Tips for founders doing their first tech startup

After my last post about my first entrepreneurial year. I thought a bit more about what specifically I would tell myself if I could that would have helped in some way to accelerate my learning. Here is what I came up:

Start a blog

It took me about 5 months before I started a blog. I could have started this earlier. It is surprising what I have gained from writing this blog. It has helped me express myself and think things through as well as keep up with friends and others. It also helps to be part of the community to understand it better. Finally its useful to promote your own vision of yourself. Altogether all the reasons and excuses for not doing it that I had didn't amount to anything.

Find a 3rd co-founder

Tony and I were the only founders when we started Revmap. The 3 main reasons why a 3rd person would have helped is:

1. Skills - Would have bought more skills with them and be another person you can depend on.
2. Conflict Resolution - Would have helped resolve conflicts. In any situation it is hard for 2 people to always reach a consensus; a 3rd perspective would have helped.
3. Learning - It takes a particular art to work with teams. I think having a 3rd person would have improved me in this aspect. Also you learn a lot about your co-founder working with them solidly for long periods and so it would have helped increase my understanding of the human character to work with an extra person to that depth.

Some of these arguments can extend to 4 or 5 people and sometimes that makes sense. But there are diminishing returns; and at that point you probably might want to consider dilution as well.

Visit Silicon Valley!

I would issue this one pretty much as a command to my younger self. I don't think Tony would have wanted to move here but visiting would have helped in many ways. It would have helped me understand more about whats necessary to build a successful Internet startup, understand flaws and lacking in Revmap. And of course people doing startups in a similar field and investors.

I think if we had come here early on we would have ended up significantly adapting our idea.

Make more friends with people who are where I want to be

I am not sure about this point, in the sense that I am not sure how I could have executed this better than I did. Again visiting SF/Valley would have helped. But I do firmly believe that the best way to learn is to meet people who are further towards the goal that you strive to achieve.

Conclusion

I have no regrets and I did what I needed to do to. I only write this to better understand what I could have done differently and help others. I still have a long way to go so I will probably be writing something similar next year :-).

My 1st Entrepreneur Year

It occurred to be me yesterday that it has been 1 year since I started my entrepreneurial adventure. I quit my job on the 2nd of October last year, with a lot of hopes and aspiration and the thought that I could go back to my previous lifestyle if things didn't work out.

A lot has changed in that one year, and happily everything for the better.

A quick summary of what happened, some of these dates might be off:

October '06 - Tony and I quit our jobs and started work on our original idea, a property website. We never really chose a name for it, but lets just call it shadymap.com because we had bought the domain and we were close to using it.

Mid-October '06 - After working on shadymap for a short time, Tony and I decided that for various reason the idea was not going to fly. We started on our first iteration of revmap.com

Mid-November to December '06 - Revmap was initially going to be a yelp for the UK except much more map based and feature-full. In the end we changed our idea because we had a competitor show up on the radar and also we realised that we would probably end up making something that we had no intention of using. We switched gears and started working on what revmap.com eventually became.

January '07 - Revmap was launched to great applause.

Jan - April '07 - Revmap hobbled along, it took a very long time before I was happy that we had all the things we required (and I am still not happy). The marketing never started, the viral growth never came and the motivation evaporated.

May - August '07 - Joined Peter and Pete to do Clickpass.com. Went through Y Combinator and the rest is the present.

That turned out to be more of a story of Revmap than anything else. There is an underlying story that would probably to intricate and subtle to articulate about the friends I made, the things I learned and how I improved as a person.

(On a slight aside; right now I am reading a book and I am finding it hard, to not write this blog post in the style of book, lol)

One of the turning moments for me this year was the point that I came to realise with reasonable certainty that I would never have to go back to a normal job again (excluding acquisitions). After interacting enough in the tech world I came to realise that:

• They (we) are all human, with few exceptional skills apart from some common traits like adaptability and "out of the box" thinking.
  
• The fact that I was good at programming and studying CS made my talents relatively rare even amongst entrepreneurs.
• I knew enough people I respected and wanted to work with in the future
• Once you immerse yourself in this world coming up with ideas stops being the hard part. The ideas are trickling all around me, if I can't come up with one, I can probably speak to 10 people who have their own ideas that they don't have time to do or need an another person to work with them on.
  

With no shortage of ideas and people, and with the skills that I have. Its pretty clear that I don't need to go back to a job. I also don't see why I would ever want to.