2above.com

Building a website is not running a business, far from it. It’s only the very beginning of beginning to run a business. Yet it often feels like it, especially for us whose entire product and business model are built on the site, no inventory, no shipping physical goods.

I have been building prototype for a while now, and pretty open about exploring options on how to get the site built from ground up. I used to be lazy: thinking to shed a small amount of money to hire a random developer, and wait for miracle to happen. No, in fact, I wasn’t waiting for miracle to happen, I worked pretty hard after the site is built in hope to see miracle: the user adoption. Maybe the idea was not good enough, but I think the key is the quality of the product.

To build a solid ground to run a business on in a niche market I believe in, it’s especially important to have a solid product design and product execution.

I don’t have the luxury of finding a rich relative, special friend to be my investor, I don’t have the luxury from a previous success, heck, I don’t even have a long time friend that I can think of to become my partner at this early stage without asking him/her to give up comfortable lifestyle: when you are no longer 20something and you want to start over, risk taking soul mate is hard to find.

So, what are my options?

Well, it never hurt to ask.

In the past three weeks, I have contacted more than two dozen people, from close friends, to linkedin requests, I have met people for a short lunch break or a long technology meetup; I have skyped, text messaged with people from all over the world or guys next door. People are generally good, NICE. But there are times that nice people think you are crazy trying to do so much with so little. Sometime, the responses, if any, was simply ignoring my requests; Well I do have thick skins.

A contact from the top Ruby developer circle told me that any type of social site needs at least $x to $y to have a first round of most basic feature sets to be built, excluding hosting cost in the future. The running rate for a top developer or development shop like pivotal is astoundingly high.

True. The reality is cruel.

However, a motivated person, a starter, should never take things at its face value. We should always dig the stories behind options, and be creative and find our own approach. That is what starting up is all about: finding a path few has taken, a path belonging to our own.

Although doing research to explore my options is pain on the butt, it can be fun and rewarding. Reality sets in, and you have to treat the whole thing like running a business from very beginning. Besides, the research often led to surprising finds in good ways.

Well, I won’t go into all the details, but I have found what I was looking for.

StyleSeat.com humbles me. It gets me thinking, it calms me down. What I need to be doing can be summed up like what I put on my StyleSeat.com’s profile.

Be active; your mind and your body.
Be gentle; You will be treated the same.
Be loving; only love fulfills.
Be humble; Nothing will be impossible.
Be patient; wonder will come your way.

Think about it, these qualities are truly what I need to be happy, and achieve what I always want.

So, I have been working on prototyping my niche social site for a while now, after feeling complete at ease and comfortable with my product idea. (That is one of the key reasons that I have not blogged much lately)

Now the new problem arises: how to get the real, full functional site built?

I am evaluating a few options:
1. Outsource through sites like elance.com: however it’s extremely hard to find developers/designers who are capable of building fully interactive, social site/widgets like many we already use.
2. Find a technical cofounder locally, who has the experience and talent: I do have a few great friends who are smart, solid, experienced. However I am leaning toward to get the site built for a public beta test first to proof the concept, get the users before promising other great talent with equities that I am not even sure about.
3. Invest my time and money to find really talented developers through virtually/physically social with who have been there, done that.

The third option is a little unusual comparing to 1 and 2. I am a loyal audience for Mixergy’s interview like this one because Andrew always humanize the otherwise mysterious early stage of any startup efforts. Watching his interviews simply gives me more access to not only those who already succeeded, but also those who are just like me, are building for the future. For example, One of Andrew’s newest sponsor is called loseitorloseit.com. I checked it out, and love the site (not that I need to lose weight). It’s almost impossible to find developers on elance to be able to build something like this. Loseitorloseit.com pointed me to its developers forge38.com, a full stack fast prototyping shop in US. Now, forge38 seems to be the type of developers that I am interested to get my site built.

The benefit working with US, cutting edge shop like forge38.com would be a top notch social site built to function and appeal to US/western audience, good for business. The challenge would probably be the cost. Early entrepreneur like me are tight with money. Every dollar counts. And I am not complaining it. As 37signal.com has pointed out, limited resource is your best friend, not enemy. It helps you build only the epicenter of the product and focus on building the core of the value.

I think I am going through option 3, I need to find out a few top notch developers, figure out the budget, and go all the way. I rather bleed more $$ to come up with a MUCH better site.

Are you a great developers/designers who have a solid portfolio and look for opportunities? I would love to hear from you!

