TheBetaStartup.com

Help Me Not

// June 5th, 2010 // 10 Comments » // experience, reflections

UPDATE:

Some furious people got in touch with me to let me know how much they disagreed with my post. After conversing with some of them, it turns out they actually agree with the points I make, but were thrown off by my *cocky* tone. So here are the points in a more humble version:

1. I am suggesting that sometimes there might be a reason why someone might have a problem, and this reason is lack of flexibility in the approach to solving it.
2. I am noting to myself: I should probably stop helping people that have not asked me explicitly for help, since I might be doing the opposite of helping.
3. I am noting to myself: I should probably think about problems in which I am on the side of the inflexible thinker.

I also learned something very important from one of the comments - The fact that someone shares their problem with you DOES NOT necessarily mean they want help. They might be just venting out, or they might just not be ready to tackle it.

I have this incredibly strong urge to help people. Occasionally I see a friend who has serious troubles. And I am not talking about a temporary problem, but a generally flawed area in their life such as, “I never have any money” or “I don’t have any friends really” or “I have always wanted to do X but I don’t know how…”

Sometimes, when I feel I am doing much better in an area they are complaining about, I try to explain what I have done to get where I am. I give tips, I even sometimes go as far as trying to draw a step-by-step plan for them. Usually those are simple things, but need time and consistency. Sometimes they just need to be reminded of a fact or be turned in the right direction so they can get the “aha!” moment.

I have noticed though there is a certain type of character that is impervious to such help. Sometimes they argue and fight back, defending their vision. Other times they say, “Yes, totally, of course!” and then go on doing the same old thing. Helping both of those types is like pouring water into a leaky bucket. You pour all your heart in them, and give them all the possible help, and you just see how it goes wasted. Naturally, you then try to fix the bucket before you continue, but that itself turns out to be another endeavor of pouring water in a leaky bucket.

3 different friends have been really bothering me, because I just can’t seem to find a way to penetrate the shield that keeps them from improving. And the most important thing I realize is that it is no random occurrence that they have this major long term issue. It is just the outcome that has been fed through the years exactly by this inflexibility to listen to others, to take new points of view, to give up on their wrong beliefs, and to change strategies in life, when it hasn’t work out till the moment.

And so:
1) I give up trying to help those people for the sake of my peace and theirs. At least until they start their own process of taking down the shield.
2) It’s now time that I myself think of things in my life that have been going wrong, and think of what I have been told over time again and again…

Good *luck* to all of us.

The Zebra Crossing Dynamic

// May 28th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // reflections

It was very interesting to see that in small US towns as soon as a pedestrian approaches the zebra crossing, cars slow down, stop and wait patiently.

In Sofia there are now zebras painted too, but signs of stopping nowhere to be seen. Cars swoosh by and people stay forever waiting for cars to run out.

And this is a problem. People stay forever waiting for all cars in sight to go by and only then walk. What bothers me is another problem i notice around – no one does anything to change that. Instead of waiting, all you have to do is put your foot on the asphalt, and make 1 step. This comes as a reminder to the cars, that pedestrians actually have the right-of-way and they stop. All you have to do is one step to claim your rights, and yet no one does it and all I hear is “Cars never stop, we’ll wait forever because of those assholes…”

If you put yourself in the shoes of the drivers, this makes sense again, “This pedestrian doesn’t look like he is ready to cross, he is not on the move, i can squeeze by and save time” vs “Oh, he is crossing, I gotta stop”

And it seems to me that everything in life follows that same dynamic. No one is going to give you anything if you don’t ask for it. It might be yours, you might be entitled to it, but you have to ASK for it. To get what you need, you need to start walking, to do work, and make an action statement that you are claiming your rights and you are about to get what you are after. That’s when people notice you and are willing to trust you and give you an extra push. If you are entitled to the thing, they give it to you. If you are not, they support you in getting it. No one is going to give you financing/help for the startup, if you don’t firmly step on the ground, get moving, show ambition and determination on that zebra path…

Reflections: Leap of Faith

// November 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // experience, reflections

Recently I stumbled again on this moving story of a snail:

The Leap of Faith has this curious characteristic of being unknown, unsure, obscure – this is way it’s called so – you are based on FAITH and nothing more. So far – Duh.

