2 years ago, I started Woodify (E-commerce store selling Wooden Sunglasses) together with Robert as a side-project. Not in the craziest dream we could have thought that right now 15,000 people would be walking around The Netherlands with our sunglasses.

We made tons of mistakes running Woodify, and more than once people asked me to share all the things I learned.

Some of this could come across as dogmatic or hollow. Even so, it would have made a lot of difference for me if I would have known these things 2 years ago.

1. Starting an ecommerce store is probably one of the best schools to learn about business.
While doing e-commerce, you have to deal with almost every part of business. From finance to logistics, from managing your employees to managing your IT infrastructure. Those taxes don’t file themselves, and legal issues don’t disappear magically.

The great advantage is that it’s all really lean and there’s a lot of failure-tolerance. Since the only real costs you face are directly related to sales, you almost cannot go into debts unless you are selling below the cost-price. Therefore you can gain experience on all these important facets of running a company, in a damage-tolerant environment that can easily scale when you are good at what you do.

2. It all starts with customers. No matter what you do.
Earning direct money may not be the only indicator of success anymore (Take Twitter for example), but it is one of the most vital parts for every businesses. I mean, if customers don’t want to pay a penny for your services, you’re probably not that valuable to them, are you?

Making customers happy should be the most important goal of every company, because only happy customers will pay you, and only with money you can use the resources you need to grow your company.

At Woodify, we really sucked at this in the beginning. In our second week already, we sold over 100 sunglasses per day. It would be foolish to even think that we were able to deliver all those orders on time, and we definitely failed at that. However, we found out that delivering sunglasses wasn’t the most important part. Managing expectations is.

We did a really terrible job on managing expectations, and that led to many angry customers. And they did scream their feelings on the internet. This costed us 100s of orders, and thousands of euros. Make sure keeping your customers happy is priority #1. Many other good things will follow from that.

3. Have fun
This is probably where it all comes down to. We humans are not as rational as we like to believe. When running a company — or doing anything at all in life — you need to perform at your maximum to succeed.

Right now, there are 20 other companies in The Netherlands also selling wooden sunglasses. In general, it is extremely likely that you are not the only one going after your specific target. Almost every company has competition. In order to beat that competition, you need to deliver your best game, you need to perform at your absolute maximum.

The only way you can really get your brain & body to give the maximum they got, is to like what you do. Therefore, if you want to be really good at something, make sure you love doing it. Otherwise, you will never ever be really good at it. Make sure you love what you do.

4. Have clear goals
While running a company, there are many things that can be interesting to focus on. While we were selling Wooden Sunglasses in The Netherlands, it was very tempting to start selling sunglasses in other companies. But selling glasses to stores so they could resell our brand was also very interesting. Or expanding our collection of sunglasses. Or selling other wooden products. Selling customizable sunglasses.

Truth is, when you try to do all those things, you will likely fail at every single one of them. This is as true for companies, as it is for life. Focus on a very few very important goals, and be the very best at them.

5. Never walk alone
We are with 6 billion other humans on this planet. One of the greatest things about humanity is that we are all different and have our own specific talents. But we also have our weaknesses, so you probably are not that capable at all different aspects of running a business. Thus one of the best things you should to in order to bring your idea a step closer to reality, is finding like-minded people who want to walk with you on your journey.

6. Friends
Running a company should soak up loads of time. If it doesn’t, it probably means that you aren’t putting enough energy and passion in it. And that means that your company will never be the best. However, putting most of your time awake in a company really is a sacrifice which isn’t easy to make. It is much easier if you work all-day together with friends than doing so all on your own.

7. Keep learning
1995, just 20 years ago. Almost no-one had a mobile phone, and having internet access in your home was certainly not very common. Who would have imagined that right now, just 20 years later, we would be so dependant on the internet and our phones? We use the internet to share our entire lives, to order our food, and to manage our financials.

