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Viva la Bill

Every day I spend with my nose to the grindstone, it keeps sneaking up on me. It started as “maybe someday,” and eventually progressed to “hopefully soon,” “maybe four months,” “about two months,” and now, three wee-little weeks: my (partial) liberation from the man as I transition to working a half-time shift!

I’m (partially) ecstatic. I don’t yet know exactly how calling my own shots will effect my day-to-day life, but it sure sounds terrific. Currently, I’m squeezing 25-30 hours a week between late weeknights and long weekend days. Time to meet with people is limited. Time to develop the site myself is non-existent. For all the time I’ve spent looking for someone else to give the executive branch of this project a shot in the arm, I’m now betting that in three weeks, I’ll be infusing the project with about as good a boost as could be hoped for at this point. For progress and morale alike.

I can still clearly remember the first morning I woke up in my own apartment after arriving in Seattle. The apartment was a complete disaster: cheap, run down, and littered with leftover food and partially emptied boxes. I woke up at about 8 in the morning after just a few hours sleep. Though I had thrown off my blanket when dusk broke a few hours earlier, I was still drenched in sweat from the sun shining through my window, baking me on my futon. I looked out my clear, sunny window onto the neighbor’s cluttered porch and an already bustling 15th Avenue. I deeply inhaled the pale smell of cigarette and newly washed dingy carpets, and pasted a grin on my face that lasted the rest of the week.

The independence was intoxicating, unlike anything I had felt in my life to that point. Every trip to the deathbed Safeway on 50th Street was a field trip where anything was possible. I couldn’t give a damn about yielding at crosswalk signals, paying bus fare, or doing the dishes.

girl_jump.jpgEven today, many of my favorite moments are those where I shun convention in favor of the freewheeling ethos that personified that time in my life. Given that, it is something of a wonder that I managed to do the 9-5 routine even for the three-plus years I’ve been at it. From what I have read and what I can sense, making the leap away from security and into a self-directed challenge that will engage me daily promises to hold the same clear air of possibility that blew by me as I baked on that futon almost 10 years ago today.

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Synergy: Beyond the Buzzword

“Synergy.” It’s one of those words that resides alongside “Web 2.0” as business jargon whose power is diluted from misuse and overuse. But, linguistic connotation notwithstanding, I think it is a critical component of sites that are going places in the 2000’s. Don’t buy it? Observe:

Etsy. A site that, at its core, is doing the same thing as eBay: selling crafts between users. Given, they have done it with a better interface, but a blind decapitated monkey could create a better UI than eBay. Most sites have. What has made Etsy so much more successful than nice-looking sites like MightyBids.com is the synergy it generates between items and artists. The preponderance of well-photographed (and thus visually attractive) items on the site exist because artists tend to be better photographers than the average user. Many of Etsy’s most unique and successful features “work” because the site is designed for abstract-minded individuals. Their “time machine” is a perfect example of this. The “time machine” is a flash application on Etsy that scrolls items of decreasing newness toward you through space. This feature succeeds resoundingly because of the synergies wherein A) people expect artsy features on an artsy site and B) art-related items are much more arbitrarily chosen than eBay items, so it is relevant to see random pieces presented. If eBay tried to do the same, you would get toasters and broken laptops and Nigerian get-rich-quick scams flying toward you. And it would not help you shop more effectively.

Biznik. A site that takes one part business, one part indy, and seasons to taste with charm. As Etsy::Classifieds, Biznik::Networking — that is, the world doesn’t need another business networking site. But powerful synergies exist when you take friendly, benevolent, like-minded indy service providers, and mix them with users possessing business acumen. The result is monthly get-togethers like “Biznik Happy Hour” which is a networking event advertised as “Not a room of business card pushing suits,” and which, over the course of the last six months, has nearly tripled in size, to the point that the event has outgrown the otherwise-terrific Liberty Cocktail bar. Why does Biznik work so well? Because its users naturally want to talk to and help each other, and if you’re talking to and helping someone, you want to get to know them, and if you get to know them, you’ll more likely to want to help them. And every time this cycle happens, the site itself becomes better because more people join and more advice is posted. The bottom line is that Biznik fosters an environment that perpetuates helpfulness, and is led by founders who embody the generous, user-first indy spirit that is manifest in so many members of the site.

As I continue to gather data and start putting the words into Business Plan 2.0, it has become very clear to me that this type of synergy is exactly the reason that Bonanzle will work. The classified ads sector is saturated, and the online auction space is beyond saturated. For a new site to make any significant inroads in this environment, there must be a strong synergistic undercurrent that leads users to the site and the site to users and users to users and the site to other sites. Fortunately, that is precisely how the plan is working out.

