First, I loved the first startup I joined.  I would not trade the learning experience for anything.  This post will seem harsh and almost a bash on the first startup I joined and its partners, especially if you know them.  I have ZERO intention of that.  These are purely honest truths of the mistakes we made.  If we cannot face our mistakes and be proud that we went through them, then we shouldn’t be in startups in the first place.  For you readers, I want you to learn so you don’t repeat.  This is why I write.

Are there things that I would have changed?  Yeah, without a doubt, but do I regret any of it?  No, not one minute.

Flying High Dies Fast without Direction

Man, it’s a great feeling:  joining a startup, getting your work station setup, feeling like you’re ready to conquer the world.

I remember the first day I started.  Though it wasn’t my startup, I was the first full-timer.  It was to be setup in my garage.  I was going to be just like Gates and Bezos.  I went out, purchased a hunk of new rug and laid it out on the garage floor.  Then, I got to work on our company.

My first task: setup our website and mine leads.  We were in real estate and we were… well, honestly, I didn’t know exactly what we were going to do.  All we knew was we wanted to take on Zillow, Redfin and every other big dog out there.

Well, it’s not that we did not know what we were doing.  There were 3 of us.  There was a real estate agent, a marketer, and a programmer (me).  It was just that each of us had a different idea about how we should tackle the problem.

But, that did not matter.  We were going to build the greatest thing the world has ever seen, and it was going to make gobs of money.

Days Drag Into Months

For a while it was great.  First week, we got stuff built.  First month, we cranked out some content and renditions on the site.  However, at the end of the first 3 months, we did not have much to show.  No leads and not much in the way of a company.

But, we pushed on.  We iterated on the site and cranked out more content.  But we still did not have a solid direction

Some ideas were presented – they sounded stinking great.  So, we implemented them and released them, but they did not get us anywhere.  No one seemed to care.

We pushed on, still.  The 6 month mark hits.  We had a vision and mission statement, but it seemed to keep changing, and its point started to get lost.  The ideas we throw around were all too weak.  We started becoming more traditional real estate agents and brokers to pay the bills.

You know what the answer was?  We just needed to go full time.  That was it.  The marketer came online at 10 months in.  We were all excited; we were going to do great things again.

We launched a huge SEO campaign.  We got content writers, built back links and continued to mine leads.  It started to pay off, but not well enough.

Our Pivot

If you have read my post The Ability To Pivot Saves Lives, we did that.  We pivoted.  It was great.  We had an idea that showed promise.  The building of the new idea started overnight, but an odd thought that always lingered with, “I still wasn’t sure if this would work.”  Performing sanity check Level 5 would have appeased that, but we never did it (Read Leaving My Job: A Plunge into Startups).

Turns out, it didn’t matter because time had run out.  Less than 3 months into the new idea that had merit, we shut the doors.

Feb 1st, 2010.  1 year and 4 months later, our team went their separate ways.

Problems 1, 2… 7

Let’s explore.  If you didn’t see the host of problems, I’ll point them out now.

1. CEO was not full time – The lead needs to be full-time.  Without a full-time CEO, you don’t really have a head.  Without a head, you simply don’t have good direction.
2. No solid idea – Having hope when you start is not enough.  Not having a unifying idea leads to run away assets.  Meaning, each individual goes and tries to implement different things based upon personal beliefs.  In a startup with no money this is a killer.  You need to be all running towards the same end; otherwise, nothing ever gets built.
3. Too many head chefs – When we started, we were all like mini-CEOs.  Maybe because there was no full-time CEO, or maybe it was purely our individual natures.  Either way, there were not enough technicians getting actual work done.  Lots of delegation and direction without any execution.
4. 3 blind mice – As we pressed on, we did not actually know what we were doing.  We needed mentors and did not have any people who could see beyond our own eyelids.
5. Untested ideas – Whatever ideas we came up with, we though were great and would change everything.  We were simply dreaming because we never actually checked with any customers/target audience.  Each was so ‘obviously-great’ in our heads.
6. Fundamentally flawed – Before our pivot, we were fundamentally flawed.  You have to re-evaluate yourself every 3 to 6 months.  Step back and look, are you traveling down the right path?  ”Polish a turd, it’s still a turd.”  That’s fundamentally flawed.
7. Not pivoting fast enough – We did not relinquish the idea that our old ways were not working for over a year.  To most startups, that was 9 months too late.

