When the startup feels stuck

When the startup feels like it's in a rut, or no progress is being made (because of team, money, supplier, distributor, etc.) there are a few options:

1) Hope that the logjam will break up by itself

2) Attack the logjam(s)

3) Attack different problems

4) Hope for an amazing stroke of luck -- someone unexpectedly drops a solution right into your path

5) Other outcome

In my mind, #1 and #4 are possible, but unlikely. Option #2 is warranted, but unpleasant, and sometimes not possible to address (eg., a customer repeatedly blows you off). #3 is a great option -- there is ALWAYS something that needs to be done, and making progress on those fronts can make you feel a lot better.

As for #5, what else did I miss?

The six-month startup has a name!

I'm so glad we've chosen a name (which I hope to reveal in the not-too-distant future), and grabbed the .com domain. It gives us an identity to hang our hat on, and is something that conveys more legitimacy to potential partners and customers than just our names and gmail addresses.

Both of us feel more invested in the venture because of the new name.

Next steps: Email, Google Apps, Website.

How to describe a pre-funded startup in one sentence

A business school classmate emailed me to ask what's going on. My response:

Early-stage startup life: Some days are really good, some are depressingly bad, most filled with uncertainty, all characterized by poverty.

What keeps me awake at night as an entrepreneur

I woke up in the middle of the night, with a disturbing thought in my head about the startup:

What the hell am I doing? How can my startup possibly succeed, with competitors lurking out there, little IP, and no money?

The day before, I had a pretty dismal day with the six-month startup (no progress). The tech startup was up and down -- a good lunch meeting with my cofounder in which we narrowed down our next steps, and I did a pretty good analysis of some of the market factors that we need to pay attention to. But we still have so far to go.

In the meantime, I have no income, and many, many costs, including looming student debt (payments start 6 months after graduation).

The worry and anxiety caught up with me in my dream state. Self-doubt regularly surfaces, but this was a particularly bad. This morning I was able to "talk myself down", and pledge to make some real progress tomorrow. But it would help if I had someone to commiserate with at a moments notice (both of my partners were not available).

The financial bar vs. the courage bar

A great quote from Ben Horowitz's blog:

Over the past 10 years, technological advances dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.

The quote comes at the end of his post about leaders making tough decisions. Well worth a read.

(via Hacker News)

Phone vs. Email

I admit it. I'm an email guy at heart. I'll gladly spend 10 minutes hammering out an email (or using any other form of asynchronous, electronic dialogue like a forum, Twitter, or G+) than picking up a phone for one minute.

Why? I'm not as good at spontaneous discussions as I am at writing. There's no record of the conversation that I can refer back to. I worry that the person on the other end doesn't want to talk with me for some reason. I hate to make small talk. I forget to ask or say certain things. Sometimes I say the wrong thing. Because it's spontaneous and anyone can say or ask anything, I don't have control over the conversation in the same way I do with email.

But my reluctance to pick up the phone is a limitation, and not just because it takes more time to write an email than it does to speak on the phone with someone. A sizable portion of the population of the population prefers to use the phone over asynchronous communication. For instance, at my old job, I learned who these people were, and tried to accomodate them. Sometimes I was forced to -- they did not consistently respond to email, which meant that I had to pick up the phone or grab them in the hallway if I happened to see them.

I've found that of my two new ventures, the people I interact with for the tech startup are very much focused on email, Yammer, and Twitter. The phone is important only when we have a face-to-face meeting and need to let the other party know where we are or that one of us will be late.

For the six-month product startup, on the other hand, I have found that almost everybody is a phone guy. I suspect it relates to the quick-moving culture of manufacturing, where people tend to be on the shop floor or moving between meetings. Of course, they won't necessarily adapt to my communications needs, so it's up to me to adapt to their ways of doing business -- which means organizing my thoughts, gritting my teeth, and picking up the phone.

A LinkedIn profile for entrepreneurs: Starting from scratch

Tonight's challenge: Rewriting my LinkedIn profile. I've been on LinkedIn for years, and think it's a super tool for highlighting my career and creating a personal brand. But there are two problems:

- It reads like a corporate résumé, as opposed to an entrepreneurship-focused resume

- Some of my career highlights -- including a slew of awards -- relate to expertise that has nothing to do with my current entrepreneurial ventures.

So, I'm going to rewrite it. One thing I've learned from past efforts is that it's very difficult to do a rewrite by looking at the existing entries -- if they're well-written, or highlight elements that are points of pride, it's very difficult to delete them and start from scratch.

Instead, I am going to really start from scratch, based on the things that I know I want to emphasize, and not even look at what I have up there now. I am also going to ignore LinkedIn's classic format, which is oriented toward chronologically ordered corporate careers. I've seen examples on LinkedIn in which entrepreneurs use the "summary" field to write their résumé the way they want, and this seems like a potential approach. Once I am ready to show my work of art, I'll leave a link here ... stay tuned!

Update: David Meerman Scott has written an excellent blog post about why he's not on LinkedIn. Another marketing pro, Seth Godin, also avoids LinkedIn ... and Facebook. There is a sound argument for avoiding LinkedIn for both -- their branding is tied up with their blogs, books, and speaking engagements, and having people turn to Linkedin to learn about them devalues their existing online resources, and by extension, their brands.

Iteration: Drop consulting plan?

