Sure, it starts with an idea (hopefully one that is based on solving a problem in the real world market and not just something that is ‘cool’). Very soon after, you need to start considering a million things:

Business plan, formation and legalization, tax plan, cash flow, capital investment, partnerships, financial projections, strategic partnerships, expansion of the idea, architecture, functional and technical briefs, functional and technical specs, wireframes, compositions, prototypes, implementations, marketing plan, system architecture, system and network implementation and administration, alpha and beta testing, marketing implementation, and eventually your launch!

Chances are that in the beginning it’s just you (and maybe another person) bootstrapping all of this. The reality is, most of these components are absolutely necessary, and it can seem incredibly overwhelming. The fact that many founders skip a lot of these steps is one of the main reasons startups go bust so early (take for example that many forgo the financial forecasting, and thus, have no true sense of their revenue and profitability potential). The contrary can be said as well, that because some entrepreneurs focus too much on these areas they never really get off the ground.

You need to have thought out your business well and you need to successfully launch and continue to deliver. But how can one or two people do all of this? The answer is that you need to stay balanced and not get too focused into any particular stage or topic, and you need to reach out and discover what other successful entrepreneurs have done.

• Is it really necessary that your pitch includes a 50-page business plan instead of a concise but meaningful 10-page one?
• Do you really need to understand every detail about how to erect a functional specification, or can a short set of mockup diagrams be sufficient?
• Do you really need to spend a lot of time meeting with marketing consultants, or should you just hire a firm to take it over?
• How can you fund your business, and once it’s funded, how do you manage your cash flow?
• What do I really need in my business plan? Isn’t that overkill?

These are questions that are difficult to answer, and there is no single answer that works for everyone. You could get caught up in years of researching each of these fields if you’re not careful (this is why eventually businesses hire people that specialize!). Thankfully, there are conferences and training programs that can be really helpful. There are conferences that help you network and hone in on your skills for a piece of technology that you may use (i.e. RailsConf, Oracle OpenWorld, WWDC) and then there are conferences that help you with starting a business or marketing it (i.e. START!, Seed, TechCrunch50, BlogWorld Expo).

For example, coming up on October 2nd, 2008, is a one-day conference called STARTonomics in San Francisco that could help you figure out what pieces are critical to your startup, and which ones really aren’t. The sessions are led by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. Here’s a little glimpse of some of the sessions that will be taking place during this intense day:

• Welcome to Startonomics & Startup Metrics for Pirates (AARRR!)
  Overview of conference agenda + Intro to Startonomics: how to create simple, actionable metrics to help startups make better decisions in product development & marketing.
• Product Development 101: Designing & Prototyping the DNA of a Killer App
  What does it take to plan, research, and develop a great web 2.0 application? Learn tips & best practices for setting the right process, goals, and metrics for your startup.
• Marrying Design & Development: a Match made in Heaven, not Hell
  Learn about the basic fundamentals of web design, and find out how developers and designers can work together to create great websites and applications.
• Creating & Implementing a Web 2.0 Marketing Plan
  How to design and implement an online marketing plan for acquiring users from multiple marketing channels, how to prioritize & mix channels based on stage of startup growth.
• Revenue: The Internet Wants to Be Free, but You Need to Get Paid
  Learn how to generate revenue using a variety of business models & strategies including advertising, digital goods, subscriptions, lead generation, & e-commerce.
• Funding Wisdom: What I Wish I Knew
  Forget the school of hard knocks – this is your chance to hear what 3 successful startup executives learned about the funding process, including timing considerations, types of funding, term sheets and working with investors.
• View the full list here.

This is a must-attend conference for startups working on Internet-based products! Beyond general session topics, you will be able to connect with other startups and successful entrepreneurs who can help you answer the really tough questions.

I’ll be there, soaking it all up. After the conference, I’ll write up a summary of some of the things I’ve learned from others that I think is most important for a successful startup!

But, these folks got it right!

A small company in the UK called Carsonified recently set out to build a fully functional and fully marketed web application in 4 days for $10,000. They stopped all of their normal activities for nearly a week to get together and build something fun, productive, cohesive, and useful for what is a considerably small investment for most businesses these days. [For those of you who are still confused with what the UK is: the United Kingdom is that really big island off the coast of the mainland of Europe! And yes, it's part of Europe!] The end result of their effort is a free web application called ‘Matt‘ that allows you to send Twitter messages from multiple accounts without having to login to each one and post the message by hand each time. It’s fun, funky, fresh, and useful if you’re a twitterer.

