My startup’s secret recipe
Update 2:
I’ve put this at the top of the page because it’s important. I messed up. The original post which is below gives a glimpse of my current strategy but didn’t explain what would happen if you try this yourself. I love blogging for the very reason I am writing this. I got comments not just on this blog but also over at YC Hacker News saying what I was doing is a “dumb idea”. I then went back to my post and reread it as more of these comments came in. I realized something, they were absolutely right. After I read my post, stood back and looked at it from their point of view, I saw what they meant. I responded explaining why my strategy would work for me but while I was doing this I wasn’t telling you why you shouldn’t try it.
In my first update below this post I explain why it works for my application but for most people it will fail. One comment over at YC HN summarized all the bottlenecks perfectly:
Plus you will find many other typical problems with remote and distributed teams (cross-communication, misunderstanding, less bouncing of ideas, bonding, agility/speed of change, etc.) to be other big bottlenecks once/if things get moving.Being in the same place, at the same time, and working closely together with people you respect and trust is essential to creating a fast moving startup less likely to die or stagnate.
There are reasons why the most successful ones were two guys in a garage.
Then there was a comment saying
…that said, it seems very closed to me, and I would feel a bit nervous working for him.
I hope my personality and the way I portait myself through my blog takes this feeling away from anyone who has it. My idea for now might be under a cover of secrecy but openness is a goal in the near future.
So please go ahead and embark on reading my post…
About 6 weeks ago I wanted to start on a working prototype, but I didn’t want to decide upon a full time team yet. I want to be location independent for as long as possible while I play with the idea of India, San Francisco or somewhere else. If I would hire an outsourcing team it would mean taking the risk that they could run with the idea. Being half way across the world means there would be nothing I could do about it. Investing into a patent application would mean the idea would become public knowledge and NCA’s/NDA’s only reach so far.
Then I remembered this small company that had a brilliant strategy, Coca-Cola. Their secret recipe is known to only a few people but thousands are producing it each day. This got me thinking… I made a note of all the parts that needed to be developed. I then separated the parts in such a way that if you were working on one part you wouldn’t know the bigger picture. Right now there are two parts almost done, the database backend and one of the user interfaces. There are a lot more parts that need to be developed but I am coming close to a working prototype.
To be in full control of a web application you either need to have a rock star development team that jumps on the gun when you say so, or you need to be able to do it yourself. I am not a programmer by heart and coding fulltime is definitely not my passion, however I can enjoy it. I believe one of the most important things for a startup is to move quickly. You can stay years in development but it’s from your users you learn. If my startup fails because we didn’t move quick enough it’s my fault. I am responsible to time the market and after launch translate the user’s needs into changes and features. Therefore I am down in the trenches at the moment, so that later when other developers continue my work, I can sit down with them and think of solutions not just Photoshop mock ups.
Update 1:
There has been a lot of responses in the comments but also on other sites from people wondering if this does not just produce flaky code. I have pasted here my response to Tom Holder (see his comment below in the comment section)
Thank you. Your comment summarizes the response I’ve had from a lot of developers and you are right. However there are a few details I should have but didn’t explain. For me it’s only temporary to get the foundation ready - the startup itself will have a full team. I am also doing this to give myself time to continue to talk to possible investors and decide where I want to locate.
Will I then throw away all the code and start over?
No and this is why: I have two user interfaces, one for the web and one as a browser extension, in any case they would have been developed by different people. They’re two completely independent parts. As last I have the backend, a complex database structure but is setup to only accept a few easy and standard queries. The rest of the queries are handled on database level.
Looking at one of these parts you can’t find out my completive advantage, looking at them all together you have my startup. I am incredibly aware of the risks I take with this and especially if I switch developers the problems that can (probably will) come up. I find it harder to read other people’s code then to start from scratch and make it myself. Therefore all the complicated parts occur on database level, the code I wrote myself. So no matter what happens there will always be someone in the team (myself) who can work on that, or explain it to others.
So beware because this strategy may work for my startup but the people who critize it are right, for many applications this can turn into a nightmare of spaghetti code.
Is lasting value diluted by blogs?
A few days ago Robert Scoble posted an entry to his blog talking about how tech blogging has become ruled by PR agencies, ‘troll commenters’, ‘shiny objects’ and one day conversations. I am not a tech blogger but his thoughts are becoming more and more applicable to the blogosphere as a whole.
