Entrepreneur 2 be

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.

When I started this blog I set off to create a full story of my entrepreneurial struggle. I have been working on it mostly implicitly by writing out my thoughts and keeping up book reviews with what I read. I feel though that an explicit update is needed every now and then, so here is one that explains my current whereabouts.

After having been through a billion ideas and finished none, I decided to jump into ONE thing ONLY and pull it off till the end. My choice was Snartle.com, the language learning site since I trust my guts and feel like my theory of how a mind is able to suck new information will be right. In addition, the market is growing like crazy. Livemocha (got 2mln funding I believe) and SpanishPod both made the Times the other day, and I think neither is really good or with much innovation in methodoly of learning. They just are there and in such market whoever is there makes it (apparently really well too).

But I mentioned how I have been struggling between looking for funding and making it myself. We finally settled for funding, and no surprise - it feels like we chose wrong. On the other side, I am pretty sure it would have felt the same way if we went with building it. So funding is planned through winning the the Merrill Lynch competition and if we don’t win it (which I feel we have decent chances) I will be totally lost. If I then decide to build it, I would have gone BOTH paths to reach the target. Why didn’t I just tried making it off the beginning? My guilty consciousness will chase me for a long time. Though if we do win the 60,000 from Zicklin, then…..then there’s going to be more posts.But for now, got no product - just a business plan ‘in construction’.

So far so OK. I feel like I am on the right track and I push. Before I know it though, I am filling a new YC application - this time it was supposed to be just a joke. As a project, we decided to use our first launch (for five years!) - a blog. A blog we launched for all this time! It was a music blog and it felt good to put some of our favorite music online and listen to it and share with friends. Turns out Alek was serious about the YC app, which he filled quite diligently, and that he has serious plans about it. I realize now our music blog was the beginning of a new startup, which we will be launching in … 2 weeks?!@# How da hell did I get involved in another startup again?! Our blog, you can find at thefeelgood.com. It has got some good music today, and stay tuned for the startup launch.

Meanwhile more ideas keep coming to me (yes, they will all end up here). One of them seems to be stuck with me for some time. I haven’t shared it online because I believe I may decide to do in the near future when I have resources.

Actually resources is what I really wanted to talk about. I have no job. Ever since I decided to work on ONE thing I have been trying not do anything but work on the startup, which meant absolutely no wasting time on crappy external jobs. Now though I am running out of money and this drives me nuts. My budget has thinned out to mere $100/mo that I can live on besides my fixed costs of another $200 (subway, cell, credit card). I am basically surviving on $400/mo in New York and this is crazy. What is crazier is that soon the last few hundred bucks that I have will run out. I have to take a job but what I can do is apply at my school for a job under $10/h which is just a waste of life, or I can work some side projects as a freelancer. I used to make Flash sites like this one, but now I think that connection soured up. It’s nuts to think how people that work the crappiest jobs have more money than me. It’s a psychological breakdown. I may have to crack open and take a job or I will starve. ‘Die’ is probably the right word here, since I am already starving.

I already talked about the Up’s and Down’s of the roller coaster and here is another wonderful example of a down. It is quite a down this time - deeeeep and loooong. I am miserable and I am barely surviving. And it seems like it will keep going worse. If it wasn’t for the possible upsides that I see in a few months from now, I would have given up. But that insane feeling that “I am almost done” with something and soon “it will pay off” is just not going away, and drags me down, and down, and down.

Let me mention some more just for a little color. My wisdom tooth is growing - as to be taken out some time soon and yes, you guessed it - I can’t pay for it. My stomach pains me. Hmm..yes, I should be eating better food. But what better food when I am eating anything I can find? I just cut my hair on my own, since I have to otherwise pay 15 bucks, with which I can eat at least 3 times. I have never had such attitude towards money saving but times change and when you don’t have money, elasticity can get practically to zero;

Damn that UP should be right around the corner because I am in B I G trouble…

It’s the end of August and I am back to college. This marks the official end of summer of 2007. Here’s what I managed to do and not do:

Summer ‘07 achievements:
- I am finally on the track to doing what I like. I started coding on my startup. I made decent progress for 3 weeks, considering how many things I had to learn. It is also the first idea that I have actually started building, so that has its significance too.
- I made some Flash sites and accordingly some money that I can use for school.
- I took the CLEP marketing test from CollegeBoard. I saved $1200 and 1 semester time for not taking the class at college.
- Took a summer class in Econometrics. Got A. It was important to pass, since it is a prerequisite to any other class that I have left on my senior schedule.
- I got in the habit of reading books. I read a bunch of decent ones. Reviews of some can be found on this blog.
Not bad for summer. I also had some fun:
- I did manage to go home for 10 days. Haven’t been in Bulgaria summertime for 3, maybe 4 years, so this was great. I saw most of my important friends. Quality experience. I had a good amount of family time too.
- I did go to a wonderfully relaxing 1 week vacation to Costa Rica with my American family. Big nice house, amazing weather, lots of sleep, decent amount of reading, soccer with locals, delicious food served 3 times a day in the house, warm ocean (warm ocean, hear that!) swimming/surfing.