I had the opportunity to talk to Elliott Kember, the lead developer for Carsonified, and ask him a few questions about their experience. Since I recently talked about dealing with discouragement in “Be Who You Are, You Silly Entrepreneur You!” and financial models in the last post, entitled “You won’t be bought by Google, so Quit Fooling Yourself; you need a sound financial model!“, I thought a few of the questions that I asked Elliott should address these areas. The following is an informal transcript of our conversation:

Kevin Elliott: So you put together a web application in 4 days. Why? What are your plans with this experiment? What did you hope to gain?

Elliott Kember: We put the site together to see if we could! Every now and then we have an “ideas week”, where we turn off all our phones and email, and everyone gets together and works on a common project. This time, we decided to use a framework and language that we hadn’t tried before, and use the Twitter API to make a useful, fun little app. Not only that, it was also an app that we had a use for, and we figured that there must be others out there who wanted to be able to post to several twitter accounts at the same time.

Kevin Elliott: How many people got together to do this in such a short period of time? How were you able to rope in a group of enthusiastic people to gel together on a common theme and goal for this project? Getting people excited about things, especially small projects, seems to be a difficult challenge. How did you overcome this?

Elliott Kember: All 9 of our staff were involved in building Matt – blogging, copywriting, designing and developing. There was a bit of confusion over why we had so many people working on the one application – we could have built the same app with just two developers and our designer, but without all the marketing, blogging, and PR we’d never have got nearly as much interest. Not only that, but everyone in the team was also able to contribute great ideas and feedback to the process. We managed to get everybody involved because we’re lucky enough to have a creative and innovative team, and a fantastic environment here at the Carsonified offices. We have a four-day week, great equipment and a beautiful office, and we all thoroughly enjoy working here – so any excuse to get involved in something exciting is always welcome.

Kevin Elliott: Did you have any major hurdles during this time? If so, how did you overcome them?

Elliott Kember: We didn’t have too many major hurdles – in fact, learning Python and Django was probably the only real hurdle! Any problems we had stemmed from the fact that we were still beginners with both. It can be quite frustrating when you know exactly what you’re trying to do, but not exactly how to do it. Twitter’s API went down a few times, which didn’t help – but it’s pretty famous for that and we managed to patiently work around it. I guess we expected it to be pretty hectic and tricky, so we were pleasantly surprised when things started falling together. A late night or two certainly helped

Kevin Elliott: At any point in this project, from conception to completion, did anyone doubt or discourage you and your attempts to engage and deliver? How did you deal with it?

Elliott Kember: Lots of people doubted us! Some doubted that we’d be able to produce a web application in four days, others said that it was just a bit of a publicity stunt. Many people missed the point and wondered why it took us so long to build. Quite a few people tried to copy what we’d done in less time and for less money, and others said that they didn’t understand the app, and thought it was all a big waste of time. Really, the only way to deal with this much negativity is to stay realistic about what you’re doing, and enjoy yourself. If people don’t like what you produce, then they’re welcome to their opinion – but at the end of the day, you’re not building it for them. The positive feedback makes it all worth it, and there were lots of positive message and compliments. Thanks to everyone who sent them!

Kevin Elliott: Your site mentions that your goal was to build a fully functional web application in 4 days in under $10,000. Considering that you included marketing, PR, copywriting, and other activities this sounds like an excellent accomplishment. What considerations did you take for planning a financial model around it? When you sat down at the beginning of this effort, did you determine how this would “break even” and eventually post some kind of profit? (NEW)

Elliott Kember: We didn’t actually plan against a budget – this figure just happens to be the amount we spent in salary during the time taken to build the app. Many readers took this to be the budget of the application, and it became one of the more talked-about parts of Matt week. So having said that, I think it’s fair to say that we didn’t have a financial model, and we didn’t expect it to “break even” at all. There’s no advertising on Matt, and it’s free to use.

Kevin Elliott: How did you measure and enforce the budget as you moved forward? (NEW)

Elliott Kember: Managing the budget was very easy. There wasn’t one! The only budget we did have was a time budget, and we basically just had to make sure we got everything done as efficiently as possible, even if that meant a couple of late nights.

Kevin Elliott: What were your intentions for building this application in the first place? In other words, what were you hoping to gain by taking on this challenge? (NEW)

Elliott Kember: We hoped to gain a better understanding of Python, and Django. As developers, we’d never used them before and were interested in the challenges of learning a new language and framework, as well as working with the Twitter API.

