Tyba offers packages to business schools that provide personalized websites and domain names for every student.

A lengthy blogpost is on its way in the course of the week explaining the roller coaster ride we are having.

It’s Monday 27^th April 00:57. At this late hour, I wanted to put on paper my vision for the company I am trying to build. Twollars started as a funny little project, an idea, something that could go viral. We wanted to create a Twitter behaviour like retweeting but for thanking. In retrospect it was superficial, when we thought of the idea, when we launched, we didn’t have a clue of the opportunities and power Twollars could hold. Frankly, neither Mac or I had figured out yet what was next. It had all come so fast, from idea to launch in a matter of weeks.

Upon launch I was enjoying the fast paced hectic life I was leading that day in London. First from Starbucks to Starbucks trying to find a working wifi connection. Time and time again pointlessly ordering hot chocolate, later espressos. With the help of Mac I finally found myself jumping in a cab, going to a Radisson hotel where I would launch Twollars from a netbook, sitting in a big leather chair with fresh orange juice, water and olives by my side. In the coming weeks I found myself all over Western Europe, The Netherlands, Barcelona, Geneva, Grenoble, Paris and then home.

Home is a tiny village named Ojén, in the South of Spain, in a province called Andalucía. I am there right now, writing this. It seems that it is taking me some time to get to the point. Putting down on paper my hopes and dreams for Twollars. Maybe it is so hard because even at this point, nothing is certain yet. The feeling of potential is there. Seeing, hearing and feeling the interest in what we’re doing. Getting excited when there is an email in my inbox from a journalist or this morning from a partner at an investment firm. However as little moments of validation and joy they both give, I know that together with Mac I’ll have to build this company. There is no easy path to success and one of the many things I am learning is that I can’t outsource a vision, I have to do it myself, hands on, one step at a time, and along the way resist the temptations of taking the easy route. I am not saying that one should always choose the harder path. I am saying to follow your instinct and have faith in yourself; money, recognition, so called fame, the underlying human desire for them seems to create the moments where you consider taking a shortcut.

For me the temptations are, funding and living the Silicon Valley lifestyle. I am only human. I am happy though that I am recognizing them and taking the time to think about them, write them down. Putting words in print seems to make them final… lasting. I guess it allows me to look back on something, maybe even create a reminder for myself, fixing this moment in time where I believe I am completely honest with myself and the reader.

Along the way, in the last two and a half months since Twollars launched, I created some of the greatest memories of my life, met some incredible people, sat humble, listening to conversations where I for once didn’t have anything of importance to say, it has been an incredible ten weeks. Those ten weeks could have been spread out over a whole year and even then it would feel like one of the busiest times of my life. Not because of the hours but because of all the different impressions. You’re living them, one after another, sadly not taking nearly enough time to process them.

Right now I just have one focus and that is bringing the next version of Twollars to life. There’s nothing on paper about it. It’s a picture in my head, it’s a hope, it’s a dream. This is the first time I am really writing it down. Somehow I sense a hesitation to put the words on paper. I don’t know why.

Twollars is a currency of appreciation, right now a nice way to thank one another on Twitter. From the start we realized that the only way we wanted Twollars to be converted into Dollars is via good causes. We endlessly discussed models, ideas, figuring out how this could change marketing. I think we figured it out. I want to create an ecosystem on Twollars where all good causes can join, where they use Twitter but also websites and blogs to ask people to send their Twollars to them. Letting people choose which charity they support. Not by donating money but by donating their Twollars.

Everyone on Twitter starts with fifty, so everyone can join. As Twollars can be sent amongst people as a token of appreciation they can also be an appreciation to a charity. The charity builds a Twollars balance, a growing number of Twollars people gave to them. Some charities will get more than others. I hope that the ones which will flourish are the ones which can show to people where the dollars end up, how each penny is spent and where and how it is changing the world.

Twitter as a base for all this is perfect because it allows even the tiniest charity to reach an audience. So dozens, hundreds or maybe thousands of charities will be building the number of Twollars in their accounts while raising awareness through Twitter. So how could we get from Twollars to dollars? Each charity can give away its Twollars. They can give them to businesses that choose to donate to them. They are selling their Twollars. Since Twollars are not infinite and everyone just has fifty, people who want more, to give again to others or to good causes, can now get them from businesses.

