I’ve heard this question asked countless times. The snarky answer in my head has always been…

“If you are asking that question, the answer is no”

In reality, things are a bit more nuanced and sometimes you just aren’t sure if it’s the right time for you or not.

I’ve been at this entrepreneurship thing for 18 years now and — upon reflecting — I’ve come up with the 4 reasons why I think starting a company is a good idea.

1. Creative control of your day
2. Accelerated learning
3. The potential for financial freedom
4. Low downside risk

Creative Control

This is the biggest one for me. For a brief period of time in my younger years, I worked in a lower middle management position in a mid-sized company. I had 3 bosses and 2 of them were named Bob (not kidding). Even though I was being paid a reasonable amount of money in this role, I felt trapped every day. I was in a sea of cubicles forced to do middle management stuff — like attend countless meetings, fill out meaningless reports, write to the IT department when I needed to install a program on my computer, etc. I felt my life draining away and knew I needed to get out of there.

Now let’s contrast this existence with running a startup. When you run a startup, every day is an adventure — sometimes a scary one. There are so many phases in a startup’s accelerated life that what you are doing one week will be completely different from what you are doing the next. It’s like you are flying a spaceship that is mostly broken and you are going really fast and you can all die at any moment. As the “captain” of this ship, you are charged with somehow making it through this journey alive. Ideally, your spaceship should be getting stronger every day, but as you travel you realize just how big space really is.

Another way of thinking about it is you are an artist creating the story of the company in real time. You have have absolute freedom to make the story anything you want it to be. There is no real way to tell if you are doing it “right” or not. Having this much freedom can be scary at times, but for someone like me, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m living my life on my terms and spending my days doing things the best way I know how.

One side note: as you grow, you may get investors or other stakeholders who are whispering ideas in your ear. You may not agree with these ideas — and if you let your guard down, it’s easy to lose track of where you stand. I highly recommend periodically putting aside some time to collect your thoughts to make sure you are the one steering your ship.

Accelerated Learning

There was a time many years ago when I was considering getting an MBA instead of moving ahead with my first company. An advisor friend told me I’d learn more running a company than I’d learn in any MBA. At first I scoffed at this idea, but now that I look back, I can say with absolute certainty that this is correct. There is simply no better education you can get in business than getting a small entity off the ground. (Side benefit is you make money learning instead of spending it).

The great thing about this education is the curriculum is constantly updating and evolving. One day it’s finance, the next it’s technology, the next it’s Human Resources. Not only do you become knowledgable in a lot of areas, but you also get a deepness of learning that you can’t get in any other way. It’s one thing to take a few accounting classes, but another thing entirely to be able to intuitively feel how your income statement, cash flow and balance sheet all work together. Obscure concepts like depreciation and amortization make perfect sense when you’re deep in the weeds and it’s your baby.

The best thing about this method of learning is it turns into personal equity. You simply become better and smarter at starting companies as you go. As you become a seasoned entrepreneur, your learning is constantly reinforced and you develop a sea of knowledge you can apply to any business situation. Perhaps this is why the most experienced entrepreneurs ultimately turn into investors. They have a war chest of anecdotal knowledge they can use to evaluate the viability of almost any startup plan.

The one caveat is it can sometimes get lonely in a classroom where you are all alone acting as both teacher and student. This is why it’s important to develop relationships with other entrepreneurs who are further along in this journey of knowledge. One thing you’ll discover is almost everyone is willing to turn back and lend a helping hand when asked in a sincere and humble way. Every entrepreneur has been on this journey and helping others heals old battle wounds. In essence while you may feel alone, you are actually surrounded by millions of fellow students wiling to help. You just have to work a little bit to see them.

Potential Financial Freedom

There are countless stories of founders becoming millionaires (or billionaires) in what appears to be an overnight success. In reality, if you look at the average timeline from start to finish overnight successes take about 10 years. This is of the ones who make it, which is astonishingly few.