Comes the day you want have to make a choice – you gonna do this startup or not? The only way to determine the success is to list the risk factors that can bring it down, and to list the good things that can make it live. I want to turn your attention to one fact – the risks are clearly visible, but the steps to success are not. Consequently your natural instinct is NOT to start a venture, because you see so many risks. This is the moment where you have to close your eyes and Leap. Example:

The first thing I started was a web development company. Client sites for cash. Here is how it looked to me at the decision moment:

• I didn’t have any support, which I only realized lately.
• I had no knowledge on how to spread the word about the new player on market for websites -> I couldn’t see how to get clients
• I had no money -> I couldn’t hire anyone
• I didn’t have money for real office or extra equipment -> couldn’t look professional in the eyes of clients
• I didn’t know how to make sites fast and professional -> didn’t have the right self esteem

These are all very specific problems that I can name, explain in details how they relate to my future failure. However none of the good stuff could be well defined to draw the steps to success. I did pay all taxes for a company, did form it, and did open my living room as an office. Here is what happened:

• It turned out I had huge support from friends, family, relatives. All of them helped me in any way they could. Found friendly lawyers, accountants to do work almost or for free, found clients. Could I have listed those specific situations in calculating the success? No.
• I know that even without professional full blown ads, I get constantly new clients from friends of friends. I could have included some of those specific clients forwarded by friends in my initial calculations? No.
• So it turned out I did have some clients, and I did have money I couldn’t have predicted => I did have a programmer I couldn’t have predicted.
• It turned out I did not need an office and extra equipment. Still operating from my apartment.
• I stumbled upon a few people that really opened my eyes on how to improve on the process – make it fast and efficient. Could I have predicted this stumbling? No.

In the end, mgPePe LLC is growing, getting clients, making cash – what it was born to do. But slowly I am realizing that the people I have attracted around it now give me the possibility to develop all kinds of inhouse projects that most probably will turn into beautiful startups that will one day change the world.

Did I predict the difficulties that would be associated with my business? Yes. Could I have seen all the things that helped me get through? No.

Take the Leap of Faith. You will find that Faith is not the only support you will find along the way.

Year ‘09

// October 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // experience, reflections

In 2007 I wrote a review of what I have completed and failed during the summer vacation. I meant to do it yearly, but I missed 2008.  I am not a student so here is the 2009 1-year summary:

TheFeelGood.com
Aaaaah. The Feel Good has been a great project.  We have users that come to listen and upload songs every day.  The moment the site is down, they call us and scream that they haven’t gotten their daily ration yet.  I learned a lot from it, but I think I am losing it.  Little by little I have been learning about the industry and how things work. It looks like this project will not get much further development, or if it does, it will be mostly for the current user base, without further expansion. We just don’t have the time resources. We’re also paying decent hosting fees (my partner pays them EVERY time) and that’s another limitations. We need to recognize when to drop something. So I guess we flopped on this one. TODO 2010: keep it alive, fix it to be really nice for current user base.

2neshta.comI
wrote earlier that we did  launch with Irena a classifieds site. It’s been very slowly growing. I worked to make a marketing campaign, which didn’t work out for few reasons. I learned. Next one will be much better. Spent some cash too. I am going to keep pushing. We have still great ideas for marketing. I just need a bit of time and money. Achievement for launching, flop for the marketing campaign. TODO in 2010: Make 3 good marketing campaigns.

mgpepe.com
So in the winter of 08/09 I formed my first legal entity. I needed to generate some cash by making sites for clients. Have done a few that kept me going. Though constantly struggling for money, I have been generally independent. I had a part-time employee, and I just hired a very decent programmer. I am barely writing code. I think that being able to cross the boundary between making a site yourself and hiring permanently an employee is HUGE. Now we execute times and times faster. I am also learning lot’s of new things so I think…great achievement. TODO 2010: hire an in house designer. Stabilize/expand cashflow/clients, begin working on 1 or 2 of the many startup ideas from our database.