Kevin Elliott: What are your future plans?

Elliott Kember: As for future plans, we’ve got some fantastic events and workshops coming up, and we’d love to see you and your readers there. We’re not sure when the next Ideas Week will be, but we’ll be sure to let you know – It was so much fun that we hope to do it again soon!

Kevin Elliott: Lastly, what were the three most important things that you learned about the team, the project, or the technologies after everything was complete? (NEW)

Elliott Kember: Mostly what we learned was the structure and workings of Python and Django. It’s a very foreign thing, learning a new framework, and learning the syntax and structure took most of our time as developers. I could say we learned that Mike, our fantastic designer, can produce a fantastic design and template in about three days! We also learned that TechCrunch readers can be a very tough audience.

Thanks Elliott!

To read more about the Matt project, Carsonified co-founder Ryan Carson wrote a guest article for TechCrunch that details more about how everything went down.

For example, you might have a Software Engineering background and you are comfortable building a prototype, acquiring some initial funding, and building the first revision of your website. However, you may realize that you have absolutely no background in Design, Typography, and Page Layout, other than some lustful blog reading. This is a tough situation to be in, but you’re not the first.

Here are some more resources to help you figure out how to more effectively perform when wearing the blue, red, or purple hats.

1. 36 Startup Tips from ReadWriteWeb. This article points out some really excellent tips for Startups, including “software engineering, infrastructure, PR, conferences, legal and finance.” It’s a must-read for anyone considering the idea of starting their own business by themselves or with a partner.
2. Creating Web 2.0 Effects With Photoshop from sitepoint. If you have no clue on how to make your company’s logo get that Web 2.0 look, this is your starting point. When it comes down to it, you might not need to hire a graphics designer to set you up for your prototype or first release.
3. The 50 Most Popular Web Design Blog Posts, Resources & Cheat Sheets of 2007 from crestock. Perhaps a little dated (I mean come on, we’re in 2008 right?), this is one of the most consolidated resources that identifies the best website design concepts of 2007. If you’re not worried about looking “too 2007″ then there’s no other place to look. This is also a great way to get introduced into design, and very quickly learn what trends exist.
4. 8 Web Design Mistakes That Developers Make from wakeuplater. Read and catch these mistakes before you do them, because you know you’re really just an amateur designer waiting for the business to make enough money to hire a truly fantastic expert.
5. 100 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Beautiful Art by 3dTotal. Well, this might not directly help you with your business, but you’ll learn a crap load more than you ever wanted about how to actually use Photoshop. Then, you’ll be able to apply what you’ve learned to your future projects.
6. Illustrator Tutorials by Designer Today. Photoshop is great for some things, but it’s not a great tool to create your logo in because it doesn’t scale well. If you need to ever make your logo larger it’ll be pixelated. You’ll want to use Photoshop’s sister, Illustrator. This is just one of the many reasons to use Illustrator.

While most of these resources focused on Web Design, it mostly serves as an example of resources that can help you solve the problem of wearing a hat you’re not familiar with!

What constitutes as a project?

First, you want to understand what a project even is. In my opinion, anything that requires several tasks to occur is a project. For example, re-organizing your home or creating a spending budget are small projects. Building a website, or even starting a business revolving around building a website is certainly a medium-to-large sized project. Making a phone call to apply for a credit card is not a project. It’s a task. Keep in mind that any major activity requiring successive or related tasks is most certainly a project, and could benefit from some kind of project management.

What is project management?

In simple terms, project management is the act of organizing and managing a project from research (identifying requirements, researching on the web, identifying solutions), planning, to implementation. With projects requiring several people to be involved, this requires managing allocation of these tasks to various people, and following up to ensure the work has been completed. Time management is key, as inter-dependent tasks will be affected by slip-ups. A good project manager can take these sorts of things into account when the research and planning stages begin, to provide time buffers for standard problems.

The reality is, if you’re an entrepreneur, or you’re just trying to solve some problems around your home or workplace, and you’re actual occupation is not project management, then managing your project can be tedious. It can be even more difficult if you’re responsible for many projects that are all important for the success outcome. You’re not a project manager, and you have better things to do with your time than learn difficult management tools, or create one in Excel.

What tools can help with project management?

Thankfully, you’re in luck, because there are a lot of simplified tools that are available today on the web that can help. Most of these services offer a free trial or a completely free account that have limitations on the number of projects or people that can participate. It gives you a good opportunity to get a feel for the services, and actually use them to get something done.

