I’ve been reading a lot about this lately – the whole work/life balance and how it affects health and relationships.
Mainly, I’m interested in productivity.
ANSWER: 100 hours per week works for me…but only right now.
The common fallacy I see in discussion of productivity for 50 vs 80 vs 120 hours per week to work is that it fails to mention enough context around what you’re doing for those hours. Studies usually site established corporations or other entities with revenue, a solid baseline product, and non-trivial new feature development.
Most people arguing in favor of 100 hours per week are probably like me.
This is my first software startup. We have me plus my co-founder, very little revenue, and work out of our apartment. There is a lot of low hanging fruit. There is a large amount of low hanging fruit. There is a tremendous amount of low hanging fruit. Product development, customer service, business development, many of these things can be done groggy at 5am probably with roughly similar quality as at the high point in the day. Things just have to get done and they take non-zero time to get them done.
In the future, this absolutely won’t be the case. In fact, it’s transitioning away from it now that we’ve just launched and have to really start buckling down to prioritize our time and make sure we’re going to be able to reach ramen profitability in as short as possible. New features on the development roadmap are definitely non-trivial and won’t stand up to only 5 hours a night of sleeping.
Bottom line, lets compare apples to apples when talking about productivity.
FIRST OFF: I want to thank Ryan Van Etten of VirtualMusic.tv so much for the article he wrote about us for his blog.
I don’t know if I’ve been living in a fantasy world for the past 6 months but this shit is real. I don’t know why, but tonight I’m realizing that this is actually going to happen. Sound Around is going to make it’s way into the world. Sound Around is going to crush it. I can just feel it.
So much has changed in the past 6 months. Where to start? My lifestyle, my goals, the way I spend my time, the people I choose to spend my time with, what I value in people (and no it’s not that they’re are working hard, it’s people that are doing something they enjoy).
If you told me a year ago what the following year had in store for me…I’d slap you in the face for being a damn dirty liar. I spoke with the CEO and marketing director of a distribution company about an iPhone solution for the some of the 400 record labels they do digital distribution for. Last year this time? I was…I think researching the different mobile platforms for the Bob and the Showgram App (which would never see the light of day). Oh how things of changed. I’m more conscious of how I spend my time…probably to a fault.
We’re launching in about a week and going balls-to-the-walls with this. I think we’re in an amazing position to be successful, maybe even win in this market. More beta apps coming down the pipes — 3 already on the App Store. We’re so lucky to be working with some amazing bands — a particularly famous one might be in the works…I really hope it all works out.
In the meantime, it’s nose to the grindstone. Late nights, early mornings, skipped parties, hardly watched NBA Finals, totally unwatched World Cup, neglected girlfriends (Sorry Caroline, I love you so much though =D ), neglected diets, neglected work outs but probably worst of all…no Super Smash Bros 64 =(. Oh, the humanity.
I feel like I’ve been misled over the past 8 years of formal education that I’ve been a part of. I don’t know if the education system or American culture is to blame, but there seems to be this permeating school of thought that may be a large contributor to the unemployment numbers we’re seeing today. And, incidentally, this was a revelation to me in that I finally nailed down why entrepreneurship is so hard. The answer, as usual, is pretty simple…
Society doesn’t care how hard you work. If you don’t produce anything of value that they’re willing to spend money on, it is your loss. The amount of invested time, money, blood, sweat, and tears only matter in your own eyes at the end of the day. Consumers reward the smartest workers, not the hardest workers; and if you think you can work at something for a little while just to sit back and take in the cash you’re sorely mistaken.
The grade school and corporation frame of mind tell us that if we try hard or if we do as our boss tells us enough to not get fired that we deserve that paycheck every Friday. Obviously, this is exactly the opposite of how people spend their money, and people with their own companies will tell you first hand that you ask yourself every day if what you’re making is going to provide enough value. Not only that, even those that have launched successful products still have to be on the leading edge to stay afloat. ”Trying” on my calculus homework didn’t get me nearer to coming up with revolutionary solar technology or cars that drive themselves, but my grade told me that it did. People take pride at staying late on a Friday to cap off that 60 hour week, as if their team got the benefit of having 1.5 employees for just 1 salary – highly misleading.
