How I built a startup while working full-time in Finance
andypickens.tumblr.com
andypickens.tumblr.com
As for the product: It's a neat idea. I think it'd be cool if you actually gave people on Facebook and promoters in general a small cut of some sort of revenue. It'd give users two incentives, both monetary and social (being known for discovering great undercover bands). Have users compete to be the best 'agents'.
Don't mind the haters – it's the growing trend 'round here on HN. If you're not a CS guy, you don't deserve much, basically. That's even more so for people working in business. But you've done far more than the people here can claim to have done.
Best of luck!
Edit: What made you settle for that one idea? Was it the only one you had, or did you choose it from a list of others you were entertaining? I imagine working in an industry like Finance you haven't got much time to play around with ideas left-and-right, so there's a bit more calculation in picking an idea to move forward with.
Based on the title, I was expecting more. Something like how you managed your time?
That said, congrats on launching.
Oh and paying attention to what you're doing and how long it took, and making sure not to waste unnecessary time on nice-to-haves or unnecessary research rather than critical functionality. This is particularly important if you're working alone; I find reviewing my source control checkins and my PivotalTracker progress very helpful in this respect.
Then again I ended a great relationship for work so perhaps I'm not the best exemplar of priorities.
Reminds me of a saying from my former CEO, "it's not about the time left in the game, but the number of swings at the bat you get."
Today I've managed to get Hadoop set up in pseudo-distributed mode in 1.5 hours on a fresh VM I just installed, while reading a tutorial in the background waiting for stuff to download and install. Tomorrow I'll think more about how I want to convert my crawler prototype from C# over to Ruby on the cluster and read a bit more about how this all works while I wait for code to compile or packages to run at the day job.
Even the 15min I spend eating while at the client are used to think, read and plan my next step or how I will implement something. Same for the drive to/from work. Yup I talk to myself. There's a lot of time in the day when you're supposedly busy that you can get constructive work done.
In the evening I'll start working on getting my first test job to run. At the end of every day it looks like I've made little progress, but at the end of the week I'm certain to be happy with my progress (something I learned from David Burns' "Feeling Good" is to actually test your hypotheses; if you feel you didn't accomplish much, actually test it by listing what you did and you'll be probably be pleasantly surprised).
Good point on capturing and reviewing progress. I'm always trying to get better at that.
I think it would be really interesting for the productivity obsessed to maybe even see a mockup of the task lists you would generate to get a sense of how detailed of a list was good.
For whatever reason, this video incited a thought about the power of free music and the power of fans as promoters of the music they love. This concept consumed me.
And...
If you are ever consumed by an idea, focus on that idea and see where it takes you. Your obsession with it likely means that it embodies your passions and values.
So far there is nothing. A website with a music player and a share-on-facebook button. But the blog post sounds like Andy already turned this thing into a billion dollar company and now bows down to the mere mortals to share the wisdom he gathered. On his heroic journy to fame and riches.
I have a feeling this project is going to turn out just like those ones from the 90's did too.
Well yeah. He worked in finance. That's how they think in finance.
"If you are ever consumed by an idea, focus on that idea and see where it takes you. Your obsession with it likely means that it embodies your passions and values."
one of the seo masterminds of our time tried to build a site that featured new bands. the backlinks were a work of art.
i guess it ranked well for a bunch of bands nobody had ever heard of but that doesn't help you when people are searching for "hootie and the blowfish"
Out of necessity you have far fewer hours than you'd like to work on a project, and this really forces you to focus on whether each thing you do takes you closer to being able to launch.
Just want to click a website and start playing music that's decent in one click, I can't be stuffed researching or downloading albums. In europe all the sites I liked in the USA have we are coming soon banners, aka massive opportunity to win by default at the moment in terms of traffic (although to be honest I have no idea how you would get me to buy something, guilt me into supporting artists by showing them pictures of their kids maybe).
Minus points:
Keeps playing the same songs, I don't really even notice because I am music retarded, but my gf will kill me if I put your website back up.
Tried to login with facebook to see if that would play me some different ones, says it wants permission to post to my wall. No way in hell am I giving you that.
How much technical knowledge did you have before starting this project? And how much did you learn in the process? Doesn't it feel awkward to say you have 'built' it?
I'd define building as putting pieces together to create something of greater value. I came up with the idea for the site and compiled the team and resources necessary to ship an MVP. Our tech co-founder built the site, our designers built the feel, and our bizdev co-founder built up the content. I managed this process strategically and am heavily involved in each aspect. We all built it together.
Remind me never to work with ex-bankers
Hope everything works out though, good luck!
When I look at last.fm, it also sells other music related items such as ringtones, and also advertises. I can't understand last.fm as well.
Am I missing something? What's your monetization plan? How long before you're profitable?
It would be less impressive if the money amounted to a huge sum! Just wondering...
>Surround yourself with smart people always. I've been struggling with this one for a while. I've cut time drains and people that keep me down, how to go the next step?
It could be cool if you could integrate something like promoters got points for dj'ing the song in some club or something.
I also built a project that became a startup while I was at a wallst bank. Although it didn't become a company till after I left.
Two jokers drop out of Goldman Sachs after a very short employment stint and hire some kid to build them a Facebook-based link-sharing game that targets emerging artists who have no money on the most garish website I've seen in quite some time and all he gets credited with is Lead Engineer. Not even Mr. Lead Engineer.
If non of the above doesn't embarrass you from turning down below-market deals with non-technical, inexperienced dreamers than nothing will. You need to recognize that your skill set is a finite commodity and the more time you spend on loser projects like these, the less in-demand you become. On the other hand, everyone knows that you'll do almost anything for cheap and you'll end up as the "coder dude" while the co-founders debate the merits of shitty internet-generated logotypes and branding as they plan their trips to SXSW.
tl;dr: Facebook-based link-sharing games are loser projects you need to avoid.
