Ryan Waggoner » Entrepreneurship

2012 Prediction: an A-list director will fund a film on Kickstarter

Ryan W. — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:30:28 +0000

Here’s my prediction: sometime in 2012, an A-list film director will successfully fund a feature film using Kickstarter.

Kickstarter’s time has come. If you haven’t heard of Kickstarter, you’re about to. If you have, you’ll still find this interesting.

Background

Kickstarter was launched in 2008 as a “crowdfunding” site and it works like this:

Someone who wants to create something (like a film, book, physical gadget, or website) creates a fundraising project. Every project has a deadline and a minimum funding amount, like $25,000. And then the project creator creates a number of pledge amount options ($5, $10, $50, $100, etc) and a prize that goes along with each one (like a t-shirt).

People who want to see that thing be created can pledge those different amounts and if the minimum fundraising goal is reached, their credit cards are charged and they get the prize that corresponds to that pledge level. If they don’t hit the minimum by the deadline, no one gets charged anything.

Pretty simple.

What’s odd is that this actually works. Really, really well. Since they launched, something like 50,000 projects have been launched on Kickstarter, and almost half have been successfully funded. And we’re not talking small numbers either; of the 27k projects launched in 2011, the average pledges collected per project was about $3600.

Reader question: what to charge as a freelancer?

Ryan W. — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:07:21 +0000

I got a question last week from a reader named James on how he could start doing freelance web design and development, and how much he should charge. I was pretty brutally honest with him, because I don’t think it’s helpful to sugarcoat things. I’ve posted his question and my answer here, with his URL and last name removed. Hopefully someone else will find it useful.

The Question:

I would like to start freelancing, but I am unsure what my rate should be for the skillset I have to offer. Here is my website: [WEBSITE URL]. What was your rate when you started out?

- James

My Answer:

Hi James,

I think your question about the rate you should charge really depends on a few things, but before we dig into rate, I’d like to make a few comments on your website and how you’re presenting yourself. I’m going to be brutally honest, because no one trying to strike out on their own is well served by false praise.

The Feedback (brutal)

First of all, before we talk about anything else, your domain name is terrible. It sounds like a russian spammer site. Get a new one, preferably a .com and one without dashes. I just checked and [READERS-NAME].com seems to be available…are you crazy? Definitely go snag that before someone else does

Second, your site design is pretty bad and this matters, because most people who will be hiring you have no idea what good code or bad code looks like, but they know what a good website looks like, and if yours looks bad, they’ll assume you can’t code very well either. Not fair, but that’s how it is.

Here’s the fastest way to fix it: go to http://themeforest.com, find an HTML / CSS or WordPress theme that you like, and reskin your site.

Third, almost all of the examples of your work on your site are terrible. You’ve included some of your class assignments, some pretty crummy photoshop work, etc. The overall effect of looking at your portfolio is that you have no idea what you’re doing.

But don’t despair, because you actually have an impressive list of WordPress sites that you’ve worked on, most of which look pretty good.

Dump everything but those WordPress sites. And since you have like 50 of them, just go through them and pick the ten that represent your best work and which look the strongest visually.

Do not go for quantity over quality. When I’m looking to hire a freelancer, I look at maybe 3 or 4 of their examples, picked randomly. If any of them look bad, I close the tab and keep looking. I want people who care about their work, and who care about what they’re representing to the world.

Fourth, you need to focus on what it is that you want to work on. I would suggest WordPress, as there’s plenty of work in that arena, and that’s where your strongest portfolio stuff is. So dump everything else off your site and just talk about how you’re a WordPress guru. Don’t mention HTML / CSS, Flash, Photoshop, etc.

Finally, rewrite your resume to reflect this new focus. Drop any position that doesn’t have anything to do with web development / IT. Rewrite your skills and experiences to include more about web development / IT. Get rid of that forklift thing.

Rates

Ok, now let’s talk about rate. When I started, I charged $50 / hr. And believe it or not, I probably wasn’t much better than you. But what I had was a few decent examples of my work, and no crummy examples (at least not public ones).