What I found most interesting and which has been my reservation since day one of blogging is that it often seems you are writing for the moment and not for a lifetime. However when I often spend an hour in front of a blank screen thinking about what I am going to write, to then take the time to do so, I write to create something that lasts.
When you’re blogging you are doing something different then when you’re writing on a website or writing a book. There times you write for the moment but yet you keep it stored for a lifetime. It seems to be an unspoken blogger’s ethic. I am going to defy this yet I continueìng blogging and not turning to essay writing. I try to write most of my blog posts as mini-essays though; content that can be read now or in ten years. I also encourage everyone to keep the conversation alive. Good writing is timeless. Many of the discussion points I raise deserve to still be discussed in a week from now (also do this on other blogs). I differ from a lot of bloggers by no longer looking at visitor statistics but rather judge my posts on the comments they’ve received.
I also find myself having different behavior when I visit a website than when I visit a blog. If I go to a blog I read the latest post, sometimes two and then I leave. There could be a wealth of great content but because the nature of the site I don’t look further. If I go to a website (they still exist) I often find myself reading far more pages. To conclude, I think for those of us who live the fast paced internet life we have become trained to filter out content. Blogs just make it easy for us by all we have to do is look at the post date.
I am implementing a few changes. I have unpublished a lot of the posts that are no longer relevant and I’ll continue to do this with each “in-the-moment post”. Once I find a good plugin to move these posts to a separate section of the website I’ll do that. Over the next few weeks I hope to be able to redesign this blog so that it encourages every new visitor to go and read all posts.
The Amsterdam Techcrunch Meetup
Yesterday I was at the Amsterdam Techcrunch Meetup. I love networking and meeting new people so this was the place to be. I think I managed to speak to about 75% of the people and it wasn’t hard to notice some trends.
First off, mobile is hot! Up until I came to TC Amsterdam I hadn’t realized the sheer impact of mobile yet. It seemed like 3 out of the 4 people I spoke to have their focus on the mobile platform. What interested me is that almost none of the mobile startups I talked to had launched yet (eBuddy and Nimbuzz as the exceptions). I then asked the question, how long have you been developing? It wasn’t uncommon to hear 1~2 years. That raises the question; does launch quick with minimal features apply to mobile? I don’t think it does and these are my reasons:
- The barrier for installation of a mobile application is high.
- There is often no way for the companies to easily update their users to a new version.
- There is limited user feedback in comparison to web applications.
There was one sector within mobile where a lot of the attention was focused. Mobile Location Based Awareness Applications (that’s a mouth full). At one point I was standing with three different entrepreneurs each with their own company but all with the same pitch that started with that mouth full of words. Mike Butcher (Techcrunch UK/USA) had an interesting take on them and said they would eventually become “commodities”. On my train ride back from Amsterdam I thought about this. I think if there’s one thing we’ve noticed on the Internet is that there continue to be new ideas that differentiate themselves from the competition. So will location based software really be a commodity?
If you are Mike Butcher or Patrick de Laive( The Next Web) you have to endure some serious flattery. My last post mentioned the Techrunch Monopoly on Web 2.0 content. However it’s no longer a monopoly they have on just content, they seem to have it on Web 2.0 in itself. Their blogs are seen as the Holy Grail for your startup. I don’t deny that a positive post can be the boost for your startup but what happened to just pure word-of-mouth. If your application is really good, they will write about you.
When you say you are building a search engine there is one guarantee, you will always get the surprised look and the “OOh”. In the middle of the event Mike Butcher gave a little speech about how there is no Silicon Valley in Europe but that it is a mindset that covers it (I will write more about this soon), he then surprised everyone by bringing up startups for an on-the-spot pitch. After about four pitches of a minute each, he mentioned my name. I love public speaking so I took the chance and jumped on the bench (see the picture below). I gave a one minute speech in which I said that our results will be “10 times better then Google”. Obviously this did not go without the necessary response of laughter, surprise and speech bubbles above their heads with the text “Is he nuts?!?” - just wait and see.
I stayed till the end and at about 9ish after five hours of networking we went to the bar. A night full of great stories and discussions but at eleven o’clock there was need for some more excitement. We decided to show Mike Butcher the low points of Dutch Night Life. This says it all:
Great content stays hidden
The problem with the Internet is that the gems are often hidden. I love reading, not just books but especially blog posts. Why? I believe that we grow as people by listening to others. I don’t necessarily have to agree with someone else but listening to their opinion allows me to think about my own. Thinking about it, it’’s not reading I love –it’s thinking. Books and blog post are just mediums through which I can get a lot to think about in a short time. This might also explain my passion for discussions. When you are with someone who is on the same wavelength, you can bounce back ideas and opinions for hours. It’s one of my favourite things to do.
