You are most productive when you can focus. Don’t kid yourself, the hobby startup that you have been pushing along for years, is taking up creative time and effort and money that could be better spent making something, anything else be successful.

There is no crime in joining a team.  All those out there in one man consulting shops pushing their startup along an inch a day, consider what you could be accomplishing with a well managed team pushing toward a finish line that is attainable.

Please assume that most of your productive time is spent on your day job.  Or at least assume your boss thinks that is true.  Or more importantly know that your team mates are treating the day job as their path to the big time.  They are thinking about ways to make it successful in the shower.  What are you thinking about in the shower?

Some businesses are evergreen. I founded http://gamesville.com in 1995 which we sold to Lycos in 1999 and it is still running and making money.  So I don’t mean to say all businesses have a specific lifetime.  I am very proud that 13 years later our economy still has a nice place for that business.

But, I’ve also started other businesses over the years that were not Gamesville.  In my experience many of them had their time and place and more importantly there was a distinct moment when the world moved on and it was time for the founders to move on too.

This is easier to say than do. Maybe turning your back on a past business is more difficult than moving on from a failed personal relationship.  Especially when you feel that you gave birth to the business.  

I certainly commiserate with how hard this can be.  When I pivoted Visible Certainty to become SaneBox, I was leaving 3 years of 24 hour a day work and 1+ million dollars of development but digging that hole deeper wasn’t going to make the world a better place.  I wrote down all the reasons that that project didn’t work which was very purging:

http://stuartroseman.com/post/619953720/out-with-the-old-business-in-with-the-new  

I highly recommend that all the entrepreneurs within the sound of my voice do that exercise.  Why has your startup not succeeded?  

At the time, I left visible certainty up and running for another year I felt a very strong personal bond to the users.  We stopped actively maintaining it. But the software was pretty amazing and it just continued to run and run.  At least until we need to upgrade the OS.  Which brought into stark relief how much of a distraction it could be.

In the end, when I really did shut it off, the world did not come to an end. Instead of hate mail,  I got a series of very sweet emails from former users.  And my world became a better place with less unnecessary distractions. It felt good. It felt like a rebirth.  I couldn’t really move on until I had buried the past.

And here is the thing.

Your startup, your hobby, the thing that isn’t succeeding, can’t be more important than your day job.  You want to be known for something.  Use your skills to build something that you will be remembered for.  Such effort requires focus and dedication.  So long as you can’t give up on the last thing, you can’t move on to the next one.

Here are some rules about how to know it is time to move on:

1) There were going to be plenty of other ways to provide the same service for free or the same price that you are selling it for

2) it was never going to be big enough because it isn’t yet big enough

3) the opportune moment had passed and now the big public companies are all releasing capabilities similar to the ones you were hoping to provide.

Lastly, remember that you have crazy skills.  When you tell the story of the Internet to your grandchildren you should be able to point to one shining success that was created by those skills.  Be able to say that you waded into the stream and pulled out the gold with your bare hands.  Be able to point to the evergreen business that was built by your hands.

If this is you and you are ready to move on, SaneBox is hiring.  Come work with us to make the world safe for email.  This business does scale.  This business is evergreen. This business is crazy fun.  You want to be able to point back to this time and say “Yup I built SaneBox - it was a crazy fun ride!”.  Send a resume and a cover letter with at least one joke to roseman dash hr at sanebox dot com

ronnkliger:

Well, that’s it! After 26 years in the corporate world I’ve made the plunge. I’ve left a comfortable, secure, well-paying job for the unknown. I should be questioning whether this is the right move but I’m really not. That must be an indication that it is indeed is the right move or that it…

It’s never too late for a fresh start!

For anyone out there that has seen their bounce rate go up after Feb 17th and been chasing red herrings trying to figure out what changed.

Firefox 10.0.2 caused the SaneBox homepage bounce rate to go from 25% to 90% for our FF users.

