One of the frustrating things about iterative software development is that you never get to do a heroic launch (a la Steve Jobs). Your software starts off to be barely good enough for someone to endure. The next week it’s better. Rinse, repeat. If you’re good, someday you wake up and you’ve built great software. We’ve got a long road before this day, but we think we’re onto something.

Anyhoo, hat tip to Web Worker Daily!

They posted a note describing some of the cool new features in RescueTime, including the very first version of RescueTime Groups, which seems damn promising. Give it a look!

I wrote a little guest post over at FoundRead (part of the GigaOm network). Give it a read!

http://gigaom.com/2008/04/02/ycombinator/

This Wednesday, I’ll be participating in a really interesting panel discussion entitled “Silicon Valley Fights Back Against the (Information) Monster it Created”. The panel is moderated by Matt Richtel (New York Times Correspondent). Here’s the description:

Intel launched no email Fridays. So did US Cellular. Some managers at Genentech urge employees to check email only twice a day. The Valley and its denizens are trying to combat a problem of their own making: information overload. Everyone knows the issue. The very tools spurring your productivity are also undermining it. This is not merely a question of personal organization. Information overload is spawning industries. New businesses and new products are being created from the likes of Microsoft and Google, and numerous start-ups, too, to help people manage and mute the cacophony and onslaught of information. The question: what can you do to avoid becoming overwhelmed? Even further, can you capitalize or build or enhance your business around helping others to regain productivity? Or have we created a monster here destined to eat us alive (please forgive the hyperbole…we wrote the end quickly because we have incoming email and need to get to it right away).

- Registration: 06:00 PM
- Buffet: 06:00 PM
- Program: 07:00 PM

Location:
Crowne Plaza Cabana Hotel
4290 El Camino Real
Palo Alto, CA

You can register for the event here. I have two guest invites– so holler if you’d like to go.

Someone posted an interesting “Ask YC”, asking:

“How to start becoming an entrepreneur while still being an employee?”

Having done this twice (started a company that eventually turned into a full-time startup), I settled in to reply. Before long, it was clear that my response was long enough to justify a blog post.

I’ve done two part-time-to-full-time startups (one resulted in a startup the sold, the second is RescueTime– currently a YC-funded company– cross your fingers).

At the end of the day, I think Paul Graham is right when he says:

“The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble. Bob’s going to grad school, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re moving back to Minnesota, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re taking on some consulting projects, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. You may as well just translate these to “we’re giving up on the startup, but we’re not willing to admit that to ourselves,” because that’s what it means most of the time. A startup is so hard that working on it can’t be preceded by “but.”"

In the beginning, however, it’s not always practical to dive in full-time. And sometimes when your idea is off-the-wall and also easy to build a prototype for, it’s smart to whip something out just to see if what you’re building is as cool as you think it might be before you take the plunge.

So if you’re too poor or too unsure to do the right thing for your business and dive in full-time, here are a few things that seemed to work for us when we did it part-time:

1. You need a co-founder and some cheerleaders… If you can’t find 2-3 friends who are really excited to be beta testers for what you’re building, ponder changing your direction. The arguments for a co-founder are many and varied. For a part-time effort, they are essential to keep you on-track and working. At some point, you’ll hit a motivation wall… If you have a partner who is depending on you, you find a way past that. If you don’t, you’ll often lose interest and find something else to entertain you.
2. Pick a day or two per week where you ALWAYS work, ideally in the same room as your co-founder(s). ALWAYS, no exceptions. We did 1 weekday evening and 1 weekend day. That doesn’t mean we weren’t working other days, but having a fixed schedule helps you through the phases of the project that might not be so fun.
3. Have a boat-burning target. What will it take for everyone to dive in full-time? 5,000 active users? 10,000 uniques a week? Funding? That should be a shared understanding. You don’t want to have one founder ready to go full-time when another has reservations. This is easy to gloss over, but you should really nail it down. I’ve lost 2 co-founders to this issue (they weren’t ready to dive in full time and I was). It wasn’t fair to them and it wasn’t fair to me.
4. Pick an idea that is tractable. Every business is a theory. If your theory is, “we can build a better web-based chat client”, that’s something you could test quickly. If you’re theory is “we can build a car that runs on lemonade”, that’s just not going to work as a part-time effort. The scarcity of available time should force you to distill the idea to the absolute essence that is necessary to test the theory. No extraneous features!
5. Understand that your v1 ia probably going to suck. Read David of Weebly’s post on persistence. It’s a long road. My first startup was a ridiculous fluke (2 months and then sold). 99% of the overnight successes you read about were slogging in the muck for 5 years before the night in question. Be prepared for a long journey and be surprised if your startup is an immediate hit. So with your v1, look for the tiny little flicker than you might be on to something to motivate you to make it better. Every week, make it better than last week and see if that flicker of light can be fanned into a tiny flame.
6. If you’re going to screw off at work (everyone does), spend it getting smarter about the stuff you don’t know. If you’re a coder, read a few design/usability blogs. Read up on what motivates angel investors. Research competitors and write down what they do well. Get brilliant at SEO (it’s not hard). Write a LOT more (blogging helps). Think about virality and research the heck out of it. This is all more valuable (and hopefully just as fun) as looking at LOLcats on Reddit. All that being said, be aware of the fuzzy line between using your cool-down time at work for your startup and stealing time/resources from your employer. If you’re paid to do a job, you need to do it.
7. [edit: Thanks to Ivan in the comments] Be sure you own your startup. I’ve had the fortune to work in places and companies where there was very clear ownership of “after hours” work. If ownership of your personal IP is not clear, do NOT rely on the good will of your employer. Greed can do funny things to people, even if they were initially big supporters of your startup.

