THE DREAM IN ACTION

Today, I’m announcing my plans to close SocialDreamium, LLC.

This decision, which came about over the last month or so, was a challenging and complex one. Either way, I’ll tell you that this decision revolved primarily around money, competition, vision, and team: maybe the most critical factors of a successful startup.

SocialDreamium was attempting to compete is one of the most crowded spaces on the web at the time. We were building a social media application that would aggregate Twitter, Facebook, and other popular networks. Sound familiar? There are many companies with significant funding and resources who are developing similar applications so it became very difficult for us to see a successful path through that market. Our team was strong but faced many challenges of communication and execution. In short, for us to really drive a lot of users to our product over some of the other startups in the space was like trying to put out a fire with a squirt gun.

Overall, I’ve come out of this experience with significant lessons learned that I definitely plan to share in detail over the coming weeks. Our team was able to complete the version one development of our product, REACH, but as we were coming to the finish we said to ourselves, “This won’t compete, do we really want to open this up to the world?” My plan is to blog about these lessons learned to help me institutionalize them so that I don’t make them again in the future. I hope that you’ll follow my RSS to get the details and benefit from my mistakes. A few of the mistakes I’ll share are:

• Not focusing on traditional project management
• Implementing corrective action, managing misses
• Communication strategies & plan
• Understanding team core competencies
• Know your products & the tech
• Be realistic with your competition
• Having passion

Personally, I’m not even close to done. My hunt for the dream has only just begun and my eyes are wide open for the right project or opportunity. As you may have read, I opened The Renliv Group to manage different ventures. Right now I’ll continue business consulting for companies looking to improve their social web presence and internet marketing effectiveness. I continually learn from the people I work with and I want to help others with those goals. You all followed the progress of LibraryForLaos.org and watched us raise over $1800 and fund 5 reading programs for children in rural Laos. This was one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on and I’m excited to be able to help with projects like this with the time I’ll now have. Giving something back and helping others definitely puts the dream in action.

I want to thank two people specifically for their support and advice along the way. Daniel Debow, the CEO of Rypple, has been a sudo adviser to me through this process. He not only was one of the people who inspired me to launch SocialDreamium in the first place, he also provided guidance along the way. His experience and friendship will surely continue to be an asset to me as I continue the search. Also, Ross Kimbarovsky, CEO of crowdSPRING, has continually supported my ideas and excitement. He forced me to hash out ideas for the product and find clarity in its goal. Ross provided challenging feedback for how to handle the “startup at night” lifestyle and why its important to look at the big picture. To both of you, thanks guys.

And last but not least, I have to say that David Abrahams my co-founder and head developer of REACH was awesome to work with. It’s disappointing that nothing ‘publicly’ tangible came of SocialDreamium but the experience for me was phenomenal, I learned a ton from Dave. He has got to be one of the easiest guys to work with and I’m certain that if I was based in Sydney or if he was here in the Midwest the outcome would have been different. Cheers buddy.

More to come…