Common Challenge

Usually when we begin something new we have a (more or less) clear vision on where we want to go. Sometimes we even know how we want to get there. Sometimes the how can be more important then where for us - if we are a bit idealistic… And then the life comes, so be ready to ditch your basic asumptions for final outcome’s sake.

At first we thought that while creating Dooyt.com we will also create a great company to work in, similar to Google: with free lunches, stimulated innovation and not always business oriented products. And, of course, employing thousands of people (well, in future at least). We did put a strong emphasis on structure - even though we chose distributed team for the start, with people working from their homes. We set up communication rules, we carefully chose project management methodology (SCRUM), project collaboration software (ActiveCollab) and we were planning kick-off meetings for our team. We also wanted to keep our day jobs for some (preferably short) time.

The reality proved to be a bit different:

1. It was hard to find the right people to create a great team
2. Managing HR took more time than it was worth - we didn’t have time to focus on polishing our products
3. Working our day jobs we didn’t have enough time to take care of product development and the team
4. The product development went slower than expected (mainly with us as bottlenecks)

Fortunately we are used to being elastic - so we adjusted ourselves

1. Our team is now responsible for inventing and marketing the products, and main architectural coding work.
2. The rest of the coding is and will be more and more outsourced to India
3. Simple business tasks are passed on to our Virtual Assistants, also located in India
4. With some of our time freed (thanks Tim Ferris) we are inventing new products - so expect more from us in near future

As you probably noticed, it’s not really about ditching your dreams, but rather going a bit deeper to figure out what your big dream really is. For us it turned out to be inventing great products. The side effects like creating new jobs etc. apparently can be also achieved this way - the only difference is that the people are now working in India

So whenever things don’t quite go as planned try this: 1. Go up, to find why you really started, what’s the REAL goal. 2. Then think how you can change the “how to get there” (for instance by outsourcing - try Elance for that). You’ll be surprised how elastic your assumptions can be.

And remember to let us know how it went

If you liked this post, make sure you give it a kick on DIGG or MIXX - someone might apreciate it.

Yup! So we did update our webpage after all. It’s been a while since the promised date of 31/03/2008 but we were busy designing the GUI for the beta release of dooyt.com. As you may have noticed the colors and the logo changed. Well… this time in fact it is a logo, not just a mockup done in PowerPoint.

Our idea behind the logo was that it should somehow show the ‘community’ aspect of dooyt.com. In our (or at least my) opinion the three little people depict just that - the community. In the world of web 2.0 an active community is by far the main and most important factor to website’s success. We wanted to express that. Now that we’ve underlined the community, our responsibility is to make sure the contributors are active. That’s probably not going to be easy but we’ll try our best We think that the design of and the concept behind dooyt.com will help in reaching that goal. Of course we invite everyone to submit their opinions and ideas once the beta starts. Now it just plain doesn’t make sense (too early) but if you already wish to send us some comments, please do so under this entry.

Moving on to the second change on www.dooyt.com, you may expect the final website to be in a blue/gray theme. Why did we choose to go that way? Well… First of all we wanted the design to be ‘light’ and easy to the eye. We were also inspired by designs and colors of webpages like www.apple.com or www.rememberthemilk.com which are both easy to user’s eyes and very functional. We also wanted to avoid a very popular web 2.0 trend of using intense colors and thus creating an eye-candy look and feel.

We will write more on the functional design of dooyt.com later once we’re close to finalizing it.

I guess that’s it for now. Stay tuned for more updates from blog.dooyt.com!

One of the basic challenges of ’starting-up’ is loosing momentum. In the beginning everything is easy, you have plenty of energy and bright future ahead. Unfortunately, soon the everyday pains come by and you have to simply go through them. Many of those are things you wanted to avoid by setting up your company: dealing with unwanted partners, unproductive paperwork, doing things that are simply not inspiring. This is where rhythm becomes so important. It’s essential to move on every day - even a smallest step. You also have to monitor yourself, whether you’re actually making any real progress everyday.

This is where good project management methodology helps. We looked at quite a few, while starting Dooyt, we also had some experience with waterfall methods. After lots of discussions (which involved rapid hand movement ) we chose SCRUM. I’m not going to cover it fully here, you can get plenty of information on Scrum Alliance website. SCRUM has three significant advantages over other methods. It’s simple - you set the goals, team takes them on and produces functionalities. It’s lightweight - you don’t need fancy software to implement it (in fact a whiteboard and a pen would be quite enough) - all we use is a spreadsheet with 3 tabs. It focuses on the rhythm - everyday every team members report in short words three things: 1. What she/he accomplished yesterday, 2. What tasks are planned for today, 3. Are there any possible obstacles in meeting goals.

Scrum has other advantages as well - reducing development time and increasing ROI to name just a couple, but those three are the most important, because they MAKE you and every other team member to keep the rhythm. And this is what makes things roll.

It took me a long time to write this post. 99% of this time was thinking how to do it the best possible way. 1% was actually doing it. Without this 1% it wouldn’t be possible for you to read this post, which would make the whole effort pointless. It’s quite an often thing, that just 1% of what you do makes the whole thing matter. Which doesn’t make the other 99% any less important.

So much for an introduction
Even though this post is coming out in march ‘08, and it says: The art of the start, it doesn’t mean we’re just beginning. In fact - we’re half-way done.
We started around 6 months ago with some ideas, plenty of energy and a bit of free lunch-time. We knew we wanted to make important products. Things that will really bring value to our customers. Things that will improve lives. 
It may sound big. And it is. Some of our ideas are dead simple. Some are so complicated even we still don’t understand what they’re actually going to do But all are going to influence the way users live and work. That’s our basic goal.

The topic is not accidental - a title of a book by Guy Kawasaki. We seem to do a lot of reading and we constantly learn, which can be important for you, as we will test some theories in practice, and will post our experiences on this blog.

So this blog is going to be about Dooyt (obviously - more on it soon), management (business, time, project) and at last but not least - starting up

Make sure you come back, at least once a week.

Dooyt is a simple project created out of passion for self development, self management, achievements and doing things together (hence ‘Common Challenge’ in the name of our blog). Dooyt is also a Common Challenge of three guys connected by a similiar vision: improving their (life and work) environment step by step with their projects. You will find more and more precise information about what Dooyt is and what it will become in the near future. But this is just a short ‘about’ note - more info will show up on our blog Stay tuned!

In the meantime we encourage everyone to sign up for the upcomming beta tests of our project at www.dooyt.com.

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