Alex Kaminski’s Blog

The relationship a company has with their customers is critical to any business. But this relationship is so much more important for a startup. As a startup, we don’t have the luxury of millions of users (so that we can ignore a couple users) and hundreds (or thousands) of employees (to have customer service departments). Each user is very important for us. Not only does each user help build our product, but each user represents an individual person that (hopefully) believes in your product/vision.

Seeing new users sign up should motivate and excite you. These users prove that your product is useful (or revolutionary in some cases) and should make you excited to work on this product. Often, users will also send you excellent feedback highlighting things that need fixing or new features you should add. It is vital to respond to this feedback. By responding to each suggestion and customer service request you are building user loyalty.

Users love knowing that their suggestions were implemented or that their feedback was important to you. By having conversations and interacting with your users you can, in a sense, get the user to care about your product in a pseudo-founder sense. They’ve invested time in both using your product and helping you improve it, this naturally makes them more attached to your product (and brand!).

By simply talking to your users and showing that you care about them and their opinions, you are building brand loyalty for life.

Most startups don’t know the full value of feedback. They love getting feedback from users, so that they can improve. But most do not engage the user further by continuing the conversation (or even replying to feedback). This is a mistake. You should always reply to every single feedback email (and, obviously, help request) with a thoughtful and personal response. This seems like a small thing, but can go a long way in developing customer loyalty.

Besides for copying a website’s design or some unique feature, I have yet to hear about a startup idea getting “stolen”. An idea by itself is not worth much if you are unable to execute and transform your idea into a successful business.

Most of the time you will only benefit from sharing your idea with someone. By getting feedback on your idea, you gain the wisdom and life experiences that those people have. Sometimes, you might even find someone interested in funding you or joining your team.

However, I think there are a few exception to this rule. Namely, if you are talking to VCs or Angels you should be careful not to divulge specific details about how you are doing things or your groundbreaking idea (unless you’re seeking funding).

Most of the time you don’t know what companies these VCs or Angels have invested in. Maybe the VC you are talking to has invested in a stealth startup that has an idea similar to yours. The VC can now take what he’s learned from you and pass it on to that stealth startup he’s invested in.

As I mentioned previously, if you’re seeking funding. You have to share your idea, a VC or Angel won’t fund you without doing their “due diligence” first. That means knowing everything about you, your team, your idea, and your market. 

Maybe this is some delusion I have, but I’ve always believed that there are people out there who want to change the world. These are the revolutionaries, the visionaries, the ones who look at the world and see something different.

These “revolutionaries” come in differnt flavors. Some have such an idealistic and futuristic vision that they want to completely change the world as we know it. Others are merely content with making some minor (but extremely significant) change to our world.

But all of these “revolutionaries” have one thing in common: they aren’t content with the status quo. They see the world as something that can be changed and improved upon. It’s not that they see the world as inadequate. They simply see a way to make our world grander and better.

There are many types of these people, from the cancer researcher who believes he can cure cancer, to the high school student reading science fiction books who passionatly believes that humanity’s future is in the stars.

They are all idealists with a grand sense of purpose in this world. They are not content with their 9 to 5 jobs. Nor are they content with running a 30 billion dollar hedge fund. Instead, they want to do something revolutionary, something to push the human race forward.

I believe strongly that these types of people exist. I belive they must, progress can not be made in another way.

Granted I am young, only 20 years old. Yet, I have not met any person who fits the above criteria. Nobody that even came close. So my question is where are these “revolutionaries” and why have I not met them? Is there something about our culture that stifles innovation, or have I simply been taking the wrong classes at school and hanging out with the wrong people?

Disclosure (sort of):
This post was inspired by Apple’s ad Think Diffrent.

Queen Rania of Jordan has just started her own youtube channel aimed at helping “people to know the real Arab world - to see it unedited, unscripted and unfiltered - to see the personal side of my region - to know the places and faces and rituals and culture that shape the part of the world I call home.”

With the help of YouTube, maybe the Queen can indeed reach some people in the West and teach them about the “Real Arab World”. I have to say that it’s sort of amazing to live in an age where a Queen can use a website to try to bridge cultural divides.

The Queen’s first video is below:

So you’re just getting started building your website and need features that require a database (such as user login and profiles). If you’ve never used a database before, this might seem daunting and complex. Well, it’s not, it just takes practice and basic programming skills.

A database is composed of tables. These tables have rows that store different information in each column. So a database will look something like this:

- Database

- Table users

- Table comments

Now, let’s see how these tables would look like:

You’ll notice that we don’t have one table, but instead split the information among two tables: users and comments. 

So why can’t I just have all my information in one table?

Most programmers do exactly that when they design their first table in a database. Let’s look at a design like that:

Notice that in the above table design the user John Smith had two comments. In order to create the second comment, we had to create another row repeating his user_id, name, and email information. This type of design is crude and inefficient. Imagine if the user decided to change his email and you need to update your database. In this type of one-table design you would have to iterate through each row that belongs to the user and update their email. Seems inefficient right?

So what do we do? We split the information up into two tables (as shown in the images above). This reduces any data redundancy and makes the whole database design more efficient. 

How to scale your database

One of the best ways to scale your database is to split your data up among various tables. This allows you to split your tables up and place them in other databases. These databases can be located on other database servers, thus reducing the strain of having one database server run all the requests. 

What do I do next?

Next, you should decide on a type of database. There are free ones available such as MySql or more robust but expensive ones such as Microsoft Sql Server. You’ll need to learn the SQL programming language, which is how you interact with the database and create, edit information. I’m not going to try and teach you the SQL language, but I’ll direct you to a website that has great tutorials on this subject. 

Naming your startup is probably one of the most important things your startup needs to do for branding and marketing. For the last couple months our team has tried to come up with a good name for our dating startup. We’ve gone through hundreds of names and all of them are either taken or we don’t “love it”. We haven’t decided on a name yet, but I wanted to share some of our thoughts on making that decision.