We just came back from MicroConf. We had a great time and we met and reconnected with some awesome people.

For those who don’t know,  MicroConf is a conference for self-funded startup companies to come together for a few days and share their success, their expertise, and just support the community that has developed.

We discuss the speakers we saw at MicroConf and what the future of self-funded startup business looks like from our view.

We discussed the following points today:

The Q & A session, the workshops, and everything we did at the conference

Resources from today’s episode:

MicroConf

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The post 099: The State of Self-Funded Startups appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

This episode is a Q & A session. When we did the live chat last month we had a number of unanswered questions. We got a ton of questions online and we’ll do our best to answer as many as we can.

We answered questions on several topics including:

When we were wrong about entrepreneurship

We also discussed some topics that we did whole episodes on such as when it’s appropriate to do a remote demo for potential clients. To learn more about demos you can email Steli at [email protected] for a copy of his book on the subject and his send you a link to the episode.

Also we plan on doing a live chat on Slack, so click here for more information on that!

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

The post 098: Startup Q&A Session With Steli & Hiten appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today on The Startup Chat we talk about worry. We get lots of questions about things that are rooted in worry. Worry is a useless emotion that just paralyzes action and problem solving. There are 2 different problems people worry about.

The problem you can’t do anything about.

Worry can be helpful in business because it tells you there is an issue that needs to be addressed. A worry should be short term and dealt with in a matter of hours not days or weeks.

Here are some observations we had about worry:

What exactly is a worry

Learning how to worry is key to keeping your business running smoothly. Problems should be dealt with quickly, when a worry creeps up, be proactive.

Please join our Facebook discussion on this topic!

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at  The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

The post 097: How to Worry in Business appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

We often talk about the importance of charging what you’re worth, but today we are going to tell you about instances where free work is ideal. To begin with let’s make it clear that this method of  marketing only works well for service based businesses. Companies can offer their service to a larger company in exchange for a logo placement of mention during a podcast or other medium.

We have two relationships that are based on this method. We don’t mention during the podcast, but we do feature their logos on the website. We work with Podcast Motor and WeBuild. Podcast Motor is the team that helps us get the podcast together for our audience. WeBuild is the team who designed our landing page and gave us the great platform for the podcast. Both of these arrangements were made because we had something that each of us needed. We had the audience and they needed the exposure.

We discuss this topic with the following points:

The growth of Podcast Motor and WeBuild

Keep in mind this method of marketing only works with people you really want to work with and want a long term relationship. It doesn’t mean if you offer free things you will automatically get exposure. Offer your work to someone who can use it and can offer you something in return.

Resources Mentioned During Today’s Episode:

Podcast Motor

WeBuild

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at  The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

The post 096: How to grow your business doing FREE work appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

Today we talk about mental toughness. Many people understand the concept of mental toughness, but they have a hard time using it in their everyday business practice. Many sports,  especially boxing, are metaphors for what we are discussing today. Having an involvement with that sort of activity can teach you about mental toughness, but we’re going a lot deeper than that today.

Mental toughness is closely related to being stoic. Many business owners mistake harsh words or brutal behavior for toughness, but in reality their emotions are plainly displayed and possibly making a bad situation worse. One of the best skill sets a business owner can learn is how to process setbacks and move on with business as usual.

Today’s points are:

What is mental toughness

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at  The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Hiten Shah:  Hi, I’m Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti:  And this is Steli Efti. And in today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about mental toughness. So, here’s why I want to talk about that. I mean we’re both fascinated by I think the mental and emotional side of life in general in specific of business and entrepreneurship. One thing that I—the reason why I’ve started thinking more recently more about mental toughness is because I’ve started doing more martial arts, right? And we’ve talked about this in a few episodes that I really got passionate about MMA and, you know, kickboxing, Thai boxing and all that—

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, hurt yourself in all kinds of stuff. Yeah.

Steli Efti:  Pain and everything.

Hiten Shah:  Steli, the go-getter.

Steli Efti:  Yes. Well—one really interesting thing that I’ve noticed as I’m doing this—as I’m doing something that’s physically very challenging when I’m not used to doing that, being physically as challenged, is that there are situations where you are slightly handicapped. And when you are in combat with somebody even sparring, when it’s not just like I’m playing basketball and I’m gassed out, maybe I will slow down a little bit or I’ll pass the ball more often, I’ll just like fall back a little bit. That’s challenging but it’s kind of somewhat easier to deal with, but if you are let’s say boxing with somebody and you feel exhausted because you’re sick or you just got—you just feel some sudden pain somewhere. The mental challenge of dealing with that handicap while somebody is charging at you and punching you in the face is on a completely different level.

