The Sounds of Starting-up (Inspirational songs)

The road to a successful venture is filled with bumps and obstacles, many ups & downs (as mentioned in our roller-coaster post ), making the going tough, and the tough going…

And there is nothing better than some music for muse, inspiration and that little kick one needs to get the engine burning and running full speed ahead.

Here’s a list of inspirational songs we compiled, full of the start up spirit.

1. Röyksopp – It’s What I Want (Simply sums it all : )
2. Bloom 06 – Fall   (–Lyrics)
3. Monty Python – Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
4. Infected Mushroom – Artillery
5. Fatboy Slim – Right Here, Right Now
6. Depeche Mode – Walking In My Shoes
7. Psy- Gangam Style (Since Jonathan just returned from Korea 🙂 )
8. Depeche Mode – Never Let Me Down Again (Aggro Mix)
9. Wamdue Project – King Of My Castle
10. Daft Punk – Harder Better Faster Stronger

All Full with startupiness, talking about the pains, the powers, and all that’s in between.

Let us know what you think, and tell us what are your favorite start-up songs.

Enjoy and be inspired,
Or & Jonathan.

Time, estimates & the Unknown

Working on various ideas and concepts, It is always crucial to be able to put price tags on them;
Nothing in life is free- and the same goes for developing projects.

I often find it funny how non-tech savvy people set expectations for the time cost to create this or that-
“So I want those features, and have it shoot fire out of it’s nose while making coffee- how long will it take to build? probably a week right? ”
…
“A month ?! really? 😦 ”

Time estimates for projects in general (and especially software) are tough, even for experienced programmers.
The main reason people find it hard, is not that they can’t evaluate the costs for the task at hand, but rather the fact that they don’t see the full picture;
The tiny sub-tasks that hide between the lines, the other (big or even huge tasks) that lie beyond your current line of sight – or in other words “The Unknown”.
Many times the unknown may contain more time-costs than the kernel you started out with. This, combined with what I call “Thinkful wishing”, leads to unrealistic estimates. Of course, the more you lack in experience- the more ‘Unknown’ you’ll have.

How can we solve this? Well, there are a lot of techniques in use that can help:
The classic leader, TOC, points to a simple answer- break things down to the smallest detail you can, and leave proportional wiggle room for mistakes (Buffers).
The problem with TOC is that even with the strongest research possible, you can’t predict the future, there will always be room for more costs to hide. In addition a strong research will be costly on it’s own.
Now-days agile techniques such as Scrum are favored thanks to recognizing the fact that the unknown is here to stay. Scrum mitigates the unknown by continuously re-evaluating the task.
I personally like to use my own flavor of Scrum, where along side task evaluation, I evaluate the Unknown as unknown (I may cover this in a future blog post).

As you gain experience you learn that there are some constants in reality, boundaries that are almost always true.
I always use the following points as key sanity-check markers. These can be really helpful, especially for the non-tech-savvy who try to better grasp the technical world-

• Nothing takes 5 Minutes (no matter how small)
• No project takes less than a Day.
• No product takes less than a Month.

Remember –  nothing that you can deliver to a costumer takes a week to make.
Most things will take at the lowest, lowest cost a MONTH to build.
If someone tells you otherwise – he’s lying!

Tons of luck to us all !
Or Weis.

Mood Swings and the famous rollercoaster

Last week we met with Ofir Erlich, Founder of Acceloweb (Acquired by Limelight), to discuss a few of our ideas and get his perspectives on entrepreneurship. Ofir talked about the roller coaster of startup life and how he and his co-founders dealt with it in Acceloweb up until the acquisition.

The start-up roller-coaster has been discussed quite extensively in startup literature but there is nothing more real than experiencing it yourself. Roller coasters are a lot of fun. I personally love going on the tallest and fastest of them. The difference is that this roller coaster is about your life (and the lack of it) and does not have a clear ending point or even a promise the ending will be all laughs and smiles. It feels serious and you can not really choose to get off when you are sick of it.

