Category — Start Ups

I spend about 3 hours a day reading stuff. Alot of that time is spent reading TechCrunch and Mashable and Business Insider and several other blogs about Technology and Business. But the really interesting stuff is found in the second level - the links and sources that those sites embed in their posts to attribute thoughts, ideas and specific data. Those links have a more focused approach to specific data points and thought patterns that give you a better insight into that line of thinking. A better insight into what is happening in the world.

I read an interesting quote today - “The beauty of the internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people.” ( - Jaron Lanier) Its very true. The value of the internet is in discovering what other smart and experience people have to say, and have to reflect about their world. Because our world is so interconnected, shared experiences are much more common - even if we don’t know each other or are on opposite sides of the globe.

Reading is a great way to focus your mind and absorb new information that inspires you. I feel like as I read, my unconscious mind is absorbing all the data I read and locking it away in my brain only to be accessed randomly at some other opportune (or inopportune) time. It brings the value of other people’s experiences, their thoughts and advice related to those experiences, it brings that all together and helps me better form an idea of what needs to be said or done here. Reading about how Google is positioning its new operating system, and how a brand new start up is unrolling its new location based social game. Those things matter, they are minute case studies on how to run a business in todays world. Real time case studies - this is happening NOW.

Of course the ultimate action is always up to me, but knowing that this company in Santa Cruz did this crazy thing when they were faced with this really bad situation and it worked brilliantly, or it was the last straw. Well thats not in you’re marketing textbook, or your finance book.

Its a little lesson you learn in the school of life, the school where you are the professor and you decide how well you do - but the rest of the world grades you. Do good things and you will do well.

Reading and absorbing is one of my favorite ways to relax, and it helps inspire me and focus on my ideas because I am always asking - “How does that apply to what I’m doing?” Always ask questions, and question the answers you get.

In the past year, I have had the best times, some not so good times, and some really bad times. I’ve hired and let go nearly a dozen people, all of whom I liked, and all of whom left me feeling down and like they had taken advantage of me. I am generally a kind and compassionate person, I almost always try to get the best situation for people on both sides of the table. But as I’ve heard before and was told recently, if you want a friend - get a dog.

I raised a small (by many standards) amount of Angel money in October last year. I took on a partner who invested time and money and committed to working side by side in the business with me.  He’s a smart and great guy, with a long history of managing successful sales teams. I thought it was the perfect partnership. But I learned the hard way that I gave up too much control of the company I had put so much in and our investors had invested in. So we set out to build a killer sales team.

And we took the right steps, we hired 3 new sales people. We purchased a massive license from Salesforce to manage our team, we did all the right things. Or so we thought. We were so psyched to get our feet on the street and bringing in new clients, that we forgot to build the product out to the specs it really needed. Our developer got behind on the new platform and all of a sudden we were 3 months, then 6 months behind schedule with the launch. But we had been training and building this sales team for those 6 months - and paying them. Not paying me, not paying my partner, but building our sales team; a sales team to conquer the world.

Lesson learned the hardway, if you build a killer product, you won’t have to “sell” it. It will sell itself. I knew we needed to focus on the product, from day 1 I knew it. Thats why I raised money, to build out this great product and then build out a great sales team to come and distribute it. We put the cart before the horse and spent all our time, effort and cash on this sales team, which flamed out and probably (in hindsight) wasn’t the right team to be working for us anyway.

So know here I am, a year later, with investors who still somewhat believe in us, a product that is halfway finished (but still great!) and a sales team 1/4 th the size it was 3 months ago. I’m stuck, because I know our idea will work, I know it does work. I have seen it work for 4 years now! But this economy turned a cold shoulder to our mediocre product, and I’m back where I started 14 months ago. Except much, much, dare I say, MUCH wiser for the experience.

I know this idea is going to succeed. Its just a question of when.

If it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger, or so the saying goes.

The past year has been a wild ride. I have gone through 8 salespeople now. Some people lie, some people cheat, and some people can’t do what you ask them to do (or just won’t). Dealing with people is hard, because when you demand a lot from someone and they don’t deliver, you’re disappointed in them, but when you don’t demand enough from people and they don’t deliver, you are disappointed in yourself. Managing is insanely difficult.