Recently, what I just—what happened during the same day was that I watched a big championship fight where one of the guy that ended up winning the championship fight, it turned out that when you watched him fight very early on, he seems to be exhausted even in the first round and he still went on to fight a really good fight and win and take the belt—he was not the champion—take the belt. And then afterwards in the press conference, he basically explained that he had a staph infection 2 weeks prior to the fight. Had to take antibiotics for 2 weeks all the way like 24 hours leading up to t...

Today we are going to talk about what to do when moving to Silicon Valley. Steli received an email from a listener who had heard that Steli sold everything and bought a one-way ticket to the Bay Area. The listener was looking for guidance on what he should and shouldn’t do, so we decided to make this the topic of our show.

Steli arrived in the Bay Area with nowhere to stay and no idea how to move forward. By chance, he ended up sitting next to Dave McClure and near Robert Scoble at a dinner on his first night. Dave McClure wasn’t that welcoming when Steli tried to listen in on his new app demo, but Robert Scoble told Steli to call him the next day once he found out this was his first night in the the United States.

Thanks to the kindness of Robert Scoble, Steli did his first online interview in the U.S.  He got an insider's tour of Silicon Valley courtesy of Robert on his 2nd day. Then he attended an event where Robert spoke and Steli had the nerve to steal an open mic and make an introduction and ask for friends. He subsequently spent the next two weeks returning calls and hanging out with people who had given him their cards.

Hiten moved back to L.A. after college, but he kept coming to the Bay Area to work on tech projects. In 2007, he and his wife decided to make the Bay Area their permanent home. Hiten was an advisor to Slideshare and Webs.com. Both of these companies sold for 9 figures, and Hiten felt he was able to be involved and make money just by doing what came natural, which was being helpful, making friends and networking.

Today we share our stories and tips for making the move a smooth transition.

Topics include:

Making friends - Make friends online and visit once or twice before the move

Links and Resources:

Slideshare

Webs.com

Startup2Startup

SaaStr

Dave McClure 500 Hats

Robert Scoble Post about Steli Efti

Video of Steli’s 2nd Day in the US - A One Way Ticket From Germany to Silicon Valley

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

Some years back Steli signed up for a series of workshops. One of these workshops taught the audience about hypnosis and Neurological Linguistic Programming. Steli has mentioned this on and off during the podcast and our listeners have shown an interest in the subject. So Steli is going to tell us about his lessons from hypnosis and NLP.

Many people see hypnosis as a party trick and a “magical power” over people. But as we discuss on today’s episode, none of that is true.

We learn these things about hypnosis and NLP:

How hypnosis is a daily state

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our  Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at  The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Steli Efti:  Hey, this is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah:  And this is Hiten Shah on The Startup Chat.

Steli Efti:  And in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about hypnosis.

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, and I know nothing about it except the voodoo I see on TV. Maybe there was like a night rider episode about hypnosis that I recall. So that’s the last thing I recall about hypnosis. I also—it related—I do know some people who consider themselves healers, so I think that’s kind of somewhat related in some ways. But, I’m supposed to talk to you about it because I want to learn all about it. Tell us about hypnosis, Steli.

Steli Efti:  So, here’s why we’re talking about this in this episode. A bunch of people have asked about this because in prior episode, I’ve mentioned it at random times contextually that I have studied hypnosis in the past and that, you know, I know a thing or two about it and people just were curious about this and, you know—Hiten was like “we should talk about this one day because I want to know more about it,” so this is what we’re doing.

Hiten Shah:  So this is hypnosis 101 from Steli straight up and I’m just going to bug him the whole time.

Steli Efti:  From Steli Efti. There you go. So, okay, let me give maybe a 2-minute version of how I got involved with it and my quick summary of it and then I’ll let you drive the conversation and whatever your curiosities are. Hiten has the most evil look ever on his—he’s just so happy to talk about this. I don’t know. You should see his look on his face. The other thing is Hiten has an awesome shirt on today. He’s so—he’s a very sexy, very handsome man, I have to say.

Now, he only has to make me one promise after today’s episode is that all the other T-shirts—so he lost all this weight. He looks great. All the other shirts that don’t fit anymore, you have to throw them away.

Hiten Shah:  Yeah, I’m working on that.

Steli Efti:  Throw them away. Okay. So, hypnosis. So I was never—I never had an attraction to hypnosis. I always thought of it as I think most people do like the stage hypnosis, the “you are chicken now, pok-pok-pok” and— you know. I never thought about it too much, never knew is this true or not or what is it, but I was not fascinated by this topic at all.

Hiten Shah:  So how did you get into it?

Steli Efti:  I got into it because I got fascinated for a while on the topic of neurolin...

There is a statistic that says 40% of the work force is going to be freelance by 2020. Or something like that. Today on the show we discuss the pros and cons of remote teams. Steli says he is slowly easing into this culture shift, but Hiten has some experience with it.  We share our opinions on this style of working and how we’ve made it work for our companies.

