2above.com

As an early stage entrepreneur, I made ton of mistakes, the biggest one was to jump into conclusion too quickly and only resulted in delayed and painful failure. No matter how much people emphasize execution, a solid idea is still number 1 thing. It’s like talking about maintaining a great marriage after you picked the wrong girl (or guy): at some point, crap will hit the fan. I have learned to spend the time to evaluate  the right idea before executing it. And I find doing following is hugely helpful.

1. Discuss

If you have friends who are successful entrepreneurs, don’t be shy, ask them for help and input. It’s even better if they are close friends. I had a tendency not to discuss business with friends. Only after I geared into “entrepreneurial desperation mood”, that is, the determination to become successful entrepreneur, I started to throw my ideas at them and see their responses. To my surprise, many of my “revolutionary ideas” are not that relevant. But you have to open up and discuss with people to know that. As what Gurbaksh Chahal told Andrew Warner, “One key thing is, don’t think you have a revolutionary idea – that’s just the starting point. 1%. 99% is all execution. Go out, and get it done. And get it done masterfully.”

2. Focus

Let’s face it: your time is limited. One hour more spent on unnecessary things is one hour less on getting to your goal, provided you are well balanced and have a rested mind. So, what do I do: I cut half the time I read techcrunch or other technology news site, focus on doing things that are directly beneficial to bringing my entrepreneurial mission to life.

3. Adopt

Instead of reading news about which startups are getting how much venture funding, try identify a few popular ones and adopt them to your daily use. Only when I started using new popular products on daily basis, I was able to “feel” the essence of it, in some cases, think about how I can learn from them. Following are just a few software products that I have been using in the last week.

1) Evernote (iphone app): it lets me record my thoughts wherever, whenever, however I want. In a rainy Sunday morning while I was still in bed checking iphone emails, a few ideas struck me and hit “voice” and recorded them. I often use it to capture the momentary inspiration while walking, eating. Evernote is also a beautifully made product, great execution.

2) Disqus: it’s a blog comment product.

I have not been a big fan for widget product. But that is the presumption that an entrepreneurial mind should not have. After seeing both Andrew Warner and Howard Lindzon use the product, I gave it a try. It is the social commenting made easy, you will be notified with people reply to your comment, especially the author you commented on. It’s “comments” delivery service. Another perfect example of what Aardvark did for Q&A world: bringing your product to where users live, be it email, IM, Cell phone etc.

3) Try your friends’ product

If your friend made a successful product, you should be the first one jump into using it and see why it’s popular.

4) Try 2 to 3 other new products each week

This past week I also tried using TwitCasting and Foodspotting, although I am not sure how big they can grow, I am so very surprised by how well both products are executed. Using them is like a dose of fresh air.

4. Simplicity

Stick to the rule of 30 seconds elevate approach. See if you can use one sentence to “pitch” your idea to others and get a “wow” answer. If at the end of 30 seconds, they are like “hmm, uhhh…”. It’s time to go back to drawing board.

5. Dare

Dare to scratch your entire idea or product. Before pulling the trigger to make something, strive to “make something people want”.

6. Timing

Timing is important. When you or someone brilliant spotted a new industry success, think about overall the key success factors and if you can incorporate some of the attributes that are part of the proven success. Each year there are usually a few hugely successful products coming out of nowhere followed by ton of copy cats. (Groupon, remember?) I am not telling you to be a copy cat, but do something that much smarter than just being a copy cat. There is hardly any revolutionary or completely new ideas, almost all ideas are related to each other one way or another. But the key is the few, the proud. Take a look at chatroulette.com, and think what you can learn from it.

