Hysterical Optimism

Last Wednesday, me and my partner Dan were lucky enough to be invited to tag along with a large Public Relations company to a press conference by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Dan and I are recent graduates of the Kauffman Foundation’s FastTrac Entrepreneur Training Program taught by ITAC here in New York City. The press conference covered several of NYC’s new initiatives to foster new start-up companies in NYC and part of that program is a huge investment in a larger FastTrac training course. So me and Dan tagged along as a human element of the story to try and show off some of the program’s previous success stories.

This was an exciting opportunity for us and our company, Dr. Chrono. As a young company any press coverage Dr. Chrono can get is phenomenal. It is a great opportunity to get practice working with a PR firm, getting interviewed by media, and even just mingling and making new contacts. It can be very daunting to talk to the media about your own start-up company. When someone with a press pass starts talking to you, you suddenly forget everything about what you wanted to say.

Good preparation can really give you a lot of confidence and help you stick with your “stake in the ground” when confronted by media questions. To prepare for the possible interviews, me and my partner Dan sat down in a conference room for about 3 hours and kept going over our answers to the 5 primary questions any reporter would ask us. This is a list that is taught to any first year journalism student and is famously known as the 5 W’s of any news story (there is kind of a sixth “h” crammed in at the end.) So here is my version of the 5 W’s tailored to what a start-up software company should focus on its media message.

1) Who?

Who are the founder’s of the company and what is their personal story? What made you found the start-up?

Our answer to this story focused on my partner Dan who was laid off from a telecom software company that was bought out and moved out of New York state. It is a popular theme in media (and directly linked to the press conference that we attended) that people who are laid off will go on to start companies because they have no other option. I don’t believe this is really true personally, but it makes for a great story. In our case I resigned from a successful 8 year career as a software developer at Bloomberg L.P. to co-found Dr. Chrono with Dan. So I thought our story had both sides of the coin, someone laid off who started a company and someone crazy enough to resign from a stable job to work on a start-up from scratch. This is a great way to start off answering any question and is a natural segue into the 2nd W since you will say, “We are Mike and Dan we founded …”

2) What?

What is your start-up doing? How is your start-up relevant?

This should really be your “stake in the ground” of any conversation with the media. The stake you put in the ground is a PR term for the one thing you want to get across to the media in every question you answer. Everything else you might say is just fluff to get your company’s name and message out there. Make sure you say your company’s name as much as possible since the press might use just clips of what you say. So instead of saying: “us”, “we”, “I”, “he”, always say your company’s name. Dr. Chrono is the first all in one web based practice management system. Dr. Chrono was founded with a commitment to excellence by two long term friends. Dr. Chrono was very optimistically founded in this economy! Nobody talks like this in real life, but you have to keep repeating yourself in hopes someone will use one sentence of what you say.

3) When?

Why was your start-up founded at this time? How does it fit in with other current events and trends?

This may be a tough one for most start-ups to answer. But for us in the context of a press conference about the terrible economy, it was pretty clear that we had to be optimistic about how great a time it is right now to start a business. We do really believe this, otherwise I wouldn’t have quit my six figure salaried job (where they also gave me free snacks & soda) to go out on my own. Big companies are consolidating and not working on any new products. There is always a hunger for new products and innovative products that can save people money are especially relevant right now. The story of a small company coming out with a subversive new product that is cheaper and better than the offerings of large companies always resonates, but especially in these hard times I believe it can really catch the public’s attention.

Barack Obama is also apparently quite popular this news cycle, so we also tried to mention how the President mentioned that EMR (Electronic Medical Records) and other innovative medical software products would be heavily invested in and would lower health care costs for the government and spur new hiring by lowering the cost of health insurance. We hope in the future to build a really compelling story about how as a start-up founded in this recession, we are one of the seeds that will grow to be a solution by lowering health care costs and increasing employment (not achieved as of today.)

4) Where?

