Being the CEO of a startup company is never easy. Knowing the old rule of thumb that from ten companies only ONE succeeds in becoming profitable makes you sweat most of the time. Maybe worse than anything is waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about some tasks which have to be done tomorrow, or this week... or this month... Since this is my fourth software company in the last eight years, from which two were profitable and one a failure, I am doing better than many, but every startup is different and each one brings both sweet and bitter tastes in different ratios.

How does the developing of the company look like from the perspective of the person in charge?
What problems do you face and how hard is it to run the start-up?
How do you choose right from wrong, good from bad, important from waste of time?
Which personal and team challenges are involved in the process?
How do you deal with the tough times and rough rides?
Do you still have time for your friends, family, yourself?
Are you getting fat?

Many times I have searched web portals and blogs for the answers which would reveal to me "the pearls of wisdom". And I have to tell you something - not many people write about this! They are either busy running their companies and do not have time to describe what is happening around them, or they are just scared of bad luck they might cause by writing about their new startup while it is happening.

So I’ve decided to write my blog precisely about this topic: what happens in our startup, week after week.
Actually, I plan to keep biweekly blogs, and my colleagues will fill in the gaps.

So, what's the title about?
I have a friend, Sunny, who works for a big IT company, and mostly does VoIP integration stuff for governments and big multinational corporations. They just finished a project in Budapest, Hungary, and he is now in charge of an internal task: to set up a better organized knowledge base of 35 projects that his 50-head-department made in the last years.
In February he got my email about Bumblehood being live and kicking, and called me several days after to arrange a meeting. I thought, couple of beers with an old friend is exactly what I need, so I suggested a small local brewery where we usually meet. He said, surprising me: "no, come to my office, I would like to ask you something first, and then we can go for a beer". Ok, visiting his working place in my working hours was not exactly what I was hoping for, especially not now when we have hands full of work preparing a new version of software scheduled for May.

But it's Sunny; always smiling and kind.
So I went. And we talked. They need semantically structured wiki software, so that each team member can participate in systematically organizing the mess they have. He asked me how much it would cost if they bought our BumbleMap platform. And I didn't know what to answer. So I said: "It will cost you 20k€ and three months of waiting since we are not finished yet". And he said: "OK, but I want these 4 customizations done for us by the 1st of July". I said OK. And we went for "Dunklesweissbier" (special dark, not filtered, wheat beer made in south Bavaria and around). Only tomorrow did I realize what actually happened.

We still do not have a pricelist for our product, there is still much going on in order to finalize the first full production version and we are working 10 hours shifts every day including the weekends. But we have the startup of something new in our hands, although nobody still knows about it :(.

But Sunny knows. He actually spent 5 hours experimenting with our Bumblebee Testing Environment after I had sent him an email about our existence. He saw the potentials of our software since he already did some research on WYSIWYG wiki software. And he put his trust in me. This is what friends are for. Thanks Sunny.

Of course, he made a deal for his company. Most probably a good deal! Should I have said 40k? I don't think so. Money will come afterwards; the first priority should always be: make the software solve people’s problems, and make it stable. Everything else will come later. Sunny just proves that the exception makes the rule.

Posted by Boro Milivojevic on March 16, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum