2008 brought some great new milestones for us:

• Redesigned Menuism and got it to a nice level of profitability.
• Got The Wedding Lens up and running with a professional design after soft-launching in 2007. Did you know what we’ve stored over 50,000 photos for wedding couples with some couples hitting almost 2,000 photos for their wedding!
• 1st full year of pay from our revenue-generating properties (no consulting necessary – yay!).
• Launched PickFu in less than 2 weeks.
• Launched the Greener Good blog.
• Joined forces with Chuck Templeton to form Delta Beans, LLC, the new holding company for all our properties. 

All in all a great year!  While our properties are now owned by Delta Beans, the two-bit blog will stick around as way to continue to document the experience.  Each day always brings more learnings as we try to grow and juggle an increasing number of projects.  

Personally, here are some goals I have for 2009:

• Document the startup/entrepreneur experience better.  I’m tossing around the idea of doing this in a wiki/e-book format. 
• Be much greener.  Greener Good helps with this.
• Eat less meat and be healthier. 
• Read more.  Books, not blogs.

I’m not even going to try to promise blogging more since I don’t want to make a promise I can’t keep, but you can always connect with me on Twitter and I’ll try to do better about blogging . 

Have a great year!

Justin

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

It’s ok if your answer is ‘no’, or ‘not as much as before’. There’s no way you can keep that kind of excitement and energy going for a long period of time. The lower your energy and excitement drop, the less efficient you get. If your mind is engrossed with the same thing for every waking hour of every day, there’s no way around it. Your senses can get dulled.

So what can you do about it?

Mix it up

You’re an entrepreneur. You started your company because you had an idea and it probably isn’t the only idea you’ve had.

1. Pick a small idea that you’ve been excited about but haven’t had the time to think about. It doesn’t matter if it’s related to your current business. In fact, it might be better if it’s not.
2. Take a day or two off and just run with it full steam. I bet it’ll be an extremely productive couple days.
3. After a few days of exploration, you’ll have a better sense of whether the new idea has any legs. If it does, that’s awesome! Or if the idea was really simple, you might even be done and launched after a few days, which is even more awesome!
4. Now you can ratchet back your effort to maybe an hour or two a day.

Finish your dinner before you can go play

There’s lots of reasons why diversions are helpful.

• Sometimes you need a little excitement and reward at the end of the day. Make that your other little pet project and only work on it after you’ve finished all your “real” work. A little pot of gold at the end of every day can make your day’s go by more quickly and efficiently. You’ll wake up early in the morning excited about working on your new idea and power through “work”.
• Dividing up your time puts more constraints on you and that’s a good thing. Try to do what used to take you 12 hours in 10 so you have 2 hours to work on your new idea. Knowing that your time is more boxed can make you use your time more efficiently. When you know you have all day to work on something, your mind can have a tendency to be a little lazy (at least mine does ).
• When you have a mental block or a difficult issue with your business, sometimes it helps to just think about something else. Business is business and by taking time each day to think about a different business that’s at a different stage, you’re keeping your mind fresh and flexible.

Google has a well documented 20% free time policy where people get to work on their own ideas a day a week. New ideas spawn new business and improve current ones while making life a little more exciting. What’s your new idea?

- Justin

These tips are from a recent NWEN breakfast talk by Ben Elowitz. Ben’s currently the founder & CEO of Wetpaint, a wiki company based here in Seattle, and was responsible for much of the success of Blue Nile and Fatbrain (I used to love that site). If you can’t learn something from what he’s got to share, you’re probably in the wrong business.