Summer ‘07 flops:
- I thought I might be able to finish my prototype for the startup. It is number one priority and is coming soon I promise.
- I didn’t manage to convince Baruch College that I don’t need Tier III for my degree, and I would rather take CIS minor than one that satisfies this Tier III. Baruch didn’t think so. I have to be like everybody else. 7 different offices were quite united around this issue. Was angry but after all, “Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig” by Robert Heinlein. Taking psychology with some cool brain/thinking classes. It’s also somewhat connected to my startup so it’s acceptable.
- I didn’t make really a lot of friends. Maybe because I am too busy and introverted currently. Maybe because people are in general very in a hurry in NYC. I dunno. Want to be my friend? Now accepting…

I have been thinking about procrastination lately. I have one specific task to complete and I have been reluctant to doing it. I have to call and beg the USPS office to give me money back for the lost package. Blah…

Among other things in Wikipedia.org I found, “It is often cited by psychologists as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety[that is not too far from fear] associated with starting or completing any task or decision”

Coping with anxiety is well said. It is exactly what we do, which is much different from coping with the problem. Since the problem stays intact, the anxiety we are “coping” with will not disappear. As a matter of fact it will grow and it will bother the hell out of us. Few nights ago we talked with Ilian about discounting. Just like discounting cash from future to present, when you are procrastinating you are discounting the future anxiety to today. In other words, you prefer to leave it for later at the price of increased anxiety (especially if you have a deadline). Quite an investment I would say.

Well, we kind of know that much. But here is a problem I want to point out and make very clear and visible. I will use Gantt Chart to illustrate it. This is how your normal week may look. You may have 1 or 2 tasks procrastinated but generally things get done:

I am going to hyperbolize [I love new words] this situation a bit but this could happen and does happen sometimes:

When you look at chart No.2 you obviously see that there are plenty tasks none of which are moving. From wiki, “For the person procrastinating this may result in stress, a sense of guilt, the loss of productivity, the creation of crisis, and the chagrin of others for not fulfilling one’s responsibilities or commitments.” The trouble here is that we have not one of those causes but MANY! Procrastinated tasks sit tightly in the person’s subconsciousness, socialize and drink beer steadily. As a result you start feeling unable to cope with life and you get a feeling of worthlessness. Add a pinch of girlfriend breakup, startup going slow, and toenail fungus in the equation and you get a genuine depression.

My point here is that it is important to recognize when depression is caused by procrastination. All you have to do is man up a little, get your fuck*** ass [don't you love my censoring?] off the couch and work your tasks out one by one. You are going to have a lot of those moments with startups, so better learn to deal with it.

It’s been a constant discussion between me and my partner whether we should look for funding have a beta version first for a pitch. At times we decided that we need but didn’t really do anything about it. Maybe we didn’t know what to do. Emailing random investors doesn’t work. It is pointless, I’ve tried it. At other times, we decided that I need to make version 1.0 first, befoe we ask anyone for $1.

So I am sure that everybody in the startup universe had those thoughts, “Should I get money, what should I do, do I really need them? Maybe I can work for a little bit and use that money…But where am I going to find it…I will read online and see if I can get some insights from news.yc….” in the end, nothing done. You go and read forever blogs and opinions and they are all the same. And they don’t help. How your project’s problem will get solved will probably have nothing to do with any of those advices, they are often too generic.

I settled on the solution - I will do v1.0, because I can make it by the end of the summer and then we’ll go and search for money. Nice plan. Worked hard for a month, made 1/2 of what I had planned. Now however, I had emergency and I had to fly home. That means money spent and now I can’t pay my school. What does it mean in regards to our project? Halt. I have to make money to survive. I hate that feeling. So little money - 6 grand per semester. Last 2 semesters, I am so close to completing this project and I have to deal with this crap. 12 thousand dollars not much but enough to make your life miserable, when everything was going well.

I am currently in Bulgaria, working on it coding when I have time. But once I get back, I have to work for school. I have always believed that I can fool investors and get some money to work on a project that would be fun. Maybe not ‘fool’ but rather convince them that my idea is good (I obviously like it myself). Somewhat I feel that funding was the end goal. This has changed. It’s about me and the project now. If I get money I get to work on it, else I have to stop. That simple but profoundly different from what ‘funding’ has been previously.

