thisDev

Research Then Development

2010-02-24T15:46:00.000-08:00

A lot of companies talk about R&D -- Research and Development. If you're doing a startup, wipe that phrase out of your vocabulary!

It's simple, really. Investors don't want to pay for research. Research is open-ended. Research doesn't have an answer -- at best, it has a theory. I was talking with an entrepreneur recently who has an idea about something that might work. If it works, it might be cool. If it's cool enough, it might make money. That's all fine and good, but investors aren't going to pay for all those mights. They don't want to invest in a theory -- they want as much certainty as possible. Their ideal scenario is where you're already making money and you just need money to expand. Certainly, you can find investors who will take more risk, but the more uncertainty you can remove, the better.

Don't get me wrong -- research is important. Most of the time I spent on Puzzazz in the last year and a half was research. But unless you work at Bell Labs or Microsoft Research, don't count on somebody else paying you to do it.

Instead of R&D, you have to think about R then D, with investors coming after the R and some of the D.

What Are You Passionate About?

2010-02-22T17:40:00.000-08:00

Adeo Ressi of the Founder Institute likes to ask the question "What are you passionate about?"

I love this question because there are many wrong answers but there is no right answer. Adeo doesn't ask this question because he wants the answer, though he is interested in what you say. He asks the question because he wants you to think about the answer. If you don't think about your passions and if you don't do something that you are passionate about in some way, then your chances of success go way down. This is true in life, but it's even more true if you're an entrepreneur.

There isn't a one-size-fits-all way to be passionate. It's all about you. My mother opened an optical shop and she wasn't passionate about eyeglasses -- she was passionate about service. She wanted everybody in town to be able to afford a pair of quality, stylish eyeglasses. She succeeded in her business because of her passion, which permeated every aspect of her business. And her shop changed how eyeglasses are sold in Lawrence. Yes, the change would have happened eventually (it's happened everywhere else), but her passion made it happen sooner.

As I wrote recently one reason that I killed my coordination services startup was that I wasn't passionate enough about it. I still think it's a great idea, but it's not my last great idea, and somebody else -- somebody else who is passionate about it -- will do it, probably even better than I would have. I wish them luck.

In case it's not obvious, passion is one of the big reasons that I'm jazzed about Puzzazz.

What are you passionate about?

Jazzed About Puzzazz

2010-02-21T11:47:00.000-08:00

It took me a surprisingly long time to come to this conclusion, but I'm taking the experiment that is currently Puzzazz and turning it into a real business, hopefully a big one.

I've been passionate about puzzles for most of my life. In my spare time, I'm a professional puzzle constructor, with puzzles published in the New York Times, GAMES Magazine, and plenty of other newspapers, magazines, and books. I've constructed thousands of puzzles. I also co-founded Microsoft Puzzle Hunt and Microsoft Intern Puzzleday, two events that are still going on long after I left the company. So what was the holdup? Did I think I was too passionate about it?

Honestly, that was part of it. I wasn't sure I had the proper distance. I was concerned that, because I loved puzzles, it would cloud my judgment and I wouldn't be able to accurately assess the potential business. But there were two bigger components.

Helping the World

Throughout my career, there's been a common thread. I do things which help people, enable people, or empower people in some way. Usually, it's been stuff which made them more productive, like word processors, web publishing software, databases, and personal information managers. But I've also done educational software (twice, most recently at DreamBox Learning) and even an embedded system for hardware that assisted the kidney dialysis process. How can puzzles stack up with any of that?

It took other people to help me realize what is now obvious. Mostly they just echoed back what I was saying, but hearing it from somebody else really helps. Puzzles aren't just fun. Like my current Puzzazz users who visit the site every single day, many people find the fun and challenge of puzzles an essential part of their life. There's a reason fifty million people in the US solve crossword puzzles regularly!

And, in the online world, there are an awful lot of crappy puzzles and puzzle games out there. Providing people who want puzzles, who can't live without puzzles, a better experience is definitely making their lives better.

Building a Big Business

How can puzzles and puzzle games be a big business? It took me a long time to see this, too. Sure, lots of people solve crosswords. Sure, people go nuts for Sudoku. But a big business? When I did some research I learned that the casual and mobile games markets combined are about a $5 Billion market and growing strong. About 20% of that is puzzle games -- honestly, not very good puzzle games. So, the market is there.

I had started Puzzazz as a fun experiment. I picked a narrow range of puzzle types and I did a number of different things to learn what would work, from the different perspectives of puzzles, site features, and revenue generation. Over time, I've come to realize that it's not just an experiment -- it's a successful one. Even though it's a tiny site at the moment, it's making a large amount of money on a per-user basis. Even if I did nothing else, Puzzazz could be profitable by just increasing the number of regular visitors. But I've got much bigger and bolder plans than that.

Learning from Failure

It turned out that by trying to make sure I didn't let my passion cloud my judgment, I allowed it to stop me from seeing what is now pretty obvious. Puzzazz has the potential to be a really great, profitable business!

I spent a lot of the time between the time I launched Puzzazz, in September, 2008, and now, trying to start another business that didn't make it. I'm avoiding the same mistakes. I have a good, practical plan, without unreasonable deadlines. I'm not trying to "boil the ocean" and the plan involves steady growth, with multiple solid revenue sources. I'm doing something I'm passionate about, where I already have a ton of knowledge, both in puzzles and in building large, scalable, quality web services. I've already gotten traction and revenue without requiring skills that I don't have (although I have started looking for my first business person). And I'm having fun with it. That doesn't mean it's a cakewalk. Nope, there are plenty of hard problems to solve to get it done right. And, though I've started the process, there's a long way to go before Puzzazz is what I want it to be.

In other words, like any good puzzle, it'll be both fun and challenging!

Learning From Failure

2010-02-16T22:38:00.000-08:00

What ever happened to Groupthink?

I get asked that periodically. If you don't know, Groupthink was the name I attached to the startup I was trying to build more than a year ago. I started with an ambitious, overly public plan, and an announcement that I was going to launch in 30 days. What I didn't say was that I had a huge, gigantic plan, and the planned 30-day launch was just the start.

If you've been reading my blog, you know the first thing that happened (I didn't launch in 30 days) and you probably know the second thing that happened (I didn't ever launch it), but now I'll make it official: it's dead and it's been dead for quite a while. I learned a ton in the process and I think my future endeavors will be stronger as a result, but I figure I might as well let everybody else learn as well.

So what was I building?

