Collective Detective Blog Archives

Vote for our SXSW 2010 Panel: My Start-Up Relationship

Every year it seems like the time to start getting ready for SXSW is earlier and earlier. Already the voting selection has begun for Interactive panels and this year we took a different approach with our panel submission.

Organized by Traci Miller, our Chief Mischief Officer, the panel: “My Start-up Relationship” talks about the other-side of being in a micro-business/start-up: How it impacts the relationship with your significant other, especially when you work together. Here’s the panel description:

It’s hard to leave work at work and home at home. What happens when they’re one in the same? This panels discusses the challenges of working and living with a spouse or friend that is a business partner.

And here’s some questions and topics that will get covered:

1. Your business partner is your spouse? Ahhh!
2. How to separate work from home.
3. What happens if it gets to be too much?
4. How to put your offline other at ease.
5. How to pull their attention away without making it seem you’re unsupportive.
6. What paperwork you need to have in place – no matter what!
7. Living and working together isn’t working, what’s the next step?
8. How to communicate, communicate, communicate!
9. Should we separate duties?
10. Schedule work nights and fun nights and stick to it.

We’ve got some interesting material already planned and may have some Collectivus surprises in store. (Yes, we’ll have launched by then.)

If you are heading to SXSW, please drop us a line. We’d love to meet you in person and hope you’ll both vote and attend our panel.

If you don’t plan on heading down to Austin next March, panel footage is usually posted online a few weeks after the event so you’ll still be able check it out. A quick sign-up and your support by giving our panel the “Thumbs Up” would be appreciated.

Enjoy the Show: Notes From SXSW

We’ve been back for a week now from SXSW and I’m just getting unburied enough to organize many of the notes I took while in Austin. It’s interesting that in tough economic times such as these, when companies are scaling back and cutting costs that SXSW set new attendance records.

I believe that this is partly because while the ROI for attending a show such as South-By can’t be precisely quantified, the value of getting together with industry peers is immeasurable. Austin becomes the tech center of the universe for one week every year; being there is being part of the energy, culture, and creativity of an industry that is doing nothing short of changing online culture in small and large ways.

Every year, I get notes or tweets from people who didn’t go and swear they will go next year; I hope they take the opportunity to experience it. As a veteran of many shows and conferences, I’m happy to lend advice on everything from what to see, to what hotel to book. We start planning all over again this summer; stay tuned.

Here are some notes from this year, but they can be applied to many other conferences and situations:

Face Time

There’s no substitute for meeting people you know online in person — none! The content doesn’t always tell you about the author and vice versa. For example: We had the pleasure of running into Merlin Mann and John Gruber and hanging out with them for a few hours one night. They had a great panel and these are writers who by their own admission can be “douchey,” as they put it. They were the nicest, most gracious gentlemen and a pleasure to just get to know and hang out with. Read their sites; follow them on Twitter!

On the flip-side, I read many reports of “web-celebs” having diva-like attitudes if they weren’t recognized or treated like some kind of famous person. They are not worth your valuable time. It’s important to not only weigh the value of content you’re getting, but consider the source.

Build Relationships, Not Networks

While there’s certainly a value to trying to promote your product or service, I believe that your time at these events are much better spent meeting people and forming relationships that will last beyond the show, not pitching and pressing business cards into as many hands as possible.

Don’t get me wrong, many of the same networking goals can be accomplished, but there’s just so many people pitching and hustling — so much noise and vying for attention, that I will take away more from a conversation we had over a beer and a game of pool than the fabulous game-changing site you’re launching and pitching me in the elevator.

In hindsight, I’m glad we didn’t have anything to launch. I think it would have created a false pressure to promote rather than relate.

Share the Love

Like many others, I believe that it’s the responsibility of all of us to help each other out. Many of the panels at these shows are about imparting that kind of knowledge; that’s obviously got tremendous value. I’m talking about taking that one-on-one time to talk with someone about their project, their challenges, their successes, failures, and fears. I can’t tell you how many sessions or meetings I missed this year because of taking the time to talk with someone and provide whatever perspective I could. I’m happy to have taken the time and will continue to do so.

One that really touched me personally was a lady with a faltering start-up who just had tears in her eyes over the frustration of all the energy and effort she’s put into her project. We stood there for 20 minutes after a panel and talked about the setbacks and failures we’ve had, the struggles that we all go through. There are tons of blog posts about people making it as well as crashing and burning, but I think you need to be able to look someone in the eye sometimes to help communicate that you’ve been there too, that it’s okay to doubt, and that sometimes you need to fail before you can succeed. Did it help her? I don’t know, but we tried.

Another notable experience was our quest to track-down the Hey Cupcake! truck driving around Austin. We eventually did and wound up in a conversation with one of the owners about how they might leverage this viral following they had online using tools like Twitter and features like a “Find the Cupcake Truck” feature on the site. There was nothing in it for us other than perhaps good karma and the ease of finding yummy cupcakes more easily next year.

Twitter and Brightkite Are Your Friends

I imagine that the demographic reading this post needs no introduction to Twitter or Brightkite. At a show like this, services like these are tremendously valuable in maintaining connections and getting together with people. I was in line for badges and out of the corner of my eye, recognized a friend I’d made the previous year. Not wanting to get out of line, I twittered out to him quick and he circled back for us to catch up.

As I’ve written before, put more than just your email on your business card to make it easier for people to reach you. Sometimes the opportunity to connect at the show is better than waiting to go home and write “nice to have met you” emails after-the-fact.

Part-time Projects? We Haz ‘Em!

