A Startup Isn't About One Big Idea, It's About A Lot Of Little Ideas

Starting a business is not about the big idea you have. Very seldom does someone come up with an earth shattering, ground-breaking business idea one day, and change the world a few years later. In fact, from my experience, the companies that do change the world tend to come about quite randomly, and the ones that started with an earth shattering idea tend to go bust.

Take Facebook for example. Mark Zuckerberg didn't invent social networking. He stole the idea from a couple of twins from Harvard who hired him to help build a website based on an idea that they stole from a company called Friendster. Six years later, Zuckerberg is a billionaire, the twins made cash by suing Zuckerberg, and Friendster is looking to sell for far less than their investors would hope for.

Twitter started as a side project. The original idea was completely based around sending status updates from your mobile phone. A few years later, that basic idea is still very much a part of Twitter, but it's turned into so much more. It's a new form of communication and it's changing the world as we know it.

The funny thing is, it took Twitter years to even understand what their idea REALLY was. Go look at the new homepage. It's all about real time search. What's happening right now? That's what Twitter is. Well, until three weeks ago, you could go to the homepage and the about page and any other page on the site and have no idea why Twitter was actually useful. The founders didn't even know. It took a lot of money, a ton of hard work and a lot of smart minds to wrap their heads around what the idea actually was and then figure out how they could present it to the world.

The point is, entrepreneurship is not about a big idea. It's about execution and it's about a whole boat load of little ideas that come from assembling a smart team of people and giving them the freedom to innovate.

That's why I loved reading about the new initiative by YCombinator. They will be issuing RFS's or Requests for Startups. Basically they give some ideas of what kind of company they are looking for and they will accept the entrepreneurs that pitch the best way to get the idea done. Obviously the people at YCombinator understand that startups need an idea, but the successful ones are the startups that make ideas come to life.

Over the past two years since starting Brazen Careerist I've realized this first hand. When Penelope and I first discussed starting a company, we had no idea what we were going to do. We knew the market we wanted go into, and we knew that we wanted to help people with their careers, but that's about it. No crazy ideas to change the world. Just a desire to do something great.

Since then, we've all had a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ideas, and the whole team has worked their tails off to make this whole thing come to life. And finally after a couple of years, we have a pretty good idea of what our business is. All it took was not being able to pay rent occasionally, showering and living at the office some days, working when we were supposed to be sleeping, and cheering our one-man development team as he coded until 6 am.

All that stuff is called execution. And that's what running a business is all about. Every startup that's lived on for more than a couple months has done the same thing, and every successful start-up will continue to do the same thing.

My point is this. If you're dying to be an entrepreneur because you're full of ideas, just pick one. Put a plan together, create some milestones, pitch in some capital, recruit a partner or two, hit your milestones and execute on the plan that you created. Be prepared for sacrifice, instability, arguments, being terrified, and a serious lack of sleep. Because that's what the game is really all about. Your idea is just the beginning.

Brazen Groups Are Live!

If you didn't join the private beta launch of Brazen Groups, I highly recommend you go check out the live version today! We officially opened groups up to all members of Brazen Careerist this morning, and we're really excited to see how they evolve.

Groups give our community the ability to create whatever content they want to see on the site. For a small site, we have a lot of user engagement and we can't express how much we appreciate that. But like any true startup, we're never satisfied. So the team came to a decision that it was time to put more control in the hands of our community, and groups was the best way to do this.

Groups have three main features. The first is chatter. Chatter is quick thoughts, ideas, relevant links, questions etc. Borrowing from Twitter, we decided to make chatter short and sweet, so 140 characters are all you get.

The next feature is events. Group members can create an event, including time and place, and an address with a Google map so attendees don't get lost on their way. We anticipate that people in the location based groups will use this feature to organize tweet-ups, Brazen meet-ups and any other networking functions. But it's also just as easy to organize online events or promote your webinars and other events.

Finally, we developed forums to let group members really dive into a discussion about a particular topic. Members can create a forum topic that they would like to get feedback on, and the rest of the group can leave comments and ideas without the restriction of 140 characters.

