Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Nathan Parcells
After writing my last post there was a lot of interest in articles exploring the challenges of being an early stage entrepreneur, both personal and facing our company. Before I do, I wanted to touch on a startup philosophy that has helped me frame the successes and setbacks of starting InternMatch much more clearly and has helped me travel the enjoyably rocky road forward.
I call this philosophy Lenses and what I mean by this is developing an understanding of how you can and must view different situations within different timeframes. Most important, is realizing you have the power to choose this perspective in any given situation — like using a microscope you can set and determine how zoomed in you are.
To explain better I think about the stages of starting InternMatch.
When first getting started, we had to zoom all the way out: we had to teach ourselves, advisors, investors, friends and whoever else we were talking to that the problem of internships was huge. We had to avoid getting hung up on any individual problem or else we would never have gotten far enough to learn how to solve it.
After raising money and building a team it was time to refocus and construct medium and short term strategies for success. This included interviewing contractors, compiling leads, meeting with universities and a lot more.
Finally, when executing — from making cold calls to writing blog posts, to checking in code, we had to zoom all the way in; focusing on the minor details of shipping these products as expertly as possible.
In any of these situations if you use the wrong lens at the wrong time you will fail. If you start investor pitches by focusing on the minutia of execution, people won’t ever get excited enough to put money on the table. If you are thinking about the impact one meeting or sales call has on the company you want to build four years down the road, you are going to lose motivation and under perform.
Okay, so maybe this is old news for most readers, we all figure out intuitively or otherwise that you need to think differently when conveying your vision and executing on it, but as I mentioned earlier the real value I found here came from controlling this perspective on a day to day basis.
Cold calling taught me the value of exploring lenses daily.
As we got InternMatch up and running we knew we needed a base of customers, and an in-depth understanding of employer issues surrounding internships. We decided to sign on board over 100 employer Beta partners, by cold calling local businesses, and setting up meetings.
Three months into this process we had gotten very good. We were setting up upwards of five meetings a day, all scheduled near one another, and we were bringing back to the office Beta partnership forms from three or four out of five meetings. But, I can remember despite enjoying the process of improvement, being at times unhappy with having to make cold calls and take meetings for the vast majority of my hours each day, and for weeks on end.
Finally, one day with enough employers signed up we went live with our first internship postings and after a week or two we made our first match. The long term value of all those calls and meetings came to fruition. We had laid the groundwork so that an intern could find a new job, career path, and future. We had gone from zero website, zero customers, zero anything except for an idea, to building a product that made a tangible difference in someone’s life and future.
I knew I needed to harness this good feeling and I knew that our goal was changing millions of lives not just one, so I found that by understanding how to zoom in and zoom out, I could better reflect on this progress and the different aspects of the business. This tactic is one I now use all the time. I find it incredibly valuable for adapting to individual meetings, but even more important on a daily basis, it lets me enjoy how far we’ve to come, while remaining excited about how far we have to go.