Job #3: Stripper

Printing companies (back when I worked for one anyways) had a process to take negatives of an image to print, stick them all together in a meaningful layout, and burn the image onto a metal plate that goes on the press to print. The negative layout part is called "stripping", and if you do that job you may be referred to as a "stripper". I did this for a while after my dad's company was bought by a larger printing company. It seems like there's a funny joke in there somewhere about being a stripper, but there isn't.

It's not a weakness, I'm a victim!

I have been through a lot of job interviews, and a common question interviewers ask when they're out of important questions is “what’s your biggest weakness?” Invariably, in an attempt to imply that their biggest weakness is that everything they do is perfect, the interviewee will answer “perfectionism”. If they’re being honest however, and perfectionism really is their biggest weakness, then they’re telling the interviewer that they never get anything done.

A second weakness that nobody in their right mind would cop to in a job interview is procrastination. Lets let honesty reign again and all admit that if one tends to procrastinate at least a little, then one is likely in good company. Fortunately procrastination doesn't actually mean waiting to the last minute to work on everything, it only means waiting to the last minute to work on anything important. While waiting for those "last minutes" one tends to find plenty of other stuff to do that is easier, or more fun, and if one is lucky that other stuff is actually productive in some way and not just playing video games or watching sports on TV.

Using honesty as an excuse one more time, I'll say that I'm a perfectionist, though I try not to respond with that in interviews (I stumble clumsily over the biggest weakness question and eventually respond with "my stomach"). As long as I'm copping to things, and not in a job interview, I will also accept responsibility for occasionally falling victim to procrastination (See? It's not a weakness, I'm a victim!). Turning the corner on my project from development through final product and onto marketing my perfectionism and procrastination have begun to rear their ugly heads.

I've spent a lot of time and energy focusing on designing and developing a product under the misguided assumption that this is all that needs to be done, and once it's complete I'll have a business to run and will be self employed. The gap, of course, is marketing. For the last sixteen years, meaning precisely half of my life and my entire adult life, I have been focused on programming and software development. I like to think of myself as a very competent software engineer, capable of creating complicated products, but I have absolutely no experience marketing a product.

My perfectionism is not causing me to find the perfect way to market my product (remember being a perfectionist is a weakness), but procrastination is causing me to use my perfectionism as an excuse to find new features and design ideas for the product rather than try to market it. I constantly find myself thinking that it just needs one more feature, or perhaps the layout or aesthetics are bad and need to be redesigned, but the reality is that nothing I do to the product itself will cause more people to see it. I really need to buckle down and get to work on the part I don't know how to do and that I won't get perfect: marketing.

Job #2: Darkroom

My grandpa started a printing business back in the late 60s, and my dad worked there, eventually taking over ownership, for about twenty five years. When I started high school I also started working at the print shop. I had matured a lot since my long stint as a newspaper delivery specialist and an hour a day now seemed like a reasonable workday to me. I worked with a huge room sized camera with a darkroom at one end, taking photos of photos to make them smaller so they'd fit in newsletters. While my contemporaries toyed with the idea of working in the fast food industry I was proud to have achieved a position that allowed me to stretch my intellectual muscle to calculate what percent 1.5 inches was of 5.65 inches. 


I worked pretty much when I wanted for as long as I wanted, had vacations and holidays (unpaid! a crime!), and finally had money for candy and toys again.

Elevator Pitch V1.0

“You’ve gone to live music at your local coffee shop, flirted with friends and coworkers, danced at clubs, even hung out in the produce aisle pretending you’re looking for the perfect melon. You are one of the millions of people who are just no good at meeting that special someone. You’ve heard that online dating is all the rage, but the idea of blind dates setup by computers leaves you slightly less than excited. What you are good at is mountain biking, or scuba diving, or knitting. Why meet awkwardly, matched one-on-one by some meet-market dating website when instead SeventhWheel.com will introduce you to whole groups of people you’ll like, all with shared interests, matched personalities, and even similar life styles. We’ll give you ways to communicate with this group, and organize events. If people leave your group we’ll help you find new people to join it. The best relationships grow out of circles of friends.”

Then I would conclude by cleverly tying the “circle of friends” concept somehow into the wheel motif that’s in the name Seventh Wheel, and you’d be sold. Anyways, this is the original idea, and the website has almost all the features to pull it off (event organization still pending). Here’s the hard truth though: if you build it they won’t come.

The truth is there are two big problems with this. The first is that a dating website is useless to any new users if there aren't enough existing users, especially one that promises to match you with whole groups of people in your area. The second is what I said before, simply having a website (even if it's the greatest website in the world) doesn't mean people will come to it.

Job #1: Paperboy

When I was ten or eleven I took over my brother's newspaper route, delivering papers to our neighborhood. After a couple months the long hours (I had to work like an hour a day! Sometimes even in the morning!), low pay, and no holidays or vacation wore me down. I gave up my candy/toy money (heck, Santa would still bring me candy and toys) and quit, deciding I didn't need to work anymore. I wish not working still only meant no more candy or toys except on Christmas.

Where are all the people?

I have a conundrum.

Roughly two years ago, discontentment with my job and a desire to fulfill a longtime dream led me to the exciting world of entrepreneurship. I had been thinking up ideas for a long time and had settled on a killer one. I had the skills to develop this idea, and plenty of examples of very similar ideas growing from tiny startups to very successful revenue powerhouses. I had very little money, but my idea required only skill and time, and then I would be raking in the money while I sat on a tropical beach all day.

So what about the time? Since I had no financing for this venture I had to keep my day job. My second son had been welcomed to this world a year before, so family filled most evenings and weekends. Filling in the cracks of time I managed to eke out a schedule that took my idea to a finished product in the “my wife is going to kill me for taking this long” span of two years.

This brings me to today, and my aforementioned conundrum. Where are all the people? I've spent two years building this great product; every spare minute I wasn’t working on it I was thinking about it. Why is nobody suddenly using what I’ve created and dumping money into my bank account while I sit on a tropical beach?

This is my original business strategy equation:

Tropical Beach + Money = My Skill * My Time

This is how I have now revised it:

Tropical Beach + Money = My Skill * My Time + x

What is x you ask? I have no idea, but after two years of hard work it’s time to find out.