Stop what you are doing and start-up

What happens when you take a sabbatical to do something you always wanted to?

[stopwhatyouaredoingandstart-blog]

You thought you’d heard the last of me…

Long-time no speak, how are you? The more switched-on among you will notice there is a mathematical pattern to the number of days between each blog post, those who know me, will know I am lying. So this stuff happened:

I have spent a considerable amount of time on the phone to my sister ensuring that all of our logos, cover photos and branded media is consistent, of the right quality and is ‘on message’. This sort of thing takes a lot more time and fiddling than you can imagine: having to optimise sizes of images, ensure they are in the correct file format and positioned correctly (all without inundating followers of your Facebook page with a zillion photo updates that will encourage them to unfollow you. After our most recent efforts I did get the feeling like my sister would like to tell me where to stick my jpeg… The end result of these efforts can be seen in the various social media pages that you will find linked at the top-right of Tmup’s (btw, that’s the business’ name) current sign-up site (www.tmupapp.com), hope you all like them! As you will see the logo is pretty simple but I feel is something that can be translated across media very easily, has a strong connection to the app’s purpose and is also quite iconic (as in having the characteristics of the icon, I’m not quite confident enough yet for it to justify the other meaning…). In terms of the cover image I was inspired by Google’s designs on their Facebook pages, keeping things simplistic (material design-esque for you designers out there), yet vibrant, not using too much detail but giving the brand a little character, with the added benefit of explaining the purpose of the app pictorially.

As I mentioned earlier we have also launched a sign-up site (if you haven’t signed-up yet do so now at the link above, I’ll wait). This was the result of a particularly productive Sunday morning where my developer made the trip to London. In conjunction with my sister we all sat around designing a simple site that could be used by yours truly to start generating interest in the app. I mocked-up the design of the site on MS Paint (bit of a dab hand with it now you see…), then we worked on translating this into the actual site. During this process I was impressed with a) the speed with which my developer was able to create the site from scratch, b) the number of graphical things you must consider (ever heard of vertical rhythm?! Nope, me neither and I hope never to have to again!) when building a site and c) the passion people feel over the smallest details (i.e. spacing, grammar, colouring). The result is the site you see before you if you click that link (click itttt) and I feel does its job admirably, looking all web 2.0 or 3.0 or wherever we are at at the moment.  

As a result of the social media and website launches last weekend we are currently up to 67 likes on Facebook and 27 sign-ups on the mailing list. While this is by no means massive it is a good start when all that has been done is having sent a few emails. My first focus is ensuring everything that I have to do to contribute to the completion of the app is done before going out and canvassing as many people as possible! But the advantage of this is that if my friends tell anyone about it now they can share the link with them to keep them posted. Outside of the app development the next few tasks for me are going to be to start really utilising my social media accounts (after having done a considerable amount of research into the best times to post, optimum post lengths, use of hashtags etc), coming up with a few competitions to get people involved, designing a few email templates to send out and getting in touch with student bodies to see if any would be interested in testing out the app.

One thing I have been truly grateful for over the summer has been the invaluable input I have received from my friends, from helping design things, coming up with slogans, developing the code, warning me of competitors, help spreading the word and general advice and ideas, it is always great to see that so many people are rooting for you! Another example of this was when I met up with a very bright friend from university a week ago. While others were watching the football, we cracked out a laptop in a pub of bemused onlookers and debated the merits of different player rating algorithms (I know, how cool are we?).

The one question that I have been asked more than any other over the summer has been “When is it going to launch?” which has usually garnered the ever-useful response from me of “How long is a piece of string?”. The difficulty being that by the nature of programming, while rough estimates can be made they are subject to considerable variance, case and point being a task that you suspect will take half an hour end up taking four and a half and uncovers additional issues you hadn’t considered. When you are trying to build something that works properly, is scalable and will not ‘fall down’, each feature has to be robustly tested and so while I would love to furnish you all with a more satisfying response to your question I simply can’t! (Although I would be disappointed if it wasn’t at least being beta-tested by the end of October…). This has meant that due to commitments on both mine and my developer’s time we have had to consider the use of external developers (if nothing else, for backup purposes). A couple of weeks ago I therefore met with a company called Milo Creative who have worked with many large corporates. After meeting with them and explaining my vision and showing them a few sketches they told me that they would be happy to help (a good start) and that there might even be potential for a ‘strategic partnership’ (their words not mine), so this gave me a bit of confidence. I must say though while it will be nice relinquishing a bit of control to them I can’t say I am overly enthused about putting a suit on again in a couple of weeks…

