Жизненное

Третий день провожу с друзьям в Pasadena. Завтра уже нужно собираться и ехать домой.

Сейчас лежу и думаю как оценить вообще время проведенное здесь. С одной стороны хорошо, потому что многих давно не видел, посидели, попили водочки, поели хоровац (шашлык по-армянски — в принципе, почти такой же как и русский, разве что у армян культ мяса более силен :).

Три дня в отеле обошлись около $189 со всеми сборами, прямо напротив библиотеки Pasadena City College. Отель, честно говоря гавно полное, но чисто, уютно. Сервис гавно, не побоюсь повториться. Однако мы с утра до ночи где-то шастаем, поэтому не особо переживаем. С другой стороны хотелось бы больше внимания. Деньги уплочены. Но так понимаю что ожидать чего-то приличного можно начиная от $90 за ночь, хотя не уверен что оно мне играет роль.

За два дня в Pasadena умудрился законфликтовать на дороге с двумя ублюдошными латиносами. Чем тупее и беднее народ, тем меньше культуры у него. Тем более, за рулем. В этом плане мне не хватает "пост-советского" беспредела. Как ни называй, но когда человек реально знает что сейчас я встану поперек дороги, достано дубилово и проведу политбеседу — все-таки сознание гораздо реже покидает его. В данном же случае быдлам-малолеткам тыкать факами из окна, как получилось со мной, не грозило ничем — я ехал в машине с женой, ребенком, и совершенно ясно я бы не исполнял ничего безрассудного, да и не вышел бы бить морду. Звонить в полицию и требовать сатисфакции как-то взападло. Однако все чаще и чаще думаю над риторикой жизни. Нужно выработать линию поведения в таком случае. Но так, чтобы и самому не оказаться крайним, ибо подобные уроды чаще всего звонят в полицию первыми, если пахнет жаренным.

Ну да бог с ними. В очередной раз предъявлял своим друзьям, с которыми за два с половиной годом стали почти одной семьей, претензию по поводу не знания армянского языка. Они — армяне. Я ожидал что за это время, я по-крайней мере начну понимать. Однако мои знания ограничиваются че (нет), бареф (здравствуй), инчкачка (как дела), хоровац (шашлык) и ара (непереводимая игра слов :). Довольно бедный запас.

По-большому счету это и все. Кроме общения, пьянства, шашлычничества, были в паре магазинов, купили бутылку Courvoisier VSOP (подарочный набор с запанками), собирались выпить, но не смогли, и собственно все. Страшно хотел поехать в Santa Monica, Beverly Center в Los Angeles и Roder Drive в Beverly Hills, однако на все времени просто не хватает. Завтра еще постаремся заехать за сигаретами, к армянам в Glendale — они промышляют контрабандным товаром :) — и домой.


Bye-bye, traffic in LA.

Third session @ Founder Insitute

The 3rd session at Founder Institute will be devoted to Name & Branding. As always, we will have three mentors for tomorrow. They are:

1. Bryan Thatcher, CEO of Empressr,
2. Jay Jamison, Founder and CEO of Moonshot, and
3. James Hong, one of co-founders of Hot or Not, listed under Troublemaker title now. :)

I really know nothing about all of them, but James Hong. Somehow his startup was so popular that a lot of people used to mention it. I actually first heard about him when I was living in LA, and he and his business were often discussed during (rare) entrepreneurship events. It would be very intereting to meet him in person and ask some questions.

Well, so now few thoughts and ideas on what branding and naming are, and how did I use them in my previous ventures before. The first thing I should say, that I never took either academic or research approach on this. I tried to keep the name of the company pretty related to what it's actually doing, but I should say I wasn't paying to much attention to it. Of the most important things I wanted to have were:

1. Conciseness — I don't like long names (well, but I had something like "Extra Communications Company" before :) I also prefer "classic" name to be used with dot com at the end. However, I'm willing to choose extremely weird spellings, like nam.es for the short.
   
2. Easiness of saying and spelling — the name should sound good and should be easily spelled out. It should easy enough to be said by either native speaker or not. When you say the name of your company, nobody should ask you about it again. It should be aboslutely clear. And when it's said, it should be easy enough to type it in the browser's location bar, without saying "How do you spell that?". Oh, and when you read it, you should be able to say it right away from the first try. :)
   

So how do I do that? The short name is always a headache, especially, as there are no more 5-letters domain names left in dot com. And 6-letters is already too much. :) That's why I prefer to start from #2, and get back to #1 when I have a good idea about the name.