So if it takes 10 years to get to a huge exit and the odds of it happening are exceedingly small, why would you do it? For one, first time founders think they will be the ones who make it. They think they have that special something that the failed entrepreneurs don’t have. The funny thing is, if an entrepreneur has a long enough personal time horizon, that tends to be true.

If a founder tries a startup and it doesn’t work out, they will do one of two things. They’ll either decide entrepreneurship isn’t for them and go work somewhere. By the way, that’s totally fine and respectable. (Inside tip, ex-entrepreneurs make amazing hires for your startup). But, the others dust themselves off, figure out what went wrong and start their next thing. Maybe that one doesn’t work out as well. Again, some step out of entrepreneurship and others stay in. The ones staying in are learning and getting better as they go.

So financial success is ultimately about shots on goal. The ones who keep at it and keep learning are the ones that make it eventually. The odds aren’t as bad as they seem. You just have to be willing to sacrifice to get there. And, the funny thing is that it doesn’t really feel like a sacrifice, it feels like a game.

If the other benefits of running a company feel like a must-have in your life, the financial freedom will come eventually. You just need to stay in the game long enough.

Low Downside Risk

This one isn’t so much a benefit, but a risk that’s a lot smaller than you think. Entrepreneurship has limited downside risk and unlimited upside potential. Why? Logically speaking, the worst thing that could happen is you lose the entirety of your life savings. The best thing that could happen is you could be the richest person in the world. See? These are two extreme examples used to make a point. Unlimited upside with a capped downside.

What’s even better is it’s possible to manage your downside risks substantially — for instance, raising money from investors can limit your personal exposure entirely. In fact, if you play your cards right, the only real risk is the loss of time. There is unlimited capital in this world, but we all have a finite amount of time. So when you think about starting a company, you should be thinking about the risk of time, not the risk of money.

This brings us back to the other points. How important are the creative freedom and accelerated learning experience to you personally? Is it more important for you to fulfill your desires to create and learn or to preserve your capital? For most entrepreneurs this question is never raised as the answer if obvious — we have a burning desire for freedom to learn and express. The financial incentive is the byproduct of that burning desire turned into value for the world.

In summary, make sure you limit your downside capital risks and remember that your only finite resource is time. If you are pursuing your passion, you’ll never look back regretting it.

Conclusion

If you’re thinking of starting a company and you’re not sure if you should or shouldn’t the answer is probably already yes. You are just going through an internal formalization process. As you go through the process of coming to a final decision, remember this one thing. There are no rights or wrongs. Regardless of what you may read from accomplished entrepreneurs or VCs, there is no single variable way of knowing if what you are doing is going to work or not. VCs look for patterns, but these patterns break all the time. Seek advice, but not answers — those are inside you.

Have the courage and faith to trust yourself. Trust that you know better than anyone what you are doing. There is no right or wrong way to be an entrepreneur. There is no right or wrong time to do it. You can’t be too young, you can’t be too old. It’s purely up to you how and when you start. Believe in yourself and when you’re ready….jump in.

Ever set a personal goal, but avoid it? For me, it’s writing online.

I want to write because there are so many ideas I have in my head and I want to record them in some format. Many thoughts are very deep and get lost on the way out (I know that sounds odd). This is half my struggle, but I hope my ability to extract a deep idea improves with time and practice.

I’m pretty active on twitter and one of the accounts I follow is @sarthakgh. He posted this:

Sar Haribhakti on Twitter

I have been trying to convince people who are on the fence abt writing on the internet by giving them personal examples of how writing maximizes serendipity of connecting w people you respect It backfires almost every time because they are too scared of being judged harshly 🤦‍♂️

This single post made me say “f*** it, I’m going to start right now”. 2 months later and I’m finally getting around to it.

Does it really matter what people think? Maybe no one will care…but, maybe they will. Maybe this will just create more compound interest. We’ll see.

