Dave Jafari

Ask Morgan Freeman

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 16:17:00 -0500

I had some time to relax after the post-election havoc and South Park was running their annual election mockery episode (I’m always shocked when there’s something I’d actually want to watch on TV). Being a big fan of Morgan Freeman, aka The Voice, I had the itch to play around with one of the episode’s subplots.

Morgan Freeman is always the answer.

I was curious what a Pinterest-style layout would look with videos. That’s a service I’d probably use myself, but I’m not sure that feature alone would be worth building when you can just create a YouTube playlist. Speaking of Youtube, I needed to use their API for one of our consulting projects, so it was a natural fit.

See Ask Morgan Freeman for yourself and, if you find any other mischevious sound bytes from him on YouTube, let me know in the comments~

Visiting the Valley: Startup School

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 22:38:00 -0400

I’ve been to San Francisco several times but never had the pleasure of seeing the famed Silicon Valley for myself. One thing that sticks out is how wholly unremarkable this place is. Don’t get me wrong, the geography is stunning and the weather is simply beautiful. But somehow I expected to see Ivory Towers and maybe a few marble statues of Steve, Larry, and Sergey. Nope, it’s just as unassuming as most American suburbs.

Stanford’s architecture is great for long, relaxing walks.

I suppose that’s why the atmosphere is so casual here. Just about everyone I met at Startup School this weekend was incredibly laid back and, most importantly, completely open about their dreams. It’s refreshing to have open conversations with people here and it really gets your entrepreneurial juices going.

Startup School itself had some great talks which meant different things to different people. I won’t rehash what’s been said already. You can watch them for yourself and form your own opinion. I do know one thing though: when Ron Conway said he could size up a person in 10 minutes to tell if he wanted to invest in them for life, you could see a sparkle in every eye. The imaginations of a thousand future founders was ablaze with the thought of getting those magical 10 minutes and finding out you were the one.

I came for the people and the personalities and it didn’t disappoint. Even if you have no long-term plans in the Valley, I highly recommend getting down here for some meetups. The way it energizes you is difficult to put into words. It felt completely uncool to be the guy “just doing some consulting right now” instead of going to the felt on an opportunity. Feeling normal for a change was awesome~

Unsubscription Rate Optimization

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 15:15:00 -0400

We put so much time into figuring out how to convert a user into a subscription that we can easily overlook when they leave. Someone leaving is the defining point in your customer lifetime value equation, so it’s just as much an opportunity as signing them up in the first place.

I signed up for President Obama’s mailing list for the chance to win one of those dinners you’ve probably heard about. It was an interesting opportunity to ask the President one question, and one that I intended to use to bring attention to my startup. But they abused me by sending endless emails which asked for money in an increasingly desperate fashion.

I said enough and hit unsubscribe.

Perhaps I should be upset that they knew they were spamming me too much, but I was instead pleasantly surprised that they offered me a mutually beneficial solution to my plight. So I took them up on the offer; unsubscribe averted.

When your customer decides it’s time to go, will you be ready to take advantage of the opportunity? Converting a current customer is much more cost-effective than an unknown visitor. They’ve already signaled their interest, all you have to do is to deliver on your promises.

#12: Pre-traction Distraction

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 15:59:00 -0400

Month in Review

Pre-traction startups are fertile grounds for the attention deficit. When you don’t have investors or customers, you lack the external pressure to keep focused. It’s easy to veer off into a different idea or be indecisive about any one of the many routes you could take. I think the modern internet has the power to make anyone a little ADHD, so this problem applies to everyone.

We have a consulting business and it’s going well. Our development schedule is organized into short sprints ending with an in-person meeting. Facetime with a paying customer and tight deadlines are great motivators. The challenge is that our product efforts have no such constraints. It’s been too easy to be casual, indecisive, and vague.

When I look around at my peers like Nathan and Tony who are growing awesome businesses and working with a singular purpose, I envy their level of focus. Having customers is like cheating when it comes to nixing distractions. So this pre-traction period is where you have to create your own external pressures.

Our First App

This month we officially started building Medium, an iPhone app for email and part of the greater Zenbox vision. I discussed our product vision with a friend last week and uncovered a nasty little secret. When he didn’t seem to “get it,” I delved deeper into the thought-process and minute details of each feature. You know how things make perfect sense in your head? Try actually communicating those thoughts and you’d be surprised how often it comes out like idea vomit.

I realized that my friend wasn’t the problem. What I was telling him was a disorganized collection of random ideas without a clear meaning. Sure, it made sense to me, but it meant nothing to him. So we had the moment of truth where I admitted that I was pitching the concept in an entirely terrible way. Even when speaking to another developer, I needed to structure my message as if he were a potential customer. The lack of focus was telling, so when I got home, I pulled out the notepad and immediately started trying to find it:

After reading hundreds of papers on email communications and productivity, several common themes emerged:

features such as tagging and folders actively reduce productivity no matter how they are employed

search and scrolling are by far the most efficient means of information retrieval

email productivity is highly correlated to actionability

users are willing to try new systems: there is little vendor lock-in and email is a major timesink

Medium seeks to simplify the email experience by removing unnecessary features which actively reduce productivity. There are no folders or tags. You don’t have to spend time organizing, drilling into folders, or maintaining the mental overhead of an ad-hoc system. We focus exclusively on the communication and information retrieval aspects, and dump popular but unwarranted features.

We treat email as a transient conversation. Traditional systems employ a segmented-list pattern in which email can be organized into separate buckets and traversed in a random access manner. Medium follows a stack pattern in which unread messages may be traversed in sequence and are only accessible once. After the message is read, the client will no longer show it, and there is no list in which it can reside. This forces the user to stop treating the email client as a repository of notes, todos, and documents, and transforms messages into inherently actionable items.

Inspired by the Get-Things-Done methodology, we provide the tools that are required to create an actionable experience. Each message has an action bar that will allow you to defer a task by creating a todo or scheduling it on your calendar, to delegate it to someone else, or to reply immediately. When you’re ready to move to the next message, you have the option of archiving the message for later search or outright deletion.

This basically expresses our message, but reading off four paragraphs to someone isn’t going to work. The short version: “we are making email more productive and actionable.”

This message is the start of making Medium a reality, not just a fuzzy idea. Being open about our progress on this blog helps make me feel accountable. Any one of you might be a potential customer. Add in some material goals with real time-tables and we will achieve the same productivity and focus as our consulting work. Deadlines and accountability are our weapons against distraction.

We’re still here and public with the numbers. Besides helping me with accounting, I’ve found it to be a source of interesting conversations and haven’t seen any drawbacks. I’m not interested in selling a made up story to investors anyway.

