Planning, Startups, Stories

Blogging: Business, Pleasure, Death Sentence?

It started earlier this week with a piece in the New York Times titled In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop. Highlights:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Gulp. I turned 60 in January. And I've done more than 450 posts in the last year, on this blog and several others. Am I brave, foolish, or both? Maybe I should do something safer, like fire fighting or sky jumping.

I think I'm (sort of) copying that response from John Jantsch, who posted I'm just dying to blog about this on Duct Tape Marketing: 

I started the story and I found myself looking around for the punch line, but I’m afraid they - the New York Times and Matt Richtel - were serious. Each paragraph was more bizarre than the next. I felt as though I had to have stumbled onto an edition of the Onion.

One of the comments on John's piece is "Sounds like a late April's Fool (sic). Good thing normal managers never are overworked or have heart attacks." To which John adds, "should have been." I'm with John on this. It should have been a joke. And I'm with him as well as he adds, on a more serious note:

Look, I’m not usually so negative on this blog, but I’ve grown very tired of the media’s characterization of blogging. There is no question that you can find people who have become so obsessed with something they get paid for that they do it death (see gamers, lawyers, miners, athletes, prostitutes.) 

In this case they found a handful of people with no life who are now being paid to have no life. So where’s the story in that?

Confession: I worked way too much during the formative years of Palo Alto Software. Try going into a third mortgage and $65,000 of credit card debt while not missing payroll. Blogging, in comparison, is a piece of cake.

One of the more meaningful responses to the piece (in my opinion) is Business or Pleasure, posted by Alan Johnston in Copyblogger. He was writing about writing, but I changed "writing" to "work" because it applies just as well:

A lot of people make the mistake of starting out by picking a niche they are not exactly passionate about simply because it pays well.

In other words, they are just in it for the money and somehow consider this a sound business model. It’s easy to show up day after day if the pay is good, right?

Sorry to burst your bubble there, but you couldn’t be more wrong. If you don’t like what you’re doing, your writing work will reflect that, no matter how hard you try.

Well said. Somewhere down in the heart of business, or maybe that's entrepreneurship, is figuring out how to do what you like to do; because you're going to do a lot of it.

(note: this was posted first on Small Business Trends, yesterday afternoon. I'm reposting here for readers' convenience.)

Time Travel, Mac, Mars Edit, TypePad

Time travel? Or is it just Mac or Mars Edit or TypePad? As I write this, at just about 8 a.m. PDT on April 9, my previous post (does investment make the venture) was (I repeat, was) posted tomorrow morning.

TypePad doesn't normally do that to me. I've taken to frequently posting things in advance so I get a post a day regardless of travel schedule or meetings. For example, I have some posts already waiting for a visit to Mexico later this month. TypePad normally handles that fine.

I was up pretty early this morning, looking at things, including tomorrow's post. I used Mars Edit on my Mac at home to pull tomorrow's piece down, edit slightly, and post it back up. TypePad was fine with it waiting until tomorrow, but I did some other things, and then as I get into the office about three hours later, there is tomorrow's post today. With tomorrow's date on it. Visible.

Isn't technology grand?

Startup Culture Shock: Is Startup Life Life?

So I think somebody struck a nerve. So what do you think of this tip to save money:

Fire people who are not workaholics. Come on folks, this is startup life, it's not a game. Don't work at a startup if you're not into it. Go work at the post office or Starbucks if you want balance in your life.

That's from Mahalo founder Jason Calcanis, late last week, on his blog. He titled his post How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips). So he's the one calling his tips "really good," not me. Some of them are pretty good tips, but I think they got lost in the storm.

Responses came fast and furious. 111 comments by Sunday morning. Other blogs reacted too: one of the best of them was from 37 Signals, titled Fire the Workaholics, which concluded:

If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs.

That one has 90 comments on it. Two posts about it -- one by Michael Arrington agreeing and another disagreeing --  have about 350 comments between them.

Jason, meanwhile, got hit hard, with some strong words. He quickly toned down the original, striking out a couple of the more quotable phrases. And, to his credit, he shows the edits too, in the post you'll find when you go there.

Fire people who are not workaholics. don't love their work... come on folks, this is startup life, it's not a game. don't work at a startup if you're not into it--go work at the post office or Starbucks if you're not into it you want balance in your life. For realz

What's going on here? I think it's culture shock; war between worlds. These are not simple disagreements. There is a whole lot of aggression and anger in the comments.

There was a joke I heard first in Mexico City. Maybe you've heard an English version, but this is a translation. It's related to all of this.

A man walks into a crowded cantina and starts shooting two six guns in the air, getting everybody's attention. He draws a line across the middle of the bar and issues an order: "I want all the fools on one side of the line and the jerks on the other."

"Wait just a minute," says one man in the crowd. "I'm no fool."

"Then move to the other side of the line."

That's what this controversy is trying to do to startups and people running startups. It's pretty much either or, if you believe the flow and direction of the comment storm: fool or a jerk.

And I don't think it's that simple. I see at least two other issues rolling around vaguely in the middle of this. And perhaps a way to bring them together.

First, how do you define success? Every so often somebody reminds us that it's an important question. But we get lost in the startup tension, or maybe that's the startup culture. I think all we have to do is ask the question, as a reminder. There are so many shades of gray between the back of plain old failure and the white of fabulous billionaire success. Some people want to have a life, and they want the people around them to have lives. And it's not like there aren't examples of startups that respected people and balance. On the other hand, there are lots of stories around. One person's obsession is another's passion. You can paint that picture how you want. Do you want to be coach the kids' soccer team or (have a very small chance to) be on the cover of magazines?

