Fire and Knowledge

Silicon Valley companies squabble incessantly and viciously over personnel. Employees change hands like poker chips, and right now Facebook has the best hand at the table. Everyone at Facebook was a star somewhere else: Taylor, for example, led the team that created — maybe you’ve heard of it? — Google Maps. You don’t get a lot of shy, retiring types at Facebook. These are the kinds of power nerds to whom the movies don’t do justice: fast-talking, user-friendly, laser-focused and radiating the kind of confidence that gives you a sunburn. Sorkin did a much better job of representing Facebook when he wrote The West Wing.

—Lev Grossman, “Person of the Year 2010: Mark Zuckerberg“

Ben Casnocha posted an excerpt from “One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way” that I found interesting:

While the modern medical name for the feeling produced by a new challenge or large goal is stress, for countless generations it went by the old, familiar name of fear. Even now, I’ve found that the most successful people are the ones who gaze fear unblinkingly. Instead of relying on terms like anxiety, stress, or nervousness, they speak openly of being frightened by their responsibilities and challenges. Here’s Jack Welch, the past CEO of General Electric: “Everyone who is running something goes home at night and wrestles with the same fear: Am I going to be the one who blows this place up?” Chuck Jones, the creator of Pepe le Pew and Wile E. Coyote, emphasized that “fear is the most important factor in any creative work.” And Sally Ride, the astronaut, is unafraid to talk plainly of fear: “All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.”

I was puzzled why so many remarkable people preferred the word fear to stress or anxiety. The answer came to me one day while I was observing physicians in the course of their training. I was following one of our family-practice resident physicians through the course of her day in the health center, seeing children and adults for the wide variety of maladies that bring people to a primary care physician. I noticed that when adults came to see a physician and talk about their emotional pain, they chose words such as stress, anxiety, depression, nervous, and tense. But when I observed children talking about their feeling, they talked about being scared, sad, or afraid.

It’s my conclusion that the reason for the difference in word choice had less to do with the symptoms and more to do with expectations. The children assumed their feelings were normal. Children know they live in a world they cannot control. They have no say in whether their parents are in a good mood or bad, or whether their teachers are nice or mean. They understand that fear is a part of their lives.

Adults, I believe, assume that if they are living correctly, they can control the event around them. When fear does appear, it seems all wrong–so adults prefer to call it by the names for psychiatric disease. Fear becomes a disorder, something to put in a box with a tidy label of “stress” or “anxiety.”

This approach to fear is unproductive. If your expectation is that a well-run life should always be orderly, you are setting yourself up for panic and defeat. If you assume that a new job or relationship or health goal is supposed to be easy, you will feel angry and confused when fear arises–and do anything to make it disappear.

To me, stress usually means “too much going on for me to process efficiently.” But I’ve used it in terms of fear as well, especially regarding public speaking when I was younger.

Yesterday I was proud to announce the launch of Twin Cities Top 5. Today we launched the Denver Top 5.

We went from idea to launch in 4 days, and two of the days were on the weekend.

In this post you’ll learn how we did it, and how you can do it, too.

We pulled this off due to 3 main reasons:

1. We based it on WordPress, which let us use templates and plugins to accelerate implementation.
2. We had the right people with talent and experience.
3. We had the momentum of excitement.

Like any project, this could have dragged on for weeks or months. We could have:

1. Created a completely custom site design. But that would have set us back weeks and a couple thousand dollars.
2. Waited until we had enough money to promote it big. Yeah, right.
3. Built it custom on Ruby on Rails or something “sexier” than WordPress.
4. Lined up giveaways and guest posts before launch.

But doing any of those things would add time and money to a project that needed to just get out the door.

Honestly there is a list longer than my arm of things I want to change or improve on the sites. For instance, I’m a bit of a design nerd, and it feels cluttered to me. We’ll definitely be addressing that when we do that awesome redesign in the coming months.

My point is: Just make it happen. There’s always more to do. Figure out how to get it out the door, and then start improving it.

How You Can Do It

1. Remember: Minimally Viable Product

Write out all the features you want, then strike out all the ones you don’t need. The goal is a minimally viable product — something that has all the functionality you need to launch, but not a single thing more. The day after you launch you can get started on Phase 2.

2. Use the Right Platform

The right platform will:

1. Be popular and actively developed
2. Let you build a site quickly
3. Be easy to install and maintain
4. Have design templates and plugins/extensions available

Depending on the type of site you’re wanting to launch, I recommend WordPress (blog or cms), Expression Engine (cms), Drupal (cms), Shopify (e-commerce), and the like.

3. Use a Template

Forget about doing a custom design for the launch unless it’s something you’re sure you need. It will set you back thousands of dollars (if you want it done right) and will add weeks or months to your timeline (depending on scope). Spend $50 on a nice template and be done. I do recommend customizing the header and colors, though.