I am building an application programming interface (API) which allows any website to send its companies’ Twollars to whomever it may wish. Imagine the following. You gave all your Twollars to friends and charities and would like to do more good. Go visit the website of any business that chose to buy Twollars. You can even pick the website that bought them from the charity you care for most. Now get a Twollar because you visited their site. Get Twollars because you left a comment on their blog. Get Twollars because you … the options are infinite and are up to you to think of, up to the community to develop and share. Everyone wins, charities raise awareness and get dollars to do their work, websites get the people and interactions they want, and you, you get to do good. [02:07]

As you might have read in my last post I’ve been working on my startup Tyba for the last few months and for the last 3 weeks it’s been in a private alpha. Once you get users it becomes real and you thrive even more to get to that point where you want to be. For me that’s not profitability but having built a service which is truly useful to people. Behind the simple aspect of rating and tagging links I am working towards a much bigger goal. My vision is to create a service where the links recommended to you when you search come from sources you’ve chosen to trust. It’s an ambitious goal and it involves planting a whole forest of trees. Each tree is yet another idea that grows towards the perfect search results.

Each conversation I have and each day that passes I have new ideas and improvements to the old ones. When I look at all the trees I want to plant and sense the exponential growth of new ideas, it’s intimidating. I am a one-man startup on a budget which allows me to only outsource a few parts however that’s a decision I consciously made. It’s easier to get funding and let others do the planting but I always had the gut feeling that if I wanted to set this up right I needed to do it myself. I don’t discard the value of a team and funding but my intuition tells me that for now it’s best to have the flexiblity to change course in a heartbeat.

So what is this post really about? It’s about taking on a project which in your perspective is too large. It’s about going for a goal which seems so far and unreachable that you’re almost discouraged to start. One of the great lessons I’ve learned from Tyba so far is that the only thing that could hold it back (and occasionally has for moments) is the intimidation of the journey ahead, not the journey itself.

A journey is traveled one step at a time and this is what you can never forget; I often find that I have to remind myself of this. With Tyba since the start of the idea the tag line has been “Your judgement above the algorithm”. This implies that I want to create search results more relevant then algorithmic search like Google is doing. I want to personalize each and everyone’s search results; we’re all different people who apply different value to different sources, so why should we all be presented with the same results? Is it an impossible goal to be better at something then a company which holds thousands of the most brilliant minds in the world… I often feel it is. However it’s not something I am yet willing to accept. Admitting failure before even trying is not who I am and it’s not who I’ll ever be.

With Tyba I am walking babysteps everyday and having an incredible learning experience. I am going towards something and I am doing it by knowing that the only way to get there is to not be afraid to fail.

Before I moved I wasn’t planning on staying longer than a month and wanted to start the application for a visa to the US more specifically; Silicon Valley. So what made me trade in the world’s largest start-up hub for a tiny traditional Spanish village. Once I started living here it was as if I had entered a completely different world. It started with waking up and having the skies being blue and the sun shining; if you’ve lived in Holland, UK or similar places where skies are mostly grey, it’s like you emerge out of dark basement you’ve spent most of your life in. The village I live in is built upon a mountain side and is known as a traditional Pueblo Blanco, a village where all the houses are white. What made me stay though isn’t the weather because California might even be sunnier, neither is it the economic crisis luring over the US.

It was the people here that made me stay. A few days after I arrived I came walking down the street and the neighbours were having a family barbecue; without hesitation we were invited and dragged into join. Even with my limited Spanish I had one of the best nights of my life because you could just feel that these people were giving from their hearts. At least 3 times a week Francisco walks by and brings with him fruits and vegetables. He’s not the only one; vinegar, avocado’s, paprika’s, mandarins, so many people here are giving and what makes the difference with Holland and so many places I’ve been to in the world; people here give without even having the thought of expecting anything back. To some it might be a small example but it shows the nature of the people here. A nature you’re lucky to find in a handful of best friends anywhere else in the world.

Throughout my life, especially as I grew older I always said I put no value into material items. I said I did all my actions for myself and not for recognition. I said I wasn’t selfish. I believed all these things until I moved here and started realizing how we all say how we hold to these moral values but they have become words without meaning. Living here allowed me to put meaning back into those words, reflect upon the life I was living and the things I wanted to change. While being here I started reading some of the books recommend to me by commenter’s on this blog amongst which Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the within 6 days finished and now my all time favourite book; The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. A lot of pieces of the puzzle started coming together. It’s hard to put it all into words but to try… I feel like I’ve become a better person then before…less selfish…less materialistic…more myself. And don’t worry, I am still the technology loving self I always was and I haven’t become a hippie either.