I am one of those people that can starve for a long time if no food that I am in the mood for is around. However, for the last 6 months probably I have been starving for another reason - I am too busy or too tired to get food. The result is that I have long term problems with stomach and need serious treatment. Unfortunately, stomach pains are not the only problems. All kinds of health issues are emerging now (a lot of them probably caused by lack of good nutrition).

So now I am sitting all in pain and worn out, “Health can definitely be a measure of your ambition and obsession!” Yup. I figured that out. But then if you really want to be successful, you have to take care of yourself too, which means that to maintain GOOD health is an even higher level of ambition and dedication. This doesn’t meant you have to get through the ’sick’ phase so you can reach the top. On the contrary - you can easily avoid it, which is why I am writing that post: spend extra energy and money to eat good quality food and to eat it regularly. Believe me it’s worth it in the long term.

Just yesterday I wrote about what I call “Amusement Park Theory”. Now I want to elaborate on the DOWNS.

Today is one of the big big downs. I am sick, worried, aggravated. I am so snappy that people around me are afraid to talk to me. I have been coding and reading about application design now for 3 straight days straight. I know now about MVC (Model-View-Controller) but I still can’t understand it truly. More specifically, I don’t know how to structure my own application on the MVC framework. I don’t know which functions should belong to View, which to Controller. I have also been looking at custom events, dispatchers, class extends and class implementations. My head is literally AS3 class soup.

Well if it takes time and energy that’s alright. But what worries me is “Can I ever learn that stuff in a decent, acceptable timeframe? What if there are other things that I really don’t have the resources to learn?” I don’t have eternity for this project, I have to move fast. I have been through so many web ideas and I have created none. I really, really want this one to pop-up online. The idea is amazing, its doable, its just awesome. But yet, I am not programming geek - I only got introduced to class-based programming this January. I work hard when I feel like it but I am new to this material. I get all those doubts now, “Maybe I shouldn’t be the one to write the code? Maybe It is more efficient to have it outsourced.”But then this is a whole different story on building up a startup:

- I have to worry about idea being stolen. If person X writes my application, at any point he can pick his shit up and finish off the idea on his own. And if he doesn’t steal it, he can blackmail for % of the company. Yeah, I know, NDA’s but who knows how well they work. Even if he is not interested in stealing and just wants to leave, I am left with his crap that is probably undocumented and has to be basically rewritten. And this can repeat again and again…
- I have to find money to pay this person X. And I can’t just get someone to do the job, it has to be done well. Plus, how do I find a good person? AS3 is new itself. Some people have been doing Flex for 6 months, but Flash is not Flex. Well yeah, I have a list of angel investors that I could approach, but asking for money before you have anything done is never a good strategy. Otherwise I would be wasting the few chances I have. This all doesn’t feel right.

This whole situation sucks big time. If I don’t figure out how to build that soon, this would be another project on the pile of scraps. And my partner this time is not a programming guru like Alek. This time Alek is away, busy with some other projects of his. I pitched my current idea to a more distant/recent friend of mine that got very excited and was eager to do work. I liked him, seemed like an honest guy, and besides sometimes all you need of someone is energy and dedication to figure the problems. But Noah is more of a firm thinker who gets me back to ground when my dreams make me fly. He is double majored in English and Philosophy which quite honestly helps zero at programming stage. I know we’ll have both a lot of work later, but for now I am on my own and this shit is not moving!!!

its 1,29am. Bed time.

Trigger: We had iPods, but we wanted immediate access to any song at any point, we didn’t want to look for downloads, put them on computer and only then transfer to iPod. We wanted a piece that streams music to a cellphone, caching only the recent songs and the most probable to be listened next.

How: Flextronics would build our music phone by our specifications and design, music.net would provide us with huge content of songs for which we would pay per stream, and then we would partner with one of the cell phone carriers to provide the wireless service for a flat fee of $5 or $10.

Mistakes: We wrote too much that in the end no one would want to read, and at the same time did nothing. We also overestimated ourselves and were overly optimistic about “killing the iPod”.

The story: We knew what we wanted, so we set off to make it. As we have studied in Junior Achievement class, every business starts with a well written business plan. Ah, yes, Business Plan! We had just won the national competition for business plan so now we were confident and wanted to create a real business. Oh boy was it writing. We ended up writing a plan close to 50 pages describing everything you could imagine - market, future competition, financial information, technical details… Anything you can possibly brainstorm.

It looked great (to us). As a matter of fact, we were high on our own project. We valued the company to 100million and were planning to quit college. It was all set up, we didn’t need crappy classes anymore, we were rich. But were we far from truth! Long time we kept thinking, rethinking, and tweaking it. Every so often we would decide to send it to an investor and worked for another week of improvements before that. But there was another problem that we didn’t realize at the time: no one that had money to invest had time to read anything more than 2,3 page executive summary. We had close to 50(with financials and other stuff)! It was an endless writing of a story, that would never become true.

