A traditional Spanish village instead of Silicon Valley and the launch of a startup

It’s been almost 3 months since my last blog post, a little over two months since my last tweet and no I am still alive. For those who’ve known me or gotten to know me through my writing or tweets quickly realized I was very hyper-connected. I would send dozens of tweets each day and engage in a lot of conversations. So what happened? I moved to a tiny village in the south of Spain where I was the first on my street (without a street name) to get a phone line and hence DSL. Which surprisingly is faster than the DSL I had back in the Netherlands. So what led me to go offline besides the occasional village power cut.

Before I moved I wasn’t planning on staying longer than a month and wanted to start the application for a visa to the US more specifically; Silicon Valley. So what made me trade in the world’s largest start-up hub for a tiny traditional Spanish village. Once I started living here it was as if I had entered a completely different world. It started with waking up and having the skies being blue and the sun shining; if you’ve lived in Holland, UK or similar places where skies are mostly grey, it’s like you emerge out of dark basement you’ve spent most of your life in. The village I live in is built upon a mountain side and is known as a traditional Pueblo Blanco, a village where all the houses are white. What made me stay though isn’t the weather because California might even be sunnier, neither is it the economic crisis luring over the US.

It was the people here that made me stay. A few days after I arrived I came walking down the street and the neighbours were having a family barbecue; without hesitation we were invited and dragged into join. Even with my limited Spanish I had one of the best nights of my life because you could just feel that these people were giving from their hearts. At least 3 times a week Francisco walks by and brings with him fruits and vegetables. He’s not the only one; vinegar, avocado’s, paprika’s, mandarins, so many people here are giving and what makes the difference with Holland and so many places I’ve been to in the world; people here give without even having the thought of expecting anything back. To some it might be a small example but it shows the nature of the people here. A nature you’re lucky to find in a handful of best friends anywhere else in the world.

Throughout my life, especially as I grew older I always said I put no value into material items. I said I did all my actions for myself and not for recognition. I said I wasn’t selfish. I believed all these things until I moved here and started realizing how we all say how we hold to these moral values but they have become words without meaning. Living here allowed me to put meaning back into those words, reflect upon the life I was living and the things I wanted to change. While being here I started reading some of the books recommend to me by commenter’s on this blog amongst which Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the within 6 days finished and now my all time favourite book; The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. A lot of pieces of the puzzle started coming together. It’s hard to put it all into words but to try… I feel like I’ve become a better person then before…less selfish…less materialistic…more myself. And don’t worry, I am still the technology loving self I always was and I haven’t become a hippie either.

About a month ago my entrepreneurial urges started itching again and what had once been a business plan pitched to VC’s and Angels I now made the decision to bootstrap it instead; to write as much code as I could myself, instead of outsourcing it. The purpose of my startup started changing, instead of building the features and design as I would like it. I built something bare bones. A web application which shares a lot in common with many others out there but it has one big difference. It’s going to transform into what users want. Everyone who looks at it sees a different use or direction it could into. I want to engage you into voicing your opinion and together with the other users vote and together built something we will love. I remember Loic le Meur writing about the Community CEO and thinking that would be amazing to be, but let me first build my vision. Instead I am going to try to engage as many people as possible to build our vision. True this is going to be difficult at times, you can never please everyone and you’re asking a lot from a community whose compensation is not monetary. However I believe that there are enough people out there who want to be involved; your opinion matters.

The startup is Tyba and it’s a simple concept: You download a Firefox extension which allows you to rate web pages and append tags (a feature I like is that when you come from Google or Yahoo the search term is automatically sent with your rating). The rating and tagging is simple, done by clicking stars or using keyboard shortcuts. Then when you feel like it you can login in to the web interface and organize the links you’ve rated into groups. These groups become public and anyone can view them. The other Tyba users can follow your groups and you in turn can also follow other people’s groups. When you follow a group you can do two things, see when new links are added to them and you can search through them. It’s a bit like building your own search engine with the links you rate and the groups other people make. Right now all this functionality is there in its most basic form.

Now all I need is users; daring and innovative people who aren’t scared of a private alpha with its bugs and downtime for upgrades, who are willing to give feedback and help decide upon the direction of Tyba. If you this sounds like you, go to Tyba.com and request an invite. I am sending the first 100 invites out tonight.

November 26, 2008 | Filed Under For the Moment, Mini Essays, Startup Updates | Comments 

Let the right motivations drive you

I had a meeting today with another startup founder. We also met last week the day after Wikia launched Evolution; which came very close to what I’ve been working on in these last few months (see this post). I discussed a partnership and how our startups would complement each other. What it came down to is that we would open up our databases to one another and share our technology. I was thinking about doing this with a series of partners. Create a network where if one startup was successful it would lift the others along. The days I thought about it, it seemed like a great idea.

In our conversation he said that it looked like now Wikia Evolution has launched I was going for a defensive strategy. Straight away I thought “Let me listen carefully, because I have the feeling he’s right.” The more I started thinking about it, the more I realized that my “great idea” had the wrong motives.  There was a valuable lesson I needed to learn from this: Looking at a strategy objectively it might be the best one but to truly judge it, you have to look at your underlying motives.

If you’re the one creating your startups strategy it’s important to let the right motivations drive you not the wrong ones. Plus! Never stop asking for feedback.

So what’s next?

A full blown offensive strategy that I will write about soon.

A short startup update:

It looks like the Firefox extension we’re developing gets new bugs with each feature we add. However we’re working hard to get rid of all of them so I can present the whole idea plus a private alpha version within the timespan of a few weeks. Anyone who is interested in participating in the private alpha can email me (the address is in the side column) or send me a message with your email address on Twitter.

August 12, 2008 | Filed Under Mini Essays, Startup Updates | Comments 

Another startup launches our idea

Have you ever found yourself working on a project or creating a business and at the time it’s going full throttle.. a competitor launches your idea. A competitor which has a 90% similar idea and has already established its self in the market. That happened to me today. They say great ideas are born at the same time all over the world. That’s probably true but is it those who are quickest to execute that take the market? We’ll see!

So what’s next?

First of all, there is no way I am going to give up on building this startup. It’s perseverance and flexibility that are factors of success, I am going to utilize them both. With a few small changes and some extra weeks in development I am going to add a new feature that tops the competition. I am going to have to reevaluate my strategy and put even more pressure behind going into private alpha.

Am I upset? Am I frustrated? Neither. In fact, I am loving it! Competition is just another driving force.

p.s. The fact that a relatively big competitor has just launched this technology can only be a verification that I am on the right track. And I’ve got some tricks (features) up my sleeve, they’ve never even thought about - I hope ;-).

Addition: I have received a lot of feedback on Twitter asking to reveal more details. I am waiting with this till we reach private alpha (which is most likely in a few weeks). Thank you for your patience.

Update: I’ve learned a great deal from a discussion based upon this post over at YC Hacker News, I encourage you to read it.

August 6, 2008 | Filed Under Startup Updates | Comments 

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.

July 26, 2008 | Filed Under Mini Essays, Startup Updates | Comments 

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.

July 19, 2008 | Filed Under Mini Essays, Startup Updates | Comments