

Moreover, flipboard enables you to “turn” pages as with a real magazine. This makes this such a comfortable read like in the old days!

I find this tool so good that it could become even a justification for buying an ipad altogether!