Here is a snap of our GA analytics spot lighting browser == FireFox  

https://skitch.com/stuartroseman/8ju9s/site-speed-google-analytics

Here is a snap of our GA analystics spot light browser != FireFox (and yes something happened between March 7th and 8th - but one thing at a time)

https://skitch.com/stuartroseman/8jw81/site-speed-google-analytics

The annoying thing is that you can parse your GA data a bunch of ways and get a similar bump.  Interestingly we thought it was an international routing issue at first since certain countries had the the bump and US appeared not to.  But that is a dead end probably caused by the up take of Firefox in certain places and specifically how much of our traffic from that country was from FF users.

When we figure out what is actually causing this I will add to this post, but in the meantime I thought it was important to get this piece of information out. Since googling for this was not helpful

Update: 3/20/12 our FF bounce rate is now receding dramatically with the release of FF 11.0 - I’ll post a chart when the trend steadies out.

It being the day before Thanksgiving here in the US, I thought it appropriate to be a little thankful.

I have a lot to be thankful for: wonderful wife, http://danielacorte.com, two wonderful kids. And we are all warm, dry, well fed, employed, and happy. That in itself isn’t too shabby these days.

But this Thanksgiving, I’d like to sing the praises of my mother-in-law, Linda

My wife and I have always been able to take a kid-less holiday or gracefully take care of a work emergency.  We’ve never had to worry about my daughter or son having a moment of discomfort because we can always rely on Linda.

My wife has infinite faith because she has a lifetime of evidence.  I have infinite faith because the worst that could happen is that Linda will turn my kids into copies of my wife. And, frankly, I spend some part of each day hoping she will.

My kids loooooove their grand-mother. They think she walks on water.  Not because she gives them more ice cream than we do (she does).  Not because she lets them watch TV more than we do (she does).  But, because they never doubt for a second that she would walk into a burning house for them (she would). And because she is firm, fair, thoughtful, just, patient, funny, fun, helpful, smart, and omniscient.

And my kids aren’t the only ones who feel this way. If I need a dinner reservation, I first mention my wife and if that doesn’t work I drop my mother-in-law’s name. Really… everyone loves Linda and they should.

Recently, one my engineers went away for his first kid-less night away with his wife in five years.  He and his wife seem to have a great relationship. And, certainly, they were doing just fine with the previous 1,825 kid-filled days.

But, wow did it sound like they had a great time on their night away.

And here is the thing…

These days, life is extremely complicated and balance seems to be a luxury.  It is a luxury to have time off alone with your wife.  It is a luxury to be able to concentrate on your new business in the midst of daily chaos.  It is a luxury to spend time playing with your kids.  I don’t take these luxuries for granted.  And I attribute our ability to juggle all this and find some sort of balance to Linda.

And my Thanksgiving day wish is that you all find your own Lindas and the balance that she brings.

You know it’s been a tough day when one of your engineers quotes Zawinski’s law of software development:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

And yes I did point out that we (http://sanebox.com) **are** the in the email business, but in the end he was correct to Zawinski me and that is why I LOVE my engineers!

Hi Ron,

Sorry.  SaneBox has gotten an insane amount of traffic so I haven’t had the time to upload it.  Adobe just announced yesterday that they weren’t going to support flash on mobile devices anymore so it is just a matter of time before flash goes the way of the dodo.  Our front end graphics creator was written in flash so that really limits it’s long term usefulness.  The backend part is still very powerful.  At this point, I don’t know when I will have time to upload the code. 

Sorry,

Stuart

I have a friend who has lost the ability to raise his arms through the ravaging effects of Lyme disease. He has been actively treating it for last year and after 6 months he started getting better. But the progress is slow, painful, soul-crushing. 

That would be awful enough, but he had medical insurance and sought medical advice and was told for years previous to his effective diagnosis and treatment of Lyme that he had an ordinary bug bite (cortisone cream), tremors in his hands (drugs to treat the symptom) and then as his symptoms progressed that he had ALS and all they could do was make him comfortable and wait for the end.  

