Friday, September 06, 2013
My 1 Week Startup: BargainWhale.com
I spent last week working on building from scratch a web application based business. You can see the results at Bargainwhale.com
This post is about that experience. I hope it will be something other potential entrepreneurs might be interested in.
Background:
The two classic resources for startups are time and money. Many of you who know me know I have a full time job, a wife, two kids, and a few time consuming hobbies. All of which is to say I'm a man without a lot of time. For those same reasons I am a man who can pay the bills but doesn't have any savings set aside that could be used for starting a company.
In the past I've written some of my own programs over Christmas break. Some people like to use vacation to play video games, I like to write code. Recently my company decided to furlough everybody for 1 week. I found myself with a week and decided to spend it writing code for myself. I decided to invite a few friends who were also being furloughed for a week to write code with me.
Other people who aren't lucky enough to be furloughed could use 1 week of vacation and do a startup in some of their vacation time.
Step 1 The Idea:
I keep a google doc of business ideas. Other people might use a notepad or an Evernote note. The important thing here is that when you run into problems in life or cool ideas to write it down in a place you can look at it later next to all your other ideas.
For this 1 week startup I flipped through the list and wrote down the top 3 ideas that met this criteria:
1) Required almost no money
2) Made use of skills I have that others don't
3) Could be made in a week
4) Had good potential to be profitable at scale
5) Would mostly run itself when it was going without constant time investment
Step 2 The Partner(s):
The upside to having partners are many. Partners mean you have more hands doing work so work gets done faster. It means you can start to specialize, with one person taking on say graphic design and another taking on say webserver administration. It also means you can take advantage of complementary skills. It's also nice to have a sanity check on your ideas, or even just look over your shoulder when you are stuck on something stupid.
The downsides to partners are also many. Your share of the company goes down the more partners you have. Not everybody will contribute at the same level to the company or have the same level of dedication. You have to coordinate between people and that means spending some time meeting together.
For this startup I asked 14 different people I had worked with and who I thought might have some entrepreneurial spirit. 12 said they were very interested. 3 weeks out, 12 people. Was I going to have to break into teams and do multiple projects?
One week ahead of the 1 week startup I set up a pre-meeting. The purpose was to agree on the project and to commit to spending 5 full days the next week working on it. If somebody couldn't attend and still wanted to be part of the project they needed to commit the the full 5 days. 12 people became 2 people.
It turns out that many people are intrigued by the idea of starting their own business, but when the rubber meets the road would rather be comfortable where they are. Most of us are used to being paid directly for our work. When the prospect of sacrificing leisure time to work without pay fully sits in our minds it sounds like a terrible deal. The ownership and prospect of greater future pay seem too uncertain.
Once the week actually started 2 people became 1 person. Me and 1 other person.
It turns out me and 1 other person is exactly the right number. We were able to build a very complex application in a single week. We worked well together and got a lot more done than either of us could have done on our own. I ended up with the best partner I could have hoped for.
Step 3 The Pre-Week:
5 day startup doesn't have the same ring as 1 week startup. But for various reasons we decided we could do this in a business week instead of a calendar week. We didn't want to burn ourselves out too badly because it was pretty obvious that even if we built things in a week that we were going to have more things we could improve in some evenings/weekends later on.
OK. I cheated a little bit and spent a couple evenings ahead of the week doing some prep. I didn't get much done, but every little bit helps. I was able to start Monday having already figured out how to download some basic test data from eBay. I also had a completely non-functional artificial intelligence framework written. It didn't work at all, the key to our business didn't work at all.
Step 4 The Week:
Monday we both spent the day pair programming (a fancy word for looking over eachother's shoulders) to make the artificial intelligence work. If we couldn't make it work by the end of the day we were going to have to change to a different project and do a 4 day startup. As the day rolled on it was looking more and more possible we were going to have to give it up. Artificial intelligence is hard.
We persevered, by the end of Monday we had it working. We could take a few liked items (we started with camera gear) and a few disliked items and predict with a fair amount of success if I would like other camera gear.
Tuesday-Friday we spent making our minimal viable product. A simple website that you can browse categories and like/dislike items and it will learn from that and start presenting you better stuff. Behind the scenes there is a lot to make all that happen.
The thing I didn't count on was that all of it was fun. Work is fun when it's something of your own creation that you own. You tell yourself what to do, and you do it. It is immensely time consuming, and mentally exhausting, and sometimes you feel like an idiot. But it is above all fun. If I had to shut down the site today and never made a penny off of it I'd still be glad I spent the week working on it.
Step 5 It's Not Perfect, Launch Anyway:
I can right now without taking a breath list at least three dozen things wrong with the site. Someday when those three dozen things are perfect there will be three dozen other things that are wrong.
That's without even getting into all the features that we'd like to have there that aren't there.
None of that matters. What matters is that what we do have is pretty cool and pretty useful. Put it out there and let people play with it. Start figuring out what it is people really want. Start figuring out how to get people to try it. Build a history.
Over time as we find evenings and weekends it will only get better. At some point we'll cross a threshold of figuring out the features, the interface, and the marketing. Then the site will go from the users being the two of us to being too many users to handle.
Lessons Learned:
Can you start a company in a week and be rich at the end of it? Well, I couldn't. What I did find was that I could make a cool product in a week. I learned that spending a week making a cool product was as much fun as a lot of vacations I've had. I've learned that owning cool product with good business potential revives my optimism for the future.
