A Banner Day

This was waiting for me when I got back from SF today.  Pretty official looking, Eh? Eh?  Gotta love Vistaprint.  $44 for a 6 x2 outdoor banner *with* the stand and free shipping so I just had to jump on it.

Quick and easy professional signage for test marketing our offer and man-on-the-street usability tests.   Watch for our Manager of Messaging (MoM)  Margaret at a mall near you.   (Hmmm, Maybe I should have told Margaret about this first....)

For now it serves as our "Play Like Champions Today" sign for morale purposes, though no one's allowed to actually touch it without washing their hands first, because it is white, you know.

Thank You from Fruhla on Thanksgiving!

You’ve probably noticed we are well beyond the 14 weeks of runway I had at the beginning of this journey and that would not have been possible without the help of a LOT of folks.  So this Thanksgiving weekend, I wanted to say how thankful I am for all the folks who have been helping Fruhla along the way, and especially now as we try to raise our seed round.   

To the start up veterans providing sage advice,  the VCs providing "tough love" for the early business plan,  the “connectors” who go out of their way to get me to the right people for no other reason than the love of helping folks succeed, to those who have gone above and beyond to help find start-up friendly work for me personally so I can keep things moving forward and still take care of my family,  to the guys writing the code (on very flexible payment terms no less), to my pro-bono finance and legal Jedi,  to the awesome folks  we share space with who have provided feedback on our tech strategy and even a code review ,  to the parents and parenting/family experts who have provided invaluable validation of the apps and inspiration for even more, to the folks that "Like" us on FB and follow us on Twitter (which, at this point means you just believe in Margaret and I because we haven't told you a damned thing about the apps yet.-We'll fix that soon!)

THANK YOU ALL, for your support, for we surely would have had to hit the pause button by now without you. 

But the person I want to thank most is my wife, Margaret.  Without your belief in me, belief in this idea, your support and selflessness as we often forego things in our personal lives in the name of Fruhla, I’d never have even gotten started, let alone persevered.  Our family fills me with a warmth, happiness and security I never knew before and you are the heart of our family.

That feeling that someone always has my back gets me through the toughest of times and I can reach all the higher because I know I am never working without a net.  No matter what happens going forward, life is wonderful with you guys in it.

-Chris

14 Weeks Redux Learning 3: Even Teams of 1 Need a Project Plan

As I wrote before, I wanted to start sharing application details with you folks and others for usability purposes, and just maintaining momentum in general, but if you do that without protecting your IPR first, you basically have no IPR anymore. So I needed to file a patent so I can then speak freely about the application we’re doing which will utilize the patent.

So I learned how to file a Preliminary Patent Application by reading Patent It Yourself. And that text says that even for a preliminary patent app, I must “describe your invention in complete enough detail that a "person having ordinary skill in the art" could build (practice) the invention (as defined by the claims in the utility patent which you will file later based on the provisional) from your application.” So for software, that means you either give them source code, which becomes a matter of public record if the patent is issued, or you give them a flowchart and other related docs. So as I brought my Inventor’s Notebook up to snuff (and fwiw other would be inventors, if you haven’t read how to do this, you are probably not creating a proper legal record of your invention) , I realized that because our app is very data driven, it’s most likely I will probably also need to provide our data model to allow a "person having ordinary skill in the art" to be able to build the app.

So I started doing Entity Relationship Diagrams of the data model in support of the patentable claims. But you can’t really just do the parts affecting the patent and do the model right, you have to consider all of the account holder databases and billing and other periphery crap, and also the future application data sharing,etc. And then I may as well normalize the tables while I’m there, right to make sure this is all implementable, right? -None of which I’ve done before.

So, 3 weeks later, as I recurse deeper and deeper, I realized that I could have paid a Data Architect to knock this out in about 2 days, and hired a patent attorney for 2-3 hrs to set me on the right path. –And if I had planned ahead, I would have  realized I needed to have most of the design done even to file a PPA and never swallowed the fly in the first place.

I wouldn’t work this way if someone was paying me, why am I working this way on my own, when my time is even more valuable?

New Plan: Even Teams of 1 Need a Project Plan.

Make a realistic plan/schedule for this iteration, which involves farming out some critical path tasks to keep the schedule predictable (More on that in another post). Keep a scrum chart on the wall to stay on task and group logical tasks for a cycle, and put on the old Program Mgr hat (now called a “Scrum Master” for those at home who want to search/replace in their resume…) to realistically revise and reassign. And unfortunately, I also just need to take the Cupertino-approach and STFU until the PPA is filed as much as I want to loop you all in.

Now to arm that mouse with some Post-It Notes and posterboard...

Space: The Interim Frontier!

