trendpreneur

Lifehacker recently published an article “Five Best Startup Management Tools”, which I naively thought was a post on entrepreneurial webapps, but is in fact about autorun and trimming your Windows boot sequence. I don’t even use Windows (unless forced), so the article — which I keep seeing linked around the place — annoys me on multiple levels.

Here’s my take on what Lifehacker should have written to satisfy the other meaning of ’startup’. (Yes, it’s sort of a list post; I have another blog post brewing on that subject, and more.) The five top tools that help me run my startup, day in, day out, manage everything that’s going on, and not go insane in the process.

1. Email and Twitter

Two for the price of one. Really, the number-one ‘management tool’ that keeps everything flowing is communication, but there are platforms and webapps and gadgets galore for such a basic human act. I spend 95% of my communication time writing, reading and managing email or Twitter. Email… well, no need to go into details, although multiple inboxes, superstars, more filters than you can shake a stick at and labelling really save the day. Not sure what I’d do without Gmail.

Twitter isn’t a key internal management tool, but it has great benefits of its own — new opportunities, new contacts, quick attention-grabbing DMs, keeping up to date on trends, fostering relationships with key people and building a brand/reputation around a specific anchor. This isn’t just idle speculation, either; everything I just listed has actually resulted from my use of Twitter as a sort of mixed corporate-personal communication channel (both on @jennielees and, in August, our shared @festbuzz).

2. Dropbox

I use multiple machines, from multiple locations, across multiple platforms. Having the headache of ‘oh shit, that file’s on that computer 300 miles away’ totally removed from my life is worth the Pro subscription’s weight in gold. I mainly use this for startup work, as personal stuff is just less likely to be as vital, but I’m starting to put more trivial content into Dropbox just for the convenience. Because it’s a ‘real’ folder, I’m not worried about losing the data, but I am a little niggled by the ‘it’s all on the cloud’ aspect — I deal with uber-secure stuff in a slightly more paranoid way. Not sure how I’d transition from personal-dropbox to startup-dropbox shared with multiple people, but I can totally see the benefit of that as we grow.

3. Skype

We don’t use this tremendously much but it’s been insanely valuable when we have. Being a distributed company with the main lynchpin in the arse-end of Scotland people often assume we can meet face to face with them when we can’t; free video calling really does help to bridge the gap. (And, initially, having an 0131 number without a real phone.)

“Virtual facetime” isn’t quite the same as real facetime though, so I should probably add a tiny mention for Easyjet here, despite their monumental awfulness. (And big up the Generator hostel in London, yo.) My mileage for the year’s nowhere near Ewan’s, but I’ve still spent plenty of time on those lovely bright orange 6.30am planes.

4. Macbook Pro

My trusty laptop. I’d say “a” laptop is useful — really, required — to run a startup, but major props to the MBP (disclaimer: matter of personal taste). It’s over three years old, and although it feels quite sluggish now, and the battery life is somewhat laughable — about one and a half hours — it’s definitely served me well.

The main reason I love Macs is because I’m a control freak and command-line junkie on one level, but I also like shiny pretty things. OSX combines the best of both worlds in a way that’s well and truly converted me to the Cult of Jobs; I can get dirty stuff done quite happily in Terminal, set up a near-perfect coding environment that beats ‘four-terminal fwvm2′ into the dust, and yet also use a fantastic array of apps which are generally jolly good. And it doesn’t do games, which is great for a work machine, but it does do WoW, which is great for a junkie’s fix on the road (yesyes, I gave up for good over six months ago).

Honourable mention goes to the iPhone for keeping me connected on the move (providing there’s signal), but frankly, its call quality is terrible, the no-ring/voicemail bug is frustrating in the extreme, the ‘no service’ weirdness I’ve experienced lately is even worse, and the bewildering array of apps is entertaining yet ultimately a huge problem that’s just not being solved. Yes, it’s a great mobile email, web and SMS client, yes, some of the apps are great, yes, Google Maps has saved me more times than I can count. But international data rates, poor signal, low battery etc mean it’s usually an expensive iPod most of the time I’m travelling.

5. Other Startups

One of the things that has helped me learn, improve and generally stay on top of things has been other people — specifically other people who are, or have been, in the same boat. Thanks to communities such as Hacker News it’s easy to learn from others’ mistakes and get a quick opinion before you plunge; of course, I’ve still made plenty of my own, but I feel I somehow did so with a little education. There are a load of events that help startups in various ways, through learning, networking, presentation practice and so on, and it’s easy to get carried away and go to too many. However, having the option and the amount of information there for the taking is still great.

