Internet Tech Boston

Really excited to post that EditMe, the startup I’ve been working on, has been been acquired. You can read all about it on our blog.  For this post, I wanted to write about  five lessons I think we’ve learned throughout this process. If you’re a superstar, or have a success story, don’t bother reading – you’ll probably find this post trivial.  This one’s for the dreamers, the wanna-be’s, the unheard-of entrepreneurs – toiling away in obscurity, driven by your vision & passion. I’m with you. I am you.

5. “Fuck the naysayers ’cause they don’t mean a thing”

There are no such things as “experts.” There are only those that have had success, emerging stars that haven’t succeed quite yet, and cynical d-bags that know they don’t have the brains or guts to succeed and want to drag you down to their level. Listen to those who’ve had success, and partner up or hire the emerging stars – but avoid those cynics at all costs, lest you find yourself actually believing them.

4. Invest in your core value – outsource the rest.

Free up your time by outsourcing as much as you can. At first, you’ll feel it’s a “waste of money” to outsource menial bookkeeping tasks that you could clearly do yourself. Or, you’ll wonder why paying for a 3rd party service to manage email delivery inside your social media app makes any sense when you could just build it yourself. But as the company or product achieves even the slightest bit of scale/momentum – you’ll be glad you’re spending your time on building your secret sauce, and not the ancillary services required to keep the operation afloat. At the end of the day, the value in your product or company is not about how well you’ve been able to send “password reminder” emails.

3. Automate yourself out of a job – then redefine your job.

Early on, start investing in ways to streamline the stuff that needs to be done, and automate as much as humanly possible. This will help conserve your most precious commodity (time).  You can use Google Mail’s “Canned Responses” to automate the most common tech support replies. You can hack MailChimp’s Email Marketing Autoresponder capability to build a poor man’s artificial intelligence to communicate with customers.  Use Amazon Mechanical Turk to outsource deactivating obsolete user accounts. Use a wiki to keep detailed notes on steps required to accomplish tasks that need to be done on an infrequent schedule so that you can quickly recall and get them done without having to waste time remembering how it gets done.

String together enough of these “automations” and you’ve got yourself a pseudo-employee – a collection of scripts, canned responses, templates, and rote memory that do some job function “good enough” so that you can free up your time to tackle new and more important challenges.

2. Mine customers for information – there’s gold there.

The most important exception to the “Cynics Rule” are those that pay you money. Remember those folks, the customers? They have every right to tell you how much you suck, or are just plain stupid. In fact, you want to setup a relationship between you and your early customers where this dialog is fostered, even expected of them. The importance of listening to customers is discussed in great detail, and much better than I can relate, by the Lean Startup guys like Eric Ries, Sean Ellis, Dave McClure, and others.

Short version of this story – do what ever it takes to get a candid, truthful dialog between you and your customers. That’s where the answers are to most all of the questions you’ll face early on. Questions like: is this product valuable? Where do I find people to buy this thing? How should I message it and market it? And, if you find yourself giving excuses about not wanting to talk to customers because “they don’t get it,” then slap yourself hard across the face – you’ve started to believe your own BS. You need the type of reality check that only listening to customers can provide.

1. Execute. Execute. Execute.

There’s no such thing as a silver bullet. You’ll need to release several features to address one user experience problem, or run a series of A/B landing pages to fix a broken user acquisition funnel. But know that every thing you ship that is meant to address a problem brings you one step closer to actually solving it. There is nothing to be gained by standing flat on your feet and hoping everything turns out for the best.

A Call to Arms

In 2010, EditMe has gone from a wiki platform, to website CMS for online communities, to internal collaboration software. Matt Wiseley and I gave a case study presentation to the Lean Startup Circle Boston on how we’ve tried to applied the concepts of Customer Development and Lean Startups to our existing business.

We don’t have all the answers on what makes a successful pivot, and if you watch the video below you’ll see that we got a lot of great help and advice from John Prendergast, the LSC Boston organizer and the people in attendance.

View the Slides

Watch the Video

This month’s guest post comes to us from Matt Wiseley, founder and Chief Architect at EditMe.com, a hosted wiki with “a powerful JavaScript API that provides complete control over a highly configurable content management solution.” Based in Maynard, MA, EditMe was founded in 2002 under a firm set of guiding goals and a disciplined approach that is uncommon in the frenetic Web 2.0 Product Development industry. To that end, I asked Matt to share his thoughts on how he made the move from part of the rat-race to stable startup and small company.

Chicken Entrepreneurship is a term used to describe a growing class of entrepreneurs who start a business while maintaining their full time job. Internet businesses that don’t require full-time staff (at least in the beginning) have made this a popular option among entrepreneurs.

Perhaps you’re motivated by the allure of riches. In his blog, The Simple Dollar, Trent Hamm discusses how Chicken Entrepreneurship can lead to financial independence.   Maybe you just want the independence and flexibility running your own business can provide. Or maybe you just want to build something from scratch with your own brainpower and two hands. Any way you read it, this strategy for starting a business has some real benefits. I should know: I started my company while working fulltime. I’ve since left that job and my business is flourishing. Looking back, I wouldn’t do it any differently.

There are three huge benefits to starting out this way:

• You don’t need a salary. You can use the income from your full-time salary to support yourself while the business is ramping up. This would otherwise pose a significant capital expense to the new company.
• You can invest your disposable income. You can also use some of that income to fund the start-up yourself, perhaps avoiding taking on debt or the need for outside investors. Remember, if you start a company with somebody else’s money, it’s not really your company.
• Less risk to your finances and career. Finally, you can test the waters with a minimal monetary investment and back out with no harm done if it doesn’t take off.