To sum all the points above up, when you’re done, you want something more like this: http://www.jaredatchison.com/

I found that guy via a little Googling for “wordpress developer”. I have no idea what the guy charges, but I would guess somewhere in the $75 – 95 / hr range, and I’m sure he’s probably swamped with clients. The reason he can charge that is partly that he’s more experienced and has better client references / connections. But it’s also because he’s presenting himself a lot better than you are.

Few people go looking for a jack-of-all-trades “webmaster” type. You’ll have a much easier time getting clients and getting high rates by specializing in something. WordPress is a good place to start.

Growing in your career

I don’t know you, but I note that you’re new to this industry and just graduated from school with an associates. And little things like how you’re presenting yourself, your domain, your newness to twitter, etc. tells me that you have a lot to learn. This is a good thing! Everyone was once where you are, and we all managed to get past it. You can too. I would recommend that you start a couple daily habits:

1. Respond to a couple dozen postings on the Craigslist gigs board, FreelanceSwitch.com jobs board, AuthenticJobs.com. You won’t hear back from hardly anyone, but that’s not your fault. This is a numbers game, so start putting in your time.

2. Reading everything you can from these sites:

http://news.ycombinator.com
http://freelanceswitch.com
http://problogger.net
http://copyblogger.com
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://wordpress.alltop.com/
http://freelance.alltop.com/

And as many more as you can.

You’re in for an adventure, but stick with it and you’ll see huge progress in the next couple years. Good luck, and let me know if you have any more questions.

If you enjoyed this post, join the conversation. I’ve been freelancing for awhile and I’d love to answer any questions on that (or anything else) that you might have. I won’t ever disclose your identity without permission. Hit me up!

Want early access and free (awesome) apps? Join the RyanWaggoner.com iOS Apps Club

Ryan W. — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:24:43 +0000

I launched SignPad, my first iOS app, last week (iTunes link) and I’ve gotten a lot of questions and feedback. I’m planning on releasing one app per month for the remainder of 2012, as well as updates and enhancements for SignPad and the other upcoming apps.

So I’m launching a little club and since I’m a relentless ego-maniac, I’m calling it the RyanWaggoner.com iOS Apps Club (takes 5 seconds to join up).

Why would you join such a thing?

Before I get into the benefits, I have five promises to make:

I will never share your email address with anyone, ever, for any reason.
I will never spam you.
You can unsubscribe at any time with a single click.
I will not email you more than twice per month (and likely only once).
I will only email you the kinds of value-packed emails I would like to receive myself.

So what do you get for signing up?

Sneak previews of apps before they’re released
Promotional codes for new apps (read: FREE STUFF)
Priority support if you ever have any problems or issues
The chance to ensure that my apps have that one MUST HAVE feature from day 1
Insider knowledge of what it’s like to be an indie app developer

I think this will be a really interesting project and I’m hoping you’ll join me. I’ll make sure it’s worth your time.

Click here to sign up in 5 seconds

SignPad is live in the App Store!

Ryan W. — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:29:15 +0000

I’ve been doing web development full-time for the last four or five years, and in 2010 I started learning how to create iPhone and iPad apps. I switched to doing iOS development fulltime in early 2011 and I worked on a number of client apps throughout the year.

However, I haven’t released any apps of my own…until now.

My very first app just hit the App Store. It’s called SignPad, it’s iPad-only, and it’s pretty much the simplest app I could think of creating. I wanted my first app to be simple, and to give me a taste for the process of submitting an app to the app store, marketing it, etc.

The concept

You know how you see those people at the airport holding a sign with someone’s name on it? I thought it’d be cool to create an app that takes whatever text you type in and displays it on the screen as large as possible.

