Marcelo Calbucci

Marcelo’s next thing

2009-10-12T15:23:00.001-07:00

After the Sampa service shutdown in mid-July and most my Sampa duties were over by mid-August, I was fully emerged into making StartupDay 2009 a great event – and it end up being a great event. The question was what should I do after StartupDay? I spent months talking to as many people as I could. The more I talked to people the more ideas I had, which was bad.

Until last week, I had decided to do a travel startup, which was a simple idea that I could execute well and test demand with minimum efforts. In parallel to that I was also working on TweepML and Seattle 2.0 and the first week my time was divided between those three projects I realized it wasn’t going to work.

By mid next week I had decided instead of doing 33/33/33 (33% of my time into 3 projects) I should be playing 90/10 – 90% of my time into one project, 10% on another.

Which projected needed to die? Which project would get 90% of my time?

Seattle 2.0 is an “established” business generating revenue. TweepML is a complete project, pre-revenue. Travel startup X hasn’t even started yet.

I decided to play safe (or smart, depending how you look at it) and grow the Seattle 2.0 into an even bigger media company. It seems whatever we do with Seattle 2.0 has achieved success. It could be me, it could be the people working with me, it could be the market demand, it could be a combination of these and other elements. I don’t know, but I know it’s working.

Over the foreseeable future I’ll be dedicating 90% of my time into Seattle 2.0, which includes the website and the events, and maybe expanding into a few more arenas adjacent to what we do already (you’ll need to stay tuned).

The other 10% of my energy I’ll continue to improve and grow TweepML.org. It’s doing really well already, so the more I keep my hands out of it, the more it will grow.

Where can you find me in October?

2009-10-02T10:59:00.000-07:00

Summer is very slow in startup/tech events, but things started to go back to "normal" by mid-September and we'll have a full month in October. These are the events that I'm planning on attending so far:

Oct/9 - NWEN Breakfast - I'm actually on the panel talking about Sampa failure. Come, do some networking and ask tough questions. I'm ready.
Oct/13 - Dinner somewhere with others like me to talk about undisclosed content
Oct/14 - NWEN First Look Forum - Looking forward to see cool new startups and their dreams.
Oct/21 - Stack Overflow Dev Days - Let's learn some new tech.
Oct/24 - Hydrocephalus Research Guild Gala - I know it's not about Tech/Startup, but Paul Gross, Sampa's CEO is behind it, so maybe you'll show up and support this non-profit.
Oct/31 - I'll be roaming the streets of Redmond/Kirkland with my two kids knocking on doors and asking for candy.

Two quick thoughts on TweepML launch & OAuth

2009-09-10T11:33:00.000-07:00

Thought 1: Never announce your product at 4PM Pacific Time.

I sent email to bloggers at around 4PM and to friends shortly after. The first few blog posts started to roll in around 4:30 (Brier Dudley of Seattle Times was the first), and a lot of them only happened at 5:30-6:00PM. Who reads blogs at those hours? Well, a lot of people actually (particularly in Asia), but it's about 5 times less people than those who read it between 10:00AM and 2:00PM. Also, we made it to TechMeme at around 11:00 PM last night until early this morning. Ugh!

I knew this, so why did I do it like that? First of, I knew we would hit some volume related bugs and I didn't want too many users at once. Second, I had several meetings today that would keep me away from my Dev machine and I didn't want all the hell breaking lose while I was away. So last night, after launching TweepML I had dinner with my kids and when I went back home I stayed until 11:30PM non-stop fixing bugs and improving the UX. I'm felling pretty god right now about the stability of the system.

Thought 2: OAuth is a bad user experience

A lot of people will disagree with me, but I make a case why OAuth is good for Twitter, but not good for your applications end-user. Read it at the TweepML blog.

TweepML: A simpler way to follow interesting Twitter users

2009-09-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

Today I'm announcing the launching of TweepML.org.

See a simple explanation at TweepML Blog.

A simple explanation: TweepML is a format to share groups of Twitter users. TweepML.org is a service that allows you to create and manage your lists, and also find other interesting lists to follow.

Go ahead and check it out.

Feedback welcome. Bugs are expected. :)

The Story Behind the Advisory Room at StartupDay

2009-09-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

I just announced it today at the Seattle 2.0 site the people who’ll be available at the StartupDay Advisory Room.

Let me tell you how I came up with the idea for the Advisory Room, but first, let me tell what it is: It’s a place, part of the StartupDay conference, where attendees can book private 1:1 meetings with other entrepreneurs, investors and professionals, like lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, etc.