In terms of progress with my other goals they are relatively similar to last time we met: gymming still on track, cooking still going well but need to be more creative, piano playing was improving up until this week and all of a sudden I have gone on a bit of a reading ‘tear’ of late, a couple of which I will recommend here: Unbroken (an incredible true WW2 story) and The Establishment by Owen Jones (even if you don’t agree with him it never harms to see both sides of the story). I also decided before I go back to work I need to get out more, therefore until I do I will try and work in a different location each day, today’s is the British Library (my first time) and it is kind of hard not to be inspired by the mammoth column of literature dominating what would have been the atrium. If you have any suggestions for other places let me know!

Mike

[stopwhatyouaredoingandstart-blog]

Life is a rollercoaster…

As a great Irish philosopher once said; you’ve just got to ride it. So again I notice somebody hacked my blog and prevented me from posting for an obscene amount of time (…that’s my story and I’m sticking to it…) As it’s been a while I figure the best way to update you is to let you know where I am at with EVERYTHING, so here goes:

The company and its holding company are both incorporated, however I am yet to decide on year end dates

A basic cashflow with budgets vs actuals has been drawn up, along with a rudimentary Excel general ledger system (which should be sufficient for my purposes initially)

Directors’ loan and founders agreements have been drafted for when necessary

I have got quotes from 5 lawyers (https://www.lexoo.co.uk/) to draw up terms of service and a privacy policy; these will be commissioned when the product is nearer to launch

The company logos has been designed and illustrations for social media pages have been completed (courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/KatHeapIllustration)

Copy for all social media and website is complete, along with app store descriptions and keyword analysis

Primary and tertiary market research is complete and has been considered and factored into the business plan

The business plan is complete (save for the formalisation of the marketing and promotion plan), including: competitor analysis, monetisation strategies, mission statements, objectives, SWOT and consideration of as many potential pitfalls as I could think of

The features required at launch have been decided upon

A first attempt at a user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) has been mocked up using Invision (http://www.invisionapp.com/) ...more on this later

 So those are the major milestones reached already, and here my furry friends are the things still to do:

A launch site is to be made in the next couple of weeks in order to start generating interest in the product prior to launch

The press release is currently being graphically designed however all of the copy has already been produced

I am meeting with HSBC to set up a start-up business bank account this week

I need to refine the app’s rating algorithm (purely a few finishing touches)

Code – see below

Launch videos – see below

So, to me it looks like we have got somewhere, but with 6 weeks remaining I am getting ever more nervous about releasing something before I go back to work!

Last week I spent a good couple of days attempting to convert some very rushed UI sketches into something marginally more comprehensible that I wouldn’t mind showing someone. After looking around at various wire-framing tools (all of which were either a) laborious to use, b) badly designed, c) expensive), I came across a rather interesting alternative. Invision (as mentioned earlier) allows you to upload pictures or sketches of your user interface; the software then frames the images in an iPhone (so it makes things look a lot more realistic). But hold your horses, it doesn’t end there, oh no, no, no, because the real ingenious bit is that it allows you to create ‘hotspots’ on each image which are effectively resizable hyperlink buttons that mean you can link all of your images together. Not only that but it also allows you to add other UX touches, like left and right swiping or pull downs etc. So after a few extended Microsoft Paint sessions (utilising my mad skills honed from years of drawing scientific diagrams at school) I uploaded my images, linked them all through, commented them so users would know how they worked and have for all intents and purposes what looks like a working app! I can’t say how highly I recommend doing this as it forces you to think of the user path through your app and is also an invaluable tool when discussing UI/UX with developers.

One of my challenges for the coming week is to come up with a few good launch video ideas. From what I can see, I think I will be needing: a ‘how it works’ video; which is effectively just screenshots of a user using the app, some promotional viral videos that are used to generate interest and a launch video or two (maybe a formal and informal version to cater for users and journalists/potential investors) which is kind of a cross-over of the two other videos. So from what I can see the first thing I need to do is storyboard the whole shebang (my job for the next few days), I am then going to attempt to shoot them on my iPhone before I go about hiring a pricy cameraman to see how things look. This is way, way out of my realm of experience so should be interesting! I’ll keep you posted…

We are still behind with the coding, but this was always to be expected, these sort of things rarely finish on time. We are trying to be more proactive in the management and oversight of the coding process now so hopefully things will move a little more quickly now, however an end of August launch is now but a pipe dream, never-mind, as long as it gets done!