But I had a few criteria:

I wanted the text to automatically scale to be as large as possible, breaking text into multiple lines and scaling optimally to ensure that the text is as large as possible while keeping all of it visible. So typing in “Hi” should result in a very large font size, while “Hey there, good looking” would result in 2-3 lines of text, so as to maximize the area of the screen used.
I wanted the font, background color, and text color to all be easily customized.
I wanted it to be beautiful.

I feel like I hit all those items, and I just got my very first review today (4 out of 5 stars). Can’t tell you how exciting that is

What’s next?

My goal for 2012 is to release one app per month. I have a list of about 150 app ideas, and I have selected the apps for February, March, and April, and have a couple of those at the rough prototype stage. If you’d like to be a beta tester for future apps, shoot me an email and let me know.

In the meantime, check out SignPad and if you like what you see, please leave a review and tell a friend. Thanks!

Check out the new DailyPath Trail Guide (a daily guide to moving forward)

Ryan W. — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:44:58 +0000

Very quick note, just wanted to give you all a heads up that my startup (DailyPath) today launched The DailyPath Trail Guide, which is a blog with short posts on self-learning, productivity, motivation, lifehacking, and moving your life forward.

Check out our first post below, and make sure you subscribe!

How Cheating Has Opened the Door for Real Learning

How can I be a better presenter?

Ryan W. — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 03:57:33 +0000

I mentioned yesterday that I spoke earlier this week in front of a few hundred investors, press, and curious onlookers about my startup DailyPath.

If you’re curious about DailyPath, you can check out the video of my talk below (it’s just a few minutes long). Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out, but I’d love any feedback on how I could have made the talk more engaging, or how I could do better as a presenter.

6 Lessons from Four Months in the PIE Startup Incubator

Ryan W. — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:21:50 +0000

Two upfront warnings: first, this post is long. Second, this post is about my experience in a startup incubator over the last four months or so, so it might not be relevant to you. However, I think many of the takeaways can be applied to other situations.

Background

For the last four and a half months, I’ve been in a startup incubator (for my startup DailyPath) in Portland called PIE (the Portland Incubator Experiment). PIE is a project sponsored by Wieden and Kennedy, and our batch of eight startups also had Google, Target, and Coca-Cola as brand sponsors.

If you’re not familiar with startup incubators, they basically give fledging startups a little bit of seed capital, mentorship, and in our case, office space and access to networking opportunities with investors, press, industry professionals, etc. Our program ran from Sept 1st, 2011 through Dec 15th, and throughout that time we had investors, entrepreneurs, and advisors come in 2-3 times per week to speak to the group and/or do 1-on-1’s with each startup.

Our demo day is today, Jan 17th, and all eight startups will be presenting to a theater full of investors, press, and friends and family about how we’ve spent the last four months and where each of us are going from here.

Since we’re wrapping up with PIE, I thought I’d write up a few thoughts on the experience, what Ben and I have learned from it, and what to be aware of to maximize your own incubator experience, should you choose to do one.

1. Be careful about doing an incubator at all

There are tons of startup incubators out there, and new ones are popping up every day. And while there are a lot of potential advantages to joining an incubator, there are also downsides.

The primary advantages of a good incubator are access to investors, access to a group of experienced mentors, and being in the company of other serious startups. While you get some money, it’s usually not enough to make a huge difference. Most incubators give out $15k – 25k for teams of 1-4 founders, which isn’t much for the three or four months you’re in the incubator.

That said, I don’t think the average startup would be best served by an incubator approach. The amount of cash is too little, the mentors are generally accessible in our industry via an email or a tweet, and you can get the camaraderie of being around other startups via a coworking space. As for access to investors, AngelList has become the way to raise money as a startup, and with some hustle you won’t need the incubator to make connections for you.

For us, our program being sponsored by the largest independent ad agency in the world (W+K), as well as Google, Target, and Coke, was a huge factor in why it’s been good for us. But while there are a few “domain-specific” incubators out there, I don’t think most of the generic ones outside of Y Combinator, TechStars, and 500 Startups are probably worth it. You’d be better served finding a coworking space with other legitimate startups that you can be around without giving up equity. And then there are some that are just pure scams.

