Starting you own Business "The Journal"

[synergy1]

AAA - question:

What programming platform(s) are you going to use? This thread has inspired me a little and I might be trying my hand at developing an idea i've had for a while. Nothing like what you are doing though.

 

[AAAgent]

-Update

I haven't done much business wise for about a month. I kicked out the iOS developer because he really wasn't a good fit and his friend/my neighbor dropped out a week later because he didn't want to lose his friend. Understandable. I was a bit blinded by my drive for success and realized I wasn't choosing my partners correctly. Luckily i noticed before i got too far and cut them out. Also my sales guy also was not a right fit. We have worked together and he is good but he's just not committed. He has no reason to be. He doesn't want to be a part of the startup because he has too much to risk. He was a bit offended when the iOS guy said the sales guy didn't do any work but it was true. I told him i was starting over as well and he could meet me halfway if he wanted to do this. He said yes. I have yet to contact him again although i see him around the office. I haven't reached out because i'm looking for a partner that's committed, and I want someone with initiative and clearly he doesn't have it either.

when choosing business partners, not only do you need to understand their skill level, how well they mesh with everyone else, but also their point in life and what they have to lose and gain. The sales guy is already making 85-100k+ a year. He seems pretty content with that. The iOS guy seemed hungry but he was too controlling and i only knew him through a friend. He was also less or a developer and more of a project lead. The other guy was okay. He was the android developer.

I've also learned that i incorporated too late/too early. You read this correctly, i did them both. I incorporated too late because I was literally putting together a team that really didn't know each other well enough to work as a team. Before i did that, i really should have had all the paperwork ready for everyone to sign. NDA, non compete, employee invention assignments, etc. Except they all came about 2 weeks too late and our team fell apart in the first month. I also lost the domain name and email addresses to the iOS programmer because he was annoyed i cut him. The name is not a big issue but now if i want to continue forward our unique name might have to be changed to secure our unique domain address.

I incorporated too early because ideally, if you have a good team that functions cohesively and operates on a level headed and intelligent level, incorporating before you are ready to pitch clients/sell a product is too early. For a bootstrapped company, every penny counts and i spent almost 4k on paying legal fee's that really shouldn't have been spent so early. In retrospect, we were not a great team but we all had the relevant skills to potential make this idea a successful business. If i could have locked them all into the company we could have potentially worked something out, but that is probably just on the wishful thinking side.

-Mistakes on made
1.) I didn't properly vet my partners. They are generally good people but not all people work together well. I should have had a test run working with them and focused on selecting the right fit for a team. I was pressured because my network, although large didn't have too many programmers. I decided to settle. I also trusted my sales guy who obviously was wrong about. He was not committed to the project which i knew from the beginning but i should have vetted him better and not just bring him on board immediately.

Lesson 1, vet your business partners extensively and go through a trial period of seeing if they fit. Also determine that they are trustworthy individuals.

2.) Don't spend money unless absolutely necessary and you're forced to. I spent 4k early that has me pretty tight on cash. Although i am technically the CEO of my company that is incorporated, it means nothing as my business isn't even operating (i'm CEO of a lump of nothing that cost me $4k). Now i'm 4k down and this leaves me in a tougher position if i wanted to hire someone to do work for me. I grew up upper middle class/lower upper class so i always had money to spend and therefore was never too stingy about my finances. Now that i support myself, i need to learn to be more frugal.

Lesson 2- Don't spend money unless your forced (absolutely necessary) to even if you have the money available. Incorporating is one of the last things you do before you're ready to start reaching out to clients (i would only recommend incorporating to get certain contracts signed and you can confirm that it's absolutely necessary).

3.) I was a horrible leader. I was not consistent in directing the team and instilling my vision. I saw us all as equal partners and assumed everyone would step up. This did not happen. I was afraid of becoming a dictator, but i guess better to have a successful dictator than a confused leaderless team. There was no order within my team because of my lack of leadership. It's also hard to be a leader when you have no leverage and are solely relying on people to follow you without having developed/built respect. If i had more money and was able to pay them, that might be possible.

