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What the Hell Do I Know?

I concluded my regularly scheduled meetings with Karrie Kohlhaas this evening. As always, there was much ado and many great questions raised for me to consider.

But my favorite question of the night goes to the imaginary businessman that Karrie impersonated, who asked, “Well, this looks like a good enough idea I suppose, but let’s be honest: you’re 27, you’ve never done this before, so what the hell do you know about anything?”

She got me. I think I’m cool no matter the line of questioning, but it was a little startling to pretend as though I were being asked that question in real time. In that sort of situation, even the smallest pause before your answer can be interpreted as doubt. If you do pause, the answer you give must answer the original question and reassert your confidence. I think the trick to answering “tough questions” like this is to know they are coming, and when they do, to give a straightforward answer that belies confidence.

When I think about how to go about answering tough questions with confidence, I think back to the first couple seasons of The Apprentice (before I re-learned to ignore Trump). With a few exceptions (ahem, “Street Smart” Chris), I was consistently impressed by how well each of those contestants could quickly and cooly respond to intense personal attacks by each other and Trump himself. As season 3 Alex said, in one of my all-time favorite interviews,

“People know how to argue more or less from their upbringing but the biggest thing being an attorney did was to prepare me to go into the boardroom and not take arguments personally.”

I thus engage the process of assimilating quick logic robot.

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Pre-Alpha Signup

We are now collecting email addresses of those who’d like to help give feedback on the design of the site. We will probably begin our formal user testing in about a month, but I’d like to start rounding up participants now so that we can get as much feedback as possible once we’re ready to begin testing.

I’ve created an email address form on the main Bonanzle entry page that you can use to sign up if you’re interested.

I’m thinking that the user testing will probably consist of us watching you try to post and search for simulated items on the site. Coffee and appreciation will be included free of charge, maybe even lunch, money, or the gift of eternal life, as circumstances dictate.

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Dear Faceless Masses

thrumaytraffic.pngDear Faceless Masses,

I figure it’s high time I offer a big “thanks!” to whoever it is that is visiting this blog. I thoroughly enjoy keeping it, but the traffic chart to date certainly doesn’t hurt my will to be consistent in my postings.

This also makes me curious just who has been coming here and why? You’re not all my mom, are you? (Incidentally, Dominic Canterbury had a great soundbite at Bizjam yesterday about the “Mom-pleaser” website. In his words, this is the site that doesn’t realize that “only your mom is going to think it’s really ‘cool’ that you have 30 web pages on your site. Everybody else wants it as simple as possible.’ I immediately laughed to myself as I considered the ‘Favorite Links’ page on my site. The secret’s out!).

Positive or negative, I’d love to hear what people have to say in response to the opinions voiced on 800 Steps. I am only at step 39 of 800 so far, and there is still much to be learned about how to manifest a vision. Let’s put our thoughts together and bang out these last 761 steps out real quick-like!

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The Continued Adventures of Biz Plan v1

“Business Plan: Alpha Version” now complete and distributed. It’s currently about 10 pages of meat, and I’ll be quite curious to hear the feedback on it. Almost all of it right now is focused specifically on the business idea, the competition, and the methods in which it will be designed and launched. According to my official business plan book, that means I’m missing at least two of the four most important sections: the Executive Team and the Financials. Hopefully I’ll have those wrapped up in the next week. But I’m pretty satisfied with how it looks and reads for an alpha version. Tons of statistics (my bibliography citations take about 20% of the whole document!), which appeals to my quantum side.

And lots of graphs, charts, and pictures. If you are going to be writing a business plan, or an important document of any sort, you must buy the new version of Word. I’ve been using Word 2000 for the last several years since it was the last copy that could be easily warezed (whoops, did I say that or just think it?). But if you buy the Home version through a Microsoft employee (and who in the NW doesn’t have a Microsoft friend?) it’s only $35 for the whole Office suite, which is really a screaming deal, given the improvements that have been made to it since 2000. The version of Word I’m using has built-in, easy to find and use templates (stylishly stylized) for every type of diagram, table or chart I have seen fit to add to the document. Hand-drawn text boxes in Word 2000 simply can’t compare.

If you’d like to get your own copy of The Plan, holler!