This is just a small example of how fast our world changes. Wisdom you have right now, may not be so useful 10 years from now, or even next year. But there are so many great resources out there on the internet. You can learn everything about almost anything on websites you can find within seconds.

If you want to stay the best, you got to keep on learning, and learning, and learning. Like Elon Musk once said: “I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”

8. Take risks
Risks are something fascinating. We humans are wired to love safety. Why would you leave your steady job to work on a startup, while not even knowing whether it will be a succes? Actually, the chance that a startup will ever make serious money, is around 5%. So you must be crazy to think that your startup will be amongst that 5%, right?

There are two things worth noting here: The first comes from statistics. The Law of Big Numbers states that if you repeat an experiment (like starting a startup) very often, you will reach every possible outcome. So the only thing you really need to do to start the next billion-$$-business, is to keep trying.
The second reason is to define what you truly want to achieve.

The only way to ever do things that are truly innovating, is by failure. If you don’t fail along the road, it probably means that it isn’t really innovating.

So just try (and fail)! If you try enough, you have to be succesfull according to statistics. And without trying a lot, you will never do anything truly impactful.

I believe these 8 points are vital for any company. I learned them the hard way, they are here for you so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel! I love to hear questions & feedback. You can tweet me or send an e-mail to bastiaan@woodify.nl. Enjoy :-)!

(PS: If you think this can be helpful for other people, please click “recommend” just below and share this to your friends!)

It’s very likely that the device you’re currently using to read this post, has it’s origins in the garage of a couple of startup founders. Whether it’s Apple, Microsoft or Intel, they all started off as startups. The car you drive in, was originally founded by Mr. Benz, who really was an entrepreneur. The first people to fly a plane, the Wright Brothers, were entrepreneurs at the heart.

We strongly believe that startup founders are the ones who change this world. Startups are the driving force behind innovation. However, for them to reach their full potential, we need the best environment possible. An ecosystem where big startup-exits flow back as investments in new startups, a culture where startups support each other and an educational system that prepares the next generation to found new companies and have great coding skills.

A year ago, Neelie Kroes (EU Commissioner for Digital Agenda & Vice President of the EU Commission) launched the European Startup Manifesto. She did this together with a couple of the most respected startup-founders of Europe. They launched a very good plan, covering most of the topics that need to be solved. However, we feel that there can be done more to improve the startup culture. They chose an Europe-wide scope, which means that they weren’t able to address specific problems within countries. Next to that, the biggest impact can be made by startups themselves, not just the government.

That is why we launched The Dutch Startup Manifesto, a movement to collect and solve problems within the Dutch Startup Scene.

We’re entrepreneurs at the heart. Therefore, we don’t like plans and talking for years. We want action. Furthermore, we’re fond of collaborating. We think we’re by far not capable of coming up with problems for the entire Dutch Startup Scene. That’s why we invite you to join and help identify the opportunities in The Netherlands. We just launched our website, on which we want to gather everyone’s ideas. We will do this in a “reddit”-like way. People can post new ideas, comment on eachother’s ideas, and vote them up.

On the 1st of September we will wrap up all the generated ideas and start building tools, connecting initiatives and form policy recommendations for the government. In this we can make quick wins by building new things with you and in the same time think about strategic long term solutions.

We’re working closely together with a group of advisors and the right organisations to help us solve the problems that are addressed. On the 20th of November (I know, that’s a century later…), we will hand over problems that can only be solved through policy to the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs, Mr. Kamp. Afterwards we will follow up these recommendations and help the Ministry to create new proposals and initiatives.

We really believe that through this we can improve the Dutch Startup Culture. Please join and help us, we can’t do this alone! Spread the word & leave your ideas on our website! Also, please send us any ideas an feedback on how to create a big impact.

Thanks!

Robert & Bastiaan

When you’re not in a 9am-5pm Monday till Friday job, you have heard about this. Work Hard, Play Hard. It’s the key to success. Especially when running a startup. If you’d only think about working less than 100 hours a week, you’d better quit straight away. The same goes for days off. That’s for the less motivated people. The lazy ones.

