Hiten Shah

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• Hiten - you have roughly over 23,000 twitter followers and you are certainly a tech star! How often do you get contacted from someone asking to, "meet up and pick your brain?" How do you vet these people? How do you balance giving back to a community of rising stars (similar to where you once were when you started) vs. spending too much of your time doing things of this nature? Any good tips/tools you use or can suggest?

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    I get contacted on a daily basis. A lot of the time I’ll setup a 10 – 15 minute call with someone instead of meeting up with them in person. I don’t typically try to vet people, though it happens a bit automatically depending on how they reached out. I get a lot of introductions from people I trust / respect. I try to make helping others and talking to them as part of my daily routine. The balance comes as a result of wanting to do it more than forcing myself to do it. I am on a “managers” schedule most of the time versus a “makers” schedule. See more about that here: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

• Social media now dictates that the way to go is to influence the influencer. What do you think the next major tactic is going to be to engage customers/market in the web 2.0+ world?

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    I’m always searching for it, but haven’t found anything worth talking about yet.

• How'd you come up with the name Kiss Metrics?

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    KISS stands for “keep it simple, stupid”. One of our investors, Dave McClure and I were sitting at breakfast and trying to come up with a good name. We kept thinking about how most product are so difficult, and eventually we landed on the KISS concept and it stuck! More info about KISS here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

• Are you still working on Crazy Egg? What's so great about it, and what's not great about it? If your visitors know you're using it, then can't they make you believe you're hot somewhere on the site, when you're really not?

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    I don’t work on Crazy Egg from day-to-day. We still own the company and it runs without the involvement of my cofounder or I. We think it’s great because it is straight forward, simple and focuses on one problem. It would take quite a few visitors to skew the results, since Crazy Egg is designed to show results for many visitors all at once.

• where do you find great talent. Once you find them how do you get them interested in working for you when you are a startup Vs MNC or big corporates.

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    If you are the founder, it’s your job to get them excited about your company and what you guys are working on. It takes practice, and trial & error to get it down, but it’s one of the most important things you need to learn how to do for your startup.

• How important do you think technology platform choice is for a new startup? With Unix based development being the industry standard, is choosing anything out of the Microsoft stack shooting oneself in the foot?

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    Yes, I believe so. Unix is the way to go.

• from companies you have observed what are the crucial things which they did which took from 200,000 to 20 million to 200 million.

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    They nailed customer acquisition. Historically B2C companies have grown via some form of virality. I’d recommend understanding the INs and OUTs of virality and customer acquisition if you are going to build a B2C company.

• What would you tell a recent graduate: a) Go work for a company like Facebook or Google, b) Get your foot in the door at an exciting startup or c) Start your own company?

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    I would do B) or C) if you are aspiring to be an entrepreneur. If you are more curious about how Facebook and Google operate than you are about startups, than you should go with A) and maybe you’ll get the entrepreneurial bug later.

• Thanks for your answer. I have to say this site while helpful. Has a long way to go, a few issues I find (replying to answer are hard, no link to ur profile, not being able to follow you.) while these sound simple and as a php developer they are, I find it hard to see a site like this missing these simple functions.

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    You should send them that feedback.

• If you are a new startup and looking to get the prototype/alpha version build quickly and cheaply, how do you find the developers who would help you with it?

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    Any way you can. It’s hard to find developers but at the same time there are so many options to get a early version of a product out. Lots of companies are out there that you can outsource to. I would also consider trolling the colleges near you and trying to find some engineers who want to help you build something.