Despite my recent embrace of my consulting career, as anyone who knows me would attest, I have been busily working on my own project. I have limited my consulting to 20 hours a week since the new year and have been furiously focused on refining a business plan and building a prototype. It has been a tremendous experience, made even better by the fact that I have found the perfect business cofounder. She is a former CCX coworker who I spent the better part of 4 years discussing every day how we would do it if it was our own company. Well, now we are.
I will be sharing more details soon, but for now suffice it to say that it is in the financial industry, it is written in Erlang, and I truly believe it will be industry disrupting.
Stay tuned!
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Friday, February 04, 2011
Website Redesign
I have officially been consulting full time (sort of) for just over 6 months now. I have some amazing clients, one of which allowed me to learn Ruby on Rails on the job. Rails has been a great success, and is quite surprisingly simple for putting together websites. I am continuing to play with Erlang in my spare time, and may be putting up a Riak cluster to serve as a distributed data store for my side project.
Getting back to the (sort of) full time comment earlier. I very much wanted to start another startup project when I left CCX, but after my experiences with the first incarnation of Simergence, I thought it best not to immediately start living on the savings I had put aside over the last 4.5 years. Though I learned a tremendous amount, the most important lesson was that a startup is just a hobby until it has traction, be that revenue, users or investment. Until I can see a clear path to a mortgage supporting company, it is not a job. With that in mind I decided to take my expertise in building software and managing projects and use it as an income source while I built my own business part time. To acknowledge my current path, I have relaunched simergence.com.
Getting back to the (sort of) full time comment earlier. I very much wanted to start another startup project when I left CCX, but after my experiences with the first incarnation of Simergence, I thought it best not to immediately start living on the savings I had put aside over the last 4.5 years. Though I learned a tremendous amount, the most important lesson was that a startup is just a hobby until it has traction, be that revenue, users or investment. Until I can see a clear path to a mortgage supporting company, it is not a job. With that in mind I decided to take my expertise in building software and managing projects and use it as an income source while I built my own business part time. To acknowledge my current path, I have relaunched simergence.com.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Chicago Startup Foundry
This Thursday, October 21st 2010, is the grand opening of the Chicago Startup Foundry. Come by and check it out!
If you have been reading this blog for any period of time you know that in addition to a random assortment of programming issues, I spend a lot of my time focused on startups. I recently quit my day job in order to get more involved in entrepreneurship once more. I began to do some consulting with the amazing Sandbox Industries on their incubated startups, while working on my own projects on the side. I also began speaking to some people about the idea of a collective of developers and designers who could collaborate on projects and perhaps have some ideas bubble in to new ventures.
After a couple of false starts, I finally met my now partner, Griffin Caprio. Griffin is a consultant and a serial entrepreneur who runs not only the consulting company 1530 Technologies, but also works with startups as A Part-Time CTO. We both longed for an affordable, entrepreneur friendly work environment, but more importantly for a community of like minded people who could advise and mentor one another as they struggled through the same process. After several discussions and dozens of emails, the Chicago Startup Foundry was born.
As practitioners of lean, bootstrapped philosophies we are applying those ideals to this venture as well. We are subletting space from the very kind Tim Smith of Venturality. We will operate from 9am - 5pm Monday through Friday, and offer a desk and a great environment for an introductory rate of $99 a month. As we gain members, and a little cash flow, we will add services and potentially move in to a larger space. The Foundry will be what its members want it to be, through a true Customer Development process.
So we invite you to come by, check us out, and if you are interested join. You can help create a community and shape the future of the startup world right here in Chicago!
If you have been reading this blog for any period of time you know that in addition to a random assortment of programming issues, I spend a lot of my time focused on startups. I recently quit my day job in order to get more involved in entrepreneurship once more. I began to do some consulting with the amazing Sandbox Industries on their incubated startups, while working on my own projects on the side. I also began speaking to some people about the idea of a collective of developers and designers who could collaborate on projects and perhaps have some ideas bubble in to new ventures.
After a couple of false starts, I finally met my now partner, Griffin Caprio. Griffin is a consultant and a serial entrepreneur who runs not only the consulting company 1530 Technologies, but also works with startups as A Part-Time CTO. We both longed for an affordable, entrepreneur friendly work environment, but more importantly for a community of like minded people who could advise and mentor one another as they struggled through the same process. After several discussions and dozens of emails, the Chicago Startup Foundry was born.
As practitioners of lean, bootstrapped philosophies we are applying those ideals to this venture as well. We are subletting space from the very kind Tim Smith of Venturality. We will operate from 9am - 5pm Monday through Friday, and offer a desk and a great environment for an introductory rate of $99 a month. As we gain members, and a little cash flow, we will add services and potentially move in to a larger space. The Foundry will be what its members want it to be, through a true Customer Development process.
So we invite you to come by, check us out, and if you are interested join. You can help create a community and shape the future of the startup world right here in Chicago!
Friday, October 08, 2010
The first version of your app should be a near blank slate
The difference between a fully featured app with beautiful design and a white background, black text undesigned website is the same as the difference between Avatar in 3D on IMAX and the last piece of fiction you read. If the last book you read has been turned it in to a multi-million dollar production with special effects and oscar caliber actors, choose the one before that. Now, when you picture the movie and some random book side by side in your head, which is more immersive? In which do the characters seem more alive, in which can you more clearly picture the protagonist's face? Chances are they both seem about the same to you. The reason of course is your imagination. James Cameron had to spend 12 years and invent new technologies while waiting for his buddy George Lucas to revolutionize theaters. Think about that. One movie.. 12 years... hundreds of millions of dollars... hundreds of people working full time. The author just had to describe 1% of any given scene, and your imagination filled in the rest.
The first version of your app should be a book. It should be as near a blank slate as possible, and allow the user to fill in the rest. The first piece of code you write should be that one thing that will make the user go 'aha!'. So instead of writing a laundry list of all the features your Facebook clone will have, and how each feature will be slightly different or better than the original, instead sit down and decide what is it about using Facebook that drives you nuts. One feature, and then decide how you would fix it. Then implement it. When you are done show it to anyone who will listen and get their feedback. If they don't go 'aha!' find out if your implementation is bad, or your idea is bad. You should be able to tell based on their feedback. If the idea is bad, move on. If the implementation is bad, iterate on it until everyone says 'aha!'. Congratulations, you now have a product that fills a need.
That is what your startup should be built on; a product, not an idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen, solutions are invaluable.
The first version of your app should be a book. It should be as near a blank slate as possible, and allow the user to fill in the rest. The first piece of code you write should be that one thing that will make the user go 'aha!'. So instead of writing a laundry list of all the features your Facebook clone will have, and how each feature will be slightly different or better than the original, instead sit down and decide what is it about using Facebook that drives you nuts. One feature, and then decide how you would fix it. Then implement it. When you are done show it to anyone who will listen and get their feedback. If they don't go 'aha!' find out if your implementation is bad, or your idea is bad. You should be able to tell based on their feedback. If the idea is bad, move on. If the implementation is bad, iterate on it until everyone says 'aha!'. Congratulations, you now have a product that fills a need.
That is what your startup should be built on; a product, not an idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen, solutions are invaluable.
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