So, I use to start with a set of names, written down, which can be related to the nature of the business. They don't have be connected. Normally, they should be a legal English words (like web, search, etc), but not a Web2.0 abbreviations (like tumblr, loopt, etc). We'll have a chance to deface them later on. :)

I'm not good at shortening names to Web2.0 notation, so as for now, I think I don't have any names like that (well, maybe but the Tweeplies).

So, when I have the list, I'm starting to looking for a good and available domain name. You need to be able to read it, and actually, have some associations with the words, that will bring you to the right direction. It's like when you're looking at the lemon-like fruit, you are ready to something like citrus, while you might not know what is it exactly.

Normally, I'm ending up with the several lists of 15-20 available domain names, that can also be a company name. I'm trying to avoid more then 5-7 combinations of the same words (or pairs of the words). This keeps you pretty limited to one meaning, while we can have a thousand of them.

When I have the lists of names, I'm just emailing them to about 5 friends of mine, quickly describing the idea of the business (very very lightly!) and the list of domain names. If there is a good association with the nature of the business and the name, you don't need to know the idea deeply, as it makes you a little bit biased. This something that I believe to be a place for improvement, as I think I need to rely on opinion of more then 5 people.

From the other hand, I'm not sure if I need to spend that much time on choosing the name, as just a name doesn't do anything. It's not a brand, it's not a trademark, it's nothing, but a name. You can make it strong, or you will forget about it as soon as it fails. Well, I know, there is also a different point of view, and some people suppose that good and proper naming can add more maturity, trust in your business, which Web2.0-like stuff can be totally unacceptable for a serious business. I can't take a solid position on any of these approaches, but I believe that something like Cornigerous, Inc. is a bad choise, no matter what you're doing.

I don't really have any specific questions for the third session of the Founder Institute. However, I'm not less excited about it, as I want to learn more about other people naming approaches. Except, the only question I might have is:

1. Did anyone experienced changing the name of the company, and having it going up or down because of that? (I'm not talking about screwing up with brand, but keeping in mind that everything else is the same, but just a different mame.)

I'm also going to take some time and discuss this with purple start team members. Four heads are always better then one, right? :)

Не могу понять...

...как можно держать в отеле персонал, который совершенно не говорит по-английски (бл#ть, мы же в США?), который будит меня в 9 утра в субботу чтобы сделать мне clean или выбить из меня желаемую фразу no clean today, и после того, как было посланы нахер, действительно туда уходят, и больше не возвращаются.

Что еще непонятнее, то почему когда возвращаюсь я в номер и ложу ребенка спать, почему же эти убогие создания начинают долбиться в дверь (3 часа дня!! где вы, сука, были раньше?), причем их не сдерживают ни бумажки do not disturb на ручке, ни явно закрытая на внутренний замок дверь.

Ей богу, первый раз я сталкиваюсь с таким. Не поленился даже встать, открыть дверь и повторно обложить х@#ми. К сожалению, меня так и не поняли. После созыва консилиума из числа трех человек персонала, из которых ни один не говорит по-английски, мне задали сакраментальную фразу для Калифорнии habla espanol?.

Нет, ну это был прямо п#$здец какой-то. Мало того что по мне видно, что я ни раз ни хабла, тем более испаньол, так и вообще мой ответ вызвал неподдельное удивление коммитета. Разведя руками, прямо как Равшан и Джамшут, представители это удивительной расы решили ретироваться приговаривая ok, ok, ok...

С нетерпением жду продолжения дискотеки. И это все в отеле которых входит в десятку лучших в Pasadena. Представляю, как выглядит десятка худших, хотя меся назад мне кажется я уже слегка ознакомился с одним из таких. :)

Cracking the GMAT

So, the GMAT story continues. I'm constantly failing to keep up with a stable and a fixed schedule for my GMAT. I would say nothing saying that I'm getting mad on myself because of not being able to keep it the way I want.

However, too many things are happening around, a lot of things need to be done at my job, I need to invest a fair amount of time for the Founder Institute program, plus a number of other things that still need my time and input.

Did I say that I'm married and have a handsome son, who also seeks my time? He doesn't get enough as well. (Hopefully, it helps him to respect it.)

Well, one should say that the right time planning would be an answer, however, I always was good enough with scheduling my time, so it's more about something else.

Whatever, down the road with Cracking the GMAT 2009, and I'm still pretty concerned about the value of it. I already saw the number of sample questions in the end of the book, however, I was actually looking for the hardcore cracking tips and tricks, more on the theory side. 50 pages more, and I'm still reading about pretty basic algebra problems with the list of hints that don't really make much sense to me.