I have been writing down a list of blog topics so I have something to start with:

1. Why I’m writing (this post)
2. Startup with your spouse is hard AF
3. Giving up vs. determination
4. Post mortem of bad deals
5. Sharing economy ai robots
6. Compound interest
7. Earth phone (??)

If you have any votes or other topics, I’d love to hear them. Consider the rust knocked off.

It’s been almost 3 years since I first wrote about what it’s like to start a company as a husband and wife team. One of the things I told myself in that post is to enjoy the early days, because if we get lucky and things work out, it will soon be much bigger and much harder. Lucky for us, that’s exactly what happened.

We were able to find great product market fit for Loveseat.com, our online / offline vintage furniture business. Along the way, we raised a little bit of money, hired close to 30 employees, opened warehouses in San Diego & Los Angeles and most importantly have grown revenues 20x in under 2 years.

But, all of that was a cakewalk….an absolute cakewalk compared to our biggest accomplishment.

We had a baby.

Our daughter, Isabelle, is now 15 months old. She’s the joy of our lives, but boy oh boy can she be a handful. We also have #2 on the way, but we’ll save that for another post. :)

This post is all about the challenges of having a baby and running a company at the same time as a husband and wife team. Let’s unequivocally get this out there. It is INSANELY hard.

Like Columbus sailing his way to America, there was no map for this journey. So if you are thinking about going down the startup aisle with your spouse and baby, get ready for advanced level life.

Here are some small lessons learned…

1. Splice out a small chunk of non-company time every day.

Having a baby and a startup means the concept of ‘work life balance’ is gone. There is no balance. It’s one big thing. We put our lives into our Vitamix and turned it up to max.

Somehow, we’ve managed to keep our sanity.

One helpful thing we do is take one small moment every day to be a normal couple. That moment for us is our morning dog walk.

Every morning we go on a mile long walk with our dog, Django and our daughter, Isabelle. During this walk, we are banned from discussing work. This keeps us together as a couple and as a team.

2. Get life helpers.

You cannot run a company as a parent without helpers. This means you need daycare, family, a nanny, etc.

We are extremely lucky that my parents moved to San Diego from Philadelphia. The combination of a granddaughter and the sunshine were a strong enough magnet to get them to rent an apartment on the other side of the country.

They went back to the Jersey Shore for the summer, so we’ve had a to hire a nanny to help us out. While the nanny is watching Isabelle, Jenny and I take turns on who will work from home that day. Check out Care.com if you are looking for a nanny. It’s an amazing resource.

3. Go to bed soon after the baby.

Sleep is your friend. Sleep won’t bring you happiness, but lack of it will ruin everything. The nights of staying up and watching a movie with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of wine are a thing of the past. We need to hit the ground running every day, so getting a good night of sleep is the highest order priority.

Our daughter is in bed by 8pm and wakes up at 6am, so we get to bed soon after her. Jenny is asleep by 9:30pm and I’m asleep by 10pm. If we stay up late to watch a movie or do some late night work, our next day will be shot.

4. Focus on your mental health.

I can’t express how important this is for anyone running a startup under any situation. I can speak from past personal experience that this often gets ignored.

When you have a second major responsibility in your life, like a baby, you don’t really have a choice. You have to prioritize your mental health.

For me, that means a few simple things each day to center myself.

Meditating, reading and exercising.

Doing these three simple things each day, combined with a good night of sleep have changed my life. I’m much more productive and able to handle a more significant workload.

5. Be prepared for a higher investment bar.

Whatever level of traction you think your startup needs to get to your next level of funding, increase it by 2x. Why?

VCs and professional investors don’t like married couple founding teams.

They like married couples with children even less. It’s easy to get all “Woe is me!” over this bias, but if you stop and think about it, it makes perfect sense.

When a founding team has a bunch of personal distractions (like a child) the chances of failure, at least on paper, are higher. So if you are an investor and are evaluating a business, but are worried that the personal situation of the founders, you might take a step back. The easiest way for the founders to overcome any potential bias is to have super strong traction.

