November 2006, Weesp, Holland
On a night in November 2006, Christian and I decided to revamp our ideas on the subject of recommendation. Ideas we have started to work on about 11 years earlier. Now 13 years after our first meeting we finally have that start up, which is specifically funded to bring these ideas to live.
Last 19 months were full of surprises. Through this blogpost we would like to share some things we learned and things that surprised us completely. There are lots of blog posts with the top x things to do when you want to start up a company. Not all of them written by people who are starting up and certainly few of them in the middle of the process.
So here is the view from behind the steering wheel. No top 10, but just the things that stood out for us. Things that are important in this phase. Remember, we are just starting up and quite inexperienced, so we reckon it covers a very small percentage of what can be learned, but as we are in the middle of it, it is all still fresh now. It is the best time to write some of those experiences down, so here goes:
Just do it
Famous meme, but as the introduction said: in truth it took us 13 years to get here. Years not months. We have tried stuff, tested things, experimented some more, talked a LOT(we sure did), but never followed through with anything truly solid and within our immediate reach.
So the first and most important lesson we learned in this 2.0 version of our ideas is: decide to do it now and to go all the way. We learned that it is alright if not everything is clear from start. We didn’t know what would happen next and we still don’t. Which is OK. You need a strong idea and you need desire. Or desire that turns into frustration, I think that helped us too. 
Another not quite so small thing to be learned here is, that there are more chances than one (idea). Just do it again.
Kiss Occam’s Razor
Size your idea down to something simple and effective that you can reach in short period of time and do this in a short period of time.
When Christian and I revamped those thoughts on recommendation technology, we brought it to a whole new and quite complex level. We developed a small demo of the technology and prepared a demonstration to support it. Next, we invited a group of trusted friends, some of which had some solid knowledge and entrepreneurial experience in internet business and some didn’t. At least, they surely wouldn’t lie to us to spare us some painful moments. And so we discovered…
It was a humbling experience at best. We were to far from anything operational and in two sessions we got more remarks than we could immediately digest. We took some months to work it all out. At a diner it all came together in a very practical plan that could be started and worked on immediately. In hindsight, those sessions gave a strong, positive result and it spared us probably years of wasted time, as even this practical approach took us more time than we thought at the beginning.
So, we basically agree with Einstein here who supposedly said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. There is more to that phrase. It is a bit like the K.I.S.S. acronym of the Occam’s Razor principle Bring it down to the smallest and most effective chunk that still has all the DNA for the future developments in it as fast as you can and start there.
You need two to tango
Christian and I can both alone come up with hundreds of ideas and we normally do. But things really start moving when we are together. We think you need someone who is a bit of your opposite and still is quite similar to you. This is true for characters traits as it is for experience and skills. It sounds like a paradox, but as the sayings go: Opposites attract and birds of a feather flock together. Both true. Flock!
J.I.T. – Just In Time
Trust us, planning is almost useless. This is our hardest lesson so far. Let’s do some math here:
- Multiply by 2: development takes twice as long as you think, if you have a complete plan with exact details to work on.
- Multiply by 4: four times as long if you more or less know what you are going to do
- Multiply by 8: eight times as long if you need to figure about everything out.
We were somewhere between 4 times and 8 times. It comes down to this: you will end up building the same thing more than once.
If you work on your start-up besides your day job, like we did till now, there are more multipliers:
- if you discover a ’situation’ in technology or business that needs attention, every one of them takes a week to resolve, no less. Before you know it, you will be weeks further with no perception of really getting ahead.
- if one task has dependencies on multiple external partners, e.g. investors, legal partners, etc, a similar situation can take a month easily.
The simple reason is that you really don’t have a lot of time. Maybe this sounds somewhat overstated, but it isn’t. And to arrange stuff you need to depend on people who are working during the day (like you now?). And, although people are quite willing most of times, they have their own agenda’s. So communications will go slower than you like, results take longer, etc. Weeks and Months, remember it.
We could have done this a lot better, honestly. Solution: None, but to prioritize heavily on what needs to be done first and only make a rough planning in months. And then take it as it comes, solve problems and move forward. Work like hell though.
Money: Easy to find, harder to finish
Although working in a day job, it wasn’t too difficult to find money. In fact, it was the other way around, it found us. I met someone I knew and could trust and told him about plans. Not for money, but just for the cool plan itself. Then a few weeks later, out of the blue, he invites me and offers us an investment. Just like that. That was a big surprise. Only then we started to work on real business documents. Before that, we were just executing ideas. The beauty of all that work before was, that we had something to show right away. From that meeting on, it went very fast. He brought more people in, we brought some more people in. And we soon came to an agreement with a good and versatile group of individual investors.
But from getting everyone’s warm interest to having the money into a bank account takes some time and steps, so we learned. The fact that everyone continues to be very enthusiastic doesn’t matter really. It just takes time. It depends on your experience, their experience, agenda’s, holiday’s, etc. Anything can happen and more than you like will happen. The multiplier so far is 3 here, at least for us it was. Three times as long as you think, calculated from the moment you get your first investment signal which is the moment you start working seriously on a business plan and more. This is something to remember if and when we are going to work on another round of investment.
You, Robot.
If you are perfectionists like us, automation and sense of “good enough” are the keys to speed. It is not without reason we are in IT business. Automation creates speed and efficiency. Start using software or web services for main tasks immediately. It takes some time to set up but it makes your work easier in the long run. And because everything takes longer than you expect, you start getting the benefits of it when you need them. There are tons of services out there nowadays and they are made and used by people who had the same need. It is probably why they invented the service. It ranges from mailing lists, publishing software, crm, gtd, bug management and web-apps to auto-deployment of software.
We are tempted many times to do things ourselves. But don’t try to invent everything. Only our product must be perfect, not everything else too
Tree hugging
You need to work hard, try, fall down and get up, etc, etc. You have probably read that everywhere, but it is easier said than done. The thing that made us really start going and keeps us going is that we found the basic concept behind all or most of both our ideas. It is a bit difficult to explain in clear terms. But call it a concept trunk where all your ideas can grow from, or an aorta that will feed all. It is basically your Tree Of (business) Life. There is a profound desire or reason why you want to do all this. So find that tree and hug it
The tree metaphor actually sums all of the above up and more. All the circumstances and resources are there to start growing, but you need to root down and come up at the right spot at the right time yourself first. Then comes the water and sunshine to make you grow. We rooted down for quite a while, so we expect a big trunk later on!
These are some of the things we noticed on the way to seed finance and start up. As i’m finishing this post up, more things come to mind to write about. But that for another post.
So, we What are your experiences? Feel free to comment with your own.
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