2. Be careful whose advice you take

Image by Gregory Taylor

One thing that became immediately clear to us was that we weren’t focusing on a lot of things that desperately needed our attention. Speaker after speaker came in and gave us a list of things that we had to be doing, like working on getting press, or building financial projections, or practicing our public speaking, or doing marketing communications (blog, twitter, etc).

The next thing we realized is that most of these people were well-meaning, but wrong. Yes, all those things are important, but the people giving these talks are specialists and domain experts. They’re not generalists like entrepreneurs have to be, and they have the luxury of focusing on one specific area. We’re constrained for time and capital, but mostly for time. So some of these things simply didn’t get done, and that’s ok. The important thing is to be aware of what you’re choosing to ignore for now, and to make sure you understand the tradeoffs.

One more thing to mention: startups are by nature ambitious, and they attract ambitious people. Ambitious people are generally quite opinionated and aggressive, so startup environments are full of people with strong opinions that they can’t wait to share with you. Be very careful to look at the results of the person giving you advice, and don’t mistake the force with which advice is given with the value of that advice. The squeaky wheel isn’t always the one that should get the oil.

3. You are not a big shot

When you’re accepted, it can be tempting to let that go to your head, and get an attitude that you’re too important to meet with this person or that person. You’re not. Or at least, you’re not because you got into an incubator. Just like raising venture capital, getting into an incubator doesn’t mean much. You haven’t built a business yet, you just took a tiny step.

4. Don’t judge a book by the cover

Related to the point above about how you’re not too important to meet with someone, one of the best things about an incubator is that it brings you into contact with a lot of interesting people who can help you get started in your business. But some of these people may appear from a distance as if they’re not relevant or helpful for what you’re doing. Be really careful with this attitude. I’ve had multiple experiences of wavering on canceling a meeting with someone because I just didn’t see what could come out of it, and then they ended up being extremely valuable connectors, partners, or sources of advice.

The key here is to limit your exposure to the risk of it being a waste of time. I’ll write more about this later, but try to tease out more via email, get them to meet somewhere close to you, just do a quick cup of coffee, and try to get *something* out of the meeting if it turns out they’re not valuable.

5. Leverage to the next level (more press, more funding, etc)

Incubators are stepping stones, so make sure you leverage them as much as you can. Right after we got accepted, we used the social proof of the incubator to raise some more money from friends and family. And while we’re not fundraising right now, most of the other startups in our batch have raised or are trying to raise additional funds coming out of the incubator. There’s a multiplicative effect here for investment and press that you should squeeze as much as you can.

6. Avoid blinders or narrow-minded thinking

As I mentioned above, we’re not raising money. We’re the only startup in our batch not raising money, and I’ll write more later about why. But this was a tough decision for us, and partly because we’re in an environment where it’s just assumed that you’ll raise money. There are real, hard-core advantages to raising money, but to claim that it’s the only way of building a company is just sloppy and myopic. So we made it a point to seek out the advice of other entrepreneurs who had bootstrapped their companies.

There are other examples, but suffice it to say that while you’re surrounded with dozens of people just like you for 14 hours a day for months on end, it’s worthwhile to talk to: a) non-technical people, b) non-funded technical entrepreneurs, c) non-technical entrepreneurs, and d) people who are very good at what they do, whatever the space they’re in.

Bonus #7: Get a good pair of noise-canceling headphones

If you’re in an incubator that has a shared space, like ours at PIE, make sure you get some good headphones because it’s really loud sometimes and when you’re in the zone, being in a noise and visually distracting space is the worst. Ben and I also come in pretty early (usually before 6am), which gives us hours of quiet time before anyone else gets to the office. So do whatever you have to do, but I recommend headphones.

Overall Takeaways

We had a great time at PIE and we’ll be sticking around in the space for a little while longer. If I could do it again, I definitely would.

