Mid-Project Summary Part 1: A Little About Me
I was reminded the other night (thx +Dave Song) why I should keep documenting my journey of quitting my job and deciding to build my own app...because somewhere out there there might be others considering the same and are looking for resources and firsthand experiences. By no means do I claim that the path I've taken is the solution for everyone, but I'm more than happy to share it with anyone that'll listen and if it'll be helpful to just one person then I've done my part.
To play a little catchup, I'll start with this entry about me and where I'm coming from. Warning: you're going to be reading a lot of "I's" so divert your eyes.
My Background
I've always dreamt of being an entrepreneur. When I was 12 I had my own table at the local mall's sports card show. To be honest I don't remember selling any because I'd price them at full Beckett book value - or above for any Michael Jordan or Jose Canseco cards since they were my favorite players - and no one was ever willing to pay full book. But that was the kind of businessman I was back then because I only invested in the cards I truly believed would increase in value, so why would I give them up for less than they were currently worth? I was a stubborn child.
As part of my Business major at USC, I did dual concentrations in Entrepreneurship and Leadership Development - all things pointing to the career path I wanted to take. My three "world-changing" ideas back then:
A sports stock market where equity in teams and players would be publicly traded, fluctuating based on performance and transactions. Kind of like how the Green Bay Packers are "owned by the fans", but what most don't know is that those stock certificates specifically say they can never increase in value. Ultimately a company called ProTrade tried to do this in 2007 and more recently Fantex. I wrote my business plan in 2003 - just sayin'.
Collapsible hangers that you don't have to stick through the bottom of your shirts. I'd manufacture hangers that either folded or had spring loaded arms. I recently saw a little kid on Shark Tank with a product similar to this called HangEase. Go buy some.
Remember that very very brief time when miniDisc's were popular? Do you also remember how they were permanently stuck inside protective casings that you didn't take them out of and you just stuck the whole thing inside the disc player? I thought this was brilliant because it prevented scratching and at the time DVD scratch repair kits were selling like hot cakes. Well I wanted to manufacture protective casings for DVD's that you could just stick right into special DVD players. All I had to do was convince Sony, Panasonic, and the other electronic giants to start making these DVD players - simple right?
Somewhere along the way though I latched onto the dream of becoming a corporate big wig and I ended up doing internships at Merrill Lynch, Transamerica, and Nissan's HQ. Man did I think I was important. Not many of my friends could say they worked on the 35th floor of a downtown LA highrise. Little did I realize that I was just a paper pusher.
One day at a USC Sports Business Club meeting, we had a guest speaker from Upper Deck named Chris Stuart (he's now a sports agent representing Drew Brees, Matt Kemp, and others). I sure as hell didn't want to miss this because working there would be a dream of mine and seemed like the best of both worlds - a big company in an industry that I loved. Long story short, I took the initiative to introduce myself to Chris, got his contact info, and followed up with him immediately after. We exchanged a few emails and he eventually offered to have me down to the office in Carlsbad to give me a tour and introduce me to some of the product and marketing folks. In the end I met the right people, got the job, and loved my time there. Who knows where I would have ended up if not for this encounter. I remember considering an offer to be part of Progressive Insurance's management trainee program. My life would have turned out a lot different not for the better - thanks Chris!
My Career
I ended up working in sports cards for 4 years, for the top two companies (Upper Deck and Topps), and had many once in a lifetime experiences I'd only dreamt about as a kid. My fondest celebrity memories:
Riding the indoor ferris wheel with Greg Oden during the National Sports Card Convention in Cleveland and later taking him bar hopping having to act as his concierge for most of the night
Shooting hoops with Dwyane Wade in Miami
Being personally introduced to Jeannie Buss and Andrew Bynum before a Lakers game that Topps was sponsoring
Conducting a million dollar half court shot where I was the corporate rep standing at half court holding the big check. He missed and I handed him a backpack full of cards as consolation.
Me and Michael Jordan in the Ritz Carlton New Orleans hallway, alone. I was too starstruck to say anything else other than "hey" as I passed by.
And not directly sports related, but sharing an elevator with Anderson Cooper at that same Ritz Carlton on that same day.
I loved working in sports cards because I loved sports and knew the history of cards like the back of my hand. This was reflected in my work and I quickly rose up the ranks to Senior Product Manager where I was in charge of Topps' entire NBA basketball card business. I would build 16+ card products a year ranging anywhere from $0.99 per pack all the way up to $125 for a 5-card pack. I was still only 26 years old and the youngest among my peers by a wide margin.
