I’ve spent the last few months on a physical and mental exploratory journey.  One of the physical activities I’ve been learning more about is climbing.  As I have an irrational fear of heights (a bit more rational when tied to a cliff) this is a very challenging physical activity that also forces me to focus mentally on myself and my limits… and how to overcome them.

Although I love the analogy I use for how I approach my work “The Internet Astronaut who rockets to the stars, but risks crashing and burning back down to earth.” …climbing is fast becoming a very close second in my analogy bag.  I’ve even begun to document an agile development methodology for building web startups called The Rapid Ascent Process.

One climbing related quote my buddy passed along to me the other day is really worth sharing.  It is from Chris Sharma who is considered to be the world’s best rock climber.  (I’ve removed the word “climbing” from the quote below, because I think this is such a great foundation for a personal mission statement everybody can use.  All you need to do is take that thing you are most passionate about and write it in the spaces below.)

For me now, I feel that _______ is a part of who I am. It’s my way of life. It’s my way of expressing myself. My way of being in the world. In the past, I questioned it a lot. Now it’s obvious. This is who I am. This what I do. I’m much more aware of that now. I think about how fortunate I am to be supported by all these companies and in reality the _______ community that supports those companies. I feel so fortunate to be supported by everybody to live this life, to travel around the world and to try and raise the standard of _______.

Modified quote from Chris Sharma [Read the Full Article Here]

What word did you write in?

Ok, so technically the above is more of a life statement and maybe not a Personal Mission Statement… but hey, it’s personal… so use whatever feels right to you. Check these links if you want a bit more information about The Value of a Personal Mission Statement or How to Write a Personal Mission Statement… or read Gandhi’s.

I’m one of the 3% or so that doesn’t hate the new Facebook design update.  I agree that it feels a lot like twitter, but with one important feature improvement… organizing my friends into more easy to follow groups.  Even if you only have a few dozen friends, seeing those updates that are most important to you can be difficult when the full stream of updates is gushing… But with the new ability to organize friends into groups, I can now filter the noise into specific channels that are most important to me.

I’ve created a group from my old friends I grew up with in Hawaii, so I can see what’s going on with them back home from time to time.  I have a group for what I call my Thought Leaders (People I admire and look to for inspiration, advice, wisdom, etc.) that I check a couple times per day.  And I have several other groups that help me see what’s going on in my social circles.  Twitter unfortunately leaves me using the search or services like TweetGrid to try and keep track of things that are important to me.  So you may hate Facebook’s new design… but you can still find it more useful.

How To Organize Group Update Streams on Facebook

Step 1: Get On Your Homepage. Find the Rough Gem.

Sign in to facebook.com.  You’ll notice the new layout and under your name in the top left corner is where your groups (networks) are displayed… I believe by default, your location, work and Private Profiles or something like that are there.

Step 2: Manage / Create Your Friend Groups

Click Friends in the top navigation.  It will take you to a page that lists all your friends and groups (Networks / Lists) that you’ve created.  Below your list of of groups, there is a Make a New List button.  Click that to pop open a div to name your new group.

I’m going to name this group “From My Post” so I can organize all the wonderful people that find me on Facebook from this post.  Hit enter after you’ve typed the name you want in.

Step 3: Organize Your Social Circles

Now that you’ve created your group you can now add people to the list.  You can do this by either searching for individual friends by adding their names into the Add to List field… or Click Select Multiple Friends to open up a grid of all your friends to easily browse through and bulk add to your new group.

Step 4: Sort Your Groups. (Yes, you’re ranking your friends…)

Now that you’ve created all your groups and added your friends to each according group, you can go back to your main updates page and organize how those groups display. Click the More button below your last displayed group and the full list should drop down. (As shown below).  Drag and drop your groups to reorder them. *Drag groups above that divider line to make them display on your home page without needing to click the More button.

Step 5: Enjoy Easier to Digest Streams of Updates

Now all you have to do is login and you can see the full stream of all your friends updates or easily click one of your groups on the left to see a nicely trimmed stream of updates that are most important to you.

An Unfortunate Trade-off

One thing that does looks like it suffered at the expense of this update was the ability to really tune what you saw in the steam of updates… ie, photos are really important to me, but zombie-brain achievements not so much.  Maybe it’s still in there somewhere and I’m missing it, but it looks like now all I can do is hide people instead of just hiding some of their updates.

Ok, so now you can find me on Facebook and add me as a friend so I can get some interesting, charming and handsome new friends in my newly created group.

Revisiting this post that I guest authored at Silicon Florist last year because I’ve spent a good amount of time recently looking at large teams working on websites, the differences between agile vs waterfall development… and I think the dangers in hiring an agency are similar to the dangers of too large of a team with too much process building a startup. You must be able to be adapt, make mistakes and respond rapidly if you want to succeed.

You just launched your new startup. You’re caught up in the excitement and energy of it all and happy to see your baby in the world… Here’s the catch, the deadliest: You can’t change or adapt your site because you hired an agency to build it.

Please know that I’m not picking on Agencies here… I’m picking on the entrepreneurs that hire agencies to build their startups. We have some of the best agencies in the world here, but you should NOT hire them to build your startup. (I mean no offense to any agencies that are reading this, but for startups to work with you they risk the future success of their business.)

Agencies Build Great Websites

Startups are not just websites. With a website for a small business you can get away with building it out and then other than keeping the content fresh and minor tweaks here and there, not mess with it much for a year or so. With a startup, you’re going to change, modify or add something major within the first few days, sometimes even hours of your site’s life. In some cases between the original site map and spec phase and the actual launch of the site, you’ll change something major.

No Ability to Change or Adapt

With any agency built site you’ll be able to update most of the content, maybe even add some sub content pages in your CMS area… But the startup world is extremely fast and chaotic. In order to survive a startup needs to be constantly evaluating their service, the market and the latest industry trends. When you exist in a market where a company can pop up overnight and completely shake things up, you need to be ready to adapt.

It is important to keep in mind that you can’t possibly create an exact plan for the first 18 or even 6 months of your startup. 50% of what you do will simply be wrong. You need the flexibility to constantly be testing out ideas, trying new things and you need the financial freedom to do a lot of the wrong stuff. If you’re paying an agency to be wrong 50% of the time, you’ll run out of money very quickly.

Agencies Are Not Cheap

I’ve worked in the agency world and I know that there are a lot of overhead costs to keep a small company afloat… I also know that you get what you pay for and getting great work from an agency means having to spend some money. But for the same price a startup would pay an agency to build their site, they can hire a solid designer and a talented programmer for an entire year. With your own developer you can test out ideas and be ready to respond quickly to problems and opportunities.

