I can remember the day in 2004 when I first thought about SportsLizard. I remember the day at work when a co-worker and I jokingly said that the workplace needed iPrioritize to organize tasks. I remember that Friday afternoon when I was pissed that I couldn’t find a way to get notified of album releases and Music Alerts was born a few days later.

And I remember back in January when we made it our goal to rebuild our e-commerce platform. At that time we had nothing but a set of ideas, a bunch of data from our existing platform, and a ton of notes from what we thought were the best shopping sites on the web.

Then I remember how disappointed I was six weeks later when nothing had gotten done yet because the weather was horrible, we were all sick, we all took vacations, and Greg and I had jury duty. I was overwhelmed with all of the work ahead. But then we rallied, one small goal at a time.

I remember how excited I was to get the first functional style-less version of the registration page done, and how pumped we all were to look at Mike’s original Photoshop mock-up of the design. And only a few months later we’ve released it to the world. We made concessions: there are still plenty of features to be added and plenty that need more work, but the bottom line is that we turned our idea into a reality in just a few short months while our sales continued to reach all-time highs.

Never mind the varying degrees of success these projects have had. It’s the most satisfying and exhilarating thing in the world to me to be able to have an idea, something that’s essentially worthless, and turn it into something tangible, something that people will find value in.

Very few jobs can offer you that.

A few weeks back Penelope Trunk wrote a really interesting article about deciding where to locate your start-up, entitled Starting a company in Silicon Valley is stupid.  Clearly from the title of the post, she isn’t one of those people that preaches that you have to be in the Valley or in NYC to run a successful start-up.  She herself moved from NYC to Madison, Wisconsin to start her new company, simply because the cost of living was low and the quality of life was high (according to studies on that sort of thing).

A couple of my favorite quotes from the article:

“The beginning of a company is slow and meandering. You have pretty much no idea what the company is or what you are doing with it, or if you even picked the right partner to do it with. During this time, it does not matter where you live. You are not hiring. You are not pitching your business because you don’t have a pitch.”

“Most of you will not be going after venture capital. You simply will not have a business idea that warrants that kind of investment. And in that case, you will be bootstrapping for a long time. And it’s a lot easier to bootstrap in a place with a low cost of living. And if you are not going to take in venture capital, then you don’t need to be where the big VCs are: New York and California”

“You don’t need your network in your backyard (which you would have automatically if you lived in Northern California), [but] you do need to be able to fly to your network frequently. The network you can build by just showing up in California or New York is unprecedented.”

All of this got me to thinking – is Albany, NY the best spot for Pure Adapt, Inc?

The answer I came up with was yes, and surprisingly our home town is actually a pretty good spot to start a company like ours.  Here’s why:

• Our networks are here – all of us grew up in the area.  You take for granted all of the people you know in your home town.  When we fired our accountant and needed a new one, we were able to get more referrals than we could handle because we knew so many people in the area that were small business owners, either through family or friends or former internships or former jobs.  Albany also has a lot of great higher education, and between the four of us we attended the four largest schools in the area.  George and I went to RPI, Mike went to SUNY Albany, and Greg went to Siena undergrad and Union for his MBA.  The connections we made there have opened up a lot of doors for us.
• A steady economy supported mostly by government and education – being that Albany is the capital of New York State, and that New York State is a pretty big state, there are a ton of government jobs in the area.  I don’t know one person who doesn’t have a very close friend or family member that works for New York State.  Every one of my friends who lives in the area that isn’t a part of Pure Adapt has a state job.  My father is a programmer for the NYS Health Department.  That’s just how it is around here.  In conjunction with eduction, this creates a very consistent economy that doesn’t boom or bust like the rest of the country, and that’s a good thing for a start-up like us.  With steady government jobs come all of the resulting steady jobs at hospitals and resturants and the like.  The recession has affected us here, but not nearly like it has in other parts of the country.
• Available talent - having such a large academic community is a huge advantage for us.  You always hear people around here talk about how top students come to school here and then leave to go to the big companies in Boston and New York City and Connecticut.  From my experiences at RPI, this was definitely true.  When I was doing interviewing for internships and full-time jobs in our career center, I don’t ever remember seeing companies from Albany.  I do remember companies from pretty much everywhere else.  I can think of a handful of companies from Silicon Valley that came to RPI to recruit tech talent, but no local companies.  While this might not be a good thing for the area as a whole, it can be a very good thing for us.  There is plenty of talent at these schools that would probably prefer (or at least consider) living in Albany post-graduation if there were options available.  We plan on being that option, and we don’t think there will be all that much competition.
• Albany is a “crossroads city” - roughly equidistant from NYC, Montreal, Boston, and Buffalo, you can get to a lot of different places in just a few hours drive.  I can hop a train and be in Penn Station in NYC in about 2.5 hours, eliminating the need to fly to get to a major networking hub. If I needed to get down there a few times a week for networking or meeting with investors, I could.
• Albany is a pretty big city - according to Wikipedia, Albany is the 56th largest urban area in US.  As you can see from the picture, the city isn’t exactly small.  Although commonly dubbed “smallbany”, it has pretty much anything that any other US city has, short of Boston or LA or NYC.
• Everything costs less - according to Salary.com’s Cost of Living Wizard, someone making $35k in Albany would have to make $55k in San Fransisco to maintain their current standard of living because the cost of living is 55% higher, and businesses typically pay only 20.4% more for the same job to compensate for that increase in cost of living.  Simply put, our money goes further.  We can pay ourselves less, we can pay employees less, and things cost less (real estate in particular).  All of this adds up to a lot of money saved for e-commerce company that, from the perspective of our customers, could really be located anywhere so long as they ship products quickly.
• It’s spacious here - when I lived in southern Connecticut, about 45 minutes from New York City, the population density was insane.  People routinely commuted up to an hour and a half to work just to find affordable living that wasn’t in an urban area.  In Albany, my apartment is less than a 15 minute drive from downtown Albany, but also less than 15 minutes from some amazing nature.  If you want to live on a farm and commute downtown, you can do it and have less than a 30 minute drive.  Or you can live somewhere like Lark Street that has a big city downtown feel.  This spaciousness is the reason that we got our warehouse space so cheap.  We’re not in a bad neighborhood or a long drive away, but we got space at about 1/5 of the cost of what it would be just 20 minutes away in downtown.  Personally, my commute is about 12 minutes on back roads, which doesn’t really feel like a “commute” at all.