I’ve been planning on something like StartupDay for more than a year, but events are very expensive and very risky. If people and sponsors don’t show up, you might be up for a $20,000 or $30,000 bill.

Over more than a year ago I started to think how I can deliver a ridiculous amount of value to sponsors so that they couldn’t refuse to be part of this conference, and at the same time make it valuable to attendees. On a typical conference, sponsors are invited to be speakers as well. I don’t have a problem with that, I just wish there was more disclosure about it.

However, I didn’t want a lawyer telling attendees how to raise money, or a designer telling about the value of User Experience, or a VC talking about monetization through advertising. I wanted entrepreneurs who been there, done that. I’m not saying the lawyer, designer or VC will not add value, but they have a different lens. They talk a different language. They worry about different things.

Without speaking spots for sponsors, how do I entice them to be part of this conference? A logo on the website was probably not enough. Then a light come over my head. Why not let sponsors talk directly to attendees one-on-one? The sponsors are being part of this because they do add value to startups, so attendees of StartupDay would have questions to those sponsors. When I left Microsoft, I spent quite a bit of time talking to lawyers and accountants, figuring out the office space market, financial planning, etc.

Then the Advisory Room came up to be. About half the people on the Advisory Room are sponsors of StartupDay and paid to be there. There are no hidden elements here, because we list their name and firm just by their logo. The other half are people I invited because they are either successful entrepreneurs, or successful investors.

The Advisory Room – and StartupDay itself – is an experiment. This is the first time we are doing a conference for “pre-entrepreneurs” and we are trying to understand what works, what doesn’t, what attendees/speakers/sponsors like and don’t like about it, but we are not afraid to innovate because we have nothing to lose (except by $30,000 if tickets don’t sell, so please buy a ticket).

Things I'd Like To Learn If I Had The Time

2009-09-07T09:08:00.000-07:00

When you go to Computer Science school you learn a lot of theories. You learn about data structure, databases, networks, compilers, OSes, microprocessors, algorithms and a lot of other fundamentals. With all that you also end up getting some hands-on experience with a few languages, applications and OSes, but certainly nothing compare to how much you learn once you are building real products in the real world.

Now that I'm in-between startups (aka, unemployed) I keep thinking if this isn't the right time to learn a few new things. Here is what's top of mind in terms of technologies and applications I'd like to learn better:

Flash: I have a pretty good handle on HTML, CSS and AJAX, but there's just so much I can do with that. Sometimes I know there are things it'd be much easier to do in Flash, but I know nothing about that.
Illustrator: I'm getting better and better by the day with Adobe Illustrator. I like it much more than Photoshop, but a lot of simple tasks I'm still struggling with and there is a lot more Illustrator can do that I'm not even aware of. I'm actually considering if I should attend some training or classes on Illustrator.
Cloud Computing: When I started Sampa there wasn't a cloud computing as we know today, and that was just 4.5 years ago. I'd like to know more about Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure.
MVC: Now we are getting into ultra-geek speak. Sampa was built with MVC (model-view-controller) even before ASP.NET/C# supported it natively. Now MSFT is shipping their own MVC solution and I'd like to learn that. And it should take just about a week, so I probably should just do it.

For me it's all about productivity, so I won't spend two months learning something to help me save a week. ASP.NET MVC is a no brainer, I'll just learn it. Cloud Computing is very much dependent on the project. I don't trust CC for high-availability apps, but for most Web 2.0 services it should be fine. Illustrator I'm just getting by and slowly learning the trade. Flash probably would take me several weeks just to get to the basic level and that doesn't add up because I can always find a good Flash developer to do it in a day or two what I need.

Back into blogging

2009-09-06T20:08:00.000-07:00

For almost 3 weeks I was blogless. Sampa shutdown its servers and I was in doubt between Wordpress or Blogger and I finally settled for Blogger (more flexibility) and spent the last day trying to get my old posts here and they are all here and integrating Disqus.

Here is what you should expect from me over the next few months in terms of blog posts.

The organization of StartupDay and general thoughts on Seattle 2.0.
The launch of a new project (coming this week)
My next startup -- At this point I'm convinced that I should do a startup in the travel space. I'm brainstorming with several very smart entrepreneurs, investors and people who love to travel about ideas.
Random thoughts on technology and some rants from time-to-time about politics, "green & clean", economy, and baby products.

Anyway, it feels great to be blogging again.