At the end of the day, you want to prove whatever you need to prove as quickly as possible, so you can dive in full-time. Near as I can tell, there are plenty of startups that have started as “hobbies”, but you need to take it out of that phase as soon as you can. There is nothing that drives a team forward like the fear of public failure, debt, and starvation. Leap off the cliff and start building the airplane on the way down and you might be surprised with what you can pull off.

Big release for RescueTime today. I have no time to write about it (and probably oughta write on the RescueTime blog if I did have time… which I promise I’ll do).

If you’re a RescueTime user, check it out and let us know your thoughts!

Everyone with a fine liberal arts education should be familiar with Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox (props to Steve Leroux for helping me remember his damn name).

“Suppose Homer wants to catch a stationary bus. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on.”

I can think of no better description of software development releases (or product development in general). At some point you have to say “fuck it”, fall forward, and confound Zeno. Throw caution to the wind and ship too early and you ship crap– and your users know it. Aim for perfection and days stretch to weeks as each day brings you asymptotically closer to greatness (which sucks the life out of any team, IMO). I know teams who literally have worked for a year or more without shipping anything to anyone. I don’t know how they can do it.

But, any way you slice it, those last few days before a release feel like you’re wading through rancid molasses.

RescueTime will never be a purveyor of widgets (as a primary business), but there’s no denying that widgets are a damn good way to spread the word about your product, assuming that anyone actually wants to install them.

A widget that displays exactly how you spend your computer time may be creepy to some. As an old skool fella who is a bit more privacy-focused, I never really thought that a widget belonged anywhere on our near-term product roadmap. However, when we did our “What features do you want?” survey, thousands of people filled it out… 26% of ‘em expressed interest in a widget.

Sooooo, we built widgets. You can see mine to the right hand side of this blog– it’s a real time report of exactly what categories of my computer time I’m spending the most time on.

As we started thinking about it, RescueTime widgets could be used for all sorts of fun stuff:

• Lifestreaming. Just a fun little way to tell the world how you spend your time.
• Life hacking. We all know that discipline is hard. As Paul Graham says, there is nothing more motivating than the fear of public failure and ridicule. If your productivity data is available for all to see, do you think you’ll be a touch more productive?
• Workstreaming. Want to telecommute? Whip up a page for your boss with a few of your RescueTime graphs up there so he can feel “in touch”. For extra credit, you could throw a few static graphs ABOVE your real-time graphs, giving your boss graphs showing your pre-telecommute productivity.
• Create your own Dashboard! RescueTime has a handy Dashboard, but maybe you care about other graphs that require a few clicks. You could whip up your own “dashboard” (on a private page or intranet, maybe) that shows exactly what you want to see. Right now we really only offer two graph types (top apps/sites and top tags– or labels), but very soon any graph will be embeddable.
• Speaking of Intranets… You could drop a few graphs there to show what you’re up to. This will really start to sing when we introduce our groups functionality (allowing aggregation of multiple people into one graph).

Widgets are officially a beta product– we’ve got a few kinks to work out. For example, in Firefox there is a Flash bug that results in the status bar continuing to report “transferring data from RescueTime.com…” even though it’s not (you can switch to a different tab and back to make the message go away). Anyone know how to fix this?

I love the idea of contextual advertising, and I think Adsense has been a boon to entrepreneurship across the world. But it’s clearly broken. Today we received some nice feedback about RescueTime:

This is the 3rd such email we’ve received, and given that the concept of PPC advertising is increasingly well understood, is not an uncommon sentiment. Internet software has to be free, right? If so, how can a thankful user reward a company?

I wonder how advertisers feel about this? It’s no wonder that Adsense earnings are sharply dropping.

I just posted what I thought was a pretty darn interesting post about Google’s dominance in my life. By my count (and, with RescueTime, my count is pretty damn accurate), 13% of the time I spend in front of my computer is taken up by Google products.

Note that this is COMPUTER time– not just my online time.

Check out the post!

Launching a big batch of new stuff is ALWAYS hard. It’s a lot of work and you’re generally making a substantial bet on some of your own instincts.

Since the launch (a few hours ago), feedback has been pouring in. Much of it is positive, but some is negative– which I think is par for the course any time you change a utility someone is used to. If you’re a RescueTime user, please log in and give us your honest/brilliant feedback!

Details of the release are here.