Founders Lessons Learned - Part 7: Operations

1. Your work is not finished when you go live, it actually started.
2. It is common to feel worried / sleepless thinking of what will happen tomorrow when you are in charge of successful product.
3. Statistics should be collected from going life day ONE.
4. Proactively monitoring production is a MUST; it can:
1. Reveal issues.
2. Show user behavior using your idea, leading to improvements.
5. Operational work requires lots of automation to save time, but in the same time you can never lose the human analysis.
6. Pay attention to small (issues / bugs / fraud) as they can grow bigger day after day causing lots of headache.
7. Stay focused all the time, don’t try to solve everything one shot, always prioritize based on the following (In order):
1. Financial impact.
2. Risk impact.
3. Operational impact.
8. Don’t waste time in politics, & people trying to distract you.
9. Pay attention to what you say / reveal during production issues, it should be to trusted people ONLY otherwise, it might fire-back to you.

Founders Lessons Learned - Part 3: Business plan

1. A business plan is nothing more than your own communication to a person not sitting in front of you—an imaginary person who will read it. Try to answer every possible question that that person could raise.
2. Writing a business plan is a MUST, it will crystallize your thoughts to communicate your ideas with somebody else.
3. Business plan is all about showing your momentum.
4. Having a business plan for big scope, having complete vision distributed on several phases shows your strong vision for the idea and its growth.
5. Business plan should tell:
1. What the company is going to do?
2. What problem it is going to solve?
3. How big the market is?
4. What the sources of revenue for the company are?
5. What your exit strategy is for your investors?
6. What amount of money is required?
7. How you are going to market it?
8. What kind of people you need?
9. What the technology risks, marketing risks, execution risks?
6. Funding in business plan, it is always better to prepare the figures before you present your idea, and you should be having multiple numbers in mind, i.e.:

1. Required x, for completing the whole idea.
2. Required y, for handling … number of customers.
3. Required z, for making a POC to show your idea can actually work to VC.
4. Required w, for covering specific region.