How to be a good VR startupper – Part 2

Second part of my post with my pieces of advice for wannabe VR entrepreneurs. If you lost the first part, you can find it here!

Notice that these pieces of advice are valid for whatever market, not only VR, so if you arrived at this page because you want to be a startupper in another field, keep reading, because you will find them interesting the same 🙂

Marketing marketing marketing

If you don’t do marketing, you don’t exist. This is one of the biggest errors I did with my previous startup: thinking that a good product will sell itself.

But how can people buy something that they don’t know? Outreach is fundamental to sell your products… and as I have shown you in the previous post, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re annoying other people.

Write content marketing, talk about your product on forums, use Facebook paid advertisement, manage your social media, talk about your company to whoever you can… you must focus a lot on marketing. And if you can partner with someone that is expert in the field, that’s even better, because he/she will know the strategies that work. Someone says that in a company 50% of the time must be spent on developing the products and 50% of the time must be spent in marketing. This shows you how marketing is important.

So, go out and tell everyone about what you are doing!

You live in a bubble

We VR people live in a bubble: we know the latest headsets available, we have tried lots of VR experiences, we have a clear understanding of how will be the future that is in front of us and so on. We are used to talking among us and so sometimes we have a distorted vision on how is the world outside VR circles.

The average person has maybe tried a Gear VR in an exhibition and thinks that that is virtual reality. He/she doesn’t know what AR/VR/XR/MR mean. Snapchat’s face filters are black magic for him/her and if you try to tell him/her that in 10 years we will all wear an AR headset on our head all day and we will live in a mixed reality, he/she will look at you like a crazy guy with a tinfoil hat on your head (it happens every time with my friends)

You have to think about this when starting up your business. You don’t have to please hardcore VR enthusiasts, you have to serve your customers. While VR communities are full of posts like “360 videos are not VR“, 360 videos are still widely used for marketing. 360 tours of houses made with 360 cameras are still not widespread and that many people still don’t know them.

We have recently visited a tech company and when we told them that we wanted to show them our game HitMotion: Reloaded on the Vive Focus Plus, they told us: “let us give you a room where you can set up your computer”. They had no clue about standalone VR devices.

Whatever you think that is “old” is probably “new and incredible” for someone that is outside our circles. And this is even truer for countries that are not at the cutting edge of technology: what is new in Italy, is probably old in the US. Remember that, when thinking about your business.

You can’t do it all yourself

I’m sure that you are smart, and that studying enough, you can do whatever you want: you can be a genius of marketing, development, business, etc.. BUT you have only 24 hours each day, so you don’t have the time to become an expert in everything.

Someone says that you have to do something for 10,000 hours to master it. If you work 10 hours a day, this means that you need more or less 3 years to master a topic. Considering the various expertises needed for a business (for which you need 3 years each), probably you will need 10 years or more to master everything. Not considering the fact that you must actually manage your company, and also update your knowledge constantly. As you can see, knowing everything yourself is not feasible.

And even if you can learn everything in one second because you have a brain plug like in the movie The Matrix, you anyway have not enough time to manage every day the development, marketing, management and financials of your business.

You can start a business alone, but soon you will realize that you need other people that help you in those aspects in which you are not a pro. If you are a developer, maybe you need someone that cares about marketing and business for instance. Apart from making your team more complete and efficient, these people will help you in feeling less alienated while you run your business: you can share with them your pains and your joys. In my opinion, having a team is fundamental.

The team is fundamental

As I’ve just said, a team is fundamental. And for this reason, it is necessary that it is chosen carefully.

Having a company is damn hard and there are a lot of difficult moments. In these moments, the cohesion of the team will be challenged and there will be quarrels, suspects and other problems of this kind. If the team is not strong enough, it will break up and the company will end.

How to create the best team? Some guidelines are:

• Don’t partner with your friends or your girlfriend/boyfriend. This is for two reasons. First of all, the hard moments may ruin your relationship. And then, it is hard to be overly critical with a friend that is not performing well;
• Partner with someone that has your same vision. If you want to make VR and your possible partner wants to be a farmer, you are not a good match. Finding a compromise between your visions is a nonsense: a company about VR headsets for cows has no potential;
• Partner with someone you esteem and trust. Trust is fundamental in a company, otherwise, when the first problems will come to light, the suspects on the other people will make the team break up;
• Find high-quality profiles, if you can. The more talented the team, the faster the startup will grow;
• Be sure all the members of the team work well together. Avoid situations full of drama when two members of the team compete with each other. If they all work good with you, but don’t work well between them, you have a problem;
• Be sure they really want to be entrepreneurs. If I stop 50 people in the street and I ask them if they want to be an independent startupper, I’m sure that 100% will answer yes. If I actually put them inside a startup, I think that 80% of them will run away. Everyone dreams of being independent, few people really want to thrive and suffer for it;
• Be sure that the group includes people with different expertises and backgrounds. A group of 3 developers has far less possibilities of succeeding than one of 1 developer, 1 artist, and 1 marketer.