As we work towards becoming a full scale social network for young professionals, we will be introducing new features on a regular basis. All of the features will come from the crazy ideas that we throw around in the office and the feedback we get from you all. So if you want to have some say in what comes next, let us know what you think. You can even join the Brazen Feedback Group and start a discussion on what you think we should do.

As always, we asked some of our most active members to beta test the product, so there are already more than 35 groups. My personal favorites right now are; Fit Freaks, Madtown Crew, Bookshelf and Drupal.

Definitely go browse through groups, join the ones that interest you, create your own groups, and don't forget to participate!

5 Startup Lessons From the Recession

Running a startup in a recession is not an easy task. All the experts say that survival is the name of the game, but entrepreneurs are hard-wired to move quickly, and simply surviving is not what you imagine when leaving your Fortune 100 job for life at a start up. It's been frustrating, but I've also learned a ton. Here are five lessons I've learned from running a business in a recession.

1. You can save money, you just have to do more work
In the past, we came up with a product idea, got a general sense of what we wanted the product to look like, and then passed it off to the designer. Inevitably, the designer would come back with a great design, but not necessarily what we were looking for. Then we would have to go back through multiple reviews and changes. This way of working is incredibly expensive and time consuming.

Now, we do a ton of work before passing anything off to a designer. We put a wireframe together, we review it multiple times and we do a complete creative brief before asking a designer to do anything. It's a lot of work, but that's what start-ups are all about. The harder you work, the more you learn. Extra preparation on the front end will save you a ton of money and time on the back end.

2. Some bills are more important than others
Deciding who to pay and when to pay them becomes a very difficult decision when you're trying to run a start up with little to no money. You have to constantly evaluate things that you would never normally think of, like, if I don't pay rent, will they kick us out or let us slide for a few months? Or, if I don't pay the accountant today, will I have enough in the bank to pay him in two weeks? Then there are other things like, how long can I personally survive without a paycheck?

The interesting thing is, when you're in a recession people are more understanding. Your landlord probably isn't filling his office space, so kicking you out is pointless. Your accountant can probably wait two weeks to get a $500 check, especially when he knows that $500 could keep your business alive. If you plan on bootstrapping your company, or waiting out a recession, you better get used to negotiating and in some cases, not paying your bills until you absolutely have to.

3. You will want to quit, and so will your partners
There's no doubt about it, if you're running a company with little money, you can't move fast, you get nervous and you will want to quit. Every single person at Brazen has wanted to throw in the towel at some point. Penelope and I have had discussions about whether or not we should shut down and I've had conversations with the other guys about whether they should be looking for something else to do.

But a good rule of thumb is that the companies that don't quit don't fail. I'm convinced that the only reason the failure rate is so high for start-ups is because most founders can't get through the dip. We've been in the dip for more than six months now. If all goes as planned, we'll be able to actually run our business the way we want to very soon. But until then, we'll keep supporting each other when we're ready to call it quits.

4. If you don't share your ideas, no one will know you have them
For the past six months I've been brainstorming different products that Brazen should launch. I have solid reasons for when we should launch them, how they will improve our traffic and how each one will help us achieve our goal of being the top network for young professionals.

The problem was that I didn't verbalize my ideas well. I have tons of PowerPoint's and spreadsheets with projections and wireframes, but instead of organizing everything and presenting it succinctly, I let it pile up. Finally, after talking things through for two months, we've determined the right direction for Brazen to go. Investors like it, the board thinks it's great and the team thinks it's the right thing to do. And other than a few tweaks and updates, we're using the ideas that I had stored away on my computer for months. Going forward, I'll be sure to present my ideas in ways that everyone understands so we don't waste any more time.

5. Sometimes the best breakthroughs come from arguments
A few weeks ago, Penelope came into my office on a rampage. She screamed and yelled, and she called me a jerk. So, I yelled back. This went on for a solid ten minutes before it dawned on me. She wasn't mad at me. She was mad that we have such an amazing business plan, we know exactly where we should be and we know how we can get there, but right now, we're not even close.

