My new favorite economist Tim Harford did a great TED talk recently chatting about our assumption that an expert approach is needed to problem solving. He argues that instead we should rely more on trial and error, a method that has proven very effective both in nature and business.
If the loading animation won’t disappear then try viewing the video on this page.
Clarence from Panabee pinged me a few minutes ago mentioning Panabee.com. I hadn’t heard of it and along with nxdom.com I’m going to add it to my toolkit to brainstorm available domain names.
My attitude re names these days fluctates between the-name-is-everything and back to sanity.
A week ago I was obsessed with the domain name WordPrice.com which a friendly cybersquatter wanted to sell me for $700. I even contacted the owner of a very similar mark and kindly got the OK to use it for what I intended. Then backed off at the last minute because a) I refuse to support cybersquatting and b) names are more about creating a well loved and well remembered brand than pretty words.
Keep in mind the relative strength of different types of trademarks when you’re thinking about future brands. Make sure you do a USPTO search and at some point spend $500 with a TM attorney to get your use of your new mark on record and start the trademark clock. I also tend to screenshot a few 100-result google searches for any new potentially strong mark I’m going to use. I date them and file them. [Once you've had your ass handed to you in a trademark lawsuit like I have, you get paranoid]
Hold your breath for a moment.
In about 10 to 30 seconds you’ll be feeling a strong desire to take a breath. That’s not caused by lack of oxygen. It’s caused by excess carbon dioxide buildup in your blood.
[Ok you can breathe again.]
The trigger in mammals that causes us to want to take a breath is an excess buildup of CO2. In reptiles the trigger is lack of O2. Free divers don’t hyperventilate to get more O2 into their bloodstream. They do it to to flush out excess CO2 and remove that breathing trigger. That’s also what causes shallow water black-out as you’re surfacing, so don’t try it without a buddy.
I’ve worked in more startups than I care to count where the lack of endurance was not caused by lack of oxygen, but an excess buildup of waste. Getting a larger office, buying excess server capacity early on that isn’t needed, hiring excess people to manage that server capacity, hiring managers to manage the people, hiring an ad agency and PR firm and a small team to manage them.
Once you start down the path of waste you may still have enough oxygen in your bloodstream to surface, but the excess CO2 in your business creates a strong demand for more Oxygen which causes you to raise another round of funding, producing more CO2 and the cycle continues.
So start your business by hyperventilating to flush out all excess CO2, take a deep breath and beware of shallow water blackout as you’re approaching the surface.
[Photo credit: My good friend Bruno Stichini who hosted a free diving world record attempt in Limasol, Cyprus back in 2000]
In any company if you save $1 it goes straight to your bottom line. Meaning it’s as if you just earned another $1. The company that my wife and I have been running for about 2 years now serves over 30 Million page requests per day. We’ve invested a lot of time in getting more performance out of our hardware but about 6 months ago we started hitting pesky issues like limits on the speed of light and electrons.
So we’ve had to keep growing without going out and buying a Google-size web cluster. A lot of the wins we’ve had have been simply using every spare drop of capacity we can find. I’ve noticed a pattern during the last 6 months. It goes something like this:
Kerry (My wife, our CFO, and keeper of the graphs): Server 12 is hitting 10. [Meaning it has a load average of 10 on an 8 CPU machine which is 125% load]
Me: OK Dell has this great special on these new R410 servers that are about twice as fast as the previous generation.
Kerry: What about the other machines in the cluster?
Me: They’re already at 80%.
Kerry: OK what else do we have?
Me: Well the crawlers are maxed, the mail server’s maxed, the proxy’s maxed out, the load balancer is maxed….
Kerry: What about 25 and 26? They’re sitting at 2.
Me: Well we’d have to [technical and managerial speak explaining how complicated it's going to be to implement]
Kerry: OK so lets do that.
Me: [More bullcrap this time rolling out the big guns desperately trying to get money for new toys]
Kerry: …[waits it out]
Me: OK so lets do that.
If you’re a CFO approving purchase decisions in your company, take it from me: Geeks and CEO’s alike love buying new stuff. I assure you there isn’t a web cluster or database cluster on this planet that you can’t squeeze a little more capacity out of without breaking things. So before you take the [technical and managerial bullcrap from your geeks and CEO] at face value, sit down with your team and have them explain all the data to you and go through all your resources with a fine tooth comb. Then, if you absolutely have to, spend some money.
And if you don’t have a CFO, nominate someone immediately!! It doesn’t matter how small you are, someone had better be the keeper of the cash-flow plan or you’re going to run out of money and wonder why.
Incidentally, this is the load decrease on one of the busiest servers in our cluster when we brought online some ‘found’ capacity earlier today.
This is a followup post to “Think you work hard? Think again.” which generated over 5,000 pageviews in a short time and almost took down my blog server this morning. It’s an audio interview with Tony Wright, the founder and CEO of RescueTime.com.
The interview runs for just over 17 Mins. Click here to listen or right-click this link and click save-as to download.
We chat about how startups on a tight budget can market their product and business for free. Topics include getting covered by TechCrunch, linkbait and getting covered by sites like Digg or Reddit, writing great headlines for articles, getting a product to market with no money raised and ugly vs pretty websites and whether that affects your marketing success.
Full disclosure: Tony and I are friends, we both run our own tech startups (I am CEO of LineBuzz.com) and love brainstorming new ideas over a beer. We will be doing exactly that at the Stumbling Monk Pub tomorrow evening after the Seattle Tech Startup meeting at the Capitol Hill public library.