Lack of Speed Kills

Bids, Quotes, Objective Summaries, Wireframes, Etc. Speed kills when driving drunk. but it is what keeps your startup alive. The web world has the attention span of a goldfish and to stay on top of their rapidly shifting focus, you need to stay tuned in to what your users need / want.

None of the Founders Can Actually Develop the Website.

It should be a huge red flag for the founders and their early investors when none of the founders can develop the site. This isn’t to say that a startup without any developer founders can’t succeed, but it will take a bigger financial investment and be a bit slower to get it off the ground.

When you don’t hire an agency, you have to know what you’re doing… you don’t have to know how to program your site… but you should know why you built it in PHP rather than ASP, why a certain framework is best for you or why you should custom build, etc. It is hugely important that somebody on the early team can build the site… or you immediately hire on a developer. If you simply can’t learn enough about what you’re trying to start to manage some technical contractors than find a partner who understands the technical part… If you just can’t learn it, then don’t start your site.

A Real World Scenario

Fantasy Land: You love sushi. You live on the stuff… You can rattle off all kinds of different rolls and fish delicacies… so you want to start a fishing company. You know how it generally works. Get a boat, hire a good crew, find some good fishing spots and viola! you’re rolling in the tuna.

Reality Land: You know nothing about how the fishing business actually works. You aren’t fluent in the terms… “Your sharemen are saying your prime berth is no good, so you’re talking to a banker about any naked mans that can point you in the right direction.” What kind of boat is right for what kind of fishing… long-lining, crabbing, etc.? How do you evaluate the skills of a good captain & crew? What is the appropriate equipment you need to buy to be effective? How do you know when you’re spending too much on something or not spending enough?

A Cure for Agencyitis

So what if you’re one of the entrepreneurs who has already hired an agency… or are a non-technical founder not sure how to go about learning what you need to learn to hire the right developer?

I didn’t want this to just be a harsh critique and not offer solutions, but the answer to the above question is a long answer and this post has already exceeded most people’s internet attention span. So I’m going to write a part 2 of this post with a hopefully helpful and in depth answer. 

The Darius’ Advocate

The points above are from my experiences, but I’d love to hear your thoughts… even if you completely disagree. An agency perspective could be useful too.

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And now on a lighter note… and sticking with the fishing theme:

Six Ways Bering Sea Fisherman are Like Startup Entrepreneurs

They Risk Big

Alaskan king crab fishing reported over 300 fatalities per 100,000 in 2005. While startup entrepreneurs rarely directly risk their lives like the Bering Sea fisherman, they risk their financial security, personal relationships and often put huge burdens on their loved ones.

They Love What You Do

If you’ve watched the deadliest catch than you would know that Bering Sea fisherman love what they do. They hear a calling to the sea and she beats the hell out of them every season… but they come back every year because they love being fishermen. Many of them have been generations fishermen and they pass down their love of the sea to their kids.

People Think They’re Nuts

It’s hard to watch the show and not think these guys are all missing a couple key connectors in their brain. The weather is as hostile as it gets, the work is back breaking hard and you stink like fish for weeks… oh yeah, and you’ll likely get sea sick enough to know what you look like from the inside out. To the outside person, it just doesn’t make any sense. Why give up the security of a comfortable career and balanced home life in order to work ridiculous hours and risk so much? Because they love it.

They Are Nuts

Let’s face it… you do have to be a little nutty to suffer as much as they do. But crazy ideas are often the most successful. It takes that stretch of the imagination and sanity to come up with something that doesn’t yet exist.

They Smell Bad

Startup entrepreneurs definitely don’t smell as bad as a fisherman, but chaotic working hours often throw a wrench in any plans you have to do basic things like grooming, working out… and sometimes even eating and drinking non-caffeinated fluids.

They Need to Be a Bit Lucky

Fishermen have Charts, Maps, Expert Team Members… and if they drop their pots where the crab aren’t it could spell disaster for the season. They also can’t prepare for the random rogue waves that have been known to steal fishermen from the decks of the boat. A startup entrepreneur can have a solid launch plan, the right team and at the end of the day… a little bit of luck could be the difference between your rockets igniting or exploding on the launch pad.

They Make Good Money

The last one doesn’t count… because if you can’t handle the previous 6, then it doesn’t matter how much money you could make it just wouldn’t be worth it. Being a startup entrepreneur like being a Bering Sea fisherman is not about the money. It is about doing what you love and doing something new, exciting and hard as hell.

Somewhere along the way we forget that failing is OK.  We attach a negative association with failure and stop looking at it as a building block or a lesson. We only see it is a final result and lose perspective on the overall success of our ideas.  The lost perspective is that failure acknowledges a flaw and gives you the opportunity to correct that flaw.  If you’ve given yourself no room to correct it or have simply not allowed yourself to have any flaws… then you can never succeed.

You stumbled, tripped, fell and crashed before you ever walked.

You grunted, squawked, blurted and mumbled before you ever talked.

Failure should be seen as the pursuit of greatness.  Mistakes and missteps are only bad if you’re not learning from them.

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” -Michael Jordan

Software is Hard on Failures…  Websites Thrive on Them.

Websites are not software.  With a software application you need to have it working really well with very few bugs, because once you ship it out to the world… it’s very hard to correct your mistakes.  Bothering users of your software to constantly be installing updated versions is a nuisance and will most likely kill your product.

With a website you can update at any time.  Weekly, Hourly… Daily if you want. As long as you’re responding quickly to the bugs and improve your service with each fix, you’re making a better product… By leveraging your user base to help you constantly improve you’ll be able to develop the best solution much quicker than any competitor who is still trying to guess it perfectly right before they launch.

The web is an international, extremely fast evolving organism.  While somebody spent months planning and raising capital to build a project that would help rank stories online… some guy spent a few hundred bucks building an idea and now that project needs to compete against Digg.  Somebody else was still revising and editing their thoughts about a micro-blogging service and in the mean time a couple of guys throw together a simple status updating service and now Twitter has changed the whole industry they were trying to work in.

You don’t need things to be perfect.  All they need to be is GEFN:

GEFN- Good Enough For Now

Does it meet the basic needs and requirements?

Does it add value?

Does it allow for improvements?

Are you ready to respond immediately to feedback?

… then it’s good enough for now.  Share it.  Launch it.  Let the world knock it around, test it out and give you feedback.

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” -Bobby Kennedy

As a perfect example of GEFN, my thoughts on “success on the web requires failure” aren’t perfect yet… But I wanted to share the idea with you.  You can help me make this idea more perfect by giving me feedback, helping me see the flaws in my logic and suggesting improvements.

Thanks for helping me fail one more time at writing the perfect post.

-Darius

This was originally posted at the Silicon Florist, but since community seems to continue to pop up as a key challenge for a lot of the startup entrepreneurs I meet… and having recently taken on helping to grow the website and community for Photosynth.com, it felt like this post was worth sharing up again.