Now, from a personal standpoint, I do want to experience and live in other places.  The few years I spent in CT were awesome.  In a few years I hope that our business gives us the freedom to do so, but in the meantime this isn’t a bad place to live.  You really can do everything except hit the beach or watch professional sporting events, but those are only a few hours away.  Aside from Albany, other cities like Schenectady, Troy, Saratoga & Lake George are just short drives away.  And yea, winter sucks here, but I try not to be one of those people who always thinks that the grass is always greener somewhere else.  There are a lot of great places to live, but we certainly lack nothing important here.  So until the company is sold or I’m removed from the day-to-day operations, I’ll be happy here.

Ultimately, Albany works great for us.  In most cases you don’t need to change your location to start a successful business, and certainly don’t have to move to New York City or Silicon Valley.

There are only two reasonable sources of capital for startup entrepreneurs, your own pocket and your customers pockets. I personally would never even take money from a family member. Could you imagine the eternal grief and guilt from your mom, dad, uncle or aunt because you blew your nephews college money or the money for grandmas last vacation… I cant.

You shouldn’t have to take money from anyone. Businesses don’t have to start big. The best ones start small enough to suit the circumstances of their founders. I started MicroSolutions by getting an advance from my first customer of $500. The business didn’t grow quickly in the first couple years. We didn’t grow past 4 people in the first couple years, and we all worked dirt cheap.

So what’s wrong with that? It’s OK to start slow. It’s ok to grow slow. As much as you want to think that all things would change if you only had more cash available, they probably won’t.

The reality is that for most businesses, they don’t need more cash, they need more brains.

When I gave my talk at Skidmore a few weeks back, one of the things that seemed to really pique their interest was that we bootstrapped our company, even turning down various funding options at times in favor of doing things like not paying ourselves. All because we wanted to keep our stock and our control. Essentially, we wanted to keep our dream. To keep our company our company.

From my experiences, business schools don’t teach bootstrapping, they teach funding.  There’s nothing wrong with that per-se (knowing about all of the funding options out there is a good thing), but it paints the picture that to start a great company you need a ton of money.   That’s just not true.  Some businesses require a lot of startup capital, a ton of funding, and a ton of manpower.  But many do not.

Almost any service business can be started for $1,000 or less, whether it’s photography, web design, or something more unique like a campus food delivery service or a company that turns people’s photo albums into digital pictures.  With the web, the options have expanded infinitely.  Once the money starts to roll in and you learn how to be a profitable business, you can leverage that knowledge and experience to push the boundaries of your industry.  It’s not the only way to go about things, but it’s certainly a path that many, many successful entrepreneurs have taken.

I wish they’d teach that at business school.

—

OK, that’s enough Cuban for a while.  I’m not trying to turn this into the official Mark Cuban commentary blog…

We’re at war.  Our economy is collapsing.  The housing market is falling apart.  Unemployment rates are rising.  We’re facing an impending energy and natural resource crisis.

What’s the solution?  While there may be a pivotal presidential election next week, Mark Cuban believes the answer lies with our entrepreneurs:

The cure for what ails is us the Entrepreneurial Spirit of this country. We are a nation of people who encourage , support and invest in those of any and all age, race and gender who will use their ingenuity and come up with a new idea.

Its always the new idea that re energizes this country. Industry, manufacturing, transportation, technology, digital communications, etc, each changed how we lived and ignited our economy and standard of living. Tax policy has never done that. The American People have.

Entrepreneurs who create something out of nothing don’t care what tax rates are. Bill Gates didn’t monitor the marginal tax rate when he dropped out of Harvard and started MicroSoft (btw, it was a ton higher than it is today). Michael Dell didn’t wonder what the capital gains tax was when he started PC’s Limited, and then grew it into Dell Computer. I doubt that any great business or invention started with a discussion or even a consideration of what the current or projected income or capital gains tax was or would be.

The impact of tax rates on productivity and development is something economists masterbate about, enterpreneurs don’t waste their time thinking about it. We have business to do.

Entrepreneurs live to be entrepreneurs. I have never had a discussion with anyone about starting a business that included tax rates. Ever. If anyone that wanted an investment from me made a point of discussing tax rates as an impact on their business, I wouldnt invest in them. Ever.

