I should have thought of it first. I walked into Starbucks one afternoon. Ok. Ok. I do this every afternoon, but something was different this time. Something really neat was going on.

At a large wooden table sat a man with a laptop. I’m sure you can picture that. But this man had a stack of Starbucks gift cards laid out neatly to form an arrow. The arrow pointed to an iPad that was being used as a sign. The sign read “Test my App and Coffee’s on Jim.”

I’ve never been shy of giving people feedback. I don’t have a great filter and before KickoffLabs made any money free coffee sounded good to me. Jim saw me coming out of the corner of his eye and stopped what he was doing to introduce himself. He was working on an educational iPad app to teach kids basic math. He asked me to play through a couple of levels and tell him what I thought.

He got an earful. I hope it was useful for him because I enjoyed the free coffee. It was such a great idea. I watched him go through the same process with about 10 people including some parents with kids that afternoon. So, for $50, he got a ton of great feedback and only had to drive to a local Starbucks. Everyone should do it, but if you do…

1. Don’t forget to get email addresses for people that come by. They could become customers and evangelists.

2. He never asked if I’d give him money today for it. He got feedback from someone he didn’t know would be a paying customer or not. He didn’t even ask me if I had kids.

I’ve also heard this works just as well before you write any code. Use the cards to get people to take a survey and validate some of your assumptions before you build anything. I wish I’d thought of it sooner.

I work at home alone so it’s not lip service to say that I have to go outside of the office to get the best advice.

I learned, launching Kickofflabs, that you need to avoid your personal networks at all costs. Those people are too nice to tell you the truth. Even my wife. I could tell Gretchen was skeptical.  She was too nice to tell me what she thought about our business. I think she believed that my silly experiment would just end one day and I’d be back to a normal job.

Even strangers are too polite to tell you what they really think. So… who can you trust for advice?

People voting with their dollars.

Someone can tell you that you have a great idea or they could pay you something for it. Which tells you more? That’s why I’m happy we launched KickoffLabs without a lengthy free beta. Talk to the people voting with their dollars and find out why they did. Then find out why others didn’t.

Investors.

Kickofflabs is not a funded company, but we’ve had a lot of investor meetings. What I love about pitching and taking investors through our pitch is that they don’t hold back the punches. Perhaps I’ve just met good ones… but I wouldn’t describe them as polite. I think they are just understand how to vote with their dollars.

People who’ve been there before.

If someone has done what you’re working towards and is close enough to your stage that they remember what you’re going through and the solutions that worked for them well enough to dispense advice.

Beyond that you should have a hard time trusting what people tell you. They may have good intentions… but you can’t sell good intentions.

I already talked about my goal of learning to delegate and outsource more in 2013, but I have three other specific goals.

1. Become a better writer.

My goal is to publish something I’ve created (I’ll get to that) every day in 2013. That could be on this personal blog or it could be for KickoffLabs in the form of a blog post, marketing copy, newsletters, automated emails, etc.

So much of selling a SaaS product, writing instructions for outsourced labor, or even working with your co-founder comes down to clear, simple, communication. I need to get better by doing.

2. Take one photography class in 2013.

It could be a one hour lesson. I just want to know how to use our fancy-pants camera better. As a way to simplify my writing goal I’m going to allow a picture posted in a day to represent the requisite “thousand words” and count. Taking good product screenshots is also an art.

3. Finish Rocksmith (Guitar learning game)

I could have put learn guitar here, but I’ll settle for this game where you use a real guitar as tabs flow down the screen. I’m under no illusion that this will teach me to be a good guitar player… I simply think it may be fun.

That’s all for my posts on 2013 personal goals. I’ll be working with Scott on goals for year 3 of KickoffLabs soon. Perhaps some of those will be posted as well.

Josh