Lesson 3- Grab the bull by the horns, take charge and provide clear direction. Strike a fine line between leading and dictating. I find that creating an excel sheet with everyones name and their responsibilites/deadlines available is a good clear way for everyone to see what they need to do. I did this way too late btw. I also color coded what was completed and what wasn't.


----

now those were all the mistakes i made but i did manage to pull off a few good things i never thought i could do.

1.) Networked my ass off and managed to find about 7 programmers that i reached out to. I got calls/responses from a handful of them.
2.) I put together a team, although really sh1tty. I was able to convince 3 qualified people who all already had jobs to join me. I was always good at convincing people to join me but horrible at leading.
3.) The reason i was good at convincing people to join me is because i'm very good at thinking outside the box and seeing things from many different perspectives to identify flaws/potential flaws. Once you have a sound proof plan and you're passionate about what you're pitching and can handle all their objections, there is no reason why they shouldn't join. Sales 101.

---

The reason why I haven't updated this in a while because i really have nothing to provide as an update, besides failure. I normally have thick skin but sometimes life does knock you down and it does hurt. I had very high hopes and was very close to launching this only to have everything crash and burn right before launch. I promised to document my journey for myself and for anyone interested to learn so i'm providing this update. Right now i'm still thinking about how to make this work. I've been slowly learning java and prepping for business school as well. Business school is for contacts and a better career/job which will lead to more money and it also doesn't hurt to learn some programming to understand who and what industry i may be potentially working in.

There also nothing wrong with the business, but i have too many obstacles to overcome in order to make this successful. Tough road ahead and atm, i'm not sure how to proceed. I have no tools and no cash to make this happen.

 

[AAAgent]

AAA - question:

What programming platform(s) are you going to use? This thread has inspired me a little and I might be trying my hand at developing an idea i've had for a while. Nothing like what you are doing though.

My business is catered to mobile phones and the platforms we're going to be operating on are mainly iOS (objective c) and Android (java). We would also need a backend site as well that might need to be developed using other languages. I'm not really a tech expert and i have very limited technical knowledge.

 

[rushing dude 123]

Excellent stuff and very inspiring. This is one of the most interesting reads I found in quite a long while and it makes me remember when I was starting out reading all these journals on how to get girls.

I am looking to start my own business as well. So reading what you are going through and all the bumps along the way is very educational. People who have millionaire dollar businesses don't really tell you the finer details of what you got to look for, so this is good material to help anyone else do what you have done too.

Firstly, I like how you have analysed your problems and mistakes along with admitting your own failures. These are the skills of a true leader, someone who is not willing to take responsibility for these is someone who will never ever learn. So well done on doing that and always look to improve even more.

I might not be the best to give advice in terms of starting a business, but I am employed and leading a team in a company for a business and it started off quite edgy, but I pick up from my mistakes quick and my team are doing fantastic now and we are smashing targets easily and getting a lot of good profit in certain projects, so I can give you some advice in leadership and business, which I have learned a lot about in the past year.

1. Firstly you are completely right you need to look at what these employees are getting out of it. I think there was a quote for american football "my job is to get them to fight for the names on front of their shirt and not the back". How you do this simple, you have to make sure that both names are tied together, if you can relate the goal of your company to their goal then you have a much stronger motivation for your employees to work hard.

So when vetting, find out why they want to join you, what are their goals? Then you can explain what your company can do to help them reach their goals. People will push a lot further if in the long run if you are using them to move your business forward, but at the same time getting them developed in the process.

2. Use an action plan, discuss with people the steps and then get them to propose deadlines for certain things and see if you agree to them. Then send the whole team the action plan, so everyone can see what everyone else is doing and the timescale.

3. Good team communication, make sure to have regular meetings, get other team members views and respect each others ideas, but at the same time play devils advocate and see if they can find a solution to these problems. Good communication always saves a lot of time, as I have seen so many times where someone would go off and do their own thing then bring it back to the team and missed something very stupid and we have to scrap the whole idea. Wasting both money and time.

4. Review success and get your employees to do the same, have meetings in why certain trends are happening and how you can change this for your advantage. The more knowledge shared out between the team the less of the same mistakes the business will make.

