Today it was announced that Guy Kawasaki sold Truemors to NowRepublic. For those of you who do not remember, Truemors was Guy’s little experiment last year to prove that you could launch a Web 2.0 startup on the cheap. I believe all told, he was about 10k in (give or take a few, but who is counting, right). There have not been any numbers released on the actual sale price, but given that NowRepublic has raised two rounds of funding and the last one being a little over ten million, chances are Guy did not make a mint on this sale.

However, it begs the question, what constitutes a successful exit? Does it come down to shear percentages, or is it a hard dollar figure? I would have to assume that a successful exit is more of a percentages game than anything else, but I could be wrong. I mean, if you can get a 100x return on your investment, does that make for a successful exit? If so, if Guy sold Truemors for a million, is that a successful exit? I would have to go out on a limb and say yes, although in the grand scheme of things, one millions dollars is not a whole hell of a lot (to me it is, but to those that deal in this sort of business daily, it is not a ton of dough).

So what about a company that raises ten million and sells for sixty million? At first glance, that seems like a pretty substantial sale price and one might consider that a successful exit, but is it? The investors are only getting a 6x return on their investment, whereas the example above they are getting a 10x, so which one is more successful? I would also venture to guess that in this example, the investors would probably not bite on a sale for that price and want to hold out for more, but is that the right thing to do? What if the company will never be worth more than the sixty million, should they not get out while they can? I know there are a ton of factors that go into the decision, and I am grossly over simplifying my examples, but the question still remains, what makes a successful exit?

In Guy’s case, I would argue he made out pretty well, after all he is now the new chairman of NowRepublic and I am sure that comes with a pretty decent salary .

This is a term that we use often in our office, and more generally in product management and marketing conversations. It seems to sometimes baffle people as to it’s meaning; but once explained, you are like no shit, I get it. It seems that most of the time that we use the expression, we are using it in terms of product features or functionality that are simple and easy to implement, would not take a lot of effort or development time and produce a good return on investment.

Seth Godin has a great post recently on the magic of low hanging fruit, and he focuses on the marketing side of it and how attacking and implementing the marketing side of low hanging fruit, you can accomplish quite a deal of good. See, often times in the product feature decision making process, we look at the things that we can accomplish with minimal effort and it may be a feature that has been requested by an influential group of users, or it may be a feature that could drive more traffic or usage. According to Seth, it makes more sense to go after those features that would drive more traffic and usage by the masses rather than those features that may have been requested by that group of influential users. Looking at it from that perspective, it makes sense. By going after the low hanging fruit that could convert the average or passive user into a more active user is more worthwhile that trying to make the already amazing users even more amazing. Seems simple in theory but a little harder in practice.

Just something to keep in mind the next time you sit down for your planning session to determine what the next features should be, take a look at the whole picture when you are picking that fruit .

NOTE: sorry Doug, this post was not inspired by you

So it has been a week or so since I have attributed inspiration for a blog post to the new guy at work Doug. However, it is not to say that he has not provided me with “numerous” inspirational tidbits, I have just been holding off for awhile for this one, but the time has come. So Doug, this one is for you .

Through an IM conversation that I will not recount here (no need to bore you all), Doug had a typo, well at least that is what I thought. In fact, it was not a typo, but a word from a language that I did not know, the language of the Internets. He went on to say that the “typo” that I thought he typed was part of a language called L337 (that is Leet for those of you that do not speak it, and Elite for those of us who have no F’ng clue what it all means). Of course, I was like WTF? about this whole “language” and Doug was so kind as to point me to the Wikipedia page for it. That’s right folks, it is a language alright because Wikipedia says so (after all, everything on Wikipedia is 100% accurate, right?). I was floored, how could there be a language out there that I was not familiar with? Once I understood the meaning behind it all, I quickly realized why I did not know of it. I fashion myself a fairly savvy Internet user, but apparently not savvy enough. I am not down with using various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters.

Lesson learned here for me, I am not one of the cool kids, I guess I have some catching up to do. In the meantime, I am going to get schooled on L337 so I can hang with the cool crowd. Once I do, you all will be pwned by me .