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Back To Square One

After laboring over this site for the last five months, we’re finally back to step one: writing the business plan. This was the first step in Bonanzle’s infancy, and has again come to the forefront as our development process has reached the point of self-perpetuation. When I think about what the “best” first step to take would have been, I think “write up the business plan” is probably about as good of a guess as any: you are immediately forced to weigh yourself against competition and enumerate what it is that you think you’ll be providing. The catch is that, in all but the rarest cases, what you think your product will be in the first couple weeks is an educated guess at best.

So it was with Bonanzle. I started by noticing a problem in the way shopping worked, and identified a fix to that problem that could extend beyond solving the original problem. The more I analyzed it, the more apparent it became that this idea could in fact extend all the way to creating a new class of shopping experience. The next couple months I bounced between business planners, entrepreneurs, market savvy types, and all people in between, as the idea grew bigger and bigger in its potential.

Taking a notebook chock full of ideas, opinions, research and facts, I feverishly pieced together the plan that constituted Bonanzle’s best opportunity to make a significant impact on the online marketplace. The result? Our original idea.

It has become increasingly apparent through analyzing our competition and my further communications with the always wise Mr. Dalasta that it takes something either vertical or completely offbeat to tempt users away from a gorilla. Despite the pages of potential applications for this site that many well-versed web veterans have brought to my attention, it is my conviction that we need to start by solving one problem, and solving it superbly.3darrow.gif

What then have I gained from these months of analysis? Only everything that will go into the business plan. Even though the idea ended up the same as it started, it has only been through having the idea continuously scrutinized that I’ve been able to determine which combinations of words make eyebrows raise. Put all those raised-eyebrow answers together, sprinkle in the words “weave,” “synergy,” and “confluence,” then for good measure, toss in a couple 3d arrows and flowcharts to represent data, traffic or customers, and you can pretty much sit back and wait for the first couple mil to arrive in the bank. Am I right, investors?

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Seattle Entrepreneur Blogs

I set an objective this week to get a feel for the Seattle Entrepreneurial blogging landscape, and have picked my three favorites from John Cook’s list of good ‘uns.

A Sack of Seattle: A. Sack (aka Andy Sack of Judy’s Book) is an honest guy with good observations. He’s also set up a forum for Seattle entrpreneurs to meet up over coffee, which is a benevolent gesture for an individual who has reached the “investment capital secured” promise land from which few bloggers return, and fewer still retain accessibility. Plus, his blog carries an extra bit of drama as he is currently in the process of trying to reinvent his site to capture a completely different niche (coupons) than it grew up on (reviews). Sounds like a hell of a trick to me, but I bet there are those who would say the same about taking on a $48 billion behemoth named eBay. Morons. They’ll obviously never topple eBay with that attitude.

Geeking With Greg: Greg is both a lucid and prolific blogger. He also seems to share my interests for Artificial Intelligence (I’ve architected the AI systems for most every game I’ve worked on for the last four years / he is making a web site that learns what kind of RSS you like and gives it to you) and productivity (I blog about it every other post / he blogs about it every other every other post). And if that weren’t enough, there is a funny quote about how engineers are leaving Google because MBAs have declared it their employer of choice.

Curious Office: Made by the founder of Imagekind, this site seems to fall into the “investment capital secured, accessibility retracted” collection. Comments are disabled on most posts. But you don’t have to be buddies with the writer to appreciate the piles of wisdom lying in plain site on here. In particular, there is a Steve Pavlina-esque article on their approach to getting funded. I like how he proposes that we wait until the investors come to us, rather than investing time on finding investors when there’s development to be done. Spoken like a true programmer. And you can bet that the story about the investor who tracked you down to give you $5 million is going to make for a great blog post/party story/pickup line when you can pull it off.

Anyone else got a local favorite local entrepreneurial blog not mentioned here? I’ve found that the defining characteristics of my favorites so far have been bloggers with experience and similar interests, who respect their readers and answer comments. It’s quite a treat when I uncover such a blog. The information that is readily accessible on any number of blogs these days (on the steps to getting investment, or generally being entrepreneurially minded) is stuff that simply didn’t exist 10 years ago. Let alone for free and in relatively unlimited quantities.

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Exploring Limits v. Self-Destruction

Along with productivity, one of the topics that perpetually fascinates me is “how much time/effort is enough to have ‘given something your all’?”

On this topic, Paul Graham says,

Startups are not magic. They don’t change the laws of wealth creation. There is a conservation law at work here: if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars’ worth of pain. For example, one way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your salary. Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can’t evade the fundamental conservation law. If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it.

During this time [when creating a startup] you’ll do little but work, because when you’re not working, your competitors will be. My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night. I had a girlfriend for a total of two months during that three year period. Every couple weeks I would take a few hours off to visit a used bookshop or go to a friend’s house for dinner. I went to visit my family twice. Otherwise I just worked.

