Tony Wright dot com

(apologies for the lack of gender neutrality in this entry– idea girls exist too…)

I had a colleague the other day refer to me as an “idea guy”. I’m sure they meant it as a compliment, but I winced when I heard it. As a guy who tends to lurk in entrepreneurial circles, I often run into self-identified “idea guys” (usually, they are in “stealth mode”, which I generally find similarly ridiculous)– and virtually every time I do, I tend to walk away shaking my head. Here are 5 quick reasons why your startup doesn’t need an “idea guy”:

1. Everyone is an idea guy. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not the case. I’ve met plenty of folks who aren’t interested (or aren’t good at) the strategy and tactics of software/product development. There are plenty of engineers out there who just want interested technology to fiddle with and couldn’t care less what the grand plan is. There are plenty of designers who just want a good set of design specs so they can make pretty pictures or highly usable prototypes. There are plenty of salesfolks who don’t give a darn what they are selling. So what makes an idea guy an idea guy? Usually it’s the simple fact that they don’t have any other skills to bring to the startup.

2. By virtue of the fact that they consider themselves an idea guy, it quite likely means that they are convinced that their ideas are better than yours (or anyone elses). Of course they are! They are an idea guy! The big problem with this is that startup ideas need to change… Very few startups stick with the exact same idea. How excited is an idea guy going to be about shifting to a new idea that he didn’t generate? Not very exited, as it turns out.

3. Ideas are relatively valueless… because smart people say so. Don’t believe me? Here’s what Paul Graham has to say (though I think the argument about the “sellability” of ideas is pretty weak). Don’t believe Paul? How about Guy Kawasaki? One one my favorite quotes from Guy when he was asked how an entrepreneur could keep their idea from being stolen. His response was “”You could discuss it with no investors, show it to no customers and never hire employees….” (see it in context).

As a test, approach a dozen venture capitalists. Explain that your primary skillset is “idea generation”. Do your best to defend this and give copious examples of your genius. Go home and wait for the phone to ring.

4. Ideas aren’t defensible. Google “First Mover advantage” and you can find all sorts of people debunking that particular myth. Google moved into an established market and clobbered it. Ipods certainly weren’t the first MP3 player. Dodgeball lost out to Twitter. Friendster was sucker-punched by Facebook and MySpace. The first movers spend tremendous amounts of money educating the market and making all sorts of stupid mistakes and the second movers come in when the market is primed and make it look easy.

5. In startup businesses, idea guys run out of things to do pretty quickly. There’s no room in a startup organization for someone to sit around and spew out ideas. Startups need builders, whether you’re building software, hardware, visual interfaces, teams, bank accounts, or audiences. If you’re a founder, you probably need to be good at more than one of these things.

Despite the evidence to the contrary, I feel like every day I run into founder and consultants who having a million dollar idea is enough to bring to the table. Most of the time, I think this is because they haven’t the faintest clue how hard it is to turn a great idea into a great product or service.

I’m a big fan of Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

Today he has an interview with Penelope Trunk, author of “Brazen Careerist”.

One of the things that really struck me was the following passage:

“Question: How much money does it take to be happy?

Answer: It takes about $40,000. It does not matter how many kids you have or what city you live in—that’s splitting hairs because peoples’ happiness levels are largely based on their level of optimism and the quality of their relationships. So as long as you have enough money for food and shelter, your optimism level kicks in to dictate how happy you are.”

Very very true.

Just read a great article on BBC by way of Slashdot about Web 2.0 (tip o’ the hat to Brian Fioca, who IM’ed me the link) It liberally quotes usability-zealot Jakob Nielsen who, as you can imagine, is not all that enamored with the Web 2.0 movement.

As usual, someone more famous than me summarizes some of my thoughts better than I’m capable of.

What I find strange about Web 2.0 is that we web geeks are losing sight of the fact that the vast majority of people use the internet as a tool. They want information. They want pictures. They want music. They want to buy stuff. They want to search for jobs.

But do they really want to socialize online, just for the sake of socializing?

Certainly teenagers do. I suppose I would too if I had a job that was 8am-3pm, had virtually no responsibilities, and had 16 weeks of vacation time.

There’s a great new study out that says:

• 15% of Americans don’t have an internet connection
• 10% view the Internet as a “hassle” (probably because ever site is trying to get them to join their community)
• About 50% of the population “doesn’t use the internet very much. I’d presume that when they DO use it, they use it as a utility.

To me, the most exciting startups are those that solve problems. That provide a transactional product or service. That, in the words of Nielsen, allow users to “get in, get it, get out”.

I tend to be suspicious of businesses that are trying to create an online “community”. You can certainly build a successful business by doing so. But I think online communities are extremely challenging to build, and they tend to turn off the much-more-massive audience that Nielsen talks about. Amazon would be a LOT less easy to use if they were constantly bombarding me with community features.