I'm especially frustrated with a very often mentioning so called "scratching" and "plugging in" things. As I've been told, the GMAT takers are pretty limited with amount of scratch paper, and even when they're given it, you have to manage the available space on the paper wisely — we won't be given an extra paper, as well as we don't have anything to erase, but our own fingers and shirt-sleeves. So why should we learn to scratch a lot, when we need to train the brain instead?

From the other side, why are the book authors are idolizing "plugging in" so much? Well, this technique can save you if you have problems thinking in x, y and z, but you should better train how to do this. I could hardly find any example which is a proper usage for "plugging in". The most of these cases were fairly easy to solve with making up an equation. (And I am not the brightest guy in math!)

So I'm pretty disappointed and starting to look for other books.

Second session at Founder Institute

Well, after the terrific first session at Founder Institute, new week comes and our new topic is "Validate your idea with industry professionals". Sounds interesting, huh?

Especially, if I'll mention our mentors for it. They are:

1. Joe Betts-LaCroix. I don't know pretty much anything about him, except that he's Founder and CTO of a just ceased operations OQO. And this is going to be something everybody would be happy to hear about. Could be a great lesson to all of us. I also know that he's a Harvard and MIT graduate.
   
2. Ken Ross. Once again, I know almost nothing about him as well. He's told to be Founder and CEO of ExpertCEO, MIT and Stanford MBA graduate.
3. Trip Adler. He's a serial mentor for Founder Institute so far, as he was one of the mentors for the first session. Well, yeah, I already know much more about him now. He looks to be a smart guy, ignoring the age.

Hopefully, you're already jealous.

Well, so let me get back to topic of the session. My understanding is that we're going to listen how these serial entrepreneurs learn about the market before turning product into a real life. Personally, I found this to be pretty challenging problem, because the wrong market estimation can turn your product into "the great thing that nobody wants".

So, well, let me share with you my experience in this subject. Previously, I had a number of startups myself. However, I'd like to make a stress on only two of them.

One of them was our first company in Ukraine, telecommunication and Internet service provider Extra Communications (often abbreviated as Extracom), which we built, run, broke even and sold in 8 months. I can't get into deep details on this, but overall it was a great experience, but not really anything else. We didn't make a fortune, but we were lucky to get the investments back (it was self-funded by myself, and "triple F" — Fools, Friends and Family, well, maybe without Fools though :).

We were the local ISP for high-speed Internet. Those days the "Internet over the phone" service was pretty mature, but the phone companies were pretty bad. This mixture made a lot of people mad. And there were no DSL on the market, available to home users, yet. Mostly, because it was still a headache to acquire the phone line, which will allow to run DSL speeds on it. Yes, we're doing something close to what cable companies are doing through their cables, but we had no such service there, as well.

So we decided to built a high speed Internet provider aiming the multi-family residential buildings (it's like 20-40 entrances per building, 10 floors per each entrance and 4 apartments per each floor). And the typical building was about 800 apartments each. Internet service was a very first draft of our idea. Actually, we're planning to create a huge, very high-speed social network of neighboors, with streaming music and movies, TV and radio channels, games and whatever not.

Building an ISP is a pretty expensive thing with a long-term payoff. We had little money, so we tried to keep the cost of experiment very low. So all of us decided that we need to research the market first, although we're sure there is an interest in such service. So what did we do? First of all, we developed a plan of how we would like to start our expansion. We choosed the buildings with the maximum amount of apartments, came up with the subscriptions costs and estimated the minimum number of users that should express intent to subscribe, for us to start into this venture.

I really don't remember these numbers, but they were rather modest, we lowered a bit a number of available apartments, but raised a little bit higher the minimum number of users who'd like to subscribe. Second, we had to get a phone number where people should be calling for sales. We got a mobile phone, with free local incoming calls. As far as I remember, it was about $60 or $70/month per month. That was pretty expensive, but we could keep the phone number if we'd like to run into this venture later, and we didn't have to have an office. Why not the office? The cheapest and two-persons-only reconstructed studio like hole-in-the-wall could cost us about $200/month plus landline phone service of $10/mo with no chance to keep the phone number later on. And somebody always should stay there, as the most phone calls, as we discovered later, were coming after 7pm and till 12am (yep!)