It’s a story, a dogma, that has been going on for years now. I’m a startup founder, I meet a lot of other startup founders. Usually at the end of the week. When I ask them how their week was, they all answer — without a single exception — that their week was great “But yeah, woke up at like 5.30am and went to bed at 11pm every evening. Worked a lot. Little tired right now”. They strongly believe that they have to do that to reach success.

At least, the fact that working hard is the way to success, is what we hear all the time. Should we even doubt it? I think we should. There are many reasons for that.

In the first place, the single skill that you will need the most when running something on a high level is creativity. You need to find solutions to uncommon problems. That’s anyway why we don’t offshore your job to China or replace you with a machine. You need to be creative at work, as much as possible. But can you be creative for 14 hours a day, with a constant stream of questions, problems, e-mails, calls, and other inputs? Research has showed us that we can’t. So don’t try to. A couple of wise man have sorted it out for you. If you want to be creative, your brain needs to run at it’s highest level. For that, it needs to have a lot of energy and be fresh. That’s not what your brain is like after a long day of constant streams of input.

Secondly, to be creative and do amazing things, you need to be able to listen to your true inner voice. Because that is what will tell you what you truly feel and think. An over-impulsed mind will only blow out what has been blown in: other’s opinions. A wise man once said “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice”.

Remember your high school period? It was about daydreaming, wasn’t it? You’re lying if you didn’t do that a lot back then. Well, Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, adjunct associate professor of psychology at New York University says this about daydreaming: “Daydreaming is where things like problem solving, creativity, goal driven thought, future planning, seeing the perspective of another person, and so on — find space to exist.”
You will probably have that moment. You were staring out of the window, and suddenly you had that “Eureka” moment that turned your entire project from a failure into a success. That’s what daydreaming is all about.

You can’t be productive the entire day, and come up with the most amazing, creative things. Research showed this, experts told us this. You can also find out yourself.

Take your time to recharge your mind. Make sure that it can performs at 200% when it needs to. When it can’t, let it recharge. It’ll be worth to compensate for the time “wasted”.

Take your time to recharge your mind. Make sure that it can performs at 200% when it needs to.

Making decisions based on gut feeling has been very popular for years and years, and it seems that there still are many people who are really enthusiastic about this way of making decisions. However, the “digital revolution” gave us some new and very powerful tools to make better decisions, and you’re an idiot if you don’t use them.

Steve Jobs is thought to be the founding father of this way of thinking, he is said to make almost every decision based on what he felt was the best. When he did Stanford’s 2005 commencement speech, he encouraged that year’s graduates to have faith in something magical:

You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve Jobs did things that were terrifying great. However, this quote illustrates that he had a capability that most people do not have. It might be luck, an incredibly amount of discipline, an ability to turn something great out of every situation, or just a really good feeling whether things will or will not work.

A difference that should be noted is that Steve Jobs’ inventions were very important for the digital revolution to take off. This same digital revolution is what caused the effectiveness of this method of thinking to vanish.

Big Data allows us to track almost everything. Companies are able to measure the effectiveness of every little button, some of them even go as far as Google, which tested 41 different colours of blue for their links — so apparently, it didn’t wanted to listen to the gut feeling of it’s designers.

The internet also allows you to ask your customers what they want, really quickly. There’s no need for calling everyone of them, you just send them a link and they fill in a form while waiting for the bus. This data tells you exactly what you customers do and don’t like about your product or brand, what they expect, and most important, it will tell you what you should to in order to make more revenue with an extremely high amount of certainty. Please hit me up if you’re gut feeling is capable of that.

So let’s make it clear. Because everyone started to use digital stuff for almost everything, we have now ended up with a tool that allows us to expect outcomes of your decisions with mathematical certainty. On the other hand, you can use this data to find points which can be improved, without even knowing about them. Why would you make decisions based on gut feeling, when you can make them with mathematical certainty? Don’t let your gut feeling fool you while it isn’t neccesary.