I pointed this out. She agreed, and ever since then we've stopped blaming our lack of execution on not having money and decided to focus on putting processes in place and getting everyone to do their job. In a few weeks, the whole culture has changed. We all know exactly what we're doing, our meetings are productive, and we're all working towards the same goal, even if it's not as fast as we would like.

We Launched the Team Brazen Blog Today

Be sure to check out the official Team Brazen Careerist blog, we just launched it today. Here's a quick taste of what the blog will be all about.

It's been a long time coming, but we've finally launched the official Team Brazen Blog. After a year of telling companies how important it is for them to blog, we figured we would drink the Kool-aid and start one too.

Most of the team has a unique online identity. And as Dan Schawbel would tell you, that's great for personal branding. But we also need a collective voice from the company. People want to know what's new at Brazen headquarters, where we're headed in the future and why we're doing what we're doing. So this will be the place to find all the latest Brazen gossip.

At Brazen, everyone has a unique job (in most cases, multiple jobs) and a unique personality.

Ryan Paugh, our Community Manager/Editor/Fill in Designer, loves talking to people. In fact, Ryan genuinely wants to be friends with every single person on our network. I often wonder how he'll do this when we have a million users, but I wouldn't be surprised if he finds a way. Ryan is determined to showcase as many community members as humanly possible through his community member Q&A's. I'm sure he'll also write about life as an online Community Manager – the coolest new job around……

Read the rest at the official Team Brazen Blog

A Bad Economy Is the Perfect Time to Start Over

My first six months in Wisconsin were interesting to say the least. Ryan Paugh and I lived on $1,000 a month in a beat up old house on the East Side of Madison. We worked from home, we rarely went out, we fought with each other, we fought with Penelope, and we watched the snow pile up on the cold Wisconsin ground month after month.

By all accounts, it was pretty terrible. I was used to having lots of friends, going out all the time, and counting on a good paycheck to come in every other week.

But then we raised some money. We took bonuses, we got regular paychecks, we hired people, we rented an office, and I moved in to a nice place with my brother and bought a flat screen TV. It was great. It was comfortable.

It was boring.

Any true entrepreneur will tell you that the best time in the life of a start up is the beginning. You work tons of hours and you can't wait until you're funded because that's when you'll be able to do the things you really want to do.

But once you get funded, the headaches just begin, and it starts to feel like a "real job." It's easy to get comfortable, to forget about all the hard work you put in before there was cash in the bank. And strangely enough, you end up wishing you could go back to the beginning or sell your company and start a new one.

Rather than being completely focused on the company, I found myself walking down the street, sometimes nostalgic about the little apartment Ryan and I lived in and sometimes dreaming about our big exit and all the money that would come with it.

Then, before we even realized what was happening, the market crashed, investors pulled back, and we didn't have salaries anymore. The whole company had gotten too comfortable; we weren't prepared to handle the downturn.

But oddly enough, three months later, things are going really well. We made a decision to switch up our business model and bring in revenue any way possible. Every dollar we make is treated like gold, we've managed to cut our burn rate by nearly 50% without losing any productivity, and we've realized just how many ways there are to make money, without begging someone for a multimillion dollar investment

I'm confident that we're going to make it through, and I'm convinced that when Brazen Careerist does end up a success, we will have George Bush to thank (Did I really say that?). The recession allowed us, or some might say forced us, to reevaluate and start over.

In a way, I did get my wish, Brazen is like a brand new start up, except we have a site that's already built, we have founders who have all done this part before, and we have a whole army of people that want us to succeed.

I've learned a lot from this whole experience, both personally and professionally. Difficult situations are the best learning opportunities; when things are good it's very difficult to see how you can improve. But when times are tough you have the opportunity to make difficult, life-altering decisions. Great businesses and great leaders embrace difficult situations and thrive when times are tough.

The question is, when adversity is staring you in the face, will you get comfortable, or will you embrace the adversity and emerge stronger than ever?