I’ve read so many articles about how to start. Even about bootstrapping while you still have your day job. But none of them provided me with basic information - where the f*ck should I get the time to code this great thing? These are things we tried or we are still doing.

First things first

Startup source code is the first thing I see in the morning. There is nothing else for me. This works great.

6-10-6

This works best for me so far. What does it mean? I wake up at 6AM and work on the startup code until 10AM. Then I switch to daily job. Ok, that’s 4+8=12 hours. In the evening I play with my son, we make dinner, bath and put him to bed. I found out that I am not so productive in the evenings/nights so I am trying to get rid of night coding (not really successfully). Also my wife does not enjoy evenings when I am starring at the screen, I can understand that :-) 6-10-6 works great for me.

One commit per day

We tried that and it didn’t work. I thought that if you will force yourself to commit something every day (including weekends), even small thing like reformatting, documentation, anything, you will make project one step closer to the finish. We even wanted to pay penalty for every day of braking this rule. But there are days when you just can’t work and even if you can, you don’t have always everything ready for commit. Didn’t work for us.

Quit your daily job

Easy, you’re going to have a lot of time :-) I was thinking about it, but recently I read several advices not to do so. It would require to borrow some money (for 1 year?), feels quite risky. But no risk, no reward?

Please share your tricks to keep things going.

Boys and girls, life is strange. Two days ago we found out that we might end up as a direct competition with our friends sitting in office next to us. They were asked to join the project started by their Silicon Valley friend. Damn boy has the same idea we have :-) It’s not that we have no competition, but this is first one we know personally and we know some background. Well, lot’s of material for thinking, isn’t it?

We are going to have a Skype call soon to present our ideas. One has to really think before he does it, because you can’t erase ideas from someone’s memory once they are there I guess. Anyway, we are looking forward to this, because we think it could be win/win deal if we can find the match. From our experience not everybody is trying to solve the problem the same way we are, so we might find out that there’s no fit.

I’ll keep this blog updated with new developments. This must be one of those difficult decisions in entrepreneur life everybody is talking about. Yeah, we are not going to split the pie 50/50 if the talks will succeed, or we are giving away greatest ideas since the wheel was invented in opposite case. Sounds like a good deal to me :-)

So the WebExpo is over and there are several things that came to my mind, that are worth writing about. I prefer to keep posts short and focused, so I’ll write more of them.

It’s a big world out there, isn’t it? I’m just a small boy from the middle of the nowhere and the most successful entrepreneur I know is the baker on the corner. Wait a minute, there are lot of Ferraris sold here every year, so it must be possible to make good money also here. And I am not talking only about politicians.

Startup competition made me thinking about these things. More precisely first two finalists: NejRemeslnici.cz (czech version of TechCrunch50 winner RedBeacon) and PixMac.com (stock photos and images). From their names down to the target markets, these startups are complete opposites.

Open the PixMac and it’s clear - it is global. Their potential market is huge and as presenter pointed out, you’ll reach just few percents of it and you are fine. There always will be people buying photos and images, just get some good Google search position and don’t screw something badly and you’ll be fine (I know it’s not that easy, but it sounds cool).

On the other hand NejRemeslnici need to get basically monopoly on their market. It is a small market, but the problem is, that unlike PixMac, NejRemeslnici need to get to the high percentage. They need to become authority on this market. There is hardly place for two. And the biggest challenge for them is to get people on board. To get viral. To persuade. But once they will pass some point, they should be safe, it will be hard for anybody to enter their territory. And they help to make world better, right?

There I come to our startup idea. We think globally. We think big. But damn, we also have to become authority in the target market. But we hopefully don’t need to get monopoly. So we sort of have the same ‘advantage’ as PixMac - many potential customers to get money from. But we share ‘disadvantage’ of the NejRemeslnici. It’s going to be hard to get people on. Correction - it’s going to be difficult to get paying people on. But that’s for another post.

First I thought I was going to vote for PixMac, but then I changed my mind and voted for NejRemeslnici (and they won, congrats!) It’s not that I think PixMac guys don’t deserve that. I just feel that they are going to succeed anyway. NejRemeslnici could take bigger advantage from winning WebExpo, as this is local conference and they are local company. Also, the first price, ads at local news site is going to be more useful to them. Both of you guys, good luck!

One guy developed an iPhone game in six weeks in his bedroom and made a fortune with it. Another one was profitable in 3 weeks. Wow. I knew that 999 other devs just failed, but I couldn’t help myself. Wow.

I was going to do exactly the same thing. I had to. It was so inspirational, that nothing could stop me. I told several such stories to one friend of mine and he said: I’m in. Let’s work together. You know, if we were cutting the trench, it’s not that we would make it twice as fast as doing that alone. It’s about having somebody to knock on your shoulder once you follow the wrong direction.

And what a true was that. Since then we discussed 10 times more than we coded and we made a complete shift from the original idea (luckily, as far as I can say after some time). Now we are solving our own problem, being our first customers. We defined the values and we understood what we want.

I mean, it is definitely possible to start by your own, but especially in the case when you still have a main day job, joining with other guys seems to make sense. The questions is what’s better: to team up with the copy of you or with the opposite of you? What’s more productive? In our case, my friend is the reasonable one, I am always driving the left lane. We can just hope it will work (which seems to be the case so far).

I moved to Prague several years ago to work for a Silicon Valley superstar company. And I enjoyed it, I really did. I had a great job, reasonable money, perfect people around and really a good portion of freedom in what and when to do. For some reason my direct managers always liked me and so I also had a very good career growth. I left the company from a senior developer position. Not that nobody was wondering why.

All of a sudden some headhunter (I guess through LinkedIn) offered me some position and that made me thinking. I checked also other interesting offers, but I decided for freelancing. Now I have a project where I have more money and I work from home. Perfect. But the most significant parts of my decision was the freedom I was about to have as a freelancer and my old dream of having my own company. To work on my own thing. And yes, also to make the money and be independent.

I always wanted that. As a small boy I was thinking about name and logo for my company. I had no idea what should be the business for it, but I wanted it :-) Now I was making decision to leave a stable job and I felt that freelancing was moving me a little bit closer to my dream.

Of course, things are not that easy, I need to feed my family, pay the house… And that brings me to the important question: ‘What the f*ck was I doing at university and in my first job when I was single, living with my parents and my living costs were close to zero?’ Such a good times for doing startup. Or were they? I calm myself down by saying that I needed to learn things. But for f*cking 8 years?!

Anyway, here I am doing this thing and trying to solve all the problems related to switch from employee to entrepreneur and I will try to document it here.

I’ve been thinking about creating a blog for some time. A blog where I could write down some observations from my new adventure. By that I meant building the web startup. Far away from the wonderful world of TechCrunch, in Prague.

I needed some push to start it and that happened to be the Geeks On a Plane event in Prague. Event itself left some mixed feelings here, but I must say that I really like Dave McClure. Yes, he did cool us down by saying US investors basically don’t invest outside the US, but his presentations were nice and useful. Look for the slides on his page (and prepare yourself for the horrible visual experience). I need to go through his 1-page business model thing again as it was something new to me. Other than that most of what he said just ensures me I’m on the right track. But back to the point, the important thing he mentioned was: let the world know about you, write a blog or something. So here I am, writing this tumblog, or whatever it is called.

Note: Yes, I am that sort of impulsive idiot, so don’t bookmark this shit yet, because this could by the last post here. I could find (again) that I have no time for this kind of self-expression and rather dig into the code. And yes, I am doing this sort of anonymously because of a good reasons.