Do something awesome.

“The core thing would be just do something awesome. Try not to get caught up in the echo chamber. That is probably the toughest thing when you are trying to break out and do something original.

A lot of things are evolutionary, and it is easy to get caught up in what the geek culture thinks. There’s lots of valuable businesses that can be built there, but i think that is where a lot of people tend to spin their wheels, and I’ve been caught up there before.

When I’ve had more successful things, I’ve thought, “Back to basics. What do I want? What do I want to see in the world?” And create that.”

-Ev Williams as quoted in Seth Godin’s Linchpin.

For a while now whenever someone has asked me what I want to do my answer has been “awesome stuff”. I’m not sure exactly where I’ll go and what I’ll be doing in the next few years of my life but I know that it has to be awesome: if it’s not awesome, I don’t want to be doing it.

That’s why I like working on things like the Yahoo Serious Film Festival. It’s a lot of work which may ultimately go nowhere and if it gets off the ground it may never make any money but I love working on it because I think it’s awesome.

Josh and I are working on a new project around the real estate industry and it’s a really competitive market. There are a lot of established players as well as new entrants doing cool stuff. We caught up the other day to define what it was that we were trying to achieve here and the conclusion was that we want to add something to this arena and that whatever we add it has to be awesome. If it’s not awesome, we don’t want to work on it.

That doesn’t mean every day is full of awesome, in fact most days so far have been utterly devoid of awesome. But in the long-term what we want to build is awesome and we’d like to think you’ll agree with us.

Ned

*image: the eternally awesome Deborah Harry on the set of the Muppets.

The Illusions of Entrepreneurship

Malcolm Gladwell has an awesome article in the latest New Yorker magazine about entrepreneurs. It focuses on two case studies which show entrepreneurs less as risk-taking cowboys and more as well-informed, calculating predators.

The examples used are of Ted Turner and his success in shifting the family business from billboards to television and John Paulson’s highly calculated profiteering from the collapse of the housing bubble in the U.S. It’s really awesome stuff.

As per all of Malcolm Gladwell’s writings it is well researched and referenced though one section in particular stood out for me. It is his excerpt from Scott Shane’s book “The Illusion of Entrepreneurship”:

“Yes, he says, many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks – but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories. The failures violate all kinds of established principles of new-business formation. New-business success is clearly correlated with the size of initial capitalisation. But failed enterpreneus tend to be wildly undercapitalised. The data shows that organising as a corporation is best. But failed entrepreneurs tend to organise as sole proprietorships. Writing a business plan is a must; failed enterpreneurs rarely take that step. Taking over an existing business is always the best bet; failed entrepreneurs prefer to start from scratch. Ninety per cent of the fastest-growing companies in the country (USA) sell to other business; failed entrepreneurs usually try selling to consumers, and, rather than serviing customers that other businesses have missed, they chase the same people as their competitors do.

The list goes on: they underemphasize marketing; they don’t understand the importance of financial controls; they try to compete on price. Shane concedes that some of these risks are unavoidable: would-be entreprenuers take them because they have no choice. But a good many of these risks reflect a lack of preparation or forethought.”

The whole article is worth a read if you can get your hands on it, seems to be hidden behind a pay wall online.

Ned

My great-grandfather.

Augustine (Gus) Stanway Dwyer, Elinor (3 years), Phillip (4 years) and Ida (Dassie) Margaret.

“Pop was my father’s father. The photo was probably taken about 1916 , or there abouts. I suspect this was taken up around Castlemaine in Victoria where my father was born.

I recall that Pop went off to WWI (1914-1918). Pop was an orchardist and later owned a newspaper shop in Orrong Road, Glen Iris.

I can remember Pop as very tall (I was rather shorter then), and going with him in the morning when the stars were out and the sun was not up. We went in his green van to the shop , to open up.

Pop died about 1949, the year before my parents took us all 4 Dwyer kids up to Yarrawonga where Phil was the Headmaster.”

New Horizons

It’s always hard to know when to move on. Whether it’s on a business deal, a side project or a relationship – to choose the right time to shift your focus onto new things is really hard.

I’ve spent a good couple of weeks over the Christmas break reviewing most things in my life and working out what I want to do in the coming years. I don’t like to plan too far out, but I’ll be finishing up with uni at the end of the year so I need to start figuring out what I want to do next.

Some things I’m still mulling over in my mind but I have made a few decisions that I think will set me up for some of my bigger life goals. One of these is to nail uni this year so I can graduate and keep my employment options open, another is to learn more about product management and finally to reduce my involvement in projects which remove focus from the startups I’m involved with.

It’s this last point that is the most important and one of the main reasons I’ve decided to resign from the Hive. I’ve had an amazing time running the Hive with James, Ross, Sandra and Anna over the last couple of years, it’s been really rewarding for me both personally and professionally. To see the entrepreneurial community grow in Melbourne to having 250 people at our last event, to be there at the start of the Hive in Brisbane and Sydney.

The Hive still has a lot of great potential and I look forward to seeing where everyone involved takes it. For me I’ve achieved what I set out to do and I’ve decided it’s time to move on to the next challenge.

I plan to stay a part of the community though I might take a couple of months worth of events off in the short term. I also hope to be a part of a couple of more tech-focused events throughout the year. Watch this space.

I’m moving on, looking towards new horizons.

Ned

Awesome Melbourne Tech Startups

There are a lot of really great things happening in the Australian startup scene and particularly in Melbourne. I thought I’d create a list of some of the more interesting, young and web-based startups. Some are bigger than others but it’s sometimes hard to know where to draw the line.

99Designs – Crowd-sourced design.

