Come for the Ride…

My father has this saying, “Never stop learning.” He’s in his mid-70s and he’s always trying to learn new things. Mind you, he has a B.S. in Chemistry, Masters of Public Health and a Ph.D in Toxiology, so he’s got no shortage on knowledge already stored up in his noggin. With this said, every challenge you take up in life should be a learning experience. You should be looking to expand your horizons and grown in your professional. Without going beyond what you normally do and what you already know, you tend to stagnate.

Early in our projects life, I felt like after the initial startup period and development, I stalled as a person. I was using all my acquired IT skills in a very comfortable manner. To a certain degree, we had the basic site and communications up in a timely manner. However, when the actual site development came into play, I’ve found my current system of site development is too slow and methodical for our purposes. My experience comes from projects that have high availability and mission critical reliability needs. We do testing to no end. We come up with programming plans, have code reviews and  reliability is job one. However, EasyAutoSales.com is a highly agile, web marketing company that needs to exeute quickly for maximum effectiveness.

In a few situations, my programming methods have had to be replaced with a small development team that can work more quickly. I’ve had to change my role and learn to be a manager. Wei has pushed me to contact developers via Guru, oDesk and any PHP forums and choose a team that reports to me, and in turn him. In this, I’ve had to admit to myself that I didn’t have an answer for every programming situation. I like to think I’m a pretty stout developer, but learning how to change my role is something I need to learn for this project and future projects.

My advice to anyone starting up a new business (online or otherwise), roll with the punches. You’re going to have to learn new skills and expand your horizons. Don’t fight it. You’re going to have to choose to pick your battles about doing things “your way” versus whatever it takes to get things done.

Whether you go nuts for New Years or could care less about New York starting every year by dropping the ball, the one thing you can’t avoid as a blog reader is to see multiple blogs doing their year in review or predictions for next year around this time.

After a month of holiday cheer and a week of laziness, many feel the need to sum up the last 365 days even though it’s really just another spin of the Earth in the cosmos. So rather than fight it, why should we be different and disappoint?

With everything that’s happened (and still happening), I would have to say 2007 has been a banner year for me. Even though this blog has only been up for a few months and the development on the service website has been slower than I liked, I’ve learned a lot this year just from changing my attitude and learning to go after it; whatever it may be.

Starting from the small things, I think I finally got over my distaste for the phone. My speech has always been something I was over conscious about; thanks to all my friends and their negative taunting throughout grade school and college. (You know, we didn’t all learn English as our first language!) Anyway, I finally decided to take my own advice of “whether you think you can or can’t (speak w/o mumbling), you’re right!” …so I’ve been trying to use the phone more even though I haven’t put a dent into my 4000+ rollover minutes yet.

Career wise, I think this was the year that I’ve matured and learned how to multi-task in ways I didn’t think was possible for me. I’ve always enjoyed managing vs. doing the grunt work and it was nice to finally to be able to reach this point in my professional career and know that I can actually manage a team without losing more hair. The art of dishing the work to everyone else is one I don’t understand why more people don’t try to master. In all seriousness… I do still take on a lot of the tasks myself but it’s definitely a great feeling when you teach and see others advance in their career while getting work done.

Networking has also played a big role for me in 2007 and it’s one thing that I highly recommend everyone especially startup entrepreneurs to go out and do. (The key is to do it in person, not hiding behind a computer.) I’ve been living in Atlanta for about 2 and a half years and for the longest time I thought I had to go get an MBA at Emory or Ga. Tech to access those alumni networks. Of course, this also nudged me to look at housing in Silicon Valley to better reach that pool of talents. However as it turned out, I was able to meet people in all three networks without taking classes or moving to the west coast.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), Facebook and Craigslist provided most of the networking opportunities for me to meet people from all over and learn about local events that I could attend to meet like minded people. Having participated in the Startup Weekend also showed me and the Skribit co-founders that Atlanta wasn’t dry of talent; we just didn’t have a clear way to network and find each other. From there, a number of opportunities have opened up and my network of contacts who have different strengths have definitely exploded. Granted, there were still some duds in the mix and I have met people this past year who just didn’t know how to network or follow up… but practice makes perfect and like dating, you just have to get yourself out there.

Along with the good, I’ve made conscious decisions to ditch some of the bad. For me, improvements aren’t just made by adding smarter and more positive people to your life, it’s also about shedding the ones that drain you emotionally or otherwise. Had Michael Vick shed the fat in his circle, he may not be in jail right now… or maybe he masterminded the whole doggy daycare gone bad thing; who knows? In any case, there were people I’ve met down here in my first year that have become unstable and it definitely did me a lot of good to distance myself from them. If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to see where our different paths take us in a couple of years.

So what’s in store for 2008? Well, with a broader understanding of my industry and real people to talk to when I need support; I actually feel like 2008 will be fabulous, instead of it being just another year.

Hopefully with hard work, everything will work out as planned!

10 years ago if you had asked, “If you could only use one word to describe yourself, what would it be?” I would have said, “perfectionist.” Granted, whether I was one or not was debatable. However, if I only had one word and I was trying to sell myself, why not be perfect?