Here’s the list, adapted from memory:

• What gets you hot and bothered? Consumer or enterprise? Products or services? Profit-driven or world-changing? Everyone’s got their own preferences – just know what gets you going before jumping into a new idea, or you may run out of passion before you get to the finish line.
• Find a good sherpa. You wouldn’t climb Everest without finding the best sherpa possible, why start a business without doing the same? Pick someone who’s got a ton of experience, loves mentoring new entrepreneurs, and has the connections to help you move your business forward. This person doesn’t have to actually be an entrepreneur.
• Think leverage. Selling and shipping heavy books (Fatbrain) for tens of dollars per order was tough, and took lots of people. Selling and shipping tiny diamonds (Blue Nile) for thousands per order, with a smaller team? Brilliant. Think about how to build your business to apply maximum leverage with your limited resources (money, people, time). This is something Justin and I think about all the time with Menuism.
• Relationships and references matter. There are countless options for service providers for your business. When picking someone you may have to lean on, remember your relationships, and get lots of references. You don’t want your support network to fail you at the worst possible time.
• Bigger isn’t better. Big teams are great for powering through the initial “build it fast” phase, but then what are they gonna do (besides burn through your cash)? Stay lean and mean, and hire only when it’s painful not to.
• Be deliberate. Like it or not, your company will take on your personality, so think carefully about what image you want to project. Cost-conscious? Workaholic? Alcoholic? Your pick – just be ready for the consequences.
• Nothing’s bold when everything’s bold. You’re not trying to be everything to everyone, so figure out your differentiator. It doesn’t have to be some crazy new technology – just pick the one thing that you’re gonna do better than anyone else in your market.

Thoughts? Got your own list of tips/advice? Let us know in the comments.

-john

Dreary thoughts, I know, but they’re reality checks everyone needs to go through. According to Seth Godin’s book, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick), people who succeed don’t do so because they never quit, they succeed because they know when to quit, which battles to avoid, and when to persevere through tough times.

At the recommendation of our advisor, John and I listened to the self-narrated audiobook version from iTunes which took a few hours to finish and sparked a few more hours of discussion. As with most of Seth’s books, the concepts are simple, but he does a good job of explaining and illustrating with stories.

One of the examples was about snowboarding and how it’s easy to learn, but there’s clearly a “dip” before you can truly master it. He made the argument that unless you have the dedication and resources (time and money) to persevere, you might as well not even start snowboarding. It seems like an extreme proclamation, but it gets his point across. It also hit pretty close to home since I did exactly that. A lifelong skier, I gave snowboarding a shot, learned it pretty well for a few seasons, but hit the wall (well actually fell off a jump onto my face and slid down the mountain) and gave up. Had this been a business, I would have wasted plenty of money and time.

The key takeaway we got from the book was that if you’re not going to be the best in the “world” at what you’re doing, don’t even start. Being the “best in the word” means you’ll have to power through the inevitable “dip” along the way to success. The keys to success here are to:

• define your “world” appropriately, and
• be aware of your capabilities, resources and commitment

Remember, this is the world of the Long Tail. You don’t have to be the best blog in the world, you can define your world to be “best blog about cute animals” and have tremendous success.

The other thing we learned from Seth is that you don’t get credit for starting something then just giving up when the “dip” gets tough. It’s one thing to quit because you recognize a cul-de-sac/dead end, but if you just quit because the dip is hard, then you’ve neither succeeded or learned anything. What’s to say you’re going to succeed at the next venture that inevitably has a dip? If the dip is too hard, change your world and your goal to something attainable given your resources and capabilities.

Take a few minutes to think about it.

Are there things that are taking valuable resources away from your primary goal that maybe you should quit? Are you going to be the best in your “world”? Should we stop blogging?

I’ve love to hear any thoughts or stories.

- Justin

The first was due to pure luck – Digital Bootcamp’s demo was right next to ours at Tech Cocktail, so on a whim I entered their raffle, where you guess the number of Digital Bootcamp dogtags in a big mason jar. Who knew that jar could hold over 600 dogtags? I ended up with the closest guess, so over the weekend we visited Mike (while sporting my Menuism tee) to pick up my prize – a nifty iPod nano. Sweet!