Goals, goals, goals, right, so good news! One goal down! I finished the 5 books (largely as a result of an intensive 3 days in which I devoured The Psychopath Test, The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect – all highly recommended!), the gym goal is still there or thereabouts, I am cooking a lot more again now, although not necessarily new recipes (must try harder), blog posts more than once a week just aren’t happening are they? And the less said about some of the other goals the better… I’ll work on them.

Mike

[stopwhatyouaredoingandstart-blog]

2 months to go…

Ok folks, it just got real; a third of the way into my sabbatical and I am realising I have nowhere near as much time as I thought… On the plus side things are beginning to take shape rather nicely. Are you sitting comfortably?

For starters we now have the makings of a brand! I have spent some time with my arty sister this week coming up with ideas of colour schemes and logos for the business, each iteration I ran past a few people to ensure it wasn’t just my tastes that were satiated, as it has been mentioned (on occasion) that my tastes at times be slightly ‘off piste’. When you see how simple it is you may not realise the level of thought that has gone into it but I assure you there was at least some! Just a few of the things that were considered included: gender neutrality, replicative characteristics, relationship with the product, not making it look 'tacky’, etc. And at the end of the day if people don’t like it well then…I’ll probably change it…  Concluding on a design though now opens up more work to do (yay). I can now start fleshing out the social media platforms and press materials ready for launch, as part of this I have again enlisted the help of my talented (because she might read this) sister. She will be helping me with the illustrative work that will head my social media pages to further enhance the brand’s image. Given a brief specification I am looking forward to seeing what she can produce.

In terms of the programming we hit a bit of a speed bump last week however are now making up for lost time working at a rapid clip.  We are planning on holding a meeting at the weekend to re-prioritise the features of the product and estimate how much longer it will be before it can be launched, so watch this space. One thing I am looking forward to is the ‘skinning’ of the product (whereby the user interface is dropped on top of the programming so it looks a little more whiz-bang and how the user will see it) I feel that this will (psychologically) be a big step in the project.

Now for the news you have all been waiting for… RESULTS ARE IN! I managed to get 60 responses to my hashed-together survey, with a lot of a valuable insight received. Fortunately a lot of the responses confirmed my preconceptions and a couple of them gave me new ideas for additional features to increase user engagement in my product. I would highly recommend anyone thinking about starting a business to do this first as it literally takes 15 minutes to set up but could completely change how you approach your business.

Continuing on the marketing and research theme from reading up on similar business to mine I realised one thing I can do ahead of time that will help massively with the launch is to build up a comprehensive mailing list of individuals who would be interested in my product. I need to get a launch site up and running in the next couple of weeks where people can input their email address and I also need to get out into the wide world, flyering and spreading the word because one thing that will kill my idea at the start is if there aren’t enough people using it. With that in mind I did a bit of research into the most successful launch campaigns and the one that stuck out to me was Tinder. They did not spend any money on conventional advertising, relying purely on word of mouth. But what made this so effective was they concentrated on the word of mouth of key ‘influencers’ in tight knit, dense communities (US college frats) then once they succeeded with one fraternity/university they extended to another and another. This approach will be a good one to attempt with my product as it will rely on lots of people using it in densely populated areas, but in order for this to work I have to try and make it as addictive as Tinder… easy eh?

The final researchy thing I did this week was to start compiling a list of contact details and information on relevant businesses in London who could use my product. Now I had no desire to trawl through the interweb to find these myself however thankfully, nowadays you can pay people to do these things for you! So I went to Fiverr (where the premise is that random people will do ‘gigs’ (jobs) for you for $5 or an agreed rate). After a little searching I was able to find someone who would populate a list for me for £12, which seemed altogether reasonable, I didn’t have the highest of hopes for the quality of the data returned but it wasn’t too bad, he ignored one salient detail of my instruction but it wasn’t the end of the world, I’ll give him a B for his efforts. One slightly unnerving characteristic of my Fiverrer(?) though was that he kept referring to me as ‘brother’ which, as I had just seen 1984 at the theatre, did unnerve me somewhat…

The other grown-up business things I have been doing this week included; incorporating my business (so nobody steals my name in the meantime), drafting a very simple cashflow so I can estimate costs to come and see how much money I don’t have and looking into setting up a business bank account (HSBC have an excellent deal for start-ups at the moment where there are no fees for the first 18 months, woo!).