Put simply, I was building a coordination services company for small- and medium-sized businesses. I had what I thought was a pretty cool idea -- an incredibly simple, easy-to-use scripting language for coordination activities combined with a highly stateful backend system that let people build coordination functionality into their applications without having to know anything about how it all worked or even running a server. You could use the same scripts to send and receive emails, provide web forms, make phone calls, send SMS text messages, even contact somebody through XMPP chat. The system could work 24/7 with any application, even one written in Visual Basic in Microsoft Access, running on a single PC sitting in the corner of a small business that gets turned off every night. The system was designed so that anybody from an expert to a casual spare-time developer could use it, with the sweet spot being VARs and ISVs delivering custom applications to specific types of businesses. These VARs and ISVs don't have the experience (or servers) to do these things on their own, but Groupthink would have allowed them to add a wide range of coordination activities very quickly. It's not a perfect analogy, but think of it as Varolii for everybody else. And I envisioned that Varolii (a Seattle company) or one of their competitors, or possibly one of the giants like Google or Microsoft, would be the eventual acquirer.

I knew that I couldn't launch a platform without a product, so I decided I needed to build one. Plus, I wanted to keep the larger vision secret. After all, I was still figuring parts of it out. So, I made my first mistake -- I picked a first product that I personally wanted to have -- a group task manager I called Groupthink Projects. When people asked me how it was better than Microsoft Project or Liquid Planner, I said "they don't make phone calls." Unfortunately, my little demo problem was just a bit too big. I spent time on Ajax UI that it needed but that wasn't critical to my overall vision. Because I'd publicly said I was going to launch in 30 days, I ended up cutting some of the critical features (including mobile access) in order to try to make my deadline. Then, I got sick for a week and lost another week to moving my father-in-law into an Alzheimer's facility (which I talked about at Ignite Seattle 6). When you only have a month, two lost weeks is huge. By this point, I also knew that I'd pick the wrong first product, but I kept going. In retrospect, it's pretty obvious I shouldn't have, but, at the time, I felt I ought to make my deadline and shipping would be good for me.

The deadline came and went, without me launching. I started spending much more time on the backend -- the important stuff. I took time out to build a couple demo apps, including a version of Eliza that I built in a day. Talking with your psychiatrist via email or text messages didn't seem so compelling, so I added voice recognition functionality to my backend just so you could just talk to Eliza. It worked quite well, except for the huge delays caused by telephony provider Twilio's incredibly slow voice recognition.

The second first app

Although I never announced it, I decided to completely abandon the Projects app and concentrate only on the platform, but I still needed a first app. When I'd been talking with people, the coordination problem that resonated with everyone was the scheduling problem, and I had identified a very solid market in restaurant schedule coordination. I knew from field research I'd done in visiting restaurants that it was a huge problem, that paper, computer-based, and even web-based scheduling system hadn't solved the coordination problem of rescheduling people and dealing with missed shifts. You should see some of the workarounds restaurants use! So, I latched onto this as my new first product.

Dumb move. It was even bigger than the first problem and I had no passion for it. Worse, everybody thought I had morphed into a scheduling company or a restaurant software company. And all the potential investors I talked to wanted to see traction there first. Yup, traction in the first app which was really just to demo the platform. And I didn't succeed in finding any customers for the platform. Truth be told, I didn't try hard enough to get those customers -- after all, I'm not a sales guy.

The skills you have vs. the skills you need

And that relates to the final problem. I had picked a problem where I couldn't succeed without an early business partner, because way too many of those skills. I advise people all the time that they should pick problems that needs the skills they already have, yet here I'd picked a problem where about half of the skills I needed at the beginning were those I didn't have. Without a business person with marketing and sales skills, I couldn't get traction that would matter to investors.

I still really like the concept I had and I think it's inevitable that somebody will build a platform like it. I learned a ton from failing. I've moved on and I'm trying to make sure that I don't make the same mistakes next time around.

I'll write about that next.

The Founder Institute

2009-11-24T11:25:00.000-08:00

At first glance, I might not seem like the typical candidate for the Founder Institute. I'm not a fresh entrepreneur. I've been doing it a long time and I've had both favorable outcomes (acquisitions) and failures (losing a lot of money). And I even serve as an advisor and mentor to a lot of other entrepreneurs. But, through it all, two things have remained constant: I'm an entrepreneur at heart, and I have a lot to learn.

And those two things are the key reasons that I'm excited that I just got accepted to be part of the Founder Institute's winter session in Seattle.

What is an entrepreneur anyway? I'm not giving anything away to tell you that the first question on the application form is why you want to be an entrepreneur. And I certainly hope I'm not giving anything away by saying I think it's a trick question. Maybe you can want to be a good entrepreneur, or a successful one, but I think being an entrepreneur in the first place, like being a writer, or a musician, or an artist, is about being true to yourself. Do you want to build things? I know I do! I love the challenges of figuring out the problem and figuring out the solution. And I love making something out of nothing. The opportunity to be around a bunch of other like-minded people over a three-month span would be valuable all on its own.

What do I have to learn? Tons, it turns out. Earlier this year, I wrote the absolute best business plan I had ever written. I created the best presentation decks I had ever written (although I didn't present them that well, ironic for someone who's a very good public speaker). I had a pretty good prototype to go with them. And it was for a business that I really think could make it and be hugely profitable. I'm a CTO, a product guy, and, yes, a visionary (though I don't really care for that term). But, I'm not a CEO and I was trying to start a company that really needed one. In looking at the Founder Institute curriculum, about 90% of the content is centered around the areas that I'm weak in, the places where I still have a lot to learn. If this were CTO camp, I could teach it. But it's a business camp and I'm happy to be a student.

And that brings up the third piece of the picture. I had the good fortune to run into Chris Early, the local person from FounderWise who's running the Seattle session, at an NWEN breakfast a week ago. I'd been thinking about applying but wasn't sure. Chris impressed me with his vision, understanding, and focus. He pushed me over the edge with information. They're looking for a wide range of people, from fresh entrepreneurs to veterans, they're hoping for a mix of talents, meaning both technical people and business people, and they're expecting a variety of representative industries, not just high-tech. But the common thread they're looking for is people who will take what they learn and run with it. All the mentors (aka instructors) are selected for the sessions they're teaching based on their specific knowledge. Each week, there are three different instructors who are best suited to the topic at hand. The sessions aren't those cattle call lectures we all remember from college. They'll be much more interactive and there's out-of-session "homework" every week. I can't predict exactly what all that means, but I loved how Adeo asked each person who asked a question at the UW session what they were passionate about. The Founder Institute isn't about one-way communication or lectures from on high. It's about guidance and learning. And that sounds good to me.