In meatspace, it’s also important to balance the often-isolated habits of entrepreneurship with the real world, and that’s where things like the Informatics Ventures/TechMeetup communities and EPIS have really helped. There’s something nice about the size and energy of the Edinburgh tech community; it’s small enough that you can really get to know people well and yet not too small to be insignificant.

Events like the Silicon Valley speaker series, Ken Morse courses, School for Startups and so on bring the world to Edinburgh. We still have a lot of barriers to get over to put the city on the map, so to speak, and there are plenty of times when I wish I was in London — but I do sense a force for change up here and some genuinely serious interest and investment in pushing Edinburgh’s ’scene’ further.

A side note: simply being in the right place is important to startup management, although not necessarily a deal-breaker. For example, it’s easier to manage a company if your co-founders, employees, investors and clients are all in the same city as you! However, it’s not impossible to succeed if none of them are, which is practically the case for me — you just have to think about things a little differently, and use tools such as those listed above to help with the process.

Having said that, there is a balancing act on hand. Despite the loveliness of Edinburgh and its awesome community, I’m going to be spending the next year in San Francisco simply because I feel I need to be there in person to nurture various things along, and get to a stage I don’t feel I can achieve remotely. But I’ll be back, and that’s what counts.

Photo is of Citizen Space, where I spent a happy nomadic afternoon working. Fortunately, the hot desks have power sockets.

I’m not at LeWeb (though Steven is), but two cool things have come out of it so far today.

Firstly, firehose access — hurrah!

Secondly, Tweetminster Search (TechCrunch link) is… interesting. It’s a very hard problem to get right, measuring the sentiment of Twitter against a particular term; if the search term is “Labour”, do you search for tweets with the term “labour” in, expand the lexicon based on domain knowledge (”Government”, “Gordon Brown”), or perhaps search every tweet by a Labour MP? The methods and results seem to be in a very early stage right now, but this is something I’ve been thinking about and looking into, so cut them some slack for the rough edges. (Having said that, I will level this one criticism: as the service stands, I can’t really find anything useful out.)

Visualisation of political opinion, trend-spotting, disaster management and voting prediction are all going to become super hot over the next few months. Tweetminster Search is timely, and the mentioned API will be something definitely worth playing with; one area Tweetminster definitely adds value in is the curation of domain knowledge, i.e. maintaining a list of MPs and related Twitter accounts (news etc), and presumably caching those tweets. Firehose or no, having a readymade domain specific API is a NLP hacker’s dream. Honest.

Pretty much what it says in the headline. The Digital Missions are a useful way for UK companies to attend high-profile events like SXSW Interactive without the massive costs involved (although we turned down the recent NYC Digital Mission because of the costs being too high for the return we would get). Today’s the last day to apply if you want a UKTI-facilitated trip to the hottest “new meeja” event of the year, and it’s worth a stab if you qualify.

A couple of caveats though. I hadn’t realised that SXSW Interactive overlaps with GDC (I may be totally mistaken, but this isn’t usually the case, is it?), which causes an interesting problem for any gaming companies out there. In the past we’ve seen innovation in gaming showcased and inspired by both events, but this year… ouch. A quick Google tells me they have clashed in the past, but not recently, which makes me wonder why it’s happening again. I have a horrible feeling GDC will lose.

Secondly, and this is a personal opinion fuelled by first-hand experience covering and attending trade shows; being showcased in a country-specific booth isn’t always to your best advantage. It depends on what you’re doing, how attention-grabbing it can be, and how accessible other options are to you; for us, for example, we wouldn’t have any other reasonable options! But for a company trying to attain equal footing with the world’s up-and-coming, being tucked away with a Union Flag waving limply in the air conditioned breeze is not going to get you attention. The press loves stories, and being “yet another British company” isn’t a story. Stand on your own feet and stand out. The best British startups doing well in America don’t focus on where they’re from, they focus on what they’re doing well.

On the other hand, schemes like this make these events totally accessible to those who may not otherwise be able to go, which is great. Just don’t rely on them as a crutch, and if you want to take the world by storm, do it!

Here’s an interesting one for anyone looking for seed funding: The Difference Engine.

We are a mentor-lead (sic) acceleration programme that offers successful applicants £20,000 of investment capital and sixteen weeks of intensive business development.