Big boys are the guys who are really good at what they do.

Little boys are the rest of us, who admire big boys.

The mindset of big boys:

1. They truly enjoy what they do
2. They constantly look for new struggles to make them better
3. They ignore competitions
4. They do NOT admire
5. They focus on Now
6. They do not believe in “secret formula”, they do not believe in the answers/solution that can be applied to themselves that are handed by others. Instead, they constantly practice on their own, exchange ideas on the side; and when they find the solution, they are glad to share.
7. They don’t care what “success” is defined, they just keep their heads down, do what they are good at.

The mindset of little boys:

1. They (or we) really admire big boys
2. They keep the little “answers” or “solutions” they learn from “success seminars” to their own, and refuse or do not know how to invent their own solutions for the problem they face
3. They do not really enjoy what they do
4. They focus on “one day”, future. They forget about “now”
5. They don’t truly know “practice makes perfect”
6. They believe in luck way too much.
7. They think about “success” too much

For starters, or aspiring entrepreneurs, it’s important to take that leap of faith: set your mindset as if you are big boys.

I used to admire the hell of every big boy that I can find through reading online (techcrunch, hello?), through my successful friends, even through my windsurf buddies who know how to maneuver every move no matter how vicious (or awesome) the wind is.

The truth was: I believed there are magic solutions out there that I just did not know: if I am lucky, someone might just give it to me.

The truth was: I had no idea what it takes to be really successful is to forget about being successful altogether.

Wake up, aspiring entrepreneurs, stop being a little boy, set your mind to be among big boys.

Do following to set your mind (and yourself) among the big boys:

1. Start working on things that you personally care or have deep experience, or have easy access to.
2. Finding some real world problems within that area.
3. Looking for solutions for those problems.
4. Keep practicing the problem solving skills for your interested area until you find a solution that you are happy with.
5. Once you become happy, you will find more motivation, you will stop admiring, you will start to focus more of your energy on your own. You will become willing to share. You will be constantly above your own game.

So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to grow up!

I came across an article called “The No. 1 habit of highly creative people” by Leo Babauta.

In one word: Solitude

I immediately thought of things and theories related to happiness, creativity, greatness, success, personal suffering, I thought of poets, scientists, philosophers, writers, musicians…great intellects. I keep pondering about whether personal suffering is the single most important drive to success and creativity. I keep thinking about the connection between happiness and achievements, and thought of the fact that Mexico and Philippine are statistically considered the two happiest countries in the world, yet having un-proportional low impact on science, technology, business, art etc.. I keep thinking about what a man with dream should pursue: happiness or greatness? Or could there be one that unifies both. I keep thinking about the study showing the correlation between high intelligence and ultimate unhappiness. Is pursuit of happiness doomed for people whose ideal life should be spectacular, an ideology, an odyssey?

Understand Solitude and desire

Wikipedia has it – Solitude is a state of seclusion or isolation;

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” ~Albert Einstein

Solitude is against human nature. Yet, solitude creates space for human to think. Solitude comes as a natural part when we are young, do not have family, no one relies on us, we live for our own being. We roam the society alone until one day we meet someone, form a relationship, a family, and life goes on. All of sudden, it’s hard to find your own space, let alone to think and create things substantial.

The kind of solitude when we are actually alone (or lonely) is different from the one that we purposefully seek out when we have family, circles of friends, and lots of social interaction. Even though I have clear idea of what to work on, the fear for too much solitude drives me to seek ways to satisfy youth left in my body: the desire, the temptations come knocking at the door. I find myself distracted by all kinds of parties, exotic resorts, beautiful women etc.. I feel the urge, the fire, sometime I let them burst out, sometime, like most of this memorial weekend, I forced myself to completely remove the part hour, turning off TV, make fresh hot green tea with some raw honey, open up curtain to let the breeze in, see the green branches swing outside my window, open up a notepad to actually CREATE. The kind of solitude created this way suppressed my physical desire, my desire for others’ attention and female touch and love, my desire to travel far and away and indulge myself in the bright sun and pouring rain. But it’s also the kind of solitude that gives me space to think and keep moving, finding creativity and getting things done. To create is to suffer. But if it gives back things that are satisfying to you more than just physical indulgence, would you mind to suffer a little?