I have been in a toxic group once and it was a terrible experience. Avoid that at all cost: in toxic groups, things can’t work, even if the members are talented. The team is one of the most important things in a company: a single project may fail, but if the team is united and talented, in the end, it will find a way to succeed.

Finding a partner ain’t easy

Finding a partner for your company will be very complicated. Most people want either to be paid for their work (and so they don’t want to have a company with you), or to be an entrepreneur, but of their own company. Finding someone that has your same vision and wants to go on a journey with you is not easy at all. I see that every time, with myself and all the other people I know.

Here there is not a secret recipe: the more people you know, the more there are possibilities of creating business synergies.

The “community” won’t help you

The title here is of course a provocation. Communities are incredibly useful and helpful… but you shouldn’t rely on them.

I have seen so many times companies saying “I’m doing this rough stuff, and then the community will help me in making it better and in selling it” or “the community will fund it” or things like that.

The “community” is not a magical entity, it is just a group of people with a common interest. People like you and me. It won’t help you just because you want that.

Do you think that starting a Kickstarter will boost your business because of the community? Well, think about this: if you were one of the community members would you buy your product? How many VR Kickstarter campaigns have you ignored in the past?

You want them to help you in ironing out bugs in your opensource project. Well… how many bugs of opensource products have you actually fixed?

You want donations. How much have you spent in donations in the last year?

I think you got the idea: as a member of the community yourself, you don’t always help others. From my experience, 80% of the “community” won’t help you… they will ignore you or sometimes even be against you. 20% of them will be helpful, but only because you have invested in the community yourself. Again, if you give to the community, you will get from the community.

So, think about your business in terms of money, market fit, and so on. Don’t base it on the help of the magical “community”. Then, if for some reasons, the community will decide to boost you, that will be great. But don’t rely on this.

Your community may be your wrong target

If you are in the VR business, probably you are selling a product that involves VR. But the VR community may not be your customer.

Let me explain what I want to mean with an example. Let’s suppose that you are offering a solution for training in VR. Something cool and super-innovative. Your first reaction maybe is the one of sharing it on VR communities, forums and magazines. Maybe you get featured on Road To VR, you get 200 likes on /r/Oculus. You go to VR exhibitions and everyone makes great compliments to you. You feel like in heaven. You think you are succeeding.

Actually, you have obtained mostly nothing. If you are in the VR training business, your customers are industrial companies needing training, not VR enthusiasts. Attending VR events, getting likes on VR magazines is nice, for sure gives you reputation, and makes you create connections but doesn’t give you much advantage. You should attend industrial events, connect with people in the industry field and so on. Those are the places where your customers are. Probably 20 likes in a subreddit about industrial training are worth more than 200 on a VR subreddit, because from those 200 likes you will probably convert nothing.

Your goal is converting, not getting likes.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be inside VR communities or attending VR events, because having partnerships and connections in your own field is important… but remember always that your customers are probably elsewhere.

Never follow the herd

Use your brain. Listen to what people in the field say, but don’t take that for certain. Don’t be influenced by the hypes or the downs of the communities. Take data from multiple sources and mix them analytically. Be like a low pass filter, don’t let the spikes influence you.

VR communities are much prone to hype… but common sentiments are not always true. When Epic Games showed its VR mode, that let you develop in Unreal Engine all within VR thanks to a dedicated editor, everyone got crazy and people for days started saying that all VR developers would have developed that way. I answered many of them that it was a nonsense, because no developer would spend 8 hours a day with a headset on waving controllers in the air. No one was listening to me. 3 years later, UE4 developers, of course, still use mouse and keyboard most of the time.

When the Oculus Go was released, everyone was excited saying that VR was going to become mainstream thanks to that. I said that it was not true, because people don’t get what VR is for, there are no applications for the average Joe. After a year or such, we all agree that the Go is a good device, has sold well in the west, but it is not mainstream at all. When Magic Leap One has been released, most people criticized it for being much less than what it was expected, but actually, when I reviewed it, I noticed that it is not a bad device.

If you follow the various hypes, you will make wrong business decisions, based on the common emotions of the moment. Take your time and think.

Don’t even trust influential people

Influential people are smart, but this doesn’t mean they are always right. In any case, as I’ve said before, you have to evaluate what they say and mix it with all the other data in your possession.

Don’t trust market analysts. In these years, they have not made a single prediction about AR and VR right. They are too prone to hype. They continue forecasting billions “in five years”, but these five years move forward every year.

Don’t you believe me? This is a prediction for the VR market I used in a business plan around 2015. Do you find it accurate?

Surveys with present data are far more interesting than forecasts in 5 years. When I attended the European Innovation Academy, the VCs there told us that 5 years forecasts for a company are “bullshit”. 5 years is a very long timespan for a new technology to make reliable predictions. You may predict a trend, but not the actual numbers.

Find a mentor, but remember that you are alone

In a company you are “alone”: there’s no one making decisions for you. YOU are the one that must decide on everything, you are the one that must risk. You will have the pressure on you. Other people can give you some advice, they can support you, but in the end, you are the one that must set the path. You have not a guide, YOU are the guide. This is not easy, because you will be required to make decisions that may make you succeed or fail.

