We’re travelling next year, with nothing but a backpack of essentials and a bank card to make it all happen. We’ve found ourselves offloading everything that does not server to add either to our travels – there’s very little that will fit into a backpack that can only weigh 15% of your body weight (that’s only 12 kgs in my case!) – and anything that will age or waste in a year is on its way out.

Reason 1 – Clear out that Mind of Yours

Getting rid of all those plans you had, ideas you cherished and other random placeholders in your mind and heart lifts your soul and miraculously adds so much more energy by freeing you from things you simply will not get to, don’t really want to do, and actually don’t have time or energy to suffer through.

Every idea you keep on the backburner, any half finished project still in the garage or to do gathering digital dust weighs on your conscience to some degree. This collective weight can leave you feeling exhausted all the time as a result of “all those things you’re just not getting to”. Ask yourself this – how many of these things do you actually have to do. I mean have to do. Need to do. Must do. Ditch anything that begins with a “but” or has a “want” in it.

If you haven’t gotten to it yet or not worn it in 6 months, give it away. Or better yet follow Adam Baker’s route and use it to get you out of debt.

I recently downgraded from the bleeding edge of Chrome to Chrome Stable (for a simpler, more reliable web experience), an offshoot of this step was this – Chrome Web App Zen:

That’s it and nothing else. Previously I had 5 pages of things which I cannot seem to remember…

Reason 2 – Someone Else Could Put it to Better Use

This one in a sense stems from greed or insecurity. I’m a hoarder. There I said it, and my fiancé would be happy with the admission. I have problems saying goodbye to a well used toothbrush. I grow attached, it served me well, it knows some of the deepest parts of me, seen sides of me I even haven’t, and we’ve come to work quite well together. Tossing it in the bin feels like a betrayal. So now the fiancé swops them out when I’m not looking, and the old ones end up as oven cleaners or something similar.

Everything we’ve given away has been accepted with open arms and a smile. From old office scrap paper to a door I painted as a blackboard on both sides, to canvasses I’ve dragged through 4 homes and two provinces. Someone else will use it. You won’t. Pass it on.

Reason 3 – Less is More, and it Makes You Happier

I posted a great TED video (aren’t they all?) about this the other day, and it’s true. The more I reduce what I have in my office the clearer my mind is, the more productive I feel (reality distortion field maybe, but good vibes lead to more drive). I’ve come to be quite strict about it, I clear my desk before I start work and at the end of everyday. I try to do the same thing in Basecamp ( which is still a work in progress). This single pair of actions has done more for my productivity than I’d like to admit.

I’m a visual person and background noise from clutter, mess, notes, post-its, cups, glasses and half read books weigh me down. Tidying them up, and better yet permanently getting rid of them (meaning I don’t have to pack them away every morning or evening!) is a tremendous mood lifter.

Less ownership equals less responsibility.

Reason 4 – Less Stuff, Less Admin

With less crap, you have less stuff to move around your house, to put in cupboards, to take out, to fold, to pack, to sort, to dust, to clean, to spend your entire life making sure its actually in the place it should be. And then paying for insurance in case some person moves it permanently, you can put it back. We put up bars and fences to protect our stuff. We buy cupboards and shelves to stack and pack our stuff. We spend hours online looking for storage tips and space saving IKEA reality distorters.

What if we just had less stuff?

Especially if it doesn’t save your life, support your life, or make it quantifiably better. If it’s just lying there taking up space, keeping your shelves busy, or gathering dust – ditch it, sell it, pass it on.

Reason 5 – Travel Light Through Life.

This one’s very topical for us, we’re putting everything into boxes ahead of our traveling, why bother with stuff we don’t even want. Cheers. Be gone. What goes into the box must come out again, so we’re making sure that its long lasting, well needed, makes us happy, serves a purpose, and we’re used it recently – if not this week.

If we don’t then we’ve got to get more boxes, wrap more things in newspaper, carefully place more things in each box, stack more boxes, and worry about which box is going to fall and potentially end the happy existence of one of our furry friends. Stuff kills.

Bonus Reason – Its Better for the Environment

Having less stuff, and even more so needing less stuff, is much better for the environment. Our environment, your environment. Recycle where you can, help others reuse where they can, buy repairable products – disposable is evil.

