By Alex Yohn

Feb 16, 2015

This is a series of articles on the process and experience of building products and, ultimately, daughter companies from within a parent company. Our experiences building Kin (and DoneDone.com) from within our parent company, We Are Mammoth, have unfolded over the course of six years.  We’re self-funded, and we build companies out of the products when the time is right. Our way isn’t the highway – we definitely slow roll because, in life as in business, it’s about the journey not the destination. Here’s the original article. 

Who’s paying the real bill for your pet project?

You and your big idea may be shopping around for investors to foot your bill. I salute you. While we never have seriously pursued outside money for our product companies (Kin is our second company, DoneDone.com was the original), we have had a few conversations. Most of the pro investors we’ve spoken with are concerned about our ability to run a company while building a company and supporting another company. They want to see $, not ?’s. If you’re going that route, you need an answer for how you, the founder, are going to move away from your already-existing, already-profitable consultancy. They may think you’re dumb. Prove them wrong. If you’re thinking of self-funding, read on, and know that this has been our way and it’s not necessarily the highway.

For the brave souls choosing the self-funded route, the answer to the question “Who’s paying the real bill for your pet project, Mr./Mrs. Founder?”, is “You are, and so is she, and so is her three-legged dog.” The team doing maintenance on those four year old websites for a consulting client? They’re paying the bills. The administrative support team you have in house that helps your nascent product team with customer support and operations early on? They’re paying the bills. You, dear reader, are paying the bill. Everyone is paying the bills!

Regardless of the source of financial funding though, building a new product and company cuts time, morale, and resources from the fabric of an existing firm. Everyone pays the price. It’s taxing, so everyone deserves a piece of the pie – even if they never write a single line of code for the new product.

You all get gold nuggets and Teslas and patience!

My opinion is that everyone who helps fund the new company (including three-legged dog) should own some of the new company in the form of stock or whatever flavor of company you’re starting (we have LLC’s). It’s the right thing to do. But, it’s also more than likely that, for the near term at the very least, the equity you’re giving to folks isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. So they’ll respond with “Great, thanks, but how will I get something out of this?” The answer is simple.

Everyone’s near term profit is in the form of education. Make sure that the failures, skills, and business experiences are shared back with the parent company – it’ll help sell new business, expand everyone’s skill set, and instill a sense of entrepreneurial spirit and pride into everyone’s overloaded souls. That’s worth a lot and it’s entirely possible it’s the only pay back folks will ever get (again, startups aren’t for the faint of heart).

You will charge money for it, right?

So who else is paying for your new product? Customers, of course. What’s that? They aren’t? No positive advice for you here. If you are smart and charging money, there’s a good chance the pricing model and value proposition is going to be vastly different than what you’re used to at your current company.

In our case, moving from an enterprise software consultancy to a monthly per-user pricing model for small businesses was jarring. One is full of giant peaks and valleys and big fish, the other is a patience-draining graph toward profitability. Alas, you need to make ends meet at every level – you’re in your parent-company’s pockets, and a well-reasoned pricing model is integral to your new company becoming a self-sustaining business.

So, learn a little about pricing psychology, and be ready to admit you did it wrong and quickly move to a better model. Within the first couple of months of Kin being launched, we learned what we thought would be a great, fair pricing structure actually sucked. We changed it quickly. Likewise, we had a freemium plan for DoneDone.com early on thinking that, if freelancers did well, they’d surely upgrade to paid plans when they grew. That didn’t work out at all, so we removed it, and it had a great effect on revenue. To sum it up, charge for your product/service, and make sure you can charge more or less depending on real market inputs.

In it to win it.

Regardless of the ultimate financial success of your new company, there is wealth to be reaped – don’t squander the opportunity to share the wonderful, anxiety-ridden experience which most people never will be exposed to: the early days of a startup. It’s a treasure trove of skills, values, failures, and emotions that are very atypical of our all-too-mudane daily work lives.

By Alex Yohn

Feb 16, 2015

Lot’s of independent design and web companies consider product development as a way to branch out from their consulting-centric business. I’m all for it, and I think many companies are in an excellent position to succeed.