Best Project Planning Services:

• Basecamp by 37Signals
• goplan by Webreakstuff
• unfuddle by Subventurate, LLC

Basecamp

goplan

unfuddle

Conclusion

All in all, if you pick any of these three services, you’re doing yourself a huge favor. You will have a greater chance of project success, and can keep historical evidence of your progress. None of the free accounts on these services are fully functional, but they provide a good opportunity to get a sense of the capabilities and general feel. Now that I’ve found (and used) all of them, I couldn’t imagine running even the smallest of projects without some kind of management tool.

Tags: projectmanagement, projects, tools, web 2.0, success, business, source code

Cluttered

Clean & Organized

For most of us, the answer is fairly obvious: Clean & Organized. For the rest of you that actually prefer clutter, this article will likely make no sense to you, and you might as well stop reading right now!

Clutter is distracting. Contrary to popular belief, it does not help spawn creativity and get the juices flowing (unless perhaps you have had a dry spell in whatever creative function for many months). Your mind has to process every detail, and it is not given a chance to focus and concentrate. Ideas might immediately arise, but never mature since you are already on the next idea. A handful of crappy ideas is not better than perhaps 2 well thought out, matured ideas. In the clutter garage picture above, you would not be able to think in an environment like that (even if you managed to find a little spot to sit). But if you sat down in the clean garage, you might actually be able to feel peaceful. Those of us who have managed to keep our homes and offices by using a system have realized that we are able to keep our sanity, and have increased our productivity as a result. Additionally, without the distractions of clutter and lost things, we’re able to focus on the things that matter to us.

Experiencing the web is fairly similar. Most web sites try to accomplish too much. I don’t blame them when it comes down to it. High server bills, the cost of bandwidth and employees. It’s expensive to run a web based business, so in turn, companies like to maximize their offerings with targeted advertisement channels, Google AdSense banners, and features-galore. Most companies think that in order to see revenue growth, they need to retain and increase their target audience so that they can charge more for advertising. But in order to retain their user base, they add on as many features as they possibly can, betting that it will keep people around. What they don’t realize though, is they are reducing the chances that their users come back when they add too much advertising or too many features; when they clutter their site, it becomes overwhelming, and sore on the eyes.

Here’s an example:

Why is it that the news posting and article on this site takes up only 1/20th of the space? There is so much extra navigation, advertising, and features that the whole purpose of the site becomes misunderstood and hard to find. This is a news site with articles about AJAX, and so the main purpose is article content. Yet they make it so difficult to read the articles. To me, they are saying that their articles are less important than their widgets filled with other cruft. They want me to work to get to the content. Instead, it feels dirty, and it doesn’t encourage my participation. I never return to sites like these.

Luckily, the Web 2.0 movement is about cleaner, more elegant, and simple designs. Many new web sites are taking hold of these concepts, and applying them. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

Background

Smartphones and Pocket PC phones are now heavily marketed, and more within reach than even 1 year ago. Manufacturers, mobile operating system developers, and carriers such as Microsoft, HTC, Palm, and Verizon have participated in extensive marketing campaigns during this time. Posters and ground mats have invaded subways (often 30 posters at one time).
As these devices are seen as the mobile holy grail of email accessibility, businesses have been the primary target of many of these campaigns.

With the invention of the smaller (but less functional) smartphones, the cost has been dramatically reduced. Smartphones tend to offer more advanced interfaces and capabilities than the traditional clamshell mobile phones, but still provide a simple and reliable phone experience. The more advanced user (technophiles and enterprise customers) tends to purchase PDA-style phones in an effort to combine the functionality of personal/business data management with standard phone functionality.

According to a report by Canalys, in 2005, there were 12,185,600 smart mobile devices shipped worldwide. A year later, 2006, 18,944,310 were shipped. This came to about a 55% growth. Figures for 2007 are still yet to be determined, as the end of Q2 has not arrived yet. The number of smartphones in India are forecasted to double in India.

With all of this growth, and an extensive number of existing applications, I pose the question: Why are Mobile Applications still useless?

Before I address some of the problems, let me clear something up. Some of the existing plethora of applications are actually useful. There are applications to scan and read RSS news feeds, download podcasts, retrieve stock quotes, chat with friends and associates on instant messenger networks, and customizing your phone’s interface. If you can track them down, many of them can be quite helpful, or even fun to use. It would be unfair of me to say that all the hard work put into developing these utilities and games ended up becoming “useless.” Some people even find these things to be nearly perfect. But with that said, in order to see more adoption and growth, some very serious problems do need to get addressed. I welcome other developers to read and address these issues, and follow some basic guidelines when creating new software offerings.