Have you ditched your shit  crap recently? Do you have a great way to do it – share it in the comments so other readers can get rid of their own shit may benefit.

Bill Gates didn’t finish college. Neither did Steve Jobs. No one knew you could have such a thing as television until Philo Farnsworth came up with the idea (in 1927, at the age of 21). They all created things that, initially at first, involved boxes (computers, TVs – get it?). But by far, they were thinkers outside of the box.

We all get opportunities to live, work, spend and save inside or outside of boxes. So here is a list of my top six inside/outside of the box concepts that contribute to better financial wellbeing :

1. Be healthy

 Rather than be dependent on doctors and medicines and insurance for your health, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, less meat, and make sure you are physically active in some way every day. This alone could save you millions of dollars down the road. Millions!

2. Don’t live in your car

I don’t mean this literally. I mean don’t allow a commute to rule your life. Live as close to your work as possible, but if you can’t, minimize how much it costs you in time and dollars. Use public transportation, ride a bike, or negotiate one day a week when you can work from home.

3. Do a no-purchases month

Experiment with living without stuff. Allow only essential purchases for food and, well, toilet paper and soap. Skip new clothes. Skip toys and software and online subscriptions. Just live with the stuff you already have. You won’t die. I’m certain of it. And you should learn how it is to just pass up unnecessary purchases.

4. Only YOUR food

Buy food only in grocery stores and make your meals at home. You save about 75% off the price of food (and much, much more off alcohol) when you make food yourself. That includes lunches as much as everything else.

5. Borrow money strategically

If you have a job, you can get short-term cash in the form of paycheck cash advance loans. You shouldn’t use these every month. But they can be a real smart way to manage a cash shortfall. For example, if you need to fix your car and it will cost $400 more than what you have on hand, get an online cash advance . This allows you to pay for that repair over two pay periods instead of one.

6. Open the envelopes

Everyone is afraid of bad news, and that news often comes in envelopes. Like thin envelopes from your bank (overdraft notice). Or something from your student loan company, or your credit card companies. No matter. Man up to it (or woman up?), face the facts of what is going on for you financially, and figure out how to manage it.

Remember, girls don’t cry in baseball. So looking at your bills, making your own meals, exercising and strategic cash borrowing shouldn’t bring any tears, either.

Writer and designer Graham Hill asks: Can having less stuff, in less room, lead to more happiness? He makes the case for taking up less space, and lays out three rules for editing your life.

Graham Hill
Graham Hill is the founder of TreeHugger.com; he travels the world to tell the story of sustainability, and tweets at @GHill. Full bio and more links

Source

I’ve spent years looking for my passion, I’m still fairly young but for at least the last decade I have been looking for what I am good at. Why? Well simply why spend your life doing what you’re average at.

That’s a waste of life.

So I plugged away, trying a hundred different things, following my head, then following my heart, then following the money. There have been a few hits and a few misses but mostly until recently only some success. On the whole up until this very week I would say I’ve been slowly evolving or iterating towards the specific passion, and the manner in which I want to do it. You see for me at least I think your passion is just as much about what you do, as well as how and where you do it. And at least in a partially self-rationalising way I think I have been working on the setup for quite some time.

The gist is that I’ve been looking for quite a few years and I’ve stumbled on a pretty good method of finding one’s passion. Its pretty simple and I believe that most people could do it. I’ve included below the basic process and some  of the thinking behind each step but if you have any questions just fire away in the comments and I’ll make any amendments to add or clarify.

Amandla!

Step 1: The Strengths Phase

The idea behind focusing on your strengths is to find what your natural talents are, where you have the most knowledge, and also where you have developed your skills. Those are three separate things, even though they sound synonymous. How do you discover this very revealing information about yourself? Well you could bumble through life and test everything, you could look at your past and try and determine it or you could do what I did and buy a book recommended by a clever friend. The books is Now! Discover your strengths by Marcus Buckingham and I can safely say it changed my life. For at least a month.

My own personal strength areas in order are:

• Strategy – this is your big picture thinker
• Input – information junkie, this explains my Internet usage
• Learner – compulsive learner, excited about new things
• Futurist – This explains why I’m a tech entrepreneur, I like things that are new, coming, possible, that reek of the future.
• Command – This in part explains why I’ve gone solo, its the ability to speak one’s mind, and resist the status quo.