So many internet startups are trying to launch with “community” as the core of their business, but they seem to be flying blind as to how you go about growing a solid community. I’ve been asked to consult for a number of these startups. And while this could be a bad financial decision for my consulting business, I’d rather see more successful communities than fewer. So here are the basics of what you need to know and the rest you’ll just have to learn—albeit painfully—as you do it.

I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of building two great communities, one in the real world and one in the digital. The lessons learned in each worlds has meaning in the other and each can serve as a useful example to those who are working on nurturing their own communities.

My Community Director Resume

After packing up my bags and traveling without a specific destination to Thailand in the wake of the biggest natural disaster in modern times… I found myself in the middle of a micro-community of travelers who showed up to help with the Tsunami recovery work. Like any web community, people were from everywhere in the world and came from all sorts of backgrounds.

For five months I lived with this community. First as a volunteer, then as a project leader and eventually co-leading the group. From that experience we grew a non-profit that has since created volunteer centers to aid in disaster relief in six countries around world with the help of a community of 3,000+ volunteers.

Visit www.HODR.org to learn more and perhaps you’ll join us in a disaster zone sometime soon.

Before I packed up my bags and prepared for a place I’d never been to, in a disaster zone I couldn’t begin to guess what it would be like… I created a simple web service that allowed people to name colors and helped other people to rate and review those colors. Responding to early feedback I grew the concept into allowing people to put together combinations of up to 5 colors to also share.

I was the first member, but more than 100,000 have since joined. We’ve been nominated for Best Community Site in the Webby Awards two years in a row and have also received recognition for the quality of our community from several other periodicals and awards organizations.

Visit www.COLOURlovers.com to learn more or share your thoughts on whether silver satin is better than New Medicines.

Now that you have some insight into my experience, let me share some of the things I’ve learned.

Lessons for Building Quality, Thriving Communities

It could be the community in your five-person workplace, your blog readership or even a massive web community… but the lessons still apply. Here they are:

It Is and Has Always Been

One of the most important lessons that came from my time in Thailand was how in order to grow a solid community, you needed to be in the middle of it. The man who originally set-up the volunteer center to which we all arrived was a local who lived on the other side of the island. Since he was a family man, he made the trip to and from the volunteer center back to his house every night and morning. I can understand why he would, considering he had a nice comfortable home only 30 min away… but what happened in his absence almost tore the whole thing apart.

In the early days of a community’s growth, things change very rapidly. Because the group itself has only existed a short time and the early participants often cycle through in short spurts of time… there is no institutional memory. To the person who arrived this morning, we’ve always had a rule about eating lunch at 11:30… nevermind that we only made that rule up the night before. But to that new volunteer, who will in one week be an old timer to many more new people… it has always been so.

Within a week of showing up and seeing first hand the constant transition of ideas, cultures and people in our volunteer community… there was growing dissent about the so-called leader of our group who was never around and nobody knew what exactly he did. To them, he did nothing. Since they woke up in the middle of it all, went to work all day in it and laid down to sleep in the middle of it… this guy had no idea about anything.

Having since been the leader of a volunteer group, there are many things that go on above the ground that are not glamorous or all that fun… but are needed in order for the community to continue growing. For a leader, it is a constant balance of getting his head above the crowd to deal with long-term growth things while at the same time spending time shoulder-to-shoulder with the community.

Lesson: You must grow within your community, especially in the early days. Later, leaders will arise who can handle some of the day-to-day things and welcome new members. But in those first few days, weeks and months… you are the welcoming committee, janitor, house mom, judge, jury and banninator. Leading from the outside will only breed dissent and resentment among the early adopters… and without their early support your community will die before it really has the chance to grow.

Set an Open Border Policy with Your Neighbors

Immigration is a complicated and touchy subject in the real world, but online you need an open door policy from the beginning… even recruiting your first members from your related blogs, forums and communities.

When I launched COLOURlovers I was part of a thriving Flash development community at the time (www.Kirupa.com) and I shared my site with some members. These initial Kirupians served as the first dual-citizenship immigrants to my new community. Not all fully converted to COLOURlovers and few gave up Kirupa for COLOURlovers, but since the sites were related—but not mutually exclusive—we were able to get things rolling with their support without negatively affecting the Kirupa community.

These early members were providing ideas to enhance the site and voicing their critical feedback about what worked and what didn’t. I took all of their words to heart and worked feverishly to create and launch enhancements that would grow the community.

Lesson: Leverage your involvement in related communities to first seed your community with participants. You can’t force these people to join… just extend an invitation to people who might have an interest in what you’re building and be ready to respond to their feedback.

Cities Grow from Towns and Towns from Villages

Don’t worry so much about jumping right into being a massive community. You need to take the time to be a village and figure out how everything works before you get into issues like mass transit, pollution and housing shortages. You also need to foster leaders within your village who will eventually become your city leaders.

When I went to Thailand, I handed COLOURlovers to my early members and pretty much left them unattended for the five months. Sometimes, blessings come in strange packages. For when I returned, I found a lot of interest had been built while I was gone…

But unfortunately, the community wasn’t able to rapidly grow unattended. In fact, I made a pretty huge mistake when I was building the database for the site: I set the primary key for the users table to be a small int… meaning the database broke once 255 people had registered and no more could sign up. (We were probably one of the first web 2.0 sites to launch a limited user-base private beta site… although fully unintentionally.)

Lesson: Hey kids! Don’t focus so much on being rich, respected doctors someday… enjoy being a kid and take to heart the lessons you learn from the bumps and scratches you get exploring your surroundings and figuring out just what your body is capable of doing.

And as your community continues to grow. Problems will arise. And, at times, even your most vocal proponent may think that…

Your Community… Honestly Sucks

This is very key feedback that you need to be willing to hear. I consistently hear bad ideas for sites where people are continually talking about how people will love the service and flock to it… but who have no early adopters. “No worries, we know the idea is great and as soon as we get it out to the masses we’ll be flooded with visitors.” More likely flooded in the sense of your first floor being under water and no ability to use your kitchen to prepare food.

Lesson: You need early adopters and they may not like what you’re doing. Be willing to hear this feedback and be flexible in developing your community in ways you might not have imagined.

How do you get the feedback you need? The community is waiting to give it to you. And that’s why…

Engaging the Community in Decision Making is a Must

Ebay = Ebooo!!!! When eBay made a major change to their feedback system recently, some of their sellers revolted in protest. This decision had a major impact on sellers and a lot felt it unfairly hurt them. I honestly believe there are hundreds of ways to skin a cat (not sure why anyone would) and if you bring your members into the decision making process you could end up with a better solution then you could have come up with on your own.