I was there when the big expert at MGH said that to him. My friend didn’t even argue with the doctor.  He had already plugged into the Lyme-aware doctor network and was simply going through the main-stream medical steps.

He lives in the suburbs of Boston.  Deer ticks are everywhere.

Now that he knows the symptoms, he has realized that his 17yo daughter who has been having neck pains for a year and is being treated with Percocet by her PCP might have the early signs of Lyme.  He sent her to have the tests and sure enough they came back positive. His Lyme expert MD prescribed her a course of treatment.

Now for the really awful part… the PCP doesn’t want her to take the treatment and has convinced her to stop.  I assume because anti-biotics have side effects - you could develop colitis.

He is now in the awful position where he has to argue with his daughter about treating a disease that almost killed him because he was so late in getting diagnosed.  She obviously would much rather believe the PCP and take the Percocet. Who would want to acknowledge a life threatening disease when they can be stoned on Percocet?  

Do you live in the suburbs?  Or visit them?  Or walk thru sand dunes?

Go read about the symptoms: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Signs_and_symptoms

Treat it early on and you will be fine.  Delay treatment and you run the risk of years of nerve problems, loss of motor control, and soul-crushingly slow progress.

Main-stream medicine has failed us in the identification of this disease and it’s treatment.  Don’t put yourself on the treadmill to the ALS ward at the MGH where they will make you comfortable until the end.  Be your own advocate.  Get treated.

Some of you may remember my previous business, Verifiable.com, which was a cloud service that enabled users to upload data and turn it into pictures.

Verifiable.com has been running in read-only mode since I pivoted the business in February of 2010 to start SaneBox. My theory was that so long as the data on Verifable was useful and didn’t require support staff, I would leave it.  And remarkably the system has run unattended for all this time; answering questions about unemployment, housing, pollution, prices, concrete production, etc…

For those interested in why I chose to pivot the business - here is my original write up on the mistakes made in that passionate car crash.

Well… in that time I have gotten 2 nibbles for the software.  Both required documentation and staff to close and I couldn’t see allocating scarce infrastructure to that **small** sale when those resources were better served building SaneBox.  Ahhh the joy of a small team and a laser beam focus. 

But, the water shed moment has arrived.

Today, I put a ticket into our system to close down http://verifiable.com except for the homepage.  We are updating all software instances to the latest version of Ubuntu and it is just too hard to worry about Verifiable anymore.  Updating unique gems and such is simply a distraction that we can’t afford right now.

I’m sad.  Creating Verifiable required a **lot** of passion and money and time and effort.  But, it wasn’t as good an idea as SaneBox ( a pay service that saves you time by filtering your email).  For the record, pivoting was the right thing to do, having a business that has lots of active users who pay for the service is way more fun.

Everyone is now talking about big data, big data, big data. So, my timing might have been a little early.  But, I still don’t see the insightful visualizations that would make big data meaningful to the universe.  And it was those visualizations that we wanted to bring to the universe. And those visualizations still require more skill and more experience and better tools than most people have.  Each NYTimes graphic is still being generated as a one-off by highly, highly, highly skilled professionals with access to extremely expensive and proprietary data that has been laboriously cleaned.

And finally, in a world where most major Republican presidential candidates are running successfully against “science”, I find it hard to believe that the tide has changed in favor of big data or little data in any kind of mass market way.

I will try to find a quiet couple of hours to upload the Verifiable software to github. I’m not sure that anyone will find it useful, but if you want a turn-key, graphic generating, data massaging engine you will find it there.

And here is my last verifiable.com wish, that all of you within the sound of my keystrokes go and find the actual data behind some societal issue and develop a scientific opinion on it. Especially those who would vote for a presidential candidate that doesn’t believe in climate change and doesn’t believe in evolution.

And run don’t walk to http://sanebox.com - we save the average user 2 hours per week.  Don’t you have something better to do than spend all that time on your email?