In our case, we go under the assumption that we need to do 2x the traction numbers of a startup run by a non-family team. We’re fine with this and have no problem with it.

As I’m sure other founders can appreciate, it’s hard to really get a perspective on progress until you take a step back and look how far you’ve come in just a couple years.

We’ve made our lives much harder than they would be if we were a normal couple with normal jobs, but the fact is that we’re just not normal.

We’re having an absolute blast building a company together and the fact that we’ve made it this far is testament to our bond as partners and spouses. It’s us vs. the world.

We wouldn’t change a thing.

Please check out Loveseat.com and get some amazing vintage furniture!

Husband and Wife (and baby) Startups Part 2 was originally published in Loveseat Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Call it a momentary lapse of judgement…a moment of weakness if you will. I mean, we spend literally almost every waking hour together. Something like this was bound to happen at some point..right? Holy shit. What do we do now? What will we tell people? What will our investors say?

Now keep in mind, we’re married (sorry for the clickbait). But still, we’re dead serious about our startup, Loveseat, a really cool way to buy vintage furniture. We’ve been working on it for almost 3 years now and have employees, a big warehouse, funding..the whole thing. We’re both fully committed to our startup baby and so we’re not about to go out and get normal jobs now that we’re having a real baby.

What do we tell our investors? What do we tell our board?

We deliberated on those questions during the “it’s early in the pregnancy, so we’re not telling anyone yet” phase. Are they going to suddenly think we suck and aren’t committed? Would this suddenly make them decide not to support us? Shit.

We ended up dropping the “we’re pregnant” bomb about 3/4 of the way through a glowing email update on sales growth.

We had all kinds of stats, facts and figures and after all of those metrics sat the news on our pregnancy. We nervously proofread this email about 100 times before we hit send.

And then we braced for impact.

About 5 minutes later, we got our first of two investor responses. We opened it. It was just one word.

“Congratulations!!!!!”.

That was followed almost immediately by another congratulations email from the second investor.

Holy shit. It’s going to be ok. High fives and cheering. We made it! What a sigh of relief.

Once we cleared the investor hurdle, we started thinking about real life. How in the hell are we going to pull this off? Can we run this thing while we have a baby? Like everything in startups, it was rife with uncertainty, but we forged ahead…and now we have data to share.

I should mention we had an especially challenging launch to our new baby project as our daughter Isabelle came 7 weeks early and she had to spend over a month in the NICU. It was an extremely scary time and it brought out the best in us and our employees. We are thankful she is completely healthy, but the whole start to parenthood was stressful and scary.

Now that things have settled down and she is 4 months old, we can say with confidence that having a baby and a startup at the same time is much harder than we thought it would be.

The biggest challenge is the lack of relief.

With normal parents, when one parent has a hard day at work, there’s always the possibility that the other had a good or average day at work (or at home). That doesn’t happen when you have a startup together. If it sucks, it sucks for everyone. If the baby has a really hard time sleeping one night, the entire executive team is a little less patient the following day.

The other thing that’s been challenging about the process is the increasing rate of change. All founders know a lot happens at a rapidly growing startup, but a lot more happens with a baby growing along side it. In both cases, we’ve been embracing change and trying to just keep focused on enjoying the process even if it is painful at times. To keep things going ‘up and to the right’, we’ve fully unleashed the power of video conferencing and Slack messaging , so regardless of who’s day it is to babysit (Jenny CTO or Chris CEO) we’re both instantly available. We try not to have our parenting impact the business or other employees in any negative ways.

Looking forward, as Isabelle continues to grow and eventually gets to her toddler days, it will be time to invest in corporate daycare — even if it means a pack-and-play in the corner of our office.

Be VERY generous with maternity leave and other family time.

This last note goes to all you non-parent CEOs (I used to be one). It’s way harder than you can imagine to work at a startup and be a parent. If I could go back and give my former self as CEO of TicketLeap a talking to, I would.

One last last note…we wouldn’t change a thing.