Too hard to import content into Blogger

2009-09-06T15:11:00.001-07:00

I'm trying really hard to make Blogger the new home for my blog, but I can't figure out how to import my existing 500 blog posts here.

Blogger doesn't support any kind of Importer except from Blogger's own Atom format. I tried converting MovableType into Blogger and Wordpress into Blogger and neither works. Not sure what I should do next.

Has anyone successfully imported a Wordpress or MovableType into blogger?

Temporary house for my blog

2009-08-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

This is a temporary house for my blog. I might stick around here or not, but you can continue to bookmark this page (blog.calbucci.com) and subscribe to my feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarceloCalbucci) because those links are not going to change.

If you got here to read some of my old posts, I'm sorry, but I have to figure out how to import them first. It should be available in a couple of weeks.

My last post on Sampa

2009-08-14T10:54:00.001-07:00

On Monday night, August 17, 2009 I'll be shutting down Sampa's servers forever.

So I felt I should do just one last post on this platform that served me and my family well since May 19, 2006 (public beta launch). I did the first blog post back then, and might be the one doing the last blog post.

I'm very sorry to all I disappointed.

Sign off from Sampa,

-Marcelo

PS: The blog.calbucci.com address will live in some other house, so I'll continue to blog. I just don't know where yet.

My last post on Sampa

2009-08-14T10:54:00.000-07:00

On Monday night, August 17, 2009 I'll be shutting down Sampa's servers forever.

I'm very sorry to all I disappointed.

Sign off from Sampa,

-Marcelo

PS: The blog.calbucci.com address will live in some other house, so I'll continue to blog. I just don't know where yet.

Cheap furniture, office supplies, dividers, white boards, etc.

2009-08-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

    Here is your only chance at getting Sampa office furniture, supplies, softwares, printers, etc., for cheap.

    This Thursday (August 13), between 11am and 4pm, we'll be selling everything at our old office. What we don't sell will be donated later.

    You can buy everything we have for $1,000 bucks (bring a big truck and two friends to load it), or you can buy the individual pieces for 10% of their retail value. All payment must done in cash and all items must be removed by 4pm on Thursday. Everything is sold "as-is", no returns, guarantees, etc.

    If you have questions you can contact Paul: paul@sampa.com.

    Here is a summary of what we have:

Software
Tables
Conference table
Cabinets
Office supplies
White boards
Shredder
Cabling
Dividers
Power strips
Color Printer
Half height fridge
Sm Microwave
Warehouse shelving

Dispersing Two Myths About Sampa History

2009-08-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

    One thing that I learned over the years is that you can’t pretend an angry mob of anonymous commenter and blog posts don’t exist, because when someone searches for you or your company years later they will find that information and have no other data on the web to disprove it, unless, you take the time to make that online record.
    So I want to disperse two particular misrepresentations that you’ll find on the web about Sampa, and, both are about investors and investments.

Myth 1: “How a team of 2 people burns $1.4M in 12 months?”
    There are 3 things wrong with this statement. Seriously. The saddest part is that I read it (or parts of it) on professional journalists reporting of Sampa closure, which shows the quality (decline?) of online reporting – I guess you can’t trust everything you read on the web.
    Let me start by saying that we raised $400K in 2007 and $1M in January/Feb of 2008. In other words, at best we would have burned $1M over 18 months. But the reality is that we didn’t spend all that money.
    Finally, as we closed Sampa there were just 2 people. But in 2008 we had a team of 9 employees and contractors working with us.

Myth 2: “Sampa investors told us to do X”
    I’m amazed by the basic lack of understanding of the relationship between an investor and a startup. You read about how investors pushed the product into direction Y, or how they were mad at the founders because they didn’t do X, etc. As far as I know, this is all baloney and people talking like that never had an investor beyond friends and family.
    Like most people on this planet, investors are busy people. They didn’t invest on you because they thought they could decide the destiny of the operations. They invested in you because they thought *you* would make good decisions.
    To go direct to the point, our investors never asked us to take the product on any direction. All the decisions, smart and stupid ones, were done by us. Investors were not “mad” at us because we shutdown Sampa. None of them gave us a hard time. They were certainly very upset their investment didn’t return what they wished for, but that’s part of being an investor and accepting risk. Not only that, but they are wise investors. They have invested on many startups to diversify this specific investment class and they certainly invest on many different asset classes as well.

Interested on buying Sampa's assets? (code, users, domains, patents, etc.)