The next thing was advertisement, and we purchased a "running text string" TV ad block, which was supposed to run during prime-time on the local TV channel. It wasn't expensive, but we've got only 1 or 2 calls while having it running. So, that was unacceptable. And we decide to go into printed ad. It was regular A4 papers, printed on our own printers, with description about what we do, our plans, prices and phone number. Then, we split into teams and start to go through every single apartment and put the paper into the door. That took a lot of time, but that was great. We started to receive calls almost the same one or two hours when one of our teams were "attacking" the apartments with "SPAM". ;)

And, yeah, we decided that 30 days would be enough to make a decision about are we going into it or not. Well, we've got a little bit less than planned number of "intentions to subscribe", but during the last meeting decided "what the fuck, lets do it!".

To crown it all, I should say we had some kind of formal marketing research, that had to be done before we'll get into the venture. We did a good job on estimation of the numbers. We were aiming only 20% of potential customer base during out research, so we had a potentially growing market. And as we figured later, a lot more people actually was aware about us, but were just waiting for the "second call". To make sure this is not a scam and not just a marketing research. :) So the conclusion is — taking time for the market research is not a bad thing and not always a waste of time.

Okay, now my other startup I'd like to tell you about is Atomkeep. It was one of my first startups since I moved to US, which was remarkable by the facts that:

1. It was built in less then a month.
2. We've spent absolutely nothing on marketing, but got about 10,000 of subscribers in the first month of our release.
3. We've got our server crashed because of being featured in Life Hacker. :)
4. Eventually, we've got featured in Read Write Web and Mashable (no crash anymore!), and
5. Atomkeep was named one of the Top 50 Web Tools 2008 by LAPTOP Magazine.

Well, I can come up with more facts about why I believe Atomkeep to be an interesting thing to tell you about, but why bother? :)

As for Atomkeep, we choose a very differnet approach and we did absolutely no market research at all. We had a few reasons for that. First of all, we had the problem of social profile synchronization ourselves. I like to try things, but hate to keep them updated. Why bother anymore? For the second, we had a group of about 5-10 close friends and fellows, who expressed the same need — which was to keep the track of accounts and keep the updated. And the cost of experiment to enter this market was unbelievable low. It was our time only and that's it. So what should we wait for?

Frankly speaking we're very excited about Atomkeep and stupidly didn't pay attention to many minor details which become very major bottlenecks eventually. But this is not what the story about. :)

I can't come up with a good conclusion for our market research affair with Atomkeep, as we basically didn't do that, but if we did, I don't really see how would it save us from our mistakes that we made. But that's the nature of Web. Things tend to happen very fast here. You're given only a moment to make a decision and rock the world, or somebody else is here in line waiting for his turn.

So, well, I've been there and done that, so once again, I'll be very excited about listening how to approach markets and estimate the potential payback before bringing the product for real. Hopefully, I'll get all answers very soon.

My questions for the session would be:

1. How to research the Web market without sharing your idea? Should we be afraid to share it?
   
2. How to make a preliminary research and gather "expressions of interest" without having a real product done?
3. Should we be afraid of waking up next day to make our market research and finding out that somebody already released the similar product, just because he though "screw it, lets do it!" ?

Maybe something else will come later on.

My mentors for the Tuesday

Few words about the mentors, whom I will be listening to this Tuesday, as a part of Founder Institute program. They are:

1. Trip Adler. I know that Trip graduated from Harvard and joined Y Combinator winter program right after the school with the Scribd. I was paying attention to what his startup does, as he was entering already established market (by my mind) with some pretty clear leaders on it at this time. I know that he was introducing a new experience to the same problem, but I never though it will be enough. While I found his startup interesting (comparing to other ventures produced by YC program), I was really wondering how far he can go on with it. As the time shows — he went far enough. :)
   
2. Philip Kaplan. I wasn't very aware about who Philip is, except that he's founder of AdBrite advertisement network. I tried it once, but it didn't outperform the AdSense for me. I also know that Philip was a founder of Fucked Company, which he decided to abandon. I never used to be a fan of it, anyway. And one of the recent projects of Philip that I happen to be familiar with is Fast140, a Twitter fast typing game. Fun, but not really addictive for me.
   
3. Jason Calacanis. I think first I met Jason at one of the startup events (few years ago) in Los Angeles. I don't really remember what was that, but it wasn't very interesting. Among that, I use to read Jason's maillist — I find it rather interesting. I heard that Jason is a very "weighted" person, and he performs a very deep investigation before starting something.
   

The list of mentors is impressive, so I'm preparing myself to a very productive session.