5. Liaising, create a huge network of contacts you could use, who knows who, what can this person do? Where can i get low cost and free marketing in an effective area, could it simply be asking one of my social popular friend to ask around... or accept an invite to a certain expo and advertise? I have a whole spreadsheet of contacts where I write lots of details on all different contacts who can help me. This makes my job tons easier as some marketing campaigns that will take me a month to do, I can do with minimum effort and time by talking to the right contacts and being in the right place at the right time.

6. Low picking fruits..., when selling your product you have different levels of conversion rates and effort needs in your business. You may have already categorized all your groups in this before, but if not here you go.

People definitely able to convert to sales

People probably able to convert to sales

People who may or may not convert to sales

People who will most likely not covert to sales

So, you want to find out which people are in which groups and put most of your effort into the ones with high convergence rates. You then need to make a plan how you can attack these people and which methods of communication will be most beneficial. Time invested into these people can be argued to be beneficial as your more likely to close the deal (Long phone call, really detailed and customized email). However leads that are quite weak you could use a method of communication, which is quick and send it (E.g. template of a very slightly customized email), which saves you time wasted on no buyers. Make sure to priortrise all of this correctly.

7. If you can't do something professionally, do not even attempt it. You have a reputation to keep for your business and time is money, so be ambitious, but if it is going to compromise your professionalism with partners due to lack of time, then don't do it. My partners are usually very responsive and hardworking for me, but I remember when i started out i neglected this and they mirrored my actions and I was getting a very bad work ethic back.

8. Lead by example, act in the manner you expect your employees to act!

9. Do not jump to conclusions and lose your cool, make sure to gather all evidence and get both sides of the story before you make a decision. Don't be afraid to bring certain things up another time whilst you think them over. I have seen managers who react to anything and will then blast their employees, with the employee giving them a simple reply and the manager is stunned in their spot "O...sorry, but I thought...".

10. Don't fear failure as it is wisdom for success. keep an open mind and you will go a long way. Praise your employees too for all their hard work and their skills they bring to the business.



AAAgent seeing you are experienced in the theory of business, I may just be informing you on things you are already doing. However sometimes when you are in the real world it is sometimes easy to miss a few of the simplest things, I see experienced managers who have got masters in business make many mistakes all the time and leading their crew in the incorrect manner, causing tons of bad gossip and an ineffective and inefficient working environment. The worst thing is that most of them are unwilling to learn from previous mistakes, which leads to no improvement in their leadership.


I hope you all the best in your adventure and will be looking forward to more posts.

 

[AAAgent]

Update on the situation for any of those interested, I've quit my full time job and have dedicated all my time to work on my start-up. The odds are heavily against me as I'm working on this startup alone without sufficient funding. I have a lot of moral support if that counts for anything and I do have two stand alone plans that might be able to make this work. It's pretty 50/50 for both but all i need is either one to be successful and i'll have a good shot at getting this company to the next step.

Plan A.) For the next 2 months i'm shooting youtube documentary videos that will be posted every other week. During the off week when a video isn't being released, i'm going to be posting a short excerpt of what video/documentary is to come with some background information. so essentially first week will be introducing what the video is going to be about with a few pictures and the second week will be the video, so on and so forth until the 2 months are completed. The video documentary's are going to be related to what my business supports. Hopefully I can garner some interest through my videos, which so far people seemed to be interested about not only what my business is about but also my videos.

During this entire time, i will be going on a social media campaign and trying to build my Facebook page to 300+ likes by the end of the 2 months. I have hired a social media manager who will be tweeting 25 tweets a day and 10 instagram posts a day 7 days a week and responding and liking peoples posts on Facebook and also sending out messages i have designated to friends and family to increase likes. After my first week of soft launching my Facebook page, i have about 30 likes. the 2 months starts this week and at the end of the social media campaign and the video documentary campaign, i'm going to launch a kickstarter campaign in week 10. Week 9 I will send out a message to all my followers and let them know i'm doing a kickstarter. The whole purpose of this marketing campaign is to build enough traction of followers so that when i do launch a kickstarter campaign, i have a chance of getting a good position to be seen. I'll also have a friend hitting up redditt and spreading the word/marketing as well during the 2 month marketing campaign.

