The Future Outlook for PandoDaily

[pullquote align=”right”]”We are a blog covering the startup ecosystem. If we’re not continuing to evolve and push what a blog looks and feels like, we’re not doing our job.”[/pullquote]We’re working on launching a new event franchise that I’m really excited about. Beyond that, we are going to do a redesign of the site. We need to create some more ad inventory. There are a lot of things that worked well in our last redesign and there’s some stuff that didn’t work as well as we wanted. We are a blog covering the startup ecosystem. If we’re not continuing to evolve and push what a blog looks and feels like, we’re not doing our job.

Editorially, we always go through these periods where we focus more on volume. Then we go through periods where, as a team, we’re used to doing ten stories a day so let’s make those ten stories really excellent… We want to have 3-5 stories a week that everyone in our ecosystems are talking about that enables us to lead the conversation. We have that a lot of times, but we don’t have it consistently at this point.

Lastly, on the monetization side, we just hired our first internal director of sales. So the next 3-6 months are really important for us. We think we have a really good product-market fit, now we really need to ramp up the organization and sell it aggressively.

#1 Tip for Entrepreneurs

Two things: First, you have to be deeply motivated by a sense of mission. I see so many people who think starting a company is going to be a really glamorous lifestyle, or that they’re going to get rich doing it. There are far easier ways to get famous and rich.

There’s nothing glamorous about the [startup] lifestyle. Even when everything goes really well from the outside (i.e. we raised funding pretty easily, we didn’t have to pivot, our business model has gone pretty well so far) the inside is a daily struggle.

[Launching a startup is a] roller coaster filled with constant fear, doubt and uncertainty. In the best cases, this is a terrifying and exhausting thing to do. And if you don’t feel like you’re doing something important for the world, you’re not going to be able to sustain it.

[hr]

People make this look more glamorous and fun than it is. People want to do it because they think, “Oh! It sounds great. I don’t want to work for someone.” But that’s not what this is about. You can’t just say, “I want to be an entrepreneur,” and then find something. There has to be something you need to do in the world.

[hr]

Tied to that, it is important to listen to your own gut and your internal compass. There’s always people along the way who are going to try to tell you what your business needs to do instead of what you think it needs to do.

Sometimes those are the people who you’re trying to get money from, or those you’re trying to hire. So, this makes it hard to have the conviction that says, “This is the kind of company we are and this is what we’re going to [do].”

Ultimately, if you change your vision to make someone else happier, and your company fails, then you’re going to spend the rest of your life thinking, “I wonder what would have happened if I had actually done this according to my vision?” Whereas, if you stick with your vision and it fails, at least you know that you did things the way you thought they should be done.

Connect with Sarah on Twitter.

This interview has been edited and condensed.