Conclusion

In the end, it was a great run.  I am still extremely proud of what we accomplished and learned.  I say again:  Regret? Not one minute.

Next Post:  Startup #2 – Still not Getting it

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Here is the start of my 2 year journey to that realization… roughly.

this is just a funny t-shirt, nothing else

Austin, Texas

I used to live in Austin, TX.  I was part of a boat club, worked at the most prestigious company in the city, and partied a bit too much.  I loved every bit of my life, but I knew I always wanted to do a startup.  Create something grand, build something large and make a boat load of money… a big boat – like the tanker sized ones.  I wanted to be the next Zuckerberg or Bezos; the big hippo in the pond.

I got a phone call to come back to Seattle and do startups.  I thought, “This is it, this is my ticket to making huge money! I’m all in!”  I’m ready to leave my company, my home, and my precious boat, all for this elusive idea of making a great and grand company.

But, the realism was, we did not really have an idea nailed down.  All we had was… hope.

Does this sound like someone you know?

[Justin Alert]

Let’s think this through.  Ask all your friends if leaving everything for your idea is a good move.  What do they say?  If a number of them say it is not smart, listen to them.

This is one of the easiest levels of sanity checks, and roughly, the order of sanity checks is:

Level 1:  Yourself
Level 2:  Your Family
Level 3:  Your Friends
Level 4:  Other people in startups
Level 5:  Customers/Users to the product you’re building
Level 6:  Investors

Anything before Level 4 is a walk in the park.  They will all tell you what you want to hear.  If they don’t, you are really headed down the wrong path.  That was me.  I could not convince my friends, and I was so self-absorbed that this was such a great idea.  I was setting myself up for failure.

In truth, you need to get all the way to Level 5 before you could even consider venturing down ANY path.  I never even got past Level 2.  It is not until Level 5 that you’re onto something.  I will go through the levels more in another post.

My Problem

My real problem was I wanted to be this great huge name from nothing.  I wanted to have people recognize me on the street.  ”Oh, there’s Justin.  He built that thing that’s so cool.”  I wanted to be great, and that blinded me from the very basics of business sense.

Before you leave your job, you had better know what you’re trying to build.  Then, you had better know that there is a problem out there.  If there is no problem to solve, then you will not be able to make any money.  If you cannot make money, you do not have a business.  And at the end of the day, you just have a hobby.

A way to know if you have found a problem worth fixing is going up and asking those exact people you’re targeting and ask, “Hey, would you use this?”

They (whoever they are) say 80% of all startups fail in 3 years.  50% of those failed in the first year.  One of the largest reasons is that they are not actually doing anything useful.  Too many entrepreneurs think what they have is exactly what people want without asking anyone what they truly need.  It SEEMS so simple, but it actually is not because it is truly scary.

“What if what I show/tell them isn’t what they want?  What if they reject my ideas?  If I just build this one thing more like this, it’ll be perfect and everyone will love it” – is what we think.  Entrepreneurs – we cannot think like that! Your idea needs to be open to change and molding by people other than yourself.  If you do not refine your idea, it will cause you to spin your wheels, bleed money and ultimately have to shut your doors.

I did it.  Got stuck for 2 years in multiple ideas.

Do you have any stories of lessons learned from not properly testing your idea?

Next Post:  My first startup – First time for Going Nowhere Fast

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Specifically, it’ll save your life and anyone else you’re directly in charge of.  In this post, I’ll be talking about the roller coaster of a ride starting a company has been.

What is Pivoting?

It’s the ability to change directions with whatever you’re doing on a dime.  I can do it.  You can do it.  Microsoft needs something bigger than a dime, maybe an ocean and a few tugboats would do.

A Brief History of Narble.com – the Goal Setting System

Feb 2, 2010 – Francis Kam and I started up an idea of goal setting.  Helping people take your goal, break it down into daily actionable items, and be social about it.  Fast forward through 1 month of planning, 3 months of coding and we come to our application to TechStars.org that got this whole crumbling affect to happen.  Monday June 7th, we bribe lots of TechStar mentors with cupcakes in hopes to get our name out there.

Tip #1: Cupcake bribes work.