Try asking your boss if you can work on something that will provide more value to your customers. See what they say.
The past 9 months – especially the last 4 – have taught me a lot about how much of a lifestyle doing startups is. In particular, the time and emotional requirements are enough to make even the most “hard working” techies flee back to their comfy IBM cubicle. One unfortunate side effect of this time commitment is my gradual removal from needing to entertain myself or “kill time” – it just doesn’t happen anymore. There’s way too much to do to be bored. And, even for those times where I do need a break to be entertained, I’m doing something productive with people or a book – I’m not buying “things”.
Girls buy shoes and clothes, guys buy video games and lifted trucks, people who start companies bring sandwiches to their part time jobs so they can keep the development server up and running. This removal from personal consumerism can be somewhat discouraging in so far as we’ll “miss the boat” or become too “disconnected” with how people are behaving and what trends the dollars are moving toward. Just because I find entertainment in working on my company doesn’t mean that others will, in fact most of them don’t. Also, my lack of consumerism doesn’t take away from the entertainment value provided by entrepreneurs like myself that are working toward providing something that the world will enjoy. Regardless, my job is to figure out how to be enough of a participant to stay relevant, but be enough removed that I can effectively stay focused.
The awesome people over at Techstars just sent us an invite to come to Techstars for a Day in March! We’ll be flying out on Thursday the 4th and staying through Sunday. Big thanks to the people at Next Big Sound for agreeing to house us for the nights that we will be there – always appreciate being able to sleep on a floor if we don’t have to pay for hotel costs. They seem like awesome guys and should be great resources for information about Boulder, Techstars, and being in a music startup.
On that note, if anyone finds it in their Giri to donate money to help offset the cost of plane tickets, we would gladly put up a huge plug for all 12 of our blog readers to see.
Also, if anyone reading this is also attending TSFAD, send me an email at scott@getsoundaround.com so that we can hook up while in Boulder for coffee. I’d love to have a packed schedule while we’re there doing as much networking as possible.
See you in March.
Well I haven’t written in almost a month but the last time I did it was about the trials and tribulations of an amateur trying his hand at web design. I’m proud to say that my skills have increased dramatically since the last time I wrote. The web site is almost done and, being that it’s the first web site I’ve ever done and all, I’m pretty impressed with myself. To a lot of people and EVERY person that has experience with web design, it’s going to be clear that it was done by an amateur but that’s ok. There are some clear issues in uniformity (read: fonts and use of color is a bit haphazard at times) but overall I’m happy with the job I’ve done. Most likely, we’ll take what I did and turn it over to someone with some real talent to really pull everything together. But deadlines are deadlines and we’re trying to get YC and TechStars applications out so the web site needs to be up.
We’re both at points in our lives where there will never be a time where we don’t have work that we could be doing and I don’t see this changing for the next…3 years or so. Wish us luck on our YC and TechStars apps.
If you’ll read the last post it will make a lot more sense.
This agony get exponentially worse with a) the future b) late nights c) alcohol and d) good press (everywhere) about your competitors.
4 months minus two days since my last post.
A more appropriate title would be: Social Media – the day of awakening.
So tonight, instead of studying for my final, I really fell in love with social media for the first time. We’ve been dating for years but tonight was the night that we really hit it off for the first time. I owe the rebirthing of this relationship to Tweetdeck; not the iPhone app but the desktop application. I can manage my Twitter (all the columns I want (or don’t)), Facebook, Myspace- which I’m actually creating just so I can have another thing to manage on Tweetdeck, and LinkedIn. And I can do it all in one place that’s visually attractive and easy to manage. It’s truly wonderful.
What have I been up to for the past 4 months? Customer development. I’ve been talking with bands, bloggers and record labels trying to validate that there’s a market for this. The results have been satisfying. Record labels range from sufficiently interested to overjoyed at the prospect of their band getting their very own iPhone application. It almost seems trivial to me because we’ve been talking about the idea for the last 6 months. But to them it’s like a dream come true.