Lesson: You need to at least let them feel like their feedback is being heard. Not every idea must be put into affect and you can’t let your members totally direct what happens with your community, but you’ll have a much stronger adoption rate for new changes if the members feel like they were a part of the decision making process.

But for all the brilliant feedback of your most vocal users, don’t let the many suffer at the hands of the few. Always bear in mind that…

No One Member is More Important than the Whole

This is something I’ve experienced with COLOURlovers, but it is a lesson I learned with my non-profit community. As they grow, communities need leaders to step-up and take on extra responsibilities. In almost all situations, this will naturally happen. You begin to rely on these leaders so much, that sometimes you think the community wouldn’t survive without them.

In one of my volunteer communities, we had a small group of leaders who were growing exhausted from the hard work and irritable with new arrivals. They felt since they had been around longer that they were entitled to more than others. I struggled for a while to try and keep this group happy and spent considerable energy dealing with issues that were being created by these leaders. It was stressful because I thought that if I asked the leaders to leave I would have no ability to send my work crews out the next day. Without my leaders everything would crumble and I was sacrificing the happiness of many for the comfort of a few.

It got to a non-pass point with this small group of leaders and they left. What immediately happened in the chaos of this change? People who had been around a little while and some fairly new people stepped up and assumed the leadership roles. I could have asked those troublesome leaders to leave ages before, and the organism that is the community would have replaced the roles on their own.

Lesson: There is always a number 2 or number 3 who is willing and eager to take on a bigger role. Your most active and valuable members will leave and a new batch will replace them.

The system, however, is not perfect. And it’s out of control. So sometimes, despite your best efforts, the whole thing will go sideways. Know that, as with most successful communities, someday you will be facing…

Pitchforks, Lanterns and an Angry Mob

If you let problems continue to grow a few disgruntled members will become an growing mob. If you don’t respond to this mob and address their issues personally you risk the mob becoming the masses… and if the masses revolt, you’ll end up with your head on a stick in the front lawn and a burning village.

If you’ve seen the animated film A Bug’s Life, you’ll have watched this lesson unfold in the form of grasshoppers and ants. The ants spend all year doing the work for the grasshoppers to gather a feast of food.

[Spoiler Alert] What the ants learn in the end is that they outnumber the grasshoppers 50 to 1 and if they unite they can run the grasshoppers out of town and no longer need to gather food for them.

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

A web world example of this was when HD-DVD stories started getting removed from the social media site Digg.com. Members felt their words were being moderated by Kevin Rose and the Digg staff and they didn’t take to kindly to the moderation. What erupted were hundreds if not thousands of new submissions, comments and digs for the DVD key posts.

Having been through some similar experiences as a community director I felt simultaneously sorry for Kevin and highly amused watching the shenanigans unfold. I imagined how chaotic things must have been at Digg… The image that comes to mind is the scene at the end of The Matrix series where the millions of sentinels come flowing into the bay where the humans can’t shoot them down fast enough…

Kevin eventually bowed to his community and submitted a blog post on the Digg blog with the title being the hacked key string.

Lesson: Stay in tune with your community and be transparent with them. If Kevin would have personally responded to why they were removing the HD-DVD keys posts sooner, he might have avoided the giant headache that was a major member revolt.

But for all of the consensus-building and listening to user input, it is important to remember that there must be balance. For, despite our best efforts…

True Democracy Doesn’t Work on the Web

At least not yet. Perhaps it is that with the enhanced ability to communicate more we haven’t enhanced the way people communicate. We have the same miscommunication problems we have in real life online… but they’re hyper sped up and 10x bigger. We also have way to much negative crap flying around the web and it is hard to stay in a constructive place when trolls, spammers and others pains in the ass keep dropping by to stir things up.

Your community needs to know there is a leader and they need to know you’re reachable and engaged. You don’t have to be the most active member but you need to be around. In the early days of your community you have to be everywhere as your community culture is totally you… but as more leaders emerge and the numbers grow, the culture will become partially directed by the community.

You need to be accessible to every member of your community. They need to know where to find you and to know that if they really need you… that you’ll be there. Maybe you only respond to emails or through in site messages… but I’d go so far as to put up your IM names and phone number. For three years any member of my site could have picked up the phone and called me on my cell if they had something to tell me. (The number on the site now goes to voicemail… but I’ll still call you back if you leave me a message.)

Lesson: Especially in the early days members of your community need to feel like they know you and that you are reachable. They also need to know that somebody at the end of the day will make a decision in a tough situation.

Sounds difficult doesn’t it? Well, it is. It takes a great deal of effort. And that immediately leads a number of folks to consider buying their way out of a difficult situation. This, too, is a mistake, because…

Buying a Community is Expensive and Will FAIL

You can pay to grow your community, but if you substitute the organic nature of feedback and enhancement that comes from the early adopter phase… you risk not learning the early lessons that will keep your community alive later on. Also, don’t confuse the passion and genuine interest of early adopters—who tend to join organically—for the participation of people who were externally motivated to join in.

Communities, like other organisms, are constantly rebuilding themselves. New cells are built and old cells die off… your early members will leave and new ones will join up. If your community does not organically grow at all and your numbers are growing only because of your paid efforts… you have no ability to continue the growth without spending more money. This is a dangerous position to be in.

Lesson: Exhaust your ability to share your community with possible early adopters for free before you start paying for traffic. You could pay to get 10x more visitors to your community early on, but feedback from people who organically joined and are contributing ideas and suggestions are 100x more valuable.

Hire No Consultants. Pay No Community Directors.

It is extremely important that you are in the trenches with your community when it is first getting started. I see startups all the time spending valuable resources to hire consultants to build their community and early buzz… but what they end up with is only a shot in the arm with no long term abilities to grow without paying for more help.

The pay to grow initially is a lot like the drug user who uses to be happy. As they use drugs they need more and more to continue to feel good. If you pay to generate growth, you’ll end up needing to spend more and more to create greater and greater results. Learn to be happy without drugs and you remain in total control of your happiness.

Lesson: If you spend the late and long hours in the early days of your community, pounding the keys, networking, promoting and sharing your community you’ll learn very valuable skills that will help your community grow in the future without needing to pay for outside services. Those outside services can be useful down the road when you use them to fill gaps in your growth strategies… and having learned the lessons early on you’ll better know how to direct an outside consultant to help you.

Final Lesson

You can’t buy lessons. Part of what makes you remember the important lessons is how much it hurts to learn them. Don’t be afraid to get a few bumps and bruises. Good luck and grow well.