In terms of my other sabbatical goals… well, I am averaging just over 3 times a week at the gym since the start of my sabbatical, TED talks have dropped off a cliff as I can’t find any interesting ones at the moment, I bought a new book (The Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson) that I have just got into and I am failing pretty miserably at all the other goals, however I am moving house at the weekend and so am hoping the change of scenery may spur me into action with a few of them!

Mike

[stopwhatyouaredoingandstart-blog]

Better late than never

I know, I know, I’m behind, but I’ll make it up promise! So this week I had some quality ‘home’ home time, just me and my developer, working away like a proper little start-up and I have to say, it felt gooood! One of the big problems when you are working for yourself is discipline in your working hours and having my developer working next to me every day massively helped my concentration and motivation and meant that this was probably my most productive week yet (of the…3 weeks so far…) and from what he told me it sounded like it helped him hugely too and so I think this won’t be the last time we do it. So what have I been up to this week I hear you cry, well:

Marketing on a shoe string

Firstly, I want to make it clear that I am starting with zero knowledge of how to market an app apart from what I see in the media day-to-day. With that in mind I thought one of the best strategies would (naturally) be to Google “How to market an app”. Handily there is a ton of information out there on how to advertise and market apps and even more handily most of them are “…for under $1,000”, or in a similar vein; perfect as I definitely have less than $1,000 to play with! I won’t bore you with the details of the marketing techniques it suggested but at a high level they largely revolve around: utilising any and all social media platforms available and relevant to your business, attending as many “meet-ups” and get in front of as many people as possible to pitch your idea, involve 3rd party promoters such as: free papers, bloggers, review websites etc, consider things like Google AdWords (bit expensive for me at the moment but after reading up on it I will definitely be using in the future), looking to get users to promote to their friends by incentivising with referral schemes etc etc etc.

I actually found it all very interesting and quickly realised that I would relatively easily be able to get my product in front of thousands of people for free; always useful. I also started to wonder about some more conventional means, namely how much do tube adverts cost? So I picked up the phone to find out, as it turns out it’s only £25.50 per panel, however when you consider the minimum order is for 4,000 panels for 2 weeks…it seems a little less feasible!

One of the other really useful things I did this week was to design a survey to confirm some of my ‘plucked out of the air’ assumptions. Survey Monkey lets you design and publish a professional looking survey to anyone who cares to look for free and from it I was able to get some excellent feedback on people’s motives, different ideas for the app and how to better sell my product to the end user, I’ll definitely be using it again in the future.

The final little breakthrough for this week on a marketing front was that I have decided on a slogan for the business (courtesy of a creative friend)! Fortunately the slogan is trademarkable too and has not already been taken so I felt like I was winning all round, especially when, together with creative friend we were able to come up with some excellent ideas for some Vine launch videos.

Money, money, money, mooooney MONEYYY

Another thing I considered a little more seriously were the options for monetising my product. I looked at what all of my competitors were doing, looked at other options for what they weren’t doing and weighed up the pros and cons of each to decide which would be most suited to my platform and users. I found this to be a really useful exercise and as a result I learnt a tremendous amount about internet and app advertising and came up with a blended approach for my app.

Programming progressing nicely

As I mentioned earlier the app itself is looking better each day, now the logic behind a lot of the app has been sussed out I am able to see the UI taking shape. There’s still a long way to go I feel but I think progress will snowball from here on out so I’m excited to see what the end product will be!

Goals…

… erm yeah… let’s take this week as a write-off, you keep quiet about it and so will I. I promise I’ll get right back at it for the next post.

Mike

[stopwhatyouaredoingandstart-blog]

The difficult second week

Week 2 has been a productive one. After my last week’s efforts I ensured that I outlined as many tasks as I could to be completed prior to launch of the business…the list became daunting rather quickly! But let’s fill you in with what I’ve been up to:

First thing was first (as it usually is), I listed every feature that I had come up with, my friends had thought of, my enemies had posited and split them between ‘launch’ features and post-launch features (i.e. 'nice to haves’ etc). I then spent a good few hours today going through each of these one-by-one with my developer to ensure they were feasible programming-wise (they almost always are) and feasible from a time perspective. There is no point spending months and months building an extensive polished product if nobody is interested in your core functionality we decided, so we stripped the product back to what we felt were the necessary functionalities required to get people using it again and again and recommending it to their friends.