About a month ago my entrepreneurial urges started itching again and what had once been a business plan pitched to VC’s and Angels I now made the decision to bootstrap it instead; to write as much code as I could myself, instead of outsourcing it. The purpose of my startup started changing, instead of building the features and design as I would like it. I built something bare bones. A web application which shares a lot in common with many others out there but it has one big difference. It’s going to transform into what users want. Everyone who looks at it sees a different use or direction it could into. I want to engage you into voicing your opinion and together with the other users vote and together built something we will love. I remember Loic le Meur writing about the Community CEO and thinking that would be amazing to be, but let me first build my vision. Instead I am going to try to engage as many people as possible to build our vision. True this is going to be difficult at times, you can never please everyone and you’re asking a lot from a community whose compensation is not monetary. However I believe that there are enough people out there who want to be involved; your opinion matters.

The startup is Tyba and it’s a simple concept: You download a Firefox extension which allows you to rate web pages and append tags (a feature I like is that when you come from Google or Yahoo the search term is automatically sent with your rating). The rating and tagging is simple, done by clicking stars or using keyboard shortcuts. Then when you feel like it you can login in to the web interface and organize the links you’ve rated into groups. These groups become public and anyone can view them. The other Tyba users can follow your groups and you in turn can also follow other people’s groups. When you follow a group you can do two things, see when new links are added to them and you can search through them. It’s a bit like building your own search engine with the links you rate and the groups other people make. Right now all this functionality is there in its most basic form.

Now all I need is users; daring and innovative people who aren’t scared of a private alpha with its bugs and downtime for upgrades, who are willing to give feedback and help decide upon the direction of Tyba. If you this sounds like you, go to Tyba.com and request an invite. I am sending the first 100 invites out tonight.

In our conversation he said that it looked like now Wikia Evolution has launched I was going for a defensive strategy. Straight away I thought “Let me listen carefully, because I have the feeling he’s right.” The more I started thinking about it, the more I realized that my “great idea” had the wrong motives.  There was a valuable lesson I needed to learn from this: Looking at a strategy objectively it might be the best one but to truly judge it, you have to look at your underlying motives.

If you’re the one creating your startups strategy it’s important to let the right motivations drive you not the wrong ones. Plus! Never stop asking for feedback.

So what’s next?

A full blown offensive strategy that I will write about soon.

A short startup update:

It looks like the Firefox extension we’re developing gets new bugs with each feature we add. However we’re working hard to get rid of all of them so I can present the whole idea plus a private alpha version within the timespan of a few weeks. Anyone who is interested in participating in the private alpha can email me (the address is in the side column) or send me a message with your email address on Twitter.

So what’s next?

First of all, there is no way I am going to give up on building this startup. It’s perseverance and flexibility that are factors of success, I am going to utilize them both. With a few small changes and some extra weeks in development I am going to add a new feature that tops the competition. I am going to have to reevaluate my strategy and put even more pressure behind going into private alpha.

Am I upset? Am I frustrated? Neither. In fact, I am loving it! Competition is just another driving force.

p.s. The fact that a relatively big competitor has just launched this technology can only be a verification that I am on the right track. And I’ve got some tricks (features) up my sleeve, they’ve never even thought about - I hope ;-).

Addition: I have received a lot of feedback on Twitter asking to reveal more details. I am waiting with this till we reach private alpha (which is most likely in a few weeks). Thank you for your patience.

Update: I’ve learned a great deal from a discussion based upon this post over at YC Hacker News, I encourage you to read it.

Yes, receiving hundreds of messages each day makes it difficult to respond to everyone. However that problem isn’t solved when you start dispersing your communication activities across five other networks. I am a big fan of Twitter because it has allowed me to build valuable relationships with several individuals. We update each other through Twitter but we talk in more then a 140 characters over email. There are many complaints that with the hundreds of emails coming in each day, how could you possibly answer each one of them. The solution is definitely not switching to Twitter/Friendfeed and spending half your day through an even larger stream of messages. If you make it your discipline to answer each email you receive, you’ll gain more value out of those conversations than anywhere else online. These are people that take the time to contact you and have filtered you as more valuable then the other 500 friends they have on a micro blogging service.

What about pitches? If you are one of the few who gets bothered with dozens of pitches each day, emails with ulterior motives, then kindly respond to them in a 140 characters “Thank you for emailing me but I am currently not interested… Best regards …”

Using the Gmail (Google Apps) interface has allowed me to respond to most emails within a matter of 24 hours, often if I am behind my laptop within 15 minutes. By the way, the reason I wrote this post is because I’ve set up my blog to now let me email-in my blog posts. I needed to write a post to test this out, I think this topic was applicable.

If you disagree with my post please voice it in the comments also I would love to hear your uses for email.

I am sitting in the train on my way home. I had one of those days where I had scheduled lots of meetings in one day. I prefer this.

The most valuable reason why you would do this is the transferability of knowledge. With every meeting you learn something new, you become more update and most likely if you’re working across a specific industry the people you meet are interconnected.