planner.bg
This one is big. Ilian and Svilen partnered with me and we formed Planner Media LLC. Basically what it does is print colorful student planners for high school kids, fill them with ads and give them away for free. Somewhat promising startup. It’s been evolving quite a lot lately in my head though, and I expect it to be successful. I award myself achievement on this one for starting it and keeping it move at a good pace. TODO 2010: i will skip this for reason, i will myself forget when i reread it.

theProject
I always keep a pot of random business ideas. Some evaporate the moment they are in, some burn out after lot’s of cooking, some linger for quite a long time. There is one idea though that stays forever in there and though quite challenging from money perspective, it’s doable. And even more so, now that I have real things moving on. I am pretty sure I have partner on it too. Flop for having so many ideas, that probably distract me, achievement for keeping my fire for theproject live. TODO 2010 (that would be very ambitious): Launch by the end of 2010.

Butcher’s Bar
Yes. I did get a job. It wasn’t for the money, it wasn’t for the fame. I just always wanted to be a barman and I did do it. Had some fun time, figured out I didn’t actually want to be a barman and I was out. Nice experience, made some friends, made some connections… all good.  Counts as achievement.

Food
Last but not least, I did do quite a lot better on food. Been eating significantly more healthy. Been learning about what to buy and what not to. I have the habit now of checking the nutrition labels to see what’s in and what’s not. Those are all great improvements towards my diet. I have also been very strict on not missing breakfast or any other meal for that matter. Stomach still hurts sometimes, but generally I am well. Today I ran in the park too. Taking long baths for meditation. Just taking care of health. Great achievement! TODO 2010: learn significantly more about food, what substances are in, and what those substances costs to us. Maybe start a movement that will teach people to look for and value quality food.

Things are being done, and future seems quite busy. SO excited! It’s kurrrraaaaazy!

Lesson from Prince of Persia 1

// July 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // experience, reflections

So I got my hands on Prince of Persia 1 (DOS version) and I started playing it. Unconvetionally, this game does not limit you in lives you can lose, but in time to beat the game – 1h. Part of the game is maneuvrability, part of the game is mazes you have to roam, and part of it are puzzles you have to solve. Every time you play for an hour and don’t complete the game, you have to start from the beginning. And there is no SAVE, just PAUSE.

So I did make a few tries to beat the game, each much better than the previous. But then I got pissed and decided to read about it in the net. First thing I found is that there is save. You just don’t have a menu and it’s a weird shortcut – CTRL+G. Well that changes a whole lot the concept, because if I waste a lot of time, I can loose the current play and keep playing from the good save (there’s only one save, no slots). Second thing I found is a walkthrough. What I found in the walkthrough was a few solutions to things god-knows-how-long-it-will-have-taken-me-to-solve. The guy that wrote the walkthrough actually said it took him and his dad 2 years to figure this one thing, and another 3 to figure out what to do next. So I did save countless hours of wandering and dying. The third thing i found was a speed run, in which I saw a few good shortcuts and tricks. So I beat the game and had sex with the princess…

But the point is – how long would I have kept playing if I didn’t do my research on the web, and didn’t find the walkthrough/speed run? I can’t imagine. And honestly it would have been a shame wasting so much time of my life. Which makes me wonder, why the hell are we so resistant to finding walkthroughs for anything else we do in life? If a 5 minute walkthrough saves us 1/2h every day, it’s tremendous advantage. If a 5 minute walkthrough saves us 1/2h once, but you do it all the time, it’s also a tremendous advantage.

The problem is that walkthroughs for life are not named ‘walkthroughs’, and we rarely make the right association to recognize the situations that can be much improved by a short googling of the problem. Have you ever googled folding a T-shirt? You fold at least 1 T-shirt a day average. How about keyboard shortcuts in Gmail? Or how about marketing your startup?

Like anything else is that you have to intentionally start forcing yourself to think about it, and try to recognize more often those situations. You have to actively pursue it and put effort in it. But boy, how do we do that…

2things

// June 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // experience, reflections

It’s really only one but it’s called 2things. We just launched a new beta –

www.2neshta.com

It’s a wonderful site for classifieds for Bulgaria. Sgot some bugs more to cleanup, but generally it’s pretty stable and well done [excl ie6 of course, which will be fixed later].