7. Leverage

Leverage is a beautiful word, it comes with the value. If you create value to others, you have the leverage. If you do someone a favor, you have the leverage. I am not asking you to think about “leverage” before interacting with other human being. I am saying when you do something you care deeply about, such as entrepreneurship for me, I find it natural to comment on others’ blog entry with more thoughts in it, and as human being, we love to know what others think of us, hence love to see my blogs or products or whatever are getting others’ attention. And when I find your comment valuable to me, I feel the necessity to communicate with you. This often creates unparalleled opportunity to open discussion channel between celebrity bloggers and new comers, even nurturing a healthy professional relationship. That is the leverage. You should create social leverage as a human being, and your product should even more so on focusing on creating social leverage to other people. Only this way can we “make something people want”.

As a side note, do you think iPad will be a hit? Just ask yourself a question: would you want one? If so, it will be a hit!

Since last week, I have done a few things differently from norm (or my intuition) to keep my mind occupied, focused and clean. A clean mind is a clear mind with more focus. Early entrepreneurs tend to have lot of ideas going on at the same time, I did following and found they are incredibly helpful for me to be upbeat and focus.

1. Focus

I already said I am working on a personal recommendation system. It sounds easy but it is a profound field that challenges many scholars. By using both Google, Aardvark, Linkedin etc., I have discovered many folks who have similar interests, I am also able to have deeper understanding about the field, and how mathematics can be applied

2. Talk (to smart people)

Usually, Entrepreneurs are loners, in some sense. They keep heads down and hide themselves in the cave to crank out great things they believe in. Is that enough? Since last week, I have started to chat with smart people more. It was not anything serious. But the results were astounding. The wisdom from combined brain power is exponential to ones own.

3. Organize

Starting from my home page at igoogle.com, which was a big mass of blog feeds from variety of blogs I subscribe. It kept growing and getting messier everyday, to the point that I don’t really know what I am looking at. So starting last week, I have re-organized igoogle feed reader into three columns with thought leaders’ blog focusing on entrepreneurship, technology trend, and niche fields. After a few glance, I immediately have a healthy dose of entrepreneurial insights, technology news, and new development in the niches field. I find it sets me in a great mood with more confidence and happier attitude. I recommend everyone do this exercise

4. No rush

Entrepreneurs have sense of urgency, they are the people trying to get stuff out of door and “make it”. I used to be always like that but it has not really worked. As Simon Sinek, the author of Start with Why said to me “I firmly believe that struggle is the single greatest source of innovation. And entrepreneurs are the ones who innovate from struggle. Entrepreneurs solve problems then share the solution.” and struggle is the reason entrepreneurs do what we do, it’s not for money, it’s for the “why” or the “cause” that are personal to ourselves. And when one does things to the right cause, one can not rush it. As I pointed out, the biggest struggle these years for me is to find the right people to do the right things, and this struggle is leading me to what I am working on.

5. Team

Wisdom is an exponential function of number of intelligent, experienced individuals. Instead of working alone, searching and inspiring people to work with you, even it’s a struggle to find the right people. If you have not found the right people, read what other successful entrepreneurs are doing. Andrew warner’s mixergy, and Paul Graham’s website, in particular the incubator Y-combinator that he started, are great places to get inspired, stay focused, maybe even stay connected with potentially like-minded people.

6. Read

Entrepreneurs tend to think they are smart enough to do things on their own, they don’t have to go to classes, they don’t have to read books. They are the ones who write the history, isn’t it!

The short answer is “No”. Last week, I broke my reading norm which tends to be fictions, bought two books from Amazon (not kindle version, I still love the feeling of flipping the real pages next to the fireplace in a cloudy day), one is Simon Sinek’s “start with why”,  the other is Paul Graham’s “hackers and painters”.

I think above things are what I did slightly differently from what I usually do on weekly/daily basis. And I feel good about it. So, I encourage you do a few things slightly differently, get some new flavor injected into your life, I think you might like it.

I am at a stage to start a new journey toward entrepreneurial success. I figure it’s a good time to look back at the past: a history of my own may have better lessons in it for me. Following is a quick glance about how unsuccessful, in-authentic, I had become, and my quest to to where I want to be.