In fact, I’ve started looking for new ways to be open and transparent. Looking for contractors is an area I think could benefit from more openness. Some of the filters for determining whether a consultant would be a good fit for you are prices and areas of expertise. I’ve always found it frustrating when shopping around that you had to open communications with companies and often go through a lengthy conversation just to get these tidbits.

It’s great for the contractor: a sales lead is a win. But for the potential customer, imagine doing this 10 times, especially when you’re not in the business of provisioning vendors. So we decided to just make it public and accessible to anyone: our Project and Pricing Guide.

Revenue
$9,600.00 ($600.00) Services
$0 (-$64.76) Merchandise
$9,600.00 ($535.24) Total

We added two new clients with small projects this month. I also turned away a potential job where we could have easily charged thousands for something that could have just as easily been done using an existing, cheap web app. Instead, we gave them some links and advice. Trust is valuable and I believe they’ll come back with a more exciting opportunity next time.

If any of you are looking to build a new web application or iPhone app, we’re looking to fill one more project this year. The spot opens in October and will be the last client we take on until next February.

The Once and Future King

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:07:00 -0400

Apple’s OSX Business Model

I love the Civilization series so much that I was willing to spend $250 when the latest incarnation, Civ5, was released. Best Buy unlocked a thick plastic case to retrieve a $150 copy of Windows 7 and VMWare sold me a $50 pass to install it on my Mac without having to use Bootcamp. I would have happily given all of this money to Sid Meier if they released on OSX to begin with.

My only poster; a show that took me 8 years to get to and was worth the wait.

The Mac was king in a distant memory and long has been his seat on the sidelines. But Apple has managed to change the rules of the game in a way that Microsoft has been unwilling or unable to compete with. This is disruptive innovation. In the past, Microsoft treated Windows as the key to the kingdom. They charge a hefty tax to enter, but once inside, you’re pretty free to explore and enjoy what you please. In a world of OEM distribution and single-purchase economics, this approach was ideal.

On the other hand, Apple has taken advantage of their closed ecosystem. I can get new OS upgrades at half the price of an XBox title delivered straight over the web without a visit to the glass case at the store. It’s cheaper, it’s easier, and I think it’s proving more profitable. Whereas Microsoft hits you hard with costly OS upgrades, Apple is treating their’s as a platform. To gain access to it, you buy Apple’s hardware and purchase software through Apple’s storefronts. They charge a premium when you purchase their devices and continually generate revenue by taxing your iTunes purchases.

To decide which business model is optimal, I think it’s important to establish if what you’re building is a platform. We’ve started coding an iOS email app that is part of our larger Zenbox vision. By all rights, we could probably give it away for free. Selling the platform isn’t our business, but selling a service on top of it will be. We simply could not build a profitable business unless we took the Microsoft approach and charged a premium for the app and its upgrades. The benefit of Apple’s platform approach is that we can give a much more competitive entry point for our software and begin building an expansive marketplace for selling future services.

Apple’s platform approach provides a more consistent user experience, less fragmentation for implementors, and less consumer resistance to a recurring development model. More importantly, Apple has made the thought of paying $150+ for a new OS disgusting. The game has changed and Windows features will be largely irrelevant until they modernize their pricing and distribution models.

Predatory Marketing

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 23:47:00 -0400

When you’re deep in the thralls of a startup, learning to market yourself becomes paramount. What may seem simple on the surface reveals a deeply sophisticated topic. As I’ve been learning more about marketing, I’ve gained a greater appreciate for it’s techniques, regardless of their manifestation. That’s why I couldn’t resist opening this suspicious package even though I routinely send junk mail straight to the can.

Dear FedEx: Please sue us.

I had to find out what was worth committing this particularly egrigious trademark infringment. Obviously, there was no trace of a company actually called Priority Express that I could find. And surely if there were, FedEx would not have granted them a license to use one of the most famous logo marks in history.

Inside we discover a veritable treasure chest of behavioral psychology. When I was in Spain, I had the good fortune to be staying with a marketing student from England thanks to AirBnB. I introduced her to Seth Godin by boldly claiming that he was part of a “good” marketing movement, one where customers get treated with sincerity and respect. I wish I had this envelope with me because this is precisely what it means to go to “the dark side of marketing.”

They pulled out all the tricks on this one. So let’s break it down, we may as well learn something here. I’m interested to see what others turn up.

The header immediately goes for the near miss effect. We’re close, we’re a finalist! And it addresses me directly, to make sure I know this is the real deal. The potential price is big and noticable with a unique type treatment that distinguishes it from the page. The spinning dials are eerily close to a slot machine display, and to ensure no subtle act is left unnoticed, the last 0 is slightly offset to give the appearance of motion.

The large font and personalization also trigger something a little more unconscious. Because my name is mentioned here (and several more times later), I am more likely to both remember the company and reflect on them fondly (research). The extra printing and distribution costs do not justify such a move without a considered intention.

Our call to action urges us to contact the promoter. And like any good landing page creator knows, any friction between me and the finish line has to be removed. I’m given a phone number, a personalized website, and even a QR code. Since I’m a glutton, I had to call the number. The IVR system immediately prompted me for the pin number. Customer tracking in the offline world is still a little cumbersome, but I played along. Surprise, there are no agents, the office is currently closed. But I’m sure my mailbox won’t be.

What good call to action would be believable without a testimonial? Nothing builds trust and integrity like a previous winner. The picture is of a guy holding a giant check. That totally makes sense when the grand prize is a $10,000 debit card. Jimmy Olaventa Birchfield doesn’t sound made up either. I always use my middle name when I win prizes.

If you like gambling, then a credit card is just up your alley. This is the perfect primer for making someone willing to spend and, when they do, spend more. Something about a credit card just screams freedom from constraints, a way out to get what you “need.” My local grocery apparently doesn’t accept Platinum Preferred though.

I’m a guaranteed winner. For their part, a measly $150 is a swell price to pay to convert on selling a car. How can I turn down the opportunity to at least find out more? I’m sure we’d learn that the winners only qualify with a purchase from the lot. Unfortunately, I’m left to jump to that conclusion since all the agents seem to be out of the office.

The promotion has clearly defined their target customer. Scratch-cards and their ilk appeal heavily to low-income households, a well-studied phenomenon in state lotteries. We’ve already been guaranteed a prize, so this one is just for entertainment. I suppose the target demographic would be thankful for the freebie.

First make me feel lucky, then make me feel special. Invitations are a wonderful way to build exclusivity and artificial demand for your offer. I ran a community website working entirely off invitations, so I can tell you they work well. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t have something engaging to show off once users got inside. Certainly nothing like that new car smell.