The second issue is founders with blinders. They want the whole team to share the obsession but they forget that only a few of the top founders actually stand to share the pot of gold at the end of that very-hard-to-catch rainbow. Sometimes its leadership, sometimes its selfishness. It's insisting that everybody buy into their private dream, which sometimes is shared, and sometimes not. I've seen that kind of driven-and-driving-founder at work. The younger Steve Jobs was like that at Apple during the Macintosh gestation in 1983. Philippe Kahn had a lot of that when he build Borland International in the middle 1980s. I saw it again from a comfortable distance in the late 1990s, with dot-coms and their hard-driving work-is-everything atmosphere. That reminds me of the late 1990s in Silicon Valley. Back then it happened all over. I knew a company that raised $45 million venture capital in its first year, hired more than 100 employees, nobody over 30, and brought in dinner almost every night and offered video games and ping pong in the office. The 12-hour days were the norm. The long hours, the lack of balance, the obsession is supposed to be shared by the whole team, but, in many of these cases, the supposed rewards at the end of that long trek won't be shared by the whole team.

It can be a bit like the one-size-life-fits-all syndrome, except in this case it's the one-size-no-life fits all. Does that work? It didn't for that company I knew, which (because a legal settlement so required it) shall remain nameless. It did for Apple and Borland. I don't think that works very well for very long for anybody, at least not for any extended period of time. But then again, some of the people who say that it works have a whole lot of money.

And how do we bring it together? I think it might be value. Believing in what you're doing. I've known companies, and teams within companies, that believed that what they were doing in the business mattered, to them and to the world. There's a very special feeling that you get when you walk out the door at the end of the day with the feeling that you've spent your time making the world better, not worse. Some companies are built on making things better, while others are built on getting money out of people's pockets. Some companies respect their customers, some companies bilk there companies. You know who you are. Does that make it better?

(note: I posted this originally on Small Business Trends. I'm crossposting here for readers' convenience)

Articles vs. Blogging

Jacob Nielson, Internet interface guru, suggests you should "write articles, not blog postings" to demonstrate expertise. Bill Brelsford, of Small Business Building Blocks, says that "doesn't even past the smell test."

It's hard to discount Nielson. I've read two of his books and refer to them frequently. Strange how ugly his website looks, to me, given his expertise; but he's still definitely one of the best on Internet design and interface.

Still, I think Brelsford's analysis is right on target. He suggests that it shouldn't be either/or situation. "Both formats have their merit – what's important is how to best communicate with your intended audience."  Articles show expertise, while blogging is conversation. I like that view.

Somewhere at the core of this question is recognition of different objectives, different formats, and different content. I think it is short-sighted to see only a portion of that. "How-to" material lends itself to the article. "What's new and what do we think about that" lends itself to the blog post. Pitting one against the other seems almost silly, like talking about whether books or magazines, or newspapers or television news, are "better." In Nielson's defense, he does focus his commentary on the specific area of communicating expertise, but still, there are different kinds of expertise.   

I really enjoy writing articles on planning and entrepreneurship. My career has been mainly as an expert in business planning and entrepreneurship. My articles are all over bplans.com, and also at entrepreneur.com, allbusiness.com, and elsewhere. I'm proud of this work and I refer to it often, but it is by its very nature one-way material, much more a lecture than a conversation. While I love to talk to audiences about business planning, and teach it, the bulk of my articles written over the past 10 years are still valid. Many of my articles on subjects like cash planning, strategic focus, and sales forecasting  don't need freshening up.

On the other hand, I also really enjoy blogging. 

I do have a general way to divide material into articles or blog posts. If it's about how to develop a business plan, meaning tips, techniques, and classic "how-to" material, I put it on bplans.com, or in my columns at entrepreneur.com, or my business planning demystified blog at allbusiness.com. If it's anything else it goes on this blog or Huffington Post or the bplans.com blogs.  That seems to work for me. 

In my case it took me stepping down from running my company to get me enough time to start actively blogging. I'm glad for how that went. So now I'm grateful to several people, particularly four who are now running my company and one in New York, for helping me see my way out of the articles-only rut and into the blogging.  Blogging is an exciting new world. It's fun.

-- Tim 

A Free Business Idea

I’ve said in a lot of places, including class, speaking, TV, this blog, and elsewhere, that the "ideas" portion of starting a business is worth little or nothing. It's the team, the actual steps, getting going, that really matters.

So here’s where I practice what I preach. Here’s a free idea. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad, and of course probably somebody is already doing it, in which case I’d appreciate an email or comment to that effect, and we’ll turn it into a plug.

Somebody should make a simple way to bind up a blog into a book. Give me some options like print this blog on demand for $10, $20, $50 a copy depending on quality, color, binding, and so on. I just read that blogs are being born at the rate of one per second. Format it automatically and roll it out into a file that will look good when it comes off the press. One option, make it look good on a coffee table.

Does that idea suck? Fatal flaw? Hey, I have lots of bad ideas, I can live with it, but please, tell me why. Or do it. Build that business. I stake no claims.

There. There’s my money where my mouth is, or vice-versa, or something like that.

Congratulations

My congratulations to Jeff Cornwall for his recent post of a graduation picture with son and daughter.  I really like how that brings real life into the picture. I find I'm reading Jeff's blog frequently these days for its very good mix of solid new research tempered by real thought, a very useful mix for me.

And this is a double congratulations, first for the graduation event and second for keeping that very human, very personal element in your blog. It works.