Michael Parkatti and Mike Marrone are in Cambridge, Massachusetts participating in the 2008 summer session of Y Combinator, a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups, to begin work on their new stealth-mode Internet startup.
They intend to publicly launch their website in August and will be filing a weekly report.
July 28, 2008 — Week 7
With less than three weeks to go until the first demo day of our product, it's amazing how much the pressure and intensity on the teams continuously increase.
Let me talk a bit about the challenges we've faced.
From a personal perspective, Mike and I have been working 18 hour days for almost two straight months, and we can definitely feel the stresses increase on many different levels. For starters, almost an entire summer has elapsed while we've been bunkered indoors in front of our laptops. It will be Labour Day before we even have a chance to take a breath above water -- but we all pretty much understood that this would be the way it was before coming to Y Combinator.
In startup life, Paul Graham talks about condensing an entire life's worth of professional work by a factor of 10, so you work the equivalent of 40 years in the space of four. I've worked in startups before, but it really does change when your name is on the marquee. Opening my laptop is the first thing I do when I wake up every morning, and closing it is the last thing I do before falling unconsciously asleep every night.
Every meal we eat is either over a keyboard or within an arm's length of one. Our house does watch the odd movie together, but deciding whose laptop we'll use to play it is like drawing straws. Everyone else watches the movie with the notebooks in their laps while the unlucky guy is forced to relax entirely.
This period of the summer is also when the most critical product development happens, which can cause massive amounts of friction amongst founding teams. Mike and I have butted heads together numerous times in the last couple of weeks — but I know that we're far from the only founding team where that's true. Everyone is simply passionate about what they're doing and what they're creating. Couple that intensity with extremely irregular sleeping patterns, and the friction is bound to go up.
Both of the teams in our house have yet to launch, though we are feverishly preparing to get to that point. Plenty of the other teams have launched so far, including Posterous, Awesome Highlighter, Startuply, Anyvite, and Slinkset. They've all been well received, which gives us extra motivation to get out there and start getting user feedback on what we've built so far. I really don't use many internet services, but I can honestly say I've tried all of their websites and love what they've made.
The web application that Mike and I are working on may not be fully featured for another couple of months, but we intend to release a free trial version of what we have simply so we can start the feedback process. If we were developing in a previous generation of the web, we might have waited until everything was completed. However, contemporary wisdom holds that releasing as early as possible is absolutely key to your product's success. Though the product will not be perfect, but it will give you invaluable user input that can drastically change your preconceptions about how it will work and how to make it better.
For aspiring Web entrepreneurs out there, take this process to heart. There are plenty of stories of founders who created their products on a shoestring budget and simply never stopped improving them. Glitzy launches are not really worth all that much. The products that last are the ones that generate their own organic growth, because of their realized value to the end user.
Last week's dinner included a speech from Paul Graham about what to expect in the coming weeks and months, with an emphasis on the fundraising process. Different funding options make sense for different kinds of startups, and he basically laid out what to expect under each option.
This is a topic I've been thinking about lately, as I realize that the end of the summer is fast approaching and we need to start planning for life post-Y Combinator. I'm starting to formally put together our investment information and begin the pre-fundraising process. At the same time, I still have to keep a hand in our product development and remember to eat and sleep.
Sometimes it is alarmingly easy to forget about the latter two. ...