1999 – 2006: from top of the class to a dying industry

School is over-rated but I am always grateful to my school: Stanford, where I regained confidence. Nevertheless, I graduated from EESOR program in 2001 without having any clue what I wanted to do with this degree and my life. The dot com era just went busted; there were hardly any jobs left. One day, my friend who was in the linguistic Phd program referred me to a company called Google which was looking for search quality raters to improve their search technology, I signed up and immediately started working on contract base till early 2002. I did not hate it but certainly did not love the job of reading bizarre search queries and results.  I honestly could not figure out why my boss, who was also my neighbor AND a Phd in biochemistry, would want to work as QA manager for Google, which was still fairly unknown among average people back in 2001. I sensed the opportunity rising to stay in Google as full time employee in its quality assurance group, but I left for a later becoming the stupidest journey I ever embarked on in my life: working for the dying US technology manufacturing industry till early 2006: 4 years of my youth! I blamed this on myself and the horrible H1 visa policy toward foreign students like me: should that manufacturer turn down my H1 visa application, I would have stayed at Google and become at least “quadruplet millionaire”.

4 years went by just like that. It was boring as hell! I could not take the manufacturing industry anymore. All I wanted was to get out, but getting out was (still is) difficult when you were tied up with a company because of H1 visa!! You cannot move around freely. It was suffocating.

Colorful 2006: Become a first time entrepreneur

Long story short, there was this big day in 2006 that I jumped ship.  Life is too short, I had become far behind in my career comparing to people of my age to start all over. I wanted to make it up, quick. What would be better than doing startup?

With no job, no money, I started a website in Mar. 2006: It’s kind of shameful for me to admit but it was about online dating: I called it 2above.com, with a hint that 2 is better than 1 (Lame! I know, LOL, but Isn’t that true in life, that 2 is better than 1?). The other inspiration was from site like 37signals, it felt like it was a trend to have a number in your domain name. And 2above also means to be above average, to be the best that I can be.

Well, 2above’s “pay-per-email-to-your-potential-date” model did not work out, although I am still damn proud of the launch party I managed to pull off at mina111 on Mar. 12, 2006, a day when snow fell on bay bridge. It was so cold, but still people lined up to see what this fashion party brought by a startup called 2above was all about.  200+ people including all of my two dozen friends in bay area attended the party filled with talented designers, beautiful models, and I did it with ONLY $400, $900 paid to Mina111 gallery, $500 ticket income. All of the models and wonderful people in our party were volunteers. They were awesome!  (Thank you again, if you are one of them and happen to read this)

Nevertheless, it did not work out.  Months later, I changed that into a group dating site called groupmingle.com (current groupmingle.com has no affiliation with me whatsoever): not only the site itself got some decent traffic within a few weeks after I worked day and night posting information all over the Internet. I also used it to start a great professional mingle group on meetup.com, thanks to the organizer who took over from me, it has become one of the popular professional singles meetup groups in bay area, and it still is today.

Bootstrapping my own website startup was difficult, I did not have expertise, certainly did not have much money thanks to the previous job, still I managed and worked with a dear technologist friend/advisor of mine on the side to set up another venture focusing on video social network just in case groupmingle does not work out. We managed to get a $30k+$20k total $50k angel investment waiting for us to sign the term paper, in exchange of 60%+ equity. Yes, laugh all you can, but that was the only offer that we got for a video streaming project. It was like a term sheet to bankruptcy from day one. We turned it down without hesitation.

I continued to hang on to groupmingle project all the way till the end of 2006, completely bootstrapping without any other side job or sponsor. During that year, I perfected my windsurfing skills whenever I felt stressful, hopeless.

2007: smell of startup money and cruelty

Finally, that day came: the day that all entrepreneurs are scared of – running out of money. Luckily, I was able to convince a search engine advertising startup who was just acquired for $60 million by a much bigger company (allow me to remove the name of it), to take me as who I am and I became their search platform’s product manager. The job got routine-like pretty quickly, although looking for a way out, I did learn a lot about search engine marketing which turned out to be very useful and rewarding experiences.