Being an entrepreneur requires you to have a close personal relationship with everyone in your company, and thats a great thing when times are good, but when times are bad - everything changes. All of a sudden daily tasks are questioned, Why do you want this from me? Well you were supposed to be doing it, but we let it slide. Well, I am the first to point the finger back at myself, and I’ve learned that discipline doesn’t make you successful sometimes. Discipline ALWAYS makes you successful, but you can’t be disciplined sometimes. Thats exactly what discipline is, its ALWAYS crossing Ts and dotting Is. Discipline is always doing all of the little things that make you great, that make you successful. Discipline is the toughness to make that extra phone call, write down that last request, finish the play all the way through the whistle.

Toughness makes winners out of players. Toughness makes good people great. Toughness allows discipline to come through and force you to succeed because you did all the right things. Not just some of them, or most of the time, but ALWAYS and EVERYTHING.

You have to be tough to be disciplined, and you have to be disciplined to be successful. If you can’t take some pressure, you will never be tough, and you will never be successful. Success is the overcoming of pressure through toughness and discipline, and it is the relentless pursuit of success that makes life awesome.

When I was in college I used to say that I wasn’t lazy but I was energy efficient. Now I’m beginning to worry that as a nation we are becoming more lazy.

Hundreds of new applications and devices are being introduced each year that reduce the effort it takes to do something, and people are waiting in throes to purchase these things. Take the new iPhone which combines the internet, elements of a notebook PC, your mp3 device and a camera. With the new version comes an app store that allows you to upgrade and add to the already potent functionality of it. Here is a device that allows you to take several unique actions and communicate quickly and easily in many different ways, connecting you to the world around you better than ever before. Think back 10 yrs to putting dimes (now quarters) in payphones.
Let’s move on to another phenomenon that’s taking early adopters by storm - Twitter. Twitter takes two already efficient mediums and combines them: email and SMS. Taking quick blurbs about our lives we can quickly share them with the people around us who want to know.
Don’t take my tone to be overly negative, these efficiency innovations go right to the heart of capitalism. Creating something that makes peoples lives better or easier. A good example, I’m writing this from my blackberry poolside, and I will email it to my posting address and it will appear automatically, with minimal extra effort.

Humans have come so far in the past 30 yrs, just in the short lifetime of many of the entrepreneurs leading these new developments. Its fascinating to see how far we’ve come and where it might lead, but it all truly comes down to effeciency innovation.
How can we take this thing we enjoy and do it better and faster? The question that defines much of what we do today.

Ok, anyone who knows me knows I can get pretty fired up. And sometimes in the privacy of my computer I can get a little overzealous about my thoughts/feelings, especially related to recent experiences. I am also pretty good at acknowledging these blights, and when necessary correcting them. In the past few weeks, I think I may have transmitted some of these blights into this blog, so I’d like to address them.

I have of late been very hard on the financial markets and the coverage of them RE: their view on the internet. And in fairness, I live alot of my life on the internet, I run an internet company and I know a few people who do as well. However, coming across a few data points (particularly this one from Greg Sterling) about E-Commerce having basically flat growth and a few fairly average earnings reports, I think I was getting a bit ahead of myself. I know a good bit about the markets, I know alot more about the internet, but the internet is still a small piece of the economy, and as a whole of our nation, only the early adopters are really savvy to its power and potential. I guess I just never really considered myself and early adopter.

On a second point, I recently remarked on a meeting I had a few weeks ago and used the term “don’t get it.” After reading this post from Mark Cuban, I realized that in some way I was being lazy when discussing the potential project. I didn’t drill “it” down enough for them. Although I never actually used this term with them, nor would I (it is rather insulting), it hit me that in many ways I’ve rationalized deals that never happened or meetings that didn’t go well as them “just not getting it.” The important part of this is that it made me a little better, and now I realize I have alot more work to do to get to a level I didn’t realize I wasn’t already on. If that makes any sense.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure, or something like that.

We are working on developing an entirely new pricing structure, from the sales materials to the training to the handling of new and recent prospects to the web architecture that facilitates it. Whole new focus, which I’m very excited about. So far this month its taken on very well.

What I’m curious about is how other companies my size are handling the current economic climate. From a general downturn, to the burgeoning online economy. I’ve been hearing alot about some other startups in our field and laugh and wonder about some of their statements.

There’s alot going on in the local search market, and its only going to get more packed. Its a very exciting time to be involved in local, and we are getting after it.