I got my cofounder pregnant. Now what?!?! was originally published in Loveseat Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Get out of your bubble. You’ll like it.

Even though everyone knows user testing is important and getting feedback early in the product development process is critical, for some reason, we all tend to build our products in a vacuum.

I’ll go on the record saying that I’m as guilty of this as anyone. You can ask anyone who used to work with me at TicketLeap.

I’d rationalize my lack of user testing with a belief that whatever I lose out on in feedback I’m making up for with a strong gut instinct and fantastic taste.

But….that’s complete bullshit.

Everyone has an excuse…

“I’m too lazy.”
“I don’t have enough time.”
“I’m a developer. We need a product manager to do that stuff.”
“My product is too much of a breakthrough to test on users.”
“I don’t want to give away the idea.“

Everyone…

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
— Henry Ford

My go-to excuse is shame (which is a common theme in my posts). I’m ashamed of the product because it isn’t right yet. I don’t want anyone to see it and judge my work.

As I’m sure you can realize, these excuses are a waste of time and they hold us back.

This post is a quick story about how we — my wife and I, the Loveseat team — finally broke our bad habit and got some user feedback — and most importantly how that feedback helped us in unexpected ways.

We are building Loveseat — it’s a mobile marketplace for vintage and hard-to-find furniture. The app makes it super-easy to find really cool furniture for your home from anywhere. As is the case with every marketplace, it’s really hard to get started. There is a chicken and egg problem to contend with — two sides of the marketplace need to work at the same time — sellers and buyers. One of the things we are doing to overcome this is to work with sellers who are already in the business. This is where the user testing comes in.

We met with ~10 of those sellers here in San Diego to discuss Loveseat and review the app. The situation was a little unique in that it wasn’t described as user testing to the folks we were meeting with — these were just partnership discussions from their perspective. We just happened to sneak in some user testing along the way.

Before I go any further, I want to say a quick few words on paper prototyping:

For all you paper prototype folks out there, I can tell you that if we walked into these busy business owners’ shops and offices with a bunch of hand sketched paper, they would have laughed at us and thrown us out. It would have been degrading and would have killed any shot at a partnership. Paper prototypes have a place.
This wasn’t it.

We instead walked in with something much more buttoned up. We have a functional app that is about a month or so out from going live. It was enough for the users to play around with and see the vision of why they should work with us. For us, getting feedback at this juncture was perfect timing, because we still have time to change things.

Here’s what we got out of it:

1. A better product — The Loveseat app was pretty good walking into these meetings. It’s even better now.
   ‏‏
   I would say that we are on the other side of the MVP spectrum. We are investing a significant amount of time, effort, & money now so we can wow our users when we launch. Getting some early user feedback gave us some humble pie on a few of our product decisions (which we are now changing), but also let us see some of that “wow” for the first time.
2. A motivated team — I cannot stress our surprise on this one. It was a very zen experience.
   ‏
   Simply put, nothing motivates product people more than getting some “wow” from the folks for whom they are designing their product. Hearing “amazing”, “fantastic”, “love it” out of our users’ mouths was like rocket fuel for our drive. I think everyone on product development teams should sit down with users regularly. It’s exciting and gives real meaning and purpose to all the work. Even on big teams, I’d argue that user testing shouldn’t be reserved just for product-titled folks…engineers should be in on it as well.
   ‏
   Back to our meetings…if our conversation went the other way, and we heard “shit”, “don’t get it”, “confusing” we would have had a heavy dose of reality. While I’m glad we aren’t dealing with that, I can say I’d much rather have that problem pre-launch.
3. Some early users — Users are key for all early-stage startups or any company launching something new. Duh!
   ‏
   Getting users (especially the paying kind) early in the process not only helps the product, but it also helps the likelihood that test users will become real users. They become stakeholders in the product because they have a unique opportunity to sprinkle a little inspiration into it — which ultimately ensures that they will use it when it launches.

