Petar Petrov's Blog

Author: Petar Petrov

  • APT: The Downs…

    Just yesterday I wrote about what I call “Amusement Park Theory”. Now I want to elaborate on the DOWNS.

    Today is one of the big big downs. I am sick, worried, aggravated. I am so snappy that people around me are afraid to talk to me. I have been coding and reading about application design now for 3 straight days straight. I know now about MVC (Model-View-Controller) but I still can’t understand it truly. More specifically, I don’t know how to structure my own application on the MVC framework. I don’t know which functions should belong to View, which to Controller. I have also been looking at custom events, dispatchers, class extends and class implementations. My head is literally AS3 class soup.

    Well if it takes time and energy that’s alright. But what worries me is “Can I ever learn that stuff in a decent, acceptable timeframe? What if there are other things that I really don’t have the resources to learn?” I don’t have eternity for this project, I have to move fast. I have been through so many web ideas and I have created none. I really, really want this one to pop-up online. The idea is amazing, its doable, its just awesome. But yet, I am not programming geek – I only got introduced to class-based programming this January. I work hard when I feel like it but I am new to this material. I get all those doubts now, “Maybe I shouldn’t be the one to write the code? Maybe It is more efficient to have it outsourced.”But then this is a whole different story on building up a startup:

    – I have to worry about idea being stolen. If person X writes my application, at any point he can pick his shit up and finish off the idea on his own. And if he doesn’t steal it, he can blackmail for % of the company. Yeah, I know, NDA’s but who knows how well they work. Even if he is not interested in stealing and just wants to leave, I am left with his crap that is probably undocumented and has to be basically rewritten. And this can repeat again and again…
    – I have to find money to pay this person X. And I can’t just get someone to do the job, it has to be done well. Plus, how do I find a good person? AS3 is new itself. Some people have been doing Flex for 6 months, but Flash is not Flex. Well yeah, I have a list of angel investors that I could approach, but asking for money before you have anything done is never a good strategy. Otherwise I would be wasting the few chances I have. This all doesn’t feel right.

    This whole situation sucks big time. If I don’t figure out how to build that soon, this would be another project on the pile of scraps. And my partner this time is not a programming guru like Alek. This time Alek is away, busy with some other projects of his. I pitched my current idea to a more distant/recent friend of mine that got very excited and was eager to do work. I liked him, seemed like an honest guy, and besides sometimes all you need of someone is energy and dedication to figure the problems. But Noah is more of a firm thinker who gets me back to ground when my dreams make me fly. He is double majored in English and Philosophy which quite honestly helps zero at programming stage. I know we’ll have both a lot of work later, but for now I am on my own and this shit is not moving!!!

    its 1,29am. Bed time.

  • Idea: KillPod

    Trigger: We had iPods, but we wanted immediate access to any song at any point, we didn’t want to look for downloads, put them on computer and only then transfer to iPod. We wanted a piece that streams music to a cellphone, caching only the recent songs and the most probable to be listened next.

    How: Flextronics would build our music phone by our specifications and design, music.net would provide us with huge content of songs for which we would pay per stream, and then we would partner with one of the cell phone carriers to provide the wireless service for a flat fee of $5 or $10.

    Mistakes: We wrote too much that in the end no one would want to read, and at the same time did nothing. We also overestimated ourselves and were overly optimistic about “killing the iPod”.

    The story: We knew what we wanted, so we set off to make it. As we have studied in Junior Achievement class, every business starts with a well written business plan. Ah, yes, Business Plan! We had just won the national competition for business plan so now we were confident and wanted to create a real business. Oh boy was it writing. We ended up writing a plan close to 50 pages describing everything you could imagine – market, future competition, financial information, technical details… Anything you can possibly brainstorm.

    It looked great (to us). As a matter of fact, we were high on our own project. We valued the company to 100million and were planning to quit college. It was all set up, we didn’t need crappy classes anymore, we were rich. But were we far from truth! Long time we kept thinking, rethinking, and tweaking it. Every so often we would decide to send it to an investor and worked for another week of improvements before that. But there was another problem that we didn’t realize at the time: no one that had money to invest had time to read anything more than 2,3 page executive summary. We had close to 50(with financials and other stuff)! It was an endless writing of a story, that would never become true.

    We also didn’t really quite get the scale of our venture. There was just no way we could get such big players in our game. We were just two college (freshmen) students that wanted to create something better than iPod. I laugh now at myself and my foolishness.