Goal is to raise 35k on kickstarter but that actual number may change depending on if i can hit my goal of likes.

Plan B.) I've taken out my entire 401k in cash and invested in heavily into risky highly leveraged stocks. I've taken out about 30k (including my saving) and have made so far 2g in 1 week. Hopefully by the end of this 2-3month stint, i'll have ATLEAST doubled my investment. The stocks almost certainly will not hit $0 but I can realistically imagine losing 1/4 of my investment or being stagnant. A lost for me here would be to lose money, stay stagnant, or not at least hit close to the 2x mark by september.

If all goes well. I double my investment to 60k, and do indeed raise the funding through kickstarter, i would have raised 100k in 3 months and things would be a lot more manageable then. If I fail……I go back to work. I have a job offer at my previous job waiting with a promotion lined up. Not the end of the world but definitely not what i want to do.

Best of luck to us all.

-AAA

 

[Konada]

Thanks for setting up this journal AAAgent. As a 21 year old trying to venture into business, your experiences have really enlightened me on what to look out for.

No offence but you seemed to miss out one very important point that you touched on earlier in your journal. No one other than yourself had monetary input into the start-up, given they were people that you have known only for a short time.

Perhaps when you start looking for partners in your new start-up you can get them to sign an agreement stating their share in the company and expenses will be shared as per their stake in the company if it terminates.

I wish you the best of luck in your current startup, don't give up!

 

[synergy1]

Once again, nothing but respect for you to really give this a try. I know funding/ knowledge are falling a little short so its good you are trying to do something about that. here are a few tid bits from my most recent ruminations of all things entrepreneurial ( which I too will be jumping back into after a 5 year haitus)

-Recommended reading: Lean startup, The art of the start, and innovators dilemma ( this is my next one)

- Eric Ries of the Lean start up advocates testing your idea repeatedly in the market - sacrificing quality so as to "learn" what customers want. You direct your design efforts towards the customers feedback. By customers, I mean early adapters who will be less picky than the final customers. As the owner/ CEO, its your job figure out what metrics to measure so you can determine if you are going in the right direction. For example ( assuming you have a program here), if you look at a metric that shows new " sign ups" but have no retention, than you aren't looking at the right thing. The whole idea is to determine if you keep going, or have to change the idea entirely ( its called a pivot). In short, maybe this is applicable to you so you don't need all this elaborate design...start with something simple and see if people like it.

Example: some dude wanted to make an online shoe store. All he did to start out was take pictures at local shoe shops, than sell them online. People loved the idea so only at that point did he turn his business from picture taking to an actual online store.

- Others Have advocated starting up with a partner - preferably with strengths you do not have. I know I would prefer to partner up, but its not that easy. Here is what I plan to do. I'll make the minimum product needed and start pitching to partners. For now I'll stay at my job and bootstrap the operation so I don't have to worry about burn. Anyway, i don't know you, but figured I would put my 0.02 in to try and give you another perspective.

- the VC and angel investor angles are different. a VC wants a 5 year projection and a huge outsized return. They care less about how much money you have put in and care more about your original assumptions, and what kind of team you have. The AI on the other hand love the process and will likely invest more on the human side of things. You get less from them. If I had to pick, I would do VC when I started making sales so that I could literally use their funds to achieve economy of scale ( assuming I am making something) and boast wider margins...

- My question to you - I am NOT a sales guy at all. How do you plan to get your product out there? I got a book on cold calling techniques ( yes laugh it up, I never done that stuff) and anticipate having to do something like that. Whats your angle here? Have you already done this?

All the best man.

 

[AAAgent]

It's hard to explain why bootstrapping doesn't really make sense for my business and try to work at home and do my full-time job besides that i'm not tech savvy and i'm trying to basically start a social media type startup company. Basically it's not possible because i can't build the product i'm trying to sell. So what i'm doing instead is selling the idea on the basis that if i get a large enough following of people who believe in the idea, kickstarter funds will come a lot easier allowing me to actually build my company and my product and maybe even find people with skills willing to join.