You then have to act on the information, so seeking a way to do this I funnily enough found his follow up book – Go put your strengths to work. Now this book is very good, but it didn’t really work for me, and the reason was that besides being a great starting and a poor finisher is that I was trying to find strengths in a focus that I don’t think held much passion anymore.

But knowing these key areas and that I was scraping the barrel trying to follow through with the activities in the second book meant that what I was doing was almost wholly unfulfilling at present. This could be for various reasons, burnout, stagnation or lack of variation. Either way I needed to try something completely different.

Go deep.

Step 2: The Introspection Phase

So I knew my strengths, and knew I needed something fresh and something different.  That was daunting, a deer in the headlights “Okay now what moment.” So I looked inward, what do I want to do with my life. What changes do I want to make in the world? How do I want to live my life, what is my natural most comfortable mode of working? What nagging desire have I buried for so long that it almost seems silly to consider it being a passion. You may have worked around, studied near or otherwise skirted your passion without realising. I did. I have worked in numerous areas that all target only certain parts of my strength areas. The funny thing was I always felt it added value in some sense, and now that I’ve possibly found my passion it makes more sense.

So trust your inner voice, you may have to turn down the volume of your life, those around you and anything else that might be drowning out your honest self. Listen and reflect on what you’ve been doing your whole life there might be clues there. This takes time, took me a few months at least and then it came in a flash that I only actually realise the value of a few days later when relating it to someone else. Its funny how that works, your subconscious keeps plugging away at something and often surprises you with an answer. Verbalising that answer can then make it far more real, than some written down thoughts, particularly if the person reacts in a supportive way. Even if they don’t though proceed to the next phase, its your life after all.

So many variables...

Step 3: The Testing Phase

In this phase I’ve taken inspiration from Matt Cutts and his TED Talk about 30 Day Challenges. What better way to test whether or not you are on the right track then focusing down and doing what you think you’re keen on for 30 days. Being a grown up about it, anyone can commit thirty days of solid effort to something that might change their lives for the better. Its a simple rationale, and an even simpler process. Take what you find interesting and think you may be passionate about and do it everyday for thirty days, recording the process in some shape or form. If you want to try out photography a common one is to take a single photo everyday. Sounds simple enough, but the kicker is that single photo. Not a 100 photos but one, it forces you to try harder and be selective. People also often extend this to one photo everyday for a year. Matt tried running, gratitude and writing. The latter is what has my attention at the moment and to be honest I am loving every moment of it, my business is actually getting in the way of it. So for me that’s a good sign right off the bat.

My other  requirement is that I reach my goal, if I can do that being the poor finisher that I am, then its truly a passion. We finish what we love don’t we? So set yourself a goal based upon what you feel is possible, whether its a stretch target or easily reachable set something to aim at. Be specific, be realistic but challenging. No real growth comes from doing what you can easily do.

Close enough.

Golden Rule:

Keep it to yourself. Often when we share what we mean to do, what changes we intend to make, we feel like we’ve achieved them when we receive social recognition for it. “I want to lose weight” – “Oh that’s wonderful, you’d look great a bit slimmer, good luck you.” New years resolution swapping often is the reason we stall. So keep it close to your chest until your first testing phase confirms your thoughts, or disproves them. Who needs to know you almost found a passion, people will think you’re flaky. Derek Sivers has a very short TED video about this very concept. In fairness there is another school of thought that telling people can be motivating, but there is an important caveat to that theory in that you need to tell enough people, to the point of bragging, such that you’ll feel so embarrassed by failure that it propels you through your achievement phase. Your choice, but I think just shutting up about it is easier.

Eating my own dog food, I’m not telling you mine until at least November 5th. And probably only some of you, the kind ones.

Other Resources Worth Giving a Shot:

Jonathan Mead’s Illuminated Mind, specifically Zero Hour Work Week (free)

In the next 90 days my world must shift. Things must change. Sacrifices must be made. Promises must be given. Trends bucked, and status quos snubbed. I have a whole lot of thumbing my nose at the greater world and its greased cogs to do before I start getting places. There’s life to be lived, and I’m not doing it.

