StartupCafe

Andrew Scott from Rummble gave an amusing talk at a recent event aimed at entrepreneurial folk interested in mobile and tablet technologies.  He talked about the DIRTY DOZEN – the name he’s given to mistakes he has made – and offered some advice to those wanting to develop mobile apps.

Depending on your perspective, Rummble is Andrew’s 5^th or 6^th startup so he’s got plenty of experience to share!

Here is what he had to say:

1. Don’t choose a cr*p name – Scott once chose Playtex, which seems ok but in the UK it’s known for bras and the USA it is known for sanitary products…!
2. Build amazingly on one platform – then you can go to a VC and say ‘gimme £3million to do this awesome thing on everything else’ 🙂
3. Location location location: Last year, Paul Carr of Tech Crunch said on The Guardian “London 2.0 is dead”.  Scott disagrees but suggests you go to Silicon valley and bring the energy and learnings back to london
4. Hire slow, fire quick. “Everytime I fire someone, I wish I’d done it a month earlier”  lol!
5. Delegate
6. Have a one line pitch – This should be something your mother understands.  E.g: Rummble is a location-based, mobile, social discovery tool, OR, Rummble makes it easy for you to find stuff you like
7. Beware the bubble: most people are not on Facebook or Twitter so talk to normal people
8. Stop guessing and measure –there are good tools available; e.g. Flurry will let you record every single action on the app that you build; or check out 500 hats (great resource)
9. Time flies – development takes five times as long as you’d expect and at the minimum it takes twice as long.  Funding takes three times as long.
10. Practice, no really. The difference between your piano teacher and an expert pianist is only practice.  Have you read the book Outliers?  It only takes 10,000hrs to become expert….oh my!
11. Help others, it’s circular – it’ll come back to you
12. Take time out – (do I need to explain this one?)

These are just a few notes that I took during this past weekend’s Launch48 Mobile Conference.  If you’re interested in the teams that formed during the weekend of app building and development then take a look at their website: http://www.launch48.com/.  It was a great deal of fun.  I didn’t join a group as I usually do but was there to soak up the atmosphere, which as usual was wonderfully warm and welcoming!