Like Paul’s “animal” test for finding the best people to work with, this analysis has been the stickiest that my brain has encountered so far. But I resent it like hell. Because I have a very goldfish-like ability (or even predisposition) toward being able to eat and eat and eat without noticing that I haven’t been hungry for days. Working 7 days a week until 3 A.M. seems to me quite dangerous, both physically and mentally. But I am crazy/stupid enough to try it, and I hear it beckoning.

So how much of that work is actually necessary?

Hell if I know. This is still step number twenty-something of 800.

But here’s what I do know. I do know that one has to push themselves further than seems possible. Rationing sleep is a start. Then you have to learn to be creative and productive and diplomatic despite the fact that you are tired and it’s hard to think straight. Then you have to dedicate yourself to consistent improvement at the same time you’re trying to get two feet on the ground. You can mess up sometimes, but it means you’re probably going to have to work twice as hard later to fix your mess up and do things better.

Add all that energy up, and how much do you have left over for the rest of your life? If it’s a pittance, is that OK with you? If it’s not, do you really think you stand a chance against those who are OK with it? Herein lies the paradox of dedicating oneself to an idea. Or really, dediating oneself to anything. There are other aspects of life that must be omitted, and you are making an implicit bet that you’ll get around to those things later. “The bet” calls the downside of passion “exploring your limits.” Most psychologists call it “self-destruction.” I’ll take the bet.

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What Flavor Businessman?

Over the course of creating Bonanzle and during my previous entrpreneurial pursuits, I’ve frequently asked myself what “good business people” do. For every component I identify, my mind reflexively poses the immediate follow-up question, “so, do you do that?” Business Always Fun

So far, the answer is often “no, I don’t.” The example I currently feel the most guilty about is that “no, I don’t do conventional business networking.” What’s worse, I don’t possess the desire to start doing it. The reasons are numerous, but in a nutshell, my least favorite part of getting to know someone is the first 10 minutes, and that is the time frame that is repeated ad nauseum at most of these “meet person, exchange business card, repeat”-type events. Furthermore, these events seem to me to be imbued in protocol, which, as a rookie, I am largely not hip to. Eventually, I consciously realize that I’ll need to change my tune on business breakfasts, but I’ll be holding out as long as possible.

In the meantime, I have to ask myself what it means about my skill set vis a vis the skill set of the successful business person. Is there a better determinant of success than correlation to what business people do? I like to think so. I think that the better question is “what a business person is?”

This question seems to me to lie at the root of what a business person does. So instead of “do you do business breakfasts?” I ask “what is a business person that causes them to attend the business breakfasts?” I’d posit that they are people who can use their communication skills to interest potential clients and partners while attending these events.

In this light, my business side shines. My greatest delight so far in making this site manifest itself has been meeting such an unfathomable number of intelligent people with diverse backgrounds and opinions. One of the most recent people I’ve met, Darren Dalasta, is a great example of a new acquaintence who has come from a totally disparate background (marketing, SEO) and has shown me an entirely different side of the web…. in one email he sent to me. This single email contained links to the Creating Passionate Users blog, eBay’s new UI, a failed Web 2.0 Post-Mortem and many other links more specifically relevant to Bonanzle’s activities. His background has allowed him to create an email that might have taken him a few minutes to write up, which has in turned kept me following links for hours upon days since receiving it.

And Darren is but one example from tens of effective, like-minded people I’ve encountered over the last few months. I think that for everyone, but especially for someone as fascinated by people as me, there are oodles of lessons and successes to be derived through being what a business person is, rather than simply following what they do.

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I ? Logo

I question whether logo matters.

Think about it: What aspect of your site/business is more subjective than your logo? At its most concrete level, it may subconsciously communicate some aspect of your business. But from everything I can tell, determining whether a logo is “good” or “bad” is about as scientific as determining if a painting is “good” or “bad.” In this sense, it is true that there is such a thing as a truly great painting and a truly awful one. But 95% of paintings/logos fall in this middle gray area where nobody is qualified to say what is right and wrong. I have a hard time justifying great costs on a collection of a few pixels that fall within the 95% of pixel collections that everyone else has.

Of course, the logo apologist will be quick to retort, that “gray area or not, the logo is the face of your business. It is who you are. It is how people remember you. When people think of you, they think of your logo. ” And of course, those facts are to some extent true.

So then I extrapolate to myself : Who am I? I am Bill. How do people remember me? As Bill. What is the face of Bill? Uh, it’s the face of some dude with short blond hair and green-blue eyes.

But even if people remembered me as “Pedro,” with “Sleek black hair and dark brown eyes,” I think I could still succeed in my goals if I had something unique to offer.

So I assert it to be with the logo, and so I save me mucho logo dinero.

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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.

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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?

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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.