The story goes like that – there are 30+ sites that do the same thing and all do it really badly. So there is no mentality for posting ads, nor a good platform that makes posting easy. So there’s the classic chicken-or-the-egg question – is there no mentality because there is not decent platform, or is there no decent platform because there is no mentality and market for it? We will finally be able to tell that – there is a not only decent but great platform for classifieds – free, easy, fast, well designed, ad-free, registration free. What more can you ask?

So let’s cross fingers and start working out the steps from the guerrilla marketing.

Facebook Page

Reflections: Simple But Right

// February 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // reflections

After few generally non-alcoholic years, i rediscovered the Mojito cocktail. Quick google on recipes brought me to a very well done youtube video on making Mojitos that brought me to the website: http://bacardimojito.com/

Now tell me, how the hell do you make a full blown business out of 1 cocktail. Here’s how they did it:

• Great website – designwise, organizationwise, colorwise, musicwise…
• Instructional Videos – well made, spread around youtube etc
• Recipes – tiny collection of the best Mojito recipes
• 1 simple product – they sell for 13 bucks Mojito muddler, but boy – well made, from stainless steel. It looks so sexy, i wonder if people use it for other stuff.

When I submitted the contact form, it said I was number 19002 or something. Compete.com shows traffic in August 2008 of 120k! And those guys are not just enjoying their analytics account, they are selling products to this traffic. Everything is so well tied up. Good job guys!

That’s the perfect example of simple, but done right!

Almost everything can flourish and make it big if it’s done right. Sometimes it’s not easy to make it simple & right, but hey, that’s where the line is cut between those who can and those who can’t make it.

What are you going to make right?

Reflections: Why The Educational System Is Not In Place

// June 3rd, 2008 // No Comments » // reflections

[Pic by atomicjeep]

I don’t like school. I don’t like going to school. I don’t like the things we do there nor the way we do them. I think that schools are fundamentally wrong in the approach to teaching students how to be successful.

There were specific reasons and needs that led to the existence of the educational systems. However, the world and so our needs have changed but the schools have not adjusted.

Internet was basically created around 1970′s. TV first was introduced in 1930′s. Radio was commercially available around the 1920′s. Now imagine life before those. The only wires that would come to your house are the electrical wires. That pretty much rules out everything we ever do these days. No computers, no video games, no television. All you can do is play soccer out with your friends, drink home-made alcohol or read books.

And indeed, if you needed any information you would have to read books. But it is not like you had encyclopedias to look up everything you wanted. You had to read many books and slowly accumulate the information you need piece by piece, book by book. Let’s say you wanted to know about Paris? Your only choice would be reading a bunch of books that maybe take place in Paris and thus overread facts here and there about this city across the ocean. But it also wasn’t like people had books in their houses like we do today. And how many libraries were there? And how easy was it to get access to them? Or even just to travel to the big city with the libraries. It’s not like everything was concentrated in few big cities 200 years ago. Also, if you were lucky, you could listen to stories of people that have been to Paris. But how many people could afford that? How long did it take them to get to Paris across the ocean on a boat? Those stories were few and probably most of them became legends.

All in all, there was huge demand for information and lack of supply. Thus simply by acquiring more information you’d be ahead of others. Simply by reading more you’d be more knowledgeable, gain more recognition, be able to get involved in business, meet influential people. You would be able to learn about the newest and greatest opportunities. Being knowledgeable at the time already gave you social status.

So in a sense, to do anything in this world, you needed to go to school where you could collect information, learn, and meet other knowledgeable people. Naturally, organized state-supported schools emerged. Their primary purpose was to disseminate knowledge across as many people as possible with fewer resources as possible. That meant then paying 1 person to teach many. That meant having books that all kids read from. But notice that the focus was just on spreading information. Thirst for information was the main driver for the formation of this monstrous educational system that is in place today. It was the most efficient way back at the time. And it worked pretty well. It worked so well actually that in few short hundred years it introduced so many changes that have not been seen in the whole history of the world. It taught people knowledge and people invented things and so came radio, television, internet…