2009-08-07T09:42:00.000-07:00

If you are interested in buying any of Sampa's service assets, send an email to me at marcelo@sampa.com and I'll send you a PDF with more information. I'll not send you the doc if you are "just curious" or if it doesn't seem you'd be a qualified buyer.

We will be running a small auction for the pieces available, including the entire system. This auction doesn't include furniture, desktops, and office furniture/supplies.

Here is what's for sale:

Domains: sampa.com, sampasite.com, BrainUse.com, InTheSphere.com, etc.
Source code (exclusive and non-exclusive)
Users table
Patents (2-pending patents: security and 404-prevention)
Entire Running System

We are *not* interested on trading anything. And pretty much everything is on the tens of thousands of dollars range.

The StartupDay Conference and an all-star speaker list

2009-08-04T19:36:00.000-07:00

Mark on your calendar: Saturday, September 26, 2009 between 10am and 5pm == StartupDay 2009, a conference for pre-entrepreneurs and those who want to learn about startups.

I'm one of the organizers of the conference and we are very excited to have startup rockstars like Rich Barton (Zillow/Expedia), Alex Algard (WhitePages/CarDomain), Jonathan Sposato (Picnik), Josh Petersen (43 Things), Kelly Smith (Inkd/ImageKind) Matt Hulett (RealGames) and many more. Check out the speakers and register for the event.

My email address

2009-07-31T15:53:00.000-07:00

I think I published my email address a dozen times. This time I'll publish as an image to avoid email-scrappers from finding it and sending me tons of emails, but here it is...

Anything and Everything About Sampa, from business to personal.

2009-07-31T09:35:00.000-07:00

The week we were announcing Sampa closing I wrote and published a blog post telling the story from a personal point of view, meaning, how it affected my life. One thing to keep in mind when reading my blog posts, is that I write to keep it to myself. It's very powerful to go back 3-4 years ago into your blog and read what were you thinking back then.

Three days after we announced, I spent 4 hours sitting in front of the computer writing 8 blog posts on the business aspect of Sampa. The title is misleading because I could never include everything there is to know, but I wrote things I think people would most interested in.

Here is the list of the blog posts:

And just to be extra clear, there are two important points: First, everything you are reading is from a guy that failed to build a business. Second, even if I had done everything that I thought was wrong right I still could not guarantee either a successful business (profit) or a successful exit for Sampa.

I'll probably do a few more posts about Sampa on this blog, then move on. There is just so much dissecting you can do.

Part 8: Would I Do Sampa Again?

2009-07-31T09:19:00.000-07:00

First of all, the original Sampa was meant to be a website builder solution primarily for small business. I even considered being a white-label solution for hosting companies. I think the small business solution for website is still somewhat broken. When people say they will build their website on top of Wordpress it gives me chills. Not because Wordpress isn’t a descent/simple solution to build websites, but because Wordpress is being considered a simple and effective way to build websites. Seriously, can’t we do better than that?

On the Family/Baby space, I also think there is lots of room to create a new and appealing solution. I don’t think anyone “owns” that space in terms of brand. If I tell you to give the first brand name that comes to mind when I say “baby website” or “family website”, you’ll probably won’t know, unless you are working on this space.

The problem with Family/Baby websites is not so much of a technology problem as it is of a marketing and customer acquisition problem.

There are 4 million new babies being born in the US every year, yet, there are just a few hundred thousand queries on Google to “create baby website” (and variants). That means people don’t even know they can have a baby website. Unless someone finds an effective way to reach those customers, you won’t have a winner. There are only three large companies, above them all, that have a finger on the pulse of the baby market, including names, emails and addresses. If someone figures out how to partner with them, this startup will likely emerge as the winner. What are those 3 companies? Toys-R-Us, Target and Wal-Mart. Together they probably reach half of all the new moms in the US through their baby registry, and if you own the “baby site” market, it’s just a matter of a year or two for you to own the “family site” space.

Some people will say that you should start at the Wedding site space, but I disagree. The wedding site builder industry is very crowded. There is no “central distribution point” you can reach many customers at once, and between a Wedding and a baby might be years.

As to answer the title of this post, I don’t know. Given the right pieces of the puzzle being in place I might do something like this again. I still think this is a good idea and the solutions out there are not good enough. It’s just a tough market to crack.

Part 7: The Little Secret of Web Startups

2009-07-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

The part 7 of my series of 8 posts about Sampa just got published on TechCrunch. Check it out.