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Taking My Medicine

Talking to the fabulously intriguing Mr. Nathan Rohm this evening, I found myself referring to my previous venture, Spek, as “a vaccination against quitting.” The more I think about it, the more I believe that is the most simple and accurate description I could give of the experience.

For those not in the know, Spek was the Xbox Live Arcade video game company that some friends and I started to start a little more than a year ago. It began in a flash. Within a week of having the idea to start the company, I had teamed up with two hard-working and dedicated friends to fill the roles of designer and artist. Within another week we had our programmer, and away we went.

By the time the ride came to an end, we had worked on it about six months and had the trappings of a working prototype, complete with an engine and a decent amount of the art assets. We had the game fully designed, and had entered serious talks with Microsoft about publishing the game on XBLA. I believe that, had we not been derailed, we stood at least a 50% chance of getting the game published, and from there, taking the company in whatever direction we wanted.

But we didn’t. Ostensibly, this was due to NCA provisions in my current employment contract (i.e., my lawyer said we could justifiably be sued and our company taken), but at the same time, I was tired by the time the party came to an end. Here’s what I learned:

1. One person can not be the business planner, project manager, and lead programmer while working 40+ hours a week at their day job.
2. Any attempts by one person to be all of the above roles will swallow you whole and make you suck at everything you do, which will in turn kill motivation.
3. Starting a business is learning to embrace ebb and flow. On one day you might win a client. On the next day you can lose a partner. On the day after you can be admired. On the day after that you can be forced to revise the whole business plan.
4. Once you commit to a particular idea, many other good opportunities will present themselves. In the case of Spek, it was the opportunity to be the lead developer on the title that was going to be the highest-budget project our studio had ever taken on. By a factor of two.
5. And despite all of this, your commitment must be absolutely unwavering.

Though I’ve avoided reliving lessons number 1 and 2 with Bonanzle (where I’ve yet to do a lick of programming (I miss it, but Bonanzle’s success to this point would have been completely unattainable any other way)), lessons 3, 4 and 5 have been just as applicable to this project as they had been to Spek. The difference is, this time I saw it coming. The longer I can prove to myself that I have that unwavering focus on what the end result is, the more fortified becomes my ability to lead any type of business, or really, realize any type of goal. What is it that Thomas Edison says on a notecard tacked to my wall?

“The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; and third, common sense.”

I knew the words, but now I know the depth of their truth.

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800 Steps to… Becoming a Farmer?

Talk of the “long tail” phenomenon is all the rage these days amongst web sites in general, but especially amongst consumer/retail sites. I hadn’t quite figured out why, so I decided to take a look at what queries had led searchers to 800 Steps.

It’s an amusingly random list. Topping the list of queries, as you might expect, were people searching for more info about the person behind this blog. Yes, people of the web want to know more about Karrie Kohlhaas. Here’s lookin’ at you, Karrie! She might not write the blog, but she did initially inspire it, and as far as Google is concerned, that’s apparently “close enough.”

Some other notable search hits: “steps in getting an active investor into my business,” “manifest investor who is like minded,” “realitivity,” “william harding press release,” “paul allen,” “write the four steps in creative entrepreneurial problem solving cycle,” “marcus latham pickles,” and my personal favorite, “steps to becoming a farmer.”

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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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Troublemaker

For better or worse, I think I am probably perceived by some at my day job to be a “troublemaker.” I like to consider myself the good kind of troublemaker who makes trouble that leads to meaningful improvements. Because I do bring about a number of those. But trouble is trouble. Given that causing positive trouble has probably cost me far more in effort and energy than it has netted me in recognition and praise, I think one could reasonably ask why I persist in doing it.

I remembered the answer today, when I stayed a couple hours late to write a Perl script that would track the cumulative time that myself and our team of 15 people spend building our project every day. I’ve been wired to derive a feeling of exhilaration from finding solvable problems and figuring out the steps to get those problems solved. So when the day comes in a couple weeks that I can assemble 15 people worth of build data and present my interpretation of what the cost of those times is, it won’t matter to me what kind of trouble I’m causing, because ultimately, a problem will be one big step closer to being solved.