As we get to the bottom of a page, our salesman begins getting more desperate at the last chance to close the deal. Here is the offer that I can’t refuse, a cash money check. Free is the ultimate seductress, and this one is calling my name. Yes, I choose a free check for $4,266.79 over the $0.25 Lindt truffle.

I suppose if you’re going to go dark side on me, then you may as well go for Death Star. But next time Landers, you might try not sending your offers to such a blatently wrong demographic. No one in my neighborhood gambles, we play Poker.

Trader's Game

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 11:23:00 -0400

TLDR: When you’re selling, you give the first price. When you want to be sold, give them the lead.

How much?

It sounds simple, but it’s one of the hardest questions in the world. So hard that the entire finance industry was born into endless capitalistic warfare upon itself. The winners exert unimaginable world power, and the losers are driven into permanent obscurity (if they are lucky). The most challenging aspect of consulting has been answering that elusive question.

You can ask what others charge, you can debate what value you’re providing, and you can consider what the other party is willing to pay. Either way, the decision takes an unbelievable amount of information. You need to know thyself, thy partners, and thy enemies. If for no other reason, this is where a professional sales person can be invaluable. The knowledge and experience in their modern-day evocation of traders is essential to finding a fair deal.

The choice of who begins the negotiation is hugely important. Opening can be a minefield: start too low and you’ll leave value on the table, start too high and you risk not even being in the discussion. The first number is the priming point from which all other negotiations evolve. As in any game, one player has to start and starting is often the most difficult part.

I’ve let some opportunities escape my grasp lately due to poor negotiation tactics. I have no doubt that there would have been a mutually beneficial outcome had we started in a different place. But being inexperienced in negotiating such a deal meant that I didn’t quite know what it would look like from the outset. Given that I wanted to do these projects, I think the cardinal mistake was to start the negotiation game myself.

The general rule of thumb is to never give the first number. When you do, what you’re really saying is that this is my ballpark. I’m happy to do the project if you hit the ball somewhere in my field, but I’d otherwise decline. So if you want the work for reasons beyond price, I think the best strategy is to defer to the other player to start. When they decline, capitulation is not an option. Instead, let them know that you’re excited about the project and you’d like to find a way to fit within their budget plans. You have imperfect information, and you’re going to screw up if you start.

The other side of the equation is when you don’t really want the work or if you’d be indifferent if you landed it. At that point, you should start the negotiation yourself. You want to prime the first number so that the ballpark is in a place where you’d no longer be indifferent. This is the conversation rate scenario where you’ll go through several potential suitors and land one. Losing the others isn’t a big deal because you didn’t want the work at that price anyway.

If it were all about making money, you’d just need to tune your lead generation and closing engines. But at times, there’s something more. Whether it be the people, equity, experience, or even future favors, there can be many more components to a deal than price. I regret my last encounter, but I think the lesson is clear. When you’re selling, you give the first price. When you want to be sold, give them the lead.

The Millennial Adventure

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:52:00 -0400

A thought from a previous generation as we set sights on Mars.

Interestingly, I ran across this Letters of Note on Twitter this morning:

This day in 1969, a chilling memo titled “IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER” was sent to President Nixon’s Chief of Staff.

The Death of Legends

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 10:00:00 -0400

TLDR: What will the heaps of data being recorded about us breed in the recountings of future historians?

I don’t go outside much, probably less than an hour a day on average. Some combination of being introverted, obsessed, and indifferent to most novel experiences keeps me out of the sunlight. Between being a programmer and getting my entertainment from places like Netflix or game consoles means I never have much reason to leave a building. I know this would drive many people insane, but I suspect there are also many people just like me. We toil away, day in and day out, on our digital devices, perfectly content with life.

So for my kind of people and the many more of us which are being born every day, I’m curious what a future historian will uncover about our lives. We leave breadcrumbs stored away in databases with our every action. Our discussions, thoughts, motivations, and actions are being recorded in real-time, every time. And a clever researcher with access to many of those stores of data will be able to quite accurately paint a detailed portrait of our lives. Extensive enough to put any biography to shame.

One hundred years from now, what will history classes say about our modern day legends. They will have such copious amounts of information that there may not be any secrets or questions left, there may be no reason to conclude that their achievements were in any way superhuman, revolutionary, or magical.

There is a mystic around my personal heroes. Alexander the Great, Leonardo di Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin, to name a few, did remarkable things in their lives. But more importantly, their accomplishments are set in a magical aura, not for what we know about them, but for what we don’t. Without that magic, will there be legends?

#11: Selling Software Consulting to SMBs

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 15:29:00 -0400

Month in Review

A late month in review is a good month to review. This month, we started looking for marketing help and I doubled-down on the consulting business. The work we’re doing on our current client projects is damn good, so I know we’ve got a product worth selling. More importantly, we need to grow our team to tackle even more interesting project ideas.

This month I’ve put myself in front of many new prospective clients. Discussing their problems, goals, and aspirations has been a pretty enjoyable experience because we’re in the unique position to provide a solution. I love when conversations are about how we’re going to do it instead of we should do it. As a technical guy, I can give real-time feedback on what’s possible, how hard it will be, and when it can be done. To be honest, it seems like sending a sales guy to have that conversation would be a nightmare in comparison.

You’re sending the wolf?… that’s all you had to say.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with some epic sales guys in enterprise software. At that level, having a professional sales guy who can walk customers through the value propositions of complicated solutions is pretty useful. But on the smaller side, for small and medium-sized businesses, they simply cannot answer the unanticipated questions that are needed to build trust. You cannot rehearse for the diversity of problems faced by SMBs.

And I’m still not certain where I stand on sales commissions. I feel like they provide an ulterior motive that degrades trust. We want to build amazing software. Thus our motive is to help a business succeed so we can continue to grow along with them. I often ask myself how someone could trust my recommendations if they thought I had a motive to sell them as much as possible rather than give them the best work possible.

Regardless, I think software consulting at the SMB-level requires that you put a creative or engineer in the room with the customer. A pure-bred sales guy may help for later negotiations, but right now I feel like they are going to do more damage than good.

On a Personal Level

Over the last four months, I’ve managed to reduce my personal expenses by more than half. When you take a hard look at what you’re consuming, it’s amazing how much you can do without. There are a few more dollars to be squeezed out, but at this point I’m not putting much more effort into optimizing my monthly nut.

(Protip - Go to the ATM to get your pocket change for the week. It’s much harder to see where you’re at when you use a credit card for everything)

My last subscription services are Netflix and Github. That should tell you something about how valuable those two things are. Amazon Prime is amazing too, but we have access to that in the family.