Part 6: Things I Won’t Miss At Sampa

2009-07-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

There are lots of good things I’ll miss at Sampa. Even my own family website which we used intensively for 3+ years (Site id 15, where the first 12 sites didn’t exist, 13 was Sampa’s blog, 14 was my personal blog). But running a startup is very stressful at many fronts and I can’t be happy to think I won’t have to deal with some things:

The Code

When I started Sampa AJAX wasn’t a known technology, there was no Cloud Computing, no JQuery, Firefox 1 Beta was just coming out. I had to build a lot of stuff from scratch. Over time, the code grew bigger and more complex. If we count today, Sampa probably has 500,000 lines of code, but over the last 4 years I probably wrote more than 1,000,000 lines. As you add, remove, change, fix, improve code it becomes complex and the architecture you designed 4 years ago it’s not ideal for the new needs of the system. I won’t miss adding features to the Sampa platform.

Systems Operations

I’ve been managing live services for about 7 years now. It sucks. Server goes down on a Saturday night and you have to figure out what the hell is happening, otherwise tens of thousands of users cannot read or update their websites. It’s very stressful. We never grew to a size I could justify hiring an Ops Manager/Systems Engineer. I just hate babysitting servers. It’s not like we had many issues, but once a week or once every two weeks. But is the stress of being on alert all the time. Only if you done that you know what I am saying.

Entitled Customers

Most customers are nice. Most customers thank you for the free service. Some customers are just spoiled brats. But, by far, the worst customers were those that didn’t take the time to read anything and send an email to support for the easiest questions ever. It’s right there! In front of you! Can’t you read?

Bugs

There is a pile of bugs I’ll never have to fix. Yay!

Spam

My Sampa email has an enormous amount of incoming spam. Mostly because I monitor default addresses like webmaster@, sampa@, postmaster@, etc.

Opportunity Lost

This is a tough one to explain, but the fact is that when you build a very complex startup and you have a large user base to maintain, you can’t pursue new opportunities. I remember when Twitter spun off from Odeo, and how I felt at the time about taking my lessons from Sampa and running a more focused-service. At Sampa we had the concept of single-purpose vs. multi-purpose products. Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Blogger were single-purpose products. They did one thing (mostly). Sampa, Facebook, Office were multi-purpose products. They did many things. Multi-purpose products complexity is not the sum of its parts, but also the sum of each connection between each of the parts. In other words, if building a blogging platform costs 1 and building a photo-sharing costs 1, building a blogging and photo-sharing service costs 3. Yes, multi-purpose products are more complex, hence harder to replicate in terms of technology, but while at Sampa I look at all the things I built and how I could have put that energy at creating a dozen single-purpose products, like: Blogging, Photo Sharing, Document Sharing, Page Builder, Web Layout Editor, Family Tree, Event Invitation, Baby Milestone Tracker, etc. And there were dozens of ideas that never made into the product because it wasn’t a fit for a “family site builder”.

Part 5: Advice to Family & Baby Sites

2009-07-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

It’s the story stupid! If I had just four words to describe about a strategy or vision for a family website, “It’s the story stupid” is how I would characterize it. First and foremost, people create a family or baby website to tell others about their kids life. Everything else is peripheral (and sometimes irrelevant). If you create a site that allows them to enter a picture, a paragraph of text and the emails of a dozen people to send it to, people would love it. Oh, wait. That exists already. It’s called email!

So, stop looking at the dozen of websites competing for the keyword “create a family website” and start tapping into how people behave naturally. For each family picture uploaded to the Web and for each blog post about kids posted, there are 10 times more pictures and stories sent via email – maybe 100 times more.

Email has the key elements necessary for sharing a story: You can attach anything to it (pictures, video, audio, links, documents), it’s fairly private, it’s very easy to use and it has your address book ready for you. All you need to do is write the content.

The obvious downside of email is that it's not easy to scroll through it or to organize it, either for you or for the recipients.

Unless you have a deep integration with email, you are asking too much of your users. Remember this is not about the author only, it’s about the readers. If the readers start complaining they can’t sign in, or “where is my password”, or “I forgot the link”, the author will just abandon your service. In other words: make it very easy for the readers to consume/contribute the content.

People Want a Mirror

Customization is also important. The problem is that startups tend to overdo it on customization, allowing users to pick any color, font, background, spacing, boxes styles, etc. When you do that, you’ll find out people can create really ugly things. Limit customization to a few of the graphical elements, but most importantly allow them to add a page Header that has their picture. People just love to see their own pictures on their website. If you had a completely plain website, black-and-white and allowed people to upload one picture of 900x200 to be their header and nothing else, people would tell you have a pretty good customization solution.