And this is how the educational system created its biggest competitor – the internet. The internet, along with all the other improvements have made the process of finding and acquiring information at cost approaching zero so trivial that the schools now seem out of place. While in the past there was a struggle and fight for more information, and the ones that had it were the successful ones, today everybody has information. All kinds of information! And at a price so low that we could probably safely claim to be free. The world has changed and being successful today is not just knowing more – because everybody knows a lot – it’s what you do with the information you do know. It’s how you satisfy the world’s needs that get you successful. And that is exactly what the schools are very bad at teaching. Schools specialized for hundreds of years to jam you with information and create that feeling of “You just come to us and do what we say and you will come out with a great degree!” But then what is a degree? An accomplishment in knowing a lot of information in certain area? But I just mentioned how this is not enough to be successful. So now we have that crisis – all college kids graduating and having random varieties of knowledge sets and not knowing what to do with it. They take random jobs they find often not connected with their majors. They panic for not knowing what to do and even more often how to do it.

Colleges seem to be taking small steps into correcting that problem but their pace is way too slow to keep up with the world’s changes. What the hell means, “You cannot cite Wikipedia as a source for your paper”? What it means is that colleges are too concentrated on self-centered, useless (in most cases of student papers), professional research and information gathering. Instead, colleges should start teaching people how to collect the information they need. They should as a matter of fact teach people how to determine which information they need. An entrepreneur is not a person that knows everything, it’s a person that knows what to learn when he needs it. We don’t all need to be entrepreneurs, but we all need to know how to cope with life, and this is not simply gathering information anymore.

Well, you could argue that schools never claimed that you would be successful after graduation. They just claim that you would know a lot on a certain topic. For one, this is not explicitly said, but is so implicitly stated that it is hard to think of college graduation anything but a step to success. We just don’t realize how small this step is and that is often a step backwards. And for another one, what are you after – a geeky knowledgeable bum that knows everything and has got nothing, or a successful person that knows only what he needs and could learn what he decides he needs?

So there is a growing number of people that recognize that problem and that try to do things on their own outside of school. They will have no support and now encouragement until they succeed. But hey, where there is a problem, there is a opportunity.

Life On Pause

// April 7th, 2008 // No Comments » // reflections

I have a friend of mine who’s blog is named “Live life in shuffle mode.” I will take this metaphor and extend it to my life – my life is on Pause.

Last 4 weeks have been really nuts. We worked really hard to launch feelgood. Then another 2 weeks of bugs fixing, introducing new features, and fixing browser compatibility. Throw in some midterms and some competition deadlines for a business plan to make it a little more spicy. I literally was shuttling between school and my desktop computer. I wake up, work a bit, run off to school, then take the train straight home, get food on the way and work till 4am. There goes my life. Paused.

I haven’t been doing any of the other things in life. My gym membership card sunk under some papers and design sketches. My credit card has got only McDonalds and Chipotle charges instead of drinks at bars. Haven’t seen a movie in a while and my Facebook status has been blaring “Update your status…”

I can’t complain though. This whole time has felt like an incredible run. I have enjoyed every minute of it. Building a product that you enjoy using and seeing the users slowly growing every day is so gratifying! It is such an irony that we have been working a number of years on random projects and never really launched anything even though we have always had the capabilities.

After each run you have to rest though. I have had completely free weekend to resume my life and reflect on the events last month. In a bit I will be ready for another dash.

Reflection: Why There Will Never Be A Startup (Bubble) Bust

// March 3rd, 2008 // 2 Comments » // reflections

[Pic by mysza831]

Just by reading TechCrunch every day you can’t help but wonder, “How the hell are there that many companies getting funded?” And that is just the tiny bit that is mentioned on TC. I shared that observation with my friend Alek, who jokingly (or not quite so) answered, “We’re in a Startup bubble ”

That got me thinking on the issue. There are a million definitions about a bubble, but generally – “a situation where market prices are unsustainably high”[I don't think there is such a word, but I got it from Wikipedia, so i guess there is]. Usually that happens as a result of overinvestment and development growth due to speculative inertia. Also, it is not explicitly stated, but a bubble is often associated with a Bust. As a matter of fact your are probably reading not because you want to know about the bubble, but because you are afraid of the Bust. But let me explain why there won’t be one.