One service that I’d like to see built is a come-to-market tool for Kickstarter campaigns. Our experience as a large pledge for Elevation Docks has been a bummer. There are delays, I get that, but the communications and expectations aspect has been touch and go. The big problem is that these companies find brilliant success through their Kickstarter campaigns but are left with no way to deal with the scale of new business. I smell a great opportunity to build a PR/support/shipping service around these campaigns to ease their burden.

We could wax on about new ideas all day, so let’s get to the numbers.

Revenue
$9,000.00 (unc) Services
$64.76 (-$85.24) Merchandise
$9,064.76 (-$85.24) Total

This month we didn’t sign any new business, and we wouldn’t have been able to work on it anyway. Our pipeline is completely full and it looks like we’ll fill up the rest of this year’s calendar soon. (also, here’s my SEO donation Regions Bank, let’s do this thing!)

8 Surprising Facts About Happiness

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 10:30:00 -0400

We constantly hear that money doesn’t buy happiness. I’m not rich, so I can’t weigh in. But you must believe it has to help a little, right? Well, it does so long as you understand what makes you happy. In a 2011 issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Elizabeth Dunn, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson accumulated several thought-provoking research findings about happiness. These are great concepts to internalize even if you haven’t made your millions, yet.

Buy experiences.

It turns out we are really good at adapting, even to the things we buy. That rush you get from a brand new car fades to black in a few weeks. But what if you bought a clunker and instead spent the remainder on an African safari? 57% of people studied got greater happiness from a experiential purchases versus 34% for a material purchase. Why? Our experiences live on as memories which we can revisit whenever we want for free. A purchase happens once and fades from view.

Help others.

We are just about the most social creatures on the planet except for those damn termites. Our relationships deeply impact our happiness. In one experiment, individuals were given $20 and assigned to spend it on themselves or others. When they were interviewed, those who spent on others were happier. In fact, people feel happier when just reflecting on a time when they had spent money on others. And those connections aren’t just cultural, even our neurons reflect it: MRIs show a connection between donating money and the areas of the brain associated with receiving rewards.

Do less more often.

We adapt quickly making a big purchase’s feeling of excitement fleeting. That first bite of a cookie gives a disproportionate amount of happiness as compared to the last. So if you have one cookie, why not eat half of it twice instead? When we break things up into smaller, disconnected pieces, we minimize the effects of diminishing returns and our abilities to adapt to that feeling of happiness.

Insurance is a sucker bet.

We adapt to the bad as well as the good. See a theme here? Often times the fear of loss is actually far worse than our feelings after the fact. People are stupendous at rationalizing and reconstruing the failures and losses in life. So those overpriced product warranties may give you peace-of-mind now, but they probably won’t make you feel better after that Xbox melts down, again. When researchers asked people if they would be more upset about missing a train by 1 minute or 5 minutes, most responded with the former. In reality, they weren’t too upset either way. The train station was to blame!

Pay now, consume later.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that credit card often lead people to stupid decisions with their money. Impulsive behavior for temporary pleasure that leads to debt anxiety doesn’t sound exciting. And it turns out if you’re a little patient, you’ll get happiness born from the anticipation of a pleasurable future event for free. The research shows that this anticipation for something provokes stronger emotions than reflecting on it later. A survey of students found that they felt happier when anticipating an upcoming vacation than they were recounting the aftermath.

Don’t forget the details.

Most of our happiness comes from the details. A trip to the ball game may be a great experience or a bad one. You might envision friends, beer, and a team victory and leave with mosquito bites, a broken voice, and a crushing defeat. When we think of big dreams and far off goals, we tend to think more abstractly about them than things we’ve done before or will do soon. Going to the Super Bowl may set your imagination on fire, but stop to consider if you’d actually have more fun watching the game with a few friends at the bar.

Beware of comparison shopping.

Comparison shopping is a great way to get you focused on the quantifiable ways in which products are different, things on which they are easily compared. But they obscure the similarities and often lead you to exclude the opportunities to discover an unknown feature that would have lead to even greater happiness. In one funny study, participants were asked to choose between a free $2, 2 ounce chocolate shaped like a cockroach and a free 50 cent, half ounce chocolate shaped like a heart. Only 46% predicted they would enjoy the bigger cockroach-shaped chocolate more yet 68% chose it.

Reviews rule.

One of the best ways to predict if you’ll like something is if someone else does. You can agonize over the product’s details but hearing others tell you how something made them happy and if they think it will make us happy too is a much more valuable insight. In one experiment, women were asked to predict how much they would enjoy a speed date. Some were given a photo and a bio and others were told what the previous women dates thought of a guy. While they predicted that the bio would lead them to a better estimation of happiness, it turns out that the recommendations were significantly more accurate.

#10: Dear Marketer Looking For a Technical Cofounder

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 17:04:00 -0400

This is your lucky day.

A recent conversation reminded me of the need to delegate and specialize. I’m not a marketer, but I’ve come to understand several important marketing principles over the years. So we could try to get by on my hustle and the fact that I know just enough to be dangerous, or we could be honest and realize that this is an area where our current team is lacking. We want someone who can own this role instead of bumble around. Thus, we’re looking for a marketing cofounder.

People shall call upon our team in times of great need.

The great prospects in our circle of friends are all busy with their own endeavors. Such is the nature of good people: they aren’t often looking for new opportunities. So instead, we’re opening our search to the wide unknown and hoping to meet some awesome new people in the process. If you’d like to chat with us, we’d love to meet you and see what develops. No expectations, and no big deal if we don’t mesh.

Bloggers tell me lists are cool so here are some. This is us, in a nutshell:

We’re bootstrapping our company, Urban Coding, as a custom application development shop. This is why.
You’re getting three technical cofounders and four developers total. Our skills are in front-end development using Ruby and Javascript, mobile development for iOS, and scalable back-end processing using Java and other JVM technologies. We’re really good at software development.
Our goal is to build products focused on improving digital communications. We’re starting with email.
We obsess about engaging experiences from both a marketing and product perspective. Our company’s values are learning, openness, and service.
Our culture is laid-back and fun but driven and ambitious.
The best way to see where we’re at now is to read my Month in Review posts.