If that was all there was to say about Digital Bootcamp, this would’ve been just a “yay-I-won-something” post, but it’s definitely not. Besides being a successful entrepreneur (DB’s going strong after 15 years), Mike hosts a monthly “Circle of Progress” Entrepreneur’s Meetup group, where entrepreneurs of all backgrounds meet to keep each other accountable. Justin and I attended last night and found it helpful. There usually aren’t many people around to keep an entrepreneur on track, so having a support group of some kind, structured or not, is critical to keeping things rolling. The “Circle of Progress” records member’s monthly commitments, so it’s easy to track what’s been accomplished or not, but the most valuable aspect is simply declaring publicly what you intend to do in the coming month and what you did and didn’t accomplish last month – peer pressure and public humiliation works wonders.

Justin and I have tried on and off to do something like this with our networks in Seattle and Chicago, and hopefully seeing what Mike’s done with this group will be the kick in the butt necessary to get something really going. Mike’s doing some neat stuff here in Chicago – if you get a chance drop by the DB offices and have him show you his neat auction purchases.

More on accountability to come!

-John

“Menuism rocked the house at TC4!” exclaimed one attendee who asked to remain unnamed. “It seemed like they were everywhere – I couldn’t resist being lulled by the sweet siren song of Menuism gospel. It was like those Highrise guys weren’t even around at all.”

Well, that’s how I imagine a PR firm would have spun it. We did attend and demo at Tech Cocktail 4 last night at John Barleycorn, and here’s the real breakdown of how it went:

• Tech Cocktail is renowned, and was fantastic last night. The venue in Wrigleyville was perfect, with plenty of space (and drinks) to accommodate the huge crowd.
• Menuism did win the crowd voting last night via Interactive Mediums‘ neat SMS-based voting system, but it wasn’t a blowout victory – the race was pretty tight with the other demoing startups, including the cool guys at ParkWhiz.
• Highrise was scheduled to be demoed last night, but those guys couldn’t make it in the end. There’s little doubt they would’ve been the most popular demo there – the 37 Signals guys are icons of the web world, and Menuism’s built on the framework they created. Highrise itself is a neat product tackling a real tangible market opportunity, so kudos to them.
• Justin and I did snag a great demo location, taking over a small bar on the side of the room but the only thing we had on tap was Menuism propaganda.
• Our booth was eye-catching, but probably because it looked like something from a high school carnival – paper tablecloths, orange helium balloons holding up printed signs, and laptops looping a video slideset about Menuism. And the “valuable giveaways”? Lifesaver mints – avoided by all.
• We did talk about Menuism to lots of people, which I felt was the best part of Tech Cocktail for us. Practice really does help when it comes to networking and talking, and we were better this time around, but still far from totally comfortable or relaxed. Any smoothness was probably due to the free booze.

That pretty much covers how TC went for us last night. We were looking forward to it all week, and as we were looking for supplies and setting up it totally felt like something out of the Apprentice. Here’s a representative picture of our setup, with me posing for the camera while Justin’s in the background, demoing his heart out.

Like many other companies there, we held a raffle to try to get more attendees to talk to us, with our prize being a $50 restaurant gift certificate. Congratulations to Clint from Stone Ward for winning our raffle – we’ll be in touch with you soon. =) We were able to meet a bunch of great new contacts, visible in card form here.

If you were there last night but didn’t win our $50, never fear – you can still win $50 in our monthly Food Fight Contest for April. We’re looking for the best salads around, so just review some salads and you’re automatically entered!

You can read more about TC4 with writeups by hosts Eric, Frank, and on the Tech Cocktail blog. All in all, we had a fantastic time at Tech Cocktail 4, thanks to the grand efforts of Eric and Frank. Thanks guys!

-John

Some key points:

• Differentiate and focus
• Always keep the entrepreneurial mindset and culture
• Maintain integrity
• Client centricity because if you don’t, you’re competitors will
• Focus on frugality
• Hire the passionate and inexperienced over the experieced and unpassionate

Enjoy,
Justin