One of the biggest fear of an early stage startup founder is that his or her ideas will be stolen and competitive advantage would be lost. I must say that in earlier ventures of mine, I was thinking in a very similar way. I would wait until everything was absolutely perfect, and then announce my creation to the world – often with little or no reaction. It is probably the most soul crushing experience you can imagine when nobody cares about what you do. I am sure there are founders that had hit “first day” experiences, although I suspect that there are not that many of them.

Now clearly good ideas (when actually implemented) have a big potential value, and giving away the secret sauce away immediately is not a fantastic idea either. I am assuming here that there is actually real intellectual property to be defended, and not just something that be built with minimal effort. In the case of software products that can be create and launched quickly (e.g. don’t have a lot of intellectual property to back the venture), there is no reason not to throw it out there, see what sticks, and iterate as fast as you can – you are essentially competing against other first movers, and the one that gets the most reaction and early traction ends up the market place leader.

I am trying something in the middle ground between stealth and totally transparent with my latest venture. I speak openly about what I am trying to accomplish, show off some of the ideas I had and the prototypes I built, and have people play with the software that is “one innovation generation back”. Since Flashback does not have a large number of users yet, I can afford to experiment and see where the conversation is leading me.

I have the attitude that for every action there should be some sort of reaction. If there is little or no reaction, I am probably doing something wrong. It goes beyond just web site analytics, to most things I am doing, even the very small stuff. The following things are extremely trivial examples, but you get the idea.

For example, I recently attended an appropriate event (a talk about visual communication in science), where I approached a small number of folks and talked to them what I am doing, stuffing a business card in their hands. Of course, I often got cards in return, although I did not proactively contact them right away. I simply waited to see if anyone would reach out to me, and guess what, some did!  It is a small reaction that tells me I am doing something right. Most people won’t spent a minute to reach out if I can’t get my story straight in the first place. If you were part of this experiment, please contact me :)

Another example is talking to other bloggers; if your story does not get picked up, then probably I am doing something wrong. I got a flattering response when I tried it, and now many more people know what I am trying to accomplish. I probably got lucky this time, but I was very happy to get a reaction.

A last example is using your social network to your advantage. Since I am pretty active on LinkedIn nowadays, I get a lot of folks that I know come by my web site to see what I am up to.  It is a small thing to add someone to your network, and then see them come by to check you out. But hopefully the little positive reaction could lead to something much bigger down the line by an appropriate mention to a friend.  The same of course for whatever I am blogging about.

I have some more example of small reactions I got with my action-oriented approach, but you should get the drift by now. I am not sure where this “for every action, a reaction” approach will lead, but I do hope it will lead me in the right direction. 

And maybe one day, a small action will lead to a big reaction.

Exactly one month ago I started speaking publicly about my latest project. I’ve been working on Flashback since late 2012, so it is great to finally be in a position to report that my ideas are starting to work!

So what is Flashback really about?

I’ve always been interested in how people work with each other, but over the last few years became more and more interested in how people in different organizations work with each other.  I am restricting my interest to longer collaborations, for example in project based industries.

There are very big differences between collaboration styles for purely internal groups and collaboration involving cross-organizational teams. This is because the inter-personal relationship changes from peer-to-peer collaboration to customer-to-client collaboration. You also have to factor into the mix professional relationships, the curated customer experience, data ownership, and legal issues. So there are lots of topics to blog about!

I believe the terminology in this domain is still in flux. Appropriate terms include cross-organizational collaboration and customer experience management (CXM).  The term Customer relationship management (CRM) comes to mind too, but I don’t think it is appropriate, because clients most often don’t have access to a CRM system for collaboration – it is typically used internally to keep track of customers.

In a previous blog posting, I mentioned that my new venture is trying to determine a product-market. It is of course a journey more than a decision, and as we enter in to the market, it is likely to shift. At the moment however, I think of Flashback as a CXM tool for designers & visual thinkers.

I find this interesting for several reasons.

Firstly, when you design something for a client, it is a pretty big deal.  Design is having a much bigger impact on everything we do nowadays, and everyone has an opinion about it. Also more and more when you open your wallet, or click “add to cart”, you are buying something that was highly designed.

Behind the scenes, that product was most likely lovingly created and manufactured by a team that spanned the globe. And that team struggled mightily to make the design perfect.

It is very hard to "talk" about a design, especially while you creating it.

How do you explain something to someone who does not have your design sensibilities? How do you even explain something when words are often not enough? If you are a design professional, you not only struggle with communicating your design, but getting feedback from your clients. As a client, why is it so hard to get the design your product deserves?

Personally, I find it hard communicating with the many designers in my life. These include the visual and UX designers for products I developed, and most recently my house remodel project (still unfortunately ongoing).

Why is this the case?

Well, there are the fundamental reasons as stated above, but also the simple fact that authoring tools are stuck in “authoring mode” and the design collaboration aspect of software tools have stagnated or is pretty much missing-in-action. Designers are stuck with Photoshop & GotoMeeting (substitute your own poison).

I strongly believe that over time design will become a more collaborative and “immersive experience” for professionals and their clients, and the result would be a big shift in ease of communicating ideas, not to mention creating much cooler products.

As they say, two minds are better than one. But you also know about two cooks in the kitchen, right? So with much more collaborative design, what new inter-human interaction problems and conflicts will be created?

It’s been approximately nine months since I left the relative safety of the corporate world with the idea to start a new company. I have done this a few times before, so I sort of know what to expect, but of course every time it is a very different experience. With this blog post I hope to give you a feeling for all the trials and tribulations I had so far.