It's been about 1-2 weeks and my Facebook page has hit about 60 likes. I have been tweeting for about 2 days and i've already reached 12 followers on twitter and 13 on instagram. People are retweeting my tweets and i've just been followed by a techwarriorz a new tech startup media blog. Things are going better than planned so i upped my Facebook like goal to 500 by the end of 2 months.

@ Synergy1: Generally VC's don't invest in idea's. Nowadays they tend to only invest in companies that tend to at least have some revenues or at least a lot of foundation already built. You can have the largest user base they've seen for a startup but they still might not invest unless you generate revenue. Your second question, my previous job i just quit and that i've been doing for 4 months was FX Sales. Was the best guy out of all the new guys there and that's why I was offered a job and left on good terms only after being there 4 months. Had to make 80-100 cold calls a days to small medium sized enterprises and sell them exchange rates and would get hung up and yelled at all the time. I have a list of great sales people that I could give a ring if this starts to take off as well. I also have a journalist already writing articles about my company. I'm hoping having more publicity will make it easier but even if there isn't any i'm still going to have to convince these companies and call the sh1t out of them.

 

[synergy1]

I am reading a book by Noam Wasserman called the Founders Dilemma - its going over pretty much your situation ( amongst others). The book covers thousands of start ups and discusses all the different ways a start up can begin- solo founder, group founders, and what not. Basically it comes down to this: the numbers aren't on your side as an inexperienced programmer as a solo founder. As far as other founders, avoid getting multiple people with your background as it likely won't work out. Your best bet is either to : 1 - start as much as you can yourself, and offer equity to a programmer to help you out or 2 - start going to programming events ( meet up, career fairs), and pitch your idea. Actually one and two are the same, but more a matter of timing and logistics.

Example: Michael Riech was the sole founder of a social network called UpDown ( its geared towards small investors). He added people with similar interests and background to his ( MBAs), but finally had to add a programmer. There was a lot of resulting stress of redundant roles. But he was able to find someone to do the programming. Keep in mind the balance between not enough and too many founders. You don't want to spread your equity pool too thin.

Here is how I would proceed if I wanted to make a social network, program etc:

1- Try and design the architecture to the best of my abilities on my own. Create an MVP even though it would be crap. Get the basics. Example - learn how to program in JAVA, or andriod, or whatever platform you want to do. There are TONS of free resrouces out there to learn basic programming.

2- Develop a pitch

3- Morph the pitch into a crude business plan. The pitch and business plan would be more of a blue print and outline my general hypothesis, ideas, and where I want it to go. Basic costs ( Cash flow) financials would be included, but I would stay away from any projections as they are worthless

4- From here I would use my pitch and create a web site and business cards to get some attention. This will be important for the next few steps

5- I would attend local colleges engineering conferences, shows, anything to start networking. My choices would be BU, Lowell, UNH, MIT. While I listed the new england schools within a stones throw, You should do some research to see what the better engineering/ programming schools are.

6- With a crude MVP, a pitch, a web site, and some colleges to visit, i would start pitching to people who might be able to do the programming. Offer equity in the company. But have something to show them.

7- Polish up the MVP, start to bring to market to early adapters.

8- innovate, learn, develop, re-release... all that ****

Again, I don't know where you are at in life/ in how far you are. But the above is the gods honest path I would take starting from right here, to try and get a social network off the ground.

 

[AAAgent]

@Synergy

I've already documented going through everything you mentioned already if you check some of my earlier posts. Right now, i'm going the route of doing it myself and bringing people on later if and when i get that far. I've been to many networking events but it's hard to find partners let alone programmers. Most people are like myself looking for programmers. Finding random team members that i have no connection with is probably the last thing i'd want to do at this point but that could change in the future.