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• The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People (zenhabits.net)

Last year I almost launched a website code named “shibuzz”: it is an app for people to treat their favorite restaurants as if they are music collections. Like music, different restaurants can be good for different purposes (business lunch, romantic dinner etc.). Wouldn’t it be nice to have such a personal collection so you don’t have to keep searching everytime you need to go out for dinner? I eventually did not launch the project for a variety of reasons, the key one is this market is kinda saturated, the other factor is complexity the product involves and I did not do a good job to keep the focus sharp (being the itune like “restaurant” collection) and eventually worn out product team’s patience, my bad.

A vision needs to be sketched out and focused. Among so many food/restaurant related iphone apps, websites, I can honestly say I only use opentable.com. Nevertheless, upcoming startup foodspotting.com seems to be very interesting, and its laser sharp focus on “beautiful looking dishes on the spot” seems to be working out so far. I spotted their initial product vision published here .

Very interesting! Don’t mix the sketch with my “product sketch”. Everyone has his/her own way of getting job done. They apparently did a much better job than I had, so kudos to foodspotting team

Rework, the 2nd popular book from 37signals.com’s Jason Fried, and David Heinemeier Hansson, is an easy but rewarding read. It takes me about half a day to finish reading it, without further peruse, the following is the 1 principle, 3 tips about starting a business (a product, a service etc.) that I have found most memorable and rewarding for me.

1 principle: Less is more

Tip1: Start from Epicenter of the idea, product
Epicenter is the core and what a product stands for. Stick to/start with what product stands for and only build features that defines you and your business. Build half the products that you want to build, but not half assed product; cutting out what is merely good, only keep the core and the best.

Tip2: Break down into smaller projects
“Rework” is brilliant on its chapter structure. Each “chapter” has only 1 to 2 pages, making it extremely fulfilling to read since I know I am making progress by moving down to more chapters. I had experiences reading traditional books with long chapters, although I did enjoy the story, I found myself often skipping, flipping pages to see how many more left to finish the chapter, to move on. Building a product for a new business should be the same way, instead of setting up long term goals, 3 months long feature sets plan, breaking them down to mini-sets, weekly feature-sets-milestone will make you aware of your progress more, bringing more motivation and fuel to keep going strong. This is how I am building mine now.

Tip3: Constrain is the resource and Outside money is plan Z
I love this tip. Never take outside money before you build out the epicenter of your product. Resource constraint is a good thing that will force us to build only the most necessary to launch the core of our product, our business, our service.

Bonus tips: teaching is the new promotion
Once you have something built up and to show the world, you will need to promote it. Out-teach, not out-spend your competitors: rework encourages. My full time job is a company that is obsessed with educating our audience; more and more software, product, even service companies are now offering webinars, free white paper, free conference etc. to “educate” and “build” an “audience”. “Teach and you will form a bond you just don’t get from traditional marketing tactics…earning people’s loyalty by teaching them forms whole difference connection. They will trust you more. They’ll respect you more.. – page 173, Rework.

So, go teach, build an audience, build a bond, establish connection, enable trust. Doing so we will prosper together.

Once I figure out what project to work on, the next step is to conceptualize it, visualize it before building it out. During this period of time of roughly 2 weeks before I set out to work on the product, I spent time constantly evaluating the options of either finding a technical partner to work on this from scratch, or building this out through hiring a technical team of developers/designs. Note that finding partner in bay area is completely different from hiring an outsourcing company. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages. I go with what I feel right: in this case, my project won’t be a technological breakthrough, there don’t seem to be an immediate need to work with a top notch technical partner. Reliability is key, in either case, I will invest my time, resources, others’ time etc., but the goal is to get something built out exactly how I want in the time period I want it to finish. So, I am choosing the statistically more reliable rout without leaving too much to the unknown. It’s simple statistics.

The most important thing in outsourcing a project to a remote team (or developer/designer) are the clarity of your product, and the quality of the hired team. Assuming you are lucky to have a great team, the last unknown factor is how you communicate your requirement to that team. This is where “product management” comes into the picture. We all know big or small tech firms have a team of people working on defining the product features according to their understanding of the market. These people are “product managers”.

To be your own product manager requires one to pass the concept, look and feel to your developers/designers to make sure the less questions are to be asked, the more clarity they have. The following are the hard learned lessons from my previous projects that I am making sure not to reproduce the same mistake again.

1. Be clear with your product, conceptually.
Given you have conceptualized the whole thing, it’s helpful to think from functionality perspectives what your system may contain, write them out in plain English, to answer these questions
1) define what the system does
2) what can people do with your product
3) how do they do it.

Sometime, a simple chart will outline what the system does. Here is an example that I did before.

