I was watching the remastered versions of the old 1960s Star Trek TV show the other day, and while the new graphics were great, I couldn't help but think how god-awful the instruments and displays were, compared what we are using today.
But then -- being the contrarian I am -- I thought: Doesn't this actually make a bit of sense?
I've spent the last ten years working on creating my own startup. I've read dozens of books, hung out with other people who wanted a startup online, joined clubs and associations, met with "experts" , etc. More to the point, I've actually built 5 startup ideas and tried them out.
I'm finally reaching the point where I'm starting to get traction -- I'm not Ramen-profitable, but some things are starting to "click" and I'm making enough money each month to cover server and domain expenses plus beer money. That's not Bill Gates-rich, but it sure beats a stick in the eye.
Now that I'm beginning to get traction, I'm also beginning to feel like I may never make it.
Why? Because there's a huge obstacle that I am not sure I can overcome on my own.
Yesterday I wrote an article about how the startup culture and business can reach a point of diminishing returns -- about how in many businesses gatekeepers adopt policies best suited to them and not the market, about how people honestly trying to help may not know their own selection bias, and about how there is a subtle motivator in the startup world to be "about" startups, without actually doing anything.
Today I thought I would quantify that a bit, using you guys as guinea pigs.
The goal? To find how how much money there could be in simply talking about startups, ie, what is one of the things in the industry causing dysfunction.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket" - attributed to Eric Hoffer.
I'm a startup junkie -- I love everything about how people can form together into small teams and change the world. To me it's the great untold story of the 20th and 21st century.
I also love writing. I have been a writer in some fashion or another for over 20 years, and loving every minute of it.
When I first started being serious about writing, I bought a copy of "Writer's Market", which would tell you where you could sell your writing. I subscribed to magazines like "The Writer" which educated me on all things a professional writer does and is. I attended conferences about being a writer. I sought out advice on how to submit, how to query, what to do or say and what not to do or say.
And a funny thing happened.
First, I became slightly successful. I wrote for local newspapers, regional magazines. Heck, I even did an interview of Clive Barker for High Society magazine. I realized that as much as I loved writing, it was a long haul and being rich probably wasn't in the cards.
Second I realized that I was consuming a vast amount of total crap in all the literature about writing. Take stories about what editors want. Some editor would write 500 words about what he wanted -- short cover letters, strong hook, yadda yadda. But what did he really want? He wanted a story to sell magazines. The story he was writing all kind of boiled down to "Don't pester me kid. I get a hundred like you every day, so write short letters, don't call, use an agent, do any freaking thing except for pestering me. I don't have time to sort through all of this junk I get"
Then there were the people who tried to sell me on making a living writing children's books. Or how-to books. But only if you paid them $99.95 for the full course. The deal here was that gee, there's no way all these folks are successful children's writers -- so where is the real action? The real action is selling courses on how to be a writer, not actually being one.
Lately, however, as much as I love startups, I've been seeing the same thing in the startup culture. As well-meaning as most people are, it's more of a racket than a help.
Everyone comes up with this cockapoo about startups. It's not about being smart. It's about being around long enough - Marty Pinchinson, co-founder of Sherwood Partners
Ever have one of those moments when you see some new product being advertised and think: Hey! They stole my idea!
Lots of folks think up stuff in a bar talking to a mate one night, only to have the idea float off. Not many actually get out and work on products. I've been lucky because my job -- technology strategy consulting -- has constantly let me look at big and small businesses and how they develop and deliver products to market. So I've seen lots of other people develop products, spend lots of money, and try to get traction. Sometimes these products looked useful. Many times they did not. Some made money. Others didn't.
Many, many times when I was in my 20s or 30s I would be approached by people who had a great idea and were looking to team up for a startup. Being a hotshot programmer and architect, I never took the bait. Why should I? Consulting rates were great, most startups fail, and if I could pick winning startup ideas I'd be playing the stock market and not slinging code and training project teams.
But then I started seeing people I knew retire on money they'd made on startups, and my opinion started changing.
I became a startup junkie.
That was about ten years ago, and since then I've had the feeling of "That's my idea!" only about half a dozen times, but each time they were products worth hundreds of millions or billions dollars -- and each time they were products that I spent real time and money developing only to run out of money before they really had a chance to take off. Hey, maybe I'm able to spot these things after all.
Buy my Jeep and let's find out.