Goldman guy meets up buddies working M&A, figures a way to flip his stupid-co to Big Corp for millions.
This stuff happens every single day. Those crazy M&A deals you see of crappy startups? They are not typically done by nerd_programmer_dude.
I am all for extreme precaution when picking cofounders, especially nontech ones, but it also helps to know what the best non-tech cofounders are able to achieve.
Further, it seems you are completely ignorant to the contributions that skilled businesspeople can make to a startup, and instead you've opted to succumbing to the played-out stereotype of all finance guys preying on the young, nubile, innocent programmer who just wants to build things and do good for the world.
Can I be any more clearer and constructive to a young developer looking to break into the industry?
Okay, maybe I should've added that if you need the money, feel free to do the work but don't go putting your name on it and make sure get paid up front.
I'm not speculating on what intentions the two non-technical people on the team have as when I see one year's worth of work from lightbulb to launch manifested in that weekend project of a poorly conceived website, I already know they have no clue what the next step is and therefore it's a waste of time to even think about it. It's a couple of dudes trying to find unsigned talent through clicks measurements on Facebook.
Didn't see that movie. Was it any good?
Mark Zuckerberg had a professor at Harvard who tried hard to convince Zuck to stop wasting time on this stupid facebook idea and get more serious about his degree.
Your advice to the developer sounds similar to the advice given to Zuck by his professor.
Zuckerberg made a rash decision and got lucky. there were many similar sites at the time and anyone claiming to know which, if any, would become the big social site isn't being very honset.
I keep hearing the "got lucky" argument when describing Facebook and Zuck. All it shows is ignorance. If you study Facebook, you can seriously find very explicit product and culture decisions at each stage of its growth. These have little to do with luck.
I'd argue Zuck experiences the same share of luck as an average person does. It's what he has made out of his luck.
For example, a big evidence cited with the "luck" argument is how Zuck just happens to run into Sean Parker who introduces him to Peter Thiel. But the role of "luck" is over-stated: there are hundreds of people who run into Sean Parker. A handful of them even get introduced to Peter Thiel. But getting introduced or funded by Sean Parker/Thiel is not a ticket to a billion dollar company. There is much more to it having little to do with luck.
All you are doing is looking in hindsight and using Facebook's profits as justification for Zuckerberg's decisions or to credit him with something other than luck.
You are defining intelligence, intuition, or brilliance based on success. No wonder your observations support your view, it's impossible not to.
As for staying in school, there are two very good reasons for it. 1) Learning is the only way to actually not be ignorant and university is still one of the best environments to learn. 2) Every smart investor hedges their bets. Every investor recognizes risk and that startups are risky and that most don't succeed. Founders are not some sort of exception. Thus, finishing school is hedging your bets. It's good advice.
I'm sure you deeply want to believe that luck has little to do with it. It's a nice feel good story. But you don't have a convincing argument. Everyone recognizes that various types of skills are important, but nobody has ever put forth a magic formula that will guarantee a successful business. Until that happens, we cannot claim that luck has nothing to do with it.
I never claimed that. This argument's always been about "how much", not whether.
I believe luck has a small part; you seem to argue that it has a huge part. I argue that in light of all the explicit decisions that facebook made, the role of luck is smaller than you appear to suggest.
You state that other facebook competitors also took explicit decisions. Merely taking explicit decisions does not provide results. You also have to make the right decisions and execute in the right way.
We can argue about Facebook all day, as many have before, but even that in itself lends support to the notion that it was mostly luck. We cannot agree on and point to any specific idea, or combination of ideas, that lead to Facebook's success over others. More, we cannot show that Zuckerberg actually held any such idea as the basis for his actions. Targeting schools? Convenience. Targeting social? A common idea at the time. Using php? Convenience and a common choice at the time. Not all successes are due to some sort of genius. Many are just unexpected and happy results.
Ridiculous. If it doesn't work out, you go back to school. Getting back in won't be hard. Just be sure you haven't spent yourself too far into debt.
In this case, can you please list the contributions that you think were made by the non-technical, strategic members of this team, and why you think they should share in 80% to 90% of the company vs. the 10% to 20% that our esteemed colleague who actually built the feature did?
And I call it a feature because a one-page that tracks your likes and posts them to your timeline making very basic use of Facebook's API is a feature, not a startup and it certainly isn't a going business concern that may turn a profit large enough to grow beyond its current MVP.
Bandpage.com very well may be a product, but what we have here is a very basic implementation of the API and nothing else aside from a horribly-conceived design. I won't even mention the uselessness of the so-called awards or even ask what prompted the use of Disqus for a Facebook app. I guess those were all consuming business decisions that took a year to hash out.
tl;dr: Exactly what value did the layperson add to this thing?
They made it happen. The site would simply not exist were it not for the dream/passion/drive/whim/fantasy of the OP. In a more deserving context, the following story could be referenced :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus
That said, I'm not going to defend the merits of the site itself. It looks awful, adds seemingly no value and isn't something I would think of actually using.
However, we should not trivialize the act of bringing ideas to fruition. That's what it's all about, after all.
Technical skills in particular are in very high demand right now, higher even than six months ago, and they were astronomically high then. But it takes years to develop those skills, and taking uncomfortable, difficult work and living through it without visiting the psych ward (yeah, that's the hard part) is a notch on your belt.
tl;dr Life is a learning process, you can even learn from loser projects.
Max Levchin compiled a very nice list of pointers here: http://www.quora.com/Max-Levchin/answers