THE DREAM IN ACTION

Last week I drove back up to Milwaukee for the first time since my move in early August to speak at Web414. I was asked by the founder of Web414, Gabe, to share my experience of failing at a startup (SocialDreamium), a topic that people usually shy away from sharing.

The main reason that I accepted the offer to share this experience and expose myself and the weakness’s of my first startup is the fact that I think sharing, claiming, and learning from failures is likely the single best way to promote trying. Doing a startup is tough and risky but what we need more of, EVERYWHERE, is trying. Eliminating the fear of doing a startup is important. We can do that by realizing that if things don’t go well your career won’t be over, you won’t be crucified, and you’ll likely be better off for it!

I would love to get your thoughts on the talk, please comment!

Below is the presentation that went along with the talk.

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Learning From Others

As I work on my “Lessons Learned” post after closing down SocialDreamium (post should be ready by Wednesday) there is one main lesson that sticks out above the rest. The one lesson that I couldn’t wait until Wednesday to post is the importance of learning from others experiences! As a first time company launcher I was green to so many pitfalls that I could potentially succumb to. What I attempted to do, and will continue to focus on, is learning from the mistakes of others.

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
- Otto von Bismarck

So, as I continue to focus on this, the next questions become, how do I know who to learn from? How do I access these individuals? And where can I converse with them in order to learn from their learnings? lanjut →

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.

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The first version of this post was a bit more detailed but I lost it because of wordpress sucking…here’s the second version.

Brad Feld wrote a post encouraging people not to post “2009 Predictions” or “2008 Year in Review” posts…I agree with him. I commented…

Brad- On the whole I completely agree, however, I will say that looking back on the year past is a good exercise if you do it with the attitude of, “what can we learn from 2008″. I always think its a good idea to look backward for lessons and forward for opportunities.

So, here are 3 lessons I learned. Please share your lessons from 2008 in the comments, I’d love to benefit from your experiences.

Lessons

1) Find out what is important and keep it close. I got engaged on Dec 26th and with the wide spread pessimism in the economy and around the world, I couldn’t feel any more optimistic about my future with the future Mrs. Graves.

2) If something motivates you, do it. One of the hardest things to find is passion and motivation in your professional life. If you stumble across something you enjoy that is motivating, then chase after it fervently. This world would be a lot better off if people did more things they enjoy and the likelihood of success is much higher if you enjoy your work.

3) Make the social web real. I’ve spent the last 6 months making a concerted effort to meet people in real life or over the phone from Twitter. There are more and more amazingly talented people joining the social web everyday making it more and more powerful. To fully take advantage of that power you’ve got to make web connections become real relationships.

Tonight I was reading the Harvard Business Publishing site and there was an article that caught my eye. It was called, What Surfing Can Teach Us About Managing the Unexpected, and was all about responding to such tough economic times. The point was made, very well, that it’s not so important how we react to economic changes but more about how we prepare and position ourselves in a timely manor to take advantage of such turbulence. This point is hitting me strong as I think about timing and positioning, first I’ll share an excerpt from the article…

Instead of paddling around in circles as though we were in some calm lake, we need to learn to act like surfers — to place ourselves in the rising and falling swells, paddling forward while glancing occasionally backwards, so that we will be ready when the big wave comes. If we do that, we will stand up at the right moment, establish our balance, take a deep breath, and ride the exhilarating force of history all the way to shore.

Growing up surfing this analogy really make sense to me. When teaching surfing (I used to give lessons) I’ve always told people that “riding waves is pretty easy, but catching them is almost impossible”. This makes so much sense from a business standpoint too because the right business idea could be ridden out by many folks…these are called employees…sure it still takes work, but not nearly as difficult. What is practically impossible is catching that wave, starting and executing on the right business in the right market, with the right product, and the right people. Timing and positioning.

I’m encouraged that SocialDreamium is actual timed well and positioned accordingly. On Read Write Web today there was a post about how Tech firms are hiring Developers and Community Managers. This is a strong affirmation that the market SocialDreamium is going after is an important, emerging market with a need. If we can develop software that meets the needs and solves the problems that community managers are having we will be successful. But, we must also build the right team and focus on the right targets.

So far, so good.

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This pitch was given by John Buckman, Founder of Magnatune at LeWeb Paris today and really hits home for me. It includes phenomenal lessons of starting up as well as great lessons for people looking for a job and deciding what type of work to get involved in. I’ve talked on Twitter and on this blog about how important it is for me to find a work environment that intersects passion and pocket book. I also believe that finding that is a continual path, not a destination.

There are a lot of slides but you can get through them in a few minutes and it’s well worth watching.

Today when Amazon had there little S3 hick-up, the pictures/avatars in Twhirl (my Twitter app of choice) wouldn’t show up. I realized that my experience using Twitter was significantly worse without the picture and I realized that the picture that shows up next to the 140 character message is significantly important.

In the olden days when people would constantly check away messages on AIM the messages were fairly impersonal. Those away message were just left for whoever cared to view it. You had to actually go into each persons away message in order to view it. With Twitter the message comes to you, there is much more of the feeling that the person wrote that tweet ‘for me to see’ versus ‘for people to see’.

Now after using Twitter for a while I now know the people I follow by their avatars and I realized that this avatar makes the tool (Twitter) so much more personal. This personal aspect of Twitter makes the messages worth checking.  This is one reason why Twitter works so well, its personal.

Lesson: Keep it personal.