Why would you make decisions based on gut feeling, when you can make them with mathematical certainty?

You guys will probably know Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, the guy who founded Facebook and who’s still Facebook’s CEO. A long, long time ago, he was in his dorm room at Harvard University. He came up with an amazing idea: he made a site on which every student from campus could make a profile, so people could get to know eachother better. We all know how this idea evolved; it became a billion-dollar business. Pretty genius idea, right? But Mark was not the only one with that idea. Dozens of other students at his time had the same idea. But there’s one difference. For them, it remained an idea in their head. Mark built the idea into something big.

This happens quite often. I myself have had tons of ideas, of which I think that they can really change something. The way people use a specific device, the way people interact with each other, or maybe completely change a specific market. However, I could never manage to make those ideas happen, because my time is limited. I am sure that you have tons of ideas too, and I also know pretty sure that your time is limited, too. Therefore you should stop wasting your time thinking about your ideas, but just pick one, and get started.

When you get started with your idea, you will learn a lot for sure. You will learn why it is a good idea, or why it is not. You start to develop a feeling that can tell you whether ideas will or would not work. And the most important: By making your idea happen, you actually change something. By thinking about it, you just change something in your mind. A second cool thing that comes by developing ideas, that it will actually give you feedback. Will people download it, or will it make revenue? You will get to know the quality of your idea.

It’s very important to just get started. Way too many awesome ideas get lost while thinking about them. So please, stop thinking about your ideas. Your idea is already pretty good. Just get started, time will tell you how to make your idea better.

By making your idea happen, you actually change something. By thinking about it, you just change something in your mind.

I have been running a webshop for the past few months. We have sold thousands of wooden sunglasses, and made around €150.000 in turnover. In just 4 months. Because of the huge demand in our sunglasses, we had huge troubles in keeping up with our stock, which led to long delays in delivery, and unsatisfactory clients.We have received 3000 mails, Twitter messages and Facebook messages/posts until today. Every single message was sent by someone who paid money for our products, and so was a valuable customer of us. We had huge troubles answering all those messages, which led to people ranting about us at social media. This must have costed us revenue, without a single doubt. Losses we could have avoided if we would have had a proper customer service.

Maybe even the best way for your webshop to grow is by viral marketing. That means that if someone buys a product from your shop, he tells a friend about it because he is really excited about your brand. That means that you want to make people excited about your brand. The single best way to do so is when you are in touch with them. But when are you in touch with them? Right! When they reach out for you with a question, you are in the ultimate occasion to make them feel really happy about your brand.

Customer service is the best way to make customers really excited about your brand

Imagine a customer sending a mention via Twitter to a company, because he has troubles making his order. Imagine two scenarios: In the first one, the company answers the mention after one and a half day. Customer already gave up hope, and he already made the order at a competitor of you. It took the customer service representative around 2 minutes answering the mention, but there’s no order.

The second scenario is that the company answers the customer within 10 minutes. The order is still fresh in the customer’s mind, he just made a cup of coffee, and when he returns at his computer, he has a proper solution. It took the customer service representative around 2 minutes answering the mention, and the company made revenue because they sold something. And yeah, the customer is likely to recommend this company to a fellow friend, because he is very satisfied. His problem was solved, in just the time it took him to get himself a cup of coffee.

The lesson learnt from this is that it does not necessarily cost your company more money to make a customer satisfied. In both the occasions, it took 2 minutes of a worker’s time. By optimizing your helpdesk, you have a very effective tool in making revenue and generating long-term happy customers, that will recommend your company to other people, from who you can generate revenue, too. So when you own a company, brand or whatever, make sure that your customer service is set up properly. It will make you money. Promised.