Time will tell who will make it to the “next level”

The last four months might as well have been the first 3 years of my post-collegiate life. The company came from the brink of disaster to pretty much where it was in October. Several complete disasters happened in between and I can say that I am much better off for it all (maybe not financially…). On December 1st, the day we launched our newest website, our server was overloaded, it crashed and we lost about 80% of the data on it. A week later a partner (and our lead outside salesperson) left with his own self determined severance package. Three weeks after Christmas, just as I was getting over the last two disasters, a fire destroyed the apartment of our most faithful employee, along with our entire office which had been relocated to a 2nd bedroom there. A terrible tragedy for her, and a major setback for the company. Not only did we lose literally all of our information from the past 2 years, but we lost our last employee for 6 weeks. Did I mention that this all happened leading up to the worst part of the year for us (which was probably a blessing in retrospect) but it didn’t bode well for the future.

In the final week of February I was certain we were going out of business. Our accounts receivable had gotten out of control in turn so was accounts payable. I had no where to turn, my credit was maxed out, but I knew if we could get to May it would all be ok. I was back on my own, running a company operating in 4 cities across the northeast and now expected to handle 300 clients who all demanded face to face service. Good thing I had just gotten a new car (which I could no longer afford at this point).

I’ve learned more about life in the past 6 months than I had in the 23 years prior. I learned that your faith in yourself should never be out matched by your faith in other people. I learned the power of a positive attitude, and I learned who my true friends were. I discovered how open most people are to helping you if you’re honest and that as flaky as some people may be, others will always be there with good intentions.

But perhaps most importantly I learned a lot about myself. I won’t go into that, but through this capitalistic battle, I learned that what I am doing really kicks ass. In a down economy, with all odds against my little company of 5 people shrunk back to one, we persevered and our clients and prospects saw opportunities for themselves, drove demand and helped us get through. Ultimately it was the market that told me not to quit. I’m persistent, but I know the invisible hand of the market can’t be forced.

I love playing the underdog. Slower technology, lesser equipment, no big names behind us and certainly a smaller team, The Life is moving forward as fast as it ever was. Bring it on funded companies, lets have at it IAC. I’m focusing on building a solid product and developing my business model to complete this sustainable business - and its working. No, we don’t have the latest web technology, or the newest laptops (I’m writing this on an Inspiron 600m I bought 5 years ago), or the most experienced Sales Team (right now its me training two people who have a combined zero years experience doing anything) and with the exception of a few casual conversations, I haven’t really gone after capital and I doubt anyone is going to come out of left field to put big money behind us (although I know for a fact we’re more profitable than a lot of funded startups).

I’m reminded of my 5th grade english teacher, who told me I would never get into college with my work ethic. I wonder if she knows anything about 100 hour work weeks.

After posting about the growing amount of information and its consequential devaluation, I received a chance to use and review a new service - NewsCred - All the world’s credible news, in one place, a new aggregator that allows registered users to vote on articles and choose to “Credit” the author or article, or “Discredit” the author or article. It is actually similar to my iGoogle homepage in that I can select the news sources and blogs that I want to follow, and track the creditability of. They are out to filter the “Signal to Noise” ratio…

One of the really cool things about the service is that they allow anyone to rank the credibility of an article, an author, or a source (newpaper, blog, etc) based on credibility, quality, transparency and accuracy. The voting process is compiled using their “credibility waterfall algorithm” which although, I don’t like the name (is that a technical term), is a neat concept. It allows the creditability ranking of a specific article to affect the creditability ranking of the author, which in turn affects the creditability ranking of the article’s source. Overall this will theoretically serve you the highest quality and credible news from all across the web. It seems to do a pretty good job of that.

One thing I feel the site needs to really become successful is the proliferation of a “digg” style badge. The relatively new plethora of sharing sites across the internet need a way to tout their creditability, and if the NewsCred “Creditability” ranking badge could furnish this demand, then NewsCred could truly have something remarkable on their hands.

The two largest threats I see for the site are one, reaching a critical mass where they have enough users to rank and “credit” articles which I might read or be interested in; and second, someone else doing that sooner. If the site never really catches on, I don’t really see it becoming anything special, that may go without saying, but here is another 2.0 player in need of user volume.

Its definitely a cool site, one worth checking out. They clearly have a good vision of where they want to be, and how they want to do it and I think it can be successful.

Thanks to the guys at NewsCred for working on something that might actually improve the quality of news out there.

Seth Godin again provided a great post this morning “Breaking the Glass” It got me rather fired up, and excellent analogy and a great example of why I think Seth Godin is a genius.

Break the glass, start doing what you set out to do, stop talking about it and do it. When you are ready to shut up and walk, things start moving, happening and growing. Inside that glass is nothing, just a vapid idea, something that could be, but something that isn’t. Its up to you and no one else to make that idea into something great.

There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.

Also, sorry for the profane title.