I've put together a team in the past and pitched about 7 programmers. 3 were interested and out of the 3 i convinced 2 to join. The other guy was only going to join after we got some traction but at that time, i already got the other 2 guys to join. Turned out fit was not there and we all had a falling out in less than a month after officially joining up. Power struggles are a real internal thing and it seems to cause the breakup of my first group. Plus one of the programmers was someone i never met before and was brought on by the programmer i knew who joined as well. You should only make someone a partner if you know them well and can work with them. I'd trial the next person before i'd even consider partnering with them.

Progress is coming along slowly

FAcebook is currently at 61 likes
Twitter - 24
Instagram - 35

Still a long way from hitting 500 likes and half of the above likes are from my mutual friends. Once i get to 100 likes for Facebook, i'll feel a bit better.

 

[synergy1]

AAAgent - this post and your quandary have been somewhat inspiring. If you check the wealth/success forum, I am in your same boat a little bit and have an idea that requires programming but am not a programmer. The thread outlines how I plan on doing it.

Of course the option to get a developer is on the table, but bear in mind a good developer/programmer/engineer is very hard to come by in the VC world, and you will struggle to get one. having chatted with someone in the VC world in my travels, he said that if you don't have one of these types, good luck. Conversely , if you are one of these types, the VCs will typically bring in the "softer" skills to compliment the team. The purpose of this post isn't to dissuade you from your path, but to share some of my experience from what I have heard from professionals in the field.

To me ( and maybe to you), prudence appears to dictate holding all the cards and having the skills.

I hope your business venture is going well.

 

[AAAgent]

AAAgent - this post and your quandary have been somewhat inspiring. If you check the wealth/success forum, I am in your same boat a little bit and have an idea that requires programming but am not a programmer. The thread outlines how I plan on doing it.

Of course the option to get a developer is on the table, but bear in mind a good developer/programmer/engineer is very hard to come by in the VC world, and you will struggle to get one. having chatted with someone in the VC world in my travels, he said that if you don't have one of these types, good luck. Conversely , if you are one of these types, the VCs will typically bring in the "softer" skills to compliment the team. The purpose of this post isn't to dissuade you from your path, but to share some of my experience from what I have heard from professionals in the field.

To me ( and maybe to you), prudence appears to dictate holding all the cards and having the skills.

I hope your business venture is going well.

Hey Synergy1,

I know exactly what you're talking about. spoken to people in this field, startups, bankers, and know people who have gotten into the incubators….."virtually impossible" unless you have a tech guy.

I've increased my likes on each of my pages but have also stopped posting. Lost a lot of momentum mostly due to financial issues and have started searching for jobs again and have had a sh1t ton of interviews and finally had my old boss call me up and offer me a management position making about what i was making in sales/account management. Being strapped for cash and not having any help, having a girlfriend, and no one who really cares to help are just some of the issues i face along with daily life issues such as having to go to a bachelor party/wedding. I'm down to my last >1k of disposable income.

On a bright note, i did manage to recruit a friend of mine who does IT and graphic design who is really interested and working for free together on this. He recently had a family member pass away so we've decided to take it slow but once i get back on my feet and have some money I want to push for this one more time in less of a rushed/forced approach and more of a lets see how far we can take this approach.

On a side note, my brother has started his own parking lot business for about a year now turning a huge lot my dad owns into daily/nightly parking. He's hired a few cheap drug addicts/ex-cons and really poor people looking for jobs and managed to make it work and makes 15K+ a month. He ended up going from 240lbs to 190lbs from all the stress and working long hours and hounding his employees.

Don't want to sugar coat anything (as this is a documented learning experience for me and anyone else interested), so people can see that my startup has not been going well. Sometimes when you need to rely on people and don't know how to "USE" or "work with" people, your fighting an uphill battle. Not having the right skills/programming skills makes it so that I need to rely on someone else whether it's using my social skills persuading them to work with me till we launch or just funding the project to completion and as I can't do both, i'm SOL. I'm hoping that picking up some managerial skills will help me with this.



TLR

I started working on a startup 1.5 years ago. I recruited a team and planned things out but team fell apart due to internal struggles. I tried again quitting my job and working on it myself but ran into development issues again and ran out of disposable income. I have not given up just yet, just need to get back on my feet and recoup some lost energy and try to rebuild another team.