Public vs. Private

Privacy is important – for some. First of all, don’t assume people think like you. Some people like privacy, some don’t care. That’s the end of discussion. You might decide to take the everything-is-public route, but you have to do knowing you’ll lose some users. On the Family/Baby space, I think the ratio is 2/3 demand privacy, 1/3 don’t care. Another thing to keep in mind is that you might be listening to your customers on this topic and they were a self-selected group based on the features you already offered. Meaning if you ask them if they care about privacy you might get an overwhelming yes or no, but that's not a representation of the population in general.

Facebook Story

You must figure out Facebook integration. That’s not to say you should build your service inside Facebook, which I think you should not. But there is an element of easy-of-sharing and ease-of-connect on Facebook that you must leverage. The biggest problem with Facebook is that it cannot reach the younger than 13-year-old because of the law, and it cannot reach the older generation because of the technology barrier. So you have to create a solution that is seamless for those consuming the content on the website, consuming it on Facebook or consuming it via email.

The only way to succeed with a Family or Baby web presence solution is to be multi-generational friendly.

I could share another dozen less important elements on being successful on this space, but it's all a guesswork because I wasn't successful.

Part 4: Things We Did Right

2009-07-20T21:52:00.000-07:00

This is a series of 8 blog posts that will describe more about my experiences building Sampa, my mistakes and what would I have done differently.

Sampa failed, but it didn’t fail because we did everything wrong. Some things we did right and I’m very proud of that. Some of those was on my blood, some I learned along the way.

Just Ship It!

The primary and most important thing that I did was to SHIP IT! Not a single person that I worked with directly or indirectly, can tell me we failed because we didn’t ship our product. I shipped good software, I shipped great software, I shipped bad software. The only reason we would abandon a feature was because we made a clear inexcusable strategic decision that feature was not on our best interest or should be traded-off by another one. That rarely happened.

Shipping is the result, and the two factors that led us to ship so often were: Focus and “no”. Focus meant when I was writing code, spec’ing, testing it or deploying I couldn’t care less about anything else. I was also good at saying “no” to myself and to others. I was able to quickly understand the difference between doing something “good enough” in 2 days or doing “the right thing” in 7 days. “Good enough” always wins on my book.

It’s Not The Code

For about 6-9 months into Sampa I was very much in love with the code and the platform I’ve built. But after the first Alpha and getting users asking some basic “how do I do this?” kind of question I quickly learned that your consumers and your partners couldn’t care less about your code. They didn’t care if it had 10,000 or 300,000 lines of code, if it was open source, if it complied w/ XHTML standards, if it used Tables or not on the HTML. They didn’t give a shit. No one gives a shit about this except developers. But we pat ourselves on the back every time we write well-documented, well-architectured and standard-compliant code.

So after that 6-9 months I just abandon my code and focused on how can I do feature X in the most efficient manner and please users. That takes a 90-degree turn in your thinking. When you care about users, you stop thinking like a geek and you start thinking about short and long term value. Don’t take me the wrong way, I still wrote shared libraries and well-compartmentalized code when I felt we would reuse it in a short period of time, otherwise I would just make the thing work. Later I learned that a lot of those concepts are called “Agile Development”.

Understand Your Limitations and Accept Them

If you really, really want to succeed you have to give away control to others. That involves everything you do today because there always will be someone better than you. Some things are easy choices. I quickly gave away all my control at being a CEO of Sampa. I also gave away all my ability at designing templates, homepages, etc., and many other things.

What we did really well was to learn that our team didn’t have the marketing branding skills to create a compelling user message. Like most tech startups, we all come from a tech background and that makes us a different beast. For example, for any geek “URL” is a simple term. When you tell a user that word they might freak out. I can see it right now someone reading this post and saying “that’s not true, nowadays everyone knows what URL is”. Alright, but if you are not like that go search your entire code for “URL” in a user message and immediately replace it with “link” or “web address”. Actually, when in doubt use whatever terminology Microsoft or Amazon uses (they test this stuff).

We Were Scrappy

Yes, we spent almost all of $1.35 million we raised (there are still some left). But that took about 24 months, which translate into a burn of about $50K a month. At one point we have 4 full-time and 5 part-time people. I won’t say that every penny we spent was worth spending, but if we did spend we thought at the time it was the right thing do to. Ok, maybe that’s an obvious and empty statement. But we didn’t have parties or morale events (which I regret a bit), we didn’t have a Wii, a Flat Screen TV, expensive chairs or desks. We didn’t sit in nice buildings with a view of the lake. We spent on things we felt would move the needle the most. Sometimes they didn’t, but unless we could plot a direct correlation between cash spent and a benefit, we would not spend the money.