I'll get back to the Redux-learnings posts in a day or so, but since I was able to incorporate faster than expected, I was able to move in a few days earlier and I just thought I'd show everyone the new digs.   I'm over in the U-district about 4 blocks from Audri's preschool, so I can take her en route. It should work out great.

You'll notice it's above ground. I was pretty insistent upon that.  Everything else was negotiable, but it's all working out fantastic.  The folks I'm subletting from (and co-working with) are very nice and easy going.  They're letting me use their kitchen, conference rooms, anything I need, but I'm off in a quiet corner all by myself.  I actually chose a cube over an office so I didn't waste a lot of time decorating and bringing in extra crap I don't need to get work done, and I chose this particular cube so I could throw up a couple whiteboards on the wall and pin up comps.  It came furnished and it took me all of 90 minutes to get moved in including putting up the whiteboards.

At my last job, I had a nice office overlooking Elliott Bay, and I filled it with photos of family and framed art, had a sofa, etc.  It was a nice place to come to every day.  And yet I wasn't very happy for the last year and a half I worked there, not-so-coincidentally about the same time I moved into that office

Now,  I'm thrilled to be in this cube, with a fabulous view of this building's crap twin.  I don't think I'll be looking up much anyway, there's a lot to get done.

14 Weeks Redux Lesson 2: Working from home just doesn't work.

At least for me. Being near the kids more is nice, but they have no concept of “working hours” or "really important", so they just bug me constantly and there's really only so many ways you can tell them to go away and leave you the f#$% alone before they start to take it personally. Then there's the procrastination factor of seeing so many things to do around the house, plus helping with errands and such. And the temptation to take a nap and make up the time later always looms large. Now with the school year ending this week, I HAVE to get out of the house or Fruhla is dead.

Working in coffee shops is hit and miss because one day you may find yourself in flow, then the next day two obnoxious moms sit next to you and loudly bemoan the fact they can’t find gluten-free cheerios and that they are now trying luke-warm yoga and sooo done with Zumba and try as they might, they can’t find 4 yr old Carson a decent life coach and blah, blah, blah.

Coworking is actually a pretty cool idea, and I’ve used The Branch in Maple Leaf, but packing up everything you'll need every day (including a kb and mouse) is a bit of a pain, and you can't leave stuff on whiteboards, pin up your comps, etc, because that space isn’t yours 24 x7 and you still have the threat of realtors and salespeople and others that work on the phone constantly.

New Plan: July 1st, I’m moving into a sublet space.
I was lucky enough to (a) find a 6 week retainer consulting gig and (b) find a business that has a whole 2nd floor they aren't using, and will let me rent just one small area for $175/mo (+ liability insurance) and go month to month and grow into more space as I need it. That should fill my Retriever-like need to be near people, but they’ll mostly leave me alone, and it's a professional, furnished space, where the tone is set for being productive. I even chose a cube over an office so that I don't waste time decorating it.  This should work well. In fact, I've been talking to a couple of out of state companies about full time roles working remotely, and even if I ultimately go that route, I think I'll still work out of this space.  (More on that possibility in the next Redux post DIY for every single aspect of the business just isn’t going to happen )

I'm going to miss being near the kids and especially Margaret during the day, but I think if I just get the hell out of here and work uninterrupted for a decent chunk of the day, I can leave it behind each night when I come home and be glad to be home instead of chasing everyone away all the time.

Then I can spend some quality evenings learning about The Clone Wars undistracted.

-Chris

14 Weeks Redux: We're Not Dead Yet!

So, some of you who are playing along at home may have noticed that 14 wks has come and gone. The good news is that Fruhla is still alive. The bad news is that calling the blog 14 Weeks to Fruhla is still totally appropriate as we have at least 14 more weeks before we release the first app.

Am I frustrated? A little, but honestly, I knew 14 weeks was extremely aggressive and I didn't factor in time spent on spinning up on tech and tools, nor a concurrent search for a full time job. But I also know myself and I work better with a very hard deadline, so I chose 14 wks because that was how much financial runway we had at the onset of the project. Along the way, good friends have been referring me for consulting gigs, and I’ve taken a couple to fill the coffers so we’re now good until at least October. Which ironically, is exactly 14 more weeks.

So, what have I learned these first 14 weeks and what's the new plan going forward?

Well first of all

1. I am pathetic at keeping a blog up to date and then I publish these enormous diatribes that probably go unread.
   New Plan: Write large pieces ahead of time, then encapsulate them into smaller bite-size posts to encourage a dialog.

So with that in mind, I am going to put out the rest of what I’ve learned as separate installments over the next few days.

Tomorrow:  2: Why working independently, in a basement, in your home is a really, really bad idea.

Checking in from the basement...

