Reflections on startup life: Week 70

Somewhere between waking up and sitting down at my PC with a coffee this morning and now, we moved some servers around, which consequently took the search offline and while I personally didn’t do much, I was online with Alex, trying to bounce ideas and test while we worked to get things going again.

Then I sat down and a quick two minute question turned into a more far reaching debate about ad placement in Trunk.ly. We put that to rest (not the time to talk about it now), and consequently a discussion about a popup profile card then chewed another hour or so.

Lunch, an email or two and all of sudden here it is, 2PM I’m catching up with my “first thing” blog post of the day.

<breath>

3.30pm and this time I’m getting this done. Did I mention it’s a public holiday here? Important distractions called (come jump on the trampoline Dad).

Actually there wasn’t that much to say! Last week was spent on the contracting gig. What it taught me was simply this. If a startup is hard, then trying to do a full-time job and a startup part time is 100x harder. I’m sure you can show me people who built startups working on them part time, but frankly, I think it’s making your job of building something that is a success so much harder.

I can think of two alternative names for things people work on part time — if they aren’t really making money, “a hobby”, if they are a fully functioning business in their own right “a miracle”. So my advice is don’t get the two confused — if you want a hobby, that’s great and more power to you, but if you want to build a business don’t handicap it by it ALSO needing to be a miracle to succeed.

Still, for the distraction, the money is an essential part of keeping things going — we buy some more runway with this little diversion and that’s always a good thing. That said, it was a real relief to be back in the study and working on making Trunk.ly awesome!

Highlights

• Release of the new build into test
• Nice compliments and blog posts
• Contract has been good fun (if distracting from the “main game”)
• There’s a lot of great people out there who want us to succeed.

Lessons Learnt

• If it’s a choice of job, or startup, it’s startup every time. Which makes the next point hard…
• Money is pretty good. It’s certainly not everything, but it’s a relief.

Goals this week

• Get the new release into user testing (hopefully). Yes, you can be invited if you beg in the comments. Otherwise you’ll just have to wait and see if I picked you.
• Finish the contract.
• Time for a solid think about a few more features and priorities — thinking about the connector redesign in particular.