More discussion on deburca. It’s a North-East England approach to Y Combinator, something I’ve said before needs to at least be tried over here. The fact it’s publicly funded makes it a little different; presumably, similar to Scottish Enterprise and the EU’s funding of EPIS, part of the motivation is regional economic stimulus, job-creation and growth. (It also means there are some things you can’t do with the cash, such as use it to match a SMART award).

Looking forward to seeing what comes out of the programme, though. It’s open to applicants from anywhere, and the application is virtually identical to Y Combinator’s (no business plan required), so off you go.

It all started in the Carlton Arms, as many things are wont to do. At least, I think it did. My memories are understandably hazy with time and beer festivals.

The year was 2004. We — a Big Bang Theory-esque group of two mathematicians pretending to be physicists, an engineer/open-source hacker, and computer scientist — had taken up residence in a nice-if-a-little-dated house which just happened to be right across the street from an excellent pub. For reasons beyond my ken, said pub was already the home for a weekly gathering of Cambridge geek types. However, it lacked wifi. Our house had wifi. Rich put these facts together, bought an extra-powerful aerial booster (basically a curved piece of tinfoil attached to some card), and geeks at the Carlton had all the Internet access they could want — provided they bought one of us a pint to get the WEP key. Perfect.

At the time, free wifi wasn’t that common. I remember one other pub in Cambridge ostensibly having it, and a couple of university places. The Cloud was just taking off, too, so paid wifi was on its way around — but beyond our budget as students, and only available at Wetherspoons. So a natural “itch meets scratch” for us was to think… What if we did this for other pubs?

The proposition was thus: We’d create a small, cheap, linux-based wifi base station, and code up a HTTP authentication gateway system (none of the ones we looked at were any good, and we wanted a way for pub owners to keep a changing password behind the bar, or to charge — we’d have a superuser password giving us free access everywhere, of course). We’d sell this into pubs and charge a monthly fee to cover the cost of the box and the inevitable tech support. Ultimately we’d build up a network of accessible locations, starting in Cambridge and expanding further afield to include further cities and types of hostelry.

Sounds pretty familiar now, doesn’t it? (That’s the first Google result I can find, I’ve seen others.)

The value proposition for the business was fairly clear, too: one, it would provide incentive for clientele who wanted to get connected to visit in the first place; two, they’d stick around for longer, thereby ordering more food and drink (in theory). It relies a little on the English habit of self-effacing politeness, that urge that makes us feel “it’s not quite right” to sit somewhere all afternoon with a single pint. Even today this just about works, though on a recent visit to the US, being unable to get a table at a cafe because it was full of patrons with empty cups and laptops, I’m less a fan of the concept.

So what went wrong? Why didn’t we jump on this idea? It could have done well, in retrospect, but there were a couple of problems. Firstly, I think the main one was simply dedication/enthusiasm. It was a nice idea, but we never really took it ’seriously’, we had plenty of other things to do (masters/PhD, hobbies, running student societies, open source, etc). I should have capitalised on my connections to societies like Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, learnt how to write a business plan, and entered it in competitions and the like; instead, I was busy with the most intensive year of study I’ve ever had.

We also lacked funds and in some way a firm vision. We had enough to buy a single box to play with, but never really got beyond that. In a way, we were too geeky; we were excited by playing with a new toy, not selling it. We didn’t identify a target customer (the Carlton would have been perfect) or speak to pub owners to see if there was a market. We didn’t figure out a price point, I think we had the rough concept of about £100 being “ok” in our heads, but we had trouble reconciling costs with that figure.

The vision was also marred by two things: firstly, the DIY “competition”, where the owner’s son/niece/patron just installs a bog standard router costing about £50; secondly, the bespoke/consultant nature of the work we would have to do. The fact that we may have to set up Internet connections and do all sorts of other things for clients (probably a fair concern) when we were pretty much fed up of doing that for friends and family already made it an unappealing vision in ways.

Fundamentally, though, it was really just time and enthusiasm. It was an idea, a project, and not something we really cared about deeply enough to pause and dedicate ourselves to. In retrospect, this was probably the wisest plan, but it’s interesting to look back and realise how much I’ve learned since then about turning an idea into reality. It’s also nice to dream about what the world would be like if every pub you went into worldwide had a Carlton Wireless box in it. It’s also somewhat reassuring to see stories of pub owners being fined for illegal downloading on their free wifi connections, and be glad not to be part of that furore, at least!

(Credit: Reminiscence inspired by Rich’s tweeting of the above ‘fining’ news story.)