Our Startup Story

Some dude I’ve never heard of, has 8 words that are the secret of success. They’re below with my thoughts on them. I found them over on Small Biz Bee.

1. Passion – Duh. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, why are you doing it. I’ve found (although i never would have guessed it) that I’m passionate about bringing people together, helping people meet, creating an atmosphere were great things are born.

2. Work – Yeah it’s work. Doing what you love feels less like work, but it’s still work, it’s still hard. Possibly harder than a “job” since failure is on you, you don’t just punch a clock go home, and not care.

3. Focus – This is hard. Tom and I have struggled with this. We’ve been lured to Europe earlier than we probably should have (though we learned good lessons there). We’ve tried to expand into things without looking, etc. Focus is important it’s something I’m trying to get a better grasp on.

4. Persist – I can’t agree more. It’s hard, at least weekly I wonder if I should fold up. Do our last two events and try to find a job. It’s hard, we’re not making much right now, though I feel that’s on the verge of changing, i know it is, but i’m in the now financially, which is tough. I know though, if I persist and work hard and as Gary Vee would say, “Crush It” I’ll succeed.

5. Ideas - This is the fun part. I’m usually not short on ideas. Ditching paper surveys, USB Drives instead of CDs, an AIR app for surveys, etc. It’s fun to think of ways to 1. be a better company, and 2. innovate the completely whacked out, old school conference business. Some ideas are awesome, some, not so much. Tom and I are at our absolute best when we’re throwing ideas at each other, sharing the “Ah snap! That’s awesome!” moments.

6. Good – This is important. Tom is a bible thumper :) I’m not, but I do believe in Karma, and we both agreed, even before we had money to give that we’d make sure we gave 20% of each event’s profit to charity. Whether it’s a check, or service, or something else. We agreed, and as Tom moves on I intend to continue the tradition, that 10% goes to the community out event serves, and 10% will be to a charity making the world a better place. I firmly believe that any business not doing good for the world around it, isn’t doing enough. We haven’t always been in a position to write a check, and it makes us sad, but when we are, it’s the best feeling on Earth.

7. Push – This is tough. My wife pushes me. She pushes me because she wants to see me succeed, and she pushes me because she wants the company to make money so we can pay the bills. Both are incredibly important. I also push myself, for both of those reasons, but also I push myself (And I push Tom for a few more months) because I think we’re doing a good thing, and I want to continue to do that good thing.

8. Serve – Easy. Tom and I have never lost sight of who we serve. We serve two masters; sponsors, and attendees. Sponsors pay us to get in front of our attendees, to meet them, to introduce them to their product or service. Sometimes they sponsor just to help the community. But we owe it to them to make the event the best it can be, have the most attendees we can, etc. The attendees on the other hand, pay us to see and hear the speakers, to meet the rest of the community, and to learn. We owe it to them to make sure the event delivers all that and more. It’s not always easy, but we’ve never lost sight of why we do events. We do them to serve the community with something we believe it lacked. We’ll continue to serve them, until they tell us otherwise :)

I’m not sure these were necessarily secrets, but they’re truths for sure. At least in my opinion. What do you think? Are there more? Are there other ‘secrets’ you think valuable?

Watch the video it’s a good use of 3 minutes. My take away. Success is charging people $4000 to attend an event, that they they have to be invited to… ok it’s not, but damn talk about reinforcing “A fool and his money…”

Tom and I had the pleasure of supporting the Flex Charity Code Jam at two different 360|Flex events (Seattle ’07 and San Jose ’08). Both times it was an awesome success due to hard work of the organizer, Ali Daniali. Here’s how it works.

Ali picks a charity before our conference begins.  He comes to the show with a spec of what needs to be built.  He announces the project during the Monday keynote. People start volunteering their time Monday morning after the Keynote. From that point until the Wednesday keynote, developers work pretty much 24 hours a day in a mad coffee, red bull, soda, and pizza supported frenzy with Ali being the overseer of all. In the end, a local charity get’s an RIA that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford.

Both times in the past it’s been a local food bank. In San Jose the food bank got a food locator, to help people locate food pick up areas in their area, it was very awesome. (Side note, if you’re wondering how ‘poor people’ have access to the internet, it’s easy. The poverty line is pretty high, plenty of people have jobs, but still don’t make enough to put food on their tables.)

Tom and I support the effort by providing a room at the conference and a suite at the hotel, so that the coding only has to stop while folks move from one location to the other. We usually provide the white board, markers, coffee, and pizza, etc. That’s it.  We take no credit for the brilliant outcome, only pride in helping make the outcome a possibility and reality by providing a place for it to happen.

The only thing we can’t cover is travel for Ali or payment for his time/effort.  In Seattle, he was local so travel wasn’t an issue.  In San Jose Adobe covered his travel, which worked out really well. Mad props to Adobe for stepping up like that.

It was awesome in San Jose, because on top of supporting the codejam itself, Tom and I were able to donate $7,000 to the food bank. Not only did they get a killer RIA that made a huge impact in the community, they also got enough money to buy 14,000 meals. It felt kinda nice to hand those folks a Publishers Clearing House style check for $7000.

Let’s fast forward to our upcoming event in May, 360|Flex Indianapolis. The Organizer of the Charity Code jam’s been out of work for a while (yeah sucks, hard).  This means he doesn’t have the resources to come to Indy or even organize it like he *wants* to. Definitely a suck factor of 10.

We can say with 100% certainty, that if our company could hire someone who could not only organize a charity project and get it built in 50 some odd hours, with all volunteer effort, we’d do it. If it was just a matter of a few thousand dollars for his time setting the event up and a plane ticket to get him to the event, we’d be all over that like spammers on an open mail server.  Thing is we can’t afford it yet.  We’re still trying to make sure we can get paid to do the conference thing 100% of the time with no side projects.

Wouldn’t it be cool if software vendors, like Adobe and Microsoft, hired people like Ali to do these code jams full time.  We know Ali had aspirations of doing 4 or 5 code jams a year.  Think of how many lives his efforts would affect (those receiving/using the project and those volunteering to code it).  Think of how much good juju and karma (not to mention press, if they played it up a bit more) the company would get.

Ah, the frustrations of not being a large enough company to make the world a better place yet, and seeing others with the means not doing it.  Someday, we’ll have the resources to step up and make sure great opportunities like this get realized.  However, this is one case where we wish someone would beat us to the punch.