Category: Entrepreneurship

PixPulse Your Life by David Xue

Entrepreneur: David Xue

Company: PixPulse.com

Hi, I’m David and I’m addicted to the go fast startup crack pipe which is really slang for I love building companies and working with the best talent on amazing new technologies.

I started PixPulse the summer of 2005 and launched the public beta a few months later on October 31st. PixPulse past 10k members in April and is mostly used by 18 - 25 year olds who are mostly female. People use PixPulse to share their photos and videos on mobile phones and on the web.

Startups are a bunch of fun, but they sure aren’t easy. Here’s advice that I follow by:

1. Recruit the best talent – As a founder or CEO you’ll spend most of your time recruiting and putting together your exec team. The first 10 employees will dictate company culture and be crucial to success. You’ll need to set expectations up front for everyone.

2. Have a revenue plan – I’m amazed at the number of startups that don’t have a solid or realistic revenue strategy. Ideally a company should launch with products or services that make money. You’ll need to deliver on 1, 2 or 3 key features very well.

3. Make usability a priority – Design and UI can be the difference between success and failure—so put in the time and money. Do usability tests and get feedback from your core demographic.

4. Make it legal – Get your legal docs done early and make sure everyone is on board and that there are no surprises. Most startups start as an LLC and then roll into a C Corp. Many law firms will do company formation and additional shareholder docs for free. Wilson Sonsini, VLG, Graham & Dunn and are just a few who will do this.

5. Test, Test, Test – Only release features that are fully tested. If the product is not ready, then push out the launch date. For any web-based company, release often—PixPulse does weekly releases. For startups in the mobile market, testing is a pain in the ass, but there are emulators and tools to help you test on each network and platform.

6. Backup your infrastructure and plan for scalability – Backup all your code and data to an offsite location. I recommend daily incrementals every 4 hours and weekly diffs. Stay ahead of demand by doing load testing and have a plan to scale your software and hardware. Software load-balancing, mysql replication and cheap colos really make it easy to do this.

7. If you don’t need money, then don’t take it – Bootstrap for as long as you can. It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur and VC money is to come by. If you don’t have a mortgage and no kids to feed, you really don’t need a large series A (unless you’re a B2B enterprise startup which probably needs $10M to get to a beta product and customers). I’d recommend a friends and family round and maybe taking on convertible debt angel.

8. Have fun! – Most likely your first startup is not going to be a home run, but keep at it and stay persistent. If you learn from your mistakes the chances of winning are a lot better in the future.

Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Lots of people in the startup community are very nice and humble; I’m very thankful for everyone that has helped me in the startups that I’ve done.