If you’re headed into an incubator, above all, remember to have fun. Life is short and if you’re not having fun with what you’re doing, what’s the point? Enjoy the privilege of being able to focus on your new startup, being able to touch every piece of it yourself, and being surrounded by startups and mentors who want you to succeed.

If you’re thinking about trying to get into an incubator, that’s awesome. A lot of the success or failure of a startup is mental, so you can gain tremendous benefit by being surrounded by supportive mentors and peer startups, like the environment an incubator offers. Just remember that most successful companies didn’t join an incubator and didn’t raise outside capital. That’s not to say you shouldn’t, but you definitely don’t have to. Take a hard look at the options, talk to people on both sides (especially people who have been on both sides), and make the best decision for you.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or curiosities about the incubator experience. I’d love to chat more about it.

Expect the worst of people

Ryan W. — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 04:12:50 +0000

I’ve been doing freelance web development for four years, I was a product manager at a major Internet company before that, and I’ve been building products of my own for the last five years. I’ve also spent a ton of time exploring products and ideas that fellow entrepreneurs have launched. So I’ve spent a lot of time working and looking at technology product ideas, whether they belonged to friends, employers, clients, or myself. And the sad truth is that most of these products, mine included, suck. Big time. They have no hope of any real traction or success. I thought I’d share a piece of advice that I think would be helpful to solve 95% of the product problems that I see.

When thinking about user behavior, expect the worst of people. Expect them to be stupid, lazy, greedy, cynical, and impatient. Because for the most part, they will be. Not in general, but when compared against the idealistic “User” that many would-be entrepreneurs seem to picture in their mind. In general, people are busy and overwhelmed, and have very little time or energy to check out something new. And even when they do, they’re constantly being bombarded by new things from entrepreneurs. Why are they going to check out yours?

The problem is that most entrepreneurs are optimistic people by nature. You have to be to invest the time and money that it takes to start a company. But optimism can be really dangerous to a fledgling business. It can subtly convince you that the unlikely is likely. It can convince you that people will go out of their way to buy what you’re selling.

Fundamentally, virtually every new startup is asking people to change their behavior in some way, whether large or small. As a general rule, people do not like change, so you must make this change as compelling and painless as possible if you have any hope of success. And optimism will lead an entrepreneur to believe that the pain of the changes they’re asking users to make isn’t really that bad.

The optimistic entrepreneur believes that users will fill out their 15-field registration page to check out the amazing new product. The pessimistic entrepreneur knows that 99% of users will leave and won’t ever come back, so she works really hard to make it easy to try the product and get hooked.

The optimistic entrepreneur puts share buttons all over the page, thinking that users can’t wait to share their new discovery with their friends. The pessimistic entrepreneur knows that he has to appeal to the user’s self-interests, and offers a bonus or other benefit for users who share the site with a friend.

The optimistic entrepreneur thinks that what they’ve created is so compelling that people will return. The pessimistic entrepreneur knows that the average person remembers 7 URLs, plus or minus 2. The pessimistic entrepreneur knows they can’t expect people to remember to return to their site.

I’ll give you an example of that last one: woot.com is a daily deal site that offers a great deal on a particular item every day. They sold last year to Amazon for $110 million. Huge win, right? From 2009 to 2011, another daily deal site (Groupon) went from $0 to a $6 billion offer from Google. There are tons of differences between the two models, but I am absolutely convinced that Woot could have been bigger if they had taken a page from Groupon’s book and focused on building a mailing list to offer their deals to. I first saw Woot years ago, but I’ve been back maybe twice. I just don’t remember to go check it out every day. But I never forget to check my email, so I always see what Groupon has on offer. And yet the Woot.com homepage still has no place to sign up for an email notification of their deals.

You get the idea. The challenge is that you have to be an overall optimist, and you definitely don’t want to grow to hate people, but you kind of do need to expect the worst from them when actually designing your product.

Of course, creating a great product is only half the battle; you also have to market it well. But that’s a post for another day.