Entrepreneurs live for the juice of making their dreams come true. Of having a vision and fighting to see it come true. The joy of mission accomplished and the scoreboard of the financial rewards.

We are in an economic mess right now. It doesn’t matter who caused it. It’s here. It doesn’t matter what our Presidential candidates and their economic advisors come up with. Its meaningless.

The cure to our economic problems is the Entrepreneurial Spirit of All Americans. Instead of bitching at each other, could one Presidential candidate please show even the least bit of leadership and character and stand up for and encourage the entrepreneurs in this country ?

I couldn’t agree more.

I hope my partners and I are just beginning what will be a lifetime of innovation.  We will certainly have our impact, but I want to inspire more young people to run a company. That’s why I write this blog.  That’s why I want to do more public speaking to get my message out.  I’ll talk to anyone who will listen.  We need more young entrepreneurs.  We need more of our best minds pushing the limits of knowledge to create new and better solutions.

The time is now.  Why not change the world?

When it comes to starting your own business, everyone has a tendency to talk a big game.  You might succeed, you might fail, but to me it’s unacceptable to talk about changing the world without even trying.  In most cases, “failure” leads to success at some other point down the road…even if it means you just laid the groundwork for someone else to come along and succeed.

The other day I saw this index card over on Indexed, one of my favorite blogs:

No arguments from me on the sex side of things

But I started to really think about the “changing the world” portion of the card.  And you know what?  Yea, I’d say that’s what most people do.  But that’s not what I do.  Or – more appropriately – that’s not what we do.

My definition of  “changing the world” – an action that improves the life of one or more people.

I don’t agree that the only events that can “change the world” are curing cancer or eliminating poverty.  I think that mentality makes it too easy to give up and walk through life feeling like you can’t make a difference.  That just simply isn’t true.  You might not be able to cure cancer, but you can brighten the day of a little kid with cancer down at your local hospital.  You might not be able to end poverty, but you can pick up some extra groceries for your local food pantry.  I look at this blog, SportsLizard, iPrioritize, Detailed Image, Music-Alerts, etc and I know that each one has “changed the world” in it’s own minor-but-relevant way because I’ve seen hundreds of emails from people expressing their gratitude for the work we’ve done.

What if I didn’t decide to start this blog back in 2005?  What if I gave up on SportsLizard after the first few tough months?  What if George and Greg didn’t take initiative on the opportunity that they saw to start an auto detailing site focused around great customer service and educating car owners?  What if I gave up on my search for an album release date service and didn’t start Music-Alerts?

The obvious answer to me is that we wouldn’t have changed the world.

All of those emails from satisfied users/customers would seize to exist.  To me that’s more important than any dollar amount in my pocket.  That’s why I continue to try to change the collectibles industry with SportsLizard even if it accounts for (and probably will always account for) a tiny percentage of our revenues.  If I can make enough money to live and I know my work is making the world a better place, I will be wholly satisfied with myself.

You might contest my definition of changing the world.  That’s fine, it’s certainly debatable.  I’ll tell you one thing that isn’t debatable:  no one has ever changed the world by just talking about changing the world.  Talk without action will get you nowhere.

It might not happen tomorrow.  It might not happen next week.  But if things keep going the way they are going gas prices are going to drastically change our lives.  Food and shipping prices will continue to rise.  Air fare will continue to rise.  It’ll probably get worse before it gets better.  We’re all going to be forced to make sacrifices.

I’m not trying to be bleak – just a realist.  With great problems come great opportunity.  I have no doubt that we will respond successfully, it’s just now a matter of how, when, and how bad it will get before alternative energies will be scalable. After reading an interview with Texas oil tycoon T.Boone Pickens in Fast Company the other day, I’m all of a sudden feeling a little bit better about things:

You recently announced plans to build the world’s largest wind farm, in the panhandle. Is that about money or the environment?
Money! First thing, it’s about money. Of course, I’m also a good environmentalist. I can pass the saliva test. But I’m not going to go do a 4,000-megawatt wind farm for the environment first and money second. I’d rather go give money someplace else. You’re talking about $10 billion.

What kind of return do you expect?
A minimum of 15%. It’ll probably be closer to 25%.

Tell me about the project.
It’s huge, the size of two nuclear plants in output, enough to power a million homes. More than 2,000 turbines, each between 2 and 3 megawatts. The first 1,000 megawatts will be ready by 2011, and 1,000 each year or two after that.

Transmission is a major challenge for most wind projects — getting the electricity to where the people are.
That’s right. The hardest part is having rights-of-way and buyers someplace.You’ve been planning a $3 billion water pipeline from the Texas panhandle to Dallas. Would the wind and water be transported along the same corridor?
Yes, if it goes to Dallas. We bought $45 million worth of water rights in Roberts County. We’ll transport 200,000 acre-feet of water a year. And we set up a water district that gives us the power of eminent domain for the transmission corridor. We can issue tax-free bonds. It has all the favorable characteristics of a city government.

How important is wind to America’s future energy needs?
The United States today runs on 987,000 megawatts, and the demand is going to increase 150,000 megawatts in the next 10 years — 15%. We could supply most of that with wind from the Great Plains, from Texas to North Dakota, but we’ve got to set up corridors to the West Coast and to the East Coast.

