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Aug

8

Forming Shapes and Lines

Filed Under business, conferences, life |

Yesterday I attended the first ever Start Conference, in San Francisco, CA. That conference was amazing, I will without a doubt be attending next year. I learned so much about the core of starting a business in ways that I found truly invaluable. It was a fantastic conference with a fantastic vibe, I highly recommend it to anyone who is in a startup, starting a new company, or just interested in the entrepreneur world.

If you’ve been following my blog, and talking to me with any regularity, it is no suprise I quit the day job and started my own company almost 10 months ago now (wow). I am happy to report I am still standing, for the most part. It has been an absolute challenge in so many ways, and every single thing I’ve learned along the way have been important to put me on the road that I am heading towards now, at quite a rapid pace.

I’ve gone into business with my brother, and although we see eye to eye on many things, at times, we disagree, which I think is healthy. One of the things I heard somebody mention during the conference is “never go into business with family”. I have always wondered in the back of my head, did I do the right thing? After this past week, I really feel like I have. The reason why it works so well for me is knowing that no matter what sorts of fights and challenges we are faced with, at the end of the day we are still brothers, and we have a common, builtin respect and love for each other, which is not something every founder can say about their co-founder.

Its hard to imagine that we’ve been doing this for the last 10 months. We’ve seen growth, albeit modest, but still, growth nonetheless. We’ve been working with a close friend of mine in defining the first product my company will release by the end of the year, and we are all very very excited that its almost worth hearing about.

I’ve never believed in that whole “stealth mode” startup bullshit. In most cases, I’ve never made anyone sign an NDA to find out what I’m up to, quite the contrary. I am excited to tell people what we are doing, because I love to see what they think about it, ask them from their prospective, its very eye opening! The reason I don’t say a lot about what I am doing, even at this very moment, is because we are still forming the concept to be “widely consumable”. Until today, we didn’t even have a true name for the product, just a codename!

What I can say is, its not directly related to the consumer internet. No, I am not building the next Twitter, I am not building the next Facebook, and I am not changing the way people work with spreadsheets. I am doing something to help a market of people who, I feel, have been ignored in the rebirth of internet technologies.

Its a modest goal, I want to help people by giving them what they are asking for…its the true entrepreneurial spirit. Hopefully, in a couple more weeks, I will actually have a cohesive “pitch” thats worth telling people about, I am looking forward to that, very soon.


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2 Comments so far

  1. sal on August 9, 2008 4:16 pm

    and the product is…

    hah

    looking forward to hearing what it is…

  2. Minifortunes on August 9, 2008 10:13 pm

    Kudos for recognizing that you don’t need to build the next Facebook or Twitter to be a successful internet entrepreneur. Just something useful is enough. I think Google’s got it right: “focus on the user first, and everything else will follow.” It sounds like whatever your product will be, you focused on a specific group of users first, and designed something to serve that population.