Perfection was fine great in the old world. Press releases had to be perfect. Products have to be perfect. Corporations had to be perfect. Websites had to be perfect… everything around us apparently had one chance for a first impression and it had to be perfect.

However, things have changed…

In a society where very few people use spell checkers and everyone can publish themselves on the web, things are hardly ever perfect. In fact, people seem to find things more newsworthy and are more sympathetic when imperfection is shared with the public.

Which one do you remember more?

1. Martha Stewart day-to-day or Martha Stewart in jail?

2. What Tom’s doing with MySpace right now or how Mark Zuckerberg is f-in up yet another new Facebook feature launch?

Which one do you sympathize or care more about?

1. Superman or Clark Kent?

2. Batman or Spider-man?

The public’s fascination with screw ups and seeing how they fix themselves can itself be a marketing gimmick. There’s a reason why Facebook is always in the news and it’s not because they’re the perfect company out there. Google on the other hand… that’s questionable.

For startups, waiting for perfection can lead to its doom. This happened with my first website that was centered around college nightlife. We had a great domain name, great design and an unbelievable product for its time. I teamed up with a couple of friends and like most dorm startups, we got cranking on the code like we had dropped all our classes.

We had coded image galleries from the ground up (a year before any major image gallery platforms), message forums from the ground up (emulating vBulletin and more) and an online bartender as a cool to have feature. I remember doing data entry for the online bar, taking pictures of various shots (and drinking them); THAT was fun.

While all these neat features were great and would have made an amazing website, in my eyes they were never ready for launch because some features were always missing from my master plan or some bugs were out there waiting to crash my system. Imperfection came with the territory for self written code and for the most part, the site was simply not ready for the public.

During the development and debugging time, my technical knowledge excelled, however my business sense or lack thereof completely failed me. My team of developers and QA found bugs left and right and we were hacking the site in ways most normal users would not have done. Because we were such geeks, we were busy fixing errors or bugs that probably wouldn’t have made a big difference in the overall scheme of things. As a result, we never really launched and we were passed by other entrepreneurs at the school who simply bought a prefabricated community software, change some colors and focused on marketing the site instead of writing code. I believe they launched in a week what took us over 5 months to write up.

Waiting for perfection can be deadly and that was a rude awakening.

Now-a-days, I no longer seek the perfect launch when doing web startups and I actually cringe when I hear others looking to repeat my mistakes. Delaying the launch for a few months to get a more perfect site out there will not necessarily make your business better. A good business is a good business — a good website does not make a good business.

Perfectionists really have no place in a web startup, at least not in the early stages.  If you have one on your team, make sure you all get on the same page focusing on the launch; the tweaks can come later.

This video of the Keynote from Nokia World 2007 was passed to me by a fellow entrepreneur here in Atlanta.  It notes some interesting innovations in thinking and changes in the economy when certain commodities are given away as freebies.

After watching the video, I feel like a lot of what we wanted to accomplish with EasyAutoSales.com (making it free to sell) have been validated.   In the old model where the cost of printing and distribution costs money, I can see why someone selling their car would need to pay $40 or upwards of $100 to sell their vehicles.  The money they pay to giant classified services were used to support a process and in the end, that process helped saved time for the seller.

However, the cost of producing a web service today has dropped significantly.  Websites no longer cost hundreds of thousands to create and hosting a large website on a dedicated or grid setup no longer require hefty monthly bills.  Not only is technology and programming cheap to find, methods of distribution are also cheap, fast and widely available.  To that end, it doesn’t really make sense for end users to have to pay for a distribution tax when the resources are essentially free.

While I’m not sure how our role will affect the economy, I really am looking forward to seeing positive change once our site becomes one of the top destinations for auto sellers and buyers.  Maybe our marketplace will allow cheaper sales while allowing sellers to keep similar margins; maybe that will lead to other bigger and better things.  Either way, it shall be an interesting experiment once the site launches and we get some feedback.

For a startup, the runway can best be described as the cash flow you have to keep operations afloat. The use of the airplane runway paints a vivid picture because once you reach the end, you are forced to either take flight or crash and burn. Unfortunately for most startups, they usually result in the latter. However, choosing the right plane and having a clear flight plan may help you avoid tragedy.

Like all things in life, if you have cash (or credit), then you have some wiggle room to make things happen. Without cash, nothing happens. On the flip side, if your runway is too long, it’s also possible that nothing may happen. A plane that never takes off is basically a bus… and no one gets excited about hopping on board a bus.

The trick to making a startup work is to make sure you can create a reasonable runway for the startup you want to take flight. Obviously if you want to fly a Jumbo plane, you will need a longer runway. If you only have enough money to maintain a short runway, you will have to reevaluate your plane; this means shaving off nice-to-have features and focusing on the core necessities (e.g. the engines and the wings).

Realizing what you need to shave off early on will help significantly as you will *hopefully* end your project with a lite but fully functional product instead of a half-completed, bloated pile of junk. Obviously, you can’t fly a half completed plane so what’s the point of trying? Surprisingly many startups do just that… They dive in and just build and build without looking at the whole picture and the length of their runways.

It makes you wonder don’t it?

So, how long is your runway?