Head honcho Andy Sack talks to us for 5 minutes and tells us to completely change our business model because he feels we don’t have one.  Ouch.  We resist, push forward and talk to Will Hartmann from HomeSavvi.com.  He asks the question, “What are you selling?”  When I was honest with myself, I wasn’t selling anything.  That was another knock at our business plan.  The final straw was talking to Dave Schapell of TeachStreet (find local and online classes).  In not so few words, he said we needed to be the master of a vertical and not the jack of all goal setting.  ”Jack of all trades; Master of none” syndrome.  We were a jack of all trades and there’s no money in that.

Tip #2: It’s always better to be the master of one thing than a know it all on nothing.

I’ll write more on this later.  With that, our entire business model was drilled into the ground and we ceased to be the business Narble.com.  We were a hobby; a something you do on the side.

In comes Pivot

In life, you’ll rarely get what you want, but what you end up with was surprisingly what you needed.

This couldn’t be truer for us.  If we had continued down the same path, we would’ve been 3 years out with still no money.  So even though what we had spent 4 months building had largely gone to waste, we were saved from our own demise.  ”They” always say it’s not how you succeed shows the measure of a person, but how you pick up from failures.  In comes tip #3,

Tip #3: When failure comes, cry for 3 hours, forget it and move on.

The ability to change directions quickly allows you to move on from bad ideas that simply drain you.  Lots of people “marry” themselves to their ideas; hang on way too hard.  If you think you’re doing a good thing, but everyone else says you’re not.  You’re probably not.  This applies anywhere in life from startups to picking a house.  Sadly, there’s always reasons to stick to your idea.

Why People Can’t Pivot

Don’t fall prey to your own fantasies.  People dream if I could only have this, if I could only do that, then I could be here or I could go there.  I know it sounds so good in your head, but the truth is you are here.  You’ll never get there on your current path.  Cut your losses and figure out another way.

In Narble’s case it was:  If we had users, and the users used our website like this, then we could get them to do this and then we could make money.  We believed if we built it a ton of users would come and we would naturally make money!  Facebook, twitter, and all them did it.  Hahaha, I know, I know.

It took 3 incredibly smart and high powered tech startup people to drill it down until we believed it.  This entire process only took 3 days and it was simply depressing.  We weren’t married to our idea

Doing Something Else

For Narble, it’s doing something else.  I’ll be posting what’s happening here and my lessons learned as we go through them.

Do a reality check, ask others who will tell you their honest opinion.  If the general consensus is the wrong path, then change.  You might actually save a life.

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Some are good at dealing with this pressure.  Calm, cool, collected… pump out the creative ideas.  But, if you’re like me, a little help never hurts.

My friend, who we’ll call Steve… actually, that’s his name, had to come up with a new name for his company.  It’s like trying to name your child in under a week because you just found out your sister ’surprise’ named her kid that yesterday.

Steve had to balance meaning, print-ability, recognizability and personal desire to come up with his new company name.  Turns out all the good names he kept arriving at were already taken.  His deadline was a little over a week to finalize the name due to product already in circulation.

A week to decide the identity you will carry for the rest of your career and all the good names are taken?  It’s time to force creativity.

Don’t panic. Don’t get Frustrated.

You’ve got a dead line, and you’ve got to do something you’re not good at.  We’ve all felt the pressures of a deadline.  If you panic, that’s all you’ll ever think about and lose precious time.  Calm down.

The feeling of panic and frustration will reoccur over and over.  It’s like waves crashing against a seawall.  When it happens, take a break for a few minutes to collect yourself.

The ‘What You Knows’

Once you’ve stopped panicking, getting started isn’t necessarily easy.  The mind can be finicky as time pressure mounts.  It darts, left to right with ideas flurrying all around.  Even as I write this, my mind is going nuts with all the ideas I have for other topics.

Here’s one way to help you get started: Write down the ‘what you knows’.  I know my starting point is A, and that my goal is B.  Here are all the things I know about A, and here are all the things I want about B.  Methodically path ideas that lead you get from A to B.

Document Everything

That brings me to my next idea.

Good idea, bad idea, document it.  Napkin, paper, what helps me?  Mind mapping - Freemind.  From start to finish, you won’t remember all your ideas.  You definitely won’t remember all the details about each idea.  Write them down.  Seeing all your thoughts laid out can help you create new ideas, combined ideas, and sometimes find great ideas.

The shorter your time frame, the harder the situation and the more trained you need to be.

In the End

When you’re put on the spot to be creative.  Usually, the problem isn’t coming up with ideas.  It’s keeping all your ideas together, remembering all of them and then putting them together to create a great idea; that elusive ‘magic’ idea.