Look at LinkedIn. They’ve been around since 2002. They’ve gotten over 28 million in VC and they have a tremendously viral service (WAY before it was cool to be viral!). They are the poster child for social networking for grownups. Yet they’ve only managed to collect 9 million accounts in 5 years (and I’d wager than only a fraction of those are active given that it’s nigh impossible to delete a LinkedIn account).

To this day, I still hear people ask, “So what can you DO on LinkedIn?” I’m hard-pressed to give an answer.

At the end of the day, there seems to be a pretty finite number of adults for whom social networking is at all relevant. And there’s a huge pile of sites that are vying for the attention of these busy users. I’d wager that the only ones who are going to succeed (on a grand scale) are also going to allow the other 90% of the internet audience to “get in, get it, and get out”.

I am, in general, not a huge fan of huge piles of widgets on blogs– I don’t really know why. The only reason that I can think of is that too many widgets offend my delicate design sensibilities. Blogs covered with widgets tend to look like patchwork quilts to me. Even though my blog template is pretty much a slightly-altered version of a free Wordpress template, I like the clean look.

Yet here I am, dropping a second widget on my site… Not only does it happen to actually match my current blog template quite a bit better than the first blog widget I added (sorry Mark!), but it also happens to be one that I helped build.

So, without further ado, I introduce you to BlogBuddy (the gray flavored widget on the right). You can get yours here!

Phil Bogle, CTO at Jobster, was the technical genius behind the widget. See his writeup here.

Blog Buddy is decidedly a beta project– many of the features that I think really will make it sizzle are still to come!

Jobster alumnus Mark Maunder has put his travel blogging startup on hold for a month or two to pursue his muse… Which, in this case is (drumroll please) inline blog comments! It would be irresponsible of me not to mention Mark’s wife and biz partner, Kerry– who is quite likely the only reason that this thing has gotten off the launch pad…. Kerry is a seasoned QA manager and has almost certainly kept this thing from being a bug-ridden pile o’ PERL code.

It’s in “soft-launch” phase and they are working out a few kinks, but I think it’s a pretty exciting idea. So try it out here, head over to Linebuzz.com and bury Mark and Kerry in feedback and bug reports.

How many people can say they’ve been involved with 3 different businesses that have been featured on TechCrunch? First Jobby coverage (featured a second time when Jobster bought us), then Jobster coverage, and now RescueTime coverage!

RescueTime is the little side project I’ve been working on with my friends Robby and Joe. It was an idea that Joe and I started chatting about almost a year ago and we’ve been dabbling in on weekends from time to time since then.

Anyhoo, check out the coverage. It’s not quite same for a project like this, but it’s still pretty gratifying!

Before I got involved with product development a few years ago, my entire career was spent owning and running a small (10-20) person web app consulting firm. Clients (ranging from mom-and-pop operations to Fortune 100 megacorps) would come to me with a problem and I would assemble a team to solve that problem with some sort of web application. 99% of the time, the size of that team was somewhere between 1 and 4 consultants.

When I started a little Web 2.0 company, it seemed natural to keep the team to 2 people, with me doing some design, PR, marketing, and biz related stuff, and Brian doing the assorted geekery required to make a web app go (server and client side coding and a bit o’ sysadmin work).

When our little company got bought by Jobster and we relocated to Seattle, one of the things that truly blew me away was the SIZE of the product development operation at what most Jobsterites felt was a lean operation. There were literally dozens of developers, a few designers, a mess of program managers, and a small army of offshore QA folks. I don’t have the exact count, but I think that somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 people could honestly say, “My job is to build software” at Jobster.

So why the discrepancy? The little teams that I had worked on for most of my life weren’t solving tiny problems. Sure, we had an occasional brochure-ware client, but a big slice of our time was build applications that were pretty darn complex and sophisticated. There are two very legitimate reasons that software teams get big:

• First off, some web software is just big/complex/ugly… and it has to be. Enterprise software tends to be bigger, more complex, and have lots of integration points which get pretty complicated. The “two guys in a garage” theory doesn’t really work for such things. The more I play in the world of web development, the more adamant I am about not wanted to play in the world of “big” software. Big projects might have merit, but they are certainly a helluva lot less fun.
• Some teams are really a bunch of smaller teams working on different things. Jobster was (and is!) definitely engaged in several different initiatives. So the team of 35 people were really (depending on how you slice it) working on two or three very different problems.

