Untitled, Haden Nicholl, 2007

Patience is a funny thing. Preaching about its virtues when it comes to building an application is odd. As the main person behind a product, you have to be constantly moving and pushing things forward, if just a little, everyday. You need that primal drive to get your product to market. Internal maniacal motivation is what your company needs and is a defining characteristic of founders. That is exactly why patience is so important. If you are properly motivated, then patience can be one of the most difficult principle to address. Building a product, and more importantly a company, you can’t always be sprinting. The realities of the world will fight you and beat you down. But the acceptance, the zen understanding that you are pacing for a marathon allows all obstructions to be intelligently addressed.

Just fucking do it (#jfdi) is a mantra moving around startup circles. I couldn’t agree more with this principle. This is a great way to motivate yourself and your team. That said, when it comes time to finding your co-founders or an early hire, a lack of patience can ruin everything. Investors place high importance on founding teams. The core of your company’s future rests on these key factors. It is difficult finding qualified people, getting the right chemistry, and finally convincing them to wholeheartedly believe in your crazy idea. Yet the wrong move can weigh heavily on your ability to make difficult decisions and your resourcefulness.

Patience shouldn’t be a slippery slope. It shouldn’t be confused with laziness either. Think more in terms of an animal on the hunt. If the predator gets impatient, it looses its prey, who easily evades the poorly conceived attack. If the predator waits too long, then it can miss critical opportunities. There really isn’t a middle road either. The best hunters are patient and swift.

Frustrations can run high in startups. You want things done yesterday, but the fact that projects can take longer than expected or even never gain momentum can dampen the most earnest spirit. Over time a constant barrage of disappointments can sometimes lead to failure. Patience will allow perspective. Patience will keep you realistic and optimistic. Patience will prove that you do have what it takes to build a product and run a company. Embrace patience with intelligence and feel good about your future.

Untitled, Haden Nicholl, 2007

The Lean Startup, as evangelized by Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Dave Cancel et all, is a great way to go about building an Internet product.  We’ve embraced many of these practices at DoDont (@dodont) including the concept of building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Summarized, you build a product/application that has very few features, but embodies the heart of what you’re trying to accomplish.  Once the product is built, iterate as necessary based on feedback (from customers, metrics, etc).  By avoiding over-building a features-heavy application, two of the biggest hurdles in product development are minimized: time and money.  Just as important, the startup becomes laser focused on iterating only where necessary.

The problem DoDont is solving deals with recommendations, reviews, and opinions.  While more and more people are on social networks, most don’t want to share their opinions with the entire web universe.  Not all people are Yelpers or Power Twitterers.  What everyone does share is a desire to express passionate topics with friends.  By finishing a post that starts with either Do or Dont, we provide an outlet for primal opinions that bubble up from within.  DoDont’s binary data, Do or Dont, is easily quantifiable by users due to their offline relationships.  A user is able to quickly compute the weight of a specific DoDont based on their previous interactions.  Plainly speaking, if you know Jane’s opinions in food mimic your own, the crucial need for trust is already established.

Taking the core message of DoDont into account, we set out to build our own MVP.  We limited ourselves to the bare essentials: posting Dos and Donts, tags, Facebook Connect, and a few other minor details.  We kept it simple, which ironically is very difficult.  We have a long list of features that feel crucial to DoDont but we excluded them from our beta product.  Instead we are waiting for our application to tell us what feature to build next. The brilliance in this model relies on the fact that our next feature could either be something we anticipated or more powerfully a necessary feature we didn’t foresee.

We soft launched in mid December.  It became apparent that having every DoDont going to Facebook was problematic.  People were apprehensive about over-sharing and in turn spamming their Facebook friends.  Others wanted to build up their DoDont library and just send a few pearls of wisdom into the Facebook stream.  We reacted accordingly.  We decided to build a check box that allowed the user to choose whether each DoDont post would or wouldn’t go to Facebook.  A check box that said Publish to Facebook? No problem right?  Not entirely.

