Come for the Ride…

For some reason, many entrepreneurs that have great vision often can’t translate that vision in the execution of the user interface. Speaking from experience, I’m sure many of you have admin pages where a blank field or drop down exists with a submit button and no descriptions or instructions on how to use the mysterious feature.  After all, the admin pages are designed by you, for you and you know exactly what its supposed to do - so why bother?  Sadly, many entrepreneurs also take the same approach for laying out the public facing website which of course, leads to confusion and a poor user experience.

Luckily, it’s now easier than ever to translate your thoughts using advanced tools or web based services.  If you are graphically challenged, you can now get some help.

Balsamiq

I had the pleasure of designing some mockups using Balsamiq as part of START Atlanta’s team.  This software makes it SOOOOO easy to design new pages its not even funny.  It’s basically as good as designing rough wireframes on paper or in Photoshop except you won’t have to scan the paper afterwards or waste hours in photoshop to get everything layered and pixeled correctly.  The tool is also simple enough to use that even an non-graphical idiot CEO can piece together some elements to get the page close to what he envisions.  If you need a tool to jump start you from concept to rough sketch, I’d highly recommend this tool.

99 Designs

99 Designs is a service I just learned about that I haven’t had the chance to use.  However, from the design of the website and the sample work I’ve seen by their community, you definitely have a lot of potential to get some great work for bargin prices.

The site basically allows you to create contests where you specify your design needs and a bounty and designers get to work based on your descriptions and feedback.  The best thing about this service is you get to see your work before you pay for it so ultimately, you win.

As a graphically challenged person, if you combine the wireframe tool and submitting the wireframes to designers at 99 Designs, you should be able to get a great mockup of your new website for under $500.  This is a lot cheaper and faster than paying a professional designer thousands only to get the work after a few weeks. Your mileage may very…

Although most startup entrepreneurs are dedicated, motivated, and hard working - sometimes things just don’t get done.  It’s not your fault really… You are already wearing more hats than most people are willing to and when you have to do 5 or 6 jobs as one person, it can easily get distracting.

While many entrepreneurs prefer to skip to the beat of their own tunes, the best way to stay on track is to make sure you have a destination and a pre-defined track to get there.

Marathon training is a great example of breaking up a large task into short term, measurable goals and forcing yourself to push forward based on a set schedule.  Since most people don’t have the agility to run 26+ miles without some intense training, breaking the task up into smaller, managable chunks forces you to do what matters and ignore the fluff.

Earlier this year, we decided we needed to get the website out there sooner than later so we set a date for launch and stuck to it. Even days right before the launch, we were still not ready and many items were still broken but when launch day came, we put together what worked and threw it out there.  Our reasoning was once the website is public, we would have to start developing against a public time line whereas if we hid in pre-launch mode, then no one would be pushing us to go forward.  In the end, it worked out really well.  By having the website out there, we were approached by many potential partners and we knew we had done the right thing.

So what’s next?

Now that the website is launched, our next steps are to set measurable growth goals and put it against a time line.  For us, this means setting short term traffic and registration goals for 2009 and 2010 and working from the top down to figure out what we need to do each month to hit those numbers.  Again, we are hoping the goals will help us push out the fluff and help us focus our spending and efforts on what will get us to our milestones.  The alternative would be to sit around and hope that people find us by ???? then PROFIT!

With that said, do you have short term goals for your company for development or traffic - one that’s placed against a time line?  If so, what are some of the things you’re looking to achieve?

Bootstrapping a startup is certainly not all fun and games and unlike a day job, you can’t clock out and you don’t get benefits.  We are coming up on our year one of operations as a team.  What started as an idea over a year ago has now blossomed into a tangible service with over 1.8 million cars serving almost 80,000 users a month.  We basically have 50% of AutoTrader’s inventory right now and looking to grow like Dubai skyscrapers.  What a difference a year makes.

Due to increasingly busy schedules and to-do items, we haven’t updated this blog too much over the last few months.  While I would love to say that a lot of crazy things have gone on, the truth is we developed a simple playbook and have been hammering it like annoying telemarketers with a huge list of numbers.

So the pay stinks, the job can be boring, why do this at all?  Why not join a large corporation with a nice salary, huge benefits, and a chance to travel?  Well, at the end of the day, its the love that keeps us going.  We’re not doing this to get on to Mashable or TechCrunch though being recognized would help our ultimate goal.  What keeps us going is the fact that we know we have a better mousetrap and when its complete, we want to make sure the world realizes it too.

