If you haven’t read this interview in Wired last November…

Another great essay on startups by Paul Graham

A little over a month ago, I joined a local startup community called Founders in Motion started by Hakon Verespej. Seattle has a vibrant startup community and any given day you can attend a startup coffee in the morning, grab lunch with startups, and learn about starting up that night. There are many, many opportunities to meet and learn about startups.

These events are great as being in a startup can sometimes feel a little lonely. One of the things I appreciate about Founders in Motion is that we foster accountability with each other. Each week, I make a commitment to the group about my next steps. I get valuable feedback on the steps but what I value most is that I make a commitment to drive my business forward. I find it very easy to justify my strengths when making decisions about next steps to take with my startup. As a technical cofounder, there’s always something technical that needs doing. I’m a big believer in the lean startup approach, which tends to favour talking to customers rather than building on assumptions. I made that mistake in spades on my first startup and so I am always looking for ways to avoid repeating this mistake. It was making a commitment to the group that helped me push past my comfort zone and ask two early adopters to provide warm introductions and to my pleasant surprise, they were more than happy to help.

There are many examples that demonstrate that a social contract can be much stronger than a legal contract. I imagine that if we had venture funding I could use that to help me focus on the business at times when I find myself building on assumption but as we’re bootstrapping, making a social contract helps me focus on executing the business. If you’re a technical founder and you find yourself building on assumption when you should be engaging customers, I’d encourage you to join Founders in Motion and see if making a social contract can’t help you.

California Unified Districts according to 2010 Census Data thanks to @mapbox and @openstreetmap #opendata

I’ve been more or less adhering to Getting Things Done using the Secret Weapon and Evernote for the past month. So far, it’s been a success and I’m finding myself more organized without having to be more organized.

One thing I struggled with is unifying my various email accounts. For a while, I had Action Pending, Waiting, and Reference folders for each account. As per the TSW’s guidance, I initially consolidated and sent everything to Evernote. However, I was uncomfortable with that because I felt that I couldn’t identify the emails I had to take action against so I went back to three folders…across all of my email accounts. For me, that was nine folders I had to visit plus Evernote, which was manageable but clumsy. After consideration, I decided to follow TSW’s guidance and consolidate everything into Evernote. It’s not ideal, but it gives me one place to work from rather than multiple lists.

I still haven’t gone through everything in my life and ordered it according to GTD but the changes I have made have provided me with more time. It’s an evolution.

If you practice GTD, do you have any tips to make the transition better?

A few days ago, our student transfer application surpassed 5000 transfer requests. Having worked on many enterprise systems, 5000 is not a large number but one of the things that I’ve always found challenging with enterprise systems is that the benefits are often difficult to quantify and due to the bureaucracy of organizations challenging to realize. This has not been my experience working with school districts.

Before using our application, parents had to fill out a paper form and drop it off at the school district. District personnel then keyed in the request and maintained the information in a combination of Excel documents, paper folders, and local computer files. As you can imagine reporting was time consuming and managing overall the student transfer process required a high degree of institutional knowledge.

Now parents complete the form online and district staff manage the entire process in a secure, open standards based, web application that requires minimal training. Reporting is built in and the entire process is very transparent.

All told, our student transfer application cuts processing time down by about 10 minutes per request. So far, this is over 800 hours saved and this speaks nothing of the benefits easier analysis provides and a (much) more transparent process.

If you build enterprise-y applications for a living these numbers might not impress you. However, it’s among the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. Our application is used on a daily basis, our customers are delighted, and I’m making a (small) difference in something I care about. It could be a lot worse.

I love Evernote and cannot wait for version 5

Planet Money has a fun series that results in the creation of a fake presidential candidate based on economic policies with (generally) broad support across (e.g., left to right) the economic community…that no politician would touch. Then they get political consultants to help them sell the policies.

The episodes (in order)

• The No Brainer Economic Platform
• Free Heroin, And Other Ideas That Won’t Get You Elected
• Making Economics Sexy
• Our Fake Candidate Meets the People

The ads

• End Mortgage Tax Deduction
• Legalizing Marijuana

While having dinner with a friend and talking about validating business models, he suggested that I not trivialize the affect of getting customer feedback. If you really care about your idea, it can be a challenge being told it doesn’t solve world hunger. Up until that point, I hadn’t even considered how I might feel about it. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t in the back of my mind but now as I’m getting my first tests out the door I think it was good advice. I think I’m better prepared mentally to accept the inevitable criticism of my idea and not take it too personally.

My first experiment on validating the value proposition is a survey to school district personal through the CETPA mailing list. Last week at CETPA, I learned that technology directors (another hypothesis) favor email and, in particular, the CETPA listserv. I’ve been monitoring the CETPA listserv for a few weeks and a lot of sharing occurs there. I’m used to LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, and Google Groups so this is a little new (old) for me. I’m very interested to see the results of the survey and the results of the engagement through the list.

My next experiment, which I’m running concurrently next week, will be warm introductions from our existing customers. The survey is a good warmup for the conversations I need to have next week. It will help set my expectations when I’m told I’m not curing cancer.

Preschool provides a 10% annual return on investment.