Sometime in early Janaury 2012, we will be jetting off to South America for at least 6 months – one way tickets and all.

YEHAAAAAAAAA!!

Although spontaneous eloping is romantic – this adventure is planned. The goal is not to shirk any of the daily drudgery that often consumes our lives, but to delegate or delete it. Its a life pruning that will culminate in ideally a six months sabbatical that will lay the foundation for the rest of my life. Most importantly I’ll be spending it with my wife.

We thought we’re going to go overseas for our honeymoon anyway. We’d really love to finally do some decent travelling. Trekking around a continent, our home on our backs, and up to our eye balls in a foreign culture. So we connected the two, and said:

 “Stuff it, let’s make this happen.”

Let’s be honest – our lives are our own making. What more is there to life than doing what we want to do, when we want to do it, and with whom we choose. You just can’t sit and wait for your dice roll, your magic ticket stub, your chance encounter, your whatever. You have to move some shit, change some shit and grab life by the goolies and demand your slice of heaven. Otherwise its just grind, grind, grind…

Grind, grind, grind

So, erm back to reality eh?

Two cats, two bonds, two cars, two businesses, too much? Nope. But herein lies the turning point, it’s not simply about the perspective altering travel my nomadic soul has been craving since early conception, but the crazy bloody consequences it will have for some of the foundational elements of my life. This journey, both the lifestyle restructuring and the physical and metaphysical acts of travelling, ideally should permanently warp my fragile little mind. One can only hope.

Let’s recap:

My business has been for the past year moving towards my own planned obsolescence, my own self-preformed founder-ectomy. In the coming months we’ll rent our Cape Town home fully furnished to a kind cat loving person, our cars will go into storage, and my business will gain two more staff members and chug along with procedures and processes put in place for this purpose. Sorted.

Well that’s the plan at least. There’s a touch more than 90 days to make it really happen. 90 days to automate our lives, hand over the reigns, the keys and our furry first borns. And as I sit here on my 27th birthday, typing this manifesto of change, this freedom charter, I can’t help but smile, and think “Challenge accepted.“

So over the course of more than a few days, but just a couple a months, I’m going to learn a new language and map out an 11 country, 17 000km journey through, over, under and across lands both exciting and unknown. I’ll be systematically removing myself from my own business. At the moment I can go absent scant days without hiccups, but I’ll have to stretch that longer and longer to numerous months. We’re going to have to reduce two homes into two backpacks, carrying our homes, worlds and our dreams with us. And in 93 days, 16 hours, 37 minutes, 38 seconds (at time of copy and paste) I will be getting married to my high school sweetheart and decade long companion, with a chuppah and all. A great start to an epic journey.

The Challenges

Matt Cutts: Player by night, Google Engineer by day.

A little while ago I came across a TED video (some of you may know that I tend to like those), with Matt Cutts, Google Engineer extraordinaire, extolling the virtues of a simple but profound exercise in purposeful living. during these 30 Day challenges, Matt did one thing every day for 30 days. He took photos, said “Thank you”, ran every day and most importantly remembered every moment more intensely. I plan to follow the same simple model but string together a few challenges that accomplish the aims I have above. The idea is to focus on incremental daily progress to climb this mountain before me.

How do you eat an elephant – an animal so big, so massive? One bite at a time.

What’s it to you?

If you have any interest in living a life worth living, chasing meaning, seeking minimalism in a world beset by crass consumerism and information overload then follow along this journey of ours. I’ll document and blog the details, the processes and any valuable insights that come out of this process to a Zero Hour Work Week.

Zen.

When a group of people decide to act in such a way as to threaten inconvenience, to threaten property, or to threaten safety – their actions are no longer for the betterment of democratic society, but are to its detriment.

When a group of people act against the norms of society, against it’s laws and against the local majority, in order to force a particular course of action by making the alternative increasingly inconvenient – that is a terrorist act.

When a group of people, however initially justified, start to hold the general populace hostage in order to get what they want, by disrupting access to necessities, by preventing the provision of basic services, by inciting the malicious damage of property, by condoning smaller criminal offences as being part of the greater cause, by oppressing a peaceful populace with violence, that group is now a terrorist group.