2. Be clear with your product, visually
Imagine and assign one or a few screen-shots to each main feature, and draw a map like flow chart between each screen. I attached an example from a previous project I worked on. “P1 to P7 are the 7 main ‘pages’ reflecting 7 ‘features’”. I drew arrows between each to describe the navigational flow.

3. Clearly mock up how each screen UI you defined
Visualize how each page looks like to you, draw them out using however tools you prefer. I usually just hand sketch on a piece of paper, but there are many tools like balsamiq if you prefer more refined mock-ups. The following is a P1 to P7 mock up that I did before, all hand sketch.

4. Set up your budget and prepare to pay up
Set up a development fund that 30% above market price, this way you will most likely get a quality team who can fullfill your project in a timely manner, in a quality manner. In the long run, it saves the money. Don’t be stingy but always be tight on every penny you spend, as many successful entrepreneurs point out, the shoestring budget is our advantage, not enemy. With it, we can spend our resources to the most needed area without distraction.

That is it. Be your own product manager, and get it done.

I left a long comment on Andrew Warner’s program with Sally Hogshead, and I feel it’s necessary to expand on that. In the post below, I will explain a pleasant shopping experience that I had today on Sand Hill Road after meeting with a Googler, discuss key factors driving consumers to make unconscious decision, as a reward for people to read my blog, I am presenting a Free idea that Aardvark should probably pay me for further discussion;)

I was shopping at safeway near Sandhill Road at Palo Alto today for two things: facial cream for men, and one bottle of wine. Coming into the store, I was completely confused with all those brands display on the shelf: the only things that make sense to me are the price, discount offered through safeway membership card, and a few names I recognize overheard on Radio or TV commercial. Since it’s a small purchase, I didn’t really care about price, all I really wanted was for someone to tell me right there what facial cream is best for my skin. But no one was around in the skin care aisle. I didn’t want to be stuck for months with a big bottle of cream that is not good for my skin. I was struggling…

I finally pulled the trigger, bought a bottle of facial cream, based on the following factors that I “neurologically” remembered, in this order of importance.
1. brand name (that I heard from TV): I feel certain brands have a more prestige than others;
2. the smell of my own shaving cream: I want my facial cream to have similar “manly” scent
3. the scientific word such as “clinically proven”: as superficial it sounds, a few words written on the label do make me feel “safer”
4. the looks of the bottle, packages: I am naturally drawn to more condensed, thought out design and package.
5. the price:
Because of all the guesstimate, I am not entirely comfortable with my choice.

In the same Safeway on Sand Hill Road, there is bigger (huge) collections of wines. Looking at thousands of bottles can be overwhelming. After staring for 15 mins today, I still could not decide which one of the thousands wines available to buy: I just want ONE bottle of wine that goes well with my to-be-baked dry spice marinated pork BBK!! Why does this have to be this complicated!
Luckily, there was a wine steward by the name “John” working in the aisle helping consumer making decision. What I did was to walk to John, striking up a conversation, told him what I am about to cook, and ask for his recommendation: I was wowed! It has become the BEST wine introduction I ever had! With only 15 mins, through interactive conversation, all live, with him, I am comfortable to say that I have leaned more about wine (types, names, bottle shapes, origins, flavors, ages, pairing etc.) than probably 90% of consumers walking down that aisle, and, I bought 3 bottles of wine, more sales for Safeway.

Decision making is a very tricky process for human brain, options won’t surface without advocate. An live advocate like John at the right time can be critical.

That got me thinking: why there is not such a system in place?

I am talking about a live help system like Aardvark (vark.com) in real time.

Forget about yelp.com, forget about Amazon’s reviews, forget about ratings.

Imagine you are shopping for a bottle of wine, knowing that you will entertain people with certain type of cooking. You are walking down the wine aisle, ask your iphone app: shopping for wine. The app will automatically reach out to people with knowledge about wines. Those who are available to help you in live time will be presented to you on your iphone (or whatever smart phone you use), you simply pick a person, the app will connect you two in real time through voice (hands free) mode and the wine expert will be able to see the collections of wines you are staring at through your iphone’s camera, while you guys can have a live conversation through the app which may rout through skype.

This type of live recommendations will be exponentially more powerful than what Aardvark, or any big guys including Google (now that Aardvark is part of Google) has. Why can’t they build a system like this. Given Google’s resource, it’s not that hard!