The internet is no longer a static place, it has become dynamic. First came the hyperlinks, then the search engines and now social media sites. I find myself spending hours discovering new content from the blogs I follow, YC Hacker News and Twitter. What’s a shame is that great content often never even arises above the surface; even with access to all these new content aggregators. With thousands of opinions being written in each niche, is it really a handful of sites that have one worth listening to?
In each niche there are a few authority sites that make up for most of the content we see (The Long Tail theory is applicable). Is it so that each blog with great content can slowly accumulate readers till it hits a critical mass and becomes an authority? Or is it so that at the start of a niche, when there are no authority sites yet, several arise and once they have a monopoly they stay there?
p.s. On a side note about reading, I went to Amazon today to order all the books I’ve been recommended to read from people who’s opinion I value. I’ve put them here below, I’ll share my opinion on each book once I’ve finished it. Hover over the images to see the book’s titles.
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The business philosophy that I always follow
“No matter if you fail at your business, if you’ve been honest and respectful along the way you can always come back to the people who worked with you. A long time ago when someone said this to me it became the start of me thinking about my business philosophy. I strongly believe that if you take the time to write down a set of rules that you will always follow it can save you from a lot of mistakes.
Most times when you enter into a project, a friendship or any other type of commitment and it fails, you look back and say to yourself “I’ve had the feeling from the start that this wouldn’t work out”. This gut feeling, your intuition, you chose to ignore at the time. Often because you saw a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or you couldn’t find a rational reason to justify your feeling. This has led to my number one rule in life and business; never ignore that gut feeling. It’s easier said than done because in today’s society we are taught to rationalize and make decisions based on facts not feelings. That’s why I think it’s good to have a list of rules you will never break because they force you to take the time and evaluate a commitment.
My second rule is based a lot upon my first. Most people judge their network based upon the number of people in it. I wrote earlier about how I try to build connections with everyone I have a conversation with. However I have a rule that throws people out of my network as quickly as they came in. I try to find people who have integrity and honesty, if they don’t, I don’t want to waste my time on them. It’s a drastic method and it often means you face difficult decisions.
One of the first meetings I had with an angel investor I left feeling uncomfortable about the person. It’s hard not to be tempted by the money but I chose to pass on any offer he would make me. When you sell a part of your company, no matter how small, you again engage in a commitment. I try to never make one with someone I don’t feel right about.
Over time more rules will definitely be added to my list and I will post about them. I would love to hear if you have any rules you chose to follow in life and/or business.
Where will life take this entrepreneur?
A few days ago I was asked if I wanted to work on a startup. I was interested and replied. I got emailed two ‘interview’ questions; how would you massively grow our user base and how would you monetize our service? They are the dilemmas of ever new internet service. I haven’t had a response yet from the CEO about my strategies. If I choose not to take the position or they don’t have a place for me, I’ll be sure to post my answers here. I make it a rule in life and business that I listen to my instincts and would always want to meet the people first.
I have a lot of options at the moment and I am going to choose the best one. Working for a startup would give me more experience, allow me to build up a reserve to fund my own company (I wouldn’t be dependent on VCs - I like this part) and expand my network. It would also mean though I would postpone my entry to university and I would have to wait with my own startup.
What I would love to do most is go to university and build my startup next to it. I am right now trying to get a meeting with Professor David Edelshain of Cass Business School, London (also a senior lecturer at NYU). I have met him on a brief occasion at the open day of Cass in London and was impressed with his openness, honesty and personality. Definitely someone I would want to learn from. I will continue emailing to see if I can get a hold of him; it seems right now I can’t get past the gatekeepers.
Right now I am actively pursuing all options; I wouldn’t be surprised if in the end I would end up doing something completely different. Isn’t this how it usually goes in life?
This post is a more personal one than usual. I would love to hear if you’re interested in more of these posts, my previous ones or if you enjoy a mix.
Creating Passionate People
Creating Passionate People is a title I took and changed from the blog Creating Passionate Users. It was a blog which offered an incredible amount of advice on how to treat your users. Unfortunately the writer stopped with it.
Not everyone though has an application where you are trying to convert your users into evangelists. What everyone does have, is thousands of people they connect with. Online these are brief connections, often short exchanges that get buried when you move on to the next thing. You get a reply on Twitter, you engage in a brief conversation and that’s it. You get a comment on your blog, you might comment back but then that’s it.