Acconex – Project management software for the construction industry

Adioso – Airfare search engine

AgileBench – Agile project management

Assess’d – Competency based recruitment testing

Corkboard – Email based file sharing

Creately – Online diagramming and design

BaseEstate – Real estate search engine

Binary Plex – Organisational knowledge capture and mining. Also see Twendly.

Docoloco – Local business reviews

Edublogs – Blogging platform for students and teachers.

Intelimail – Email marketing

I Vote For Art – Online art community and marketplace

JebHunt - Job application manager

Jodoro – Collaborative modelling tool.

Merspi – Social learning tool for VCE students

MyTVR – Online television recording/viewing

Nodecity – Non-profit wireless networks

Orgnition – Non-profit organisation management.

QMCODES – Mobile marketing

Red Bubble - Online art community and marketplace

Rentoid – Rental industry aggregator

Retail Me Not – Discount store aggregator

SimpleSponsorship – Sponsorship management

Skitch – Screenshot and collaboration tool

Stateless Systems – makers of RetailMeNot, BugMeNot etc

StoreCrowd – Discount store aggregator

Suburb View – Real Estate search tool

Twendly – Twitter people search engine

XHTMLised – PSD to XHTML service

Yabble – Local business reviews

These are just some of the awesome startups coming out of Melbourne. I’m sure there are plenty more on their way and some that I’ve missed.

Who else should I add?

Ned

2009 into 2010

I’ve been thinking a lot about the last 12 months these last couple of weeks, what I’ve achieved during the year, how I’ve changed and what I need to work on in the future. I’m not really one for new years resolutions but I think the holiday season is as good a time as any to plot and scheme.

At the start of this year I wrote a really self-indulgent livejournal post (I know, right?) about all the crazy things that I wanted to get down inside of 12 months. Get the ad network I was working on at the time cash-flow positive, start a crowd-sourced bar, all kinds of shit. What I’ve realised over the course of the year is that some of the things on the list I still want to do, some are worth doing and some aren’t – but all of them are going to take a whole lot of precious time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_niy2ZM5Jo

So I thought I’d follow it up with another self-indulgent post this time on this Wordpress blog via my Posterous account. Only this time I thought I’d get some of my longer term life goals out there. Something for me to look back on in the years to come and remind myself about what I wanted when I was in my mid-twenties and maybe to get back on track to ticking the list off.

1. Finish my entrepreneurship degree. I’ve got at least a year left, I want to nail as much of it as possible and get great marks.

2. Continue working with Josh Sharp to make something awesome. We’ve come a long way, we’ve still got a long way to go.

3. Learn more programming. My html/css needs a bit of work but this feels like a fairly easy thing to get better at – just build more stuff. Django/Rails on the other hand feels like hard work, definitely looking for a more permanent tutor and resource on this.

4. Move into a house with a backyard. My current place is nice but sharing with 4 other people can be taxing at times and I’d like a place with a backyard and a decent kitchen.

5. Travel overseas. Ideally I’d like to go to San Francisco for a little while when I finish up uni for the year so I’m going to work towards that. It might be to apply for YCombinator, it might not but I at least want to get over there and hear what all the fuss is about.

6. Eat better. 2009 was the year of cooking stuff from scratch for me and given how old I am this hasn’t been much of a goal. I want to still be cooking from scratch as much as possible, diversify the menu and cook more often than eating out. This will help with getting point number 5 ticked off the list.

7. Run. 2009 was going to be the year that I ran a marathon but for a variety of reasons (but I’m mainly going to stick with “injuries”) I didn’t make it. I did do a lot more kilometres than I’d done in any year previous and feel like mentally I’m on the right path. This year I want to focus on more general exercise including bike riding, some weights work, maybe some swimming. Either way I’ve realised that if I’m going to do it I can’t just rely on running alone to get there.

Bring on 2010, I’m looking forward to it.

Ned

Post-Launch

Josh and I launched the first version of Orgnition almost a month ago now and we’ve learnt a lot in that time.

When we pressed the go-live button and emailed out to a bunch of our contacts, activated the Adwords, started up the Twitter accounts and let the wider world know what we were doing we had some entrepreneurial optimism that the world would beat down our door.

Suffice to say it hasn’t been that easy.

Some things that I’ve learnt in the process:

1. Large organisations will always take a long time to move.

For us this means we’re going to have a longer sales-cycle than we were originally anticipating so we’re adjusting our plans accordingly. It seems fairly self-evident looking back but I think this is where our entrepreneurial optimism kicked in, which I think we also would have needed to finish the project.

2. Launching is hard.

It’s not easy to get a whole heap of people really interested in your product, especially when it’s a minimum viable product and therefore still in development and you have a fairly narrow market base. I have a new found respect for people who launch big.

3. Singular focus is important but customers are more important.

We can’t rely on service organisations alone to purchase our product so we’re expanding our reach out to other clubs and associations (some of whom have already shown an interest). We’re also spinning out some of the features of Orgnition into a separate Orgnition product aimed at the wider non-profit market.

4. It really is just the beginning

Launching kind of closed the “introduction” chapter of Orgnition. The chapter included everything that Tom Howard had worked on over the last 6 years with Rotary District 9810 through to Josh and I agreeing to take on and work on the project and right up to pressing the launch button. Now the real work kicks in with continuing product and customer development, documentation, tutorial videos, copy-editing and website optimisation, marketing and public relations. But now that we’ve got the product out there we can move a lot faster and have some credibility when we’re in meetings with potential clients and partners.

So now the real work begins.

Ned

Ned Facts #5: Names

My first name is Edwin; I have no middle name but if I did it would be Beaumont.

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Ned Facts #3: Birthdays

I share my birthday with Yahoo Serious.