I read an article by Ben Stein last night titled “Success Is All in a Day’s Work”. In the article Ben describes the conversation he had with a new writer who had big ambitions, but not the drive & work ethic to get there. I think this article describes what I like to call the “startup dream”. Startup life has been made out to be the nerd’s version of a rock star. Usually the success of the startup/business is whats glorified, but rarely is it mentioned the undying determination and work to get there.

A Wasted Weekend

…
Today, a Sunday, I had a long phone conversation with a young man who lives in Washington, D.C., my ancestral home. He’s 30 years old and a highly talented writer. He aspires to be famous, although right now he’s a humble writer for as newsletter about environmental protection legal issues. He calls me many times each day and tells me how eager he is to be famous and much better-paid.

When this man, whom I’ll call Chuck, called me on my car phone, I asked him what he’d done with his weekend. “I played tennis,” he said. “Then I swam, then I hung out at a bar in Georgetown. That was on Saturday. Today, I played tennis and swam, then watched the football game, and now I’m about to go to a movie.”

He asked me what I did with my weekend. “Well, you’re 30 and I’m 62,” I replied. “So on Saturday I researched some issues about hedge funds. Then I studied the performance of some of my investments. Then, today, I worked very hard on a research paper on basic economic issues of hedge funds, and then I did some investigation into the performance of defunct auto parts companies.”

“Wow, he said. “I wish I could have done that.”

The Truth Hurts

By then I was out of patience. “Look,” I said, “you want to be a writer. No one knows who you are now outside a tiny circle. But you’re a good writer. Why don’t you write a short freelance article every day? Just on whatever comes into your mind. Then try to get them published. Throw them against the wall. If one in three gets published, in a year you’ll be really well-known and in five years you’ll be a household name.”

“But I don’t have that many ideas,” he said.
Read the rest of this entry »

Moved: http://www.findmotive.com/2008/03/24/twitpic-now-integrated-into-twhirl/

I want to start this off by saying I’m not bashing ruby or any specific language. I want to share hang ups that I went through and other’s have went through, when dealing with hype about other development languages and frameworks.

While surfing around the internets today I came across a blog post from Gravatar and it really hit home with me. Basically Gravatar rewrote its entire site from Ruby on rails to PHP. Below is an excerpt:

The first thing we did, after stabilizing the service, was set out to rewrite Gravatar in PHP. Now before we launch into any holy wars I’d like to point out that our decision on this matter had nothing to do with Ruby, or Rails — in fact we have a great respect for both! The reason, the only reason, we switched is that PHP is our core competency at Automattic. As a PHP application we will be able to apply the sum total of our collective abilities to bear on any problems that Gravatar might face. The guys I work with are genuinely some of the most technically gifted people I know!

The line in bold above is what really set me straight and this applies to any language.

The bottom line is this: Develop with what you know and don’t get hung up on deciding which language to build your app with or which framework is the best. Just do it, you have bigger decisions to deal with. It doesn’t really matter if you use Ruby & Rails or PHP & Cake, what matters is your product.

I’ve been developing in PHP since 2000 and it has been my core language for web development ever since. I’ve been reading up on Ruby/Rails in my spare time this year and I’ve found Ruby to be a beautiful language and Rails is a great framework, but I can accomplish the same thing in PHP right now without the learning curve and the end result will be the same.

Found this article today and thought it was worth posting, since I’m in this category.

My favorite stage of a startup is the early, early days. This is when things are the most chaotic, resources are limited and the team is small enough to fit a single car.

Tips For Startups:  The Early, Early Days

1.  You don’t need office space:  Plenty of startups do just fine working out of a basement or spare bedroom.

2.  Don’t Bargain Shop For Small Things:  Resist the temptation to find the best deal on cheap things (like computers).  It may be personally satisfying to save $50 on a printer, but you’re wasting valuable time.

3.  Think Of A Good Name:  Spend at least a few hours thinking about a name for your business.  Read a couple of practical articles on the topic.  Talk to other people to test your names.  Most entrepreneurs spend too little time (as in almost none) on a company name.  A good name won’t make your startup successful, and a bad one won’t make it fail, but some simple guidelines help.  And, a name is hard to change later.

4.  No Fancy Titles: Don’t waste time coming up with fancy titles for the founders.  Simply use “founder” for your title and get back to real work.

5.  Forget Business Plans:  Instead of laboring over your business plan, labor over your business.  If you do work intensely on your business plan, assume that you are the only person that will ever read it.  Even your mom and you spouse won’t read it.  Potential investors will definitely not read it.

6.  Avoid Pontificators:  Early team members all need to do something.  Don’t recruit pontificators.  Beware the pure “idea people”.  You want “get things done” people.  There will always be more ideas in your startup than there are people to execute them.

7.  Venture Funding Is Hard:  Raising venture funding is actually harder than bootstrapping — especially if it’s your first startup.  Try and figure out a way to get going without funding.  Take the hundreds of hours you’ll save and go help customers solve problems.

8.  Allocate Most Time To Customer Value:  Act as if someone is paying you $1,000/hour for every hour you spend making life measurably better for your customers — and $10/hour for everything else.  In the long-run, the ratio will be about right.

9.  Part-Time Is Sub-Optimal (but OK):  Many people will tell you that you are unlikely to succeed with a startup if you’re working on it just nights and weekends.  They’re probably right.  But, better nights and weekends than waiting forever to get things kicked off.

10.  Get Started!  I have yet to meet someone that took the leap, quit their job, started a company and regretted their decision (regardless of outcome).  Most people that have great jobs over-estimate the risk of leaving them.  Great people can almost always find another job if things go really, really poorly with their startup.

Read the full article at OnStartups.

Thanks for stopping by. We hope you enjoy what we post. We will mainly be posting information about our projects and other stuff about nusoni, but from time to time we may share things that we find useful.

Be sure to subscribe to our feed