These are the kinds of things we’d like in a marketing cofounder:

You are ambitious and draw identity from changing the world through your work. Passion is something you fundamentally understand and not in a cliche resume keyword way like programming “rockstars”.
You believe good marketing lays at the intersection of creating remarkable experiences and helpful relationships.
You believe in measuring everything and finding insight in the data. Data isn’t the end of the conversation, it’s just a beginning.
You have uncanny writing skills. Maybe you would have been a journalist or novelist in another life.
You have a great sense of humor and don’t take failure too seriously. Laugh with us when this blind shot for a cofounder fails, not at us!
You are awesome at networking. Unlike me, you don’t break the ice with “so you’re a sales guy, right?”
You are unemployed or willing to be so within 6 months if we fall in love. And you totally want to fall in love, or we will try to charm you in very sad, geeky ways.
You are passionate about digital communications in the abstract and their power to change the world. There is something terribly wrong with the way things are and you can’t quite put your finger on it.
You are selfless; you care about others. (also, you care about us finding the right fit as much as we do, so you’ll happily Tweet, Like, up-vote and otherwise spread the love about this post)
You live in North America. Traveling to Birmingham or Atlanta to hang out with the team occasionally if you’re not here already doesn’t phase you. Wherever you are, the cost of living is favorable to bootstrapping.

We need you to help us in…

Helping find and negotiate sales in our consulting business and managing those accounts afterwards. This is how we’re going to pay you. Failing that, we have lots of old laptops we can eBay.
Building and managing our social and content strategy for our product business. Our target markets are owned by big companies with huge budgets, so traditional advertising is simply a non-starter for us. One day you’ll write a famous book about how you successfully hacked the system.
Being party to our customer development efforts, aka applying lean startup principles to product discovery and development.
As our last cofounder, and one with a totally different background, your perspective and knowledge will play an important formative role in our company.

And lastly, I’d like to point out what we didn’t say. We don’t care if you are already a so-called professional marketer. I think the industry has changed so much in the last decade that no formal education would have helped anyway. More importantly, most of those old techniques treat people as commodities which is not what we’re about. We don’t care about your age, race, or gender. We only care about your actions. You are a good person in all senses of the word. If this is you, then this is me: dave@urbancoding.net.

The 10 Most Echoed Seth Godin Posts

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 10:30:00 -0400

Coming up with a content strategy for Zenbox has been an interesting experience. We have hypotheses about who our target users are and the things they might find interesting, but I’m not marketing expert nor am I a seer. I am an engineer, so I took the natural approach: data-driven (just saying it makes me excited, YEAS).

We’re going to approach building a content strategy in the same way a marketing person looks at SEO and conversion analysis. Create a hypothesis, just do it, and then measure the results. Part of creating these hypotheses has been looking into things that have worked for others. The first thesis is that our target audience are ambitious, creative people who admire and want to become thought leaders.

So naturally, I sought to break down one of my favorite thought leaders, Seth Godin, to see what his “hits” looked like. I wrote a script that examined the social influence of each of his last 1250 posts to count their tweets and likes. Since they make for an awesome read, I wanted to share them here:

The triumph of coal marketing
March 22, 2011
Score: 46690, Likes: 8680, Tweets: 3290
Back to (the wrong) school
September 05, 2011
Score: 46036, Likes: 8544, Tweets: 3316
The future of the library
May 16, 2011
Score: 39071, Likes: 6932, Tweets: 4411
The forever recession (and the coming revolution)
September 29, 2011
Score: 26531, Likes: 4640, Tweets: 3331
Voting, misunderstood
November 01, 2010
Score: 24389, Likes: 4645, Tweets: 1164
Where do ideas come from?
November 24, 2010
Score: 23447, Likes: 4046, Tweets: 3217
A eulogy of action
October 05, 2011
Score: 22254, Likes: 4033, Tweets: 2089
Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so [a rant]
October 20, 2010
Score: 20912, Likes: 3702, Tweets: 2402
The world’s worst boss
December 04, 2010
Score: 19394, Likes: 3443, Tweets: 2179
What’s high school for?
May 06, 2011
Score: 19230, Likes: 3379, Tweets: 2335

Some statistical notes:

Before these 1250 posts, Twitter and Facebook adoption were much lower and skew the scoring on a purely social measure.
I did not adjust for time so recent posts are penalized in having less total exposure.
These scores do not reflect inbound links. Social metrics reflect discussability more than permenance.

WECJ3VWNJQQT

#9: In Search of Fans

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 15:36:00 -0400

Month in Review

Things are getting more intense and I’m stoked (trust me, I only pull out that word for important occasions). We’re in the full throws of working on a client project and our own product idea, Zenbox.

Complete with coffee stain.

As you can clearly (not) see, we’re working on an integrated communications tool. We see much of the “email problem” as an issue in the user interface, so the most interesting part is developing an incredibly contextual, intuitive user interface. Obviously, this is much easier said than done, but I don’t think this particular idea warrants anything less than totally ambitious.

Unlike my previous projects, this time we’re going to start marketing long before the product is released. Now when I say marketing, I don’t mean expounding on the virgin virtues of our soon-to-be remarkable product. I mean building a community of interested users, trying to let them guide our hand, and returning the favor with helpful, interesting information (ps, join our mailing list and we shall worship you).

There’s only one bad thing. I’m sort of like the Mitt Romney of startups. You could say that I occassionally have trouble connecting with people. Sometimes I can get into the “flow”, and sometimes I can’t. “Shooting the shit” with people is just hard for my laser-brain to do. That’s probably the reason I exited high school with three friends in a class of 700. Fortunately my cofounder is much more socialable (and sexier) than I am, so I like him to play the good cop in interviews.

To make up for my deficiencies, we’re going to be true engineers and use a data-driven approach to finding our fans. Sure, we talk to people, get feedback, and do research to understand the fundamentals. But we aren’t going to declare “this is the strategy” and blindly follow it. We’ll hypothesize, try something out, and measure the results.

On a Personal Level

This month, I shared my methodology that led us to this particular idea and why we’re bootstrapping with services. I want to thank Patrick McKenzie for his feedback on our bootstrapping approach, but more importantly, I just want to say that the entrepreneurial community rocks. Nearly everyone you’ll approach is helpful and willing to lend their ear to your concerns. It’s great to see a reply from some of these guys whom are obviously extremely busy themselves.

Feedback from our potential Zenbox users has been overwhelmingly great too. Whether it be in person or through email, people have been willing to give us some pretty detailed stuff. Maybe this is just indicative of the early-adopter mentality. Either way, seeing real frustration in potential users and understanding what is important to them has already shifted my thinking in different directions.