All it takes is for you to ask a question.  Be polite.  Ask nicely. Say thank you regardless of the outcome. You will sometimes save money, get extra or better value with the super simple act of asking a question. Some people feel embarrassed asking a question or feel like it is rude to do so, but if you ask politely then nothing you’re doing is offensive.  The asked could be offended, but that has nothing to do with you.  They can simply say no.  If they get upset at having to say no, then that is there deal.

You’ll really never know what options you have unless you’re willing to ask.  Be creative.  Be open to different options and don’t be afraid to ask. Here are two examples of how asking a couple questions made my life better.

Best Seat in the House for $8.. and a Free Beer

Last month I wanted to watch a UFC payperview fight, but didn’t want to shell out $70 to watch it at home and didn’t have any friends in town that I knew were paying for iy.  So I looked up what bars in town were showing the fight and I headed down to one.  Turns out the place was packed… and there was a $5 cover.  The bar area had dozens of screens so you could see the fight from almost any table, but there was standing room only.  I made my way towards the back area of the bar where there was a bit more standing room and noticed that a decent sized table only had 3 people sitting at it, 5 could easily fit.  I asked nicely if they wouldn’t mind if I sat in one of the chairs facing away from their table… they didn’t mind.  So I ordered myself a beer for $3 and sat there with a big screen TV only a few feet away.

There had to be at least 50 people crammed into the bar area all uncomfortably standing there for a couple hours. All I had to do was ask the table if they minded if I used a chair.  They could have said no and nobody would have been worse off, but I took a few seconds to ask the question and at the end of the night I got front row seats with pretty much my own TV screen and a beer all for $8.

Getting What I Want + Extra… For Less Money

I just moved to Seattle and I forgot my cable to connect my Canon camera to my computer to get the photos off.  I know I own several of them, but I couldn’t find a single one if the stuff I brought up with me.  I found a RadioShack just a few blocks down and walked over to buy the missing cable.  When I got there an associate showed me $21.99 RadioShack brand cable after I explained to him what I needed… I asked about another cable at $19.99 and was told it wouldn’t work and that the cable he selected was “made for a Cannon camera.”  That makes about as much sense as certain bread being made for crunchy peanut butter and another bread being made for creamy, but for the $2 it wasn’t worth dealing with him any longer. I let it lie.

On the way to the counter I asked about if they had any Card Readers.  He reached onto a rack and grabbed a 6-in-1 card reader for $12.99.  Oh, it included a cable too.  He asked if I still wanted the RadioShack cable too… I did not.

I got the cable I wanted plus a 6-in-1 card reader because I asked one more question and was thinking creatively… Saving me $9 or 40% off.
 
 
Do you have a story about asking a question for a great reward?

I was taking a trip down archive.org memory lane last night, looking back on some of the first websites I ever built. Really matrixy, techy fonts on black backgrounds circa 2001… funny stuff. I also spent some time revisiting the first web community I ever created: REiToolBelt, for real estate investors. Even back then I enjoyed writing articles about the experiences I had, giving advice to my fellow young investors. (I was 20 at the time.) Here is one article I found from 2002 that is a bit self-helpy, but I think has some good points that are worth revisiting.

Originally written in 2002 by Darius A Monsef on ReiToolBelt

Thinking About Sand

You are standing on the most beautiful beach in the world.

It may have palm trees for some, and none for others. It may be a small secluded beach or extend as far as the eye can see. It could be black sand or white sand.

This beach is perfect to you. It is how you imagine it.

Now imagine that you are standing in the center of this beach, but instead of taking a few steps back to enjoy every aspect of what this beach has to offer, you look down and focus on a single grain of sand.

It’s hard to make it out from standing height so you crouch down. It’ s still hard to focus so again you lean even closer to the sand.

You now have your face an eyelash away from this single grain of sand. You’ve focused every particle of thought on it.

While you are focused on the grain, a nice breeze passes by. An unexpected thing happens; the grain of sand is blown into your eye.

Why when you are standing on a perfect beach would you focus on the smallest part of it?

Our lives are this beach. Our lives are in the whole perfect, beautiful; we chose to see the whole beach or focus on grains of sand.

Each day starts as the next; a chance for you to enjoy the view or get sand in your eye. Think of how your day went. Were you focused on the whole of it or only each task at hand? Were you working on each task as a part of the whole?

If you saw your day as the whole; why did you let an argument take up so much of your valuable time?

We spend so much of our time only focused on what we are doing that moment. The problems arise when we don’ t conduct the tasks at hand with an idea of how they apply to the whole picture. We started the day with certain things to accomplish but at the end of the day there was not enough time to get to them all. Where did all that time go?

Often that time goes to things that matter so little compared to the whole of our lives. We spent x amount of time today trying to prove someone else’ s opinion was wrong. In the end all that was proven was that time will pass whether you chose to be productive with it or not.

We get so wrapped up in these tiny specs of sand, that we lose the ability to see the beach. We lose the ability because with our focus so tightly wrapped around this grain of sand, we lack the peripheral vision to see anything else. If we stepped back we would see there are hundreds, thousands, millions of grains of sand; and that this is just one small spec that makes the beauty whole.

Making Choices & Deciding to Be Angry

We make choices every second. Are they choices that involve looking at grains of sand or beaches? You have the choice to get angry. Anger does not control you; you control anger. Something does not anger you unless you let it.

What does being angry accomplish for you? Have you thought about how much energy goes into being upset? How much time is wasted? How much more anger is created when you are upset?

Have you thought that you have a choice to be angry or not?

You had a choice a few minutes ago to respond to a post that added no value to your life. Did you look at it as part of your beautiful beach and move your attention to something else, or did you get your face right up next to that spec so it could get you in the eye?

We create the world that is around us, so pay attention to what you are creating or the tide will wash your beach away and you won’ t even notice it.

Communication

You are out enjoying the night when a stranger approaches you and tells you “you look fat in those pants.” Do you get upset or do you take the time to figure out that what you misheard was that they asked you to dance. Communicating takes time. There is no way around that, but communicating poorly takes more energy and more time.

We are in the age of communication. We can communicate with millions of people across the globe; we can enter into millions of other lives in an instant. We improved the communication network, but we didn’t improve communication.

Jane told you John said you were a terrible person.

Did you call John to ask him why he felt that way about you or did you call Sally to tell her John felt this way about you?

Did you take Johns opinion of you as simply his opinion and move on or did you tell everyone that John was a terrible person?

We can use our communication tools to build or destroy. Use them to build.

OTFD

I will pass onto you a great communication tool my mentor taught me early on. It’s called an Open The Front Door. Think of it as opening the front door to the problem.

Open
Observation
What did you observe? What did you hear? What did you see?
“I heard you thought I was a terrible person.”

The
Thought
What does what you observed make you think about? How do you think about what you observed?
“I think you have the wrong opinion about me.”

Front
Feelings
What does what you observed and think make you feel?
“I feel hurt and angry.”

