The Great Styrofoam Disaster

We have an unfinished basement where the kids LOVE to play, especially when friends come over. It's a safe place where they will sometimes play for hours.

In addition to toys, like many basements we also have an assortment of cardboard boxes. And being the frugal people we are, we also have a few very large boxes full to the top of styrofoam packing peanuts for use in shipping things.

Kids + packing peanuts + "let's play snowstorm" = ultimate basement disaster.

It actually wouldn't have been so bad if we would have cleaned it up right away, but we were both so appalled with the whole thing that we shut the door and ignored it for weeks. The kids continued to play completely unphased, smashing the thousands of large styrofoam peanuts into millions of little styrofoam pieces.

We finally faced the music yesterday and armed with brooms and vacuums were able to clean it up.... in 8 times the amount of time it would have taken us to clean it up right away.

Moral of the story: don't ignore small problems, they only get bigger. It's another spin on the classic "car-maintenance" analogy (another thing I am awful at). Think how this applies to relationships with coworkers, angry customers, business plan flaws, etc.

What are you ignoring right now that's only getting worse?

You wanna start something?

(photo by John C Shaw)

This week I attended a great workshop about starting companies - however the principles learned apply to starting anything: a new job, volunteer assignment, or maybe even a new child. The workshop was called "The Lean Startup" and it is put on by Eric Ries who writes the great blog "Startup Lessons Learned".

The Pivot

Did you know?

• Paypal started as a way for cell phones to make payments
• The original goal of Microsoft was to make a small tool for programmers
• Flickr started as an online game service!

Throughout your "startup" experience you are going to constantly be refining the direction you are going. Eric calls this a pivot. A pivot IS NOT deciding you are going to change from selling auto parts to cosmetics. When you pivot (in sports) you have one foot grounded. This is how companies should change directions as well, they should keep one foot grounded in what they have already learned, and pivot the other foot in the new direction they should go.

A pivot is something that is based upon trying something, gathering the data, and learning what works. Eric maintains that the key to success when starting something is minimizing the time between pivots. Thus as you can reduce the time it takes to try and learn, the more pivots you can make, and the greater your chance of success.

Learn Faster

The rest of the conference was about minimizing the time through this learning loop. A few of my favorite pearls were:

• Test your riskiest assumptions first. Don't waste your time doing the easy stuff first - the most important things to learn first are the risky ones.
• Embrace your visionary customers. You will have a few customers who will get your vision better than you do - let them design your product.
• Update continuously. When making improvements to your product, do it continuously if possible- don't store it all up for one big "release day".
• Actionable Metrics. When building your product, build in ways to measure your progress and test a hypothesis. When you measure something, the results need to be simple enough that you know exactly what to do. For a website, Google Analytics is an example of THE EXACT OPPOSITE of this.

So there it is. You want to start something? I do.

Who loves a launch?

My partner Holly has an awesome post about our latest BlogFrog launch (on a Technorati 100 blog) over at her blog, BreadCrumz.

Tweetsharp Twitter Search for .NET

If you are a regular reader you can skip this post now. If however, you are someone searching Google for hours about using Tweetsharp Twitter Search, you've come to the right place.

Here is the easy simple way to use the amazing Twitter Search capabilities of TweetSharp.

1. You must be using ASP.NET 3.5

2. Make a class in App Code called TwitterCS or something like that and include the Tweetsharp libraries:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

using Dimebrain.TweetSharp.Fluent;
using Dimebrain.TweetSharp.Model;
using Dimebrain.TweetSharp.Extensions;

///

/// Summary description for TwitterCS
///

public class TwitterCS
{
public TwitterCS()
{
//
// TODO: Add constructor logic here
//
}

public static List TwitterSearch(string query, Int64 sinceid, int numresults)
{
Dimebrain.TweetSharp.TwitterClientInfo clientinfo = new Dimebrain.TweetSharp.TwitterClientInfo();
clientinfo.ClientName = "YourClientName";

var twitter = FluentTwitter.CreateRequest().Search().Query().Take(numresults).Containing(query).Since(sinceid).AsJson();
var response = twitter.Request();
// Convert response to data classes
var searchresults = response.AsSearchResult();

return searchresults.Statuses;

}

}

3. Now you have a List of type tweet that you can easily iterate through. For example here I am converting the list to a datatable and binding it to a gridView (don't forget to include the Tweetsharp libraries on this page as well).