Unfortunately, the list of reasons for team bloat goes on and it gets pretty ugly (note: some of these are paraphrased from Parkinson’s Law)

• People make work for each other. Certain people are REALLY good at creating LOTS of work for other people. Some of this work is valuable and productive, but much of it (excess documentation, “here’s what I’m up to” meetings, etc) is not.
• The amount of work on a team ebbs and flows. Sometimes there’s a ton of work, and an undisciplined (or over-funded) team will seek to get bigger rather than just suffering through the peaks.
• People like subordinates. Oftentimes, a manager is measured by the size of their team. Bigger teams mean bigger budgets and more responsibility, and that looks good on a resume.
• Work, like water, spreads out and seeks to fill the nooks and crannies of an organization. If a 10 hour task for one person spreads around to involve 4 other people, it’s likely that the manpower spent on the task will explode to something well beyond 10 hours.
• An individual’s tasks will expand to fill the time alloted to accomplish them. This seems like the other side of the “necessity is the motherhood of invention” truism. In the times where people have more time than they need to accomplish a task, they’ll find a way to stretch it out. This includes surfing the web or (much more dangerous) adding complexity/oversight to the processes involved in completing the task (creating a longer term “bloat”).
• Communication paths grow exponentially with the size of the organization. With two people, there is exactly two possible communication directions. With a team of 10 people I have 9 other people that I have to communicate with (and who have to communicate with me). This dramatically increases the chance of miscommunication, confusion, excessive questions/clarifications, and (everyone’s favorite) office politics.
• Low quality team members can hide in the herd. If a team member loses their motivation in a two person team, it becomes pretty evident pretty quickly. On large teams, low-productivity members can lurk for months without any problems.

Of course, there is some value in larger teams. And, in my opinion, there is simply HUGE value in growing your team from 1 to 2. Two brains are most certainly more than twice as sharp as one. Beyond a team of two or three, however, I think that the added manpower offers asymptotically diminishing returns. While I truly believe in the Wisdom of Crowds, I think the best way to harness this wisdom in software development is by collecting thoughts and opinions in a one-off kind of way (usability tests, focus groups, consultants and the cheaper alternatives of asking peers, friends and family for their opinions).

Just read a GREAT interview with Seth Godin, who is about to launch a book entitled, “The Dip: a little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick)“.

For the record, I don’t think it’s time for Jobster to quit (or for me to quit Jobster). Recently, I’ve been asked to direct the product vision for our subscription recruiting application, which is used by hundreds of customers ranging from the enterprise on down. The application has evolved over a few years and has a wide array of features and initiatives. I’m eager to attack each of these with as little bias as I can to see whether they are providing the value we need ‘em to be. I think there are some features in our subscription app that need a little extra love and there are some that aren’t getting used that probably ought to get removed (with the ultimate goal of increasing our user’s value).

If a VC walked up to me tomorrow and said, “Here’s a pile of money. We need you to do something great in the recruiting space, and you’re going to have to compete with the likes of Monster.com,” I’d see that as a real opportunity. Monster and their ilk are well past the point where they are capable of startup-style innovation, and (more importantly) have a lot of revenue to risk if they shifted directions. And, beyond the competition that’s out there, there is an army of recruiters and small-biz hiring managers who are REALLY frustrated with the solutions that are out there.

While the opportunity is clear, it remains to be seen whether Jobster has the recipe to capitalize on that opportunity (though I’m pretty optimistic about it).

Jobster has some tremendous advantages over a “brand-new” startup. We’ve got a team of talented people already in place, solid infrastructure, and a lot of wisdom about the industry. And we have a pile of customers that are using our tools.

The one disadvantage we have is the same one that Monster and the more established players out there have. We have business model that’s bringing in revenue. We have years of legacy code that we have to deal with. We have tons of features, initiatives, and business processes in play, some of which are really valuable, but ALL of which demand attention and resources.

One of the key things that Jobster (and ALL startups) need to be willing to do is quit. We need to be willing to quit initiatives that aren’t working and quit ideas that no longer make sense. People can be adamant about holding on to their beliefs– Startup teams need to be doggedly agnostic about their beliefs (did you know that Flickr started out as an online game? How’s THAT for quitting).

And, most importantly, we need to be willing to quit ideas in a complete enough way that it frees up resources and eliminates the opportunity cost that Godin talks about.

“Smart quitters understand the idea of opportunity cost. The work you’re doing on project X right now is keeping you from pushing through the Dip on project Y. If you fire your worst clients, if you quit your deadest tactics, if you stop working with the people who return the least, then you free up an astounding number of resources. Direct those resources at a Dip worth conquering and your odds of success go way up.”

Great quote.

In the midst of house hunting in the Seattle area, I somehow have managed to launch a little marketing site for RescueTime (my current side project). It shows a few screenshots, answers a few questions, and allows folks to sign up to hear about it when we launch (via a quick-n-dirty PHP script).

I’d love to hear from folks about their thoughts on the site. Is the messaging clear?

I feel like we web geeks need to be constantly aware of the “curse of knowledge” we have about our own industry and the products we create.

