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.

Links Mentioned:

Web414

SocialDreamium

What I’d like to see more of in Chicago

Eric Ries – StartupLessonsLearned

CrowdSpring post about studying competitors

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?

Well there is this small tool on the world wide web called Twitter (come back from the earths core if you don’t know about it). Entrepreneurs, can finally be reached and because of the relative “new-ness” of Twitter they’re still accessible. Use this list below to reach out to people, ask questions, avoid future mistakes, and learn.

Entrepreneurs on Twitter

Name w/ blog link, rank change from blog order, @twitterhandle, position & company (twitter followers)

Update: For your benefit there have been a few add ons

*list ordered by follower count

1. Tim O’Reilly, +3 (@timoreilly) Founder / CEO of O’Reilly Media (525,728)
2. Jason Calacanis, +3 (@jasoncalacanis) CEO of Mahalo (68,583)
3. Chris Pirillo, +9 (@chrispirillo) Geek, Internet entrepreneur, hardware addict, et al (65,181)
4. Mark Cuban, +11 (@mcuban) Owner Dallas Mavericks; Founder Broadcast.com (59,888)
5. Jeff Pulver, +13 (@jeffpulver) VOIP entrepreneur (26,538)
6. Loic Le Meur, +20 (@loic) Founder / CEO Seesmic, Founder Le Web (26,499)
7. Dave McClure, +20  (@davemcclure) Serial entrepreneur now adviser (20,100)
8. Craig Newmark, +25 (@craignewmark) Craig from Craigslist (12,030)
9. Jason Fried, -6 (@jasonfried) 37signals co-founder Jason Fried (11,475)
10. David Heinemeier Hansson, -2 (@dhh) Co-founder 37signals (11,249)
11. Paul Stamatiou, +29 (@stammy) Founder / CEO @ Skribit (11,204)
12. Anil Dash, +25 (@anildash) Co-founder Six Apart (11,041)
13. Ross Mayfield, +7 (@ross) Co-founder / President of SocialText (10,970)
14. Joel Spolsky, -13 (@spolsky) Founder / CEO at Fog Creek Software (9,558)
15. Jason Shellen, +29 (@shellen) Founder / CEO at Plinky (7,555)
16. Dharmesh Shah, -6 (@dharmesh) Founder / CEO of HubSpot (7,102)
17. David Sifry, +6 (@dsifry) Founder / CEO at Technorati (6,713)
18. Caterina Fake, +18 (@caterina) Co-founder Flickr (6,595)
19. Andrew Chen, -3 (@anderw_chen) Serial entrepreneur (3,971)
20. Jonathan Schwartz, -13 (@SunCEOBlog) CEO at Sun (2,964)
21. Christopher Carfi, +9 (@ccarfi) Co-founder Cerado (2,820)
22. Eric Ries, +10 (@ericries) CTO and serial entrepreneur (2,639)
23. Ryan Kuder +0 (@ryankuder) Founder /Neighborsville.com (2,475)
24. Rahul Sood, +26 (@rahulsood) Founder VoodooPC (1,889)
25. Nivi Babak, -15 (@nivi) Entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs succeed (1,637)
26. TheFunded, -3 (@thefunded) Various C-level executives at startups (1,582)
27. Ryan Graves -0 (@ryangraves) Founder / The Renliv Group (1,525)
28. Ross Kimbarovsky -0 (@rosskimbarovsky) CEO / crowdSPRING
29. Benjamin Yoskovitz, -7 (@byosko) Founder / CEO StandoutJobs (1,477)
30. Rajesh Setty, +1 (@upbeatnow) Serial entrepreneur (1,405)
31. Dan Bricklin, -7 (@danb) VisiCalc co-creater (1,365)
32. Steve Blank, -5 (@sgblank) Retired serial entrepreneur now professor of entrepreneurship (1,304)
33. Prasad Thammineni, +23 (@pixily_CEO) Serial entrepreneur and founder at Pixily (1,246)