Next post: The Little Secret of Web Startups

Part 3: The Market Noise & Facebook

2009-07-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

This is a series of 8 blog posts that will describe more about my experiences building Sampa, my mistakes and what would I have done differently.

I already talked about on Part 2: Early Mistakes at Sampa about being 12-months late to market. The problem was when I was launching Alpha and Beta versions of Sampa the number of startups launching Web 2.0 products was nearly doubling every couple of months. In 2005 and early 2006 there was one or two new startups launching everyday and you could read about them on TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. By late 2006 and all of 2007 there were half-dozen to a dozen new startups launching each and every day!

Building Websites, either for consumers or business is a pretty broken industry dominated by 1&1, GoDaddy and the tens of thousands of consultants out there. So, I’m sure I wasn’t the first to think about fixing this industry and at one point I had a list of 100 (!!!) startups playing on that space. From vertical solutions (for Homeowners Associations, Dentists, Families, Baby, etc.) to very horizontal plays like substitutes for FrontPage and Geocities. To top it off, there was the rise of blogging and photo-sharing services like Flickr. That’s a hell lot of noise.

Seriously, no matter how good your solution was, with this many players every time we talked about Sampa people would say “you are just like X”. And we were nothing like X – on our minds. That didn’t matter. What matters is the consumer perception. And the press/blogosphere perception is just representative of the consumer perception.

We looked deep into our strength and weaknesses, in what we had and what others didn’t and we had a feature that we implemented in January/2007 (and we patented it as well) that allowed users to add friends and family to a private site and when new updates were sent to these users they would just click on the link on the email and be able to see the photo-album, or blog post, or whatever, without ever have to enter a password (over-simplifying for the sake of brevity). It was very powerful! Users loved it. We loved it.

Over 2007 we changed our brand to be around Privacy and Safe Sharing. Although that branding should have been with us from the get go, it wasn’t easy to explain and people would go “but I can have a private site on Blogger”, or “I can share privately on Flickr”. Argh!

Then, Facebook came. At first we didn’t perceived Facebook as an immediate threat. It was mostly college (or recently graduated 20-something) and the geeks that used it. But they started to grow, and grow and grow and mainstream was using it. Because Facebook has most of your friends and quite a few of your family members on it, and sharing was by default private, it kind make sense for you to upload the latest picture of little Jimmy playing on the beach and everyone could go “oh, cute”.

Facebook is awful at creating a family place or a baby place on the web because it doesn’t give you *any* customization (I’ll talk more about why this is important in another blog post) and it’s cumbersome to tell people about new content you want to share.

Next post: Things We Did Right

Part 2: Early Mistakes At Sampa

2009-07-20T20:21:00.000-07:00

This is a series of 8 blog posts that will describe more about my experiences building Sampa, my mistakes and what would I have done differently.

About half-way through Sampa existence I’ve made a blog post named Top 7 Mistakes At Sampa. It’s pretty hard when you look back at 4+ years of work and not to find hundreds of mistakes you’ve made, small ones, big ones and everything in between. At the end of the day, the only mistakes that matter are those where you believe would have made a difference on the outcome of the company or made the journey better. Here are the key mistakes I believe I've made:

You Need A Co-Founder & Tell Friends

The two mistakes I’ve made out of the gate (i.e., even before I started working on Sampa) were to not look for a co-founder and to be stealth about the product. I actually believe we could have a better Sampa, shipped faster and be more customer focused if more people were in-the-know and if I had someone to split the work. I needed someone that was either not a developer, but would have good business, marketing and design skills, or someone that was a better developer than I was so I could shift at learning the business or marketing (and hire a designer). And the Stealth part is a no-brainer. After I told people what I was doing around September/2005 (9 months into Sampa) instead of having a lot of spies looking into Sampa, I’ve got my own army of friends-spies looking at what else was on the web and sending me a lot of good info, connecting me with key people and sending critical early feedback on the business.

Timing Is Important

I will write about the noise on the market in another post and how that affected us, and a lot of that could have been avoided if I had started Sampa 12 months earlier. Startup is all about timing. Some people think if they ship a month earlier they will “win”, and that’s BS. But a year can make a huge difference. If you are too early, the customers and the partners are not prepared to absorb that technology so you better have a lot of cash to keep fighting. If you are late, you have dozens of other companies doing very similar (or substitute) solutions. And that’s a tough marketing/branding battle.

