Are you bored with your life, not feeling like you’re getting ahead?
Are you still saying “if only” and “what if”?
Stop. Take a breath.
Take control. Understand yourself- your strengths and weaknesses. Explore the opportunities around you.
Find what motivates and inspires you in this life. Then, take a deep breath out.
What did you see?
Continue this exercise until you see the beauty around you- the answer.
Take charge. Be yourself. Obtain the goal.
A Year of Lessons Learned
When I did this exercise awhile back, I saw the opportunity- it started off as a mere thought. My friend’s son had just graduated from college and needed some guidance on coding. I wanted to help, so I began to brainstorm. Here’s my story.
I searched the resources out from around me and found 15 eager participants, waiting to create something.
From hardware engineer to software engineer, to accountant, to marketer, to friend that said yes, I asked for their ideas and opinions of what to do.
One of my best friends, Gerald, suggested we work on a web application, but asked that it be only him and me. I agreed, and we began.
1. Create a site built for “family tree” social network. The idea was for families to be able to link everyone together (from 1st cousin to 30th cousin).
Because this site idea was so huge, we decided to work on one area of the site- video messaging. This idea led us to make the decision to develop another product. We began idea #2.
2. Create a facebook application that allows multiple people to record individual video messages and send it in one package to an end user (kinda like a group video card). You can actually see the app here: Giftomi.
While Giftomi was being developed, I decided we create an “umbrella” corporation that would encompass the web apps we were anticipating developing.
3. LiveUmbrella was formed. The mission to bring people together “one app at a time”.
I became immersed in understanding the new marketing tools I had out there and researching what we were going to do once the product was ready.
I was also attending a bunch of startup events like Startup2Startup, MashupCamp, CloudConnect, and Web 2.0.
The main theme of these events were based around speakers and networking, but I found more value in the networking. I wanted to bring people together in the startup community and have a more “networking-focused” event. Why not do this under our company’s name as well?
4. LiveUmbrella began throwing the Entrepreneurs Lounge. Our mission then changed to wanting to bring people together online and offline- online through web apps, and offline via the Entrepreneurs Lounge.
Giftomi was ready to release. So we did. And no one came. The app was not viral, and required too much work for the user or users friends to want to use it. It’s a great app, but nobody cared. We decided to instead focus on what both Gerald and I loved- food.
5. The idea: a food site where there was a database of menus and people could rate/review the dishes in restaurants- kind of like Yelp but for dishes.
After doing research, we found similar sites in this arena, and other sites that didn’t have menus, but had simply pictures of dishes at different areas. It seems everyone was trying to solve the same problem: help people find dishes in restaurants. But everyone was missing one component or the other.
For the databases of menus, they were missing the virality and compulsion aspect of user generated content. The content also seemed out of date/could never be trusted.
For the sites that let you take pictures of what you were eating, the completeness of being able to view all the dishes in a restaurant/know what was good was missing.
We decided to change our direction.
6. Battledish was formed. The first adventure game for foodies! Simply a place where foodies can eat the best dishes in restaurants (all dishes listed are foodie-approved) and where restaurants can feature the best dish they have for the public to discover. Fun, eh?
Battledish is now our main focus and we stopped development with the other web applications we were working on.
LiveUmbrella then has become an event company.
7. LiveUmbrella now focuses on bringing people together offline at the Entrepreneurs Lounge. We encourage quality networking with other startup founders as well as invite lean-minded leaders to have a conversation with us.
So in the past year, we’ve changed things 7 times, and then some.
The changes and ability to go with the flow have allowed us to focus and refine our goals. It’s been the best ride ever.
One of the keys to my success is tenacity and the ability to see ahead.
In any startup, there are a multitude of things that can and will go wrong- over and over again. Do you let things like this discourage you? Have the determination to pull forward. If you understand your surroundings, you can then instinctually prepare for them and recover fast when the pebbles come your way.
- Have the courage, the determination, and the will to survive.
- Know when you need to drop an idea and focus on another.
- Make sure your vision is clear.
- Always measure the value of what you do to the ROI.
- Give back to the community and it will give back to you.
- Have fun, remember to laugh.
- Be human.
- Be resolved.
Take charge of your life in 2010 and make a difference in the world. Make a difference in yourself.