The Strategic Importance of the Offensive Line

Posted in: Blog, Development, Startups, Technology on August 29, 2010 | 1 Comment

The small running back leading the large offensive line onto the field

My 10 year old son has begun playing tackle football this year, and I honestly can’t tell which of us is more excited about this fact.  We now find ourselves spending a fair amount of time talking football strategy.  He plays running back and is easily the smallest kid on the team.  As a small, nimble, ball-carrying back, my son has quickly developed an appreciation for the strategic importance of his offensive line.  Without them blocking for him, he would quickly be overwhelmed by the 11 defenders eager to tackle the kid with the ball.

I often compare the football offensive line to a startup company’s tech operations; the guys who keep our servers and systems up and running.  As a startup that prides itself in being small, nimble and quick – with weekly sprints and product releases – the analogy to 5^th grade tackle football feels somehow appropriate.

As an offensive lineman your primary job is to protect the guy with the ball.  If you play a perfect game, the credit you’ll get is that nobody will ever call your name.  If you screw up just once, a defender will sack your quarterback or tackle your running back for a loss and you’ll look like a buffoon and likely kill the drive your entire team is working on.  Same goes for the operations of a small tech startup; being perfect 90% of the time means that 10% of the time you are down which will almost guarantee the failure of the entire organization – no matter how good you are in every other position.  In other words, 90% perfection isn’t even close to being good enough as an offensive lineman or a sysadmin.

Startups are a team sport where the true “skill” positions are most often behind the scenes, technical and usually very underappreciated.  In honor of football season kicking off across the U.S., I want to point out how important the tech ops folks are and say a great big thank you to every one of them.

–Keith

Finding the Product Love

Posted in: API, Blog, Game Mechanics, Improvements, Startups on August 8, 2010 | No Comments

Since our announcement of our public beta and fundraising almost two months ago, we’ve been blown away at the reaction by the market.  There is clearly a large and growing market interest in gamification and virtual economies.  In a startup there are no shortage of challenges, but we’ve been blessed to have been able to address the issues of capitalization and market desire in our first year (although these two are sure to come back into play again before too long) and are now very focused on what we call, “finding the love.”

What finding the love means to us is that we are on a mission to make our product both necessary and loved by a large number of customers.  We’ve already been hearing from a variety of our partners that the BigDoor platform has allowed them to launch game mechanics significantly faster and with more flexibility, functionality and insights than they could have accomplished without our platform.  We are encouraged and happy to hear those things.  At the same time, we recognize that in its current form you have to be a developer (or have one working for you) in order to use our platform.  That will quickly be changing.  Within the month we will be launching new functionality that will allow a non-developer to quickly and easily add game mechanics to their site.  We are confident that our first pass at this will need some work, but we’ll continue to iterate by listening to our customers, analyzing tons of data and asking lots of questions to prospective partners.

Finding the love is a journey wrapped in a process, and one that we are having a blast with.

Holiday? What Holiday?

Posted in: Blog, Development, Startups, Success on July 5, 2010 | No Comments

As a kid I recall reading a story about Thomas Edison being so wrapped up in his work that he would often times forget to eat.  I remember thinking that it would be absolutely wonderful to someday find something that I care that passionately about that my focus on my passion would drive me to forget the basic essentials of life.  When I started my first company (over 15 years ago), I quickly realized what that wonderfully passionate focus felt like.

And it’s still there with company #4, but not just with me – with everyone else on our team as well.  Last Friday as we were working through a few issues, I had a thought that maybe we should have a day off given that it’s America’s birthday and all.  I mentioned something about it to our development team and all I got were a bunch of stunned looks.  You would have thought I had just suggested we swap our dev environment to .NET or something.  After a brief pause, they each explained to me a few of the long list of things they planned to complete over the weekend and rollout on Monday and then we moved on and the conversation was forgotten.

This morning as we were all cranking away in the office, our wonderful (and apparently more considerate than me) HR person reminded me that today is an official (and documented on our Holiday Calendar) company holiday.  That’s when it struck me how amazing our team is.  Not because they’ll work themselves to the bone – that doesn’t help anything – but because they are so incredibly passionate about what it is we are doing that other details seem to suddenly matter less.  That’s when you know you are onto something cool, and when you know you have the right team to execute on the plan.