Door
Desire
What is the outcome you would like to arrive at? How can this problem be resolved?
“I would like you to tell me if you feel this way about me and not tell others.”

It’s not important that you actually use an OTFD, I only hope that if nothing else it helps you think about how you communicate when you have a problem or disagree.

My opinion is different than yours and yours is different than mine.
That is ok.

As an internet entrepreneur you never have enough time complete all the things you have on your list get done. Often working out is not high up on that list, but I’m going to encourage you to put it up there at the top… Membership fees cost around $20-50 a month and I promise you you’ll get a great return on your investment of cash and time. Have more energy, feel better, be happy, sleep better, be more successful… yes, I’m going to stretch this one all the way out and say a gym membership will in the long run make you more successful.

You Are Your Startup. A Sick You is a Dead Startup

In the early days of getting your idea off the ground you are the one man army that gets the ship all ready for launch… and then after the launch you’ll be juggling even more things under even more stress. Getting sick enough to knock you out of commission means your startup will be out of commission too. If you left your web server exposed to the dangerous viruses and bots of the internet, it would eventually get infected and shut down… killing your site. You run the same risk with not keeping your own physical body healthy.

TIP - Don’t think of your gym membership as just a place to exercise.  Use it as a core part of your lifestyle to stay healthy, fit and energized.  Take a daily multivitamin. Exercise and eat well.

Commit and Be Disciplined

If you’re going to make it as an internet entrepreneur, you’re going to need to be very dedicated and disciplined. You are in the captains chair of your startup and it will fail to launch or rocket upwards based on your passion, efforts and commitment. There are any number of distractions that will pop up along the way and while you need to be flexible and responsive, you also need to maintain order and balance in your life. Can you do without this in order to achieve that? Can you still get there if you start from here? Seth Godin’s book The Dip is a great resource for explaining how you might need to give certain things up in order to be successful in what things are most important to you.  Your health is paramount to your survival and that of your startup.

Make sure you get to the gym regularly and that your diet is supporting your efforts in the gym. The reward will be well worth it.

TIP- The best way to be disciplined is prioritize all the things you have in your life and build some structure around the most important things that need to get done. Be conscious of your actions and commit to your goals. Committing to certain goals often means giving up on others. The old adage of quitters never win is stupid. Lance Armstrong quit a lot of other things in order to be the great cyclist that he is today. Be disciplined and make sure you stay focused on your major priorities, exercising included.

Remember to Eat or Your Body Will Eat You

Your body is a little like a zombie when it thinks it’s starving. Muscles require more calories than fat and if you forget to eat and your body thinks it might be starving… it starts eating your muscles first for energy. One of the most common things that hard working entrepreneurs forget to do is feed themselves, which usually leads to picking something up that is quick and usually not so healthy.  Make it easy on yourself.  Have some healthy snack food around that allows you to eat something when you’re in a rush without comprising your diet… yogurt and granola is one good option.

TIP -Drop by a GNC or sports supplement store and pick up some protein drinks… not the 60 grams of protein build muscles like a horse stuff, just the ready to drink meal replacements. Some taste great and aren’t that expensive.

Sleep Better & Have More Energy

Let me first say that I live by the mantra that I’ll sleep when I’m dead… but with that being said, your body does require a basic amount of sleep to function well and strenuous physical exercise during the day will help you rest better at night.  Like most entrepreneurs my brain doesn’t have a very easy to access off button.  I often take several thoughts with me to bed and can end up spending some nights tossing and turning without getting the rest I need.

TIP - Don’t work from your laptop in bed.  Make your sleeping space only where you sleep.  If you often work from bed your brain begins to associate your bed with being alert and working.  Train it to deactivate when you’re in your sleepy space by keeping your work on your desk.

Get Happy and Get High on Life

Being an internet astronaut can be very stressful. The constant fight to keep your idea alive and the financial risk can wear heavily on your mood and attitude. One way to get your spirits back up is to get high on life… And do it without any drugs. Your body releases endorphins during strenuous exercise.

“Endorphins are neurotransmitters produced in the brain that reduce pain… They have also been known to induce euphoria.” says Alan Hirsch, MD, neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago.

TIP - Researchers say that the better physically fit a person is, the more receptive they are to endorphins. Also, as your exercise intensity and duration increase, the greater the concentration of endorphins released will be… so keep hitting the gym and hit it hard.

Get Structure With a Regular Schedule

In the chaos that is getting your idea launched the rapid fire schedule that comes along with it, needs a little balance every now and then. I understand that sometimes things pop up and you have to be able to adjust your schedule, but making a regular time every day to hit the gym is a good way to give a little structure to your day. By using the gym as an anchor point in your schedule you can build out structure for the rest of the day and your evening.

TIP - You get more of a benefit from working out earlier in the day. You can use an early workout to give your brain a rest before the onslaught of the day begins. The drive to and from can also give you a little bit of time to think about the things you need to get done in the day.

Fight Isolation and Get Human Contact

When you spend all your time hunkered down behind a keyboard you can begin to feel isolated. Maintaining some connection with the outside world is good for your mental state as well as for your perspective of what’s going on. It’s pretty hard to build a tool or service for other people if you haven’t seen one in several weeks. The gym can be a nice way to get some exposure with other people without being overly social and distracting. If you find a partner to work out with, you can have some chit-chat between exercises or during breaks or you can meet new friends after classes or workouts.

TIP- The gym is not a bar. Your primary reason for being there is the workout.  Make friends and have some short conversations, but spending the whole time you’re there will result in a poor workout for you and annoyance for those around you trying to get theirs.

Eat a Better Diet & Eat More

When you’ve spent several hours in the last weak sweating and literally busting your ass to burn off some extra calories it helps to put the 500 calories in the ice-cream cone you’re about to consume into perspective. After a few weeks in the gym your muscles will feel tighter and the mild soreness from the previous days exercise are very useful reminders of what’s more important. A short sugar fix or the long term health of your body? Getting control of your diet is more than half the battle in getting healthy and fit. That isn’t to say you need to eat like a monk. Take a free day to eat whatever you want and rain in the junk food for the rest of the week.

Also, as you put on more muscle mass your body will naturally need more calories during the day. So you don’t need to starve yourself to be healthy. If you eat decent sized meals several times a day and you can feel satiated without gorging yourself.

TIP- Learn to enjoy black coffee. You can shave off a few hundred calories a day by drinking it black instead of with the creme and sugar. Learn to love plain yogurt. I’m lucky to have grown up in a Persian household where plain yogurt is a normal part of the diet, but it is a healthy snack with good protein and live cultures to help your body… throw on some granola and raisins for a good and tasty treat.