    Also, a major issue was that we ourselves didn’t do anything really. Everybody on the line of ‘killing the iPod’ had a practical purpose- Verizon provides the wireless midium, Flextronics builds the phones, Music.net dumps terabytes of music on our server and what are we doing? We are connecting them. Making phone calls. That mean that even after incredible and impossible amount of work to make this happen, we were easily cutable out of the deal. We didn’t put any real value in providing the service.

    One more problem that didn’t really become very clear from that project alone, but you can definitely mark it out: its not always about creating the best and newest. Sometimes the technology is not ready. We wanted to use 3G back in 2005, but there was barely any implementation. We thought of WiMax, which is still not out for consumer products even today! And what’s more subtle: sometimes just the market is not ready. You can introduce a brilliant product, but if its not the right time for the right price, you will lose because people will not be able to understand how good the product is. Its also not about efficiency but about money. Why would Apple provide flat fee for all their music, if they are milking you $.99 per single song! Of course this will be the model until people are ready to stop paying for it.

    The Moral:
    – Don’t write huge business plans, 2 pages is more than enough for investor. Actually don’t write business plan at all. Thinking is easy but it probably has 2% significance, the rest is DOING IT. Also, things change as you go along, so wasting 2 months of brainstorming, for an idea that will change later is pointless.
    – Make sure you pick up a REALISTIC idea. Don’t fly in the sky, because you will fall sooner or later.
    – Don’t talk too much before you do anything. People can mock you for a long time how instead of being a millionaire that took over Apple you are still a college student, writing some anthropology homeworks or some crap..

    PS. Alek wrote about his KillPod experience on his Bulgarian blog.

    [UPDATE]
    Here is a link to our bplan…if anyone is interested.
    Financials.

  • The Amusent Park Theory

    This is not really a theory but its an analogy I like to make between the life of an entrepreneur and an amusement park. I will explain it in the framework of my first successfully completed project – the Planner Project.The so called “Planner Project” was simple – I wanted everybody in my high school to have daily planners for homeworks and to-do lists. ACS did not have that, so Svilen and I had to raise a couple thousand dollars, make the design, create the press files, print it and distribute it. Hardest part was raising money. We had to cold call various companies, meet with people, pitch the idea and hope that they will want to pay money to advertise in our planner for high school students.

    I don’t know how many days I have spent with Svilen running around the city with my legendary Fiat Panda to random companies to “beg” for money. It was tiring, annoying, sometimes humiliating. We would get “No! Not interested” and it would seem that the world is collapsing. If they didn’t want it, no one would want to advertise with us. No money, no planners, and days and days of work lost. Also, it got pretty tought at some point, because we had decent money from the second national TV and GlaxoSmithKline and couldn’t make it. How do we go back to those big guys, “Sorry we couldn’t do it, we apologize for all the husstle, here is your money back…” But other times a random person would come up and give us a great idea, “Hey your mom told me about the planner, why don’t you check Rossignol, they might want to do it, and you’e kind’a friends with them too” and then we would picture again the project successfully completed.

    It was ups and downs. So many and so extreme. But I look back, it was all worth it. It was definitely amazing to complete such a cool project. It was also very rewarding to feel and taste (i have to be honest, you can’t understand what I am talking until you try it) what it is to create your own projects, and nurture them for months until they are done. From total despair to full hope and ecstatic joy in 5 minutes. Some of those moods lasted for days, some for minutes. So if you ever get a chance to do projects on your own – go for it. Don’t get scared, just do it.

    Now the theory. So you already see what I wanted to say – life is like an amusement park. Every project is a ride. Crazy big important projects that might bring a lot of rewards are the crazy big scary rides. You go up, you go up big time in the air. Make millions. You go down, you go down big time. Your dreams of millions just shattered. If you are just working for a company for hour by hour, you are probably riding a Marry-Go-Round.

    Moral: Choose your rides wisely. If you go big, expect more than just bumper-car experience.

  • Undone Ideas

    I constantly come up with random ideas. Most of them are web related, but some are simply practical things in life. I think that I will start sharing them. For most I haven’t taken any steps on implementation and for the ones i did – I haven’t done much (whether because I didn’t like it, didn’t have time or something else). But maybe you can do it. Or maybe you can find the missing piece of the puzzle and then we can do it together. This new category is dedicated to such ideas.