After 8 weeks working from the basement, one starts to lose their social skills.—I just realized my last real post was a month ago and I owe you folks some updates!  It’s easy to blog when things are going well and you are feeling optimistic and omniscient,  but much harder when you feel behind.  –Partly because it’s hard to justify the time spent to write, but mostly because my personal tendency is not to whine  er, share, but rather to STFU, redouble my efforts and focus on putting things back on track.

Anyway, the kids don’t have swimming lessons today so it’s a great time to catch you all up.  It’s going pretty slowly as I work alone, and hence, serially, but pretty well If I step back.  Here’s what’s been accomplished:

• We have a new logo (see the top of the blog)  It’s snazzy (imho) and clean yet hopefully playful and family friendly.  A tall order to ask from an Adobe Illustrator file, but we’re happy with it, for now anyway.  (btw: Did you see the little ‘F’ in the leaf, or did I just waste half a day learning to do that with a graphics tablet?  -On second thought, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know)  Anyway, it probably needs a little tweaking from a pro, but is a good starting point.
• We have the start of a Style Guide.  All of our subsequent apps will have the same clean (but not sterile) look, with the same sort of orange/green UI elements against white, fonts, icons, and other styling.  This is one of the reasons the first design is taking so long. –Getting the styling close for all other apps.  It’s something we can easily change in the actual product by using CSS, but the closer things are when you start designing the user experience (Ux) the better feel you have for whether the app flow works.  (You don’t make assumptions this uncertain feeling you have will go away when someone else pretties this up…)
• We chose a backend architecture.  LAMP +RubyOnRails on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We have an AWS/EC2 account and played around with putting images up and tearing them down.  Very slick stuff, and a great sandbox to play in where you don’t have to commit to a server stack day one to even start playing around.   I highly recommend going the AWS route for anyone starting out.  To get this far the last time I started a business, I had to spend about $10-15k.  With AWS, I’m still in the free Micro-tier and can experiment for zero cost. We may switch to node.js and forego LAMP long term, hard to say right now, but again, the beauty of virtualization in AWS-we can play with both and run A/B tests and cut-over with relatively little pain. When we have more experience on the ins and outs of configuring AWS, I’ll blog about it.
• We have 90% of the design of the first app done.  This should mean that the actual coding will go smoothly, because by doing *every* screen and permutation, I caught most of our Ux issues before they ever made it into code on phones.  Whenever I am in doubt, I call Margaret down, and walk through the app by touching my monitor like I’m using the product on a smartphone and turn Photoshop layers on/off to simulate the app flow.  If she looks confused or underwhelmed,  I know it’s too complex.  If I find myself wishing the screen were wider, or switching to a smaller font, it’s too complex.  If I get up to get coffee, and come back, and I don’t intuitively know what to do as a user of the app by what I'm staring at, it’s not the right design. (More on the design process I've been using in another post soon, I promise.).  Once I have some near final comps, I can hand jpegs over to Margaret to start writing the promotional materials for the app (screenshots for AppStore, the corp website, family-oriented media publications, etc.)
• I did deep dives on Photoshop, Illustrator and HTML5. I am now using the first two pretty effectively and we’ll find out about the HTML5 soon. FWIW I highly recommend Safari BooksOnline to anyone that does dev or design. I have saved at least $400 on the materials I would have needed to spin up.  Totally worth the $18/month. And taking the time to do full video tutorials was totally worth it.  I’ve easily recouped that time by not fumbling around CS4.

Sooo, am I happy with the progress?  Sorta, but it’s hard to be more than halfway through the 14 weeks and not be coding yet. I feel a lot better when I subtract the time spent spinning up on tools and technology.  I will say it's very rewarding though to see the screenshots on my iPhone and show others and they laugh and instantly get the app and 100% of parents so far WANT the app and to be in the beta. (Will share with you all soon, I promise, still have the patent issues to sort out...) and  I do think taking the time to do the full design in Photoshop first is going to pay off long term since I’ve scrapped a lot of screens and started over that would have just been wasted time and code.

But I am very antsy and just about every day have the urge to just start coding.    None of the progress matters if I run out of money before the app is done..  The good news is that it looks like I can put together some short term consulting gigs to keep throwing down pavement at the end of the runway, but even that is a slippery slope that devolves into full time consulting as I know from the last time I started a company.

Actually, reading this I do feel a lot better about the progress and should do this (blog) more often to get perspective back. For one guy in a basement, this isn’t a bad 7 weeks when you consider I have also been looking for full time work and consulting gigs as well.

But still, none of it matters if I don't finish.   Tomorrow we're taking the day to head out to the tulips and Deception Pass as a family to unwind, and then I'll get back at it Monday 5am.

I promise to do a better job bringing you all along with us for the second half.

-Chris