I don't know if the Founder Institute is right for you. It depends on who you are and what you want to do. But I'm really looking forward to it.

I Want To Like Microsoft Azure

2009-11-18T21:53:00.000-08:00

I want to like Microsoft Azure. I really do. I've been using Google App Engine for more than a year now (Puzzazz, SeattleTechCalendar and the FriendMosaic front end run on it). I'm also familiar with Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud or EC2 (the FriendMosaic back end runs on it). Both have advantages and disadvantages.

Google App Engine is a wonderfully scalable system that requires programming to a very specific, narrow API and use of Google's BigTable database rather than a more traditional SQL database. It's super easy to get going (literally, you can have an app running in the cloud within minutes of installing the SDK). Scaling is completely, totally automatic, and you pay for the capacity you use, when you use it. But, App Engine isn't appropriate for apps that require a lot of processing power, and you can't easily take the application elsewhere.

In contrast, EC2 is very flexible. You can run Unix, Linux, or Windows on virtual machine instances and you get pretty complete control of these instances, as if they were real servers. And, if you grow big enough to afford your own servers, its easy to move those instances to your own physical boxes. But, it's much more of a pain to get going and scaling is awkward. You have to allocate complete instances of different sizes as if you're deploying real hardware and to change your capacity to respond to changing needs, you have to add or remove instances. If an instance crashes, you lose any local storage on the machine. And, you pay for active instances even if they are sitting there doing nothing.

When I first heard about Azure, I thought it was a brilliant way to split the difference and get the advantages of both systems -- a wonderfully scalable system with great flexibility. Sadly, Microsoft has produced the exact opposite -- a poorly scalable system which requires developing to a special API that limits flexibility. In other words, the disadvantages of both systems.

Azure uses instances, just like EC2, which means that scaling is by instance, not automatic. At launch, apparently you'll be able to configure this to happen semi-automatically, but it's still the case that you have to run an entire instance even if you have no traffic for it and you have to decide when additional instances get added and what capacity they have, instead of having it just work, as Google has done with App Engine. And, Azure isn't Windows. You can't just take a Windows application and plop it onto the box. In fact, you don't control the virtual box. You can't install helper applications on it. Instead, you have to program to the Azure APIs, meaning can't easily take an Azure-based app elsewhere (or take a non-Azure app and just have it work, like you can with EC2).

It's not too late. Azure does have some of the advantages of both App Engine and EC2 (a simple model, flexible, powerful), plus Azure has some nice advantages all its own. The way they've defined roles is very nice (especially if they clean up the definition of the worker role, which I'm assuming they will) and potentially more flexible than the App Engine way of doing everything through a URL. A certain amount of sandboxing can be a good thing. And, of course, C# can be a joy to program in, with the best IDE and debugger on the planet (I'm still waiting for a decent Python debugger).

And, really, there's only one (big) change necessary. Azure needs to automatically scale, so developers just create code for the roles and everything else works, with as much hardware as necessary allocated on demand (and not allocated when you don't need it). With their architecture, Azure could accomplish this really well, if they choose to do so. Then they can add additional role types with different feature, performance, and scaling properties. But, if they don't do this, I don't know why anybody would use it over the competition.

Update: Microsoft has created a new site MyGreatWindowsAzureIdea tbat's worth taking a look at. It's a voting site using UserVoice. The current top votegetter is "Make it less expensive to run my very small service on Windows Azure," with twice as many votes as the runner-up.

You Can't Outsource Yourself

2009-10-30T23:19:00.000-07:00

Outsourcing is a buzzword these days, but you can't outsource your core competency.

Three times in the last few weeks, I have had meetings with consulting clients or potential clients who believed that they could build a technology company with no developers -- in essence, that they could outsource their core competency. I'm not talking about a remote developer, or a virtual development team. I'm talking about companies that believed they could hire a consultant or a code shop who would build their product for them. After all building the product is the easy part. It's the idea that's the hard part. Or selling it that's the hard part. Here's a tip: it's all hard.

There's a simple, important question you have to ask when deciding what you must do and what you can outsource. What is your core competency? What is the thing which is essential to your value proposition? What is the unique value that you provide that your competitors don't? Who are you?

You can't outsource whatever it is that defines you. It's not possible that your unique value proposition can just be put together from off-the-shelf components by a rent-a-coder shop. If it were possible, then your unique value isn't very unique, is it? And if you actually pay a lot for consultants to build you something truly custom, what happens to all the lessons learned during development? If there aren't a lot of lessons learned, chances are the product wasn't developed correctly. You need to own that knowledge -- it's essential for you to grow as a company.

I'm not saying that you can't ever outsource software or software development. For example, I've outsourced the software that powers my blogs -- they're built on Blogger. But, the value of my blogs is in my content, not the code that runs on the server. By using Blogger, I can concentrate on my blogs' unique value -- my unique content. But I'm not about to outsource software development when I'm building a software company.

Open Source Client Simulator

2009-06-23T16:47:00.000-07:00

In these days of web 2.0, it's quite common to build clients and servers that communicate with each other. Debugging the communication can be a pain, especially if you're not in control of one end of the connection. This is particularly the case with a service like Twilio, one of a bunch of telephony providers that you can connect your server to. With Twilio, every live test you do requires making or receiving a phone call. This is arduous, takes time, and costs money in phone charges.

So, I wrote a simple simulator to simulate the Twilio server contacting my server, which I released today as open source.

Chlorine is a simple, small (400 lines of JavaScript), and easy-to-use client simulator. It doesn't do much but it does the essentials to allow you to debug a protocol:

Submits requests to your server via GET or POST.
Displays the results back in a readable fashion, minus the contents of comments and CDATA blocks.
Supplies a link you can use to GET the raw response from the server if you need to inspect it (for example, when the server doesn't actually return XML, so it can't be parsed)..
Turns any attribute or text value in the result that looks like a URL into a form which will submit that URL back to the server, along with any parameter values you specify.
Allows you to configure it to add additional parameter fields to each form that is created.

Chlorine itself is generic, but I've included a version which is configured for use with Twilio.

Chlorine is available at http://chlorine.googlecode.com

Twitter Puzzles on Puzzazz

2009-06-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

I launched a new class of puzzles on Puzzazz today -- Twitter Puzzles. Unlike the Daily Puzzles, which will continue to run every day, Puzzazz Twitter puzzles run continuously. Just follow @Puzzazz on Twitter to get them. In addition to the delivery system, they're different in another way. Each puzzle is a "successive reveal" puzzle in which you get a series of clues. The more clues you have, the easier the puzzle is. But, once you know the answer, you'll want to tweet it, since the first person to tweet an answer is designated the winner and immortalized forever on the puzzle's page on Puzzazz.com. If you weren't first, you can visit the puzzle's page to verify your answer (or get additional clues). And don't worry -- the solution is hidden unless you choose to reveal it to preserve the fun.