Stay cool, write it down, and you’ll be that much closer.

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Don’t get caught up listening to your parents constantly telling you, you need to study (unless you actually don’t study, that’s different).  Here are 5 tips to help grow your college experience, set you up for the future, and have fun doing it.

Do the Minimum

Whatever grade you want to get, do the minimum to get it.

Don’t get me wrong, studying is important, but time is precious so don’t over study.  Use your new found time to do these next 4 items.

Get an Internship

While every college student knows this idea, it’s amazing how few attempt to get one.  It’s not enough to simply have an education.

When I look at resumes, there are 3 things: school, work experience, grades.

1. Did you come from a university?
2. Did you have strong, quality employers?
3. Do you pass the minimum grade level required?

Everyone applying to a job along with you will have #1 & #3.  #2 will set you apart.  If you’re missing work experience, you’ve got a long hill to climb.

The benefits of real world experience far out weigh what you’ll learn in college.  I won’t list them here, as I’m sure you’ve heard them too many times.

GO OUT, with purpose

Too many people do 1 of 2 things: Go out way too much or not at all, and either case is bad.

If you go out way too much, you’re on the right track, but you need some focus.

Don’t waste all your time (some time is okay) hanging around the same group, doing the same things week in, week out.

While you’re out, meet a butt load of new people and become friends.

You’ll never know if the next person you meet will be a Zukerberg, Bezos, Buffet or your spouse.  No quality relationship you make is a waste.

Need to get out more?  Do it, but the goal is the same: build relationships.  The results are the same: friendships, idea bouncers and people to help you.

A common phrase is, “It’s nearly impossible to meet new people outside of college.”  It’s pretty much true.  College is the time to do this work.

Meet at least one new person a week.

Join a Club, or 3

This is right along side with GO OUT, with purpose.

Specifically, what’s nice about joining clubs or different sports is you’ll meet and work with people you normally would have never been able to meet.

Get a Mentor

Study under a great mind.  If you like business, get a business mentor.  Engineering, programming, bible study, anything go find your mentor.

Whoever it is, find them, e-mail them and say, “I’d like you to mentor me.”

Simply surrounding yourself with a great person or people is usually enough to make you want to be great.

You want what they have.  They’re just a bit larger than life.

Having a mentor helps maintain focus and remind you why you’re doing what you are doing, and what you’re aiming for.

Notice, only 1 out of the 5 have anything to do with studying.  It’s diminished at that.

The other 4 are networking – getting to know people.  In life, you’ll find the idea, “It’s not what you know.  It’s who you know,” reigns truer and truer as the years pass.

Might as well start early and have fun doing it.

P.S. If you liked this post, subscribe to me via RSS or E-mail.  I’m cool with either =)

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Turns out, Warren Buffet doesn’t think outside the box.

Buffet is one of my favorite examples of Making Your Box Bigger.  He is so far from creative, creative thinking and thinking outside the box it’s not even funny.  Everything Warren did and still does is common knowledge in the world of investing.  It’s all ‘inside the box’ and not that original.

And yet, how is he the 2nd richest man of the free world?  That’s serious.

The answer is astonishingly simple:  He slowly, but surely, grew his box larger.

Focus

Every night, Buffet would hole himself up in his little office downstairs and read, study, read, study.

Buffet wasn’t creative, but he studied and read until his understanding of investing was so large that he didn’t have to think outside the box.  All his great ideas were a culmination of knowledge, experience and pushing the envelope just a little bit every time.

Relentless

When Buffet first discovered GEICO, he took a train down to their headquarters in Washington D.C. on a Saturday.  He pounded on the door until a janitor let him in.  Turns out Lorimer Davidson, GEICO Vice President, was in the office and Buffet insisted on speaking with him.  Davidson allowed it thinking it would be a nice gesture.  After 15 minutes of speaking, Davidson soon realized he was speaking to someone “extraordinary”.

There are a number of things going on here.

1. As soon as he discovers GEICO and deems it valuable, he heads there, immediately.
2. Arrives on a Saturday and pounds on the door.  Who does he expect to find!?
   1. Thinking deeper: If he showed up on a weekday, the VP would not have had time to see him.  What then?
3. He pounds until someone opens.  When someone opens, he convinces them to let him in.

Don’t stop at anything to get what you want.  Sheer willpower won out here and many other times for Buffet.