It’s been 10 weeks since I started “Daily things to do as entrepreneur“. I have probably evaluated no less than 30 different ideas. I have followed so many entrepreneurs’ stories, read so many different blogs, even books, all of which continue to inspire me. The more I read, the more I experience, the more I am convinced that there are really no “correct” answers about many facets of starting up. There is no straight answers about if you should follow your passion, or how to find your passion; no one can tell you how to form a vision; there are no straight answer about whether you should start with a 15 years long term vision, or just stumbling upon ideas that stick; there is no right or wrong about if you need and how to find a partner. You should not believe in either outsourcing your development or doing it yourself, etc. etc.

All in all, every situation is different, we are human being and we all have different stories. I have seen plenty of examples, especially thanks to Andrew Warner’s Mixergy interview like this one, that plenty of entrepreneurs following completely opposite routs but end up all very successful in their own ways.

So, I have been thinking: if every entrepreneur has different successful stories, there must be some common denominator among all that contributes to their success. What is it?!

It turns out, all successful entrepreneurs have dug really deep into the market they chose.

You don’t have to be passionate about the market before you dig deep into it.

You don’t need to keep thinking about how to get a partner.

You don’t need to worry about how to implement the idea, just yet.

I have adopted following methods/ideas to help with digging deep and defining what to work on. Everything else will follow.

1. Narrow down to a few markets to enter
Keep a pen/paper or PDA on hand at anytime to jog down worthy ideas when they surface. I have collected ideas this way in the past 10 weeks that provided a good mix of breadth and depth. I then work on narrowing down to ideas that I either personally WANT to do, OR that I am curious to do a bit more digging. It turns out what I want to work on may not necessarily the projects worth working on.

2. Dig Deep:
Once you have narrowed down to a few ideas, it’s time to pay particular attention to the markets that you are already familiar with, even you may not have any interest or passion about.
1) First, you need to research the market size: a very preliminary way to do this is through Google keywords discovery tool. By typing the keywords that are relevant to that market, Google keywords tool will provide you information on global monthly search volume, how competitive these keywords are (to see how many advertisers, or potential competitors are already in the market)
2) Identify and research competitors: Techcrunch is a great place to find out the front runners in the market you are interested. Type in the keywords in Techcrunch.com and it will spit out bunch of blog posts writing about the startups relevant to that market. Once you identified the front runners, read the article, and read MORE the comments. TC blog posts’ comments are the most valuable content because many ambitious entrepreneurs, knowledgeable professional will provide more relevant players in the market.
3) Defining the problems people have and startups are solving: going to the competitors/startups’ website to see what problem they are solving, and how they have been doing. You can easily identify if a company is doing well or not by looking at web traffic level and its growth trend.

3. You don’t have to be passionate about a market
As long as you keep a curious mind and healthy appetite for opportunities, dig deeper on all the markets you have narrowed down to through methods I mentioned in 2. Particularly, I would pay attention to the market I am already familiar with and have been reluctant to dive right in, and pick the top startup/uprising companies to see how they address that market. Read/watch what industry veterans have to say because they have deep “experiences” to the market and they are the most close to the consumers/customers. And learn to think like consumer/customers in that market, try to get into people’s mind, the average people’s mind.

4. Cultivate knowledge, passion will follow
When you have done 3, you will have much better visibility about the consumers’ concerns, hence that market. And market “pain” will surface as a more clear target to you, followed by potential solutions. As problem solvers, we entrepreneurs will get the satisfaction when we find a perfect solution. And we will have incredible sense of achievement, hence happiness from within, that happiness is the source of passion. So, do not worry about it if you already have a passion. Passion follows happiness. Happiness cultivate the passion. Passion does NOT have to be something you LOVE to do in your spare time, it just has to be something you are happy to think about. I am speaking to it from my own personal experiences.

5. Don’t worry those intangible
Let the nature (of business) take control, stop worrying if you have or will find a partner, or resource to do what you want to do. Once passion starts to form and follow you, you will become much more succinct and efficient when communicating that to other people. Always stay connected to people, so when you are truly in need, people will pick up on your clear vision, your assertiveness and your efficiency, and they will follow you. Leadership, partnership, working relationship will form naturally this way. I would go one step further to say: if you find yourself struggling with finding your first partner to take your first step, you are probably working on a solution looking for that market, not a real market problem.

All of the above are what I have been doing, thinking and concluding. They are still evolving, but they are very helpful to my personal struggle. And I hope this can shed some lights to other entrepreneurs as well