How Not To Run A Startup

In brief, continuous deployment is releasing your code as often as you commit a change. For more detail see Continuous Deployment in 5 steps.

Using some continuous deployment principles with a sprinkling of manual intervention over the last five days, Missed Connections has been deployed around 10 times with new versions.

I always enjoy working on the code but seeing the results live so quickly has been a good morale boost.

I’m crap at marketing, so for those other solo small time entrepreneurs that are worse than me, here’s some thoughts swimming in my head that will help, hinder, or be meaningless:

• Truth pays
• Be personal, talk to a person, not crowds
• Promote others
• Be useful
• Shutup about yourself
• 80/20 “rule” - spending 20% of the time to get 80% of the results is a good idea. Forget the rest, that’s time for improving your product not chasing PR
• Getting featured on tech blogs will not make or break you.  Its like paying for a one-off TV ad - it’ll boost your audience hugely for a small window, then mostly you’ll be forgotten.
• Marketing includes building something worthwhile that helps people.  This may be the best use of the time you spend “doing marketing”
• Word of mouth

Update: This post is a little outdated, as I wrote it before I finished my contract and before writing about my thoughts on asking for donations (post from October 6th).

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to create a startup without needing money?

I think the next best thing is if you can avoid chasing venture capital and funding rounds and presentations and business plans and forecast projections and other things I don’t want to get tangled up in; I have an idea and I just want to see if it works, my strength is in the execution of that idea, not chasing investors.

Here’s two low-risk ways where you can fund your startup yourself and so remain the only boss without having to waste time on VCs.

Get a job and work on your project out of office hours

I reckon this will work for anyone that is reading this. If you hold down a job and have time to find my obscure blog then you have some spare time to work on your startup.

Regardless of if you’re a parent, married, single, or retired. If you think you don’t have the time, try taking the fuse out of your TV’s or feed reader’s plug for 10 days and see how much free time you have. If this doesn’t work for you either you need to try harder or you have serious non-work commitments (like caring for family members) that I admire you for.

Work part-time instead of full-time and shrink your spending

This is what I do. I’m a contractor programmer 1 to 4 days a week where I work for The Man. The rest of the time I work for “the man” (I’m saying this out loud pointing my thumbs to my chest and doing my best to sound cool).

I think the idea of programmers creating their own startups deserves a blog all to itself, not one I have time for but I intend to write more about this topic in a rallying call sort of way.

My wife and I have turned down our spending and there’s room to do more if we need. Is this hard? No, we’ve been doing this for years now, maybe at first it was, I don’t remember. Two things we do to help with this:

• I have a spreadsheet that I use once a month to total up all the money we have in our bank accounts.  Here I can compare how much money we have today to previous months and this helps steer our spending for the next month.
• On the kitchen pin board we have 4 index cards to track our spending on: one card for my spending, one for my wife’s spending, one for groceries, and one for joint spending (e.g. for going to cinema, buying stuff for the home). We allocate a cash amount to each card for the week and try not to spend over that amount.  Each week we reset the card and change the allocations if we think its needed.

Summary

Fund yourself, you can do it.

Here’s how I saved time to have more to spend on my startup and felt happier about it.

I stopped reading blogs from entrepreneurs, tech commentators and VCs because well for some reason they just make me feel crap, after reading them I compare my startup to other companies that are getting press and that just kills my buzz and optimism for a while.

Instead I remember that most stories on these sites are a version of:

• Google/Twitter/Facebook/Apple did something today that isn’t as groundbreaking as their original rise to fame
• Money swapped hands. Companies and/or VCs were involved.
• Top 10 list of something that sounded interesting at first but you’ll never use
• Here’s how you should run your startup if you want to be like me
• Here’s a new startup and this article will be the peak of their success

When you want some advice from an entrepreneur, go search for it online at that time, you don’t have to inefficiently check their blog output daily for the one imagined gold nugget that will make or break your business.

If I had any readers this applies to this blog too, make yourself useful and leave this blog forever, I mean it.

Not being a fancy big city entrepreneur with fancy big city money I wrote my own press release a few days ago.

I tried to make it objective and useful by mentioning not just my site but Craigslist and Gumtree too.

Promoting the competition in a press release?  This could be nearly as stupid as the time a flatmate of mine wrapped plastic film around an oven tray to save having to clean it when cooking.

I promoted the competition because I wanted to be honest.

The advice I gave in that press release is the best way to find your missed connection I can think of, and I think about this stuff a lot.  It wouldn’t be true to myself to pretend that the best way was to limit yourself to one site.

What did I want to achieve?  A journalist or blogger writing a piece on missed connections in general, hopefully with a mention of my site.

What did it achieve?  No inspired journalists that I know of.  A few new visitors, a small rise in the level of awareness, a link from the press release site, and some thank yous from twitter users I pinged who had the problem that the press release aims to solve.

Looking back I’m satisfied with the outcome, the tweeted thank yous were the best thing.  If I have the time to do press releases in the future I’ll do my best to keep them honest and objective.

There are more features that can be added to my site to further improve the chances of reconnecting people.

Problem is, these days finding the time to add them is getting hard as I have my online shop taking my time up.

My current contract has just finished, so that frees up some time, however, that also means my family’s main source of income has just finished.  So I must concentrate my efforts on the project that I believe can bring in some income sooner, my shop.

However, in the shower this morning, I remembered seeing Wikipedia and a Twitter-related startup (I don’t remember the name) asking for donations from their users to help maintain and grow their web sites.

I think I might give this a go, perhaps I’ll see what donation widgets there are out there this morning.

I want to keep the users happy, so if I do it and they don’t like it I can always remove it, but I get the feeling that some will enjoy donating to help develop the site, perhaps it’ll be like donating to give romance a helping hand.

My name’s Eliot and I run a two year old startup. It’s not failed and it’s not succeeded.

Some people say my startup is on its way, others say it’ll never work. I’m trying to find out who’s right.

Nothing qualifies me to run a startup unless having an idea and no business experience counts.

I’m going to try broadcasting my experiences here. Why? Reasons that spring to mind are:

1. Other startups can learn from my mistakes. This is comforting.
2. My startup is an obsession, it occupies my brain too much, blogging is an outlet.
3. Maybe it’ll help my startup. If not that’s cool, I have reasons 1 and 2.