User testing is much more than getting feedback on how a button works or if a menu is clear or not. It’s the very first moment that your product comes to life. It’s also your chance to step outside of your private startup bubble and show the world what you are working on.

No matter how scary that may sound, you should do it. It may be your most rewarding moment yet.

User testing. Enough excuses. was originally published in Loveseat Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What to do on your first week to get started.

Creating your startup’s online identity is an often overlooked early step. Many startup founders (us included) are reluctant to unveil anything about the company out of shame that the product is not finished.

Yes, shame. Loveseat (a mobile market to buy used furniture) is still a month or so off from launch. We want the world to see our vision, which is not what we have today. Because of this, our instinct was to wait until we were ready for launch to unveil anything.

We were chatting with our advisor, Gabe Weinberg of Duck Duck Go, about our plans for gaining traction (an outside perspective is enlightening). He questioned why we were waiting for launch and ultimately gave us the push we needed to get something out there.

Taking the “we’re doing this for testing purposes” approach to online marketing made the whole exercise easier to swallow. Also, we only spent about 8 hours total on this, so it didn’t take too much time away from some of the more proprietary stuff we are working on.

Disclaimer: This post covers the most basic topics for online marketing / customer acquisition analysis. It’s a very “hacky” approach — which I would argue is exactly how a startup should do things.

Why bother with your online identity when you are pre-launch?

1. It’s a tool to get the word out to early fans & you get to build on it.
2. It’s a platform to test customer acquisition costs. Learn what works.

Establishing an online brand identity:

———————————————————————————————

If you are like most founders, you have extremely high aspirations for what your brand should look like. You want the perfect url, perfect logo, perfect colors — everything. You may even be tempted to hire a design agency, do a fancy video, etc.

Don’t do this. No one is going to remember what you looked like your first week. Just get something out there to start testing and building a following. We did all “design” ourselves by taking our mobile splash page and modifying it in Photoshop…nothing tricky.

Things we did this week:

Launchrock Page:

http://signup.loveseatapp.com/

Time to build out: 1 hour

Thoughts: We needed a landing page that would also act as our temporary homepage. For us it was really important that we had a form to collect email and zip code.

The Launchrock page got almost 100 signups in under a week. This is pretty good. We even signed up a bunch of cool vintage furniture stores and importers via our marketing efforts. Perfect.

Building out a Launchrock page is dead easy. If you are looking to get something up quickly, it’s a no-brainer. It has two useful features I like:

1. Trackable URLs: Although they hide this feature as user referrals, you can use those trackable links to see the effectivness of online advertising.
2. Google Analytics: You can plug in your Google Analytics property id and start collecting basic analytics instantly.

It gets tricky (maybe impossible) when trying to do sophisticated things like Google Adwords tracking or Analytics Goal Tracking. We were able to get some things going by modifying Launchrocks’ javascript (instruction here), but it’s a really ugly work-around. We’ll very likely end up building our own landing page w/ form in Django so we can do more advanced stuff before our launch.

Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/loveseatapp

Time to build out: 5 minutes

Thoughts: Right now its only purpose is so we can run Facebook ads properly. We have a whopping 13 fans.

Twitter Profile:

https://twitter.com/loveseatapp

This also took about 5 minutes. Right now it’s only purpose is so we can run Twitter ads properly. Yes, 4 followers.

Google+ Profile:

https://plus.google.com/b/106055749303466121036/106055749303466121036/posts

This also took about 5 minutes. We will be using it to test content marketing via Google+ and see how it compares to other content platforms (Medium/Tumblr/Wordpress).

Testing customer acquisition costs:———————————————————————————

This is the part I really care about. The inner scheming geek in me LOVES this stuff. I want to know two things:

1. How much does it cost us to get a new user via a channel?
2. Is the supply of new customers we can get via this channel limited?

This week we wanted to learn about customer acquisition costs on Adwords, Facebook, & Twitter. What we learned was pretty surprising.

