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.

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.