Dim StatusTable As Data.DataTable = New Data.DataTable("StatusTable")
StatusTable.Columns.Add("UserName")
StatusTable.Columns.Add("ProfileImage")
StatusTable.Columns.Add("Status")
StatusTable.Columns.Add("StatusDate")
StatusTable.Columns.Add("StatusType")
StatusTable.Columns.Add("StatusID")

For Each T As TwitterSearchStatus In TwitterSearch.TwitterSearch("BlogFrog", 0, 10)
Dim StatusRow As Data.DataRow = StatusTable.NewRow()
StatusRow("UserName") = T.FromUserScreenName
StatusRow("ProfileImage") = T.ProfileImageUrl
StatusRow("Status") = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(T.Text)
StatusRow("StatusDate") = DateTimeOffset.Parse(T.CreatedDate).UtcDateTime
StatusRow("StatusID") = T.Id
StatusRow("StatusType") = "REPLY"

StatusTable.Rows.Add(StatusRow)
Next T

twitter_gridview.DataSource = StatusTable
twitter_gridview.DataBind()


And there you have it. Happy coding and your welcome :)

Your first child - 8 lbs of pure terror

"I am 8 lbs of pure terror and I'm going to get you"

I asked Halle what I should write about today and she said "your kids".

I still feel like a kid raising kids.

So you can only imagine how I felt when we had Halle. I was barely 23. And mind you our sweet Halle was no ordinary baby. You wouldn't know it by her sweet demeanor now, but when she was a baby she had two modes of operation: asleep or screaming.

Oh the screaming. She was blessed with titanium lungs... and she wasn't afraid to use them. Especially at all hours of the night. I thought we were going to die. I remember being so sleep deprived that I didn't even know what day it was. I remember thinking things like "I can't believe people really do this" and "I hate everyone who was ever a baby".

I'm sure it didn't help that we were totally clueless. The people who let us leave the hospital with another human life should probably be arrested. We read the books and watched the movies, but just like most training, nothing can prepare you for the real thing. For my next job I'm going to arrange a service where newborns are loaned to expectant parents. Halle would have had them running for the hills.

Everything in this story ends well. After about 3 months of torture and just when we were nearing our breaking point - it was like she flipped a switch from evil to angel. The clouds parted and she became my sweet little princess.

So if there are any new dads out there who feel like they are going to die, don't worry it gets better. And Halle, you may have been a tough baby, but I always loved you and always will!

The Importance of "Auto-pilot" Thinking

what does stringing a racket have to do with running a business (photo by ryamane)

Some of my best ideas about a project come when I am doing something totally unrelated to the project - on "auto-pilot".

TheBlogFrog is not my first startup. During college I had the idea of starting a tennis school. I checked out a couple books from the University library and went to work training, making flyers, and making lesson plans. I had my first expirience with gorilla marketing by going door-to-door and spending hours on the phone (always asking for referrals) signing up students. In the end it was a succesful startup, providing more income during the summer than most of my friends made year long.

But this blog post isn't about the tennis school. It's about what really made the tennis school succesful, and that was the hours of "auto-pilot" thinking that was done while stringing tennis rackets. Every night I had at least two tennis rackets to string. This was something I had done so many times that I could definitely do on auto-pilot where my body was working but my mind was free to think. This is when I planned lessons and thought about all the little things that made the school a success.

With girls it was always shooting the basketball. We had a hoop in the backyard and whenever there was a girl question or problem that needed to be worked out, I would shoot the ball around alone. Again this was something that my body could do on auto-pilot.

This is mostly how my current startup was shaped. At my previously employer, I had gotten to the point where I could mostly perform my job on a sort of auto-pilot. I could sit at the computer and be designing circuits, but my brain was solving the problems associated with blogging and social networking.

Now that I am executing the unending day-to-day tasks that come with a startup, it can be a challenge to sit back and engage in the type of creative thinking that got me here in the first place. A couple of times I have gone down in the basement where we have a ping-pong table. This is where I now do my thinking. I put one end of the ping-pong table up and hit against the wall Forest Gump Style.

I encourage everyone to engage in some serious auto-pilot thinking.