The puzzles are a mix of different puzzles, ranging from Hangman Trivia to What Goes With? puzzles. You can always see the current puzzle on the site at http://www.puzzazz.com/s and get more information in the FAQ.

These puzzles are part of the broader strategy of extending the Puzzazz brand. I'm interested in what you think.

Learn From My Mistakes

2009-03-26T18:17:00.000-07:00

I broke a lot of my own rules in my talk at the First Look Forum and, unfortunately, it wasn't the best thing to do. I've spent a lot of time listening to advisors over the last few months. And, most of the time, the advisors know more than me, so I've learned a lot. But, sometimes, you have to trust your gut. By not doing that, my presentation did not accurately reflect the potential of my company.

Before I go on, let me make a few things clear. First, it wasn't a total loss. I made some great connections with potential investors and I have some follow-up meetings scheduled. It just wasn't as good as it could have been and I didn't have the opportunity to do my full 10-minute pitch to the room full of investors. I would have liked to do that. And, second, I'm not faulting any of my advisors. The buck stops with me.

The First Look Forum process is unlike anything I've gone through before and, to some extent, that led me to some bad decisions. We started by creating 10-minute slide decks and, then, after they were created and reviewed, we created shorter 3-minute slide decks. Almost all of the 3-minute presentations at the forum were clearly shortened versions of the 10-minute presentations. As I noted in an earlier blog post, I started that way, but I ended up with a 3-minute pitch that was completely different.

If you've ever heard me speak, you'll know that I never use notes. I speak extemporaneously and I do a pretty good job of it. I will sometimes create an outline, but it is a very brief outline and I never refer to it during a talk. In thinking about it, the last time I gave any sort of a scripted talk was in 9th grade.

However, 3 minutes is really short -- it's easy to run over, as most of the presenters did. And, over and over, my advisors kept telling me of all the things I had to make sure to include. So, I ended up scripting the talk. That was mistake number one. Next, I rehearsed the talk in front of a lot of people. This was good and I kept tweaking it. By Saturday, I really had it down.

On to mistake number two. On Sunday, one of my advisors told me they thought that the pitch was only a B+, that to make it an A, it really needed work. I had too much fluff (compelling fluff, but nonetheless fluff) and I needed to cut that out and add some critical things that were missing, like a brief discussion of revenue. I think her advice was basically correct, but I should have ignored it, for two very important reasons:

By taking a pitch that I really knew and replacing it with a pitch that I didn't, I made it worse, not better. I could have elevated the B+ pitch to an A with good oratory. But a poorly delivered A pitch can easily fall to a C level. I didn't have the time to do the changes and I should have deferred them to the future.
Most of the other pitches, including the majority of the ones chosen for the 10-minute session, had more fluff than I had, and far less in the way of fact.. It turns out that the investors were looking for the grab, not the facts, in deciding who they wanted to vote for. My original pitch had more grab and fewer facts, especially given the delivery.

Whenever you're in unfamiliar territory, it's a good idea to assume the worst. I considered having an audio clip as part of my talk, but decided that there was no guarantee that we would have sound. I also could have had a little demo using the Internet and my cell phone, but I decided there was no guarantee of a net connection or that my cell phone would work (in fact, there was no internet connection available, which we didn't find out until Monday). I brought a backup of everything on a USB drive just in case something got messed up (and, in fact, the wrong version of my presentation was included in the deck, so that came in very handy).

That leads to mistake number three. We were told there would be a podium. If I'd been able to put my notes on a podium, I could have spoken more naturally and the notes wouldn't have mattered much. The fact that there would be a podium allowed me to make mistake number two above. But, the podium had the laptop and was basically in the way, worse than having no podium. If I had assumed the worst -- no audio, no podium, etc., I would have been in much better shape.

So, in short:

Listen to advice, but do follow your own rules as much as you can.
Time pressure trumps good advice. Defer it to later if you don't have time to do it right.
Assume the worst, most inhospitable environment. You won't be far off.
Learn from your mistakes. Or, even better, learn from mine.

Making A Fast Pitch

2009-03-17T08:09:00.000-07:00

It always takes longer to write less. I already had a pitch for a 10-minute talk, but the first pitch in the NWEN First Look Forum is a 3-minute pitch. And, I only get to do the 10-minute pitch if I'm in the top five, so the 3-minute pitch is actually more important.

The 3-minute pitch deck is limited to five slides which, unless you're the fast talker from those old FedEx commercials, is about the most you can do anyway. So, I took my five key slides, basically the five slides on the topics they recommended we cover, and then I crammed some extra points into them to make sure I covered everything. Then, I did a practice pitch to my NWEN coaches. Ignoring the fact that my 3-minute pitch took me more than 4 minutes to deliver, it was a totally flat pitch. Even I wasn't interested in hearing more. What went wrong?

Well, in trying to cram as much as possible into the time available, I took out the soul. I took out the excitement that I had worked hard to get into the longer pitch. And I crammed in way too much detail. The 3-minute pitch, like the 30-second elevator pitch and the one pager I discussed earlier, should be all about excitement. You don't need tons of detail in the 10-minute pitch and you need even less when you go shorter. Remember, the point of a short pitch is not to get investors -- the whole point, the only point is to get people to want to hear more. So, I scrapped everything and re-created the deck from the top down -- about customer pain, the excitement of addressing the need, and what the solution looks like. In one case, I had a slide with eight long bullet points. The new slide is just a diagram, which I've also added (in a smaller size) to the longer pitch deck.

I don't know if a picture is worth a thousand words in a pitch deck, but sometimes it can be worth eight bullet points.

The One Pager

2009-03-16T08:51:00.000-07:00

A business plan, an elevator pitch, a pitch deck -- the number of different things you have to have to successfully pitch your company is amazing. Now add in the one pager. Whether you call it that or an executive summary or a company overview, it's an essential part of the whole story. Like the one-page resume, you want a single, concise one-page document that you can hand to potential investors and business partners. There are lots of advantages to having it be a single page, but I'm only going to mention the most important one -- investors expect it.