We decided to start metering our own mood swings on a 1-5 scale and plotting the points in an excel to map out our own roller coaster over time. Keep an eye on the blog to see it coming up!

Naming a company. (or Japanese creatures, British Kings & Persian gods.)

Wow – finding a name for a company is tough. We are currently still not settled on a final idea so we wanted to grab a generic name which could be used for any purpose. Of course, when you consider a name for your freshly minted company you want to take care of the following:

• You actually like the name
• It’s simple to remember & type
• .com domain / twitter handle / Facebook handle are free
• Not infringing someone’s Intellectual Property

We have been trying to come up with suitable names for a while now with no avail. Or found a list on wikipedia  containing name of thousands of Legendary Creatures. We found some cool-sounding names yet every time we checked the whois the .com domain was taken.

Or’s fingers began to itch and in less than 2 hours he whipped up some Python code to check all these wikipedia lists and only spit out creature names that have a free .com domain. The code worked great and we soon got a list of free domains. The results were pretty dire, since almost all the domains were taken. it seemed that the only free domains were of super eerie creatures or legends. Some examples?

Well, turns out that Boginki.com is up for grabs! Don’t be too cheerful. The creature has the following description on wikipedia: “Boginki were said to steal babies from their human parents that were replaced with Odmience – the Changed Ones.”

Akateko.com Is also free! but oh, it turns out to be a Japanese monster that appears as an infant’s hand hanging down from a tree. Yes. You read it right – not that pleasant.

We also tried Persian, Scottish, Swedish and British kings, Japanese legendary creatures and many other lists with potential but they all turned out empty for now.

In an act of desperation, we decided to write George R. R. Martin, the writer of the Song of Ice and fire books (which recently gained mainstream audience love from the HBO “Game Of Thrones” series).  We are both big fans (Or is a fanatic!) and we love the characters, the cities and the depth of each of the stories which he cleverly weaves together. We also love how the different houses have suitable names that just seem to fit. There are so many characters and each has a unique name and character. He just has a talent for naming as well story telling. We spent a lot of time crafting an email to George with the hopes to catch his attention. Should he answer, we will, of course, let you know on our blog.

Do you have any ideas for names with available domains? .ly, .do .io and other top level domains are also turning more popular so we are also considering “out of the box” ideas. Write your ideas in the comments below.

EDIT:

Joel from buffer published a great post about naming.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Welcome to our newly minted blog run by Or (26) and I, Jonathan (28) residing in Israel. We have created it to document our journey of building a company starting from the ground floor. We have a very interesting story about how we ended up together, but we’ll save it for a future post. Instead, we’ll tell you a bit on the first steps we took.

One of the first things we decided to do was to meet up with successful entrepreneurs within our network. Some of the people we met up with so far include Roi Tiger from Onavo, Omer Perchik from Any.Do, Aviv Revach from Commerce Sciences, Gilad Avidan & Shlomi Atar from Smore and Joel Gascoigne from Buffer.  We want to take the opportunity here to thank all of them for their time and kindness of welcoming us to their companies and talking to us about their experiences. You guys rock.

It was amazing to see how each company is so very different than the other. Not only in obvious issues such as the industry they operate in or the product they’re building but rather in the culture DNA. The range was really phenomenal – some companies feel more “calm” while other are hustling and bustling. Some had traditional offices in a large office complex while others were tucked away in a fancy residential towers, the home of one of the founders. Some had a very “nerdy / techy” feel while others felt more business like. In short, a range of different cultures, most likely influenced by the founders.

When we presented some of the ideas we are considering, the angles of approach these different founders suggested were as mixed as their startups. Each giving us his own unique spin based on their own experience or skill set. Even though we felt confident in our mental image of the idea, they presented issues we haven’t fully considered.

Seeing this mix of successful startups up close in such a small country like Israel is delightful. We admire the people and the path they have already walked. In the future, we’ll post insights from meetings we’ll have.

We’ll also tell you about ideas we are toying with; our quest for a (good!) company name; our meeting story and much, much more. Stay tuned!