When deciding on critical items to clear before launch I started by thinking; what are the non-core issues that could jeopardise the business? First I thought ownership of ideas - I need to make sure anything that can be trademarked, registered or copyrighted is dealt with and that all IP is unequivocally owned by myself/and or the business. Then I thought what about lawsuits etc? I need to make sure from the off I have user terms and a privacy policy that is suited to the business and will not be exploited if the business scales. So after a quick Google I found a very helpful lawyer (I’m sure you would be for £250/hr) who specialised in exactly what I wanted him to. This will be my first major outlay for the business and I am “happy” to pay it as I think copying a competitors T&Cs may actually turn about to be a false economy later down the line.

I have spent a relatively long time trying to do a couple of more 'mathsy’ things too: firstly trying to come up with a user rating algorithm that will encourage users to interact with the product more, and secondly using a considerable degree of guesstimation to calculate the 'tipping point’ of users, before the product becomes a run away success… Both of these things have been very interesting and I must say, never did I think I would be reading up on FIFA and chess ranking systems! However a good rating system implemented at the start will definitely increase user engagement and knowing the tipping point will enable me to more effectively market my product initially, so I felt both were worthy tasks of my time.

I am 'home home’ now for a week so I can work right next to my developer, something that I think will benefit us both greatly, like symbiotic parasites… Today we spent the majority of time planning, planning and… well, planning (much to my friend’s enjoyment - he loves planning). But this ensured that we were both on the same page with what we were trying to do and actually resulted in us being able to cut out some things we didn’t feel were necessary and come up with an idea for the user interface, so victory all round (see victory picture).

On a personal note I’ve been trying to be more of a 'yes’ man (Jim Carrey style) and this lead to me going to a party and for want of a better word 'networking’ with someone who it turned out worked in PR and offered to put me in touch with people who could advertise my product in Shortlist amongst other magazines (when it was finished of course)! I’ll reserve judgement on how this new attitude plays out but it’s off to a good start!

In terms of other goals, I’m now one book down (Go set a watchman if you must now - and I liked it), but still failing miserably with the cooking and volunteering and this week isn’t going to be so good either as I have no piano to play, unless I can somehow break into the local church… Hmmmm… Anyway I’ll get back to you on that one.

Mike

[stopwhatyouaredoingandstart-blog]

Victoryyyyyy

[stopwhatyouaredoingandstart-blog]

Wake-up call

Just over a week down now and to be honest last night I had a bit of a wake-up call. As I mentioned previously last week I shared my business plan with a few of my friends and I have to say, their critique was invaluable and I can’t thank them enough for taking the time to read it and give me their views and comments. It also made me realise how much more explicit I need to be in explaining all of the concepts and ideas buzzing around in my head.

On Monday I met up with a friend who is currently in the process of overhauling his own business with his brother and he hit me with a few home truths: the business plan wasn’t the be-all and end-all, where were the hard data and facts backing up some of my assumptions? What else was I doing apart from this? He then drilled into me the fact that despite having 3 months I am in fact hugely time-restricted and need to be doing as much as I can while my developer is developing to ensure that when a basic product is ready it can be released and tested. I think that it being my first proper ‘break’ of the calendar year meant that I was in a bit of a ‘sabbatical’ mindset and haven’t launched into things as quickly as I should. Yes, there has to be a balance, but currently maybe it is not enough in favour of my business, and he’s right, that needs to change, it is unlikely I will get another opportunity like this and I need to squeeze everything I can out of it.

So it turns out there is a lot more I can be doing now! Let me give you an idea of a few things on the menu for the coming weeks:

‘Launch roadmap’: I need to identify the specific ‘work streams’ and actions that need to happen and at what dates they need to be done by in order to launch my product before the end of the 3 months (focus less on the features down the line and more on the core functionality)

Marketing strategy in detail: the key to my business is getting user numbers to a ‘critical mass’ level, how in actual fact am I going to do that? What channels (apart from social media) will I use? Who should I be talking to now to arrange these things?