Don’t accept no from someone who can’t say yes

Ryan W. — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:19:14 +0000

I’ve been meaning for some time to write a post about my experience in the Navy and what it’s meant for my life. This isn’t that post, but I was recently reminded of something that a senior non-commissioned officer told a group of us once about navigating bureacracy. Being a large government organization, the Navy has its fair share of bullshit and nonsense, which makes it difficult to get anything done. Especially anything out of the ordinary. So here’s the advice I got about trying to get something done:

“Don’t accept no from someone who can’t say yes.”

This stuck in my mind and has served me well ever since. Bureaucracies are built on the back of rigid rules and hierarchical structures, but even the most rigid systems need room for exceptions. But empowering individuals at all levels to make those exceptions is the antithesis of what bureaucracy stands for, so these organizations only give the exception-making ability to those at the top. But the hapless victims of the bureaucracy constantly want more exceptions than those at the top have time to handle, so the solution is simple: have the minions at the bottom just turn down any requests for exceptions to the rules as a matter of course. It doesn’t matter that those minions couldn’t approve the exception if they wanted to, because the victim asking for the exception probably won’t push it.

But if you do push, even a little, you can often get what you want. I left the Navy with about a year’s worth of college credits, across a hodge-podge of subjects. They didn’t fit the requirements for my degree at the University of Colorado, so they told me I’d lose some of them and have to take other classes instead. Unacceptable. So I fought and cajoled and bugged them until I got the decision-makers and got them to accept every last class. I didn’t lose a single credit.

Another example of this is customer service call centers. Roughly 90% of my interactions with customer service agents are negative, because I avoid calling unless there’s a problem. And they almost never solve the problem to my satisfaction. So I request to speak to their manager, at which point they balk and explain how there’s nothing better that can be done, that’s their policy, blah, blah. About 50% of the time when I get the manager on the phone, they offer me a better solution than the customer service guy at the first level did. If that’s still not good enough, I go to *their* boss, which is almost always very difficult. They very often just refuse to connect me, in which case I have to do some digging and cold-calling. But when you get that person on the phone, they’re completely empowered to solve your problem, and they often do. Kind of sad that corporate America has this kind of relationship with their customers, but that’s another story.

So decide what you want and ask for it. And don’t stop when they tell you no, especially if they’re not able to tell you yes.

What the $1.5 trillion Federal budget deficit taught me about time management

Ryan W. — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 07:31:01 +0000

I was listening to NPR today and they talked to a writer from Newsweek (whose name I didn’t catch, unfortunately) about this year’s $1.5 trillion Federal budget deficit. Everyone says we should fix it, but we can’t come to any sort of agreement on how. Since the vast majority of the population receives some benefit from the Federal government, either in the form of services or in tax benefits, balancing the budget necessarily involves pissing off very large constituencies, which is why few politicians seem to do more than talk about balancing the budget.

Then the Newsweek writer said something very interesting: large budget deficits are what you would expect to see in a democratic society that lacks a strong sense of priority and purpose. Instead of making the tough choices about what to fund (and what to NOT fund) based on what’s really important to us, we try to fund everything, and end up doing it all halfway and running up a huge debt.

I instantly thought of time management: don’t many of us play this same tired game with our time? We don’t want to make tough choices about what to cut from our time budget, so we juggle too many things while trying to “have it all” or “do it all”, and end up doing a bunch of things poorly, falling into mediocrity, and running up a deficit of time, money, or both. Just earlier today before hearing this story, I was contemplating my attempts to juggle too many projects and struggling to know which, if any, of them I should give up. This idea made it much easier.

I don’t want my life to resemble the current Federal government: an on-going war of different priorities and interests, vying for attention, and creating a dystopian clump of mediocrity. So I cut two projects from my life today. Maybe they’ll come back someday, but they’re officially on ice for now, and I’m down to three projects or areas that I spend my time and mental energy on. I hope to cut another by the end of the year, but that’s all I can say for now.

Does excellence require focus? Are there counter-examples? And if it does require focus, why is it so hard for some of us to just do one or two things?