But eventually I came to a reality — that sports cards weren’t getting any more popular, only less. So I looked to what industries were growing massively at that time? Tech, video games, and the entire Silicon Valley scene. Even though I didn’t play games much, I ultimately found myself taking a job at Ubisoft in San Francisco where I had 3 great years managing games like Assassin's Creed, Naruto, Shaun White, and the Raving Rabbids, and working with some great peers that I'll consider lifelong friends and always go out of my way to help. It was here that I learned how to market and sell things, both internally and externally.
While at Ubisoft, I was presented with an opportunity through a friend to get my feet wet in the tech space. So I took a Product Marketing gig at Palm, which had just been acquired by HP and was largely still being operated independently. The pay was great, the pace was slow, the workload was easy...welcome to old tech. It was comfortable, but at the end of the day the work just wasn't fulfilling. Another long story short, HP shutdown Palm, I got a free 6 month vacation out of it, then a Palm co-worker who had moved over to NOOK gave me a ring to come over. I even got a raise out of it. This experience was a little more fulfilling, not just because of the raise, but because I got to work within the development team and have a slight impact on the final product. This is when I really started thinking seriously about either trying my own startup or joining one, so I started reaching out to those I knew who were or had been there before.
Enter an old co-worker at Ubisoft +Philip Navidad who had recently joined a startup called OnLive that happened to be right down the street from NOOK in Palo Alto. We started meeting up semi-regularly to exchange ideas and hashing out the details of one idea we called Declutter, which was a mobile app that would help you get rid of the things you don't need and give them to friends that might need them. Turns out we weren't the only ones with this idea at the time because I've seen numerous attempts at this since then like Bondsy and NakedRoom. A short time after we started these meetings, Phil moved over to another gaming startup called Raptr that's basically a social network for gamers and we continued to meetup after work.
Phil and I ended up doing a Startup Weekend Hackathon together where he got up and pitched the idea to a room full of developers in attempts to recruit some to help us build it. Let's just say I probably should have had the courage to do the pitch myself since I had been trained for such things, but Phil did an admirable job given the circumstances though the 60sec timer buzzed before he even got to the main idea. We ended up joining another team (shoutout to +Chris Zweber and +Lauren Kim!) that wanted to develop mobile party games and we were a natural fit since we came from the gaming world. Our team won honorable mention and we learned that we don't have to be developers to be significant startup contributors because we (mostly Phil) did a large share of the prototyping using a mobile prototyping service called Codiqa.
After the hackathon we both went back to our day jobs. A few weeks go by, then Phil pings me about a job opportunity at Raptr. He wants to move into a Product role, which opened the door for a spot in Marketing. Though I didn't particularly want to go back into gaming, I saw this as an opportunity for my first foray in a real startup. It was a well funded 40 person company led by serial entrepreneur Dennis Fong who had previously founded 3 successful companies in addition to being cited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first ever professional gamer, so the risk didn't seem all that great. I spent a year and a half there heading up the marketing team and really got to learn a lot about the development process and what drives product decisions. But the itch to build something myself still loomed and I eventually made the hard choice to split off on my own and try to learn things I knew little about.
For a long time I've debated about going to a developer bootcamp like Hack Reactor, Dev Bootcamp, and App Academy, which are programs that claim to teach you the equivalent of an Computer Science degree in only 9-12 weeks and also help place you in developer jobs for startups afterwards. This always seemed like the simplest solution to obtain the skills to build my own ideas. Instead though, I enrolled in a 10 week Product Management course at +General Assembly while I continued to teach myself programming on the side to possibly prepare for one of those bootcamps. Though I've been a Product Manager before, I'd never done it in tech and not at a startup. This class taught me how to validate and rapidly prototype my ideas and also to write technical specifications that could be handed to software engineers to develop. The topics covered were a little slow for me at first since most of the class came from zero Product Management or startup backgrounds, but eventually sped up and ended up being really fun and constructive once we got into the building phase.
When the class was over and I had what I thought was an awesome prototype of my app idea, I had a decision to make - take a Product Manager job offer I had received from a startup a friend referred me to (a dream job in a past life, see college idea #1) or continue down the path of taking my idea further. I couldn't help but think about what someone somewhere once said:
"Do what is most uncomfortable"
...and that's always stuck with me for some reason so that's exactly what I'm doing now. I've spent the last month in and out of one off programming classes and have hired two personal coding tutors I found through +Codementor that I'm working with the build out my iOS app. This solution met my objectives perfectly because I'm 1) building my app, and 2) learning as much as possible along the way. If that's in-line with anyone out there, checkout that link and we'll both get $25 credit if you decide to try it out.
Next up, a summary of my project learnings as I've dove into developing in Xcode and Obj-C for the first time and am nearing the 50% completion mark. Stay tuned.
