Posted: July 8th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Startup |
Building a team is a hard problem, building a good to great team even harder and throw in the idea of a good remote team and now we are talking an activity that is harder and fraught with higher risk and imbued with additional administrative issues that would normally put it out of the reach of any sane startup
Well ODesk to the rescue, sort of.
First an important but irritating caveat that though hopefully implied, I still wish to state explicitly. In my opinion, there is no tool or service out in the marketplace and non expected soon or in our lifetime that deterministically leads one to spin up an “A” like Team especially in the technology development arena. Unfortunately, most of Technology recruitment still and probably always will rely solely on the weight of different technologies you can stuff on a maximum two page resume and which will hopefully ;for the candidate that is ;game whatever keyword sniffing tool they have looking for specific stated technology experiences.
Caveat aside, Odesk is a network of individuals and an application set that provides an infrastructure for building virtual teams.
It is a company , this is no open source amalgamation of systems and people and as in most if not all “body” shop or freelance organizations, it takes a cut of the wage or rate paid to it’s members.
If you are on the demand side of the equation, the commission is well worth it as it offers
- Work Task definition and opening it up for bid from the community of Odesk Freelancers
- Validating work effort (not work product but effort. Are they working when they say they are)
- Payment in non local currencies
- invoicing and payment. The payment is via Credit Card which is perfect for a startup
- Managing Work Flow and communications within the team
The value proposition for Odesk centers around the network of potential team members scattered throughout the world with varying degrees of competency and passion that it pools for someone building a team. Additionally it provides the tooling to define your needs ie work orders, broadcast those needs to the network of Odesk connected potential, sift through the responses and work it till you find the right individual(s) to engage and then manage the assignment over time including the intricacies of payment, conflict resolution, add-on work etc.
Though the core technology architecture and development is not outsourced in this manor at Jittr, we do look to Odesk for staffing various aspects of Design, for instance crafting the various image artifacts with the standard scale and layout for iPhone and Android applications as well as test engineering on various representative handsets for the smartphone applications we develop.
I do want to take this opportunity to state a stirring in my mind that occurs as I avail Jittr of the talents of people in various roles throughout the world. The average wage rage for professional services in the Technology Development area which is a high paying area relatively speaking in all countries is abysmally low when compared to USA wage rates. I pay my cleaning person more per hour then an experienced though way remote individual Senior Software Engineer who’s local currency is in India rupees.
Furthermore, though my main focus is on software engineering talent, I am nibbling at Designers, Product people and other roles and there are a multitude of non technical types that can be engaged via Odesk.
What will be the eventual end state for various professions here in the USA with this evolving network of remote/ low cost professionals available relatively quickly? Well, hopefully it will all boil down to quality in the end.
I will update this post as the evolution of my team building and execution proceeds through the use of Odesk and comparable networks and Systems like Elance.
Posted: June 4th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: New York City Startup, Startup |
As the title states, this is from a very specific and personal (me) perspective on some of the things I have learned , usually the hard way in the past few months as I work to boot strap my own startup.
It isn’t just me , I am doing this with a ex-colleauge from AOL and we kicked around the idea for many a late night before we (actually more myself took the gamble.
- I am accountable at 100% not just the area of primary concentration
Basic truism and one that is key as otherwise it is easy to get resentful when things don’t go quite the way you want them. As the Chief Technology Office (A highly pompous title for the person who is responsible for the technical architecture and software engineering of the product), I have to accept; and I do; accountability for all other areas of the process that go into providing utility to a user that will help establish out startup. ie Product requirements, Design aspects , monetization potentials.
- Irrespective of 100% accountability, you can’t do it all
Self explanatory but a high risk especially for those in the technology wing that are seduced into thinking that Technology acumen can solve all problems. It can’t because there is more to a business, even one with Technology at it’s core for building new Products, then the bits and bytes that give life to the product.
- “Get the right people on the bus”
I believe this is from Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start which a bunch of us enterprising sorts read and re-read circa 2006 when we were seriously contemplating leaving the womb of a big company and going off on our own. Like a real bus at least in the City of New York, there are plenty of stops along the route to let people on and often times more importantly let people off. Also don’t turn a blind eye to those that try to get on the bus without paying the fare either sneaking in through the rear door or by excuses they left the fare home while entering through the front.