So you’re an oil man who’s turning his back on oil?
Foreign oil is costing us $500 billion a year. In 10 years, $5 trillion goes out of the country. It’s nuts. It’s the greatest transfer of wealth from one area to another in the history of the world.

You argue in your new book, The First Billion Is the Hardest (out in September from Crown), that global oil supply is slowing.
If I’m right, world oil supply has peaked. Existing fields are going to start declining at 5% to 8% per year, and it’s like a treadmill: As your production declines, it gets harder to keep up. Look at the biggest oil field in the world, Ghawar in Saudi Arabia; for every barrel of oil, they’re lifting six of water. That means the field has matured. It peaked at 5.7 million barrels a day; now it’s 4 million.

What will happen in the next five years?
Demand will go up, and price will go up.

Take a stab at what we’ll be paying at the pump in five years.
Oh hell, that’s so far out. Maybe $6 to $8 a gallon.

Is ethanol part of the solution?
Ethanol is political. That’s what Bob Dole told me in 1989. He called me up and said, “Quit talking down ethanol. You need to understand something: There are 21 farm states, and that’s 42 senators. Those senators want ethanol.” He said, “Are you getting the picture?” And I said, “Yeah, it’s coming through pretty clear.” [Dole confirms that Pickens's account is "probably accurate."]

Not exactly an inspiring vision of Congress.
The leadership is absolutely, totally pissy in Congress — a real conglomeration of fruitcakes. I mean pitiful people.

So would you cut the ethanol subsidy?
No. Hell, I’d rather subsidize ethanol or cream soda than have the money going out of the country buying oil. If you subsidize ethanol, the technology will ultimately get better. Corn will not be the primary ethanol fuel. They’ll go to something cellulosic. People who are against it say, “It costs so much to buy ethanol.” It costs more to buy oil from the Middle East. You’re better off circulating money in the United States. Create jobs here.

Money and politics aside, you’ve long said — like Al Gore — that climate change is happening, and it’s man-made.
It could be that it’s happening naturally, and we’ve pushed it over the edge. Regardless, I’m going to take action. Opponents say it’s going to cost so much money to address. And I say, well, hell, go ahead and spend it. I’d rather take a chance that I’m right than that I’m wrong. I don’t want to wait around until the house burns down ’til I decide whether it’s a serious fire or not.

F*ck yes! You have no idea how happy it makes me to read this.  Don’t get me wrong – me and T.Boone don’t exactly have a lot in common – but this guy is exactly what we need.  He admits that we have a problem and that the solution is about money first and philanthropy second.  That’s OK – like he said, it’s freaking $10 billion!   He’s a rich oil tycoon who sees financial opportunity in alternative energy.  The largest problems in the world will be solved when they become the most lucrative to be solved.  People with the money and resources to truly make a global impact tend to focus on the things that will make them the most money.  This guy is so rich he could potentially save our country on his own.

Imagine if every oil bigwig got their head out of their ass and instead embraced the potential opportunity like T.Boone? Kudos to an 80 year oil tycoon for recognizing change and taking this on.  It would be easy for him to just sit on his money and relax for the rest of his life.  I’m glad he’s not.

Ideas are a very, very small part of the majority of great innovations. Most great innovations come from a recognition of a recurring problem that a company encounters repeatedly and has the foresight to come up with a creative solution. It’s less about ideas and more about discovering opportunities that other people have failed to see or exploit. Most of the time, you only find those opportunities if you are working passionately at your craft each and every day for years.

I’ve talked a lot about how I feel like our shopping cart software for Detailed Image is one of our competitive advantages. As I was working on subtle features and additions for Tastefully Driven that will result in it blowing DI out of the water, I thought about how all of these daily micro-innovations will result in one big innovation. By 2010 maybe we’ll be featured in some magazine for our unique shopping cart community. Some kid will be reading it and think “man, I wish I could have an idea like that.” Not realizing that DI was in existence for 2+ years running osCommerce before we even attempted to build our own cart. And that DI was running the new cart for 6 months before developing the Tastefully Driven cart/community. And that the majority of features that make it great in 2010 hadn’t even entered our minds in 2008.

Want to be an innovator? Work hard. Pay attention to your customers. Analyze data. Learn like there’s no tomorrow. Open yourself to opportunities. Execute – every single day.

Today was the perfect example of this.  Ask any one of us what we accomplished today and we’d probably have to think for a second, look at our to-do list, and rattle off a few things that we did in addition to our day-to-day.  All relatively minor, but all subtle things that make us just a little more efficient, just a little more effective, and just a little bit better as a company.