In my first post to this blog ("The Six Month Startup"), I talked about doing some consulting on the side to help pay the bills while I got the tech startup and six-month startup off the ground. Yesterday, I met with a former colleague who now has her own consulting business about my plan.

The good news: It's very easy to get started -- basically hanging out your shingle (including putting up a website), mentioning your services to everyone in your network, and starting the sales process with your first leads.

The bad news: Getting into consulting will suck energy from the startups, even if I am strict in my plan to allot just 10 hours per week to consulting. The reason: There are a lot of follow-up and back-office tasks related to marketing, sales cycles, collection, accounting, etc. that not only take up a lot of time, but require attention throughout the day, which distracts from anything else that's going on and reduces the paid consulting hours out of the planned 10-hour weekly allotment.

My colleague asked me: Is it worth it?

I didn't have to consider the answer. No, it's not. I want both startups to have a real shot at success and get the right start in life, and if it means pulling the belt a little tighter, so be it.

Communicating with suppliers: Local accents rule!

I've found that when I am talking to people on the phone for the product startup, local suppliers often have local accents. It's not surprising; die-cutting shops and some printers are blue-collar places. They are usually staffed by people who grew up in eastern New England. When I hear this on the phone, I almost unconsciously shift my own accent away from standard "North American" to something that's a bit more Eastern Mass. But just a bit.

It's not hard to do. I grew up here too, and while I never had a Boston accent -- my parents were from out of state, only a few friends in high school had light accents, and I spent most of my 20s overseas -- speaking with a slight inflection feels natural. I assume it helps a little in terms of letting people on the other end feel more comfortable, but maybe I'm assuming too much.

Design problem: Die-cutting at an angle

A message to my partner in the six-month startup:

Just spoke with someone at in New Hampshire, who designs dies for die-cutting presses.

He said it's not possible to design dies that go at an angle. This is what you originally thought (the cookie cutter model). I spoke with another die designer in Wakefield, who confirmed this but added that when you are stamping foam, it usually ends up with concavity because the foam compresses as you push down (this kind of jives with what seemed to think it was possible). However, the Wakefield die designer said that he is not sure if you could design a die that tried to get a uniform concavity every time. He noted that it's usually something people try to eliminate with foam.

He suggested that different cutting techniques -- reciprocal knife cutting and water jet cutting -- might be possible, although the latter might not be appropriate for foam.

I got another piece of intel from someone who actually operates die presses -- she said it's basically 15 cents every time the press comes down.

So, we have a few options:

- Pursue die cutting, test concavity on different foams with different foam densities
- Explore alternate cutting tech (reciprocal knife cutting)
- Molds?

Deciding on a company name

For the product startup, we need a name. I thought we could put it off for awhile, but that won't work. An excerpt from the email I sent to my co-founder this morning:

Let's get a good company name and domain through Google Apps. Whenever I talk with people on the phone, they want to know the name of the company. I tell them "<redacted>" but that's the product name ... not sure if we want something that could be more flexible for future products in different areas. It also looks weird when I send email from my personal or .edu accounts. I figure if we decide on a name, we can simultaneously get the domain and a Google Apps account, which includes email from that domain.

Die cutting costs, and a metrics mistake

Talking to a local die-cutting shop, as I research potential suppliers and prototype manufacturers. Found out that the creation of the die is actually done elsewhere, and that once a production run starts, "every time the press comes down it's 15 cents."

Then there was this, when I was describing the dimensions of the product we want die cut in millimeters:

"What's that? We don't do millimeters."

Chalk it up to quirks of the American manufacturing industry ...

The six-month startup

A little over two months ago I finished business school. Since then, a lot of friends, classmates, former colleagues and family members have been asking "what's next?"

The short answer: Startups.

A slightly longer answer: I am working on two startup ventures, and seeking some consulting work on the side to help pay the bills.

Both of the startups are at an early stage of development. One of them, which I will simply call the “tech startup,” won’t turn into a full-time endeavor until early 2012 owing to prior commitments among the team. But we have already begun work, and are thick in the ideation phase. The ideas are coming fast and furious, and we are constantly iterating upon them.

Then there is the other venture, which I am calling the six-month startup. Unlike the tech startup, the six-month startup is not software. It is centered around a real-world product, which myself and another partner hope to design, build and launch in a six-month period. Technology will come into play, but during design, marketing and order processing, as opposed to the operation of the product (there are no embedded software or other electronics involved). Our idea was hatched in mid-July, and we set a goal of getting the product to market by Christmas. We already have a good idea of the product features and have a rudimentary prototype; now we have to decide on materials and work out the many details relating to manufacturing. I won’t talk about the product just yet, but will talk about some of the learning experiences (and difficulties) as the project progresses.

The idea of building and launching a product in a short period of time is not new to the startup world. “Lean” development processes have been a mantra since the beginning of the Web and perhaps even earlier. It’s also possible to develop physical goods on a quick prototyping/iteration cycle. But, as I’ve found out in the last few weeks, there are a lot of of obstacles to getting a prototype built using the same materials that will eventually appear in the finished product.

Is it possible to simultaneously get two startups and a sideline consulting business off the ground and on a path to success? Probably.

Am I naive to think that we can get a product to market in six months? Maybe.

But I have a belief in myself, my partners, and our ideas. Further, I refuse to accept conventional assumptions about what’s possible until I have tried them myself.

Lastly, while validation of our ideas and building successful businesses are the ultimate goals, I acknowledge that I may fail … but through failure I will learn and iterate for success the next time around.