A group that does all of the above in the name of whatever cause, over the course of an extended period of time, is simply spreading the same malice of a car bomb, over a greater timeframe and greater area. Low level terrorism is still terrorism and the perpetrators should be, as is both democratic and justified, held to book over their actions.

Holding unions responsible for the actions of the majority of their members, financially and if need be legally, would swiftly bring these violent strikes to an end. These strikes are beginning to follow an all too familiar pattern of descending into violence and malice, from what often appears to be the get go.

The results of the group’s descent into mob madness is often counter intuitive to their own needs – with commuters destroying their own means of commuting, with poverty stricken workers removing more capital from the system, and with public protectors turning on their own public.

Call a spade a spade.

Update: CT to claim R92,000 for destroyed bins

The one surprising but not altogether unwelcome thing about being such an incomprehensible and incongruous laggard in this department is that at this point any bloody phone will do. We’ll not any, we troglodytes still want all the shiny bits, its just that the technological chasm between even a year old phone (absolutely prehistoric) and my previous phone is.such that relatively speaking any bloody phone will do. Any modern phone would such a monumental technological leap forward…

With that in mind I got the f**king effing best one. Why not? Most shiny bits, all the right inches, so thin it’s literally terrifying. I was considering giving it its own seat and seat belt on the drive home. The first nerdstatic five minutes of fiddling I did, using both hands and sitting on the floor… This will last, of course until I do the – heartwrenching – but inevitable and test how well it bounces.

(Note: The fiance tested this out for me within the first 48 hours. Startlingly it seems I love her enough to let this one slide, like my phone. This marriage may just have legs.)

The long and the short of it is that I now have one – world beware. From blogging in bed to peppering the world with overly effects-laden photos of my bored big boned cat – you have all been warned.

They need your help to get there. Last year they were funded by the Mark Shuttleworth Foundation, this year they need your help.

Here’s a bit more about the kids in question:

Seeing Swans, a Cape Town-based software engineering company, is looking for assistance in sending a team of High School learners to Istanbul, Turkey to take part in the RoboCup Junior Challenge – a prestigious international event aimed at encouraging the youth’s interest in science
and technology.

Last year, the team of six learners (4 girls from Khayelitsha and 2 boys from Athlone) represented South Africa at the 2010 Challenge is Singapore, where the they placed 10th, despite not having the any prior experience or exposure to the field of robotics. The team was able to participate at the
event last year due to sponsorship by Mark Shuttleworth.

This year, the team faces the possibility of not making it to the RoboCup Challenge this year, unless YOU can provide even partial assistance towards sending the learners to Turkey.

So lets see what we can do to give our own robotics industry a push, and in the future when we have our own ASIMO (this link for some fun) you can say that your help, aided our fledgling industry in getting there.

You can find out more on the citi.org.za website, or download this PDF for more details.

Sidebar: I recently bought a door. Painted it with blackboard paint. On both sides. And leaned it against a wall in my office. I plan things on it. I draw ideas on it. I generally just have fun with concepts on it.

What I’m getting at is that in my constant absorption within this wonderful digital world within a world that we’ve built up around ourselves. This intangible, out of reach, scraggly little blanket – I feel cut off. Overwhelmed honestly, and in this deluge of information, to dos, action orientated blog posts, top ten lists, and posts about “20 [Insert Semi Useful Thing] You’ve Probably Missed Out On.” More blah blah here, more blah blah there. Its a bit much. Its also not real. Its chock full of faux experiences, faux connections, and shock horror faux friendships. You know the type, “Yes I’ll accept your friend request, cause yes I’m awesome, and now I have 500. And its awesome.” Flash forward to some version of a mini-mart somewhere and its all about ducking into aisle three because you’d rather develop an intense interest in the ingredients of floor polish that speak to your ‘new’ friend.

I’m finding this digital world with its constant SEO gardeners, social (I’m not really interested, but its a good racket) media marketers, press releases, trending this, random #SomeThingImportant that, all a bit indistinct. Insubstantial. Not in an ethereal “Oh like, its made of binary, man” sense, but rather a there’s just not much of it that really matters. Matters in sense of what actually results from its happening. What bit of this 4.6 billion old hunk of rock it actually changed.