To create my one pager, I started with my five-page business plan. I went through and highlighted all the most important stuff, then consolidated that in a new document which ended up about two pages long. Then I started looking for things to trim. I was pretty close to finished when I decided that I should make sure what I was doing was consistent with what I needed to submit to another competition, the Willamette Angel Conference (although I'll be at a disadvantage because Groupthink isn't an Oregon company, I figure the extra connections will be worth it). It was at that point that I realized I'd made a mistake. The Willamette Angel Conference uses Angelsoft, and the whole way it works is different -- your one pager gets created by filling in a form on the site. Here are the items you're asked for:

One line pitch
Summarize your business
What specifically makes your management team most qualified to build this business?
Define customer problem
Describe the solution you sell
Define your market
List your current or potential customers
Sales and marketing strategy
Describe your business model
Describe the competitive landscape and list your competitors
Define your competitive advantage and list barriers to entry

Each of these items also has a longer explanation you see as you're filling out the form. For example, the explanation for "Define customer problem" reads: Investors fund pain killers, not vitamin pills. What critical customer need does your company address? If you are a web company, you may need to make a hard decision here on whether to talk about your audience or the people who will ultimately pay you (like your advertisers). You only get 210 characters to answer that one. When you're done, Angelsoft turns your information into a one page summary that looks like this sample:

At first, I was thrown for a loop, but then I realized that this was a much better way to do it. After all, investors looking at your one pager have a bunch of questions in their head that the'll use to decide if they want to read anymore. If you don't answer those questions, it's over. So the number one task really should be to make sure you answer those questions!

In the process of answering the questions, I managed to get in every one of my key points and pretty much nothing extraneous, but the document wasn't exactly what I wanted to best represent the company. For Angelsoft applications, I have to take what I get, but that's not true for NWEN or other investors. So, after I finished up the Angelsoft process, I took all the information and created a new document that I could edit. Then I made a few changes:

Combined the one line pitch, business summary, and customer problem into a new opening section which read better than the three individual sections.
Combined target market and customers sections.
Combined competitors and competitive advantage sections.
Added a little bit of additional detail in a few places where I'd been constrained by Angelsoft's character limits.
Added a (small) illustration to help explain the product.

In each of the cases, I made the change to improve readability or punch. But, overall, it's a lot like the one pager from Angelsoft. You don't have to do your one pager like I did and your executive summary might be longer. Garage.com recommends two to three pages in this excellent article. But, whatever you do, keep these things in mind:

The purpose is to sell your company to investors, not tell them everything about it
You want to convey the excitement and the energy behind your business
To the extent that you can, answer the questions potential investors will have before they ask them

It's Not A Zero-Sum Game

2009-03-14T19:44:00.000-07:00

Although Groupthink is one of the twelve finalists in the NWEN First Look Forum, I don't know much about the other companies. One of the companies was founded by a couple of guys that I see every week or two. I'll confess that I don't know a lot about their business, but I do know a few things. They're sharp guys who seem to know what they're doing. They're working hard,. And they're nice guys. So, even though we're technically in competition with each other, we're not really competing. We've exchanged information and tips. And we've wished each other luck, sincerely.

The fact is that we're not really competing. Sure, we're in the same space and there are only so many investors out there, but, for the most part, it's not a zero-sum game. We can both succeed and each of us most likely loses nothing if we help the other. Far too often, we see people thinking that in order for them to win, others have to lose. You certainly see this between companies, but you also see it between groups (and even employees) within larger companies. Between the time I started this blog post and now, the Seattle 2.0 Awards got announced and Marcelo Calbucci of Sampa wrote this about the process: "The flip side is to find the people you thought were your friends, or at least acquaintances, working against you. Even if in a subtle way." It's disappointing to hear that, especially when it's about something that the folks at Seattle 2.0 are doing that is positive for the community. From my point of view, you have three choices: be supportive, be neutral, or be negative. No, you don't have to support everybody, but what's the advantage to being negative?

I'm glad to say that most of the Seattle Startup community is in the supportive and neutral category. There's a lot of collaboration and camaraderie. We can all win and grow our industry and community.

Let's keep it up.

And, to the other finalists in the NWEN competition, a sincere good luck the rest of the way.

Don't Forget Your Strengths

2009-03-13T11:18:00.000-07:00

I've gotten a lot of advice on my slide deck for the NWEN First Look Forum competition. So much advice, in fact, that I followed it too well.

The first versions of my business plan and my pitch deck were so focused on the product, the technology, and all the cool things that we're doing for customers, that I neglected to talk enough about the business. I talked about how the technology scaled, but not how the business scaled. As one of my advisors said, investors will assume your technology will scale -- they want to know how the company can grow to be a billion dollar business. And I'd made the same mistake in other areas. The pitch deck (and the pitch that goes with it), initially had a lot less about the business side of the business than the business plan, so, off I went, removing technical stuff, and fleshing out the business side. It was looking pretty good.

Then, I went to my first coaching session with my NWEN advisors. We went through the whole deck and they gave me a lot of great feedback. When we were done, they asked a few questions, including a key one -- what's exciting about this? When I explained what I thought was exciting, they both responded, practically in unison, why isn't that in the pitch? It turns out that I had over-corrected, by a long shot. I had spent so much time working on my weaknesses that I had given my strengths short shrift. I wanted to make sure that everybody knew the business was solid, that I had basically left out what was exciting about the business in the first place.

In the final deck, I lead with the big vision and the long-term plan that is a key part of the excitement, then I segue to the first product and the customer pain that it's all about. The pain is a bit less exciting, but it's compelling. Elsewhere in the deck, I make sure to revisit the things about the business that I think make it really exciting. And, I try to talk about technology only where it directly relates to customer pain, solutions, or growth. The result is a significantly better pitch.

Why I've Been Quiet

2009-03-11T22:32:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that I haven't blogged much lately. There are a few reasons for this, all centered around the NWEN First Look Forum.

First, I've been very busy. From the time that I found out the details of applying for the Forum to the time that I had to submit my business plan, I had just ten days (plus three when they extended the deadline). In my case, I was creating a business plan from scratch. Fifty companies applied to present at the forum and NWEN narrowed it down to twenty companies. Next, each of us had to create a deck for a 10-minute presentation to take to our "screechers" (screener/coaches) who were going to evaluate us and coach us at the same time. Fortunately, I'd already started a deck after the excellent pitch clinic from the Alliance of Angels that I'd gone to. That helped a lot. Even so, I walked out of my screeching session with a throughly scribbled-on presentation, having no idea if I'd made it to the next round or even when I'd find out. A week and a half later, I got an email saying I'd made it in and I had a new list of things I had to produce -- a deck for a 3-minute presentation and a 1-page executive summary. Plus, I revised the 10-minute deck and went back and updated my plan based on feedback, since I'll be using it for other purposes. So, not even counting things like meetings and seminars, I've been amazingly busy.