Paid Is Different Than Free

When I started Sampa the business plan didn’t include any free offerings. As time went by, and I was about to ship Alpha 1 (Sep/05), the Web 2.0 wave was starting to hit and everyone was offering everything free. Add to the fact that doing a paid offering requires quite a bit of work and would limit the growth rate of Sampa, I changed the business to be free. I somewhat regret that decision. When I was on my early-20s my boss and I were talking about Pizzerias in Sao Paulo (there is about 1 every 3 blocks in the city) and he said “they only way someone can open a new pizzeria and be successful is if he charges 3 times as much”. Sorry to say this to the TechCrunch-reading crowd or to Chris Anderson but there is a correlation between price and perceived value. Free is perceived as “not as good”. Even on the Internet!

Create A Healthy Win-Win Ecosystem

Now, probably the biggest mistake of them all was not to find partners early enough, primarily companies that would be the distribution channels for Sampa, the companies providing design templates for our users and much more. First of all, when I left Microsoft I swear I didn’t even know what “business development” was. When you work at the Mothership, you don’t do partnerships. You seat and wait for all kinds of companies to present you with offerings and you just give thumbs up or down. On Startups you have to work long and hard.

Next post: The Market Noise And Facebook

Part 1: You Don’t Learn This At Microsoft

2009-07-20T20:03:00.000-07:00

This is a series of 8 blog posts that will describe more about my experiences building Sampa, my mistakes and what would I have done differently. I already wrote from a personal point of view and now I'm writing from a business POV.

I spent seven years at Microsoft learning how to build large scale software. And by large scale software I mean millions of lines of code and software that’s used by hundreds of millions of people. There are just a dozen or so companies on the planet where you can have that kind of experience. It’s priceless.

The more Microsoft grew and the more the group I was in grew as well, the smaller my scope of ownership, control and influence was. I’ve always been curious about more than the engineering part of building a product. I wanted to learn about Marketing, running a business, user experience, strategy, M&A, PR, Focus Groups, etc. I couldn’t do it at Microsoft. The few times I tried to got out of my “zone” I was either reprimanded or shunt.

The first thing you don’t learn at Microsoft is Customer Focus

Then I went to do a startup to feel like I had purpose in life. You think after 15+ years building software, that building a tech startup wouldn’t be hard. I know the hardware I need, I know the software, I can built whatever people through at me. I felt like I understood pretty well customer focus.

The reality is that Microsoft is not a customer-centric company. It’s a engineering-centric company. Most people inside Microsoft doesn’t even know that. Actually, they probably don’t even know what I’m talking about. They will argue they are customer-centric because they do focus groups, they interview customers, they listen to support and to feedback on the Internet, yada, yada yada.

The second thing you don’t learn at Microsoft is Customer Acquisition

Between Jul/2000 and Apr/2001 I worked on a project called MSN SmartTags. For those that don’t remember, it was a web augmentation plug-in that every time certain words would appear on a web page a squiggly line (like the Word spell correction line) would appear under that word. Once you passed the mouse over it, a menu would appear with contextual links. For example, if the word was “Seattle”, you could see “Weather in Seattle”, “Travel to Seattle”, etc. The project never shipped, but it was supposed to come integrated with Internet Explorer 6 and Windows XP. The day IE6 and XP shipped, this product I built would be on the hands of tens of millions of users. In a few months being used by hundreds of millions and in a few years by about 1 billion people.

Let me give another example: Products at Microsoft which fail to reach millions or tens of millions of people on the first few weeks are considered a complete failure. No one, not a single soul at Microsoft thinks anything out of the ordinary about that.

Microsoft (and Google, and Yahoo, and IBM…) has its foot on the door of so many people and so many companies that it just a matter of embedding, integrating, adding, up-selling a product to another to guarantee customer acquisition. Contrary to the Federal government, I believe that Microsoft earned this right and it’s good for them. But it shields anyone at Microsoft at understanding the fundamentals of customer acquisition.

Even upper management at Microsoft doesn’t get it. They are probably still scratching their heads trying to figure out why Windows Live Spaces is not as popular as MySpace or Facebook.

My Plea To People Leaving Microsoft

If you leave Microsoft today I suggest you have a deep and long conversation with people building startups to ask them what they consider customer focus, how they decide to build what they’ve built and how they go about acquiring customers. There is a lot out there to learn.

Next post: Early Mistakes at Sampa