Time to Unplug from the Matrix

I’m all about throwing yourself into your work and passionately working long days and nights… but you also need to unplug sometimes and give your brain a chance to rest and get exposure to the real world you live in. The gym is a great place to give your mental wheels a break as you focus on your workout and not all the hundreds of details bouncing around upstairs.  You can also take a run outside or a hike on a trail to get some peaceful exercise in.

TIP - To make the most of a workout, you should be making a mind body connection… meaning, you’re focused on what you’re actually doing and on what muscles are working. Focus on your movements and the muscles that are working for better results. Put the details of your work out of your head and enjoy the meditation of focusing on yourself for an hour or so.

Designers Would Be Out of Work if Looks Didn’t Matter

Let’s be honest, looks matter. I’m not talking about the superficiality of current fads or facades. I’m talking about the appearance of a healthy person vs. an unhealthy person. Again, in the early days of your startup you are your startup. Investors put money in at the angel phase more so for the person than the idea… and a healthy person is a much more appealing investment. Even the best ideas can get passed over if they’re presented poorly. So let me be clear again since this can be a touchy subject. You don’t need six pack abs to be a successful entrepreneur, but if it looks like you can barely take care of yourself it is harder to convince people you can take care of your startup.

TIP- Potential job hunters spend huge amounts of time building the perfect resume. In a lot of respects, for the internet entrepreneur, your resume is you. You’ll be pitching investors, enlisting the help of partners and evangelizing your idea. Take pride in the skin you’re in and take care of it. Instead of a fake tan or another layer of make-up… try some natural color and some confidence.

There should probably be some sort of disclaimer here that says you should consult your doctor before engaging in strenuous activities and that I’m not a medical professional and my advice should not be taken as such.

P.S. How many people yawned when they saw the photo for the Sleep Better & Have More Energy section? For fun you should go browse stock art tagged “yawn” and see if you can hold out.

I guest posted this over at Neighborhood Notes, but thought with the current financial climate it was worth cross posting over here. (Use your local coffee shops.  Do not spend money on an office for your startup.)

With the economy where it’s at… saving some money is a good idea. While financial advisers often tell you to avoid expensive coffee shops when on a budget, if you can save on the major expense of paying for office space by leveraging your local coffee shop… Grab your laptop, order a drip coffee and move your office into your neighborhood coffee shop… just try and stay away from the pastries.

I’ve been what they call down south in the valley a “New Bedouin,” working primarily from a home office and a number of coffee shops around town for a couple years now. I can’t do my writing at home with all my normal distractions so I leave the nest to find comfort in a cafe with a cup of coffee. I know the shops that have food, quite space for meetings and the ones that are open late. While Starbucks are useful because of their mass number of locations and consistently decent coffee, they still charge for wireless access and I’d prefer to support my local independent shops. Overtime I’ve narrowed down my favorite places to work by rating them on the following criteria:  Hours, Food, Space, Table Size, Coffee Quality, Parking, Internet, Bathrooms.

Hours

I’m a late owl.  I can’t tell you how early a shop opens, but I’ve been there when they all close.  As I like to work late into the evening, I give extra points to the place that stay open late.  While around 7-9 is the average, there are some places around town that are open super late.

Food

Very few coffee shops also serve good food and needing to eat is probably one of the main reasons I leave a place.  Only one from my list of favorites below actually serves any sort of substantial meals… I can only eat so many muffins and scones before I fall into a diabetic coma.

Space

A bad environment can ruin my working mood or it can motivate it.  I like open and bright space, but still enjoy my own table space that provides me with a little island to work on.  Although I recognize that making coffee isn’t the quietest process and people will be having engaged conversations, but I prefer to work from spaces that also provide some quite space or are quite in general.

Table Size

I tend to need my space.  I have my laptop, my moleskin notebook and usually a book.  I like being able to spread out and work freely without worrying about knocking stuff off my table or encroaching on somebody elses space.

Coffee Quality

I drink my coffee black so I especially notice when it isn’t very good.  Lucky for me, I live in a city with tons of great quality coffee all around.  I wouldn’t call myself a coffee afficianado, but if I wanted burnt tasting coffee I’d stop at a 7-11.

Parking

Having to remember to plug the meter is no fun at all… especially since I know I’m going to get focused on work and forget.  Finding a great coffee shop with a large open parking lot is pretty hard to find, but any place with free street parking gets high marks.  Sometimes free street parking can be found just a few blocks from your favorite places, so do a little block cruising to find out.

Internet

I want it free and I want it fast.  Having to pay for internet at a coffee shop is a huge turn-off for me.  I have a mobile access card anyway, but I’d prefer to know a place has reliable high-speed access.  Sometimes speeds can get a little crippled when other patrons are catching up on their torrent downloads…

Bathrooms

I tend to drink a lot of coffee while I work and I often get so focused on work that I push the limits of what my bladder can hold before I need to visit the bathroom. Coffee shops with only one bathroom and high traffic can develop a queue for the loo, so any place with more than one gets extra marks in my book. Also, important is the cleanliness of the bathrooms.

Power

Running out of battery juice can ruin a great work session… having only a few outlets can ruin a coffee shop for me.  I don’t care if they’re hidden under benches or in the ceiling, I just want to be able to plug in without running an extension cord across the whole shop.

My Favorite Portland Neighborhood Coffee Shops

NE - Albina Press

Photo by Coffeed

So, I rarely make it into N & NE Portland for coffee, but I was recently up north meeting with Ken and some other community focused creatives and was quite happy with the space and environment at Albina Press.  Several of us were gathered on the couches in the back room as others worked and relaxed on tables near the big bright windows up front.

Hours: Open til 8pm M-F.
Food: Standard cafe snacks and pastries.
Space: Good sized space with a great couch & lounge space in back.
Table Size: Several good sized tables to spread your work out on.
Coffee Quality: Serving the quality Stumptown coffee.
Parking: A good sized lot with street parking on surrounding streets.
Internet: Free and fast.
Bathrooms: Only one, but was clean and stocked.
Power: Several outlets.

SE - Stumptown

Photo by Stumptown Coffee Roasters

I’m probably a little biased as I met my fiance at this Stumptown Coffee, but this place has great quality coffee and a small but good energy filled sitting and working area.  The tables are big enough to spread out on, but the narrow room can feel a bit cramped when full of people.

Hours: Open til 7pm M-F.
Food: Standard cafe snacks and pastries.
Space: Narrow room can get packed.
Table Size: Big enough to spread your work out on. work space for two people.
Coffee Quality: Stumptown is well known for their great coffee.
Parking: Small parking lot and street parking on the neighboring streets.
Internet: Free and fast.
Bathrooms: Only one, decent shape.
Power: Several outlets.