Anyway, enough of this abundance of joy. I need to get grumpy and focused again. So without adieu, the numbers:

Revenue
$9,000.00 (+$5,500.00) Services
$150.00 (-$939.34) Merchandise
$9,150.00 (+$4,560.66) Total

We didn’t sell many more Elevation Docks this month and I’ve resigned to push the rest of them on eBay. I’m really bummed that our Name Your Price post got killed on Hacker News (wtf?) as we were on track to sell them all in one day. On our first 400 visits, we had sold 17. I’m pretty sure that 4%+ is the best conversion rate for a payment in the history of Hacker News. Either that or Humble Bundle.

If you’d like a great deal on an Elevation Dock and want to help us out at the same time, please drop by our store!

You're Not Trying Hard Enough

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 15:00:00 -0400

It’s easy to get overwhelmed. When it comes to space, people are expansive. If you give a person more money, they will usually find a way to spend more. Give them more storage and they’ll get more stuff. Clear some time and they’ll fill their todo list. In many ways we create our own problems and then feel powerless to fix them. The truth is that the same weakness that leads to those problems is what we must fix to get out of them.

Acceptance is a big part of my personal philosophy and of several eastern traditions as well. We all know things to be true, but there is a difference between knowing and accepting. For example, we all know that time is finite, more stuff creates more maintenance, and more relationships leads to more expectations. But knowing obviously doesn’t stop us from trying to shove yet another thing into the todo list.

Here’s another thing we all know and choose to ignore: working harder doesn’t necessarily make you more productive, especially in the long term. The solution is obvious: work smarter, not harder. This directive isn’t a shift in what you do so as much as a perspective, a frame of mind.

Let’s do a quick thought experiment. Take a minute to consider this: you need food, so you will go to the grocery store tonight to buy some things. What will you get?

Don’t look ahead, think about the things you’ll get.

Ok good. So you thought, “I definitely need x and y, and maybe z. Maybe I’ll get a little a or b. And I should check to see if we need more c.” Did you write anything down? Did you consider your health? If you’re like me, you just took a minute to do some vacuous, unfocused thinking and simply waited for things to magically pop into your head. You said, “yea, that’d be good.”

Now think about this, or better yet, try to understand it:

Did you feel it? Your mind saw something it wanted to understand and it leaned forward like a runner moments before a sprint. You were focused on proactively using your mind to figure that picture out. Waiting for something to pop into your head feels like the lazy route in comparison to this concentration.

You just experienced what it feels like to work harder. Even the best of us eventually start mentally disengaging, sometimes intermittently and sometimes for long stretches. Your mind literally starts waiting for links to happen instead of trying to force them. The ability to analyze, understand, and conclude slows down and it often goes completely unnoticed.

Close your eyes, lean your mind forward, and focus. When it leans back, it’s time to do something else. Working harder is great, but if you don’t introspect your frame of mind and what you’re accomplishing, you may lead yourself down the wrong path. Stop. Try harder. Get the most out of your time by fully applying yourself. Otherwise you’re just being lazy even though you tell others that you’re working. It’s akin to taking a casual ride through the countryside in your shiny fire truck while someone’s house is burning down.

You have a goal; so do I. We all want to get there as fast as possible with the best we can bring. Inevitably you’ll be solving some sort of problem for yourself or others. If you disengage, you’ll see the problem in the wrong way. To solve the problem of having enemies, you’ll build a moat or a (great) wall. This is a temporary solution to a temporary problem.

I’ll leave you with a quote from someone I greatly admire for being an innovator, artist, and engineer. Leonardo Da Vinci wrote this letter to apply for a position in the Duke of Milan’s court and it exemplifies what working smarter means to me:

Having, most illustrious lord, seen and considered the experiments of all those who pose as masters in the art of inventing instruments of war, and finding that their inventions differ in no way from those in common use, I am emboldened, without prejudice to anyone, to solicit an appointment of acquainting your Excellency with certain of my secrets.

1. I can construct bridges which are very light and strong and very portable, with which to pursue and defeat the enemy; and others more solid, which resist fire or assault, yet are easily removed and placed in position; and I can also burn and destroy those of the enemy.

2. In case of a siege I can cut off water from the trenches and make pontoons and scaling ladders and other similar contrivances.

3. If by reason of the elevation or the strength of its position a place cannot be bombarded, I can demolish every fortress if its foundations have not been set on stone.

4. I can also make a kind of cannon which is light and easy of transport, with which to hurl small stones like hail, and of which the smoke causes great terror to the enemy, so that they suffer heavy loss and confusion.

5. I can noiselessly construct to any prescribed point subterranean passages either straight or winding, passing if necessary underneath trenches or a river.

6. I can make armoured wagons carrying artillery, which shall break through the most serried ranks of the enemy, and so open a safe passage for his infantry.

7. If occasion should arise, I can construct cannon and mortars and light ordnance in shape both ornamental and useful and different from those in common use.

8. When it is impossible to use cannon I can supply in their stead catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other instruments of admirable efficiency not in general use—I short, as the occasion requires I can supply infinite means of attack and defense.

9. And if the fight should take place upon the sea I can construct many engines most suitable either for attack or defense and ships which can resist the fire of the heaviest cannon, and powders or weapons.

10. In time of peace, I believe that I can give you as complete satisfaction as anyone else in the construction of buildings both public and private, and in conducting water from one place to another.

Why We're Selling Services

Mon, 28 May 2012 10:30:00 -0400

TLDR: Consulting is a good way to bootstrap and learn from others.

These days the startup media is covering the likes of YCombinator and Techstars alums who are setting fire to their life rafts and going full sail into unknown oceans. Well that’s not us. The lottery is fun and all, but I’m not sure the safety sell-out is a sustainable approach. We want to create a long-term business that is capable of trying many different products. Even after you reach success, that creative product building experience is a valuable asset.

Consultants have tons of meaningless stock photos. Don’t be that guy.

Services keep you in the game and give you great experience at product-building, especially if you choose your projects wisely. You get a front-row seat into the business opportunities and trials of another team and an opportunity to hone your own skillsets. We really enjoy our current client, so it’s a win-win.

I recently spoke with Patrick McKenzie on this topic and he happily allowed me to share some of that conversation (I highly recommend that any young bootstrapping entrepreneur check him out):

1) Congrats on quitting the day job.

2) Taking contract work to keep a roof over your head is an EXCELLENT IDEA. In addition, right now you’re not quite so experienced at annoying business stuff like e.g. keeping books, managing cashflow, and whatnot. Contracting will help with that.

3) Many successful companies went from having a contracting business to doing 100% product work. 37Signals and Fog Creek spring immediately to mind. Additionally, contracting work tends to expose you to the problems other businesses are having and, hence, would pay to avoid having.

I generally try to keep myself ~ 1/3 utilized on consulting work and have 2/3 to my own projects (and life in general). That balance works pretty well for me, although periodically I have to just pause consulting for a month or two to make progress on Appointment Reminder.