I'm building a new startup -- it allows people to collect and share quotes from books and web articles. As you add each quote, you tag it. When people vote up or down your quote (or comment on it), the system trains itself to learn which tags each user likes. I may like quotes from American History. You may never want to see any quotes about politics. Over time, the system learns this and acts accordingly. That way you can have a broad range of subjects with a large user base and the app still has the feel of a private forum.
A while back, Paul Graham wrote a language called Arc. After he wrote it, he challenged other languages to create a simple set of web pages in as few tokens as possible. In Paul's philosophy, the fewer tokens a language has (or needs) the more robust it is. Therefore the more likely it is to last a hundred years
I've been thinking about Paul's assertion for over a year now. I've programmed in lots of languages -- to me they're just tools. Old friends. I can't say I am crazy about one language or another, no matter how many tokens it has.
As I and others pointed out, you can make a computer language do almost anything in as few tokens as you like as long as you've set up a DSL (Domain-Specific Language) for the problem domain.
Since I'm building my product almost from scratch, I thought I would take you through a quick tour of how you end up with powerful "languages" that have maximum expressiveness and minimum tokens, no matter what tools you are using. For this discussion, we'll stick to a (mostly) .NET stack, with some major modifications, but the stack is really not important.
People often ask me if I eat my own cooking. I thought this picture should prove that once and for all.
First, from the size of me you can obviously tell I've been eating somebody's cooking. Secondly, as you can see, pair programming is alive and well here. My partner and I work long hours making sure the code is exactly right.
I don't want to get into any kind of personality dispute, but my partner has a tendency to lose interest and fall on the floor quite a bit. He's obviously the brains of the operation -- the strong silent type. I figure after all these years of being both a high-level consultant and a code monkey, it was time to join forces with my logical ally, sock monkey.
And you can't beat the swank evening work area we have -- couch, TV, music, munchies, and pillows. Sock monkey doesn't talk a lot, but I can tell from the way he looks that he is really liking our coding crib.
I was talking to my good friend Jacques the other day and he asked a set of penetrating questions which all boiled down to -- do your realize that you're probably going to fail? Jacques and I have been studying and reading about startups for a long time and (I think) are getting pretty good at separating the BS from the real. Plus he's been helping me with my current effort, so he has a pretty good idea of what I'm up to.
So for all those entrepreneurs out there who are reading the self-help startup books and are excited about your new application, it's wake-up time.
You will fail.
I thought somebody should tell you that, because we don't talk about it enough. Odds are, you will fail. That's doesn't mean there's anything wrong with your team, your idea, your market, or any of that. Stats show that most teams -- even teams that are rated highly in all success criteria -- do not meet the expectations of founders and investors. In fact, most kind of fizzle out after a while. This is not my opinion, it's just stats.
This is why investing in startups looks so comically tragic from the outside: nobody really knows what will work or not, so at the end of the day it's intuition and gut feelings. Of course it's funny: at an early stage investors are writing checks for real money based on less information than the average horse better has. They just try to dress it up more.
But whatever you do, however, keep trying! The world needs you. Entrepreneurs in startups are going to change the future of mankind, and they're going to do it over the next decade or two. At this time in our history, being an inventor and innovator is the highest calling anybody can have in life.
Just be honest with yourself about the odds. And when you do fail, whatever you do, don't go on the internet and write a long tirade about how everybody else is to blame. Sure, it will feel that way. Worse than people not giving you an honest shot (which sucks if you are used to being a hyper-achiever) is watching other folks take your ideas and get funding and run with them. That kind of pain can last a long time, I know.
The best way to look at it? It's a numbers game, just like sales. Books and positive reinforcement and all of that exist to keep you motivated and playing the numbers. So try to fail quickly. Try to pivot from your original idea to something else. If you can fail at 40 different startup ideas in your life, you're going to kick-ass at one of them. Learn to laugh at yourself and others -- all while you're working as hard and as smart as you can.
Just thought I'd say that. I think a lot of times it's easy to lose track of reality in this business.
As for me and my startup? I'm going to keep plugging away. I'm in startups because I want to make the world a better place, I want to help people, and I want to create, not just consume. When I die I don't won't to look back on all the times I quit, I want to look back on all the times I tried. Sure, quitting is logical at some point. But lots of times I've quit before I even really gave things a chance, and I don't want to do that any more. I try because trying is good, noble, and honest. I'd trade a life full of trying as hard as I could any day for a life where I tried half-assed and hit it big on startup #1 and then never created another good thing for mankind. In fact, most guys I've seen that sold out successfully on a startup lost track of who they were, drifting from one half-assed investment to another, never able to devote themselves to any one thing again. After all, why pour yourself into anything? You might fail!