Second, while I was writing code and mostly doing development, writing a blog post was a great break. It was something different. You know, the right brain/left brain thing. But, now, when I'm spending most of my time writing and wordsmithing, writing a blog post feels pretty much the same, so it doesn't come quite as naturally.

And, third, although I've been very open since I started this company, I decided to be quiet about some details for a while. The reason for this is that there are some significant changes to the business based on lessons learned and I really want the Forum to be a real "first look." I want the potential investors in the room to be hearing the details for the first time from me, at the Forum, with my (hopefully) finely polished messaging. After the 24th, I'll be sharing more again.

The Business Plan Trick

2009-02-10T11:35:00.000-08:00

They tricked me! NWEN told me I only had to answer five questions, but I essentially wrote a business plan. Just five questions, one page each, but each question had questions inside it. For "Describe the market in terms of characteristics and size," I ended up doing market research to get very precise data, then I analyzed the data to narrow in on exactly my target market. And the innocent looking question "What will be the funding requirements to grow?" caused me to create a cash flow spreadsheet to be able to provide an answer.

In the process, I ended up doing two complete rewrites. On Tuesday, I sent out what was basically the best business plan I'd ever written to a bunch of my advisors. The feedback came back that it needed a ton of rework. I did a complete top-to-bottom rewrite and sent out a new version on Thursday which was a lot better -- the new best business plan I'd ever written. Back came feedback. Yes, it was better, but it was still way off from what it needed to be. So on Friday and over the weekend (thanks to NWEN extending the deadline), I rewrote it once again and on Monday I sent out what was now clearly the best business plan I've ever written. I hope it's good enough!

I used Word to do a comparison of the first and third versions of the plan. In case it's not clear, red indicates text which changed between the first and third versions of the plan.

Despite all the red, there's a lot of similarity between the versions -- after all, they're describing the same business. But the way in which they say it changed completely.

Here are some of the things that I've learned.

Start with a hook. I decided to start every page with a hook, a sentence or two that summarizes the page. In essence, put the summary at the top, not the bottom. Your readers might not get to the bottom.

This isn't a literature contest. I had some writing that I was really proud of. It was eloquent and had a great feeling to it. Save that for your novel. I tossed almost all of it and now I have a lot of short to-the-point paragraphs and bullet points.

Stories are OK, but keep them short. Real world stories that convey customer pain that you will be addressing is a good thing. On the first page, my hook is a story that illustrates the customer pain I aim to solve. This is the only place where I kept some of the great prose I'd written.

Answer all the questions. If they've asked a question, don't make them read between the lines. Provide the answer as directly as possible. What's the value proposition? How does your business scale? What are you actually doing?

Don't answer all the questions. I like to be complete, but if you're generating your own questions, there are lots that just don't need to be answered. I removed a ton of information that was answering unasked and, probably, unimportant questions. Working through and figuring out those answers wasn't a wasted exercise -- I still know the answers if I get asked them.

Forget technology. This one was particularly hard for me. My first version had half a page on technology and more in my bio. Investors want to know that the technology is doable and that the team has the technological expertise. They don't care about the actual technology. My final version has almost nothing about technology, even in my bio.

Scaling is about your business, not your technology. Following on to the last point, investors will assume that if your business is successful, then your technology will scale (they may want details on this during due diligence). But, at the beginning, they want to know if the business is going to grow through greater market penetration, opening up additional markets, selling more expensive versions, selling additional products, etc.

Get real numbers. I think every single talk that I've been to about business plans or pitches trots out the line that you can't just say that you'll get 1% of a billion dollar market. You'll hear investors talk about the addressable market over and over again. It took me way too long to internalize that, but, when I did, it took me a lot less time to get real numbers than I thought it would.

Use real numbers. Investors will know if you're hand waving when you say you need an $X million investment with no explanation. Cash flow projections aren't that hard. Figure out your assumptions and be ready to talk about them, but get some real numbers.

Be positive. Every business plan is, in some sense, a guess. You don't have to say "We plan to..." or "We hope to..." or "We don't know ...." Everytime you do this, your readers view you as less positive, less certain, less able to be successful. They know it's all a plan and that there are many things that you don't know yet, so don't hit them over the head with it. Personally, I tend to be a bit too honest about my deficiences (for example, many people have heard me say "I suck at marketing"). The business plan isn't the place for that.

Don't be afraid to ask for help. If you don't ask, nobody will help you. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I am very appreciative of my advisors.

An Impressive Startup Weekend

2009-02-09T22:33:00.000-08:00

When someone asks me which team I was most impressed with at Seattle Startup Weekend 2, I'll say ALL of them. Wow!

Thirteen teams demoed at the end of Sunday night, winnowed down from 47 ideas presented on Friday and 17 teams starting on Saturday. The most amazing spectacle to me was the Scrampede team, led by John Clifford, which was super organized, had giant project management charts on the wall (courtesy of Paul Osborn), and had a full pitch at the wrapup about how the business could make money and grow. The Scrampede idea came out of an idea John brought up at the brainstorming session I led at StartPad last Thursday -- after the brainstorming, when we split up, almost half the people joined his group to discuss the idea a little further. So, I'm a little extra proud of them, but, to be clear, I can't take any credit beyond providing a venue for initial discussions. But it does show the benefit of starting with brainstorming. Scrampede is one of a number of teams that has plans to continue beyond the weekend.

Another team with a hopeful future was 1nvite, which was the only team that was actually incorporated by the end of the weekend, courtesy of team member Adam Philipp of Axios Law. 1nvite's mission is to make it easy to invite your friends to multiple social networking services at the same time, particularly useful after an event like Seattle Startup Weekend 2.

There were two Twitter apps, TweetSum, which gives you information about your followers to help you determine if you want to follow them back (and a great interface for organizing followers), and TweetReporters, a souped-up Twitter widget (and infrastructure behind it) for newspapers and other news sites.

I think FavorWish was the best looking site at the end of the weekend. You can't tell the home page from a company that's been in business for years. And KnarlyVote, despite its rather, uh, knarly name, solves an interesting voting problem in a very nice way. As they said, it's not a new technique (I'm blanking on the name for the mathematical underpinnings of what they're doing), but I'm not aware of a site that does this. If they can clean it up and solve a few fundamental usability problems, I think they could have a winner. This is a good time to mention that the UX Office Hours that I have at StartPad are open to everyone -- startup entrepreneur, laid-off tech worker, or Startup Weekend warrior. If you want to take a step forward in your UX, feel free to drop by (the next one is this Thursday, February 12th).

