pumperknickel’s blog…the journey of a wannabe entrepreneur

Right up until I left my paying job to do this startup I was living in a fantasy world. Last friday when there was no paycheck in my bank account I knew I was in the real world.

So, when you’re the boss of a small startup with different people relying on you, it can be tough and very stressful. The one piece of advice I would give to someone with any level of responsiblity in a startup environment is to celebrate the small victories. Its easy stress on the details and the big things so find the energy from those small victories. Today’s small victory was a big customer not telling us they didnt like our product. It just means we’re still in the running….thank god!

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I’m leaving the land of 9 to 5 and a steady pay check! This day next week is my last day. In other news, we are out trying to raise a round of financing. Its a slow process, we appear to be gaining traction but its very much like interviewing for a job. It doesnt mean a thing until you’ve signed the job offer and they’ve accepted!

We’re also looking to hire another developer to expand the team.

 More later

Pumper

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I just got an email confirming our first investment! Ok, so its less than 10% of what we need but we have our first investor. Happy days! We’re pitching on Friday as well. I expect it will take some time to close everything we need for the angel round but its nice to have some momentum behind the funding process!

Your thoughts?

Pumper

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We got our first bite from investors recently. We’re looking to put a small angel round together to get us to the end of the year. Let me tell you, there is nothing more exciting than getting the first positive response from investors.

We’ve also been out there demo’ing the product to prospective customers. That has also been fun and positive. Quite frequently, we’ve heard the term “wow” when people see the product…high praise indeed.

On the more practical side of things, my wife and I are re-financing our house to make sure we can make the payments while I’m without salary! Its not quite as scary as it sounds but it is holding me from leaving my 9 to 5. Assuming the refi goes through I’ll be leaving mid to late April…woo hoo!!

By the time that comes around we should also have incorporated, which assumes we will have finalized the company name (who would have thought it could be so hard!).

We’re also beginning to think about employee #3. The hiring will have to wait until we’re funded but we’re already making a plan. The early hires are critical to our success so we’re trying to get straight in our heads what and who we are looking for.

Thats it for the moment.

Your thoughts?

Pumper

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Firstly, happy new year!

So what’s been happening? As you might expect things are hectic and have been for a quite a while. Along with the normal getting us off the ground work I’ve managed to squeeze in some travel to Europe and India where I met some VC’s and had some interesting conversations.

On the product side, we are putting the finishing touches to the alpha version of the product as we speak and are hoping to have a Beta product by early March.

Also on the list of to-do’s are finalizing the company name, incorporation, polish business plan and pitch, file provisional patents…and the list goes on.

All of the above is fun and is bringing me closer to throwing in the towel at my 9to5 (which motivates me enormously!). I’ve a personal target date set and let you folks know as soon as it happens.

On a very different note,  I read an interesting and timely post this morning from Jason Goldberg, firstime CEO of Jobster. Enjoy!

http://www.socialmedian.com/2008/01/12_learnings_from_my_first_sta.html

Your thoughts?

Pumper

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Its been a year already!! I was going to celebrate this grand occasion by updating the timeline I posted previously….I just dont have the time to do it!

This blog’s original aim was to stike up a conversation about the journey of a wannabe entrepreneur and hopefully pass on some of what I learned from this conversation. It may not have been of benefit to others but it has been great for me to be able to air my ideas and thoughts and get your feedback. So, many thanks to those who have helped me on the journey!

The coming will see big changes for this blog and RudNua. Things are happening fast and I really feel we have some momentum. Enough momentum even to start laying out some serious plans.

With prototype in hand, we’re about to enter into an intense phase of customer interviewing and feedback to inform our decisions on product features. It’ll be interesting to see if the product delivers on the concept we laid out the first time we spoke with them. With that info in hand, we’ll be pushing forward as fast as possible with an alpha or beta in parallel with incorporation and the search for external funding. Also, I expect I will be taking the BIG step of leaving my 9 to 5, probably in March! Wow, just seeing that sentence on the screen scares me!

The last part, and the most exciting for this blog, is that we will going public with the product and company. It’ll be exciting and I promise, you folks will be the first to know about it! As a little teaser, I thought it might be fun to show my favorite of the proposals for our logo…Enjoy!

Your thoughts?

Pumper

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One of the things that has pushed me to become an entrepreneur is wanting to create an environment where the culture was healthy and somewhere others would enjoy working for the long hours most of us work (can you tell I’ve worked in some f*ckin terrible places!). My somewhat idealistic thinking was that the culture would be defined as we went along and certainly wouldn’t need to be discussed until way further down the road.

Kind of like my previous post on branding, I’m realising that culture needs to be discussed up front (and not just a token chat about it either!). I came to this conclusion for two reasons:

Naming (Again): Last night I got to hear a guy from Catchword Branding talk about their process for generating and proposing names for their clients (Now that I know how hard it is to come up with a good name, I have a lot more respect for my buddy, Gil Rosen’s Triplay.com). They say, that for a company name, as opposed to a product name, the founders and employees need some skin in the game, a personal connection with the spirit or essence of the name….kind of sounds like the culture a little, doesnt it?

Ethics: I was talking to someone today who told me a story about a startup with somewhat loose ethics and integrity. That kind of stuff really pisses me off, its hard enough to get up every day and go to work without having deal with people like that. Ok, rant over, but my point is that its important that we bake these values into the culture now. My confidence is high that my CTO and I have acted ethically and with integrity up to this point but it doesnt do any harm to explicitly state those values in our culture. We all slip every now and then and need to be reminded! Come to think of it, this post will also serve to keep me in honest in the future!

Your thoughts?

Pumper

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Why should a startup in Stealth mode care about its brand? After all, it hasn’t done anything it wants to talk about yet?

Two reasons:

1) Naming.  We’re working on different names and trying to make a decision on whether the company and the product should have the same name or different names. If we go with one name it will cost us in the future when we need to seperate the brand from the product (so we can create new products under the same brand). On the other hand, if we have a company name and a product name, thats two brands we have to grow.

Dont believe the last comment? A previous company I started imported and distributed racecars. We had a company name and two products. Nobody could ever remember which was the name of the car and which was the company. We could have fixed it by spending more time (and money) messaging the brand better. We didnt have either so we just lived with it and it hurt awareness.

2) Company Culture and Brand are related. The brand should personify the culture of your company and vice versa. Right now the culture of the company is our personal values. The other element will be learned from customers when they tell us what a company needs to bring them. But if we cant articulate our brand (culture) today we certainly wont understand how it will need to evolve to appeal to customers.

Your thoughts?

Pumper

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Well, today my CTO got the first prototype of RudNua to work! WooHoo! I always enjoy the day when the vision becomes a tangible thing in front of you. This is even more sweet because it’s MY dream thats becoming reality.

In parallel, I’ve been busy building the website and getting to know php. We’re starting to do useability testing on it (which is also a little new to me). From an emotional level, its tough to take the criticism of your baby in an objective manner!

Of course, there’s so much more to do, but today is a good day!

Your thoughts?

Pumper

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