What I’ve Been Up To Lately (On past and new worries)

I’ve been very busy at my new startup, EveryMove, and that has been consuming most of my time. I passed the point where I try to have much of a life outside of EveryMove and because of that I’ve been saying “no” to new ideas, new projects, existing projects, coffee meetings, advisor roles, or anything. I’m sure I’m not getting a lot of new friends by refusing to meet for coffee with entrepreneurs who want some advice, but Dharmesh said it better.

Anyway, I’ll be at the Startup Weekend Barbeque this Monday if you want to talk to me in person (I’m always open on email).

At EveryMove we are working on our core product and that’s where I’m spending most of my brain cells in. We launched two products over the last month or so, but those were private and experimental only and we don’t want people to get confused about what we are doing so we avoid mentioning them.

If I’d divide up my (work) day, 40% of the time I’m coding the new product, 40% working on the UX, value prop, design, etc., and 20% working on business related tasks. I forgot how much decisions must be made at the early days of a startup. There is a ton to be done, each one affecting (holding back or pushing forward) the other.

I’m finding this time around so much easier than when I started Sampa in January of 2005. Back then I didn’t know squat about startups and I didn’t know much about a lot of technologies I needed, so I spend a many months just learning stuff.  Now, I can short circuit all that because I’m either good and/or proficient enough to get the job done. I can say that technology is not getting in the way of building a technology business.

Contrary to when I started Sampa where I was anxious about software scalability, customer support, AJAX-based limitations of IE 6 and crap that didn’t matter, today I’m worried about UX, value proposition to end users, life-time value of a customer and distribution strategy.

I’ll finish this post with some great news. Oops. Can’t talk about it yet, but it’s a big deal for EveryMove (and for me of course).