There are businesses that have embraced the whole remote team model. And some of those companies are big names like Buffer and Automattic. With any remote team the issue of business culture is going to be a problem. There are ways to build a positive remote culture through retreats and meetups. But no matter what the hack for the dynamic issues, team culture does suffer when you choose the remote style.

We outline the pros and cons of remote teams with these points:

Our backgrounds in remote teams

Have you worked with remote teams? Do you work as part of a remote team? We’d love to hear about your experience.

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Hiten Shah:  Hi, this is Hiten Shah on The Startup Chat.

Steli Efti:  And this is Steli Efti. And in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about remote teams, how to manage remote teams, how to build a remote company. The reason I want to talk about this today, Hiten, is that Close.io today is kind of a semi-remote company in the sense that we do have an office in Palo Alto and most of our employees are in the Bay Area. But, we do have a few employees that are fully remote. We have an increasing amount of employees—the next 4 offers that we’re putting out there are all remote, and even the people that are currently in the Bay Area, half of them are planning to move somewhere else in the next 12 months. So we are kind of making a transition to becoming more and more remote.

Even before having any remote employees, I would say that, you know, two-thirds of the time a large number of people would not be in the office. So people would work from home or travel like so we are kind—we’ve always been used to being semi-remote. So we enjoy working from wherever. We enjoy traveling. We like people that are talented from all around the world, but we also kind of still like to be around once in a while with each other. We do a lot of team retreats and things of that nature.

And now we’re in this phase where we’re starting to hire more and more remote. I see some people that have worked for the last 4 years very closely with planning to leave and this is both an excitement and an anxiety about how we’re going to make this transition to being better at remote especially when it comes to like the fun stuff, the cultural stuff, the you know trust, the relationship building because we were able to do a lot of that because we knew each other already. So, if you fuck off and travel and only work with me in chat, I already know who you are.

But now we’re starting to hire people that I don’t know well and I only communicate through chat, so how do we do this? We’re also now having people that are in totally different time zones ...

We compare the terms leadership and management today on the episode. Both roles leader and manager are necessary to keeping a business going. We discuss our own definitions of leadership and management.

Hiten makes the point that early on in a business you need to focus on leading a team and then move into managing them once things are established. Today we discuss what both roles do for a business.

We cover these topics today:

What is a CEO

At the end of the day finding the right people to manage and lead is based on your own goals for the business.

We invite you to join our Facebook group.  It’s great to have such an incredible group of entrepreneurs out there making it happen every day.  We’d love to hear from you; please feel free to join our Facebook group and share your experiences, challenges, and motivation with us and the rest of Startup Chat community.

We appreciate having your email address at  The Startup Chat  because we’ll be sharing some special podcast episodes and other things exclusively with the people on our email list.  Click the link above and fill out the email address box to become part of the community today!

As always, you can hit us up on Twitter @Steli or @hnshah, #thestartupchat.

Steli Efti:  Hey, everyone. This is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah:  And this is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti:  And today at The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about management versus leadership. So this is going to be a fun episode. Just because this has been a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot, it’s also kind of a current thing that’s going on in the company so I’m super curious to hear your thoughts on this. Well, first, I do believe that there’s a massive difference between management and leadership.

Hiten Shah:  So I pulled up Wikipedia.

Steli Efti:  Nice.

Hiten Shah:  So let me just there.

Steli Efti:  Okay.

Hiten Shah:  I’m going to just read what they say. So they say management in businesses and organizations is the function that coordinates the efforts of people to accomplish goals and objectives by using available resources efficiently and effectively. So management is about using resources towards goals and objectives. It’s their definition in business.

Leadership, so there’s been some research and stuff and so this is what I think they’ve said. Leadership is both a research area and a practical skill. Regarding the ability of an individual or organization to lead or guide other individuals, teams or entire organizations. That’s the sort of short version. So that one is really just—that one is really mostly about skill, it sounds like. And management more about maybe you could say coordination?

Steli Efti:  I haven’t totally reversed. To me, leadership is the quality that you have found the answer to a common question like when do we need to go, what needs to be built, what needs to be accomplished, what are we trying to conquer? And like leadership is somebody defining the answer to a question and then taking the steps towards accomplishing that and inspiring people to want to follow that person to help with that solution or help accomplish that thing. That’s leadership and to me that’s much more of natural and authentic than management.

Management to me is like once we’ve—leadership is like defining the end-goal and being the first one to take the steps towards that end-goal and management is about defining the route, right? And organizing people and when we break and what we eat and what we drink and when we’re going to make stops and how to get there in the most efficient and effective manner. Management is about organizing the resources to get to that goal.