Being the CEO of a start up is quite “glamorous.” Most may not be aware, but founding a start up is no picnic. We don’t get to ride around in jets and sit in leather chairs drinking fine whiskey while rubbing elbows with billionaires. That is, unless we’re already a wildly successful executive, then that can happen. For the rest of us, we get to personally respond to customer service email, hire contractors, pay bills, manage the bank accounts, make sales calls, implement marketing plans, and engineer the product. Some of us also actually write the CSS or programming code or design the sites ourselves in Photoshop.
My business partner, Paul, has the same “glamorous” life, such as cleaning out databases, re-installing SQL Manager when it crashes, and analyzing dozens of daily error reports. Paul also reads and responds to customer service emails. Did I mention he programmed the entire site himself?
Between the two of us we’re programming, design, customer service, accounting, operations, sales, and marketing for our site www.skillwho.com. We can’t afford to have people do all these things for us. Not in the beginning at least. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, started building computers in a garage. Sergey and Larry from Google started in their college dorms.
I believe that one of the greatest parts of being successful is looking back on the path and story that got us to where we are now. If it was handed to us on a silver platter then it’s not as interesting or as fulfilling as building a billion dollar empire from a garage.
I’d like to be able to spend more time on business strategy, but little things seem to take up a lot of my “CEO” time. For example, we’re trying to move from an outsourced server to our own servers in a data center. Guess who has to back up and FTP 30 GB of data from the old server to the new one? That’s right, the CEO. Takes hours and hours. Could I pay someone else $10 per hour to do it? Sure. Do I trust them with server passwords and access to 2 years of programing and customer data for 35,000 members? Nope. I’d rather do it myself than take the risk. Once we have some employees with established trustworthiness, then I’ll let them move 50,000 files from one place to the next.
Something that I life has pounded into me is that success takes time and I must be patient. Paul and I both still have full time jobs, so we can only work on the site 5-10 hours each per week. More than half of that is day-to-day operations. So we’re only left with 2-3 hours per week for programming, product development, and marketing.
It’s been about 2 years since we started the business and it’s been live for about 1 year. Had we been able to focus full time, we’d probably be 5-10 bigger than we are now. Why don’t we just raise investment capital? Well, that’s another blog.
I should mention though, that founding a start up is also fun, challenging, exciting, and fulfilling. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. You get to build something from scratch that’s all yours. It’s like working on your own house instead of that of someone else, or holding your own child instead of a stranger’s.
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