I don’t need to bring too much data to convince you that Internet Startups are quite hot today. There is an army of angel investors that occupy the range of $0-$1mln along with VC’s that are targeting investments as low as $500,000. News sites keep coming up with brand new company names. Strange simplistic products become hits in an instant[away status products?]. Early stage venture capital companies like Ycombinator seem to be extremely popular lately. Applications grow in times each consecutive year. Even colleges have a standard practice of organizing competitions and funding the winner teams. Ladies and Gents, there is a gold rush if you haven’t noticed yet. But a Bubble & Bust? Nah. Because the internet market is like no other market:

There is a tremendous growth. Just like in real estate where developers build, people happily and readily buy, developers make more money and keep building. The one difference is – in the internet market new people just keep coming. No geographical area has such unbelievable influx of client??le. New people get hooked with bandwidth every second. People that have it increase their use of internet all the time because there is more stuff to do online. And more people means more developers and more products and more stuff to do. When does that end?? When supply of new people dries up. Not any time soon, I will tell ya that. Most of the internet users come for about 15 countries and total less than 1/2 billion. With more than 6.6 billion people there are quite a lot of future entries. With such dynamically increasing demand, how can this market be saturated?

Another interesting characteristic of the internet market is the movement speed of huge masses that can pick their belongings and move in a different building. Switching between products (email clients, social sites, tools, etc) can be done in incredibly short time by incredibly huge masses. Or for that matter adopt a new product/mindset. Think Gmail, YouTube, Friendster-MySpace-Facebook. That means new developments can target not only the tourists but also the locals. True, old buildings get tossed in garbage but so what? Owners made money, now it’s time for another venture or other entrepreneurs.

The third interesting thing is that the internet market sucks off the real world. Or should I try to present it better – is in symbiotic relationships with the real world. There is a constant addition of new ideas that are based on establishing the connection between the real world and the internet. Online TV, USPS online tracking, mp3 (players) and a gazillion other things are being now invented that make a wonderful bridge between the virtual and the touchable. With every new such feature fuels the internet, revamps the market and gives rise to other ingenious ideas. Net has catching up to do with real world and there’s plenty of opportunities for sucks off people and products from the real world.

It would seem naturally to make parallels with the Bubble in 2000. “If it happened then, it may happen now”, you would say. It’s quite different though – 2k was a flop because people realized the power of internet before the audience was ready. Huge speculation positions were taken while nobody believed in the Internet. Everybody jumped into making products that weren’t bad (and would probably have made money today) but the crowd was not convinced that internet will be part of their lives. Today, IT is not only a source of information, but a means of entertainment, and a medium for communication and social enterprises. The internet is becoming more and more an irreplaceable tool for almost everything. Before 2k it wasn’t so. As it happens very often – technology was ahead of mindset. Investors and entrepreneurs got burned. We now know the power of fire though, but we also know how to handle it.

Time IS going to come when there will be a slowdown due to the underdeveloped countries that can’t wire themselves. The big powers that could afford to wire themselves are doing it and when they are done things will indeed slow down. The Balloon will deflate but not Bust. The reason for this is that it has become tremendously cheap to build, scale, and maintain a product. If in the past the main investing players were VC’s with millions, today it is everybody that has an extra 10,000 or 100,000. That has huge implications on the Bubble effect because while before 2K valuing the market was based on few VC investments and few believers and a crazy amount of speculation about the future, today there is one source of information – the internet market. It is the ultimate measuring stick. It is composed of millions of businesses and small websites each of which has a pulse. We can measure that pulse and we can go in hibernate mode if needed. But we won’t default.

So my prediction is that Startup culture will keep growing healthily. It will also make deep changes our perception of careers. As the internet gets more integrated with the real world businesses and as those connections get systematized, it will become quite easy to start a regular business too, like never before. It will become much more common for people to have the mindset of business starters than company employees. No bubble, no bust – just growth, growth, growth.

PS external factors like World War or Net Neutrality, etc. not considered