This post is about that experience. I hope it will be something other potential entrepreneurs might be interested in.
Background:
The two classic resources for startups are time and money. Many of you who know me know I have a full time job, a wife, two kids, and a few time consuming hobbies. All of which is to say I'm a man without a lot of time. For those same reasons I am a man who can pay the bills but doesn't have any savings set aside that could be used for starting a company.
In the past I've written some of my own programs over Christmas break. Some people like to use vacation to play video games, I like to write code. Recently my company decided to furlough everybody for 1 week. I found myself with a week and decided to spend it writing code for myself. I decided to invite a few friends who were also being furloughed for a week to write code with me.
Other people who aren't lucky enough to be furloughed could use 1 week of vacation and do a startup in some of their vacation time.
Step 1 The Idea:
I keep a google doc of business ideas. Other people might use a notepad or an Evernote note. The important thing here is that when you run into problems in life or cool ideas to write it down in a place you can look at it later next to all your other ideas.
For this 1 week startup I flipped through the list and wrote down the top 3 ideas that met this criteria:
1) Required almost no money
2) Made use of skills I have that others don't
3) Could be made in a week
4) Had good potential to be profitable at scale
5) Would mostly run itself when it was going without constant time investment
Step 2 The Partner(s):
The upside to having partners are many. Partners mean you have more hands doing work so work gets done faster. It means you can start to specialize, with one person taking on say graphic design and another taking on say webserver administration. It also means you can take advantage of complementary skills. It's also nice to have a sanity check on your ideas, or even just look over your shoulder when you are stuck on something stupid.
The downsides to partners are also many. Your share of the company goes down the more partners you have. Not everybody will contribute at the same level to the company or have the same level of dedication. You have to coordinate between people and that means spending some time meeting together.
For this startup I asked 14 different people I had worked with and who I thought might have some entrepreneurial spirit. 12 said they were very interested. 3 weeks out, 12 people. Was I going to have to break into teams and do multiple projects?
One week ahead of the 1 week startup I set up a pre-meeting. The purpose was to agree on the project and to commit to spending 5 full days the next week working on it. If somebody couldn't attend and still wanted to be part of the project they needed to commit the the full 5 days. 12 people became 2 people.
It turns out that many people are intrigued by the idea of starting their own business, but when the rubber meets the road would rather be comfortable where they are. Most of us are used to being paid directly for our work. When the prospect of sacrificing leisure time to work without pay fully sits in our minds it sounds like a terrible deal. The ownership and prospect of greater future pay seem too uncertain.
Once the week actually started 2 people became 1 person. Me and 1 other person.
It turns out me and 1 other person is exactly the right number. We were able to build a very complex application in a single week. We worked well together and got a lot more done than either of us could have done on our own. I ended up with the best partner I could have hoped for.
Step 3 The Pre-Week:
5 day startup doesn't have the same ring as 1 week startup. But for various reasons we decided we could do this in a business week instead of a calendar week. We didn't want to burn ourselves out too badly because it was pretty obvious that even if we built things in a week that we were going to have more things we could improve in some evenings/weekends later on.
OK. I cheated a little bit and spent a couple evenings ahead of the week doing some prep. I didn't get much done, but every little bit helps. I was able to start Monday having already figured out how to download some basic test data from eBay. I also had a completely non-functional artificial intelligence framework written. It didn't work at all, the key to our business didn't work at all.
Step 4 The Week:
Monday we both spent the day pair programming (a fancy word for looking over eachother's shoulders) to make the artificial intelligence work. If we couldn't make it work by the end of the day we were going to have to change to a different project and do a 4 day startup. As the day rolled on it was looking more and more possible we were going to have to give it up. Artificial intelligence is hard.
We persevered, by the end of Monday we had it working. We could take a few liked items (we started with camera gear) and a few disliked items and predict with a fair amount of success if I would like other camera gear.
Tuesday-Friday we spent making our minimal viable product. A simple website that you can browse categories and like/dislike items and it will learn from that and start presenting you better stuff. Behind the scenes there is a lot to make all that happen.
The thing I didn't count on was that all of it was fun. Work is fun when it's something of your own creation that you own. You tell yourself what to do, and you do it. It is immensely time consuming, and mentally exhausting, and sometimes you feel like an idiot. But it is above all fun. If I had to shut down the site today and never made a penny off of it I'd still be glad I spent the week working on it.
Step 5 It's Not Perfect, Launch Anyway:
I can right now without taking a breath list at least three dozen things wrong with the site. Someday when those three dozen things are perfect there will be three dozen other things that are wrong.
That's without even getting into all the features that we'd like to have there that aren't there.
None of that matters. What matters is that what we do have is pretty cool and pretty useful. Put it out there and let people play with it. Start figuring out what it is people really want. Start figuring out how to get people to try it. Build a history.
Over time as we find evenings and weekends it will only get better. At some point we'll cross a threshold of figuring out the features, the interface, and the marketing. Then the site will go from the users being the two of us to being too many users to handle.
Lessons Learned:
Can you start a company in a week and be rich at the end of it? Well, I couldn't. What I did find was that I could make a cool product in a week. I learned that spending a week making a cool product was as much fun as a lot of vacations I've had. I've learned that owning cool product with good business potential revives my optimism for the future.