Building a business from the inside can invigorate a company’s culture, diversify income, and focus an entire staff’s talents into a beautifully executed product that only they could have built. It can also wreck a company’s finances, morale, and focus.

Building and self-funding a new company has a long term financial impact on the parent company, it requires team culture and domain expertise unique to the market at hand, extreme amounts of discipline, and ultimately you’ll be deciding what to do with this thing once you’ve learned whether it meets a real need.

Success isn’t always easy to see, and 99.9% of the time it’s not something you wake up to one morning (unless you just built ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com). Rather, it’s a slow, deliberate process that requires an entire company’s patience and understanding.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing thoughts on the topic based on our experiences building the Kin and DoneDone companies from within We Are Mammoth. Know that this has been our way and it’s not necessarily the highway.

Let’s start with the money part of it. Read on >

By Alex Yohn

Feb 11, 2015

We pride ourselves on providing a top-notch HR service to our clients, but drill down a bit further and our biggest mission is to help others do their job better. In a world where time is money and money is tight, every second of your workday is precious. Here are some tools that I use everyday to work a bit more efficiently that may help you get some time back into your day.

Note: Some of these tools are specific to Apple’s OSX operating system – sorry Windows users!

Knock

Like most folks that spend their day in front of a computer, you probably enter your password to log in countless times each day. Knock is a nifty smartphone app that syncs with your computer to bypass this repetitive task. Simply walk up to your machine, knock twice on your smartphone, and Knock will unlock your computer for you using Bluetooth Low Energy. Simple, secure, and a huge time-saver. Find out more at knocktounlock.com.

Cloud App

With more and more interaction between coworkers happening digitally instead of physically, we’ve lost the ability to put something in front of people and say “Here, look at this”. CloudApp helps give that back with crazy-fast sharing of files, screenshots, screen captures, and just about anything else you can think of. It’s an indispensable tool for communicating complex ideas quickly – one we make good use of here at Kin, sending screenshots between designers and developers to discuss bugs and features. Head over to getcloudapp.com to see more.

Instapaper

Instapaper is a digital vault to collect, access, and archive all of the articles you read on a daily basis. As a reader – I love the ubiquitous, offline access to all of my reading list on all my devices. As a writer, I love the ability to quickly reference everything I’ve recently read. It integrates with just about everything and has a great user interface. Create an account at instapaper.com.

Alfred

Aptly named, think of Alfred as your personal, digital butler. With just a few keystrokes, you can instantly:

• Open Applications, Websites, Files and more
• Search Google, Wikipedia, or other custom sites
• Access the dictionary, calculator, contacts, and command line
• Execute system commands like shut down, sleep, eject, etc
• Get instant access to your entire clipboard history

It’s the easiest way to become a keyboard power-user. Apple has launched it’s own similar app with Yosemite, but the ability to create custom workflows will keep me an Alfred user for a long time still. Get started at alfredapp.com.

You Get Out What You Put In

It’s hard to learn a new system for getting things done – harder still when you need to take time out of a busy day to do it. But when leveraged correctly, the proper tool can save you from huge amounts of mindless busywork, whether it’s as simple as Knock or as intricate as Kin. I hope you can carve out the time to give these apps a try – they’ve been a huge help for my routine, and I have a hunch they’ll help you out too.

By Alex Yohn

Feb 5, 2015

I twiddle my thumbs a lot about leadership and, admittedly, whether I’m any good at it. Holacracy plays a starring role in a recurring dream in which I absolve myself of the need to express opinions or direction of any kind in most situations. To be sure, I’ve missed plenty of opportunities to galvanize our team, and pull them toward an ideal – or even to a decent place for tacos which is arguably the time my team needed me most. But over the years of building our companies I’ve largely succeeded as a leader, and I’ve certainly spent my fair share of time discovering what leadership is, and how it works at We Are Mammoth, Kin, and DoneDone.

In my experience, most people who yearn to lead do so for the wrong reasons – they believe the rest of the world is full of morons, that it’s a quicker route to financial gain, or that their complete inability to work with others is, somehow, a COMMAND FROM ABOVE TO LEAD THE PEOPLE. So, intent on leading for the wrong reasons, leaders-in-the-making learn the wrong stuff, climb the ladders at some unsuspecting companies, and ultimately do a crappy job leading. Whoops.