But I'm no fool, either. Life (and the market) is not a meritocracy, and simply because I work hard and am a good person doesn't mean that anything good is going to happen. I'm not doing a startup to cash out in five years. I'm doing a startup because that's who I am. You try hard, life kicks you in the ass, you learn more, and then you try hard again.
Just try not to do things you'll regret while doing it.
I've been busy working on my startup for the last month, and as an agile-big-corp guy, many of you are probably wondering: how am I doing in the micro-team startup field?
Very well, actually.
Here's a brain dump of things I've learned over the last month. As always, take what you can use and leave the rest:
Got a paycheck stub? Then consider yourself lucky, or at least some folks say. With that little piece of paper you can purchase cars, get loans for unforeseen expenses, apply for jobs -- even play paycheck poker.
I was thinking about this magical piece of paper today as I worked on my start-up. It's a beautiful day here today -- temps in the mid 60s (15C), low humidity, clear blue skies, and gorgeous autumn views. It's Saturday. All my "normal" friends are out shopping, spending time with their family, hiking, or otherwise enjoying the day.
I'm up at my office, with the flu -- a fever, sore throat, and stomach ache -- banging away at a hunk of code that, if I'm lucky, might one day show somebody sometime that somehow, someway, I have an idea that's worth pursuing. If I'm really lucky, it might actually provide some value to some users somewhere. But most of the time getting to profitably isn't as simple as hacking out some code; it's a multi-step process, of which an piece of code is only a very small and replaceable part. So it's extremely unlikely that one piece of code I write today is going to change the world. It's as absurd as working at a pig farm hoping to breed flying pigs.
I'm amazed at the number of businesses, small and large, that have lost their hunger.
Over the last two months I have been looking for a SCUBA instructor. We're headed to the Great Barrier Reef. I've always heard that you should dive it if at all possible.
I found a local shop about six weeks ago and started a conversation with the owner. I say conversation only in a loose term -- although he had a yellow pages entry, was on the web, had a store, and sold lots of equipment, he was rarely around. It took days for him to respond to my voicemails, and getting the paperwork and everything else settled took weeks. By the time we were ready to train, our instructor had an aunt die and was unable to help us. Seeing as how there was no backup instructor, and the owner was away from the shop (again) we simply ran out of time. So sad. Too bad.
I'm not writing this to quibble with one shop owner. As part of this same trip I've had the opportunity to contact little hotels and shops all around Australia and New Zealand. Most of them were very cordial. Some were downright friendly.
But others weren't so much.
How many times have you visited a blog or read an article and wanted to reply or comment but didn't because of these issues:
How about this idea as a response to these problems?
/* BEGIN GRUMPY RANT */
I blog for myself, mostly. I'd like something for the great-great grandkids to read about me, and I enjoy putting my thoughts on paper. If you like any of this, I'm happy.
My latest reading mission has been on web marketing. I want to find out why and how some people start with Google and end up buying something. We all do it, yet I really don't have a clue as to how it happens!
After years of creating some pretty good programs, the light finally dawned on me that promotion and marketing is as much, or actually much more of an important skill than just slinging code. Being a code monkey is fine, but it's more fun to build a code zoo. I'm finding something similar in web marketing.
Not that everybody else knows. Some folks seem determined to ignore reality.
Many, many times somebody at Google says something like, "Well, the best way to get people to visit your site is just to have good content."
That's total horse-hockey, and Google knows it. Let's get real.
I was finishing up work on one of my microsites (shameless plug: Neuropathy is a serious condition and you should be aware of it) when I came to the decision about badges.
Badges are those little graphics you see on some web pages that assure the reader how safe the page is. "Scanned for viruses" or "Member of the BBB" or "HackerSafe" or "Endorsed by Dr. Phil"
We've all seen them. I looked into how to get some of these. Some are very expensive! Some just require you to fill out an online form. One page had a bunch of the buttons and said to complete the application to receive one. Only there wasn't an application anywhere. So I just lifted one of the images.
One guy was making his own badges. "Approved by Chuck!" it proudly said, with a picture of Chuck (I presume) in the middle of an ornate circle.
So from a web owner standpoint, these badges are valued all over the place, and what do they really say? That you had money to pay somebody? Do the badges actually serve a purpose?
I recently had a team that was under-performing by any standards. They were all nice people: smart, capable, positive attitudes, competent in their work. But they just weren't producing that much.
So management told them: produce or die. Basically either finish up your work in the next sprint or we'll just throw away the entire project and start over with a different team.