34. Mark Pincus, +26 (@markpinc) Serial entrepreneur / recovering VC (1,224)
35. Gabor Cselle, +9 (@gabor) A blog about email and startups (1,175)
36. James Hong, +6 (@jhong) Founder Hot or Not (1,111)
37. Tony Wright, +8 (@webright) Founder / CEO RescueTime (1,024)
38. Jana Eggers, +28 (@jeggers) CEO of SPRD.net AG (879)
39. David Cancel, +25 (@dcancel) Co-founder & CTO at Lookery.com (823)
40. Sean Ellis, +7 (@seanellis) Serial CMO / VP Marketing (818)
41. Daniel Tunkelang, +18 (@dtunkelang) Chief Scientist at Endeca (769)
42. Naval Ravikant, -30 (@naval) Entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs succeed (762)
43. Pito Salas, +27 (@pitosalas) Founder BlogBridge; former CTO eRoom (754)
44. Steve Barsh, +14 (@sbarsh) Serial enterpreneur / interim executive (561)
45. Barney Pell, +6 (@barneyp) CEO of Powerset (556)
46. Daniel Debow, -0 (@ddebow) CEO of Rypple
47. Laurent Feral-Pierssens, +34 (@lfp) Founder / CEO Silentale (532)
48. David Hauser, +30 (@dh) Co-founder ReturnPath; CEO Grasshopper (487)
49. Jonathan Mendez, -20 (@jonathanmendez) Serial entrepreneur, online ad expert (477)
50. Greg Reinacker, 0 (@gregr) Founder & CTO at NewsGator (477)
51. Joe Krauss, -13 (@jkraus) Entrepreneur (473)
52. Furqan Nazeeri, -13 (@altgate) Startups, venture capital & everything in between (428)
53. Jules Pieri, +24 (@julespieri) CEO at Daily Grommet (414)
54. Carson McComas, -36 (@carson) Entrepreneur (419)
55. Matt Blumberg, -13 (@mattblumberg) CEO @ ReturnPath (368)
56. Alan Meckler, +17 (@alanmeckler) CEO WebMediaBrands (351)
57. Dave Kellogg, -6 (@ramblingman) CEO of Mark Logic Corporation (349)
58. Various Entrepreneurs, +16 (@founding) Founder Institute (286)
59. Doug Levin, +13 (@dalev) Entrepreneur / former CEO at Black Duck Software (258)
60. Sim Simeonov, -4 (@simeons) Entrepreneur; recovering VC (248)
61. Andrew Payne, -3 (@payne92) Serial entrepreneur (240)
62. James Siminoff, -4 (@grid) Founder / CEO at PhoneTag (184)
63. Alain Raynaud, +3 (@alain94040) Founder FairSoftware (182)
64. Michael Gracie, (@michaelgracie) Serial COO / CTO (174)
65. Tom Keller, +15 (@tkeller) Founder & former CEO of Intense Debate (117)
66. Jay Jamison, +19 (@jeremiahjamison) Serial entrepreneur (100)
67. Bert Armijo, -12 (@barmijo) Co-founder & SVP at 3tera (81)
68. Charles Teague, +1 (@dragonstyle) Technologist-in-Residence at General Catalyst (59)
69. Jon Gillespie-Brown, +13 (@gillespiebrown) Serial entrepreneur (40)
70. Brian Shin, -2 (@briankshin) Founder / CEO at Visible Measures (14)

This list created by Furgan Nazeeri, much props.
http://www.altgate.com/blog/2009/06/entrepreneurs-on-twitter.html

###

So, who else should we be following? Who has experience and advice that we can learn from? Please share in the comments!

image via antiguan

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…

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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• Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz calls it quits
• Give Your Sales People All the Knives
• Surfing for Beginners: How to Start
• Kaizen for Developers: No Inventory

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

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.