SW - Blue Joe Coffee “Lake Oswego”

Photo by Coffee Shop Journal
While I know Blue Joe Coffee this is technically outside of Portland proper, this coffee shop is just down the hill from the SW Portland neighborhood that I call home and I spend quite a bit of time here. The space is large with plenty of table space as well as couch space to lounge and read. The jimmy-buffet-all-the-time radio station they play can be a bit much sometimes, but the coffee is quality and parking is always easy to find on the 4 hour or 1 hour free streets of L.O.

Hours: Open til 9pm M-F.
Food: Croissants, quiches, muffins and scones.
Space: Huge open space. Several tables and one long table seating 8+.
Table Size: Big enough to spread your work out on. Not big enough for two.
Coffee Quality: Great. One of the better Americanos I’ve had.
Parking: Lots of easy to find 1 hour and 4 hour free street parking spots.
Internet: Free and fast.
Bathrooms: Only one, but it is always very clean and stocked.
Power: Several outlets.

NW - Urban Grind

Photo by sandpuppeteer

Urban Grind seems to be the place from the twitterati crowds.  Almost every time I’m there I see somebody from the Portland tech / web scene tapping away on their laptop.  This place is one of my regular mobile offices around town and one of my favorites because of the fact that they also serve good food.  Parking downtown sucks on the meter, but if you park just a couple blocks west of 405 there is free street parking.

Hours: Open til 10:30pm M-F.
Food: Standard pastry type food as well as a menu of sandwiches and soups.
Space: Big open space. Several tables and one long table seating 8+.
Table Size: Big enough to spread your work out on. Working space for two people.
Coffee Quality: Always great quality.
Parking: Metered street parking outside, but free street parking within 3 blocks walking.
Internet: Free and fast.
Bathrooms: Two bathrooms, always stocked and clean.
Power: Several outlets.

What are your favorites?

Mobile Coffeeshop Office Fun from Improv Everywhere

For our latest mission, three agents entered a Starbucks one by one with their own giant desktop computer and CRT monitor. They bought coffee and worked at their computers as if they were laptops. One computer even had a Wi-Fi card installed, enabling our agent to surf the web.

Read more about this mission at Improv Everywhere

Co-Working: Between an Office and a Coffee Shop

For those of you that enjoy the ability to leave the house and find some nice quite place to work, but who want a bit more structure and privacy then your neighborhood cafe… there are some co-working spaces that might be a good solution for you. Check out Souk on the west side and CubeSpace on the east side.

Thomas Marban, creator of popurls.com is an internet astronaut. I’ve been a big fan of popurls and honestly I’m quite jealous it wasn’t my idea. The site is a successful example of how powerful doing something simple, but innovative can be. I check the site more than 50 times a day and I must not be the only one… As of 9/26/08 popurls cracked the 2 million pageviews mark. Pretty awesome traffic for a 1 page site!

Thomas is a great first internet astronaut to profile for this blog as he is a perfect example of what can be accomplished with some hard work and creativity over a short period of time. He created an innovative, useful tool and bootstrapped it himself. His total cash investment was minimal and the return has been and will continue to be great.

Who are you? What is your background?

I’m a serial entrepreneur, based in austria where I co-founded my first company at the age of 19. I have a versatile background ranging from design to technology to marketing but i’m far off from calling myself an expert in any of those fields. I just try to creatively mix and match the obvious of many worlds.

What inspired popurls?

I came up with the idea for one simple reason which was to keep my traditional feed reader (mostly vertical industry news) clean from short-term headlines that you find on sites like digg or reddit but still have a dashboard to catch up with the latest web zeitgeist. In other words, if your feed-reader is a well-tended lake then popurls is the torrential river.

What were you working on full-time when you started popurls?

I was running an enterprise software company (celum.com) with a school mate for almost ten years. It was self-funded and we grew it to a considerable market share and more than 30 employees when I decided to sell my share in fall 2007 to move from the business to a consumer focused industry.

How much would you say it cost you to launch popurls?
The only real expenses were trademark registrations and a small fee for hosting; other than that the only investment was my personal work time. The cost structure is about the same today, though i’m operating a small server farm now.

Can you give us any general number on the income generated by the site?

The current dollar<>euro exchange rate is a drawback for me as I’m operating from europe but i’d say that revenues cover a decent middle-class lifestyle.

What development language do you use? PHP, ASP, Etc.

php, but just for historic reasons - i would probably use python or perl if i’d start from scratch.

What are a couple of the new startups / websites that you’re excited about right now?

I have no specific startup that makes me really excited; it’s more about the fact that many ideas that started ten years ago have matured into viable businesses or tangible use cases and devices that are ready for real-world use today. It’s just the same with the ubiquity of APIs and the respective availability of relevant data.

How much time did you spend coming up with the name and brand for popurls? Why the butterfly?

I’ve spent a lot of time developing the brand, its consistency and public perception. Although popurls encapsulates a lot of web 2.0 sites, my objective was to be the anti-web2.0 brand, in fact you won’t find all those infamous visual elements or phrases in the user interface. also, given that my resources are limited figuring out what directions and topics you ain’t gonna pursuit is of high importance and in turn an advantage at the same time.
The logo is no innuendo - to enforce the disillusion: the butterfly was my first attempt in working with the path tool in adobe illustrator at the time i wrote the first popurls version. By virtue of its disarming shape I reused it as the logo.

Did you build it yourself?

Yes, it’s all a one-man labour of love - from design to a multi-server backend.

Was it built using a platform or CMS?

I used a few industry-standard components but that’s about it, the rest it built it from scratch.

How long did it take from idea to having something online?

Only a few days, but the solution back than was way simpler compared to how popurls works today.

When did you realize you really had something?

I think it was the first half year after launch when direct traffic grew to almost 50,000 views per day and remained stable without the dependence from other sites or search engines.

When did you decide to go full time with popurls and the popurls network?

That’s closely tied to the reason i mentioned above; about a year ago.

What new projects are you working on?

popurls is still my endeavour that gets 100% attention. I’ve launched a site called readbag.com a few months ago that got 10,000 users just through word of mouth but it was mainly built to solve a small problem and gain some experience with google’s app engine.

What were the biggest mistakes you made with popurls?

It’s a very technical one but I think solely supporting login standards like openid is still not the best way - the majority of users just don’t care if they have to create new proprietary accounts once more to use a service.

What were the smartest / best things you did?

Stick with the single page concept for all the years and not overdo it with features that users wouldn’t expect from the popurls brand, such as building vertical sub-sites for each and every topic or offering personalization in terms of the included content.

What words of advice / wisdom would you have for other internet entrepreneurs?

If I’d start all over today on the web, I’d rather try to solve a problem that was not caused by the internet itself.

 
 
Thanks Thomas. Good luck with your future launches.