- Move on quickly
Don’t dwell on things too long, maybe a nano-second is enough. If a path chosen (a potential partner, product idea, a development tool, etc) doesn’t pan out as originally envisioned , change direction and don’t beat yourself or them over it afterwards.
- Reconsider previous decisions based on new circumstances
Even though you want to move on quickly, it is also often true that new circumstances change the dynamics of why a path originally taken and ditched now seems like a worthwhile path to take again. Risk of waffling in this of course but it should be straightforward to recognize over time that you have fallen into a rut of zig-zagging from one path to another and back repeated ad-nauseum.
- Don’t pack it in and give up at the first , second , nth roadblock
Almost everyday (except days off) will bring up scenarios that make you question having gone out on your own instead of staying within the womb of a more established gig. It may be a subtle form of self hypnosis , but itemize and remind yourself of the points why your chosen path has benefits over the more traditional , comfy established route .
- If you can’t itemize some compelling points from above, then all likelihood you shouldn’t be out on your own
Posted: April 25th, 2010 | Author: John | Filed under: Startup |
Earlier in our weekly call, we talked about focusing our energies. I came across this image that I had saved to inspire. 
Credit goes to Bud Caddell @ whatconsumesme.com
Posted: April 18th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Startup |
Of two minds when I read the press about the apparent bidding up of Foursquare , a barely 1 year old New York City startup in the Location based products arena. Of course, as a principal in my own mobile based startup Jittr , it gives me that added inducement to keep on plugging away long hours and potentially breakout in the same manor. I am a heavy user of Foursquare, being the proud mayor of 10 establishments and growing. On the other, incredulity sets in. Where is the inherent value that would drive such an inflated valuation? Given the names such as Yahoo or even Google that are apparently interested (and throw in AOL though restricted from acquisitions over $100 Million for the moment), big companies with to much money $$$ and time on their hands come to mind.
Here is the essense of Foursquare. It is a Location based gaming platform where one “checks in” to establishments one visits, say your regular early morning visit to Starbucks and score points for visits depending on varying factors such as how many in one day, how widely widely distributed over the course of the day. Enough visits to one establishment over time has the potential to reward you with the Mayorship of that establishment Badge. Of course it is not a solitary game as you are competing against all other active games who may be checking into the same places you are.
The well done integration with the large social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook provide the vehicle to be constantly broadcasting to a much wider audience your whereabouts and your game scores and achievements including Mayorships and “Badges” procured.
I personally use Foursquare primarily from my iPhone but from time to time from my Android powered Droid phone. It is meant to be a smartphone accessed application though it has a relatively austere Website.
From a technology point of view, it is quite simple, leveraging the GPS that all smartphones now provide to surface coordinates (latitude and Longitude) which drives a Web Service search to establishments/places nearby from which you can then choose the actual one you are visiting. If the list of nearby venues does not include the one you are at , you can add it via the application and then check it. All of the above usually can happen during the short time you are on line picking up a cup of coffee at your neighborhood Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts. I strongly suspect they have licensed a feed of venues from one of the few listings aggregators ie InfoUSA, Axion plus they provide the ability of adding your own venue. This broadens the venue pool to those non retail locations such as Parks, subway stations, your own home. For instance, I am the mayor of Jittr Headquarters and I have regularly checked in at the 68th street number 6 subway station in Manhattan which is next to Hunter College in New York City.
These large companies that are ostensibly interested in Foursquare would have the wherewithal to develop their own application with identical functionality in little time measured in 2 months at most. Since they already probably license the same data (save for those individually added places) the incremental costs of licensing content would be negligible at most and since they already possess Social networking products, you can assume the right integration would bring with it the necessary pool of potential users immediately. Though Foursquare is the leader in this location based gaming at the moment and I have heard of about 1 million registered users, that still pales in comparison to Twitter’s (50 million registered users) or Facebook’s (half a billion) making the space still open as no one has a significant user base that gives it the momentum of true breakout and uncatchable leader.
Then why the inflated values being talked up in the Trade Press? I will go into that after a word from our sponsors…
Posted: March 22nd, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Mobile, Startup, Technology |
Trying an experiment in Product development this coming week. I spoke to my daughter about some ideas surrounding “Social Shopping” over the week to gather what she thought of the idea. Of course, anything to do with shopping will immediately get her attention no matter how crazy the actual Product Idea may be. It is enlightened self interest on her part. With no money, no source of money and little chance of that changing anytime soon, if she needs to hear a pitch and go through the observations of the shopping habits of teenage girls, all she knows is she will be in a shopping environment with someone who has money (me) and who is a sucker for any whim she may have (once again me).