I’ve received so many tweets, comments and lengthy emails from people I’ve gotten in contact with through the internet in just the last few weeks. That a stranger is willing to write a 1000 word email to give me tips on my Blog and Social Media Experiment, Amazing! What’s more amazing is that this didn’t happen once; I’ve gotten dozens and dozens of great tips from numerous people, I even got a book!
I strongly believe that if you take an effort to take an interest in other people and build relationships you are Creating Passionate People. People who are passionate about the time you take to leave a comment on their blog or an email you sent them. I for one have become passionate about people who have done this for me in the last few weeks. I have written here how I am doing this.
I started to organize everyone I’ve had a meaningful conversation with in the last two weeks. It soon split itself up in four categories; Business, Twitter, Blogs, Emails. I then did the following steps:
I opened up Excel and I made a sheet for each of these categories. I then setup a series of headings: - Name - Email - Username (If Twitter) - Company - Location - Website - Biography (If Twitter / Blog) - Comments - Actions - Last Date of Contact
I went through my Twitter replies of the last two weeks and looked at which users I’ve had a conversation with. I browsed to their profile and added them in a row in Excel. I copied the standard information but more importantly; I read their blog. In the comments column I added a little note about what we talked about and my first impressions. In the last column I added the date we last had contact.
For business contacts I did a similar activity, instead of Twitter profiles, I had business cards 
and notes I’ve made. For people I have been emailing in the last two weeks it often took a few searches through Gmail. Last I went back to all the blogs I commented on. I went to all the websites of the people who commented on my blog. The most important part of this are the comments you write down. It’s amazing how quickly you can forget little details and impressions you’ve had.
Now it comes to part which I am advocating, the actions. I’ve gotten so much value from these brief connections, I decided to try and scrap the word brief. In the actions section I wrote down how I could continue the conversation. I went over each person individually, I read the comments I had gathered and decided if I still needed to send an email to thank them, write a comment on their blog, any interesting questions I wanted to ask but hadn’t yet etc…
I am going to keep my Excel sheet updated and I am going to see if I can continue the conversation with as many people as possible. I read an article a few weeks ago about how a person can only obtain a connection with a limited number of people, I believe the internet is changing this. If you make an effort to maintain them you can be connected to as many people as you like. As your conversation becomes larger you also soon find out with who you want to continue to talk.
What’s interesting is that I got the idea for this post from the title of a book a Twitterer had sent to me (one I’ve had an amazing conversation with over the last two weeks). It arrived this morning and the title is SuperNetworking. I skimmed through it and realized that if I would write this after I had the read the book my idea might have been coloured by it. If I pick up any interesting things that I would like to add to this post as result of reading the book, I will be sure to write about it.
The Entrepreneurial Coder is cool!
I was 13 when I started to build on my entrepreneurial urges by learning how to code. My motivation to learn was to code to build businesses. In 2003 this was frowned upon, a programmer wasn’t someone who loves business and reads The Economist in his free time. He was guy who lived for coding, loved Assembly and at least once a year strongly considered writing his own operating system.
Over the years though there has been a changing trend. With the rise of internet companies being run by hackers, there has been segregation in the world of programmers. Those who code because they love it, and those who love what they can do with it. The first we call the Hackers and the second I call the Entrepreneurial Coders. I think the rise of these guys has been one of the largest factors of success for companies like 37signals. There has been a redefinition of the way an IT company has to be run and this time by the people who have been in the trenches.
Now the fundamental problem of ICT companies is being overcome; communication. The breakdown of it between management and coders is infamous. At almost every programmers cubicle you can find a cartoon about it posted on the walls. For those who lived through the first bubble I am sure you remember the CEO’s that were put in charge by VC’s. Please share your horror stories.
Now only 4 years later when I talk to the hackers who helped me learn how to program, I am ‘cool’. The entrepreneurial coder is becoming more and more accepted and it will slowly change the world of IT. I would love to hear in the comments; how you experienced this change, if you agree or disagree and what you expect for the future.
I am Hyper Connected
I am an internet entrepreneur and that means I need to be on Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, Techmeme, HackerNews, Google Reader etc… When news comes in on any of these sites I am one of the first people in the world to know. There are several applications on my dual screen which keep my notified of any interesting tid-bit of information that is rising in the blogosphere. I judge the value of the sites and web apps I use on how quickly they bring news to me, every second counts.