I just sat in on the firing of my fashion designer wife Daniela Corte’s latest sales/assistant this morning. Yes, it was an awful experience.

I’ve worked at companies where no one ever got fired.  That was pretty awful too. Everyone knew who the bad people were and tried to avoid having them on their projects. Sometimes you got stuck and you made the best of it.  But it always felt wrong.  And the really great people always left because the situation was simply too frustrating.

Fast forward to today.  My wife  has been trying to fill a sales/assistant slot for years. She has tried

• experience/expensive
• young/inexpensive
• some experience/still lots-o-money.  

Nothing has seemed to work. In the end, it always seems as if it is easier and better to have no one sitting in that chair than the person she has hired.  Which is seriously not a great option. Of course, the process does force you to streamline and automate if only to get through the day.

But, what is my wife doing wrong?  

There have been 5 of them over the last 6 years. Each person lasts between 1-3 months.

What was wrong with them?

• one of them was stealing
• one of them was just genuinely crazy… really crazy
• one of them could not keep details straight - shipments were lost, everything was a rush to the finish, there never seemed to be control
• one of them was really, really bad with customers
• the rest some combination of all of the above

You get the idea.

My wife has other employees that are great and have been with her forever. But this one position appears to be Murphy Brown personal assistant doomed.

And here is the new awful twist.  My 4yo son and 6yo daughter spend a bunch of time in our offices. They become friends with the soon-to-be-fired employees who are regardless of their professional failings actually nice, well-meaning people. And oddly they are all good with kids.

So we now have these conversations at the dinner table.  Mommy what does it mean to fire someone?  Was so-and-so doing a bad job?  Why? What did they do wrong?

Sigh…

Seriously, I have to put more money in my kids therapy fund.  Frankly I probably have to put more in ours too. And frankly, I hope the employees have a therapy fund too.

In the end, firing someone, while a better idea than leaving a bad person in place to drag down morale, is still a failing of management.  It is a sign of a broken hiring process or a broken on-boarding process, or a broken training process.  But it is a failing of management and an expensive one at that.

The next candidate starts in a couple of weeks. She seems great. And every firing forces you to look yourself in the mirror and change something, fix something. I’m sure this one will be the keeper.

In my experience, we are all different enough that someone out there hates us for that difference.  My wife is latino. I’m a jew. Our best friends are gay.   You get the idea.

But, for me, I have never personally had anyone shout at me or physically attack me for being jewish. I know it happens.  I have read about it. But, it is always somewhere else to someone else.

Today, one of my closest friends had to face this.  And I am absolutely furious.

He dropped off his husband at work and went to park the car. They have been married for as long as you can be gay and married in Massachusetts. A lot longer than most hetero married couples I know.  And with a lot more positive energy and a lot less drama than most of the hetro married couples I know.

I’m sure they briefly kissed goodbye.  I’ve seen the drop off.  The kiss is a reassuring peck.  Sometimes accompaigned by a short hug.  I do the same thing with my wife. She can be leaving for the morning or a week or a minute and I get the quick kiss goodbye.  I’m sure you all do the kiss goodbye.  And none of us think much of it.

But, that kiss must have caught the attention of 2 guys that proceeded to follow my friend to where he was parking and start screaming “faggot” at him.  This is Newbury Street in Boston at 9:30AM in the morning. It should have been safe to park a car and walk down the street.  It should have been safe to drop your spouse at work.

My friend walked quickly away. I can’t imagine what that feels like. 

Then, a loud crash.  They had smashed the glass in his car with a bat.  They sped away. They did all these things.

Life is complicated. There are the bills and the kids and the family and the friends and the job and all the other random concerns that make up adult life. But, somehow they found the time to scream “faggot” at the kindest man I know and smash the glass on his car and run off.

The Boston Police came.  They took down the information.  They were helpful, concerned, actively anxious to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I have no doubt they will try to catch these guys.

But, if they catch them or not, I am furious. You should be too.