I’ve often wondered if what we’re doing is a cop-out. Every startup event I go to seems loaded with people going our way. The playbook sounds like this: “we’re selling services to fund a product side.” But if you go talk to someone whose been in the consulting game for a long time, they’ll tell you how hard it is to build a product in-house. I suppose the skillsets and team members you acquire along the way just aren’t as suitable for product development. I’m resistant to believe that we will be the same, so time will have to teach me that lesson.

Whether or not it’s the soup du jour, many successful businesses have started off as pure service companies or hybrids like ourselves. They may not be the Apples or Microsofts or Amazons of the world, but you don’t have to go far to find them. I think it’s just a sensible way to bootstrap, and I found the night and weekend thing with a day job to be simply inadequate for building a business. Keep your job if you still want to learn, experiment, or network, but it’s time to go when you want to build. There are many paths to victory.

#8: We Have Our Idea

Thu, 24 May 2012 07:23:00 -0400

Once we decided on our risk appetite (thanks consulting income!), the field of ideas narrowed considerably. The one we came up with, er, stole, is something I’m pretty excited about:

Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a messaging protocol. It’s a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list.

Paul Graham

This is a big, fun, and unique problem. It’s a known problem/market with an unknown solution. That is, people wish there were a solution, but few significant ones have succeeded over the past 40 years. Google and Microsoft are your competitors, MVPs are nearly impossible in such a mature space, and there are thousands of dead startups who have failed this cause before. But the stakes are worth it: a billion dollar market with many more billions in lost potential.

We could go the MVP route by adding X or Y feature to Gmail, but I think a much more fundamental shift is needed. Thus far, most everything else has just served as yet-another-thing-to-click. A new vision makes the marketing plan much more palatable too. Instead of going toe-to-toe with the fat cats, we can attempt to carve out a nonoverlapping segment.

And that will come with the territory. No matter how you change email, 100% of its current users won’t be on board. Email is both ubiquitous and low on abstractions. Make a tweak and you’re going to lose part of your audience. So we’re planning on losing some here and hopefully picking up others there.

Why do I think we have a chance in hell?

The market has stated a desire for a change, though it be presently unknown, and is financially motivated to buy into such.
Past research has indicated a willingness of people to try and use new communication products if they deliver value. At the individual-level, providers have little lock-in.
Our competition is mostly irrelevant in that it’s highly unlikely we’ll both make the same tradeoffs and exist in overlapping market segments.
Risk is high, failure is certain, but the work required isn’t much different than yet-another-pinstagramblur. We’d be going back to the same place anyway - contracting.
We have the hacker, the hustler, and the designer. And they can all code.

So here goes nothing. If you’d like to follow along, visit the future home of This-Is-Gonna-Be-Huge(tm), also known as Zenbox.io.

The Round Table: a Thought Experiment for Idea Evaluation

Sat, 12 May 2012 16:34:00 -0400

Ideas are born from the creative centers of the brain and take on a life of their own as they flourish or die. In their young days, an unbounded enthusiasm fueled by agreeable anecdotes and friends creates a burning desire to start hacking immediately and ignore the consequences. After all, any future problems which arise should be easy to solve: just tap the creative wellspring again for your Jobsian vision for the future.

Most of us who’ve lived that experience once know what the other side feels like. You launch to a whimper, no tech blogs even respond to your tip requests, and your repeat visitor metrics look like your savings account interest rate. And tomorrow it will just get worse. No idea survives first contact with reality. I think we all learn this lesson the hard way and there is no better teacher than this first failure to get you to think before acting.

Ideas must morph from the creative into the rational and that transition is a methodical process that anyone can follow. Before I further develop any concept, I sit down with my Round Table: a mythical group of advisors which express the perspectives of the different realities my idea will face on it’s way through life. Each of these advisors is an incredibly outspoken and pessimistic creature with the attention of a savant. My job is to move them from “what an awful waste of my life” to “interesting”.

User

User only cares about benefits. She cannot hear arguments or data which isn’t phrased as a benefit and any attempts otherwise will infuriate them into an immediate back button. To pass this gauntlet, you must ask yourself how an idea will benefit the user. Most importantly, you must be able to demonstrate that value to them.

This is a good time to start narrowing the scope of your idea to a user segment and persona. If you thought gummy bear cupcakes would be sensational, wait until you meet Vegan Paleo User. And what about young children? They are at the mercy of Carbohydrate-Hating Parent User and Money-Doesn’t-Grow-On-Trees Parent User. Perhaps we can appeal to the Cult of Cute Things 18-24 female segment.

Find a user, a specific user, which has the need, motivation, and ability to embrace your product.

Investor

Investor only cares about returns. If you’re not speaking ROI, you’re pissing in their Cheerios. To pass this gauntlet, you must provide impressive traction metrics, a large and growing addressable market, and a team capable of executing.

This is a good time to start thinking about the market’s dimensions, marketing and sales channels, and customer acquisition costs. If you build NoSql Reporting Engine, can you afford the enterprise sales cycle’s time and cost? Do you have existing customers, preferably those who bought in before you even started building? What’s the total lifetime value of a contract and how well does your pitch convert buyers into customers?

Find a sizable market with available and cost-effective distribution channels combined with your ability to present attractive conversion and retention metrics pre-funding.

Accountant

Accountant only cares about costs. Their sanctuary is the kingdom of credits with walls built skyward to keep the hordes of cash-burning heroes at the gate. To pass this gauntlet, you must afford and justify the cost of success while pricing in the risk of failure.

This is where you look at your runway. How much cash do you have and when will you run out? Will your development or marketing efforts die without an investment injection? If you build Obscenely Greasy, the Fart App then you can afford to get to an MVP and the risk of ruin is calculated on how many of these spammy ideas you can work through before failing. Saving Your Life, the Complete Heart Cloning System will take significant capital in both human and resource terms. You’ll need to support such a risky venture with an alternate income stream, a willing angel, or a “wedge” come-to-market strategy.

Find a cost structure which lets you get to a scalable cash-flow positive outcome before the Ramen runs out.

Builder

Builder only cares about creating things. Here lies the knowledge and ability to create your vision. Feed him accomplishable objectives and a safe habitat or he will go back to the Corporate Headquarters Inc who will.

This is where you decide if your team is up to the task. Ability and expertise must be a given. What we really care about is if these people can work together productively and share a passion for what they’re creating. Can the bros get up in the morning to work on The Worlds Greatest Recipe Book? What if one person will only work well with Neckbeards or has a prejudice against Beardfaces.