It’s funny - of all the people I’ve networked with in the past year who were dedicated to their ideas, many of those startups no longer exist.  Maybe the pay cut is too deep, maybe they learned quick their idea won’t fly or maybe the lack of passion killed it before it ever had a chance.  Whatever it is, it’s amazing to see what a difference a year can make.

Someone once asked me if you found something you loved doing, would you really do it for free? I guess the answer is yes - with some contingencies of course.  But one year later, I’m really glad to see the progress we’ve made and to experience everything we have learned.  Despite the struggles, sleepless nights and developing a habit of talking to my dogs to get their opinions, I probably wouldn’t trade it at all.

It will be interesting to see where we are another year from now.

If there’s anything watching the news has taught me, it’s that excessive spending and uncontrolled growth will ultimately lead to a big crash.  Sure, when the times are good and your customers are paying for your R&D, growth or fancy company retreats, more = better.  However, during the tough times when most people are double clipping their cash to make sure it stays in their pocket, have excess fat on your operations could cost ya in the long run and chances are the government will not bail YOU out.

Since our operations for the most part is still pretty compact, I’ve been pushing the team to focus on trimming the fat in our technology.  When you face a scaling issue with your website, there are a couple of options available to help relieve the issues:

1. You can simply buy more machines to scale up if you can afford the cost.
2. You can tweak your code and squeeze more out of your existing infrastructure.  This one costs money and time as well but the improvements will help you exponentially as you scale up buying more machines.

Of course, both are really valid ways to grow - but if you do 1 without at least attempting 2, then you’re setting yourself up for bloat and wasted expenses.

In the case of EasyAutoSales - our monthly AWS costs for processing and storing images are getting close to  $1,000 a month. For a service that is supposed to the cheaper solution, it either means we’re growing well beyond our initial expectations or that we need to tweak the setup to work faster so we can save some dough.  Luckily for us, our problems are a combination of both growth and some bloat, the latter which we can fix.

In addition to tweaking some processes to make sure everything runs smoother and faster, we also found that Amazon now offers a cheaper mid-sized EC2 where it offers more computing power at half the price.  I guess Amazon realized that many are using EC2 for computing and not necessarily storage for a website and have decided to offer this new service to respond to the usage patterns.  By making code changes and instance changes, we expect to save a significant amount of money, possibly up to 25-30% of our monthly bill with Amazon.

With that said, what have you done with your startup this month to curb expenses?

As an avid automobile enthusiast, as well as entrepeneaur, it’s always interesting to find a parallel between my hobbies and my businesses. Such is the case when I got this month’s copy of SportsCar magazine. SportsCar magazine is the official club magazine of the SCCA (Sports Car Club of America). This month, an article by Randy Pobst (a well known professional racer) caught my attention in his column. “Planning Your Races” (as he calls this article) talks all about “reducing” risk over the course of the race in order to finish as well as possible. Consistant high finishes are key when you’re chasing a racing championship. This is very similar to trying to become the market leader in a given market. Making high cost, high risk moves can give you a huge payout, but more often times than not you will “end up next to the other guy in the gravel trap”, as Randy puts it.

One of the more important concepts in the article deals with the concept of watching your competitors (for a few laps) to determine what their strengths and weaknesses are. If you go in with your hair on fire trying to make passes without knowing your competitor, you might inadvertently subject yourself to risk that might be avoided by a lap or two of research. Watching, listening and planning is key. Obviously at some point you have to take the leap to make the pass, but learning your opponent’s weaknesses is key to minimizing risk.

Another form of this research comes through race engineers. They work with you before and during the race (over the radio) to tell you what opponent will do or is doing during the race. They are knowledgeable about other races on the track with you. They know who’s fast, who’s a hot-head, which cars are prone to breaking and which cars are going to be the main competition. They are complimentary to an advisory board, people in the industry who have been through the early stages of where you are and have “made it”. They are benevolent souls who aren’t in the “driver’s seat” anymore, but want to help the next generation make their mark and, again, minimize their risk by directing them towards actions that will maximize their goals and minimize their failures.

Though it may seem cliche, running a business is akin to driving a race car. Every week is another race and constantly finishing well will put your business high in the rankings. Making impatient, rash moves may put you ahead one week and behind the next. A few weeks of poor finishes can lead to frustration that snowballs. Planning and thinking ahead is an ongoing and evolving process while racing or in business. You have to constantly reassess yourself to make sure you’re decisions are taking you to your goal. As Randy ends the article, “To continue pounding this into your head, planning means planning to finish. All the crying and blaming and finger-pointing in the world will not unbend that suspension and get you back on track. Planning means using your head, not just your heart, or your hormones.”