Testing: Who am I going to be testing my product on? How am I going to test it? What metrics should I be looking out for? The tests can all be designed irrespective of status of the development

Market research: I need to go out and talk to some of my end users to check that I have some primary data that confirms my ideas about demand for the product

User interface: How do I want the product to feel? How should the user interact with it? What is the branding going to look like?

That list is by no means exhaustive but as you delve further into the detail of each point it made me realise I need to pull my finger out…

In terms of the development we hit a bit of a stumbling block and reluctantly decided to start from scratch, while this is by no means ideal, I really do believe it will be better in the long run as it means that the product will be built solidly from the ground up. Now the main challenge is to keep the development on track to ensure all the milestones that I will create in the launch roadmap are achieved!  

On a bit of a side note, while I had some down time I started trying to learn a bit of Swift (the programming language used in creating iOS applications), just very basic stuff, but I thought it might help me in a couple of ways: allowing me to communicate a little more with my developer (although not the same language) and also allowing me to build a very simple quiz app that my housemate and I have been talking about for a while and think would be a bit of fun. I signed up for an online course from Udemy that I am finding to be easy to follow and very interactive, so have worked through about 20% of that to date too, so watch this space!

In terms of my other goals I managed to do the majority but fallen behind with a couple: while I did cook most days, I don’t think I can really say, hand on heart, that I cooked 3 new recipes… And although I did look for some volunteering opportunities I did not manage to devote an hour to actually volunteering (you’d be surprised just how hard it is to read to somebody in a hospital! – Everywhere I asked needed 3-4 hours commitment for a minimum of 12 months…Seems a bit strange really that people are willing to volunteer and get turned away, never mind, I’ll keep looking).

Oh, and my favourite motivational video of the week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc (Steve Jobs’ infamous Stanford commencement speech, first time I have watched it in full and can confirm it is excellent).

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Mike

[stopwhatyouaredoingandstart-blog]

Day 5 - The starling has left the nest

Okay, we’re 5 days down, so I guess you’re wondering where I’ve got to with House of Cards…? Truth is I actually haven’t even started, however the upshot of this is that I have actually had a busy week work-wise. Let me get you up to speed:

Business planning schmissness schmanning

I think in general people have quite a dour view of ‘business planning’, seeing it as an inconvenience, a box to tick to get investment or some other form of corporate frippery. However, this week I have definitely seen the value in it.

As part of my job we were taught how to prepare the bare bones and structure of a business plan and this has helped me to organise my thoughts and give me a framework from which to think about my own business. My plan has allowed me to pour all of the thoughts I had buzzing around in my head out onto paper, enabling me to start critiquing them and consider additional features. Not only this, but it helped formalise my approach in looking at the potential pitfalls of my product and the ‘competition’s’ strengths and weaknesses. I finished a draft version of the plan (still some parts to fill, however they are less vital) and sent it around to as many people as I could think of who asked to look at it in order to (hopefully) get them to tear it apart.

One other little thing I learned was that NDAs (or ‘Non-Disclosure Agreements’ - for the uninitiated it is like an adult’s version of “I swear on my dog’s life not to tell”) are not (by and large) necessary when you tell people your idea unless you: a) have some spanking intellectual property that the very uttering of will ruin you, b) want to irk investors, developers or friends or c) want to play Bertie Big Bollocks. At the end of the day there are so many great ideas out there, but the value lies in their execution.

Think BIG

As you may or may not remember one of my sabbatical goals was to go to a new talk or meetup a week, so this week’s was an interactive session on developing a business model for very early stage start-ups held at the O2 Think Big Hub in Hoxton Square.

To kick things off we watched this video https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed?language=en (spoiler alert: the biggest reason start-ups apparently fail is ‘timing’, good job I have my trusty Casio). Strangely enough this was also the first TED talk I listened to on my first sabbatical day, spooky eh? We then split off into groups (about 12 people or so attended) and discussed our mission, objectives, business identity, internal and external strengths, revenue generation possibilities etc; all very well and good. What was more interesting though were the people. I observed a couple of things about the entrepreneurs in the room: they’re VERY vocal and want to get their opinions across regardless of whether anyone wants to hear, ‘food’ and ‘fashion’ are apparently the next big things (Gaga was obviously a step ahead of everyone in combining them), the majority of them had other ideas that they wanted to pursue or had already, and finally, however unique your idea, somebody will know a similar idea like it (the entrepreneur’s response will always be “but mine’s different” *hastily Googles competitor*). I found the whole affair rather interesting and managed to come away with a new idea (given to me by one of my new companions) in how to further engage my users, so all good!