So what is Social Shopping one may ask? Well , I would suspect it is the antithesis of how I shop at least when it is of the bricks and mortar variety. Of course when shopping online like on Amazon I do make liberal use of the Reviews to guide my purchase (or non purchase depending on the gist of the reviews). In the bricks and mortar variety shopping experience which is still the predominant means of shopping, the only thing social about me is making sure no one gets in my way to obtain the article I have already decided to purchase and similarly on the mad dash to the checkout line. Thankfully I am the exception instead of the rule. With the ubiquity of online social networking, the exploding smartphone engagement with all sorts of services tied together including photos, video, search, location services and the penchant to shop of teenage girls regardless of all messaging that they should deal with more outer worldly things, we are poised for the killer app that will tap into all of these forces to magnify the shopping experience so that the romp to “the mall” can take on the force of the virtual romp to the Mall.
What are some of the characteristics of this presumed killer application.
- Doesn’t introduce yet another Social Network but leverages the existing winners in the space, Facebook, Twitter specifically and presumably FourSquare in the Location based services realm
- Doesn’t get in the way of the activity of social shopping so it has to be very easy to use and unobtrusive. Outside of quick checkin or setup.
- A tough one; has to aggressively protect privacy but still maintain flexibility allowing the user to easily define how restrictive or open to make the Social Shopping “event” . With the main demographic being teenage girls, adoption would be impaired if parents caught wind of gaps in privacy that could put their child at risk of the perverts in society.
- Is patterned after Web mashup but optimized for speed. Checkin or definition of shopping event, tying in messages/photos and all forms of communication revolving around that event. Syndication to only the chosen network of
users party to that event whether in person or virtually via the social network.
- Acts like a persistent store of the “event” after the fact. ie The pictures of posing with different outfits
Posted: March 11th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Startup, Technology |
Foursquare Badges & Mayorship
EDITS on Thursday Evening March 11,2010
Is someone reading my blog?
Starbucks and Foursquare
Been giving serious thought to why I take the trouble to check-in my locations via Foursquare and less often via Gowalla. Well I do have an understanding why centered around the gaming aspect of winning badges, becoming mayor of my own Subway station or frequented Starbucks. But outside of this very basic gaming angle and the pride of being Mayor of an out of the way Dunkin Donuts in Whitestone, Queens , what utility is actually being driven for me?
Over time, and the time may be near, I can imagine the utility to the business establishments and franchises that I visit having access to the stream of information about who ,when and how often folks are frequenting their establishments.To what extent FourSquare aware and engaged folks are representative of the demographic of any particular establishment’s customer base is probably up in the air but at least at the current moment, I doubt they are very representative. Also part of the information is already gleaned from the cash register of course and I don’t know to what extent users of Foursquare or like minded products will allow anything “private” to be divulged to the venues they visit.
Representative or not, as the location service increases in breadth whether through the likes of Foursquare/Gowalla or by other Local sites ie Yelp comes to mind adopting this as a platform feature , over time the collected data will be more then about just the early adopter, wiz-bang type of person.
What will drive mass adoption? I don’t believe that mass adoption will occur until the act of checking in is instrumented to be so easy and automatic that one doesn’t even think about it. Often times I start checking in while waiting on line , say at a Starbucks which is notorious for long lines especially in New York City, and I have still not completed the checkin process by the time I have reached the barrister to place my order. It should be like E-Z Pass , the automated toll collection system spear-headed in New York City for the traffic choked toll lines across all the river crossings. You go through a special lane and the rest is done via transponder on the E-Z Pass side and conceptually the same for the “Checkin” side.
But now I am back to the crux of the question,
what is in it for me?
From a social networking perspective, I am more selective of the “friends” chosen. They represent people I have known personally for some time and in all likelihood interacted with them on a social basis including outside of work. That selectivity can be powerful especially compared to the “whoring” that goes on on Facebook where it appears the concept of Friends is severely deprecated. Foursquare doesn’t put any limitations on the extent of my social graph but the nature of the service makes one more hesitant to just accept anyone as a “friend”.