This is where being an ultra-bootstrapped company clashes with the quick iteration desired in lean startup theories.  Many companies that are bootstrapped are financially stable/well-off.  They have received founder, family, and/or friend funding which has allowed members of the startup to work on it full time.  Myself and my partner are both working other jobs and can’t devote all our time to DoDont.  To delineate between the haves and the have nots, I’m coining the term Ultra-Bootstrapped: companies comprised of founders/members who work other jobs and devote their free time to their startup.  At ultra-bootstrapped companies iterating can take frustratingly longer than at full-time startups.  In this particular instance, we had other fires to address.  We had server hiccups, blog delays, and pressing minor issues.  We prioritized and then ran smack into the holidays.  We had a large gap between the recognition of our issue and the actual update to DoDont.  But this post is not about questioning the Lean Startup model.  I believe the model is the best practice for ultra-bootstrappers.  The main takeaway is that ultra-bootstrapped startups can experience serious angst and longer delays trying to keep up with the necessary addition of features.  In a startup, when money is tight, motivations can waver.  It is important to grasp the fundamental realities of working two jobs (1 paid and 1 unpaid).  The ultra-bootstrapped startup’s resilience within this layered framework combined with the quality of their released MVP reflects strongly on the team’s character.  They have overcome.  They have pushed each other.  They made this in their spare time because they believe in what they are undertaking.

Some people think if you’re a real entrepreneur you need to quit your job and go for the gold before you have any funding or are profitable.  I do not agree with these types of generalizations, especially when it comes to money.  It is easy to to look at a few proven examples and make a rule, but it can be damaging to exclude those who do not fit within such arbitrary guidelines.  And people who make generalization such as these can change their minds.  Why?  There will always be exceptions to these types of rules.  And as exceptions go, it is usually the talented who embody these exceptions.  I can’t afford not to work.  I have a day job working part time, so I can devote more time to DoDont.  I work as an administrative assistant, a position that I’m over-qualified for, in order to concentrate on DoDont.  My family has made serious sacrifices so I can invest all free time into this startup.  I would love nothing more than to quit my day job and work on something I love, but economic realities preclude sophomoric optimism.  As a result, team DoDont works nights and weekends.  We try to improve as fast as humanly possible within our realities.  This is the situation we are in.  At some point our situation will change.  Until then we are scrappy, pushing hard to make DoDont better, growing little by little, unwavering in our desires to create something useful, meaningful and lasting.

Untitled, Haden Nicholl, 2007

This is part of a short series I’m putting together about building your own web application/product.  This is for the average person who gets an idea, and then wants/needs to act on it.   Mark Suster has an great series on his blog about what he looks for, from a VC’s perspective, in an entrepreneur.  I encourage you to read all of it.  But this is a more practical take.  These posts will concentrate on the process of going from idea to live product, from the perspective of a non-techie.  The four categories I’m currently centering on are education, experimentation, team building and patience.  These will be written over time and I’m allowing myself the right to change them at will.  (I’ve already changed waiting to patience.)

So once an idea erupts from within,  either in your dreams or while conscious, how does one go about building it?  I’ve grown up on some form or another of the Internet.  Back in the day my family went from GEnie, to Prodigy, to AOL, and finally to the browser thanks to Netscape, opening us to a world with Yahoo and everything else.  I would say for most people with an idea, user interface intuition is already present.  You know roughly how you want your application to look and function.  But technical understanding (nuts and bolts) is usually lacking.  Before I started DoDont I didn’t know the difference between API or Ajax.  Many people still don’t know the difference, which is fine, but in this field you have to be able to at least dip your toe in the deep pool of technological jargon if you are at all serious.  So I began a self-taught online course primarily utilizing two separate applications.  The first was Google’s Reader and the second was Twitter.

Utilizing RSS feeds, Reader pulls in content from web pages and blogs, so you don’t have to go to multiple sites to see content you deem important.  (See the icon next to “Subscribe To Our Blog”?  That icon is your key to any site having a feed option.) So I started by joining a core set of tech blogs.  Then I started aggressively following links the tech blogs mentioned, and I followed that new blog as well.  This gave me a massive amount of tech information to analyze, cross reference, and digest.  As a result Reader has become my morning paper.  I read or skim well over a hundred articles almost everyday.