I also fell in love with the idea of being a blogger for TechCrunch one day. I’ll be writing more often to keep you (the total of zero readers who keep coming back to this) updated more often and to practice writing. See you in the funny papers.
Like all birds do, I’ve jumped from my branch. Gone is the safety of my nest, the food of my mother, the cover of the foliage. I’m falling, ever faster and these feathery things on my sides feel so awkward. But the ground definitely isn’t getting farther and I’ve got to do something quick. It’s sink or swim and the operators manual is a figment of my fantasy. Fly or die trying.
And such is the life of a young entrepreneur. I feel like I’ve jumped from my perch and it’s up to me to either fly or hit the ground like a rock. There’s no one to catch me, I’ll have to find my own way. After much pontificating (as Scott would say) come to realize my path to success is going to be written in “enough planning, it’s time to do“. When you’re in college it’s easy to kick around ideas and half-heartedly plan things out, but when it comes time to turn that “market research” item on your to do list into actual numbers, you’ve reached your first gut check of entrepreneurship. No matter how many million-dollar idea you have drawn out on the proverbial napkin, you will never make a name for yourself unless you start to execute.
College entrepreneurs are frequently faced with challenges that they have no idea how to tackle. Therein lies the source of inaction for many college entrepreneurs. When met with brick walls the easy thing to do is quit. The reason an inexperienced entrepreneur has to scale so many walls is that there are so many roadblocks along the way where the solution to passing them isn’t taught in school. There are currently four points of research on my to do list that I have no idea how to begin. I wish experienced entrepreneurs were more available (and maybe they are) for guidance on some of these things. But then again, maybe it’s good that we’re forced this first time to carve our own path. Creating a successful start up in college while having limited prior work experience is life’s ultimate “weed out course” and is nothing short of a miracle.
So to recap, the most important thing for college entrepreneurs to learn is the power of just doing. At some point you have to stop talking about it and be about it. If you try flapping your wings without planning you might just escape the fall, but if you plan out the best method for flapping all the way down, you’re sure to be an easy meal.
It has been roughly six weeks of working a solid 8-5 internship up here in Maryland and I’m just starting to realize the struggle of working on business endeavors unrelated to your primary job. Ive been told time and time again to take advantage of my free time at college, and that when I hit the work force I wont have time to do nearly the amount of stuff you can do while at college. This comment has been shrugged off time and time again – surely my extra curriculars and commitment to classses has more than prepared me for what is to come after school. They were right…sorta. I was wrong…sorta.
What they should have told me is “enjoy the flexibility of your schedule while in school”. Its not that I am working any more hours at my job (I’m usually pulling out of the parking lot by the time 5:01 rolls around), but rather that I am at my job at 8am whether I like it or not. College has the great luxury of taking Monday to play super smash for 4 hours, Tuesday to put in 15 hours on the autonomous robot and parallel processing model, Tuesday night to have a 6 pack, and sleep all day Wednesday. The best part of all is that the next week doesn’t have to, and most likely wont, be the same. I’ve been told that as I grow older I’ll appreciate the more predictable schedule. Maybe this will be the case when I am married and have kids, but right now I feel like an angry toddler roped into a play pen.
I’ve been back and forth in my head about taking an extra year to go to grad school and get a quick masters. The decision is becoming more and more of an obvious answer in favor of going, solely due to the fact that I can take an extra full year to pursue getting situated with a product or service of my own. Believe me when I say that the masters tag on my diploma is a great thing to have to put on a resume and to tell my family and friends that I came to college and wooped its ass. Believe me when I say that I will continue to recommend to my friends and mentees that graduate school is excellent opportunity to enhance your value to the workforce. And believe me when I say that graduate school is a great way to give yourself another year or two to let your creative license flow round the clock as you pursue that which gets you up in the morning (whether it be 6am or 2pm), and that which keeps you up into the wee hours of the night working incessantly to achieve nothing short of absolute brilliance.