All of these things probably added up to 3 hours of work total, but all will make an impact:

• Previously we each got one day a week off from the warehouse, with all of us going on Monday.  We agreed to all still go on Mondays, but now everyone will get a second day off.  Tuesday – Friday will only have two people in the warehouse, but those two people will obviously be doing a lot of warehouse work on those days.  This gives each of us a little more freedom and will save everyone on gas.
• To trim the time down that we all have to spend at the warehouse, Greg called and had our FedEx pickup time shifted from ~4 PM to now ~2 PM.  We get a lot of early deliveries, so the two people at the warehouse will now have to work approx 7:30 AM – 2:30 PM.  We can stay later if we want, but we won’t have to.  Again, more freedom for everyone involved.
• When using our custom built back-end shipping platform the only required input is box size (you look at the order and enter a box size for each order).  We had a drop down of our available boxes, but it was poorly organized and defaulted to 10 x 8 x 8″.  This worked OK when we only had a few orders a day, but causes a few issues when you’re shipping 20+ orders a day.  Greg uses the system the most and requested that I re-order the boxes by dimension and that we default the drop down to say “Choose a box size” so you can quickly scan the list and see the ones that still need to be inputted as opposed to wondering if they really are a 10 x 8 x 8 or if they just haven’t been entered.  Minor stuff that I never really noticed, but if it trims an 8 minute/day job to a 5 minute/day job it’s worth it in the long run.
• Greg also negotiated a 3.5% reduction in shipping rates with our FedEx rep.  With gas prices these days, a reduction in shipping costs is huge.

We’ve also recently reduced common Detailed Image inquiries with a new FAQ system, reduced my SportsLizard work down to almost nothing by automating customs submissions, reduced accounting work when George automated our accounting so that PayPal transactions can be imported to our QuickBooks, and probably a lot more that I didn’t mention..

Nothing major here, but the fact that every day we do a few of these things adds up to our company growing A LOT every week, month, and especially every year.   It seems obvious, but it’s easier than you’d think to get caught up in the day to day operations of a company and neglect anything that won’t pay immediate benefit.

My fourth semester I finally got it right: 1 – 3 hour breaks between classes, equally spread out throughout the week. I got the same amount of work done in a 2 hour break that I’d get done in a 5 hour break the previous semester. I didn’t mess around and waste time because I was under a time crunch. A 2 hour break really means like 70 minutes of work when you factor travel time and setup time into the equation. You don’t have any time to mess around with 70 minutes: you’re always under a bit of pressure and that’s why you get so much done. You’re focused. This one lesson has stuck with me ever since.

Read the following excerpts and stop and think for a few minutes before continuing the post.

If you’re an employee, spending time on nonsense is, to some extent, not your fault. There is often no incentive to use time well unless you are paid on commission. The world has agreed to shuffle papers between 9 and 5, and since you’re trapped in the office for that period of servitude, you are compelled to create activities to fill the time. Time is wasted because there is so much time available. It’s understandable.

Most entrepreneurs were once employees and come from the 9-5 culture. Thus they adopt the same schedule, whether or not they function at 9 AM or need 8 hours to generate their target income. This schedule is a collective social agreement and a dinosaur legacy of the results-by-volume approach. How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9-5 is arbitrary.

Since we have 8 hours, we fill 8 hours. If we had 15, we would fill 15. If we have an emergency and suddenly need to leave work in 2 hours, we miraculously complete those assignments in 2 hours.

Tim Ferriss – The Four Hour Workweek, pages 73-74

ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

In the 4-Hour Workweek, you helped people understand that because of technology, people don’t have to defer living until retirement. They can design their own lifestyle. Now imagine what would happen if the entire culture of a workplace went through the same transformation. That’s what a ROWE is. A ROWE is a work culture that gives people the power to take control of their lives. As long as they get their job done, they’re free.

One of the misconceptions about ROWE is that it’s a work-from-home program. It’s not. If you want to work in a cube, that’s great. If you want to work from a coffee shop, then that’s great, too. The question in a ROWE is not “where is everybody?” but “is the work getting done?”

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson in an interview with Tim Ferriss

The United States leads the world in two categories: work and waste. American employees put in more hours and take fewer vacations than just about anyone else in the industrialized world, and our individual ecological “footprints” are much larger.

Coincidence? I think not. The way we work drives our habits of consumption and waste. The more we work, the more we drive, the more energy we burn, the more styrofoam to-go containers we use. At the end of the day, we’re so tired, we devour more takeout and TV, often falling asleep in front of the latter. If we want to accelerate the recent trend of reducing waste, it may be time to consider the radical step of, well, relaxing more, consuming less, and living fuller lives. May the Wall Street Journal editorial board strike me down.

Naturally, most businesses blanch at the notion of giving up any competitive edge in a globalized economy. But it’s not as if moving to a four-day (or 32-hour) workweek would simply lop 20% off the economy. Cutting hours may actually raise per-hour productivity. France, home of the 35-hour week, creates more GDP per work hour than the United States ($37 versus $34, as of 2003). Norway spanks us too ($39), and Norwegians work 26% fewer hours a year than Americans. It’s a myth of modern hypercapitalism that an overworked, sleep-deprived, stressed-out workforce is a necessity. Studies have consistently shown that longer workweeks increase productivity only in the very short term. In a recent survey by Salary.com, workers copped to wasting about 20% of the average day Web surfing and gossiping. Sound familiar?

Companies can take the first step by reinventing the workweek. Then it’s up to us to devote our increased leisure hours to activities with low environmental impact — and not to driving around gas-guzzling cars or booting up power-hungry electronics. Then we could enjoy both continued wealth and improved planetary health.

