Mike Coyle’s Weblog

One of the benefits of having Approach.Botonomy.Com (A.B.C) up and running is that the A.B.C site is now the repository for much of our reference-worthy content. A.B.C is where we are communicating our opinions and beliefs on topics ranging from the rise of folksonomies in project management to the mainstreaming of dynamic programming languages.

That frees up my weblog for much more casual personal observations and such. A quick analogy: If Approach.Botonomy.Com is the legitimate theatre, then my personal weblog is late night basic cable reruns of Sanford and Son.

Or so I would hope.

So, speaking of of uninteresting things that I do, I was at Costco over the weekend, picking up a few gallons of relish and a 12 pack of fire extinguishers. As I was making my way past a throng of 20 people waiting in line for a spoonful of lentil soup, I ran into a guy that I went to grade school with. He too is working on a online startup. He said that he was looking to launch in 6-8 months and is keeping the concept very close to the vest.

Mmm, stealth mode.

Been there. Done that. Have the “I missed out on important early feedback” t-shirt to prove it.

Now, in all fairness, I had already told my former classmate that my company was in the online app business. Perhaps if I was a podiatrist or was slinging hash at the local Denny’s he’d have been more open, but that’s irrelevant. This is not about being nosy, and I wish the guy and his team all the luck in the world. Rather, I bring it up because it was a moment of clarity for me, as I realized how my views on the nature of the “killer idea” has changed over the last year.

Here’s my current take on running your micro-ISV startup in stealth mode: At first glance, it seems kinda cool. Just like cranking the radio on your car stereo when you’re cruising around at the ripe old age of 16 maybe seemed cool at the time. If you don’t get loud music out of your system early on as a teenager, you’ll do irreparable damage to your hearing.

Fast-forward the clock 20 years, and if you’re doing a small startup and don’t get the mystique of “stealth mode” out of your system early on, you might end up figuratively too deaf to listen for early stage questions, comments, and concerns. Maybe even some that might otherwise have a profound impact on your business model and prospects for a timely success.

In hindsight, I now realize that the incremental benefit that you receive from getting an arbitrary outsider’s initial reaction to your idea far, far outweighs the low incremental risk of someone ripping off your idea and beating you senseless with it in the marketplace.

Now if you’ll please excuse me, I have to run back to Costco.  We are going to have hot dogs for lunch, and l must have left my gallon of mustard in the cart.

Like many others that somehow stumbled into the technology business, I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) as a kid.

In D&D, one of the things that you do when creating your character is roll dice to determine the physical and mental capabilities of your character, based upon six attributes. To do this, you roll a six-sided die (i.e. 1/2 of a pair of plain ‘ol dice) 3X, yielding a score between 3-18. In this way, you’re essentially playing craps at the Genetics Casino, and your character turns out to be the winner or loser. The attributes are:

• Strength
• Intelligence
• Wisdom
• Dexterity
• Constitution
• Charisma

Even though I haven’t played in over 20 years, it just dawned on me the other day that you could evaluate a startup using these same six criteria. Plus, a startup is already somewhat of a roll of the dice to begin with. So, here is a walkthrough of the six character attributes from D&D, and how I see them mapping to the characteristics of a startup:

• Strength: In the game, this refers to the physical strength of your characters. In a startup, Strength is the “bang-for-the-buck” that your product/service delivers. A strong offering can go so far as to alter the very market in which it competes. A weak offering wilts to death quietly in the corner, unnoticed by the marketplace. In both cases, Strength helps open doors.
• Intelligence:
  In the game, this refers to the raw intellect that your character possesses. In the startup world, this refers to how well your company understands the problem that you are addressing and the markets that you serve.
• Wisdom: In the game, Wisdom measures your character’s insight and perceptiveness. In the startup world, this refers to your ability to make sound judgement calls. In particular, I believe that startup Wisdom is all about picking the right problem to try to solve. Set your sights too big, and you end up trying to “boil the ocean” in vain, such as having a grandiose mission to fundamentally change the way people shop for gasoline. Set your sights too small, and you end up niche-ing yourself to death, such as aspiring to be South Dakota’s leading source for Officially Licensed Leonard Part 6 merchandise.Those problems that are “Big enough to be interesting, but small enough to be successful” are the domain of the wise entrepreneur.
• Dexterity: In the game, Dexterity is a measurement of your fine motor skills. This comes in handy when dodging arrows or picking locks. In a startup, Dexterity is a measure of your ability to adapt to change, as dictated by your customers, competitors, or in some cases, your better judgement.
• Constitution: In the game, this refers to the health and vitality of your character, and it contributes to the amount of beatdown that your character can sustain before assuming room temperature (i.e. running out of Hit Points). In startups, Constitution refers to your ability to repeatedly take on challenges and overcome adversity in a sustainable fashion. While financial health is the obvious analogy in startup land, I also believe that the robustness of the founders’ relationship is the other key aspect of having a healthy startup constitution.
• Charisma: In the game, this refers to the physical attractiveness and persuasiveness of your character. Characters with strong charisma are better leaders, and can influence fellow travellers, townspeople, and even some adversaries. In a startup, the firm’s measure of Charisma is not solely on the shoulders of shiny fast-talking sales folk, as there aren’t enough Herb Tarleks to go around (be thankful for the small things in life). Rather, the Charisma of your startup is also measured by the attractiveness of your message, the attention to detail in your product/service, and the polish and consistency of your marketing collateral. Oh, and having a decent looking and informative web presence ain’t a bad idea, either.