We should all be geeks

We have all heard this story over and over again. We need just need adjust ourselves to new inventions, like we had to do when the train was invented, when electricity was invented and when the smartphone was invented. That is completely true. The only way to keep going forward, is by invention. There is one big issue with this fact: Innovation is going way faster than it has ever gone before. Because the way and especially the speed in which innovation is taking place, we should change our attitude towards it, too.

Invention’s evolution

I currently own an iPhone 4S, which is considered as a pretty hightech phone at this moment. But according to the rumors, Apple is going to release a new iPhone at the end of this year. This will make my old phone obsolete. Five years ago, laptops were considered as stupid, large and heavy pieces of brick, ment for crazy people. Right now, everyone walks down the street with his superlight ultrabook or MacBook air. New products are becoming obsolete way faster than they ever did before.

Rumors told us that complete new inventions like the Google Glass and smartwatches are going to be released at the end of this year. Much people consider these techniques as pretty scary, but ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’, as society calls them, consider these techniques as the future, months or years before society does so. These complete new products will replace the current smartphones for at least a large part. I expect that in the upcoming years, smartphones will be replaced by Glasses, holographic screens and smartwatches. This will mean that smartphones, more or less ten years after their introduction, will become obsolete.

The story that we have all heard over and over again would tell us that we need to change our lifestyle and society into a way in which we can cope with those new technologies, every time over and over again. This would have worked 200 years ago. This works pretty well, when everyone switches to a new technology straight away. That is not the case.

Ingredients for the perfect invention

New technologies, inventions, products are great, when everyone uses them. For example, the train. What if everyone would have used the train as the primary way of transport from its first day on? Because everyone would use the train, there would be train stations all over the country, and trains would run very often. These things would have made trains an even better invention, and this was made true because of the fact that everyone used them.

The same was for smartphones. Because more and more people started using them, the best developers and designers started making apps for them. This made the smartphone a way better invention, because many awesome apps popped up. Because a lot of people had those smartphones, phone carriers would optimize their networks and plans for these phones. These things made this invention even better.

This is the rule for every new technology; when lots of people start using it, it will get better and better. There are many great inventions that aren’t used that much right now, but would be very good when a lot of people would use them. Take the autonomous driving car as an example. In Silicon Valley, people actually already use these cars to be drived to their office, but because of our laws and the conservative mindset of a lot of us, it will take years, or even decenia to get these cars on the road. Why wouldn’t we start using them right now?

Of course, having many users is the goal of every invention. In order to reach a lot of users, the product or invention just needs to be really good, but we’re missing down on one point. Nearly our complete society has the mindset that they would only start using something new when it is really good and a lot of other people use it. But those other people think the same, they will start using it if a lot of other people would use it. Infinite loop. The same is for how ‘good’ the invention is. It will get way better when many people use it.

This is a huge problem, and a lot of inventions are not fully used because of this silly reason. The actual reason is that the most people start using something new after it became accepted by society and proved itself as something good. This is a complete wrong attitude. Why do young people use phones way more than old people? Because when these young people saw a phone for the first time, they didn’t knew about how communication over longer distances used to be. The only thing they cared of were the amazing opportunities of this invention. Old people would think of the way they lived for the past few years, and then conclude that this would be something new, also known as scary.

This is where things go wrong. Those old people hadn’t had an open attitude to smartphones. If they would have had an open attitude, they would have seen all the great advantages and new opportunities, instead of the scary change. In a world in which new inventions follow up on each other quicker every day, society can’t wait for itself to accept something before starting with using it, but it needs to be open towards every new invention, and start using it immediately if it is better than what we have and use at this moment. If it doesn’t do this, lots of very good inventions will go down the drain. Wake up society! You are the ones who are going to use all those new amazing inventions, don’t wait for those few geeks and unborn children to find out how amazing it is before using it. Change your mindset to a curious state, try to find out all the advantages and opportunities of new inventions, don’t try top stop the future from taking place!

Innovation was originally published in I. M. H. O. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.