As for me ... I didn't do much. I pitched an idea that didn't get enough votes, so I looked to join another team, but the couple I tried to join ended up disbanding. By then, other teams were in full swing and I realized that I still had a lot to do on the second rewrite of my plan for the First Look Forum (more on that later). When I wasn't writing, I walked around, encouraged people, and offered a few suggestions (and at least one got taken, that a team switch to Google App Engine as their platform).

But that does bring up one disappointment -- the selection process on Friday night produced some potential teams that were clearly not viable as weekend projects. For example, a team with zero developers or massive infrastructure needs can't get very far. That's not to say that they were bad ideas (in fact, most of the 47 original ideas were interesting ones), but they distracted. I hope this can be remedied next time out.

All in all, it was a great event. I'm looking forward to seeing which companies survive and, next time, I plan to not have a deadline on something else and dive in all the way.

Just Ten Days

2009-02-06T11:10:00.000-08:00

I've written some complimentary posts about NWEN's First Look Forum, but this one's a bit different. The Forum was only announced a couple of weeks ago, and no information was available about what a submission looked like until last Tuesday, with a deadline of today at Midnight. That's just ten days to put together a plan. If you already have a business plan or a standard pitch deck, that's not much time for a rewrite. But, if (like me) you don't even have that yet, ten days is an almost impossibly small amount of time. If I wasn't a good and fast writer, I'd have no chance. Even so, I'm in the midst of an almost complete rewrite today based on feedback from my advisors and I'm really feeling the time pressure.

NWEN appears to have recognized this because a little while ago, I got some email saying that the deadline has been extended until noon on Monday. Unfortunately, for those of us who are doing Seattle Startup Weekend 2 this weekend, that doesn't help. I still intend to submit my plan tonight. If I have time on Monday morning (and I'm not too exhausted), I can send an update, but I really need to be done tonight.

I still like the First Look Forum very much and problems like this aren't too surprising for the first time out with a new event. At least they've recognized it, even if their doing so doesn't happen to help me much.

And, now, I have to get back to my rewrite.

Blunt Feedback, Payback

2009-02-05T10:41:00.000-08:00

I received a lot of feedback on my 5-page plan for the First Look Forum yesterday and more has come in today. There's some irony -- a lot of the feedback says things that I've said to other people, reflected right back at me. It's so much easier to see flaws when you're reviewing someone else's work, rather than your own, and that's especially true when working under a deadline.

There were also plenty of comments that were completely new, reflecting greater knowledge on the part of my advisers about certain things, mainly business and marketing. The best part about the feedback was how blunt it was. I asked them to be direct and they were, and that lets me know the feedback is honest and useful.

Not all the feedback was negative. Even though I made it clear that I was looking for things that I needed to fix, there were still lots of kudos and positive comments mixed in. That was nice to see.

Overall, I feel pretty fortunate to have people who are willing to help me like this. I know that when I do things like the Startup Brainstorming Session today (which I scheduled before I knew about this deadline), I'm helping others with no direct benefit to myself. It's paying it forward, and I get paid back by other people at times like this. Thanks!

The 5-Page Business Plan

2009-02-04T04:31:00.000-08:00

It's 4AM and I just sent out copies of my 5-page business plan for the Northwest Entrepreneurs' Network's First Look Forum to a bunch of advisors, plus a few extra people who I haven't previously solicited advice from. It's so easy to wait to finish something until right before the deadline, so I deliberately set my own deadline three days early so I'd be able to get some feedback before I have to submit it.

If you're still working on your own plan, here are some thoughts from my process:

I've been pitching my business concept and long-term vision to people for months now, but where does that go? Strictly speaking, it's not an answer to any of the five questions they're asking. I ended up putting parts of it in each of the first three sections (Market/Opportunity, Novelty/Concept, and Scalability of the Business Model).
Similarly, in discussions with people, a decent amount of technology has been discussed -- what I'm using, why, what's good about it, what were the alternatives, etc. Almost none of that made it into the document. Investors want confidence that you'll make the right technical decisions. They don't need details on those decisions.
The addressable market, funding needs, sales projections -- if I was a business person, these probably would have been trivial. I think I did a reasonable job and, in this document, a lot of detail isn't required.
Competitors -- there's an often discussed trap of saying you have no competitors. It's like a catch-22, though. If you have exact competitors, you probably don't have a viable business. I pointed out competitors and how none of them are doing exactly what Groupthink is. I did not have room for one of those market charts, but, when I do one, I'm thinking of putting Groupthink in the middle -- Papa Bear's on one side, Mama Bear's on the other side, and Groupthink is in the middle, just right.
Scalability -- don't confuse scalable technology with a scalable business. I wrote about both.
The Team -- gee, it's just me right now. I wrote about both my own skills and experience as well as my search for a CEO.
Even if you're not applying to the First Look Forum, this is a great exercise. I put a lot of stuff down on paper that I've been saying over and over again. Now I have the opportunity to really refine it.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the version I sent out, but I also fully expect that I'll be making major surgery on it once I get some feedback. And, of course, when I wake up, I'll have at least half a dozen things I've realized on my own while I slept. I predict I'll be busy until Friday.

Leveling the Field

2009-01-31T00:31:00.000-08:00

I've been a bit quiet lately, so apologies for that. I've been focusing on a few things ... like getting closer to launching. I'll post more on that soon, but I have a different topic that I want to cover today.

One thing that has always frustrated me as an entrepreneur is the advantage that business people seem to have. Although Groupthink is my eighth startup (and that's not counting Puzzazz), I've never been a business guy and it seems that there's an inherent bias in the startup world toward business types. I say inherent because I don't think it's intentional -- I think it's just that business people have their own language and their way of doing things and it permeates communication. So, despite the fact that I have a great network of contacts, including angel investors and even a few venture capitalists, I've always felt like I've been at a disadvantage.

A while back, when I was working on a business plan for a potential startup, I met up with someone who was also working on a business plan. He was a marketing guy, with limited technology knowledge, so it seemed that we could help each other. His business plan was gorgeous and read well, and it had all the right revenue projections and graphs. Now I'm no slouch as a writer, but mine was dreadful. My plan had accurate descriptions and diagrams of the architecture of the system that I planned to build, and I had a working prototype to go with it. And his plan? He also had some architecture diagrams, but they were basically fiction. I pointed that out to him, but he said it didn't matter -- they were just placeholders and investors wouldn't care. Guess which company got funding?