If you can, find a mentor that can show you the way. He/she can explain to you the path that you have to follow, and help you during the moments when you are unsure the most. Finding a mentor is not easy. You may find him/her through your connections, or by participating in acceleration programs. Usually, a mentor is an experienced entrepreneur in your field, or a person whose job is being a mentor of companies.

If you can’t find a mentor, at least surround yourself with smart people you can ask for advice once in a while: if you have someone who can help you with marketing, someone else with financing and so on, this can be great in critical moments. But having someone that follows you during all the journey is still better.

Try to keep a healthy work-life balance

This is probably the point I suck the most at. Try not to work 100% of your time, but to still have a good relationship with your family, with your special one and also to find some time for yourself.

A company may suck all your time and energies. You can always do more. Instead of going out with your friends, you can write a new content marketing post on Medium. Instead of having a dinner with your SO, you can make a new experiment with a VR headset. And so on. But if you work 100% of your time, most probably your life will be horrible.

We are social animals, and we need love and affection. We need to hang out with other people. We need to care our families. We also need time for ourselves, to have a hobby, to go to the gym to have a healthy body. If we remove all of this, we get crazy and unhealthy, reaching the famous “burnout”.

Working 100% of your time has no sense, for the following reasons:

• If you spend your life working… what are you working for? I mean you work to earn money so that you can still work. It has no sense;
• This will ruin your mental and physical health. And, ironically, once your health is gone, you can’t work anymore;
• We over-estimate the short term effect of working a lot. I read a very interesting post on Medium (sorry, I don’t have the link) of a guy that because of working too much was going to ruin his life (divorcing, etc…). He stopped and re-evaluated the sense of his life, and so started working less time each day. He noticed with much of his surprise, that he managed to be successful the same. He has not become Elon Musk and he needed a bit more time, but he did it. He said that consistency is much more important than working a crazy amount of hours each day. If you will be consistent and continue working to succeed, you will succeed;
• Without proper resting and distraction, your mind will be tired and won’t even be able to activate its creative processes, so you will perform worse;
• There is never an end for the work of an entrepreneur. For a project, you may say “I work 100% of time for 5 days, but then it is finished, and I can relax”. You can’t do this for a company. Once you reach a goal, there will be other goals, so you will keep working all the time always;
• What happens if your company fails in the end? When my startup shut down, I thought at all those moments in those 3 years in which I could have rest more, hang out with friends, relax a bit and so on. I sacrificed 3 years of my life for nothing;
• What if you succeed in 20 years? If you succeed when you’re 40-50, that’s great… but you have not enjoyed your youth at all. Maybe you won’t be able to experience some things anymore.

Don’t misunderstand me. You will have to work a lot, a 9-5 mentality for an entrepreneur has no sense. You will have to work during the weekends, you will have to say no to lots of nights out together with your friends, you will have to do a lot of sacrifices. You will get tired a lot. But don’t fall in the trap of working always.

Reserve some time in your timetable for other activities. Consider them as mandatory. For instance, I have some time that I must go to the gym, even if I’m tired, even if I’m very busy. I avoid the gym only if it is strictly necessary. I do that for my health. I try to reserve at least one night out in the week to see some friends. I try to find some time to stay with my family, maybe working from home once in a while. I’m still sucking completely in time management, but I’m trying to improve.

In the end you may fail

90% of startups fail in 3 years. Always remember this. Probably all your efforts will be useless, even if you put 100% of yourself in, even if you are talented, even if your product idea was great.

When I attended the European Innovation Academy accelerator, one of the mentors told us a little story. A friend of his had invented years ago a system to synchronize all the documents across different computers, so multiple people could share them and work on them together. Yes, like Dropbox, but years before Dropbox. But while Dropbox is a very successful company, the company of this guy failed and now he’s working in a bank or something like that. He invented Dropbox before Dropbox and he failed… doesn’t it sound weird?

Actually, it is a pretty standard story. There are too many factors that influence the success of a company. One of them is timing: when that company was out, it was too early for a similar product to succeed. Dropbox came instead at the right time. Too many factors mean that things may go good or wrong notwithstanding your talent and effort. Always remember that before starting your venture.

The odds are against you and most probably your company will have to close.

It will be hard

Being an entrepreneur is hard. Very hard. It can ruin you financially, emotionally and also make you unhealthy. It’s a tough journey. You may like it, it could make you successful, it can transform you into a better person, but it will be really tough. Don’t be scared, but be prepared. And enjoy it.

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That’s it for this super-long list of basic pieces of advice for entrepreneurs. I hope that it will be useful for you. As I’ve said, I’m also thinking expanding it and creating a free PDF out of it. Do you think it could be a good idea?

Don’t forget to also add your personal pieces of advice in the comment of this article or answering me on social media channels! This can help the people reading this article even more.

And if you want to connect with me to talk about possible collaborations in the VR field, feel free to contact me! I would be happy to talk with you 😉