A year ago, my partner and I planned on launching a quick/dirty version of our site in “two weeks” to test the concept. We had no idea that after we actually sunk our teeth into it and decided to develop it right it’d take us closer to 1.5 yrs… In this post, I want to share some lessons learned along the way, some things I love about the business, and some things I love about being an entrepreneur in 2011.

- I love that we’ve taken the time to hire a solid development team. We recently interviewed 10+ development companies via e-mail, interviewed the best three via Skype, decided to hire all three for a test project for two weeks, and planned to keep the one with the best balance of communication, code quality, progress made, professionalism, etc. — compared to our first two developers who were hired with practically no interview, this last due diligence definitely paid off.
- I love that we hired a Quality Assurance (QA) professional who helps identify bugs, documents them, tracks their resolutions, and verifies they were fixed. My partner and I used to do this ourselves with our first developer: we’d spend hours documenting all the bugs and we’d receive a list back from our developer marking everything as “FIXED”. We’d go to verify and see that 33% were fixed, 33% were re-developed incorrectly, and 33% were marked fixed but left completely the same… this was extremely draining and hurt our momentum significantly… having a QA professional help with this has been a complete lifesaver.
- I love that my partner and I can manage the development effectively in 30-60 minutes/day in the evenings, with 2-3 hour deep-dives on the weekend.
- I love that our team is global and efficient. We have 6 people in 4 time zones. (me in Japan, my partner in the states, our QA professional in Shanghai, two developers and a project manager in SE Asia)
- I love that our PM has a great attitude, is available almost 24/7, speaks fine English, is professional, but still throws in winks and smiley faces in the daily reports. I also love that he works free, and is complimentary with the development team.
- I love that our QA professional absolutely crushes things. She is freaking amazing at finding bugs and documenting them with screenshots, steps to reproduce, expected behavior, actual behavior, etc.; when we first hired her for a 2-3 hour test to see what she could do, she found and documented 8-9 bugs, one of which was a critical security vulnerability that could have put us out of business had we launched without catching it.
- I love that the developer who won our hiring contest fair and square is based out of SE Asia. The per-capita income of their country was under $2,000 in 2009… we paid our developers more than twice that last month alone. I love globalization, and the thought that these intelligent folks acquired the skills necessary to compete in the global market place and leapfrog the local economy…
- I love that we’re paying our QA professional and developers fairly… it’s stellar to be working with true professionals from around the globe for such reasonable, win-win rates.
- I love we adopted Redmine to manage our project, track all our bugs, feature requests, development roadmap, etc… we used to use various spreadsheets/etc for this stuff, but Redmine is actually designed for the purpose… I also love that Redmine is free.
- I love that we use SVN for version control (also free). There are obviously tons of benefits to using version control, but believe it or not we were using FTP a couple months ago and whenever we wanted to move code from development into production we’d have to mirror all the files at once and it’d take an hour. Now we can move only the updated files and it takes just a few minutes.
- I love that we won our first customer a few months ago, and did so in a theoretically profitable way (I won’t elaborate!)
- I love that although our website wasn’t completely ready for launch at the time, we were able to service the customer effectively, and are now working to further automate things.
- I love the fact Gmail and Skype enable free webcam chatting with my partner in the states, and staff in other countries.
- I love that oDesk.com tracks our team’s Work Diary and takes screenshots of their screen a few times per hour so we can verify that an hour billed is actually an hour worked.
- I love that my employer was open to my starting an unrelated side business, and that when I went to HR to ask about it they were willing to approve it in writing (that says something great about the times we live in).
- I love that my partner and I were able to start everything without seeking venture capital funding. Yes, we’ve had to make major investments, but it has been do-able.
- I love that free & open source development frameworks like CakePHP, Kohana, CodeIgniter, etc. are available to help us retroactively improve the quality/stability of our code and implement MVC for a reasonable development expense.
- I love that building a company like this is equally as fun and even more satisfying than playing video games.
- I love that sites like TechCrunch.com, VentureBeat.com, Techonomy.com, TED.com, Quora.com, etc., have an absolute explosion of exciting business innovation available on a daily basis that serves as an endless source of inspiration.
- I love that in addition to my current business, I have 5+ other ideas I’d love to turn into businesses some day that are likely to be ridiculously more lucrative and exciting (although significantly more challenging to execute).
- I love that the pace of innovation is accelerating to an almost unfathomable rate.
- Although at this point we are still far from making back the money we initially invested, I am confident and hopeful that over time we will, and then I’ll probably love that too.