We also didn’t really quite get the scale of our venture. There was just no way we could get such big players in our game. We were just two college (freshmen) students that wanted to create something better than iPod. I laugh now at myself and my foolishness.

Also, a major issue was that we ourselves didn’t do anything really. Everybody on the line of ‘killing the iPod’ had a practical purpose- Verizon provides the wireless midium, Flextronics builds the phones, Music.net dumps terabytes of music on our server and what are we doing? We are connecting them. Making phone calls. That mean that even after incredible and impossible amount of work to make this happen, we were easily cutable out of the deal. We didn’t put any real value in providing the service.

One more problem that didn’t really become very clear from that project alone, but you can definitely mark it out: its not always about creating the best and newest. Sometimes the technology is not ready. We wanted to use 3G back in 2005, but there was barely any implementation. We thought of WiMax, which is still not out for consumer products even today! And what’s more subtle: sometimes just the market is not ready. You can introduce a brilliant product, but if its not the right time for the right price, you will lose because people will not be able to understand how good the product is. Its also not about efficiency but about money. Why would Apple provide flat fee for all their music, if they are milking you $.99 per single song! Of course this will be the model until people are ready to stop paying for it.

The Moral:
- Don’t write huge business plans, 2 pages is more than enough for investor. Actually don’t write business plan at all. Thinking is easy but it probably has 2% significance, the rest is DOING IT. Also, things change as you go along, so wasting 2 months of brainstorming, for an idea that will change later is pointless.
- Make sure you pick up a REALISTIC idea. Don’t fly in the sky, because you will fall sooner or later.
- Don’t talk too much before you do anything. People can mock you for a long time how instead of being a millionaire that took over Apple you are still a college student, writing some anthropology homeworks or some crap..

PS. Alek wrote about his KillPod experience on his Bulgarian blog.

[UPDATE]
Here is a link to our bplan…if anyone is interested.
Financials.

This is not really a theory but its an analogy I like to make between the life of an entrepreneur and an amusement park. I will explain it in the framework of my first successfully completed project - the Planner Project.The so called “Planner Project” was simple - I wanted everybody in my high school to have daily planners for homeworks and to-do lists. ACS did not have that, so Svilen and I had to raise a couple thousand dollars, make the design, create the press files, print it and distribute it. Hardest part was raising money. We had to cold call various companies, meet with people, pitch the idea and hope that they will want to pay money to advertise in our planner for high school students.

I don’t know how many days I have spent with Svilen running around the city with my legendary Fiat Panda to random companies to “beg” for money. It was tiring, annoying, sometimes humiliating. We would get “No! Not interested” and it would seem that the world is collapsing. If they didn’t want it, no one would want to advertise with us. No money, no planners, and days and days of work lost. Also, it got pretty tought at some point, because we had decent money from the second national TV and GlaxoSmithKline and couldn’t make it. How do we go back to those big guys, “Sorry we couldn’t do it, we apologize for all the husstle, here is your money back…” But other times a random person would come up and give us a great idea, “Hey your mom told me about the planner, why don’t you check Rossignol, they might want to do it, and you’e kind’a friends with them too” and then we would picture again the project successfully completed.

It was ups and downs. So many and so extreme. But I look back, it was all worth it. It was definitely amazing to complete such a cool project. It was also very rewarding to feel and taste (i have to be honest, you can’t understand what I am talking until you try it) what it is to create your own projects, and nurture them for months until they are done. From total despair to full hope and ecstatic joy in 5 minutes. Some of those moods lasted for days, some for minutes. So if you ever get a chance to do projects on your own - go for it. Don’t get scared, just do it.

Now the theory. So you already see what I wanted to say - life is like an amusement park. Every project is a ride. Crazy big important projects that might bring a lot of rewards are the crazy big scary rides. You go up, you go up big time in the air. Make millions. You go down, you go down big time. Your dreams of millions just shattered. If you are just working for a company for hour by hour, you are probably riding a Marry-Go-Round.

Moral: Choose your rides wisely. If you go big, expect more than just bumper-car experience.

I have learned that to be entrepreneur it takes a lot. You have to be in it, you have to sacrifice time, energy etc - you know it. I have been very busy lately - 13h workdays, 7 days a week…

And today I saw a movie. Surf’s Up! Its an animation about surfing penguins, with good funny jokes, with dreams, ambition, competition. There was a scene where Big Z (the pro surfur) tells Cody (the hype ambitious kid) that its all about the fun and the love for surfing itself. It made me think that sometimes, when you work too hard, you forget to enjoy what you do. So I hope I will remember more often now that I do what I do, because I like it and I have to enjoy it. That’s all life is about.