Of course, the first question on everyone’s lips is “how is it going”? If you are a vanilla Silicon Valley entrepreneur, the standard response would be that “we are killing it”. In reality this is seldom true, so I am not going to sugar coat my response. For me it’s been a grueling months of excessive thinking, massive software development effort, now-and-then talking to potential prospects, product-market fit analysis, and early awareness promoting via social networks.  

And in reality not much has happened yet, since a lot is still being figured out as I write this.

The first phase of a new software startup is always to find a product-market fit, and it is the phase I am still currently in. It takes a long time to find out what the product is and who you are going to help with it. If you don’t really understand your target market, you are pretty much lost. A new social network for cats is probably not the best idea if you’ve never owned a cat, right? I fortunately know my target market quite well, having spent the last six years developing related products, so I think I am OK on this front (and note there are no cats involved in what I am doing).

But since any new venture is typically a very long effort stretching over several years, I was also very concerned that I might be launching myself into a corner that I would regret later, requiring a gut wrenching “pivot”. So what did I do to figure it out? I took a very long vacation first!

Actually taking a very long vacation was more a necessity than anything else. I was pretty much burned out with endless meetings, global discussions at all hours of the day, travel and general corporate mischief. So I decided to spend two to three months just thinking, and seeing what would happen. Now my idea of a vacation is a bit different than most, since some of the things I like to do sound suspiciously like work to most folks.  

First, I did an absolutely huge amount of reading on the latest trendy technologies knowing that I have to pick something myself that I might regret later on (I ended up making very conservative technology choices in the end). I also talked to a number of startups that were in the formation phase (some super-stealth that threatened me with death should I ever mention them), just to see if there might be something else that might be more interesting and safe than throwing myself again into a founder role. I also spent a lot of time adjusting to drinking Sauvignon Blanc with my family - I am more a Cabernet person, but you have to drink what the locals in Cape Town buy you. I also connected with several friends, a few who made massive changes to their life styles, ranging from having babies, moving to the place they really want to live, and sailing around the world. The latter cemented my belief that whatever I want to do the next decade should involve having lots of freedom.

Unfortunately the “vacation” had to end. It was very useful in that I had a basic idea what I want and don’t want to do in life, a rough outline for potentially useful product, and of course I was pretty rested and ready to rumble.

Around the fourth of January 2013, just after recovering from New Years, the massive software development effort started in earnest after many months of mental preparation. I find a lot of enjoyment in figuring things out while coding, but for most readers this is probably the boring part. Needless to say there were many ups and downs, total redesigns, duh-moments and engineering disasters. You end up doing a lot of stuff that nobody will really ever care about, and it takes a huge amount of time struggling to put stuff together. Just me coding, and running off the gym to “think” some more.

As soon as you could see some new part of the product, I was showing it to trusted advisors or connections I have to people in the design industry. I was actually very positively surprised that a lot of people immediately liked the direction I was going with it. My previous experiences in this regard was often extremely frustrating in that a lot of people would have no clue what the hell I was trying to accomplish. I attribute my small successes to learning from experience and being a bit more seasoned in product blabbering, but it is really hard to say whether that is true. Often it is just pure luck, and you can’t tell the difference.

As I was getting feedback and tailoring the product-market fit, I started getting concerned how I was going to get the message out. Previously I've had a case where I “launched” a product and there was pretty much zero reaction – which is of course an eye-opening experience after spending many months on development, and often leads to huge amounts of doubt and negativity. And I don’t have a lot of experience with early marketing, so I was getting doubly worried.

So I spent some time researching what other startups did in my situation, I formulated a few plans for myself. I just wanted to get a few people to sign up to test the software, so that when I do a private launch, there are some folks ready to play around with it.

The first step was just to get something about the product and company up on a web site.  I was very concerned since I’ve spend huge amounts of time and money building a web presence before, and I really did not have the time or inclination for it again. I nearly convinced myself of a path that would have sucked up huge resources when I stumbled on the new generation of site building tools like Weebly. It was a huge relief and suddenly a site was up in one day!  This was around May 8th of this year, so just about a month ago since I write this.

Of course, the next problem is how to let people know about it. I heard some “advertising tricks" people used to drive traffic, and tried a few only to fail miserably. Does anybody care? No, that is pretty much the answer. If you don’t do something useful yet, but just talk about things that might become useful sometime in the future, you pretty much have no reaction.

I had to change gears, and started using my professional network on LinkedIn to tell people that I am back in business, and to expect good things in future. It was not much effort to expand my connections to folks that somehow was not connected to me already, have interactions with them, update my profile and personal pages, etc.  Slowly traffic started to flow to the web site, and people started responding with “likes” and sometimes contacting me. A lot of old friends and colleagues from Autodesk came by to check out what I am up to, probably out of curiosity and sympathy. Here is a big wave to you if you happen to be one of them reading now about my saga! 

A few people signed up to be alpha and beta testers, but it is still nowhere near the number I would like it to be. If you read this far, please consider signing up yourself, or perhaps letting a friend know about the product. I promise it would be fun, and you will definitely help me sleep better at night too!

In conclusion, the product is starting to look good and finally becoming useful. I’ve had a few interactions with companies that want to field test it. It is scary and exciting at the same time. A bit of validation and traction is always great, and keeps me going.

Thank you for reading this far, and please do come back to hear more how my next life story unfolds.