Find a passion for which you’re all willing to go to war.

The Savant Round Table can be an exhausting and frustrating place. You’ll often have to leave the building to speak with users, research markets, or have humble team discussions. The reward is your idea’s first birthday, the place where you can start discussing it’s merits and implementation from an objective, rational point-of-view. Don’t sweat the fatalities along the way. They may be brutally frequent but their reward is measured in months or years of saved time.

Which savant personalities would you use? Who would you add or remove? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Are You Peeing Enough?

Sun, 06 May 2012 14:48:00 -0400

TLDR: Drink 3 liters of water a day or you will be stupid.

We could have said drinking instead, but then we couldn’t use this bad-ass toilet pic!

Mild dehydration is the most common and easily avoided brain health issue I see programmers fail on a regular basis. Even a small drop in optimal hydration, say 1-2%, can degrade cognitive performance and mood. Over a longer period, a brain without enough water is unable to effectively cleanse itself of toxins leading to potentially irreversible degradation of memory and ability. Everyone’s body varies, but for myself, I start feeling ADHD and foggy-headed when I haven’t had enough water.

One of the most fascinating aspects of neurons is that they store water in tiny balloon-like structures called vacuoles. Water is essential for optimal brain health and function. Water is necessary to maintain the tone of membranes for normal neurotransmission. It enhances circulation and aids in removing wastes. Water keeps the brain from overheating, which can cause cognitive decline and even damage. This is one of the main reasons to encourage students to drink water during exercise. Dehydration most commonly occurs because children go long periods of time without drinking water. When they are thirsty they often choose sweetened drinks instead of water. By the time thirst is felt, there may be a loss of body weight up to 2% from water loss, and a 10% cognitive decline may be present. Dehydration can lead to fatigue, dizziness, poor concentration and reduced cognitive abilities. Even mild levels of dehydration can impact school performance.

Healthy Brain for Life

Most of us programmers live by the sword, and by sword, I mean King Kong sized vats of coffee. The caffeine, sugar, and sweeteners contained in our daily intake of coffee, tea, and soft drinks act as strong dehydrators on the body. These chemicals effects, known as diuretics, causes an increased heart rate and loss of liquids through urination. Now contrary to popular belief, caffeine doesn’t actually cause much water loss in habitual users. But many of us spend the first half of the day on a cup or two of coffee until lunchtime and it’s simply not enough liquid.

So how do you know you aren’t getting enough water? Some things are obvious such as thirst and a dry mouth. Others are not so immediately linked to dehydration: fatigue, yellow piss (sorry, urine), headache, a warm forehead, and lightheadedness. I can’t tell you how many times a day you should be hitting the bathroom (everyone’s different), but if you’re peeing less than usual, chances are it’s already too late. You need more water and eight cups won’t do.

Have you ever heard the eight cups of water a day advice? I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it was a good idea. The saying is about as ubiquitous as Disney when you’re young. The truth is that you need far more, around 3 liters for men and 2.5 for women. Eight cups comes out to be a little less than two liters.

Now many people don’t have a problem actually drinking. If you put a cup beside someone, they will habitually drain it, sometimes without even noticing. But the thing people miss is getting back up for a refill, something I’m guilty of myself. The remedy is easy: just keep a water bottle with you.

Peeing more and with clear urine is a good thing. Before you go grab a modafinil, make sure you’ve got your dietary basics covered first.

#7: Iterating without a Product

Wed, 02 May 2012 20:41:00 -0400

Month in Review

Damn this month flew by fast. Time flies when you’re having fun, and I’ve definitely had a good time on this ride so far. We cemented our team’s partnership and core values, got underway on some exciting client work, and threw out our first product experiment.

Our experiment this month was a creative approach to Elevation Docks. It’s an MVP of sorts but of which kind I have no idea. A startup funding mechanic? Kickstarter arbitrage? We’ll see what the data and our customers tell us. The only decision that had to be made was if we were going to try to ink out every dollar in profit from our Kickstarter pledge. The answer was no.

Everything in a young startup’s life is an opportunity, so we chose to take a flyer and study the results. So far we’ve learned a few new e-commerce and marketing tricks which have been rewarding by themselves. I hope we’ll get the chance to put out at least one new concept a month: validated learning is a useful tool even before you’ve chosen an idea to run with.

Just f’ing do it, as they say. I didn’t over-analyze our effort or even premeditate what a desirable outcome would be. The primary goal is simply to sell our docks so we can avoid paying a rediculous inventory tax at the end of the year. Whenever you invest 3-4 days of work into an idea, bozo-ing around in abstract discussions seems like a total waste of perfectly good building time.

By the way, if you’d like a great deal on an Elevation Dock and want to help us out at the same time, please drop by our store!

On a Personal Level

This month, I shared a couple of my closely held beliefs about learning from your mistakes and how anyone can find intelligence or creativity. There’s one more that I’d like to share, “Always Leave Yourself an Out,” but I didn’t find the time to write it up this month. Something about publishing your core beliefs is quite satisfying to the ego, so perhaps I’ll save it for a rainy day when things inevitably dip south.

My partner, Trent, and I also attended Birmingham’s own Startup Summit and I think I can speak for both of us in saying that it was a totally awesome experience. Kudos to Tony Summerville and Jonathan Sides for putting it on. Our humble little town boasts one of the best tech incubators in all the kingdoms and a tight knit community of founders; we hope to do them proud.

When you spend so much time in work-isolation, it’s a nice change-of-pace to spend time with your startup peers. No one else on the planet will understand you like they do. And this makes for an easy piece of advice: seek out your local startup community, these guys will just get it and can often help you in unexpected ways.

As for the company itself, we spent some time discussing what core values we would like to embody. We’re still evaluating product ideas, but I don’t think it’s a travesty to not have a mission yet. However, defining your purpose from day one is crucial in establishing a why and how into what you’re doing. This month I’ll share some of those values and how we’re attacking the search for a product idea.

But first, the numbers.

Revenue
$3,500.00 (+$3,000.00) Services
$1,089.34 (+$1,089.34) Merchandise
$4,589.34 (+$4,089.34) Total

As I promised you last month, we definitely brought in alot more bacon. We started working on a web application for a client we really love which should keep us occupied for the coming months. The Elevation Dock revenue looks pretty, but the margin has been about half of what I’d like it ot be. We’ve made around $120 on the first 20 docks we sold.

I know angels are popular these days, but I will stand by raising our own money as long as it makes sense. The market for contract work is pretty killer right now so a little patience can go a long way in bootstrapping. The approach isn’t for every team or idea, but so far it’s working for us.