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

Hi All,

Welcome to the DoDont blog.

What’s our thinking behind DoDont? We want to be the place where you alert your friends to useful information and, in turn, where you will be able to find useful information from your friends whenever you need it.

Why Do and Dont? This way all the clutter in between is ignored; you really like something or you really don’t like something. We’ve all had the experience where we just ate at a terrible restaurant or finished a great book, and we immediate want to tell our friends about it. So maybe you go to Facebook and write a status message, but then it’s gone, lost in the avalanche of Facebook noise.  That is the essence of why DoDont is valuable.  DoDont is a site where you and your friends opinions, recommendations, and reviews can be expressed, stored, and easily found whenever you need it.

As described in the About Page, DoDont was the result of a dream I had almost two years ago. But dreams are one thing and reality is another. In order to get from dream to reality there was a lot of education, experimentation, team building and waiting.

I’m going to do a blog post on each of these topics (maybe in order, maybe not), because I feel the process from idea to beta product is important to discuss. You may look at DoDont today and say, why doesn’t it have this and this and this? My short answer is, “It will.” But the longer answer involves the factors above in conjunction with the Lean Startup and Minimum Viable Product (MVP) theories evangelized by Eric Ries and a slew of others. A basic understanding involves  stripping your grand idea down to a MVP, and then iterating to find out what people really want, or more so, what works best. Flickr was initially an online game before it became a photo sharing site and You Tube was a dating site. We’ve released a pared down version of DoDont to find our core components. But releasing such a minimal product is not easy. It is said that  if you’re not embarrassed by your first release, you’ve released too late. Our goal is to listen to our customers (here), analyze our metrics, and then improve DoDont accordingly.

Thanks For Reading,

brent