Another classic day of entrepreneurs came into our shiny office in a beautiful day of San Francisco bay area, rather suddenly, 9 months into the job. The parent company that acquired us sent its CEO and a whole management crew from NYC, fired almost everyone on our team which they just acquired, founders included. The only ones left were a Caltech physics PhD and a MIT graduated director of engineering, allegedly critical to “optimize our revenue platform”. Read this, there is no magic in earning customers’ trust, hence “revenue”, the hedging technique used in search engine bidding war was rather not high tech at all, as the result, achieving sustainable profit from that technique is just not sustainable, much like real estate bubble’s burst. The firing was anticipated, but certainly sooner than everyone thought it would come.

2008 to today: Embracing a growing brand

One thing I am good at is to be optimistic. I never really got nervous when I was out of job, or running alone a startup project; I remember my professor told me that I am an opportunist. I know it sounds better when it comes from an investor, business partner rather than your academic advisor. When I was thinking about what to do next, I took the time to fly my aging parents to bay area all the way from China, showed them this country that has become my 2^nd home.

With deep understanding about search engine marketing platform, I soon got two companies competing  to hire me, while an online shopping company offered me better compensation, I chose the company I have been with till today: fitness anywhere, and moved up to my beloved San Francisco from also beloved Palo Alto. Fitness Anywhere (the inventor of TRX brand) turns out to be an amazing company, an amazing story. And I am lucky enough to witness how a great brand (called TRX) is being born and grows to be a world class one. It teaches me every day the right things to do to grow a startup (Fitness anywhere was funded by one person in 2005/6, now we have become the go to choice for fitness training).

Life has become slight easier and more enjoyable when you have pleasant work environment, friends, comparing to running a venture alone. But I know the real fire inside of me is to become someone who can create. The success of our founder convinces me more: create something valuable for the society, become a fearless person who dares to chase his/her dream, no matter what circumstances are.

2009: Getting onboard with current technology

Starting from the end of Mar. 2009, I started to use this blog to analyze Twitter applications, its eco system and twitter.com itself, which in many sense resembles Google in 1999/2000 in its growth rate. Twitter has grown extremely fast for its simplicity, stories-sharing and viral effect: it’s so easy to share information in real time. As the twitter’s real time information network explodes, it comes with a billion dollar question: how to better use these gazillion tweets? Hence the twitter’s app world is exploding, with a few twitter apps/websites announced each day. Who are the signals, who are the noises? Who are in for the long run with good cause, who are in for the short term, and quick bucks?  For about 4 months time, I did a lot of research about this eco-system, had tons of interviews with notable or nameless twitter app developers which resulted many blog entries. Around summer time 2009, this blog was getting a couple hundred visits a day. And I have become confident about what type of web applications can become sustainable success.

It’s time to strike out. Yes, I am throwing it out there about what I am working on. Yes, I need your help, you, brilliant engineers, and brilliant business guys!

And confident I have become, I am ready to strike out again. This time around, I have been through a lot more in my life, had and still have ton of problems that are personal to me that I want to find solutions for, and of course, I am more experienced about what web entrepreneurship is about. With social media reaches its tipping point in 2009/2010, I feel the timing is right to do something that utilizes this unparalleled momentum and technology available to create something that simply works and give more power to everyday people.

Yes, I am in the game of building a useful recommendation system to connect people. This system will not solely rely on either human or machine, but it’s smart enough to offer manageable recommendations for people to enjoy their life more and connect with each other more.

Thinking back, I am still proud of full ride research scholarship I earned at Stanford business and medical school, working with world class mathematicians and medical researchers. I have gained a little bit exposure in the applied mathematics areas and consider myself a mathematical inclined entrepreneur at heart.

But, I am not a great software engineer, and I am not sure if I am a great marketer. I figure: instead of figuring out stuff on my own, I rather become more social and open to society, let talented people in to become better at what we do to build something useful, influential to the society we live.