4. Get the Right People Onboard

If you’ve got the time and talent to do it all yourself, congratulations. Even though I know how, I don’t have the time to do it all myself, and I need people who are talented and excited to help. Figure out how to get people involved. If you don’t have money, use commission, equity , ad revenue sharing, experience… be creative.

5. Find a Good and Reliable Designer and Developer

I’m lucky that I can do both design and development. If you don’t have those skills, you’ll need to find people who do (you can learn, but that will delay things and it’s probably a waste of time). Of course I recommend Rainsong Media but I’m biased since it’s one of my companies. But you can also use friends or outsource with services like Elance and Odesk (just be prepared for frustration in the communication department).

6. Register Your Domain & Get Shared Hosting Setup ASAP

You won’t need anything more than shared hosting at first. My favorite host is Site5 — they’re cheap and the performance and uptime is great. If you need something that scales more, VPS.NET is worth looking at but it will require Linux command-line skills.

7. Write Out Your Action Steps

Take 15 minutes and write out each action step to complete the project. Things like: Brainstorm and decide on name; register domain(s); setup hosting; install WordPress; have Hannah design header; etc. Then you can run down your list and get stuff done. This is far more effective than always re-thinking action steps.

8. Focus

Focus is a powerful technique. Distraction wastes too much time. Isolate yourself for a couple hours at a time and get as much done as possible. Turn off IM and email. Just get stuff done.

9. Don’t Neglect Fun

Even though I was very focused on getting these projects launched, I made time to go out to lunch, play racquetball, watch a movie, attend a party and play a long game of poker. Your brain needs a break. Work hard, play hard.

This is less important if you don’t launch things often, but when you’re in a continual state of launching things like myself, it’s a necessity to stay focused and excited.

10. Enjoy the Hard Work

If you’re excited about the project it shouldn’t be hard to enjoy the work involved in launching it. (If you’re not excited, STOP RIGHT NOW and do something else!) For me, launching and starting a new venture is one of the most fun parts. Make sure to enjoy it.

Timeline

For those interested, here was our basic sequence of events:

Thu, Oct 21

• I tell Abraham Piper about our idea for city communities and ask if he wants to be involved.
• Abraham comes up with the Top 5 angle.
• Founders meet, discuss, and approve it.

Fri, Oct 22

• I purchase domain names.
• I setup a WordPress multi-site install to have one platform for the cities.
• I use a theme (Mystique) to get a jumpstart on implementation.
• I setup facebook groups.
• Abraham sets up twitter accounts.
• Abraham begins writing posts.

Sat, Oct 23

• Hannah, Rainsong’s designer, creates headers for the blogs.
• I setup the sidebar and customize the theme slightly.
• I setup feedburner for rss and email subscriptions.
• I update the DNS records.

Sun, Oct 24

• Abraham finishes 2 posts for both blogs.
• DNS starts resolving.
• We launch Twin Cities Top 5.
• We tweet about it and submit social media links.

Mon, Oct 25

• We launch Denver Top 5.
• We do more tweeting and begging for fb likes.
• I write this post.

I think we’ve all almost done this before:

This applies to more than games, folks. I have been guilty of this too many times:

How many designers have been asked to make a “GTA killer”, or a “Guitar Hero killer”, or a “WoW killer”? I personally have heard numerous designers and producers working on unreleased MMO projects describe their game in these terms: “It’s like WoW, but…” I just shake my head when I hear this, because the team that is best poised to deliver a successful game that is an evolution of WoW is… well, the WoW team. They’ve got their thing, and they’re good at it. Let’s all carve out our own thing, and be the best at it. Truly great games are made by passionate teams who are on fire with the notion of changing the industry. If you are aiming at a competitor rather than aiming to make something fresh and innovative, you’ve lost.

—How to Create a Successful MMO by Jeff Strain.

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Kevin Rose (creator of Digg) gives 10 tips for entrepreneurs to succeed at the Tahoe Tech Talk. Here are

1. Go build it. If you really believe in something, you should just build it.
2. Build & release. List out your features for six months, sort them by importance, and go build three to five of them.
3. Hire your boss. Senior positions: only hire people you’d personally work for.
4. Don’t raise money. Beg borrow and steal for as long as possible.
5. Go cheap. Use Amazon for storage and data. Work from home for as long as possible.
6. Connect with your audience. Start a podcast, even if you have a small audience. It has to start somewhere, right? Throw a launch party. Invite press and influencers to the party.
7. Hack the press. Invite only system at the beginning. It will get people excited about your product and also make them curious.
8. Advisors. What technical problems are you going to have? Ask Joe Stump for advice. If there are people you trust out there, give them 1% of your company for them to be on call for any issues you might need advice for.
9. Leverage your user base to spread the word. Think Farmville and Facebook notifications.
10. Analyze your traffic. Tons of analytics. Make sure that you act on your feedback.

Read the whole thing on ZD Net.