Does this sound familiar? To most people on the internet it won’t but if you’ve come to my site you probably have done so through any of the websites I’ve mentioned. This means there is a high chance you are one of the “few” (let me make a guesstimate, hundred thousand) people online who’s hyper connected and interested in anything that is going on in the web 2.0 blogosphere.
For the last week I have been reflecting upon my productivity and I am going to ask you to do the same thing. I am finally coming to a point where I start to wonder if it matters that I find out about the new Wordpress version tomorrow and not today. I love reading news, especially interesting blog posts and articles that give me knowledge. However does it really matter if I read the summaries the day after or if I am the second person in the blogosphere to know something (this was the case when Twitter bought Summize).
When is the last time you sat down and worked on one specific project for 2 hours, without having any other source of information coming in? Yesterday the electricity had to be shutdown because they were fixing a power line. I realized that all off a sudden I was without internet. I immediately went to my PDA to link it to my laptop and get a 3G connection; fortunately my phones’ battery had run out the night before. I then sat in front of the screen wondering what to do for the next hour. I opened Word and started writing a blog post. This was a change on its own because I have been using online solutions for so long now. I had my full focus on this post and really got to spend some time on it, Is blogging dead? was the result. When I looked at my statistics it became clear that this had been my most successful blog post as of yet. People spent on average a good 4 minutes and 20 seconds on my site, a lot of people read it and the comments amounted to over 2000 words.
I made a realization in that hour my power was cut. I had been more focused and productive then I had been in a long time. Currently I have taken my laptop away from my desk, am sitting in my chair with nothing but Word open, writing this blog post. Try it out sometime!
Is blogging dead?
Jason Calacanis retired from blogging. Jason retired because next to wanting to spend more time with his family, he believes blogging is dead. A controversial statement which guarantees a lot of response from bloggers. When blogging first became popular it was about connecting with an audience, building a lasting connection and having a conversation through comments. Like I often end my blog posts asking you to post a comment. Jason is right when he is saying that these days blogs are often no longer about the integrity of the content but the number of backlinks it receives, the number of page views and how high it ranks in Google.
Is this wrong or not? I believe that depends on how you portrait yourself. There are many bloggers these days that voice controversial opinions not because it is how they feel but because the secret to blogging success is response. Like they say “The only bad publicity is no publicity”. Many bloggers have realized this and they play on it. Often to increase page views and so increase advertisement revenue but also just for the sheer enjoyment of 15 minutes of fame. As Jason says “Folks are so desperate to be heard–and we all want to be heard that’s why we blog–that the effort put into being heard has eclipsed the actual hearing.”
This blog centers around my life but also my social media experiment “Have you talked to Eiso Kant yet?”. Do I want to rank high and receive as many visitors as possible? In a way I do and in a way I don’t. It is in direct line with the goal of my blog to reach out to as many people as possible and have a real conversation with them. I love having a conversation and I blog to receive comments. From those comments I get ideas and the conversation that comes from it is so much more valuable than what I initially wrote. However I have made a conscious decision to not blog for search engines or backlinks. As you can see there are no advertisements on this blog and I also have no aspirations to become an A-list blogger.
Jason has solved this problem by starting an email list. My initial response was that Jason was trying to go for the million dollar success, email marketers like Mike Filsaime have had. I then read his first email. He convinced me that he was actually looking for a real conversation and connection with his readers. I replied to his email:
Dear Jason,
When I first read your announcement on your blog I wasn’t doubting if you were retiring from blogging but I was doubting your intentions. I thought “this guy who knows publishing inside and out, wants to do what guys like Mike Filsaime have done. That is make millions with promoting affiliates through newsletters.”. Your email convinced me that is not what you are doing and it has given me an immediate respect for what you have accomplished and what are you doing now. I’ve studied your Mahalo Social Media Campaign and I’ve respected the way you’ve used tools like Twitter to promote your company. What you are doing now gives an extra dimension to you as Jason, the person and not Jason, The Social Media Machine.
I look forward to reading your emails and having a real conversation (140 characters are overrated).
Best regards,
Eiso
I think I will be proven right or wrong depending on if he will reply to my email. If you are trying to build a valuable connection you cannot just have a one-way conversation.
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About
I am blogging with my real name at the top of each page. This means that I stand behind what I say. As an individual I am looking to engage in a conversation with you, the reader. What I hope for the future of this blog is that the comments become more valuable then the text I initially wrote.
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Email: contact@nulleiso-kant.com