I imagine the selectivity in growing one’s Foursquare network is not just innate to myself but will be a generally accepted principle. If that turns out to be the case the usefulness of that network will be magnified. In it’s most simple venue based extension, I can learn about or take as recommendations establishments I should try based on my own network’s frequenting of those establishments.
Or better yet, as a business establishment looking to extend my reach I can tap into a customer’s Foursquare network (with their permission of course) to make offers available that would entice potential new customers.
Though I can see lots of potential in the limited network of my Foursquare friends. it is also possible to intersect with a feature that allows things/events to be “pushed” to me depending on what specific locale I happen to be at the moment. A totally made up and unfathomable example, a theater’s ticket sales are lagging as showtime nears at 8pm on Broadway. Why not blast out a last minute appeal to those that may be enticed and in the area with discounts or other inducement to fill the seats that may otherwise go wanting.
Posted: February 26th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: New York City Startup, Startup |
For two hours on Wednesday evening February 24th, I and a group of other interested and hopefully entrepreneurial folks were treated to a discourse on Angel Investing – the when and how to ask for money from an Angel by David Rose, a dean of the art in New York City .
For those that have an interest in the presentation, here is a link to the audio.
The event was hosted by New York University’s Stern School of Business and the packed house seemed to be filled with mostly young and hungry NYU business students. The invite was not limited to just students but open to all that could reserve a spot which is how I got in.
I did take a front row seat with my polished Apple , spitting distance from Mr Rose and plopped myself down for what ended up being an enchanted two hour presentation.
The crux of the presentation was tailored around the protocol of enlisting angel funding for a startup. I won’t redact the entire two hours into this post , what I will concentrate will be on what I got out of it as singularly important.
- Have your elevator pitch
As the saying goes, you should be able to describe what problem your business attempts to solve in the short period of time that you may be in an elevator with someone, Ok, let’s assume you are in a New York City high-rise but notwithstanding, you have 30 seconds or at most if you are lucky 1 minute to provide the thrust of what your business strives to accomplish and be.
That is much harder then it seems and takes considerable thought and work to get it right and then practice to be able to deliverable at any time planned and most importantly unplanned. You never know when you will be presented an opportunity to deliver the pitch. For example , at the tail end of the 2 hour presentation, 3 people were selected at random to deliver their startup pitch to David Rose. The ground rule was you got two minutes and nothing more to present. Being concise but thorough enough to enlighten someone you have just met with the pretext of your business so that they come away with a general understanding and more importantly a desire to learn more is key if you want to successfully navigate the avenues of angel funding Remember, though quite naturally one is the most important person in their own universe or mind, the full universe is full of countless others who feel the same and thus the competition for attention is intense. Get your message tight and have it fit within that veritable 30 second window. imagine you were given 30 second spot during the Super Bowl.
- Craft a Business Plan
Even though David Rose admitted the likelihood of an angel spending time combing through a business plan was low, the strong expectation is the entrepreneur would expend the time and energy tailoring a business plan with a time horizon of 3 to 4 years. Anything out further then 4 years is dismissed as pure fantasy.
There is a recognition that even a 3 to 4 year horizon will be liable to be off and require constant recalibration. Nevertheless the act of preparing the plan gives evidence to a necessary discipline that is important for the budding business itself as well as an artifact that demonstrates to those you want money from that you have applied a degree of rigor to how your business purports to operate.
- Personal investment is key
It’s your business! If you don’t put some of your own funds on the line, how would you expect someone else to take a chance?
That seems very self evident but was hammered home at length. The absolute amount of personal investment is not the key factor as that will depend on multiple factors. Are you actively investing your own capital? How about Friends and Family who are the people who know you best? Even better, is there already a revenue stream from customers who are voting affirmatively using your services or products. If the answer is no to all above, fat chance you will have a willing angel investor.
These represent some of the things I took away from the two hours. It is a major distillation of what was a broad based educational presentation of how to interact with a potential angel investor if that is the path that makes sense for your startup.
Now that I have gotten myself on a magical listserv, I was also invited to an event this coming Monday March 1st 2010 to review the finalists of NYU’s Stern Business Startup Showcase. Starting with over 170 entires, the group has been whittled down to 40 semi-finalists in a content to garner from a pool of over $175,000 in capital for the winning ideas. I suspect I will be privy to a slew of more social networking or aggregation sites which seem to be in abundance as startup ideas but I hold out hope that doesn’t end up being the case.