Where is your company located? What ties to the community do you have?

On the Internet is not a good answer to this question. For Dr. Chrono, founding a start-up company in New York City is a very unique experience and very different from any of the start-up stories that have come out of Silicon Valley. This is good news for us, in that the New York City media is starving to hear about success stories and they are not going to get a lot of them anytime soon from Wall Street.

5) Why?

Why was your start-up founded?

These types of questions at first glance seem to be the least relevant and fluffy of any question you can be asked, but they are your best chance to get a personalized message out there that has a really high chance of getting used by a journalist you are talking too. When Microsoft or Google launches their new health oriented software they don’t have a sick parent at home that they are trying to help. A large company can’t personalize a problem or its solution the way a start-up can. These questions are a great place to really dig deep and share about how you want take charge of your own destiny by founding a company and how the problems your company is trying to solve personally affect you and your customers.

5b or sometimes 6) How?

How are you managing to do it? How are you financed?

Dr. Chrono is a bootstrapped company and it defines who we are as a company. We are working 6 days a week, as many hours a day as we can, to try and get our first version of our product completed so we can start earning revenue. We are working phone lines and pushing our first customers for feedback because we only have so many months of savings left until we run out of money. Every company has a unique story to tell and how you are managing to live your dream is part of that story.

A great book that I’ve read on the subject of Public Relations was aptly titled Propaganda, it was written by a nephew of Sigmund Freud who served in the Allied Propaganda efforts in World War II. One of the gems that I got from the book was that the word Propaganda itself is no longer used to describe Public Relations because the Allies were so effective at making the enemies Public Relations seem devious by titling it as Propaganda that they actually tarnished the word forever. This point really stuck with me as I realized how powerful Public Relations and impressions can be and actually how little it has changed in the last 80 years.

I found myself giving some online dating advice to a friend who just moved to NYC and was trying out online dating. I’m not sure what you have to do to consider yourself an expert at online dating, but I definitely consider myself a guru on the subject. I’ve dabbled on lots of online dating sites for a few years and I met my current girlfriend online. I often help friends with their online dating profiles and like anyone else who has been on the dating scene in NYC I’m very liberal with giving out advice on how other people should run their personal lives.

What started out as an innocent email to a friend with some advice on his JDate profile turned into a really scathing rant about how cold online dating is and how much of a numbers game it is. I surprised myself by how mercenary my advice sounded when I reread it. Being new to running my own business, I can really relate to how difficult it is to approach strangers with a sales proposition. The underlying skills needed to meet someone online or sell a product online seem to be the same. What little formal sales training I’ve had often used dating metaphors to try and help you understand how to make a sale. I’ll try out the converse and use sales metaphors to help you with online dating. You have to be brief, to the point, and Always Be Closing.

Remember, “Coffee is for closers!”

Transcribed from my advice emails with all identifying names/info removed, here is my expert JDATE profile and dating advice:

The key is to say very little about yourself. Edit your profile down to the most basic info possible. Have fun with it, I think that if you are serious about dating women on JDate, the key is to devote about an hour per day 4-5 days per week cruising JDate and contacting as many women as possible. My advice would be to get to know the woman as little as possible online and push for a first date at a bar, coffee house, or any public space. Avoid buying your date food at first, meet in the afternoon where you will seem generous buying her a cup of coffee or a drink (most people don’t drink a lot in the early afternoon.)

Put a $10 limit on this first mini-date, and if it leads to a real first date put a $40 limit (for both of you) on it. Never ever spend more than $40 on a date with any woman. Also avoid bringing women back to your apartment. I feel like you should know all of this already, but you probably don’t. Start listening to Tom Leykis’ 101 podcasts that you can get from ITunes. I don’t care that you don’t have an IPOD, go download them and listen!

Any online dating site is full of a lot of suspects. What you are actually looking for are prospects. Suspects just waste your time and energy. Here are 3 simple rules to transform suspects into prospects. Remember, your goal on any online dating site when talking to a woman is to do the following:

1) Make sure the woman is not a man.