Current problems with Mobile Applications:

1. Most of these applications lack solid and clean design.
   They’re often so clunky and confusing that people outside of geekdom have a problem using them. It has been proven time and time again, that a well thought modern design can tap into a user’s emotion, giving them an enhanced experience. This promotes longevity, loyalty, and simplicity and directly affects the image that consumers have on the company and its products.
2. They’re unstable.
   Most smartphone and pocket pc users have been through this: the occasional or daily soft-resets required to clear out some funky state that is usually caused by a misbehaving third-party application or game, or a conflict between multiple applications.
3. Finding and installing new applications is painfully hard.
   Unless you’re reading mobile phone blogs or digging through huge (and outdated) web-based application directories, you are not aware of the new applications. We’re too busy for that! On-device catalogs that retrieve freeware and commercial applications need to become more useful and prevalent. These are mobile devices that connect to the Internet, so why are we still using our desktop PCs to find and install software for them?
4. Interfaces are inconsistent.
   Each application and game uses a different method of providing menu choices. Some use one of the option keys to present a menu, some rely on tap-and-hold functionality. Others use graphical objects to represent program choices. Still others use no menu at all, and require keystroke combinations. In order to reduce the interface learning curve so that people can spend more time learning the application’s offering, a basic interface consistency needs to materialize. There should be a standardization in how a platform provides access to functionality in an application.
5. Prices are unreasonable for a majority of the commercial offerings.
   Mobile application developers will probably disagree with me, but from a consumer standpoint, applications and games for the mobile platform are ridiculously overpriced. Often, a consumer spends anywhere between $200 and $750 for their smart device. Additionally, they spend money on accessories that the device did not come with in shrinkwrap, such as a leather protector, a cradle/dock, additional memory, charging cables, extended/spare batteries, etc. This often adds at least another several hundred dollars. The device typically comes with a very basic operating system, and requires additional software. Many applications and games are priced anywhere from $20-50 a piece. At this point, these devices become almost equivalently priced to a desktop PC, but only provide a fraction of the functionality. In order to push more sales and increase adoption, mobile software needs to be priced more reasonably. From a developer perspective, time and money is spent on developer toolkits, APIs, training and education, and the investment to borrow/purchase devices to do development and basic QA testing. This ends up increasing the price overall dramatically in order for a development house to make a living. Cross-platform development toolkits, such as the offering from AppForge, will need to come down to a more affordable price tier for small and independent developers. If this doesn’t happen, the platforms will never become standardized, and developers will only focus on the platforms they are familiar with.
6. Lack of creativity.
   As the bulk of even PC software falls under this category, mobile software is not creative enough. For example, there are at least 12 chess games available for the Pocket PC that each try to accomplish the same thing. They all fail in so many ways. None of them have creative interfaces for small screens, and none of them try to introduce new ideas. A fresh outlook on the development of applications and games needs to happen; innovation and creativity need to merge and give birth to new breeds of software. Introduce a new idea, concept, style, or interface.
7. Authors abandon their work.
   Some independent developers spend 1 or 2 years working on a new creation, often times one that actually works. After some time passes, the developer either loses interest, runs out of time due to a day job, or gets discouraged from not making a living from the effort. It is then typical that the developer abandons development of the application and with changes to the platforms, eventually becomes useless or broken on newer systems. There are a lot of applications that have not been updated since 2002, but could benefit from some growth or updating. Sometimes the authors no longer respond to correspondence to their contact information, and typically do not open source their original work. This can lead to end-user frustration, and for software catalogs to be cluttered with stale software.

A Step In The Right Direction

Thankfully, a handful of companies are trying to move things in the right direction. Even with all the controversy attached to the Apple iPhone, just the existence/rumor/announcement of the iPhone has created quite a stir and demand from businesses and consumers for mobile platform developers to create sexy, useful, and easy to use applications. Microsoft has responded to this demand by spinning off and funding ZenZui, a company that has built a prototype platform for delivering high end widgets to the hands of consumers, literally. Whether these particular companies end up with successes is yet to be seen.

Is it my recommendation to independent and small development firms to address some of the issues mentioned above. With improvements to these areas, more users will adopt the mobile platforms and will become more useful over all. The larger companies are taking the lead, and to stay competitive the smaller fish will have to start attacking these issues as soon as possible.