David Roberts – Reinventing the Workweek, Green Business Practices – Fast Company: May 2008

OK, soak those in for a second…got it? Here’s what I think when I read excerpts like that:

The Logical Thought

So if I’m not an employee, and we’re in long term growth mode (past the start-up phase), and 9-5 is completely arbitrary, and it’s shown that less time working will make me more productive per hour spent, and if I’ll be healthier/happier by spending more time on things outside of work, and it’s better for the environment, why the f*ck am I working so many hours?

In the startup phase there’s a “cavalier” attitude that you have to have. Life = work and work = life, and that’s OK. But I’ve been doing that for two years and I don’t want to become that guy who works 24×7 for their entire life and misses out on everything else. I enjoy new experiences and new people. I enjoy experiencing life. A large part of that is being an entrepreneur, but there’s also a lot that has nothing to do with running a business.

I spent a lot of my engineering days in college, on internships, and in the work force working on Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing projects and always thought to myself “why can’t these principles be applied to areas in business outside of manufacturing?” What 4HWW did for me was validate that increasing effectiveness and efficiency not only can be applied to all areas of a business, but in all areas of life too. Like everyone else I have become conditioned to 9 -5 and needed a little push to realize that I didn’t have to stay a part of it.

What I Want us to Become

I badly want us to become a model of efficiency and effectiveness. I want it because it makes us a more valuable company. I want it because removing the mundane and repetitive improves the quality of our lives.

In my head, all of this starts with our business processes. Unless you’ve got a ton of money (we don’t) you need to do the equivalent of hiring people by automating anything that is repetitive and can be done without human input. It started with our shopping cart software that automates inventory and shipping (side note: we had the owners of a large e-commerce store that’s been running for twelve years come visit us recently. The founder turned to George and said “I could fire two employees if I had that technology”. That made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside). It continued by moving all of our data to the web and automating backups and with George automating his accounting. In the future we’ll automate more of our marketing – while things like Google Base submission are automatic, niche newsletters based on customer behavior aren’t quite there yet…but they will be.

Once the business processes are set we can move on to us. We all want to work less hours. Some tasks – like packing and shipping – cannot reasonably be automated with technology so the way you “automate” them is to hire employees. I feel that by the end of ’09 we’ll have the 2-3 people in place that we need to allow us to work 20 hour workweeks. That’s my personal goal for each of us – the other guys might be thinking less or more, but that’s what I’m pushing for.

How did I come up with 20 hours? In 4HWW Tim Ferriss asks the question “If you had a heart attack and had to work 2 hours per day, what would you do?” He asks the question to challenge you to think about what you really need to do to successfully complete your job. However, he bases this on the premise that you don’t like your job and want to work as little as possible. That’s not me/us. I love this stuff. One of the things I really want to do a lot this summer is white water rafting – I’ve been twice and it was fun as hell so I want to officially make it one of my hobbies. I’m pumped. But I equally want to expand upon an email marketing system that we recently launched (right now we send follow-up emails to everyone who makes a purchase asking them to review their products on the DI blog or TD forum, but there’s a ton of growth potential there). I also equally want to hike every state park in the Albany area. Of course I also equally want to bulk up my AJAX skills and improve the user experience on our cart.

Clearly I love our company as much as I love non-work related things. It’s a good place to be in life. 20 hours limits you just enough so that you get excited to work. If I can only work 20 hours the intensity in which I work will be multiplied many times over. I’ll also really look forward to those few hours a day instead of letting my mind drift to things that I might rather be doing.

What I’m Doing About it

I realize that this all starts with me. I’m the one usually “proposing” these wacky things to my partners so I have to prove the concept before I can expect them to get on board. 20 hours isn’t realistic right now because we don’t have an employee and won’t for a while. However, I’m always looking to make progress and prove my point so I’ve decided to limit myself to 35 hours of work each week. After a few months, I’m going to make it 30. Then I’ll stay at 30 until we have our 2-3 employees in place and trained.

What counts as “work” you ask? Good question. I’m counting everything that is related to running Pure Adapt with the exception of:

• Commuting time
• Blog posts on this blog
• Time spent reading business books or business magazines
• Time spent learning (for example, I have a few AJAX books that will take a lot of time to work through…those don’t count)

Everything else is fair game. I purposely waited until the end of Thursday to do this post because I wanted to test my limitation this week. This week is the perfect test week – if I can do it this week I can do it 95%+ of the time. Being that I got NOTHING done last week with our server mess, my to-do list was backed up a ton. On Sunday night I took all 20 action items and split them up equally among the days of the week. In my head I said to myself “you’re only going to have 6 or 7 hours to do all of this, so you better be focused”. It has worked. Every day I knocked each item off. I am getting at least as much work done in far less time. Some days I worked right up to the last second and others – like today – I was done early. Thus far here are the hours I’ve worked:

• Monday – 7 AM – 2:30 PM (7.5 hrs)
• Tuesday – 7:30 AM – 4 PM (8.5 hrs)
• Wednesday – 7:30 AM – 1:30 PM (6 hrs)
• Thursday – 7:30 AM – 1 PM (5.5 hrs)

That puts me at 27.5 hrs through Thursday. We each have four days at the warehouse and one “off”. My off day is Friday, so I generally do the most work Monday – Thursday. 7.5 hours for Friday – Sunday sounds just about right. I’ll probably work about 4 hours tomorrow, 3 hours on Saturday, and just check email on Sunday (Indy 500 baby….anyone else pumped!?!?!).

