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Faq

Frequently asked questions

What's your routine?

From Routine
Go to text ā†’

I'm a fan of routine and not thinking about thinkgs I don't have to. This is why my days are fairly regular, especially in the morning.

Thoughts about pivots

Advice I found helpful about pivots

On Strategy

On finding ideas

From jared-how-to-get-startup-ideas

Takeaways

  • you don't need an amazing idea, but do take time to think about the idea

  • focus on problem

  • evaluation framework for idea

    • how big is idea
    • founder/market
    • are you solving an important problem
    • do you have insight intot his field

  • other advantages

    • you like the idea
    • it only recently became possible

  • filters

    • not doing because of Schlep
    • boring space (eg. payroll)
    • too hard (eg. stripe)
    • existing competitors

  • 7 ideas

    • what are you/team good at? what companies have you worked at? what problems were there? how did they get fixed?

On schlep

From schlep-blindness

Takeaways

  • don't do things because it seems too insurmountable (eg. finance, healthcare, government, etc)

On hard pivots

On Open Source Licensing

Dendron went with the AGPLV3 license. This is to satisfy the following requirements:

  • we wanted to keep our product open source and available for others to build on top of
  • we wanted to build a sustainable business on top of Dendron (this would be harder to do if someone just made a proprietary fork of Dendron)

It was because of the latter that we did not go with MIT or Apache Version 2. That being said, we did implement an End User License Agreement for all pull requests which lets us relicense when necessary. This gives us room to accommodate individuals and organizations that absolutely cannot work with the AGPLV3 license.

On communication as a remote team

Dendron (my company) is all remote (5 people, 4 countries, -8UTC to 8UTC). Almost everything we do at Dendron happens async and remote. This works because of the following practices:

  • instead of meetings, we run asyncs: this is a note we create inside of our knowledge base and then also copy a pointer to in a gdoc called "meet.daily" (this has all asyncs for the week - it is merged back into our knowledge base and cleared at the end of the week)
  • instead of standups, we ask everyone to keep a daily journal: this is a short note inside our knowledge base that goes over what people did the previous day, what they'll be working on, and any blockers they might encounter

Asyncs and daily journals make up most of our remote workflow. We make sure that all essential information goes through these channels

More details in the dendron handbook

On virtual team events

We do an online secret santa using secret santa organizer and give all employees a budget of $100 + shipping to buy something for another teammate. We then do a virtual unwrapping ceremony afterwards.

On CRMs and managing contacts

I use Dendron as my CRM. This is done using two hierarchies:

  • a people.* hierarchy to keep track of contacts
  • a meet.* hierarchy to keep track of meetings

More details here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/de93124b-c23b-4028-9e2c-6de6a56ca5e9

In general, this system has served me well. The features it lacks compared to salesforce/hubspot:

  • filtering through metadata is a bit harder (its currently not easy to filter by anything thats not a tag)
  • no automatic email integration (I compose in Dendron and c/p to email)
  • no followup reminders (I create tasks for myself manually if I want to follow up)