On the flip side, there are the natural born leaders – heroes destined to inherit the favor of the masses, and deliver them to happiness and liberty, or to a more sinister outcome like servitude. These are the once-in-a-blue-moon leaders and they’re real. Their talent is recognized early and developed into a high-powered laser beam of organizational drive. Their charge to success produces a swath of literature, best practices, and insights which the would-be leaders consume via audible books in order to continue doing a poor job leading.

Lest we forget: Leadership is a service provided to others.

Then there are the leaders like the rest of us. For us, leadership may have been there all along but perhaps it wasn’t an indisputable talent to employ, nor do we see leadership as an end in itself. Instead, it’s an ability we discover and nurture over time, and it eventually becomes a well-honed service we provide to others. Yes, leadership is a service provided to others.

My kind of leadership.

My definition of leadership is simple: It’s is the ability to guide other people through a dark period of something – in business, life, or lunch. Nothing more, nothing less.

Leadership: the ability to guide other people through a dark period of something – in business, life, or lunch.

When leaders lead, they often don’t have any more information about a situation than anyone else. Rather, they’re just curious and audacious enough to know they can see through an imminent problem that others don’t believe they themselves can. Successful leaders aren’t just comfortable working in the these murky realms, they’re actually productive there – their labors leading others to carve out their own purpose and success.

Easy to behold, difficult to embrace.

Yet, simple as it is to define, the misperceptions of what leadership is and what it takes to provide it make it a difficult skill to learn, teach, and even recognize (thus the vast market of leadership and management books). So, how do you know if you and your organization are doing a good job leading? Turn the problem upside down. Look for evidence of a lack of leadership – artifacts like an unclear business vision, lack of clearly defined jobs/roles, and a void of operational integrity across an entire team.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, a group that has iron clad work ethic, takes pride in team work, leads by example, and has fantastic communication are the trademarks of good leadership. The rewards of the latter are clear enough, and the signals of the former are a wake up call.

There’s a saying: “leadership is the ability to hide your fear from others.” Dig a little deeper, and I think you’ll find that fear isn’t generally a part of it – a good leader sees the opportunity, brings clarity where there was once only fog, and delivers to his/her team’s doorstep, a roadmap to accomplish great things. They see it all along and it was nothing to fear.

This piece was originally posted on the blog at WeAreMammoth.com

By Alex Yohn

Jan 21, 2015

Do you have holidays that span multiple days? Or offices in multiple countries? If so, there are a couple of exciting new updates to Kin’s holiday management you should know about.

A cleaner way to manage holidays

Adding and editing holidays in Kin has a new look and feel. You can now include date ranges for your holidays, and we’ve also included a quick and easy way to add ‘common holidays’ to your list.

Assigning time-off policies to holidays

Now you can set holidays to apply to specific time-off policies. This is a huge improvement for our customers with employees in multiple countries. What you’ll want to do is create your time-off policies on a per-country basis. Then from the Company Holidays section you can select which policies apply to which holidays.

Note, all of your company holidays have been set to include all time-off policies.

Select which time-off policies should be applied to each holiday.

How holidays affect time-off policies

When a time-off policy is assigned to a holiday, only employees who are on that particular policy will be affected. For employees who aren’t on that policy, it’s business as usual and, although the holiday will still show up on their calendar, it has no effect on their time-off balances.

As a side note, there is an existing option in Kin’s time-off policy configurations that offers the option to ‘Include company holidays in time-off requests’. By having this option selected, all holidays will be counted as regular workdays. This option essentially overrides the assignment of policies to individual holidays.


Option to include holidays as workdays from the time-off policy’s Work Schedule.

Need help? Let us know!

The new Company Holidays feature is a lot more bang for the buck. That said, its relationship with Time-off Policies may bring up some questions on how best to configure your account for 2015. We’re here to help anytime, just write us as Support@KinHR.com or click “Need Help?” from the menu in your Kin account.