Starting a business is hard. By far, the hardest part, is delivery. When we first started Pollenizer a couple of years ago we followed the Google idea of 20% time in which we would dedicate approximately 1 day per week each to internal projects. We tried to launch a small product called Goalsy like that:
Goalsy was never released after more than a year because the hardest part was delivery. In particular, the hardest part was finishing. Done ‘for free’ in ‘our spare time’ and ‘finished when its done’ is a true recipe for failure because the longest road to travel for product release is the last 1% and it needs such focus that cannot be baked from those ingredients.
I should have remembered the day I was interviewed at Google in California. I asked all the engineers what they do with their 20% time and they all said they did nothing because there was no time. All 15+ of them said that.
To deliver, people need limits, rewards, consequences.
Instead of limitless time and as-close-to-free-as-possibe budgeting, our new approach is to tightly time-box projects and invest in them fully for that time. As always we have limited capacity to invest in incubation projects but limiting the initial time investment limits the spend. Additionally, it focuses us on getting the job done, allows us to feel the pain of spending money and feel the threat of missing the date and the opportunity.
We did that with Spreets. We talked in mid December 2009 about launching a site in the Australian marketplace that was inspired by the phenomenal success of Groupon in the US. We deployed a whole team on it with the condition that it be launched with the core feature set by February 8th 2010.
Over the quiet of Christmas, our office was noisy with whiteboard sessions and sales calls.
Then we launched it on February 4th. We did it quietly, but we DID do it.
Now we are learning from it. Do people transact? Does the viral loop have its own momentum? We are in the next time box with its own set of limits.