Google Adwords:

Total spend: $63.71

Cost-per-click: $1.72

Good old tried and true Google had the highest cost-per-click (and therefore highest acquisition costs) of any channel we tested. We targeted users in San Diego via the search network only — aka, no adsense ads.

The concentration of mobile users via Google adwords was much lower than what we saw on other channels, so I think it’s safe to assume this won’t be a major channel for us.

Disclaimer: Our ads sucked, the copy was meh, the landing page had a really low quality score — so I can’t really hold this entirely against Google.

Facebook ads:

Total spend: $6.97

Cost-per-click: $0.35

Facebook ads are ridiculously easy. We limited our ads to San Diego residents over 18 years old targeted based on broad categories of “recently moved” & “home and garden”.

You simply can’t do that with Google. Also, Facebook ads format perfectly in a mobile feed. Next up we’ll run ads based on more specific interests.

The big takeaway is that Facebook ads have a dramatically lower CPC than Google for our purposes. Our assumption is that there will be enough users to target via this channel over time.

Twitter ads:

Total spend: $28.86

Cost-per-click: $0.72

Twitter ads are also really interesting. They seem to be a better fit for us given the near real-time nature of the targeting. You can target the ads based on twitter search (less frequent matches) or feed content (more frequent). In other words, you can show an ad when someone uses Twitter search or you can promote an ad in their feed if they tweeted recently with triggering keywords.

We ran our ads to San Diego users only targeting keywords “Craigslist” “furniture” and “ikea”. The results were pretty strong. With some better targeting we expect these to improve and the CPC to come down. Also, since these ads are based on Twitter updates, we don’t think there will be a limit in terms of potential audience for us.

Twitter lead-gen cards:

Total spend: $49.82

Cost-per-click: $0.43

Twitter lead-gen cards are my favorite thing. Ever. This is displayed to Twitter users in their feed as a promoted tweet targeted just like a Twitter ad. The difference is when the user clicks the button on the card that says “Join the beta list”, Twitter adds the user’s registered email address to a csv file they send to us.

What this means is that a CPC is really a CPA. We have now “acquired” the user’s email address. While they aren’t yet a user of our platform, we can reach out to them to explain the benefits of Loveseat.

Just for kicks, we did a second campaign w/ Twitter lead-cards targeted at startup people in San Diego (keywords: startup, techcrunch, vc, entrepreneur, github, etc.). Guess what? These folks converted at a whopping 3.41% which is 50% higher than the other target group. Go nerds!!

So, we spent a total of $149.36 + 8 hours of time to learn some key information. What did we learn?

We learned that our rough acquisition costs for a user ranges from $1.95 to $11.18. This is before doing any optimization and with some not-so-carefully thought through ads. We also learned that Twitter & Facebook are probably a better fit for us to promote our mobile platform.

The main takeaway is there is some opportunity here. And, we can talk to someone (like a VC if we were raising) about user acquisition and have some data to back up our claims.

Equally importantly, we now have accounts set up on a bunch of platforms we will use into the future.

And finally, most importantly, we have nearly 100 people who are eager to learn more about Loveseat.

There are people out there who will say: “Yea, I’ve heard of that”.

=)

Final notes:

We were only able to approximate CPA due to some limitation with Launchrock (not a knock against them). However, we know that our landing page has a 15.45% conversion rate. So, we can take the cost-per-click spend above and multiply by ~6.5 to get the CPA. Remember, the key at this stage is directional information.

One tool that was mentioned here is Google Webmaster Tools. It’s used for a number of things in conjunction with Google Analytics & Adwords. It didn’t help us just yet given the setup of our landing page, but you should definitely get on it.

Online marketing for startups was originally published in Loveseat Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

5 tips on making it work

From the sunny beaches of San Diego, my wife Jenny and I are deep in the trenches of building our first startup together, called Loveseat. It’s an elegantly simple marketplace for stylish furniture in your city.