  • Book: Wikinomics

    Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
    by
    Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams

    ISBN: 1591841380

    So I promised I will write reviews. Here is a book I just finished. The very attractive name caught my eye in Barnes and Noble

    The book makes very good points about how the economy is taking a different shape these days. Development of communication tools allow for much greater efficiency. How? Well instead of hiring, companies and organizations can uncover the work that needs to be done to the world and the person with most expertise and cheapest price can do the job. And no matter how many people corporations have hired, the world pool is bigger.

    A good example of this transparency and opening is the mining company. Goldcorp was struggling with finding new gold resources, so it put online all the private information and told people, “We give you all our information, you tell us where to dig!” The prizes they paid to people totaled $575,000, but 80% of the suggested dig places yield substantial quantities of gold. 100 million company became a 9 billion monster that eat its biggest competitors. Another example of transparency was how IBM opened up their patents for use to public, receiving in return over 1billion in revenue yearly.

    Its also worth noting that people have become what authors call ‘prosumers’. We are not only consumers, we are not satisfied anymore by slightly customized products (pink iPod or 2gb ram in the new Dell). We now like to completely build our products. We like to create video, blogs, photos, we like to make software and show it off. Its the reason why open source software will continue to grow and why collaborative sites are going to flourish. And figuring out our consumer preferences might be quite important for a business’ survival…

    What else…oh yeah, I thought it was funny how Geek Squad (have you seen those black and white beetle cars zooming around the city?) communicates and exchanges most efficiently ideas at Battlefield 2. “Shoot that mother cracker, behind the tank. BTW, where do I find firmware for WRT-54GL…”

    So yeah, its worth knowing those things. Limp Bizkit sang it really well, “You better stay on top or life will kick you in the ass”

  • Don’t Forget to Be Happy: A Note to Myself

    I have learned that to be entrepreneur it takes a lot. You have to be in it, you have to sacrifice time, energy etc – you know it. I have been very busy lately – 13h workdays, 7 days a week…

    And today I saw a movie. Surf’s Up! Its an animation about surfing penguins, with good funny jokes, with dreams, ambition, competition. There was a scene where Big Z (the pro surfur) tells Cody (the hype ambitious kid) that its all about the fun and the love for surfing itself. It made me think that sometimes, when you work too hard, you forget to enjoy what you do. So I hope I will remember more often now that I do what I do, because I like it and I have to enjoy it. That’s all life is about.

  • How Entrepreneurial People Get More Entrepreneurial

    I worked a good chunk of time for a very successful entrepreneur that made a fortune from real estate. For the time I was with him I saw how from a single person he grew to a super efficient team of about 15 people that are building and renovating at a dazzling speed.

    One unique thing about him is the amount of books he reads. Almost every day, I see him with a different one. Sometimes its about dog psychology (he got a dog and was very into teaching it), sometimes its about stock volatilitis, sometimes its about oil and comodities. We discuss some, he gives me to read others, but its way too much for me to keep up with him. Now that his team does most of the work, he has plenty of time to read and get an edge over competition. He also doesn’t just read. He reads interesting useful books that have studies, reflections, wisdom and experience.

    I decided i should try it too. Read a bunch of books on networking, communications, and motivation/attitude. I have to say that the knowledge I gained from those few books is nowhere to be found in our college textbooks. And by far more useful. I also think that in the long run, when I look back and see what books I have read, I will see correlation with what I have achieved. For that reason, from now on I will review all the good books that I have been through. I am setting up a section named “Books” where all my posts with reviews will go. Enjoy.

  • Two and two yields Ten

    The following question bothered me today, “Why are the so-called ‘art people’ valuable and what is the reason that they can’t make a lot of money?”

    I decided to go back to my understanding of creativity. It seems to me that ‘creativity’ and ‘art’ are very correlated, since a great piece of art usually has an unusual and new perspective. So my theory is that there is no true creativity in this world. I think that our brains can never create something drastically new, they rather mix different things to come up with something whole, something ‘new’. In that sense, true imagination and creativity are non-existent.

    So it follows that art people feel free enough to scoop elements of life from the most unrelated mediums and put them together. Art people are the ones that do the ‘forbidden’ things in our lives. We live according to rules, they go and say, “No i don’t think pencils should be used for drawing. They make up great chopsticks!”

    And then it struck me how important it is to learn to put things together. We are so used to putting things that match, that we can’t see the true outcomes of unusual combinations (think of mentos + coke. Ever mixed those?) Everything we have today is a result of putting together smaller pieces. The better the putter you are, the better the problem solver you are. If you know how to put together unusual things, you will get unusual solutions, that no one has thought of before. Many are weird, don’t work, but the ones that work make it big because they are the only ones.