The biggest reassuring thing we got from everyone else this year was how many of us are working on side or part-time projects. There’s so many posts out there that say if you’re not willing to quit your day job or take the plunge full-time, you’re not dedicated enough to your vision. It’s not true! It was so awesome that many of the people we met were also working on a passion project too. Thank you to everyone we met who shared their stories with us!

Social Media Whatever

We tend to laugh off anyone calling themselves “social media experts,” but those people could be making a killing working with SXSW musicians on how to better leverage the online space to build better presence and brand. We saw so many good bands who are just doing a crap job promoting themselves online. Big opportunities in that space to help a musician out!

Believe Everything and Nothing

If there’s only one piece of advice I can impart, it’s this: Work on what makes you happy. You can drive yourself nuts attending panels with conflicting advice, reading blogs advising you of the formulas to success, listening to people you think have it figured out that are just as terrified of failure as you are. Make up your own mind on what guidance to hold onto and what to drop on the floor.

One thing you absolutely will find at a show like SXSW will be the opportunity to make new relationships, meet helpful people, and get exposure to all of the information and people you need to re-energize the passion for your cause and empowered with more ways to make it successful.

See you next year!

This is How We Roll

We’ve recently been getting some questions about what the story is with Collective Detective? I thought it might be a good idea to write a post about how we’re set-up and operate because:

• People were asking: Our accountant, people from high school tracking me down, Mom, etc.
• We haven’t posted an update in awhile
• We’re about to make our annual pilgrimage to SXSW where we’ll be telling our tale. However, many of these people will have had many drinks and/or have talked to many other people, so we thought it best to have a refresher post ready when they wonder how our cards wound up in their pocket and looked us up.
• There are others out there who operate in a similar capacity or are thinking about it. You’re not alone!

It’s a Micro-What?

Collective Detective is what is best described as a “micro-business.” We develop creative projects on the side. A few month’s ago, Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo, did a pretty good summary of what exactly this is in an email called “The Future of Startups.” He used the term “micro-startup,” but we prefer “micro-business.” “Startup” is sometimes an abused and trendy buzzword like “beta.” We’ve got a plan around being profitable with our projects quickly and have long-term goals and vision. We’re not looking to build something to offload for a quick payday or build something with no idea how to monetize it.

Anyway, the whole email is a very good read, but here’s the summary I’m referring to:

The zero cost startup has led to the age of the “microstartup.” It’s
no longer two folks in a garage hoping to build a prototype in order
to land a huge VC round, then getting millions of dollars to build out
an office. Microstartups are sustainable from prototype to launch and
on to a core user base, all for around $5-10,000 in costs.

That’s us in a nutshell. Some people buy an old beat-up Ford Mustang to work on in the garage on nights and weekends. For us, new ideas are the cars in the garage we enjoy working on.

Cash or Umm…Cash?

We’re self-funded. We put money into the business account and have a 1-to-N prioritized budget. The money covers reoccurring expenses and accumulates for known future expenses. If the money isn’t there, that next item or task waits until it is — simple as that.

We’re a small team. Coding, graphics, wire framing, paperwork, contracts, business strategy, etc. are all currently managed by two people. We have careers, so we work nights and weekends on our projects. We have a lawyer, an accountant and a few people advising us. As you can imagine, this keeps us pretty stretched resource-wise, so a long development cycle is something we’ve had to be content with. We’re nimble and can quickly adjust, but we’re not yet that fast.

Patience Helps

Collectivus, our current project, has been worked on for years in some way, shape or form, but it was only around a year ago when the concept was really dusted off and reworked into what we now refer to as the “manifesto.” It’s a detailed plan of the entire vision.

A few months ago, we started making planning choices of what to break off from the manifesto in order to create a scope of work that would be the initial release and could be executed against without external funding. This is another important tip regardless of your project size and resources: No matter how passionate you are about aspects of your project, you need to be merciless about what to cut and where to prioritize. You want to release as fast as you can and iterate on that; building some monolithic app up-front is a bad idea. Of course “fast” is relative, especially in our case. It’s not easy and you sometimes need to recognize you’re too close to it and seek outside perspective to get back on track.

It’s Not (Just) About the Money

So I guess the last piece of useful information (if you’ve found any of this useful) is an explanation of why we’ve chosen this path. We certainly have enough industry know-how, connections, and experience to have pursued VC or angel funding, even before the economy went belly-up; we’re bootstrapping on purpose.

Why?

A few reasons:

• First is vision. we have a very specific vision and when someone’s giving you a check, you’re giving them control. The value of that control is very lopsided if you don’t have a product building value through growing usage, brand-recognition, and revenue. We’re not against outside money when the time or need is right, but right now, we can get by without.
• Second is passion. It’s great that people “in the know” are excited to hear about Collectivus and frustrating sometimes that progress on it isn’t faster, but if this project was being driven by a need to get it to market before the grocery money ran out, it wouldn’t be as good.
• Third is harder to explain. We’re not building you’re typical web application, it’s something else. That “something else” quite frankly would have added layers of writing extraneous proposals and plans. We’d rather spend the time just building it and showing you what we mean.
• Last is life. Sometimes you need to put the code down and walk around in the sunshine. We see too many people who are consumed by the start-up lifestyle: All work and never coming up for air. I was that guy in a past life. It doesn’t make us any less passionate about our work when we take a weekend off to go to New York. If someone’s funding us, our work ethics wouldn’t let us rest until that ROI was achieved.

I hope you’ve found this informative. We’re not a typical business, but where’s the adventure in being typical?