This past four days has been the best of my life in terms of work-life balance. There’s nothing outside of work that I wanted to do that I didn’t. That’s huge for me. I’ve also stopped doing work at home – I do most of my work at the warehouse and the rest at Starbucks/other local coffee shops, which helps me mentally unwind when I walk through the door of my apartment. Continuing this schedule will go a long way to ensuring I get the fulfillment I’m looking for out of both work AND life.

I’ll definitely continue to post updates as this unfolds…should be interesting.

So we came up with a plan. We would have a set of desktop workstations (one to start) that have the full Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection (the $2,500 one) and Microsoft Office Professional 2007. Our laptops would then use the OSALT (open source alternative). Aside from that warm and fuzzy feeling you get from using great open source software, this move will save us thousands of dollars each year. We figure that 95%+ of tasks can be complete with the OSALT, but when we need to use the standard software for better performance or file compatibility we’ll have desktops at our disposal. The only way this really breaks down is if the 95% doesn’t hold up (in which case we’d probably buy a copy of the software needed for that individual) or if too many people *need* the desktops at one time.

In the comments Anthony from Xonatek and I had a great back-and-forth about taking our mentality a step further utilizing Google Apps and free web based software.  Ultimately, we didn’t change our plan at the time but the conversation left the thought in the back of my mind.

Just before we moved into the warehouse George’s computer died and we lost all of his data.  I personally was doing an OK job of backing up my files, but we didn’t yet have a company backup plan (something I planned on doing once we settled in).  The more I thought of it, the harder the idea of a backup plan became because we’re always on the move.  You can’t set your laptop to auto-backup at midnight if it’s in a different location each night at midnight.  What happens if it’s suspended or shut down?  If it backs up as soon as you boot up that could bother you and prevent you from performing a time-critical task.  If it skips the backup that defeats the purpose.

More and more I decided the route to go was not to back anything up, but to have everything stored on the web. Aside from not needing to schedule and perform backups, you can also work from any internet-ready device at close to full capacity.  The downside of course is that if you have a slow internet connection many of the apps straight up suck.  We combat this by having the open source alternative installed on the hard drives on all of our computers.  We also still purchase software when necessary:  for example, Mike has a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 that isn’t really replaceable  with an open source alternative for the graphics work he does.  We also sort of killed the idea of a super duper master $5,000 PC – what’s the point when almost everything is online anyway?

Here’s how we have it set up:

• We use Google Apps for:
  • Email hosting through Gmail. This is for our @pureadapt.com emails.  For the rest of the emails (sportslizard, iprioritize, tastefullydriven, etc) I use the mail fetcher to take a copy of each incoming email off of the server and put it in an appropriate folder.  It leaves the message on the server for me to download in Thunderbird (still my email client of choice), acting as a great auto-backup.  I also set it up so I can reply from any of those email accounts via Gmail if I’m on the road and don’t have access to my Thunderbird on my laptop.
  • Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations for our office suite. We’ve already had quite a bit of great collaboration on some docs and spreadsheets that otherwise would have been emailed back and forth a bunch of times.  Far more useful than I anticipated.
  • Google Sites to replace our Wiki’s. We have one wiki for just the owners that has critical info in it and a second wiki that employees will have access to that has all of the important processes (like how to pack and ship an order).
  • Google Calendar to manage our schedules. We don’t use it much, but it’s an easy way to set up a meeting with everyone without having a big chain of emails back and forth.
  • The company start page where you can access all of these things.  I can’t over-emphasize how nice it is to have one login for everything.
  • The Remember the Milk plugin for the company start page as a shared task manager (ironically, I had someone email me the other day ripping Remember the Milk and saying iPrioritize was far better…maybe so, but iP doesn’t have a plugin like this…suppose that’s my fault…)
• Xdrive for storing other files like our Quickbooks backup, database backups, PDF files, PSD files, etc.

So far it’s going great.  The coolest part for me has been that it has opened up a whole new world of devices away from my laptop where I can work.  I went from working solely on my one powerhouse laptop (dual core processor, 2 gb ram, etc) to now sometimes using my desktop for its 22″ monitor when I need more space.  I even pulled the trigger on an ultra portable Eee PC for when I’m on the go.  For $399 I figured I could reduce the wear and tear on my current laptop (especially the hard drive – the Eee has a solid-state hard drive which is much better for traveling) and reduce the amount of stuff I need to carry on a regular basis while still remaining almost as productive as I would be on my lapper.  Linux took some time getting used to, but with the help of EeeUser.com I’ve become addicted to hacking up this little device.  I’d say at this point I could work solely from the Eee PC for a few weeks with very little productivity loss.  I wrote a full review over on the Tastefully Driven blog, but take a look at how much smaller it is compared to my current lapper:

Random happenings not worthy of a full post…

• This weekend I’ll be moving to a new apartment so the posts might be slow for the next few weeks.
• Check out this little analysis I did over on TD:  Gas Prices Got You Down?  Buy Online…Really
• Thanks to the NBA and NHL playoffs my sleep schedule is all f*cked up again. I’m still getting up at 6, but going to bed really late means I need to take a nap in the afternoon….which kind of sucks.