Reader has folders and tags.  I have three main folders: Art, Architecture (which is also design) and Tech (which I call My Face).  The folders contain the blogs I follow.  The tags are how I categorize the blog articles I find useful.  If I find something interesting I tag it, and then that tag forms its own tag ‘folder’.  As my information gathering progressed, I quickly realized that I was over zealous and oversubscribed.  I was reading way too many blogs and websites.  Many were redundant.  Some were catty and abhorrently subjective.  I had to widdle it all down.  The cutting actually became rather cathartic and enlightening.  I realized that I’m in control.  If someone is writing nonsense…they get cut.  If I find a new blog that I like, I add it.  It raises the bar for quality.  To this day I am always playing with my feed preferences.  This isn’t TV or even email.  Here you’re in charge of what you see.  It feels perfect.

My Twitter entrance was a bit slower.  When I started reading tech blogs, Twitter was written about to death.  Still I wasn’t able to find value until I found @vctips.  This was before lists.  @vctips follows a handful of VCs who are active in the tech world.  So I followed all of them, and from there I curated who I followed more or less identically to my Reader curation. Some people claim  Twitter killed RSS, which powers Reader.  I find this silly.  I read Twitter on my phone and do Reader on my desktop.  When a person I follow links to a blog I read, I immediately go back to the Twitter stream.  I will read that later.  That is not what Twitter is about for for me.  Twitter is a place where the people I follow give me new information.

I learned about APIs and Ajax.  The biggest thing I learned had to do with the tech community.  I was and still am blow away by the resources available to any entrepreneur, enthusiasts, and industry insider.  Regardless of motivation, people in the tech industry are willing to educate each other.  This includes open-source, blogging, lecturing, and putting everything of value on the web.  Want to know what was said at that conference that was $500?  Well, save some money, wait a bit, and it’s up on the web.   This openness is a smack in the face to my previous field, fine art, which is incestuous and highly secretive.  I’d like to write more about the culture of continuing education present in the tech industry, but that is another blog post in and of itself.  Bottom line is there are a wide variety of resources available.  You just need to engage.

My final point is both obvious and difficult; asking questions when you don’t know something.  This is one of the most important skills out there.  But the fact is, asking a question about something an entire room knows intimately can make you feel, well…stupid.  And you can’t always pull out your phone and look up something if you’re in the middle of a long conversation.  So ask.  Just ask.  A few years ago I was in job training for a position in the mental health field that involved working with troubled teens.  The word cathartic came up.  My new colleagues were psychology majors, recent masters in social work graduates, and career mental health professionals.  I was new to the field.  Everyone kept mentioning cathartic, but I couldn’t contextualize it.  This was week one of a new job.  I didn’t know anybody and my learning curve was definitely steep. We were all sitting in a circle, and cathartic this and cathartic that.  No one was able to have a conversation without saying that word.  I couldn’t take it.  I had to ask.  I knew everyone else probably knew the word, but I also knew I wouldn’t know what was going on in the conversation if I didn’t speak up soon.  Did I look stupid?  I probably felt more stupid than I actually looked.  But once that kernel of information was transferred I was better able to  participate, not just in that conversation, but in overarching concepts related to the mental health field.  In the tech field with a mountain of tech specific terms, you can’t hesitate.  Just ask.  Otherwise you’ll be behind, uninformed, and less effective.  Remember, this is part of your education.  As with everything, the more you put in the more you’ll get out.

After a few months of this, I had a basic understanding of the tech world.  After two years, I’ve become much more confident.  Once a level of comprehension is achieved your mind can wander towards meditative thinking, where solutions lie dormant.  If your application is trying to solve a problem in a specific industry, you have to sponge up every piece of information related to that industry.  Only then can you think outside the box and find unseen answers.  Education is magnetic because it pulls you to new discoveries.

Thanks for reading,

-brent