I will continue to use this blog to share entrepreneurial insights. I sincerely welcome entrepreneurs, bloggers and engineers to contact me without hesitation to share your insights and stories. I will be gladly publish your opinions should it become obviously beneficial to the circle of entrepreneurs, hence humanity.

And finally, my vote to most inspiring to me

Most inspiring entrepreneur: Neil Patel

Most inspiring startup: Aardvark

With twitter and facebook, now google buzz become mainstream media, it’s a matter of time for more “status update” ad network. I have written about “how to make money with tweets” through this type of ad network such as revtwt.com, but I have not come across a legit ad network focusing on facebook status update. Facebook has been very aggressive on shutting down any ad networks that serve “sketchy” ads, and I can’t agree more with that. Just take a look at revtwt.com which is the #1 “tweet” ad network you will find many advertisers are really sketchy. For a new ad network to succeed, it has to add value to facebook eco-system using the core of the facebook platform: social graph. There also has to be a quality control system in place to preselect the advertisers, only allowing the formats and contents that are in par with Facebook.

Who can build that out?

I have been dormant on twitter for a while, ever since I decided to keep my head down and focus on building stuff without tweeting too much before internal beta. However I do read tweets on regular basis and always end up finding interesting people, brilliant services. Here is an example from today, an overcast Saturday while the city soaked in the mysterious pacific mist outside my window is perfectly picturesque.

Not sure how @gwenbell merged into my feed, but her tweet “I never hire somebody without having a meal with them, Would you?” got me curious. (yes I would, lol). A visit to her twitter profile landed me on her website http://www.gwenbell.com, completely pleased with the way it was designed, I clicked on her note at the bottom of the page: “Krystyn rocked the shit out of this”; Naturally, I clicked to Krystyn’s website, completely enjoyed her design style and hence followed her on twitter @squaregirl; at this point, I was also drawn by the touching photo of her Fiancee with her notes

“After a beautiful day in the city and playing in the snow, @richyferrell asked me to spend the rest of my life with him.”

. Although it made me feel sad about loss of my love of life, it did not stop me from clicking on “Come in, we are hiring” attached to something called “Authentic jobs”; As you will discover like I did, I was utterly impressed with the simplicity and powerful utility of Authenticjobs.com (@authenticjobs), it quickly becomes my favorite recruiting web services. Of course, I came across this great company who Krystyn works for, called http://www.squarespace.com/about

That wraps up my 1 hour adventure on the web, starting with a simple tweet.

To sum it up, my little journey (or dynamic social graph) was like:

@gwenbell
-> http://www.gwenbell.com
-> http://www.squaregirl.com
-> http://www.authenticjobs.com
-> http://www.squarespace.com/about

In this process, I was influenced by two creative women, inspired by one great web service (authenticjobs.com), and encountered a great company called squarespace, while enjoyed about 20 photos from flickr streams of these people.

There is one common trait among all these people: they seem to care deeply about what they do, and strive to put their best foot forward.

I have been thinking about this for a while. I have two kinds of entrepreneurial friends in real life, the first type is dreamer, or I call them A-lister: they have an idea, or a killer technology, they work really hard and set the goal very high, they get the venture money, often from the best VC in the valley, however it’s not uncommon to not having a penny in income, or not profitable at all. But in the case of sale (being acquired by a larger company), they will get boat load of equity ready to cash out.

The 2nd type of entrepreneur is practical type, or B-lister, similar to the ex you broke up with, not romantic enough. Many of them have their own online ad agencies, some sort of ad networks, marketplaces, and are making CASH left and right, some even get acquired – notice they are in general not good candidates for acquisition due to lack of technology, low entry barrier. The success often comes with the relentless pursuit of founder. And it goes quickly with them as well. I saw many of them before.

Thinking of twitter app founders, I can’t help separating them into these two types. Although the scale may not be as big, trazzler and twazzup are more like the dreamers, while many players in the twitter ad network world, be it “contextual”, or “pay per tweet”, or “twitter account name parking”, are actually making cash, even though their future is questionable and they are not as glamorous.

What kind of entrepreneur are you?