The shareable observation to make here is that, though the pleasure I took from writing this script was tremendous, there were still a few days that I prioritized it lower than my everyday tasks, because technically, it was optional. But once I finished it this evening, I realized that this is what makes me really happy. If you’ve got something that sounds like a good idea to you but is going to take a couple hours to get done, listen to how you feel once you finish that thing. If it is “good” or “great”, hopefully you will join me and be smarter about what gets precedence next time you’re prioritizing standard responsibilities, distractions, and whatever makes you feel like a champ.

The other point is that every company needs some quality troublemakers.

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Noonhat and Immotion

I am such a naughty networker. Yet again tonight, I spent a few hours at a Biznik networking event, and yet again, I talked to all of about three people over that time.

In my defense, the folks I did manage to talk with had some of the best ideas/services of the many Bizniks I’ve met so far.

Best idea of the night/week/month (this is my blog, so best idea of the year will unsurprisingly be awarded to me) goes to Brian Dorsey. Brian is the creator of one of the least interesting personal web sites and most interesting utility web sites I’ve known. In a few weeks he will be releasing Noonhat, a service that connects people in the same geographic area to completely random lunch partners. The site is currently slated to be dirt-simple: just login and be matched to someone nearby that is interested in having lunch today. Looking in my crystal ball, I can already predict the first (second, third and fourth) request he is going to hear will be to create a Web 2.0-ey profiling mechanism to the site so people can match themselves up with those of similar interests. But Brian has astutely realized that what makes this idea so offbeat is precisely that you don’t know who you’ll be eating with when you sign up. It might be a new business partner, it might be the next great axe murderer, or it might be your grandma. I love this idea and hope that I’ll be able to help him usher it into existence with the imaginary time that I don’t currently and never will have.

Best up-and-coming business of the night goes to Kei Wakabayashi. Kei is looking for ways to grow his web design company, Immotion to the point of perpetual profitability. I predict he will succeed in doing this; his site’s aesthetic and portfolio, though sparse, is some of the better looking stuff I’ve seen amongst my web-wide travels. Kei had a number of great questions about starting a business, and between his curiosity and web talent, I wish I would have run into him earlier. I’m looking forward to watching his wildest entrepreneurial dreams come true.

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Jump!

Myself and a bunch of friends are going to jump from a plane in a couple weeks. I have mixed feelings about how much I’ll enjoy it. The safety statistics don’t concern me much, nor does the thought of jumping from the plane particularly make me sweat. The part of the trip I am most dreading is the many hours that we will have to sit around the wherever-you-sit-at-a-skydiving-joint and think Think think about all the tiny logistics of what we’re about to do. The same unending stream of thoughts that makes my brain so very useful for discovering creative solutions/solving deep-rooted problems isn’t discriminating about what it will analyze; therefore I’m probably destined for some miserable hours. It is one thing to go from hanging out and drinking beers to jumping 14,000 feet. It’s another to sit around with little diversion for hours and ponder how someone could hit the wing.

Two Dentists Offices, Stolen from Creating Passionate UsersI’m thinking the skydiving experience will most likely prove to be another everyday example of preventable customer discomfort. I believe that these discomforts exist in large part because, often times, customers do not even realize their discomfort is preventable. The example on Creating Passionate Users of two potential dentists’ offices comes to mind. One dentist office looks more or less like every dentist office I have ever been to: dry, clinical, and, um, black & white. The other one is dressed in warm colors, “smells like cookies,” and has a wine bar. Every time I have gone to my dentists’ since seeing this graphic, I think to myself, “Where’s the damn wine?” Every time I sit in the seat, stare toward the ceiling, and listen to the sweet lullabys of the dental drill, I think, “Where’s the plasma TV with ESPN or Xbox 360 or anything?”

Simply put, service providers have a tremendous opportunity to see past conventions and create an experience that makes the customer happy from the moment they enter to the moment they leave. The service itself is but one aspect of the experience. In many cases, the service itself might take only a small portion of the overall time for the experience (how many times have I sat 20 minutes or more in an empty patient room at a doctor’s office, waiting for a doctor that spent five minutes with me before rendering their verdict?). And the service is frequently not what’s on the customer’s mind during most of the experience.

It is the experience that I remember, and it is the experience that I think about when considering whether I’d go back.