2) Convince the woman you are not a psycho and it is safe to meet you in a public space.

3) A.B.C. -> ALWAYS BE CLOSING: Within 2-3 contacts push for a phone call and to meet in public. If a girl spends more than 2-3 emails getting to know you it is 90% likely she will never meet you in person.

Your stats:
1) Remove your income, have your income as not disclosed. I could write a whole essay on why that is a good idea.

2) Include finance as one of your interests (this relates to why you don’t list your income. Create the illusion that you have lots of money without actually saying it.)

3) Remove your political alignment. If anyone asks, you are a vigilant Ron Paul supporter. You wrote in his name on the ballot even though he didn’t appear on the ballot in NY. You will avoid any political disputes with this viewpoint. It’s important to ask yourself this question, “Would I date a really hot girl that voted for the other candidate in the last election?” If you say No, then delete your profile and give up on online dating.

Your Ideal Match:

1) Remove age range, you can ignore requests out of your age range.

2) Remove all of your requests except non-smoker.

3) Remove any restrictions on political alignment.

It seems snobby to make too many limitations and it is downright stupid for a man to do this considering that not a lot of women reply to men. So you should have no problem filtering out the women who contact you directly who you aren’t interested in at all (just don’t respond back, that is the proper etiquette.) However, being a non-smoker is very politically correct in NYC, so this is the one appropriate filter for a man to request from a woman online. Don’t worry, smokers are always lying to themselves about quitting in the near future, so if the perfect woman for you is out there and she happens to be a smoker, she will still contact you because in her own mind she can somehow classify herself as a non-smoker because she is planning on quitting.

On Dealing with Rejection:

In business, immediate rejection is 10 times more valuable than rejection after wasting hours of effort! The same goes for online dating, it is definitely a numbers game. Send out 100 emails, get 5 responses, out of those 5, 2 will lead to actual dates. Send out 100 IM’s, get 10 responses, get 3 conversations out of that. If you see it as a game, then you can deal with this rejection better. They aren’t rejections, they are failed sales pitches. Either you sell them on why they should meet you in person or they sell you on why you shouldn’t. Either way a sale is made. Watch Boiler Room and Glengarry Glen Ross to get psyched up!

To my friend’s credit, he is already a savvy business person with a good eye for sales. Here is his feedback:

The frustrating thing about online dating in general is that women control it. It would be a lot more efficient if it was controlled by men. You know that the girls are telling their mothers and grandmother’s that there are no guys out there, but in reality there are tons, they just don’t know how to identify them. It is actually quite clear, because if you read the JDate success stories, in many cases the girl rejected the guy at first, for whatever reason, and then on a second, third, etc. pass they decided to talk to the guy. The real question is how many of those 2nd, 3rd connections were just not made. In any case, it is what it is, you are just going to have play along.

If businesses controlled 100% of consumer behavior we would live in a theoretically 100% efficient market. In real life there is an incredible inefficiency in connecting supply and demand. This is why great salespeople seem to walk on water, at times they can connect supply and demand at an amazingly efficient rate (even to the point when they are supplying needs that there aren’t even real demands for.)

A sale is always made! One way or another.

I had my girlfriend read this post and she told me that I didn’t follow any of these rules when I met her. However, I think I followed all of them so well she didn’t even notice; and that is quite an accomplishment since she is a salesperson herself. The best advice I ever got on selling was to never sell the customer, simply help the customer buy from you. So you will never really have to sell yourself online. Put the goods out there and let the demand find you, but you have to remove the natural obstacles for the consumer.

The purpose of this blog is to republish my personal essays on running a web startup from http://blog.drchrono.com which is the company blog of DrChrono.com blog, so I wanted a forum that would focus on those posts more and let me publish other articles that are too personal and opinionated to post on the company’s blog.