Finally, I spoke to one person who wanted to do for air what Evian et al have done for water, think about it and it isn’t as crazy as it sounds…

All in all a pretty productive few days, in terms of my other goals believe it or not I am on track with them all, although I could do with some new music to play on the piano as I really don’t want to learn scales.

Mike

[stopwhatyouaredoingandstart-blog]

About time

Today is the day that I start doing what I have wanted to for too long. Last Friday was my last corporate working day for 3 months. After a brief week’s interlude, today I am embarking on a new challenge – starting my own business.

Since I was small (I was never small) I always wanted to be Richie Rich rich, McDonald’s in the mansion, kidipult in the garden, that sort of thing. As I grew up I was obsessed with programmes like the Apprentice and Dragon’s Den and dreamt of the day when I left university to start my own business. Unfortunately due to a lack of entrepreneurial ideas and conviction I ended up falling into a finance job in London. The job has had its ups and downs over the 5 or so years I have been there and should this venture fail I would not be wholly disheartened to return to it while I regroup, as it is there I have met a lot of bright people who have made excellent sounding boards and friends, but it is not my number one dream; being in control of my future is.

A year or so ago I started coming up with a few ideas that I thought for once could actually be viable, things that people would actually use and I would be passionate about creating. The ideas however seemed distant and I didn’t pursue them further, attempting instead to make tracks in the well-trodden path of finance. I didn’t manage to achieve this for various reasons and so began to wonder what I would make of myself instead. At the start of 2015 I was having a bit of a rough time professionally and personally and so did a quick bit of mental maths and discussed with my mentor at work and decided that now would be the perfect time to attempt to start something; a step change to shake myself up a little and take myself out of my ‘comfort’ zone.

With a little persuasion I managed to convince my employer that a sabbatical would be a good idea and so I started considering my options more carefully and seriously. For the first time in my life I started to save money to enable me to live for 3 months and partially fund a start-up (I am definitely not talking $$$, just enough to pay for some administrative bits and bobs). For the next couple of months before my sabbatical I explained my idea to anyone who would listen to get as much input, critique and advice as possible. I was able to get a lot of different points of view and even some a name for the business! In hindsight I wish I was able to start more sooner however I was unable to due to work commitments. Never mind, I’m here now and don’t believe in crying over spilt milk (although I do have an affinity for the white stuff I must say).

There are a couple of reasons I wanted to start this blog and they are as follows (as you can see I do like a list):

To keep myself honest and make sure I have something to hold myself accountable to

To show anyone thinking of starting a business what is involved (I myself don’t have a brilliant idea of it all at the moment…)

To get advice from anyone who cares to give it

As a creative release for my own mind!

At this stage I suppose I should be rather candid and say what scares me about this:

That I waste the opportunity and get lost in the Indian summer London is currently experiencing, frittering it away watching Netflix

That I have nothing to show at the end of the 3 months

That a competitor pips me to the post

That nobody is interested in my idea

That working largely on my own for such a sustained period drives me mad or into a depressive state

But let’s balance that negativity with the business’ hopes/goals:

To have a basic functioning, designed prototype that can be used by the end of the 3 months

To learn what is required to start a business, even if it fails as long as I have learnt something!

To have met with like-minded people who can help me and I can help

To put it into a bit of context this is a high-level day 1 status:

Developer (a very talented friend) in place and raring to go

Company to be registered, business plan to be written, ‘proper’ formal market research to be performed

Name decided

Minimum viable product (MVP) decided upon

While this is going on in order to combat me becoming a reclusive potato I also came up with a few other goals to try and achieve while this is going on:

Read 5 books

Play the piano for 30 mins per day

Exercise for an hour a day

Cook 3 new recipes a week

Spend 1 hr volunteering per week

Meet up with someone from work at least once per week

Go to a talk or meetup per week

Visit 3 new places in the UK

Write 2 blog posts per week

Listen to 1 TED talk a day

Right, I suppose I should actually get cracking and stop making inane lists. I can’t promise daily updates but I will try and post something on a bi-weekly basis (they won’t all be this lengthy; I’m just setting the scene and all that…)

Mike