Nonetheless, there’s still a lot of cool stuff on TD that isn’t completely obvious if you just scan the site for a few minutes. So below are my Top 10 favorite things about the site:

10. One Account
When you have a forum on an e-commerce site, I think it’s utterly important to tie the two accounts together. Instead of just throwing up a copy of vBulletin and making the colors match, we took a bare bones copy of bbPress and hacked it apart until we were able to mesh it seamlessly with the shopping cart. Right now the only benefits of this are that you log in once (at the top of any page…another cool feature) and that you have the same username/password across the board. In the future – assuming the forum becomes somewhat popular – this opens itself up to all sorts of interesting social-networking-type opportunities: for example, imagine getting product suggestions (via PM, email, or displayed inline on the site) based upon your previous purchases and the threads you participate on the forum. In 2-3 years this could be how we make that jump from large e-commerce site to “social shopping” platform. It’s a ways away, but we laid the foundation now.

9. Integrated Affiliate Program
A lot of affiliate programs make it ridiculously difficult to sign up and create links. Using a 3rd party affiliate software is something we didn’t want to do for Detailed Image and we brought the same system over to TD. Our payout rates are posted for everyone to see, and signing up is really easy: in your My Account page there is a message enticing people to sign up:

If you click ‘Apply Now’ you only have to choose a payment type, click ‘Apply’ and you’re good to go. We also make it super-simple to create links. In addition to a tutorial page, we now display an affiliate link on every single product page for that specific product when you’re logged in:

8. Forum Product Recommendations
When you are viewing a forum topic we display a banner ad of up to five related products at the top of the page. So if you’re in a discussion about caffeine it will “recommend” the caffeine capsules for sale in our nutritional supplements section. Again, this has large potential to be highly customized in the future based upon more than just the forum topic.

7. Personalized RSS Feeds
This is one of the few features that came with bbPress that we kept in tact. Every user can mark their favorite forum threads and then subscribe to a custom RSS feed to track the progress of the conversations they’re interested in.

6. Blog-Forum Sync
One of the other things I saw as absolutely necessary was merging the blog comments with the forum. Each time we post in WordPress, a corresponding thread is opened in the forum. If you click to comment on the post, you are redirected to the forum. Blog posts also pull the conversation from the forum and display under the post just like normal comments.

5. Upsells
Inline upsells offering a 5% discount was one of the most fruitful moves we made with Detailed Image. Average order value went through the roof. With TD we changed the page structure around and moved the upsells up “above the fold”. This may or may not be better – we’ll see.

4. Image Upload System
One of the most time consuming aspects of Detailed Image was uploading pictures. Each picture needed to be re-sized several times, watermarked, and then linked to in the database. For TD, I built an image upload system to automate all of this. After we’ve entered the product info in the database, we can log in to our admin section and upload a 500 x 500 png file and the script automatically re-sizes it, saves it, watermarks the images, and creates the appropriate database relationship. Big, big time saver.

3. Shipping System
Sure, this is basically the same as DI, but it’s the backbone of our company. This system is the single most efficient process we’ve put into place. If we didn’t have it we would have a full time employee processing and shipping orders right now. Each morning we click “Process Orders” in our admin section: the PDF receipts pop up to print and save, along with a text file to import to FedEx Ship Manager, which prints the shipping labels and gives us a text file back with tracking numbers, which we upload to auto-email each customer their tracking info. It’s a 2 minute process whether there are 5 orders or 25 orders (or 250 orders down the road).

2. Design
The design of the logo and the site was all Mike. I think he did an A+ job aesthetically conveying exactly the image that we want our customers to see….especially by differentiating each store with it’s own unique color scheme. The Games store, for example, has an orange color scheme but you still know that you are part of TD:

1. Commerce with Conscience
The icing on the cake for me: we’re donating 5% of our pre-tax profit from the site to local charities with our Commerce with Conscience program. Sure, 5% isn’t much now, but it will be as we grow. We’re choosing new charities quarterly, and the first charity – The Regional Food Bank of Northeastern NY – has been very supportive (I got an email back from the Executive Director, which is pretty cool). Along with participating in events like the Climbing UAlbany Event, we hope this program is how we funnel some of the money we pull in online from all over the country/world back to our community. I anticipate that as we grow we will spend more time personally working with each of our charities so that we give back more than our money – our time and expertise can do equal amounts of good. My favorite part about this program is that it ensures that no matter how big we grow we are giving a corresponding amount back to the community. Target does the exact same program and you see the immense social impact they are able to have because of it. If we can even have a fraction of the impact locally that they do nationally, it will be a huge success.

We’re also all rocking Commerce with Conscience wrist bands:

The bands are included with any order over $100 for free, or can be ordered for $4.99 on the site (with all of the profit from the wrist band being donated).

———

What’s next? I’m a firm believer in letting things settle for a bit before diving back into more development. Aside from a necessary focus on marketing, I’ve learned (the hard way) that you need to provide ample time for data/feedback to accrue before jumping to any conclusions about what you do and don’t need. By the end of 2009 I hope to have expanded the forum functionality with the aforementioned social-shopping stuff and to also integrate some AJAX into the cart in places it can really help (coupon codes and add/update cart come to mind), but other than that changes will be dictated by our users and the data.

All in all, we couldn’t be happier with the site we put out. We’re a small team and we did it on an extremely tight time schedule. I’m ridiculously excited to see where this cart takes us over the coming years.