Re-invest in Yourself

Buffet started out with a paper route and made $25 (~$250 today).  With that he a pinball machine, stuck it in a barber shop.  In a few months he had 3 pinball machines.

Every dollar you make, you have to ask yourself, “What is the best way for me to use this dollar?”  For Buffet his answer was always figuring out ways to make it into more dollars.  Easier said than done, and required a lot of him to be relentless in getting that dollar.

More of the same, Buffet had $174,000 when the firm he was working for closed down.  He took all that money and opened up Buffet Partnerships Ltd. and over 6 years amassed his personal wealth to $1M (~$7.1M).

Ignore All the Noise and Eat with a Grain of Salt

Even in the 1960’s there were countless ways of investing (and there are still today).  Buffet picked up The Intelligent Investor and memorized it.  He could have picked anyone else’s methodologies just as easily, but he picked Ben Graham’s because he felt it was the best.

At the end of the day, no one makes a decision for you except yourself.  Sift through all the noise of marketers, advertisements and plain garbage to find the golden nuggets.  Take everything you hear with a grain of salt and decide for yourself whether it’s a good idea or not.

Even this blog! decide for yourself whether or not what I type is good for you.  I hope it is.

Love What You Do

Realistically, Buffet doesn’t care about being rich.  Look at his home.  Look at me in front of his home, ha!  His goal was simply to make money, and he loved doing it.  He didn’t care for many other things.  His favorite steak house is actually not that good.

irjustin Standing in front of Warren Buffet's House

Loving what you do allows you to endure those long nights, cranking out content, writing e-mails to different markets or reading Moody’s manual like Mr. Buffet himself.

The 9 to 5 hours become blurry, almost start looking like the 7pm to 2am stuff.

Be like the $40 Billionaire

Push harder, drive harder and focus.  That’s Buffet’s style, not some fancy creative ideas, and it’s not outside your bounds either.

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Why am I, as irjustin.com, here?  Too many people say, “Think outside the box,” and, “Think creatively.”  It almost feels as if it is a cop out answer like, “I don’t want to tell you,” leaving you stranded.  This site exists to help build a base for strong creative thinking, and it starts in something that’s surprisingly basic.

Building my tree fort

Say I’m trying to build a tree fort with no tools and no money to start.  I ask the guy down the street who already did the exact same thing.  “Sir, how did you build this tree fort with no money and no tools?”  His reply is, “It’s easy!  Think creatively!”  What!?  That didn’t tell me anything!  So now I’m supposed to go home and think of all the out of box ways to build a fort with no tools and no money.

Not surprisingly, I come up with lots of ideas that don’t seem very good.  No “ah ha!” ideas.

The real problem is:  I’m trying to create something from nothing.  Trying to come up with an idea about a topic I have zero knowledge about.  While some people can do this, most of us just have a frustrating time spinning our wheels, including me.

Looking at it differently

Why not, make that box bigger instead of trying to think outside of it?

For some reason, we miss the box itself.  It’s you, your knowledge, your experience.  There’s no way that’s static.  This is what irjustin.com is all about:

• Growing your knowledge
• Expanding your experience
• Linking both together to create new ideas

Learn a little bit more; do a few more things you’ve never tried.  Keep this up, and you suddenly realize your box now encompasses the area you were trying to think outside of.  No longer trying to create something from nothing, but linking experience and knowledge together to create “ah ha’s!”

This is something we can all do.  It’s not magic.  You’ve been doing it formally since kindergarten.

With no money or tools

Build vertical knowledge by studying how to build this tree fort – books, internet, friends (who don’t say think outside the box).  Trim costs where it can be done – use different materials and tools, probably means lots of plywood and borrowed hammers.

Expand horizontal knowledge; learn how to raise money for tools and supplies.  Can’t get an idea?  Ask a friend, again.  Better yet, build a club, enlist your friends for ideas, tools and money or money making.

Learn it, link it, build it.  Thinking creatively is within your grasp.

Just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world

A key idea:  Have faith in what you do.  If you don’t, learning halts, experiences will be missed and sadly, you won’t grow.  That box won’t get bigger.

This idea can be applied to anything you do, anywhere you go but, please, don’t relent.

Keep it up and you’ll have built yourself a bad ass fort.

P.S.  If you didn’t get the title in the last section, look for the title of the song to understand.  Post it up in the comments.

P.S.S This is my first post.  How did I do?  Bad?  Good?  Need work?  Grammar? Better stories? Amazinggg?  AHHH!!

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