What kind of businesses are best started this way? Look for these traits:

• Recurring revenue. Look for a business model that provides steady recurring revenue. You won’t have time to work for every penny the company earns. The more money the company can earn on its own, the less you’ll have to be there.
• Headless. Your business can’t require your presence during the day – you won’t be there.
• Homemade. Look for a product or service you can build/develop yourself, or one you can easily afford to outsource. If your company is within your area of expertise (it should be), nobody can implement your idea as well as you can at this defining stage.
• Low capital requirement. The company shouldn’t require a large capital investment, such as buying a fleet of delivery trucks, unless you’ve got the dough on hand and won’t miss it.
• Monthly expenses. Look for expenses that can be paid monthly rather than in large sums up front. Use services aimed at small businesses rather than hiring staff and buying equipment. This will allow you to use your disposable income to pay the company’s expenses with as little pain as possible.
• Keep the wind at your back. Find a business that takes advantage of market conditions. This is true for any business, but the more your company can benefit from external conditions the less up-hill pushing you’ll have to do. For example, I started a wiki hosting business just before the man-on-the-street was starting to know what Wikipedia was.

Once you’ve got an idea, you need to do a self-check to determine whether this is going to work for you at this time in your life and career.

• Spare time. You will need a lot of spare time in the evenings and on weekends. Without it, your business will be starved for attention. If you’ve got young children or are otherwise time-committed, this is not for you.
• Disposable income. Do you have significant disposable income? If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you won’t have much to put into the company. Cut your expenses down to the bare minimum during this ramp-up time (between 1 and 3 years) to maximize your non-debt investment capability.
• Leveraged skill. You will need a skill that can be leveraged by the company. For me, it was software development. Your time will be the most valuable (and free) asset the fledgling company has, so make sure it’s put to good use.
• Flexible job. You should work things so that you’re not interrupted at all by your business during the work-day, but some flexibility in your day job will come in handy. If you have a pushy over-seer of a boss, consider moving to something a little more low-key during this process.

Finally, you’ll likely need to pick up some new skills and do some homework. Assuming you’re the only real employee, you’re going to have to wear all the hats. Don’t assume you can figure these out as you go along. Find good books on each subject you don’t consider yourself an expert in and read them before starting out.

• Marketing. Your company will need to make every penny of its marketing budget count. You can avoid costly mistakes by doing your homework before spending any money. Trust me: marketing is harder than you think.
• Insurance. Research your need for business liability insurance. If you don’t do this properly, you can be sued by customers and lose your personal assets.
• Business entity. Research legal business structures and pick one. Doing so can add to your protection against lawsuits, and can also provide valuable financial and tax benefits.
• Delegate. Learn to delegate and outsource. For example, don’t design the marketing materials and web site if you’re not a designer. Learn to use tools like Elance to find affordable short-term staffing.
• Employee agreement. Research the implications of any employee agreement you have with your current employer. Consult an attorney to make sure there are no conflicts and that your employer can’t swoop in and “own” your company.

I spent years slowly growing my business, rather than BAM! New business. This organic, gradual growth enabled a lot of practice and trial and error. The only deadlines and revenue goals were my own, and not a lot was riding on them. To me, it was the only way to go. It was smart, not chicken. With no debt and essentially no risk at all, I got to where I wanted to be: owning a company that I enjoy working for. I’ve never regretted it and am currently incubating another idea to build on the side while running my business. So, go ahead, be chicken!

The proliferation of wiki-based sites has been one of the hallmarks of what has become known as Web 2.0. Wiki’s give a group of people who share a common purpose the ability to quickly and easily create information online. For an official definition of wiki, look no farther than the site that made the idea famous – Wikipedia.org:

A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.

As the definition states, wiki’s are meant to be the simplest form of creating and managing data online. This is great for people who have simple needs combined with a lower level of development skills. But for those that want to combine the simplicity of a wiki with more advanced functionality, standard wiki’s quickly becomes a problem because the functional set built into wiki’s cap out pretty quickly. Even slightly more complex functionality such as the ability to capture information from users with forms, or allowing security settings on pages or groups of pages is not part of what a wiki typically does.

EditMe is a wiki that goes above and beyond the typical feature set found in a wiki. By exposing a robust developer API built in server-side javascript, users can build custom functionality into their wiki based sites that allows simple content editors to become true web developers. The API is written in a custom tagged javascript, so your EditMe code development is done the same way content is edited in a wiki – right in your browser window. According to the EditMe site:

No FTP servers, compilers or IDEs required. EditMe’s API uses server-side JavaScript and our templates use XML, so there are no new languages to learn.

Disclosure: I’ve been paid to do some development with EditMe’s API in the past. My experience using the API to build wiki-based functionality was pretty fun, actually. Matt Wiseley, EditMe’s founder and President is also excited about the robust API built into EditMe:

Most web “APIs” are really just another way to see the site’s data in XML or JSON or some other format. Few allow the complete scope of read and write that the standard web application provides, and I don’t know of any that allows the API to be used right within the product as seemlessly as EditMe does.

Having full CRUD access over all data and wiki functionality really makes a difference. It’s possible to build permission based content authoring tools all the way up to a full fledged CMS right within your personal wiki. EditMe has been able to pull off integration of this powerful API within a “normal” wiki environment. You don’t have to take advantage of it if you don’t want to. The familiar wiki content editing rules apply. However, with access to the API at every price level – you’re getting a powerful toolset at any price.