Forward Ho!

One of the quickest lessons I learned in mingling with the indy business persons is that being an indy business person sort of sucks. In many cases, you are vying amongst numerous able competitors for a tiny pie. Times are lean and times are fat. Potential clients treat you like old meat. Investors try to take over your company. So why do you do it? One of the most common reasons I’ve heard is some flavor of “I have no choice. I can’t stand working for some bozo. It’s in my blood.” Well, yeah, but… I can stand working for some bozo if it behooved me intellectually and financially to do so. Does it still make sense for me to wander up the path of most resistance?

Most definitely. And here’s why: because if, after maximizing my potential as an entreprenur, I still had complaints, I’d keep on a’movin. I think Oprah or someone said that the most important part of being alive is challenging yourself daily. To me, this doesn’t mean challenging myself to keep putting up with a situation I hate and have hated for years. It means “doing something exciting to me that I’m getting better at.” I can’t imagine a time in my life where I could be concurrently growing and discontent. I can imagine obstacles to growing: habit, excuses, and of course, contentment. But all things being equal, I think that, for both entrepreneurs and employees alike, feeling alive (and thus feeling content) is assured when you dedicate your existence to consistent improvement.

People

As Karrie Kohlhaas put it to me a couple months ago, “there’s no faster way to kill an idea than to keep it to yourself.” Taking that sentiment to heart, I’ve met more people in the last month than I probably have in the last five years. It’s been a revelation of sorts to see how many people I don’t know that are doing interesting things and who I respect greatly. And who aren’t that hard to meet. The previously-plugged Biznik is one great way to do it, but Meetup also has hundreds of local interest groups for damn near anything (Eastside Paranormal Group? Check). And best of all, you minimize the luck needed to meet people with similar interests when meeting through interest-based sites. The very first (and probably still my favorite) person I’ve met through Biznik was Ben Woosley. Ben was at the event not because he was pitching a business, nor because he needed to find partners or make contacts. He was there because he figured that all sorts of wise & talented people would end up at an indy business person get-together, and those were the people he wanted to know. I concur. I wish I would have thought of that five years ago.

What’s So Bad About Getting Paid?

Yo non-profiteers, ye so virtuous, ye so in touch with your internal belief set, and working every day to further your altruistic cause: you suck!

Yo for-profiteers, ye so obsessed with pennies in a billion dollars, ye so proud and ascribed to the adage “It’s business, it’s never personal”: you suck too!

Yo Mickey Mouseketeers, ye with such freakishly proportioned ears, ye so happy on the inside and somehow also happy on the inside: you suck three!

Is that everyone now? Good. Let’s continue.

I want to meet people who are benevolent and like getting paid. From what I can tell on TV and even in real life, it seems that people are largely split into the two groups. The non-profiteers want no part of the capitalist, affluenza pandemic that has infected rappers and America and especially for-profiteers. The for-profiteers, on the other hand, want money severely. They want money so badly that they will pollute environments, defraud geezers, or otherwise embrace whatever vices blacken the bottom line.

In the middle, there is an island upon which I hope to find some fellow refugees. What’s so bad about getting paid?

This Party Is Started

With six beers and one big-ass veggie/supreme pizza to mark the occasion, work on Bonanzle has officially commenced!

We spent a lively afternoon and evening in the basement on what I believe may have been an otherwise lovely Sunday afternoon. The first matter was applying some further tweaks to our fancy new Mac Mini Server (running Trac, Apache, and Subversion); then we began creating the model layer for the most integral parts of the site.

Hard to say after only using it for a couple hours, but Ruby seems to be a suitably high-octane development language. I was especially impressed with the very straightforward syntax by which the database layer was created. Also a lot of high-level programming concepts built into the language, which makes me optimistic that time spent programming will be more concerned with the meat than the mundane. For someone that was developing GBA games in C only a few years ago, I can particularly appreciate a language that takes care of the obvious stuff for you.

Meeting up with some web-designy types tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll mix a spark of creative content with this high-octane language and get ourselves some fire before long.