And just so you don’t think that I’m some sort of a-hole, slave driver (I am, but I don’t want you to think that); I had payroll add a day of accrued vacation for everyone who “forgot” and showed up for work today.  Now I’ve got to get back to testing…the dev guys have more stuff to rollout.

5 Things We Suck At (for now)

Posted in: API, Blog, Partners, Startups on June 27, 2010 | No Comments

As a startup with limited resources, we are keenly aware of the fact that we can’t do everything we’d like to.  Most of this will be fixed with time, but as of right now we want everything to have been done yesterday.

Over the last two weeks I’ve had the opportunity to personally walk 47 companies through our platform for the first time.  For the most part the response I get to a new demo is, “We were just getting ready to build this ourselves, I’m glad we found you.”  Most companies find that our platform is flexible, can accomplish what they need, and will be a considerably better option than building everything from the ground up internally (even the hard-core “not invented here” CTOs quickly come to this conclusion).  A few come up with use-cases that will require some added functionality for our API – which we love to find.  Some file the concept away for when they have a bit more time, most seem to dive in immediately.

I’ve been “selling” stuff in one form or another for the last 20 years and I can honestly say that I’ve never before experienced this much interest in anything I’ve been involved in.  That is very cool, but it also means we need to deliver – and “find the customer love” as we like to call it around here.  One of the best ways I know of to do that is to listen to our customers and then constantly improve on the things that are important to them.  We value transparency, so I figured we’d make a list of some of the stuff we suck at so you’ll know what it is that we are working on and getting better at:

1. We don’t have game mechanics on our own site. Lame, I know.  What’s the old saying, “The cobbler’s children have no game console” (or something like that).  The best place to demo game mechanics for a non-game site is on our own site.  We’ll get there, but for now the cobbler’s children will be forced to play with a stick and an old tire in the middle of the street.
2. Real-time analytics. Up until a week ago we had real-time aggregated analytics, with cool charts and graphs.  We built our systems from the ground up to provide deep analytics, but the process we were using for aggregating and then presenting that data was meant to be an intermediate fix.  We knew it wouldn’t scale to huge proportions, but we thought it would last for a while.  We ended up hitting our critical mass late last week, and the hourly updates to our analytics ground to a halt.  Turns out that providing deep analytics on 200 million API calls per month is tough for a startup to do.  We are cranking on a very cool new infrastructure for our analytics that will provide real-time analytics at scale and will give our platform considerably more access to analytics.  (Worth noting: All transactions and data in our API are accessible real-time, it’s just our aggregated analytics that temporarily outgrew themselves.)
3. User Interface. We’ve spent the vast majority of our time and energy making the back-end of our platform work really well, but our “front-end” tools need some work.  They may be highly functional, but they aren’t overly pretty and more importantly the design and flow isn’t always overly intuitive.  This comes from a deeply held belief that the API is more important than the GUI we slap on it, since anyone can put their own GUI on our API.  But the reality is that our GUI should set the example for the rest that are to come so we will be working to improve it.
4. We aren’t quite sure yet how to talk about our platform. Is it game mechanics, or is it a virtual economy?  Are we the scorekeepers, the accountants or are we the game builders?  Do we power virtual currency or do we enable points and reward systems? Not sure?  Neither are we.  We do all of the above, but we are still figuring out how to communicate what exactly it is that we do.  With an emerging concept comes an emerging industry and with it an emerging lexicon.  Some words mean one thing to one company and something entirely different to another.  I love discussing what it is we do and seeing how people react – even when it is painfully obvious that they are giving me the “What in the f___ did this guy just say?” look.
5. Our platform isn’t accessible enough. Jeff likes to say that we’ve built silly putty; “It can do everything, but by itself it doesn’t do anything.”  This is the way many platforms start out, but it doesn’t change the fact that it introduces the requirement that for now programmers/developers are required to implement our platform.  Our early customers love that, because they want to configure and customize their own game mechanics and virtual economy and all have great engineers to implement what their product and marketing folks design.  But we are working with the developer community to build an “apps layer” on top of our platform that will make it much easier for non-developers to add game mechanics to their site or app.  Just think how cool it will be when as a blogger, in under 10 minutes you can point and click your way to adding game mechanics and a virtual economy to your site.