The nice thing about this model is that it provides a handy list of characteristics that are somewhat familiar to a decent number of people (particularly in the technology space), as the game has been around for decades. I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that these attributes, given the proper mapping from role-playing game to business, could be used to drive a MECE-esque qualitative analysis of a startup.

Tune in next time, and we’ll take a look at a couple of hypothetical startups, and see how they’d stack up in D&D-speak.

When we set out to build ProjectPipe, we were originally looking to bring lightweight nouvelle Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the discipline of agile IT project management. We had some cool demos and prototypes that we shared with a small group of people that we trusted. Nothing earth shattering, but content interesting enough to compel us to spend most of our free time pursuing our vision and ultimately quitting very good full-time jobs to make a run at launching a software startup.

Fast forward to the actual release of ProjectPipe in December, and none of the functionality that we initially prototyped and shopped around to friends and colleagues is present in the user-facing elements of the application. Some is still in the Proof-of-Concept stage, some of it is teed up for future releases, and some of it is leveraged behind the scenes, but none of it is visible to our growing user community.

To a certain degree, we set out to build product A, and ended up shipping product B.

It turns out that this is not all that uncommon. Paul Graham spoke about this phenomena in his presentation at StartupSchool, which he subsequently published in his essay titled Ideas for Startups.

So just as our original product vision evolved, so has our vision of our target market. Originally, there were two profiles that made up our view of our centerpoint customers:

• The “Alpha Dog”, or technical architect/PM that leads corporate IT projects
• The Independent contractor that is often the Project Manager, architect, cook, and bottle washer for smaller projects and/or sidework

It’s recently become evident to us that the feature set of ProjectPipe is also useful to a third market: The (drum roll please) Web 2.0 Startup.

[TODO: Blab about the fact that we’re a startup ourselves, and mention the bit about “eating our own dogfood” for the umpteenth time]

There are a bunch of things in ProjectPipe that we’ve found useful in spinning up our company. Here’s a sampling:

• Most small businesses incorporate some form of To Do List to coordinate their day-to-day activities. ProjectPipe’s Issues tool works nicely for this. It allows you view items either in a flat list or as a hierarchical outline. It also provides assignments and prioritization. Plus, you can also subscribe to a secure RSS feed, so that you’re notified when an item is completed by another team member.
• Subversion is a no-brainer if you have source code that you’re developing as part of your startup. But it also comes in handy for other files that you’d like to work on locally, yet keep synchronized across 2 or more machines. I can see the ad now: Subversion: It’s not just for source code anymore.
• ProjectPipe’s Document Management capabilities allow you to edit documents from within a web browser, or upload existing documents or images. We actually use Subversion for most of our Document Management, since Subversion-managed content is readily accessible offline. But the Document Management tool is still real useful in its own right, and it’s integrated with one of our upcoming collaboration-based features. Stay tuned for more on that topic…
• Lastly, ProjectPipe’s Notes tool is convenient for outline-based notetaking. It’s probably no big secret at this point that we’re huge fans of outlining. While our web-based Notes tool isn’t quite as as fast as a desktop outlining app such as OmniOutliner, it’s more than responsive enough for most uses, unless you’re taking live dictation from the president of the New York Speed Talker’s Society after he shotgunned a Quad Shot Iced Espresso with a Red Bull chaser.The hoisting capability allows you to narrow down your focus to a specific topic while still keeping all of your content in one taggable, RSS-enabled basket.I’ve used the notes tool everywhere from boardrooms to Wi-Fi enabled bookstores. It works quite nicely.

In closing, we’re starting to market ProjectPipe to web startups. We’ve created a new Google Group to support a community of users that are leveraging ProjectPipe for their startups or small businesses. The group is named projectpipe-smallbiz.

If you have any thoughts regarding how you’d like to use ProjectPipe for your startup or small business, please join the Google Group and/or drop me a line at mcoyle@botonomy.com.

Oh, and if you are still looking for that “Killer App” to justify gobs of VC funding for your very own Web 2.0 startup, here’s a veritable treasure trove of ideas.

Here’s ours:

At Botonomy, we create solutions that help small teams solve large problems

This catchphrase-based mission approach has three immediate benefits. First, it provides a basis for judging whether or not your various signals and messages to the marketplace are internally-consistent. Everything you say and do should be easily traceable back to this single sentence.

Second, it provides a means to hint at the businesses in which you’re not explicitly engaged or pursuing. For example, we’re not casting ourselves as an “Enterprise” software firm, although there will be clusters of folks in large companies that will immediately “get” what we’re doing with ProjectPipe and find the featureset and integration that we provide uber-useful. We’re also not focusing all our energies on the small-to-medium business segment, although the infrastructure-on-demand aspect of a hosted app is very appealling to those with modest IT budgets.

By explicitly focusing on “helping small teams solve large problems”, we’re defining our core target market as “small teams”, with far less emphasis on the size of their greater organization or specific industry affiliation.

Lastly, keeping it to a single sentence means that you have to leave non-differentiating stuff out. A single sentence doesn’t provide too much room to discuss “customer service”, “shareholder value”, “operational excellence” or the like.