I dunno, maybe its my neck of the woods, my circle of influence, or trust or whatever. Maybe I don’t have a social graph, maybe its a social flat line with an odd shaped bump at the one end. Either way it feels like I need a bit more analogue. Some R&R. Disconnect. Unplug. Take the fucking blue pill. Argh.

I’ve started doing more real world things. Being creative is somehow unfulfilling when all you’ve done in a day is push pixels or herd some bytes. Making something physical that remains after the process, without the whirr of fans and distant puff of fossil fuels. So I make blackboards, to keep me away from trying to think on a screen that just doesn’t ever seem big enough. Even with two. Thoughts just feel framed, divided, distracted, distorted, 2D, reduced to their digital essence and somehow lacking any warmth. Blackboards are messy, I have chalk dust everywhere, bits of chalk lying all over the place, and I love it. Its child-like, its back to basics, its completely real. There’s no spell check, no incessant drive to perfection that the digital world allows.

“Wait did I spell that right?” F7 – done. Is that fact right, Google: Answer in a halo of light, and background of choir notes. Done. Edit this, redo that. The constant ability to erase, and start again. Easy on, easy off. It messes with your head. You don’t think, you do. Fuck Nike. Think. Learn. Grow. Turn it off. Use paper+ and pen for fuck sakes.

This incessant rush of information, the ability to go anywhere, see anything, read anything, experience anything without doing anything, learning anything, or going anywhere. Its a more alluring temptation than TV, which is just a window unto worlds we shall not see, of lives we shall not live. I’m typing this on a laptop while lying bed, hypocritical yes. But such is the state of my handwriting, the level of atrophy of such a basic skill, that we spent years learning, a hallmark of civilisation, that it takes forever to read what the hell I’ve written. Oh and the next day, you might as well have written it, the meaning’s out the window, gone.

We forward emails about sick puppies, and urban legends, and warnings about rat faeces, and free random shit. No seriously, no one is going to give you anything for forwarding an email. There is no email genie, he’s left the building. Spam accounts for more than 80% of email sent and received. This blog has captured a staggering 900+ spam comments. There is so much ones and zeros flying around that are actually interesting it would make your head explode, but that’s also in a sea of inconsequential mindless, ineffective, resource wasting, random rubbish. Turn off your phone, step away from your PC, go and sit in a quiet room. The worlds best spam filter – there you have it. Free, I just gave it to you.

I love the Internet its what I do. I believe it has the power to change so much. But that power is only in that it connects real things. Real people, with real needs connected to real products or purposes. Real world cause and effect. Checking inboxes, refreshing for retweets, scanning streams, IMs, BBMs. Malignant minutiae masquerading as meaningful measures of production, of connection, of affection.

So I challenge you unplug, disconnect, reconnect, re-experience, rediscover. Before you become like me and rant and rave about how kids these days don’t know what they’re missing.

Do something real, and enjoy the fuck out of it.

Its a good read and I hope it resonates with you too.

7 Reasons Why My Social Music Site Never Took Off

By Dan McGrady

I read posts on Hacker News about “Why my start-up failed” and found them interesting because its a raw start-up story not the fairy tales that magazines like to write about. So here is my shot at it.

Last summer, I started developing a social music site, Contrastream. The problem: finding good indie music was difficult and a good reason why the 5 big labels control everything. The solution: a Digg-inspired site where you submit albums you want to share and vote up the ones you think are worth listening too, each album gets its own page with a YouTube music video, comments, etc.

