People’s Software Company

We slipped. Well, we didn’t slip, our release date did. And we were bummed, big time(at least I was). In my perfect vision, we’d already be out in the market for a week or so, iterate, release, iterate–and head toward the end of techstars with lots of feedback from users. Only, we hit a bug. Something we had decide whether we’d work around or work through. And that kicked everything back on the sked.

And I got really depressed about this. Totally bummed. For a day or so, I walked around feeling sad, thinking that doing a start up was like one of those inflatable clown toys with the weighted sand bottom where you knock it down and it springs back up and then you knock it down again. How many times did I want to face setbacks I had to fix? How many times did I want to get knocked down and get back up?

And then, I got over it. Lisa and I hunkered down on the problems, like we always do, and we started to find solutions and ways to move things ahead. And then we had a talk about how being in a program like techstars has the benefit of making you go fast and accelerate development, but how it can be very artificial in some ways. In other words, if our brand new company had a one to three week product slip on its first release out in the world, would we be as upset as we’d been feeling earlier this week? Were we being too close in on the immediate situation and was that getting in the way of our moving ahead?

The answers were yes, and yes, combined with the real world acceptance that stuff happens and all you can do it fix it and move ahead.

So now, we’re all back on track. The programmers are working away, we’re doing our business plans and meeting with people, and the next three weeks are filled with milestones and things on which we need to focus. And of course, the takeaway is that doing a start up is always going to have moments when you feel like the beaten down clown, when things go wrong and it is just terrible. But there’s room to rebound from that, and that’s what we did.

Yes, I feel a litle bruised, but mostly I feel wiser, because I’ve learned that what doing this requires isn’t only the strong execution and action-oriented skills I have, but an emotional resilency that can survive multiple set backs and still want to move forward. And you know what, I have that.