Going for the unreachable

I am writing this while listening to Pachebel’s Canon in D Major; a composition which with its tranquility gives a great contrast against the streams of content flowing by these days. If you listen to it while reading my post it might give a better insight to me as a person.

As you might have read in my last post I’ve been working on my startup Tyba for the last few months and for the last 3 weeks it’s been in a private alpha. Once you get users it becomes real and you thrive even more to get to that point where you want to be. For me that’s not profitability but having built a service which is truly useful to people. Behind the simple aspect of rating and tagging links I am working towards a much bigger goal. My vision is to create a service where the links recommended to you when you search come from sources you’ve chosen to trust. It’s an ambitious goal and it involves planting a whole forest of trees. Each tree is yet another idea that grows towards the perfect search results.

Each conversation I have and each day that passes I have new ideas and improvements to the old ones. When I look at all the trees I want to plant and sense the exponential growth of new ideas, it’s intimidating. I am a one-man startup on a budget which allows me to only outsource a few parts however that’s a decision I consciously made. It’s easier to get funding and let others do the planting but I always had the gut feeling that if I wanted to set this up right I needed to do it myself. I don’t discard the value of a team and funding but my intuition tells me that for now it’s best to have the flexiblity to change course in a heartbeat.

So what is this post really about? It’s about taking on a project which in your perspective is too large. It’s about going for a goal which seems so far and unreachable that you’re almost discouraged to start. One of the great lessons I’ve learned from Tyba so far is that the only thing that could hold it back (and occasionally has for moments) is the intimidation of the journey ahead, not the journey itself.

A journey is traveled one step at a time and this is what you can never forget; I often find that I have to remind myself of this. With Tyba since the start of the idea the tag line has been “Your judgement above the algorithm”. This implies that I want to create search results more relevant then algorithmic search like Google is doing. I want to personalize each and everyone’s search results; we’re all different people who apply different value to different sources, so why should we all be presented with the same results? Is it an impossible goal to be better at something then a company which holds thousands of the most brilliant minds in the world… I often feel it is. However it’s not something I am yet willing to accept. Admitting failure before even trying is not who I am and it’s not who I’ll ever be.

With Tyba I am walking babysteps everyday and having an incredible learning experience. I am going towards something and I am doing it by knowing that the only way to get there is to not be afraid to fail.

December 16, 2008 | Filed Under Mini Essays 

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