7 Reasons Why it Never Took Off

1. Design Perfection, I’ve heard its common for founders to spend too much time doing what they like or what they are good at. For me it was spending too much time perfecting the design. Not only how it looks but all the aspects of user experience. This would of been a good thing if I was a designer on a team but there was a lot more I should of been doing. Adding content, SEO, getting press, writing blog posts, and getting to know the early community to name a few.
2. Underestimated the “Cold Start” problem, I read this article by Bokado Social Design which talks about a big issue you face with a social site, especially when it relies on user generated content. The value you provide to your users centers around the content on the site, so to build a user-base you need a lot of content created by the first users to kick off the community. In my case it was having interesting new indie albums always on the site. But user content usually follows the 80/20/1 rule, 80% browse, 20% interact (comment), and 1% contribute (add albums). So even though I had 10,000 people visiting in the early months, I still ended up adding 75% of the content. It was very demanding and time consuming especially being a solo founder.
3. Market Size vs Business Model, the market I was targeting with the site, indie fans who knew a lot about music outside of the usual review sites, was small. I had planned to monetize the site with ads and in the process I realized that you need a LOT of people using your site everyday to make money off of ads, or a certain type of people who can’t tell the difference from AdSense and site links. The people I was targeting were also notorious for not clicking on ads (similar to the tech community).
4. Bad launch, the launch of the site wasn’t planned very well at all. I decided to use the “genius” marketing ploy of having a private beta to create scarcity. I saw a bunch of other sites doing it and figured it was a good strategy. I was wrong. Private betas are good for sites that have either complex technology or something that’s hard to scale, and those two are about the only times you should do that.After the site appeared to be ready to go live, I decided to email Techcrunch about it. At the time I didn’t understand the importance these types of blogs put on exclusives. I figured they would take a day or two and send some questions. But about an hour or two after I emailed them, Techcrunch posted about Contrastream.Not only was I unprepared to have thousands of people come to my site right away, it turns out I didn’t get the chance to fully pitch my site to TC. Michael Arrington called the number I had posted in the Whois and privacy policy which was my co-founders cell phone. I had used his because my phone was broken at the time. He called at about 11pm and my friend was sleeping, he also had no idea who Michael Arrington, an internet celebrity to most tech founders, was. In his half-asleep state he didn’t know what the call was about. I didn’t find out about the call until my friend had woken up a couple hours later and decided to tell me about it… so we were off to a good start.
5. Competition, we had a lot of high quality competitors. We were offering information on great albums and community voting. But other sites like Last.fm and Hype Machine were offering the actual music. That was a competitive advantage that’s hard to beat and we lacked a significant user base to convince enough people.
6. Motivation, having to consistently find new content was probably the biggest hit to my motivation for the site. As much as I loved indie music it was draining to constantly find new albums to post up. It turned something I liked doing into a chore mainly because at the same time I was busy marketing the site, redesigning it, and attending classes. (I was in college for business for 18 hours of the week).
7. Co-founder, I had started the site with a friend, he was smart and knew a lot about business but in the end could not contribute much to the site. One reason why was that he’s not technical, so he couldn’t help much with the development of the site and knowing who Michael Arrington was might of helped. The other reason was that he wasn’t really into indie music so providing content and reaching out to the users was a barrier.
8. Bonus: Derivative Idea, I tried to avoid just listing the common start-up mistakes written by Paul Graham, but this one was pretty accurate. The idea itself for Contrastream wasn’t too innovative or original. It was inspired by Digg.com which had applied the same model to news and articles on the web. I still believe applying this model to music is interesting and useful, but there were so many other me-too Digg sites. It was simple software to develop and it could be applied to almost anything. Plus there were open source PHP versions of it available on the web.

4 Important Things I learned in the Process

1. Ruby on Rails + Mac, I had used PHP+MySQL professionally in my last year of high school but had become rusty over the years. I decided to learn Ruby on Rails to develop Contrastream and I’m completely convince it was the right decision. This is a language that lets you build applications quickly and stay agile. Like most rails developers I also bought a Mac which is another thing I’m completely convinced about, OSX has some of the best designed software.
2. How to Get Press, I learned the importance of having something interesting to say, how to leverage a product launch to get press, and the other basics like press releases and messages.
3. Practical “Getting Real”, I’ve read this book twice and had the opportunity to apply almost everything with Contrastream. Great way to learn something.
4. Niche Social Networks are not Businesses, they are communities. They have to be built like a community. That means spending a lot of time building relationships, knowing everything about the niche, and finding users. You can monetize a niche social network but its really important that you don’t approach it like a business.

Bottom line, I learned more from starting this site then I would ever have from college business classes or reading blogs. As a music site it has hasn’t exactly “failed” at the moment, it still pulls in around 3000 people a month mainly from search engines. I now consider it a hobby site and I’m looking forward to applying what I learned with my next start-up, Integrate.

- By Dan McGrady

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Please do comment if you have any similar experiences or lessons you’d like to share.