Contrast.ie launches

Contrast launched this week to a great many hangovers the following morning, the way Irish launch parties should be I guess. 

I've been going through a massive back catalog of Ruby Fringe podcasts and had the lowdown of Eoghan McCabe and Paul Cambell on the Ruby Fringe podcast last night discussing their latest and greatest application.  Now I have to say, I'm a massive fan of Get Exceptional, it has the opportunity to make life so much easier for contractors.  Imagine a client waking up to find over 100 errors have screwed up an application you designed and developed, something you have staked your reputation on.  

Well, fear no more, exceptional allows for rapid SMS notifications that an issue has occurred and allows for graceful notifications too so your inbox isn't spammed to death.  Fixing an issue before the client even realizes there is an issue is always a good way to earn brownie points.  It comes in the form of a open source ruby gem and is pretty damm nifty, especially for production systems.

Best of luck in the future guys, not that you'll need it.

Defining success and getting outta dodge

So you've built your prototype and are suddenly making money.  Now what direction do you take?  In what sense do you measure your companies success?  For many software companies they are always asked "What's your exit strategy?" by VC's.  It's something that I've been giving a great deal of thought to, at what point will I stop doing what I love so much?

Now that you are now the hottest shit since "Vampire Zombie battles" in the tubes and you have developed the coolest application ever, what are you defining your success to be? When looking at an investment I would imagine that questions will be asked of your user base.  Whats your demographic, how many do you have and are they paying money for your app?  You can have a million people using your service, if you are not making revenue off of them, well, what use are they?  Obviously you have not thought this whole business thing out properly then eh?  With Google having re-defined free service offerings apparently no-one wants to pay for anything anymore.  Just remember that if it's a good enough service, the money will come.  But to get them hooked, give them an incentive, get them thinking that this is the best service since bread was sliced and they just cannot live without it.  

So, the business is now profitable, money is coming in, but you want to go to the next level.  So now you are suddenly being told to sell, sell, sell your baby to a larger organization.  Being bought out by the larger business is heartbreaking stuff, Watching it being taken in the wrong direction is something which would tug on the heartstrings of any entrepreneur.  The wad of cash that is now your bed will defintely help, as will the steady supply of toilet paper printed with presidents faces but should you give up something that you have worked so hard for for so long? I guess that is a decision everyone must grapple with one day, take the money, live the life of luxery, pay some bills or continue on with your company.  

A huge wad of cash, is that success?  It's everyone's wet dream, the VC's swoop in, give you loads of lolly to go public with your company.  This is the pipe dream, something that can happen to the rare few in their wildest fantasies.  You would want to be offering something truly unique in order to get to this level, not everyone can be the next Google or VM-Ware.  The founders are usually kicked off to the side at this point, left to come out during press conferences and used as the face of the company, in the meantime, a new CEO is hired and all the important decisions are now made by the board of directors.  Everyone has a price, it's just finding what the currency is that is the problem.

Normal startups outside of the Internet space take years upon years to flesh out and develop, software startups are no different.  Give them a chance, give them some love, sweat and blood and they will repay you back tenfold.  The reason why I'm looking to commence my own business is that I want to develop something that that succeeds, something that gives people a bit of freedom in their day to day lives and something that I am satisfied with.  I just hope that I never forget the reason I wanted to build a company; corporate life does not interest me. Being like any other company does not interest me, being exciting, unique, innovative and loved by your customers, I don't know a single entrepreneur who does not dream of that.  To me, that defines success, not money nor fame.  Doing a good decent job and knowing that you have helped people out, that is my motivation.  How many of you feel the same?

Office Necessities 101

So I've been thinking quite a bit about what facilities should be provided within a company to it's employees.  So for a startup company I kinda figure that it should be minimalistic to the extreme. As I kinda figure that for an IT company, I would initially be bootstrapping the operation I have for the past year been thinking about different areas vital for the success and happiness of the company and employees. Making your employees happy does not have to break the bank, it just has to show you care about their wellbeing.  Remember, it's the small things that count.  I've narrowed it down to the following items for a small startup:

Fast Internet Access

In this day and age, Internet access is a necessity.  Browsing the web may be regarded as a hinderance in some industries however in mine it is often regarded as sources of inspiration, discovering new techniques and methods for problem solving.  I really do figure that a sure sign that a company is dying is when they start sending their employees on extremely expensive training courses to learn for example a new programming language or tool.  It seems very strange to me to waste large amounts of money on those courses especially when all the required material that is taught on these courses are available directly from the web.  I should emphasise that the access should be as fast as possible.  Many interesting resources are now coming over in screencast form which requires decent bandwidth to watch, besides, if an employee is waiting an age to do something like this, you are losing money due to lack of productivity.  

Having lived in China for some time I was often quite annoyed by some of the speeds outside of the mainland, this was due to mainly government filtering however I can imagine many others were in a worse situation than me.  Having worked in this Chinese company for some time I can only imagine the difficulties their IT department encountered daily to get direct stable connections to the United States for rapid development, testing and deployment of large solutions. 

A Clean Comfortable Adjustable Environment

I don't know how many times I have heard about people complaining about bad backs, sore eyes and migraines.  I myself notouriously suffer from extreme cases of migraines however I am often spending 16+ hours a day in front of a monitor.  Solutions such as enforcing breaks between coding sessions, comfortable erogonomic chairs, correctly positioned monitors and desks, really do make life a lot easier for your employees.  As I said, it's all about the small things.  Having coffee at hand 24x7 is vital.  Startups do not keep regular working hours, it is often a case of working hard all day, working hard all night.  It is not something I recommend to everyone but some people need more in their life. They need to be part of an idea and seeing it through. So back to the office, having clean facilities makes a huge difference.  Working in a logistics company for a time I noticed that for an office of 5 people they had a maid come in every morning, just to empty garbage, clean floors, freshen up desks and take away stale cups of coffee.  It's really worth noticing the smiles on the staffs faces when they were smelling fresh scents around their work environment, it really does make a huge difference.  

My personal favourite was when I was working in Dalian, every evening without fail during the winter I was privy to some of the most epic sunsets of my lifetime.  Having a great view from where you do your daily slog is extremely beneficial, especially when you just need to take 5 minutes out of your day with your jaw open, gaping at it's beauty.  The chances of this happening in a small startup are remote as hell with the likelyhood of working from your parents basement much more plausabile.

An Efficient Storage Solution

Investing in hardware at the start while working on a prototype is probably a venture doomed to deadpool hell, spending over 5 grand on a server is a bit much initially with zero capital coming in so I would think about perhaps using a third party solution like say slicehost to manage a virtualised solution.  Extra machines can be daisy-chained together to provide quite an efficient clustered environment.  Alternatively leverage various clouds that are in existance through their API's, such as Amazon and the upcoming Google Apps service.  I have had first hand experience working with companies who have not thought far enough ahead to anticipate these types of issues, they are a nightmare to workaround as once employees get comfortable with one insufficient solution, it is a difficult challenge to break their mindset and habits. 

The reason I really do mention storage solutions is that it is incredibly annoying when that piece of code you wrote 2 weeks ago was not correctly backed up, or the drive that it was on crashed out.  I have seen companies rely on one storage system, there was never a backup of that backup. I myself have lost over 1 TB of data this past month with not just 1 drive failing, but both, simultanously.  I think there was a gremlin and coffee involved.

So I'm coming to an end with this blog post, in future episodes I'll be talking about the main requirement of a startup - incredibly smart people.  Also, coming up with an idea will be something I'll be also dwelling on too.  If you have any other suggestions I'd love to hear from you, as always, comments are extremely welcome.