No Lines

One of the key metrics to indicate you’ve found your passion: you can’t tell weekday from weekend.

I love my weekends. It’s the time I get to spend with Katy and my friends at large. It’s the time I go on vacations. It’s the time I get to be outside and enjoy the ever-nicening weather around the ‘Sound. But it is seldom a Friday that I even realize the weekend is about to begin.

Not so when I was in school. I can recall feeling a palpable joy every Friday. In class, I took to watching the second hand of the clock dilly-dally in slow, ambling circles. The same was true when I worked at the University Bookstore. I have met a fair number of people who claim to like their job “because it gives them plenty of time to cruise their favorite Internet sites,” but I can remember no slower, more agonizing days than the ones that I had to try to find website after website to keep my brain occupied in five minute intervals. I wonder if these same people would want a job that required them to watch daytime TV for 8 hours a day?

To someone whose weekends were discernably more satisfying than their weekdays, I would hasten to remind them that weekdays are the 5:2 winner in how they will spend their life. That’s a problem if you don’t love ’em.

And So Forth

Sorry about the neglect, blog. I just haven’t been feeling profound enough I suppose. The idea orgy that typified the first month of business is over, and has been replaced with the part of the rollercoaster where you get hooked by the chain that pulls up up up toward the top of the coaster. Each of the clinks that you’d hear on the way to the top is one more piece that gets put together. But face it: when people talk about their favorite roller coaster, the trip up that first precipice is an oft-neglected component of their story.

That certainly isn’t to say that it isn’t fun and fascinating to look over the side at how high up we already are. In the last couple weeks, I’ve continued building information and partners, to the net effect that real live development should be getting underway in the next two weeks. We’re now three developers strong, and I can honestly say that if we were on the playground and I had the first three picks of whoever I’d want to be helping, I got ’em all three. Not only good for the project, but good for the developers themselves, because if there’s one thing that my day job has taught me, its that programming enters a whole new dimension of fun when you get to work with great people who can amaze on a daily basis. And if there’s one other thing my day job has taught me, it’s that the opportunities to work with people like that can be few and far between in the real world.

Wheeee!

The Farmer

I don’t doubt this analogy has been used before by some other observant entrepreneur, but starting a business is a lot like starting a farm. First you plant seeds. Lots of seeds. Thousands of them if possible, because you know most of them won’t grow. Then you start watering and nourishing the seeds. To this point, you could plant the seeds whenever you decided you wanted to become a farmer, and water them whenever you decided you wanted them to start growing.

Then they start growing, and things change. There is life all around the farm, and there becomes a certain responsibility that goes along with keeping these plants alive. The schedule is now dictated in equal parts by your needs and the needs of the crop. If you’re a good farmer, a lot of those thousand seeds probably took, and now you’ve got yourself a challenge: which area gets watered first? Do you need a new tractor or farmhand?

It is an evolution. After a couple months of planting, this farmer has found himself with more plants to water than days to water them, so it’s time to cut back the less important sprouts, and figure out what’s most important amongst the rest. I’m putting the “busy” in “business,” and it’s just where I want to be.

Realitivity

When’s the last time you heard that you did a “really great job”? Even better, when’s the last time you heard that you did a “really great job, and here are some ideas as to how you can do an even better one”? Hopefully in the last few weeks, but working at the average company with average boss, chances are that it’s probably measured more in months or years. As an individual in search of constant improvement, I am severely bugged when I see this happen. When one acts as their own sounding board, the veracity of the evaluation they give to themselves will be inherently more random. And with randomly correct data about what was and wasn’t good, the precision with which you can determine how to improve your actions is low. After working even one year without meaningful feedback, you end up with a lot of data points representing tasks that you completed, but no bin to sort them into. They are points in space, and the value of that experience is largely diminished because of it.