Well, that’s more than 20 things I love about being an entrepreneur in 2011. Times are good indeed.

NOTE: I have intentionally not revealed what our business is, and don’t plan to. Please don’t bother asking, and if you somehow find out, please don’t share it broadly. We’re trying to keep a low profile while we scale up since we don’t have the investment resources to scale as fast as other companies might. My intention for writing this post was to share my positive outlook on entrepreneurship in 2011, share a few lessons learned, and perhaps inspire others to try something similar. Thanks, and good luck!

It’s not quite there yet as they still need to find a way to open the bounties up so anyone can contribute their $50-2,000 to the innovative dilemmas challenging humanity, but aside from that they’ve pretty much got it. The incentive is there to open it up since it’d mean growing their revenues exponentially, but they’d probably no longer be able to take 40% of the cash, and would have to find a way to handle the complications that come up when multiple people with somewhat differing objectives pool money for a common innovative cause.

You can come up with the craziest/zany-est ninja doodle idea you can think of and let me worry about finding a way to incorporate it into the lessons. No limits on the funky kind of stuff I’ll buy. I’m thinking of paying around $5 per doodle, purchasing up to ~20-50 doodles, so, up to around $250. I know my price is cheap, but it’s also a reflection of how small the doodles are I’m willing to accept. They could be 2″x1″, 3″x2″, 1″x1″, any random ninja doodle. (I actually would like a corn on the cob in ninja garb, if someone can doodle that; probably around 1″x1.5″)

The only thing is the doodles need to be in a digital form, e.g. a JPG or GIF file. If you can doodle it on paper and convert it to digital without it looking too weird that’s fine.

So, if you’re interested go ahead and send me a sample of what you can do! 1-2 sample doodles is fine, & if your stuff is usable we’ll chat about an on-going ninja-doodling deal based on how many you’re interested in making.

If you’re not much of a ninja doodler yourself, but you know someone who is please pass this post on to them. I could really use a great doodler. Thanks!

It doesn’t allow people to track their contributions in as many ways as I’d like to see, but it does provide a beautiful/simple way for people to make a difference with hardly effort at all by “Enabling and optimizing your computer’s power management settings to help save the world energy.”

If I wasn’t already working on a different startup, I’d love to take this idea to the next level with my domain greenolution.com. Previous posts of mine detailing that business model & vision:

- The Greenolution Pitch
- Three Design Opportunities for a Brighter Future
- Anyone Join Me for $25 Million
- Count Down Your Carbon

If you combined CDYD and Google’s Energy Saver gadget and threw in a global goal, a gadget easier for people to paste on social networking sites than the Google Gadget, and some greentech product recommendations on the most cost-effective technologies currently available, you’d have my idea for greenolution.com.

Aside from possible ad revenue, you could add an e-commerce portion of the site to sell the greentech conveniently to consumers/businesses, or at least collect affiliate earnings.

This startup has been under development the past several months & it’s nearly time to unveil it to the public. Half a year ago I released a couple low-quality Game Theory lessons on YouTube to see the kind of response I’d get and what kind of market was out there for the concise teaching of academic material. Below shows some interesting feedback (see the comments.)

F’d up comment aside (hey, can you say he’s wrong?), if that’s the feedback for the junk recorded while hardly awake yet, I’m excited to see the impact & education I can provide when I invest significant time & effort and make it twice as fun. Wish me luck.

In order to be a successful entrepreneur, you probably have to make at least 350 mistakes, learn from them, and keep persevering. I hope this podcast will save you thousands of dollars you may have lost through similar mistakes, so you can skip to more advanced [and enjoyable] mistakes & the learning opportunities associated.

For those of you interested in learning more details on the network security startup I bootstrapped in this podcast, I refer you to this older podcast focused on that startup that I released back in March – How to be an IT Consultant – Part IV

For those of you unfamiliar with Kiva, it’s a way to invest in an entrepreneur in a developing country. There’s a 97% likelihood they’ll pay you back, which is really great. When the entrepreneur pays you back, you can withdraw your money or re-lend it to another entrepreneur – whatever you want! Here’s a quick clip on Kiva for those interested:

Enjoy!

Edit 3/11/2007: I took parts I & III offline. They were ok, but I plan to cover them better in a new consulting series coming up. Stay tuned!

Edit 3/11/2007: Took down the previous podcast as I plan to re-release a higher quality version soon. Thanks for bearing with me as I strive to improve the quality of my podcasts. Stay tuned!