This isn’t our first startup experience, but it’s our first together. Prior to Loveseat, I founded TicketLeap, a Philly-based DIY ticketing platform and grew it to over $70m in gross annual sales before moving to San Diego. Jenny was a key early engineer at Venmo, a social p2p payments platform, and she was with them all the way until they were purchased by Braintree.

Building a seed-stage company is much easier the second time around, but doing it as a married couple is a bit tricky — especially since it’s our first time together. There are lots of great articles out there on later stage husband and wife startups, like Susan & Eric Koger of Modcloth & my personal frenemies Julia & Kevin Hartz of Eventbrite. And there are even more articles on why investors won’t invest in husband and wife teams — like here, here, and here.

But we thought the world could use some words on the seed stage of a married startup in real time. So, here are 5 tips to making your company and your marriage/partnership a success. Good luck.

1) Honor your different working styles

It’s easy to let your guard down with workplace etiquette when you are working with your spouse. Since you know each other better than anyone, it’s easy to assume that you’ll be able to work together in perfect harmony. It took us a little while to realize that we work completely differently — and it took us even longer to stop trying to change each other.

Respecting each other’s working style is essential. For instance, Jenny likes to work in short intense bursts (under 5 hours). During this time, interrupting her will result in some sinister looks or worse. I work less intensely, but I’m always working. I am most effective when I can jump between multiple tasks and brainstorming the whole time. Trying to get me to work in a non-ADD manner will result in an irritated non-productive Chris.

We now work much more harmoniously because we let ourselves be individuals during work hours.

2) Create non-work time

This one is a lot harder for me because I like to work all the time. But, maintaining a marriage can’t be solely built on burndown charts and pull requests. You need to actively stop working (including talking about work) and just enjoy time together. We try to carve out most of the weekend for couple time and it’s actually helped us to be more productive.

3) Know your roles

The idea for Loveseat was mine and Jenny started building it while I was still CEO of TicketLeap. The original plan was for this to be her startup. When things changed and we decided to start working together on it, it took us some time to learn our roles. We are now co-CEOs, but we’ve taken a divide and conquer approach. Jenny does the majority of the engineering, I am doing the majority of the marketing and traction strategy. We both work on product vision together.

Having this clear division of work enables us to have our own focus areas where one is the boss and the other the employee. That said, we both know exactly what the other is doing and no one is working on anything with the other in the dark. This lets us brainstorm together and create a superior product than we could individually.

4) Work arguments will become real-life arguments

This is a big one. When starting a company it’s natural to be extremely passionate about even the tiniest details. In fact, without intensity I’d question your commitment to your vision. If you are taking it seriously, it’s definitely worth arguing about. But, when you argue intensely about company details as a married startup team, it doesn’t take much to turn this into a personal argument.

How to resolve this is very simple. Stop arguing when you start. Take a step back. Hug.

When everything has calmed down, get back to the discussion at hand. We find that taking a few minutes to reconnect during these tense moments not only helps us as a couple, but it also helps us to see the right answer for the question we were debating.

5) Enjoy the process

This is one you can only understand if you’ve done it before and it doesn’t just apply to husband and wife startups. Some of my fondest memories from TicketLeap were the few years when it was just me and Iqram — former TicketLeap head of technology and now cofounder of Venmo. We worked insane hours and were always focused on getting to the next level. As the company grew to 10, 20, 30 employees I started missing the early days. And you can’t get them back.

Even though we’re still in the early stages of Loveseat, I can’t help but think that we’ll look back fondly on these times when it’s just the two of us banging out work in our apartment like mad scientists. With more work and some luck, soon we’ll have a bunch of happy customers, an office and a team of employees. But, you can never get back to the kitchen table startup without starting over again, so make sure you enjoy the unique trip together.

p.s. — The photo at the top of this was the best we could find to symbolize working together. It was directly after getting interviewed by Paul Graham and team for YCombinator. We got the dreaded rejection email later that day.

Husband and Wife Startups was originally published in Loveseat Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.