The idea of the “curse of knowledge” as it relates to web geeks is one of the most compelling ideas I heard at SXSW, in a presentation by the authors of “Made to Stick“. I’m going to quote Harley Stagner, who has the distinction of being the #1 google result for the query “tappers and listeners”. Congrats Harley!

They told the story of Elizabeth Newton, who in 1990 earned her Ph. D. with an experiment involving “tappers” and “listeners”. In this experiment the “tappers” received a list of well-known songs that they had to tap out on a table to the “listeners”. The “listener” had to guess the song being “tapped.” Out of 120 songs only 2.5% were guessed correctly. What made this noteworthy was the fact that the “tappers” were also required to guess how often the “listeners” would guess a song correctly. The “tappers” guessed 50% when the reality was 2.5%. Why such a huge margin of error? The “tappers” had what the Heaths referred to as the “Curse of Knowledge.” When they “tapped” a tune it was impossible for them to tap it without hearing it in their head. Their prior knowledge of the song title made it impossible for them to imagine the “listener” having no such knowledge.

That 47.5% discrepency is the best damned illustration of the curse of knowledge that I’ve ever seen.

Sometimes I feel like even the best web UI designers are busily tapping away, confident that the users they are building for are “hearing” the same song that’s in their heads.

Anyhoo, if you get a chance, check out the RescueTime site and tell me what song you’re hearing.

(this post is prompted by 3 things. One, a friend of mine just dramatically shifted strategy on his 2-person startup… for the better. Two, Jobster is dealing with these challenges– and dealing with them reasonably well. Three, I just read some related thoughts on Andy Sack’s blog.)

My advice is this: If you’re going to scrutinize your startup idea, do it early and do it often.

Starting up a company is (as I’ve said before), pretty much laying down a bet on a hypothesis. As many startups learn, their hypothesis might be just plain wrong. Or perhaps their hypothesis isn’t nearly right enough to to justify the time, effort and/or funding that has gone into it.

So it’s time to punt on your idea and go with another one. This is one (if not the only) true advantage that a startup has over larger and better-funded competitors– the flexibility to change strategy and tactics at the drop of a hat.

The thing about shifting your idea in a new direction (whether it’s a big shift or a small one) is that it gets exponentially more difficult to do as your idea and company ages. Here are a few reasons that shifting is hard in a mature company:

-Codebase. Codebases have momentum, and they don’t often go away (or go in a different direction) without a fight. It’s oftentimes a lot easier to build something new than it is to shift a codebase in a new direction, but development teams are often loathe to give away their hard-won coding victories.

-People. People get passionate about ideas. The more people you have and longer you’ve pursued a given idea, the more likely you are to have someone importantly vehemently opposing going in a different direction. In short, any shift generally results in SOMEONE having their feelings hurt.

-Customers/Audience. Just because your product isn’t as world-changing as you need/want it to be doesn’t mean that you don’t have loyal and happy customers. If you’re going to shift direction, what do you do with your customers? How are they going to feel when your focus is (at least partially) shifted in a new direction?

-Investors. Investors and other shareholders know darn well that shifting strategy is ALWAYS expensive, even if it’s a relatively small shift. The more you’ve sunk effort, time, and cash into an idea, the more people will tend advocate for a “stay the course” attitude (even though it’s sunk costs).

-Cruft. Cruft is all the crap that your company accumulates that makes it go slower. It’s a database server that acts up from time to time. It’s a middle manager that schedules lots of meetings that never seem to lead anywhere. It’s slapdash code that a developer whips out and promises himself that he’ll fix down the road. It’s old hardware and old Windows installs that start misbehaving. Every day that passes, a little more cruft gets introduced that gums up the works.

All of these reasons get a heckuva lot more painful as a company gets bigger and older.

At Jobster, we’ve recently shifted our strategy in some new (and amazingly cool) direcions. Our attention is split between a few initiatives (which, in itself, is a challenge). While I think we’re moving forward at a brisk pace, I can’t help but ask myself “What if we started moving in this direction 2 years ago?” I’ve only been with the company for 10 months, but I tend to feel that the only thing keeping us from finding our muse earlier was a dogmatic attachment to the correctness of own ideas. We should have been more critical. We should have asked more questions.

We’re not alone in this.

Andy Sack, one of my favorite bloggers and CEO of Judy’s Book, has recently been blogging about his experience shifting his company from an online user-generated-review site to a local affiliate/shopping site (here’s his first post, here’s a longer and more interesting followup). Andy’s company is also about 3 years old and he seems to be experiencing similar challenges (and a few of the same frustrations) that come out of shifting late-in-the-game.

I’m sure Andy is wondering the same thing with the same 20/20 hindsight that I am.

“What if we’d shifted our strategy in this direction in our first week? Our first month? Heck, our first YEAR?”