So, not getting feedback=bad. But is getting feedback=good? Sometimes. A concurrent epidemic that seems to have infected many of the noble feedback givers is that of not assigning degree and example to feedback. Did you ever have a class that was graded on a curve in college, and sit in class on a day where the professor jubilantly declared that “everybody did so well on this test, I am so proud of you all!” Seldom was there a compliment that I less wanted to hear. In reality as we know it, there are few, if any, absolutes. So feedback such as “you did well last week,” ranks only slightly higher in data conveyed than no feedback at all. A disclaimer is in order here that this is coming from a computer programmer who works in a world of logic and quantifiable principles, but in my eyes, a compliment that does not come attached to a comparison and an example will still be only marginally informative. Strictly speaking, whether you are “smart” or “good at what you do” does not exist in an absolute world. It only exists relative to other people (or your past self) who do those same things worse.

“Harsh,” you might be thinking, because it is. Society likes to sugarcoat the reality of comparison by labeling those that see the world as a place of relative degrees as “competitive.” Competitiveness of this type is often discouraged in casual affairs, or even in some business settings where it is important to preserve feelings. But whether you’re winning or not, the relative nature of success is here to stay. Deal with it and grow richer in your understanding of yourself and the world. Deny it and protect your self esteem while you remain ignorant to how you could do better.

It’s “Realitivity.”

Bonanzle!

Productive evening! My business name, “Bonanzle,” is now trademarked with business cards en route. The basis of “Bonanzle” is the “Bonanaza,” but I couldn’t tell you what that means or why it is yet. So sit back and enjoy my newly-minted business cards. Thank you Photoshop CS trial version.

business card

Kill the Gorilla

I went to see Sujal Patel give an intriguing talk on “Introducing Disruptive Technologies into Mature Markets” this Friday. Listed as starting at 6:30 (it actually started at 8, but that’s a different story), my expectations were high as I dragged myself out of bed at 5:30, after a mockingly short 5 hours rest. It didn’t disappoint.

In brief, his three keys to dethroning your gorilla:

1) Possessing a “disruptive technology.” According to Patel, for a new product to make a dent in an existing marketplace, it must be at least 10x better than similar existing offerings. Not twice as good, not five times as good. The logic behind this is that a product anything less than 10x better will not be able to cross the chasm into the early majority, because all breeds of majority adopters (early, middle and late stage) are compelled to adopt only when a product is so overwhelming better that it justifies the investment of time to learn it. This matches my intuitive perception of user adoption patterns — I’m certainly unlikely to adopt something new unless I can clearly see high benefit and low risk (i.e., of the new technology disappearing) to doing so.

2. Tenacity. Though this one is somewhat obvious, the depth to which it is necessary is something that new or non- entrepreneurs may not understand. Patel gave the example of spending literally three months in VC meetings for “all but two days. ” In many of those meetings, he was assured that his idea “was like so-and-so’s idea,” but worse. Other challenges in his case involved convincing VCs that two late 20-somethings, who knew almost nothing about storage, could build a successful storage company amongst a landscape of almost 100 competitors. An illuminating example that he didn’t give was that, as he lectured us, his company had dropped in value almost 22% in the last couple months on news of poor fourth-quarter earnings. Nevertheless, he had to show up, organize an hour-long show, and preach the perfection of his company’s execution. Guts.

3. Partners=results. If there is a single, overarching requirement for success, it is surrounding yourself with the absolute best people that exist. He specifically mentioned the need to find “high ceiling” people who have separated themselves from their peers. When asked in the Q&A session why he’d failed to mention “adaptability” as one of the core needs of a new business, Patel responded that “adaptability” is really a function of who you have. Do you have partners that hear the needs of the business and work together effectively to ensure those needs are met? If so, adaptability is already assured.

Overall, it was an extremely relevant topic for me. Thinking about the features of the site that are truly 10x better than their alternatives helps to focus on the core of the business model. And the need to partner was one that I had already understood, but Patel’s commitment to not compromising on a less-than-ideal partner certainly resonates, as my search for able accomplices extends into weeks from what I’d hoped would be days.