When you schedule all these meetings after one another you’ll find yourself bringing new found knowledge to the next meeting. It’s hard to illustrate, I say give it a shot, put all your (related) meetings on one day in the week.

Don’t have a one dimensional network but have a multi dimensional network where you can make the links between your connections and their mutual affiliations, it brings a new dimension to your networking efforts.  Be aware of the possible links in your network and start connecting people with one another. In this manner you can interlink your network and increase its value. However do be careful with becoming the guy who makes introductions for everyone. Every introduction is a reflection upon you.

Right now this is a stub and that means I will take down this post when I have the time and turn it into a mini-essay. I would love your input in the comments.

I’ve put this at the top of the page because it’s important. I messed up. The original post which is below gives a glimpse of my current strategy but didn’t explain what would happen if you try this yourself. I love blogging for the very reason I am writing this. I got comments not just on this blog but also over at YC Hacker News saying what I was doing is a “dumb idea”. I then went back to my post and reread it as more of these comments came in. I realized something, they were absolutely right. After I read my post, stood back and looked at it from their point of view, I saw what they meant. I responded explaining why my strategy would work for me but while I was doing this I wasn’t telling you why you shouldn’t try it.

In my first update below this post I explain why it works for my application but for most people it will fail. One comment over at YC HN summarized all the bottlenecks perfectly:

Plus you will find many other typical problems with remote and distributed teams (cross-communication, misunderstanding, less bouncing of ideas, bonding, agility/speed of change, etc.) to be other big bottlenecks once/if things get moving.Being in the same place, at the same time, and working closely together with people you respect and trust is essential to creating a fast moving startup less likely to die or stagnate.

There are reasons why the most successful ones were two guys in a garage.

Then there was a comment saying

…that said, it seems very closed to me, and I would feel a bit nervous working for him.

I hope my personality and the way I portait myself through my blog takes this feeling away from anyone who has it. My idea for now might be under a cover of secrecy but openness is a goal in the near future.

So please go ahead and embark on reading my post…

About 6 weeks ago I wanted to start on a working prototype, but I didn’t want to decide upon a full time team yet. I want to be location independent for as long as possible while I play with the idea of India, San Francisco or somewhere else. If I would hire an outsourcing team it would mean taking the risk that they could run with the idea. Being half way across the world means there would be nothing I could do about it. Investing into a patent application would mean the idea would become public knowledge and NCA’s/NDA’s only reach so far.

Then I remembered this small company that had a brilliant strategy, Coca-Cola. Their secret recipe is known to only a few people but thousands are producing it each day. This got me thinking… I made a note of all the parts that needed to be developed. I then separated the parts in such a way that if you were working on one part you wouldn’t know the bigger picture. Right now there are two parts almost done, the database backend and one of the user interfaces. There are a lot more parts that need to be developed but I am coming close to a working prototype.

To be in full control of a web application you either need to have a rock star development team that jumps on the gun when you say so, or you need to be able to do it yourself. I am not a programmer by heart and coding fulltime is definitely not my passion, however I can enjoy it. I believe one of the most important things for a startup is to move quickly. You can stay years in development but it’s from your users you learn. If my startup fails because we didn’t move quick enough it’s my fault. I am responsible to time the market and after launch translate the user’s needs into changes and features. Therefore I am down in the trenches at the moment, so that later when other developers continue my work, I can sit down with them and think of solutions not just Photoshop mock ups.

Update 1:

There has been a lot of responses in the comments but also on other sites from people wondering if this does not just produce flaky code. I have pasted here my response to Tom Holder (see his comment below in the comment section)

Thank you. Your comment summarizes the response I’ve had from a lot of developers and you are right. However there are a few details I should have but didn’t explain. For me it’s only temporary to get the foundation ready - the startup itself will have a full team. I am also doing this to give myself time to continue to talk to possible investors and decide where I want to locate.

Will I then throw away all the code and start over?

No and this is why: I have two user interfaces, one for the web and one as a browser extension, in any case they would have been developed by different people. They’re two completely independent parts. As last I have the backend, a complex database structure but is setup to only accept a few easy and standard queries. The rest of the queries are handled on database level.

Looking at one of these parts you can’t find out my completive advantage, looking at them all together you have my startup. I am incredibly aware of the risks I take with this and especially if I switch developers the problems that can (probably will) come up. I find it harder to read other people’s code then to start from scratch and make it myself. Therefore all the complicated parts occur on database level, the code I wrote myself. So no matter what happens there will always be someone in the team (myself) who can work on that, or explain it to others.

So beware because this strategy may work for my startup but the people who critize it are right, for many applications this can turn into a nightmare of spaghetti code.