I'm not saying that technology people like myself are dismissed entirely, but it's certainly a much easier road for people with a business background.

So, I was really pleased to hear about the details of the Northwest Entrepreneurs' Network's First Look Forum (FLF) earlier this week. The FLF replaces the annual Early Stage Investment Forum (ESIF) that NWEN used to run, with some big differences, the biggest one being that it's not an investment forum. NWEN properly recognized that there are already plenty of investment forums in the area, but there was very little for the stage before that. And they recognized that early stage entrepreneurs need more than money -- they need help. The forum is designed to:

Recognize early stage companies that show promise and could benefit from the process.
Help the companies to take their idea and make it presentable, through intensive, personal coaching.
Provide presenting companies an audience of qualified angel investors that they can present to and network with.
Provide those angel investors with interesting opportunities that they probably haven't heard about before.

What I like most about the FLF is that you don't need a business plan. Instead, they want people to answer five straightforward questions (paraphrased):

What's the Market and Opportunity?
What differentiates the concept from others?
How can the business scale?
What traction do you have so far?
Who are you? What's your experience?

I look at this list and, unlike a formal business plan, I think: I can do this. To me, it levels the playing field, allowing me to leverage my strengths without having to suffer because of my weaknesses. It's almost like they designed it for people like me (and maybe they did). The FLF will have a winner that wins some unspecified "fabulous prizes." Sure, I hope to win (we all do!), but I think I'll be a winner no matter what stage of the process I get to. If you're one of my potential competitors, good luck. And, if you haven't signed up yet, do so quickly -- they have limited slots and they were more than half sold out as of Tuesday night.

Note: Earlier, I said I wasn't going to write about the fundraising process. This blog post doesn't change that. I'll probably write more about the FLF as I go through the process, but I still won't blog about fundraising itself.

The Challenges are Universal

2009-01-15T11:40:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, I attended a Business Plan Writing Workshop sponsored by NWEN, the Northwest Entrepreneur Network. It wasn't nearly as valuable as the Alliance of Angels pitch clinic that I attended last week. That doesn't mean it was devoid of content, but it was half the length and less focused, which basically meant it was one-fourth the content. Had I done the two in the opposite order, I might have felt it was more valuable. And, since the NWEN workshop is free (if you're an NWEN member), that's a reasonable way to do things.

Although one talk was about a slide deck for funding pitches and the other was about writing business plans, the content of the talks was very familiar, which isn't too surprising. After all, the mission of both is to explain your business.

I was surprised with the variety of entrepreneurs in the room at the NWEN workshop. When we all introduced ourselves, the businesses included technical stamping, specialized video, traffic information, mobile content, travel, transportation, medical devices, iPhone applications, biotech, farming, retail stores, healthcare, cleaning technologies, e-commerce, and a non-profit, plus two software as a service companies, including Groupthink. Wow!

Interestingly, pretty much every question asked of the presenter, despite the variety of businesses and even business models, applied to Groupthink and probably everybody else in the room as well. The challenges in starting and building a business are universal.

Authentication and Planning

2009-01-07T23:35:00.000-08:00

I surprised myself by deciding to rewrite authentication again. I'm almost done with version 3, which is a complete rewrite instead of a modification to the existing code, like version 2 was, and it's taken me longer than the first two versions combined. But, I feel it's much stronger the way I'm doing it and some of the bugs I had in item-level authentication should just vanish. After finishing the 2nd version, I had this nagging feeling that it still wasn't right. Basically, my design was based on the need to work around a limitation in Google App Engine -- the lack of proper relationships between tables (combined with wanting to reduce the number of database queries). I spent some time thinking about it and realized a simpler, more elegant way to avoid the limitations which got me a much better data structure and thus, much better code. I wish I'd thought of it in the first place! But that's the way it is sometimes -- I had to learn from my mistakes.

On a different topic, yesterday I mentioned that I went to the AoA pitch clinic. I've decided that I'm going to spend at least an hour a day working on business planning, my pitch to potential investors, and related items. But, I'm not going to blog about it, except perhaps to indicate how much time I spend on it. The reason for this is that I want to make absolutely sure that nothing written on this blog could be construed as anything resembling a public offering to invest in Groupthink. I will, however, think about writing some blog posts about the process after it's all over.

Advisers and Angels

2009-01-06T23:19:00.001-08:00

As we all know, long meetings are frequently less effective than short ones. So, I'm pleased to say that in the last few days, I've had not one, but two, effective meetings that ran three hours.

The first was on Friday, with one of my advisers. We talked mostly about business and how to build the business, not the product, though we spent some time on that too. I learned a lot, but, not surprisingly, was reminded of how much I still have to learn about business.

Today, I went to the Alliance of Angels pitch clinic, a once-a-month seminar that covers what the "10-minute pitch" and the corresponding pitch deck should look like. It's somewhat ironic that it takes three hours to cover a 10-minute talk. But, it wasn't three wasted hours. Like the 10-minute pitch itself, it was all content. Sure, there were sample slides and even some silly bad example slides at the end, but there wasn't the fluff you so frequently get in presentations. The information was clear, useful, and on target, and it was obvious that the presentation had been well honed over many, many presentations. Net: if you're thinking of looking for funding, even if it's not from angels, I highly recommend AoA's pitch clinic.

The meeting and the seminar were different in a number of ways. One was a discussion while the other was a presentation. One had a very simple agenda while the other had a big long agenda and a slide deck. But, they were both successful, despite their length, for the same reason -- clear focus, with everything discussed revolving around that focus. And that's something useful even when you're not in a meeting.

In product news, I'm in the midst of rewriting the authentication system again. Almost done. I'll blog why and what tomorrow.

Authentication System Changed

2008-12-17T23:59:00.000-08:00

I was surprised that my planned changed to authentication stirred up some controversy. The basic issue is that Google IDs, which I'm using for authentication, only allow you to use one Google ID at a time. That means that if I force you to switch to a different Google ID (because I need you to prove your email address), that might sign you out on other sites. Not all sites work that way. For example, the way I've done authentication on Puzzazz , you will not be automatically signed out the next time you visit. But that's not the way most sites do it.

In the end, after weighing the options, I decided to go ahead with my plan to switch to only keeping email addresses. Of the various other solutions, all of the good ones are a superset of what I was planning to do, or can easily be built from it. The other solutions are more complicated or more problematic, or keep the problems I was trying to avoid. So, I did it and it's working now, at least for projects. Now I can go back to dealing with the issues that inspired this change.

I forgot to post last night (too many things going on), but the chart still includes yesterday as a working day.