It was amazing. People started working harder, using and creating effective information radiators. The team's stand-ups became laser-focused on the work. Everybody was looking for obstacles and getting them out of the way before they could affect progress. The team innovated several new ways of getting things done faster. They had a six-fold increase in productivity.
So what drives innovation, anyway? What makes one team create the next Google and the next team struggle to create a simple report?
Last year I wrote an online agile project management system for a large corporation. I don't think you understand what's involved with a problem until you write the code for it and work with the users.
So in the spirit of sharing, I'd like to provide you with my list of features an online scrum tool would need to have.
I've been exploring an idea for the last several weeks: creating small websites (microsites) geared for little areas of the internet that are underserved.
Actually it's a little more complicated than that (isn't everything!). The trick is to find a three-way balance: things that people search for that advertisers pay for that there isn't a huge amount of information out there already.
And of course there are no black-and-white answers. Ideally you'd find a topic that a million people were searching for daily, that advertisers were paying million dollars a lead, and that no other sites existed on the internet.
Ideally I would have my own lunar base and be declared emperor of the solar system. Unfortunately, we live in a world where we don't have universal perfection, simply local optimization.
My new microsite Neuropathy.me is about seven pages of the common things people search for when looking up neuropathy. (Neuropathy is a condition that affects the nervous system, causing tingling or numbness. If you've ever had a foot fall asleep, you get the general idea)
I've made about 40 pages in all for this general area, all spread out among various related domains. I will probably mention them here over the weekend as they come up just to get some link juice. I'll be sure to put them in the title, so you can skip them if you want.
Lots of questions remain, and this is just an experiment to try something and see if it works. What's the smallest number of pages that makes a useful microsite to a user? Is it better to split your information up into 3 or 4 domains? Or have everything in one domain? What types of advertising would work best for such a system? How long does it take to get working?
So far, this is a lot of hard work! I wouldn't recommend it for people looking to get rich quickly. It's more for patient people who want to make a little money slowly. Search Engine Optimization is just a smoldering pile of dirt -- search engines control this huge amount of cash flow represented by eyeballs. So games are set up between people wanting to rank highly on search engines with minimal effort and the engine-makers, who don't want "bad" sites ranking highly. What's bad? I guess it's like pornography: you know it when you see it. So millions of folks are trying to optimize a system that is actively adapting to not be optimized. It's not exactly a friendly situation to get into.
But still, I'm fascinated. As part of learning all of this, I'm learning why some things are popular on the web and some things aren't, and (maybe) how to make use of that. If nothing else, it's a skill I can take with me to my next adventure.
After all, once you build something -- once you complete version 1 of you killer internet app, if nobody knows about it, what difference have you made? I read somewhere that initial application development is only about a tenth of the total effort needed to get people buying your product. Yet many times we hackers treat the coding part as the important part. Lots of really complicated coding never amounted to anything, and lots of really simple coding made millions. The difference is all about finding a need, filling it, and getting the word out. Kind of those same three areas I mentioned above, huh?
So if you get a chance, take a look at the site! Feedback is greatly appreciated. What would you want, as a reader, that isn't on there? What's wrong with the business model I've described?
I haven't been blogging much lately, mostly because I've been reading up on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web analytics. As part of that, I've also been in discussions with an acquaintance from HackerNews about forming a startup.
The startup is basically the simplest thing imaginable. Make a web site that people visit. Provide them with things that they would like to purchase. Make a commission on sales.
Since this is the thing that all startups have to do, I figure this is a nice back-to-basics exercise. Solve the general problem.
But wow! This is like saying making a million dollars is easy because you simply need every family in the United States to give you a penny. It sounds easy, but it's really, really difficult.
I hate advertising. I mean I really hate advertising. I'll go out of my way to avoid ads on TV shows, movies, and the web. If I want something, I'll do the research and go out and buy it. I'm already buying way too much junk I don't need, and I have a weakness for ads. So I don't "do" ads.
Which means that when I pick up a new brand there had to be some kind of sneaky marketing at work.
It started, innocently enough, with my 12-year-old son. We were watching a uniquely manly movie --- one of the early James Bond flicks with Sean Connery -- when we got to a bedroom scene.
I hate watching bedroom scenes with my kids around this age, because you never know what kinds of conversations might be coming. Not that I discourage good parental conversations about sex and such. Talking about your sexuality and romance and such with a trusted parent is essential for a healthy adolescent life.
After all, that's why you have a mom.
So we're watching these beautiful women come on to James Bond and them "hooking up" as kids call it, when my son looked at me and said something I'll never forget.
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