Like any startup, there is a very long list of the stuff we suck at.  These are a few of ours that I’ve been focusing on and that we are working furiously to improve upon.  So tell us, what did we miss that’s bugging you and what do we need to make better?

A Fire-hose of Goodness

Posted in: API, Blog, Improvements, Startups on June 13, 2010 | 1 Comment

Here at the BigDoor nerve center we had a bit of a busy week.  We announced our funding on Tuesday which kicked off some good press, which in turn kicked off a torrent of interest in our platform.  It is amazing how many times I continue to hear, “We were just getting ready to try to build out game mechanics for our site, I’m really glad I found you guys.”

This recent press resulted in hundreds of inbound contacts from interested publishers and developers, over 100 of which registered with us last week and began utilizing our platform.  Tripling the number of “active” developers and publishers working to implement our platform has uncovered a fair amount of things that we need to do better in order to make it easier to implement.  Dozens of, “Can I see some sample code,” and “How should I best implement your platform when I’m doing ___” requests have been an incredible help to us as we work to make our systems easier to use.  Feedback and questions are as important to a startup as water is to a traveler in the desert.  So this week has been like a fire-hose of goodness.

This feedback also resulted in a fair number of updates to our platform, which we will release tomorrow.  Look for lots more reports, better documentation, clearer sample code and a bit of an improved layout by sometime tomorrow afternoon.  Coming soon; some quick instructional videos for everyone (like me) who hates reading dry, boring documentation.

All we ask is that you keep the questions and feedback coming, we love it.  And if you haven’t registered yet, what are you waiting for?  Signup now and start adding game mechanics to your site or app.  Make our digital world more fun.

Venture Capital: A Love Story

Posted in: BigDoor news, Blog, Financing, Game Mechanics, Our Thesis, Startups on June 8, 2010 | 13 Comments

Today we announced that we closed a $5 million Series B financing.  A lot of entrepreneurs complain about their investors and most see venture capital as a necessary evil – and based on our past experience we understand the sentiment.  Yet behind every deal is a story…this is ours.

Jeff and I started BigDoor in early 2009 with the grand thesis that websites and apps needed a better way to engage users and a more interesting method for making money.  That may sound a bit broad, and that was our intent because we figured that somewhere within that thesis was a really interesting business – we just weren’t quite sure yet what it would be.  My long-time friend Andy Sack, general partner of Founder’s Co-op was brave enough to make an early bet on us by writing us a check and joining our board.  The Founder’s Co-op investment was quickly matched by 11 fantastic angels, and we were off to the races.

We started out by building a “pay wall” for non-game digital publishers.  Our thought was that the same functionality that OfferPal and SuperRewards provided to the game developers would be needed by non-game websites and apps.  We worked hard, launched a product, got some great traction and then realized that there was a different role in the “stack” that was much more interesting and was begging for a solution.  We quickly concluded that we needed to kill everything we had just spent six months building and go back to the drawing board.  Given that we had only two months of cash in the bank at the time, this decision wasn’t an easy one but we felt strongly that it was necessary.  At a critical stage like this, most entrepreneurs would be exceedingly nervous to approach their investors and board to tell them that they were shifting strategy after some promising momentum and very little cash in the bank – but not so with our investors.  Andy has a favorite saying, “We know your plans are wrong, we just don’t yet know how wrong.”  This attitude as an investor and board member set the stage for us to be able to make a difficult decision significantly easier.  Jeff and I met with Andy in Vegas and told him about our plans to scrap our budding new business and technology and pursue something much bigger.  Andy listened intently, probed with questions and within 30 minutes said, “Great, let’s do it.”  Encapsulated in this one simple response is an unbelievable depth of understanding about how a startup works.  We had made commitments to Andy and our other investors, and changing direction like this meant he was willing to forget every one of those prior promises and start down a new path.  We needed more capital and more runway than initially planned, and our investors immediately got behind us.  Jeff and I toasted each other repeatedly that weekend, reminding ourselves how blessed we were to have a partner that allowed us the flexibility a startup needs in its early days.

Our small team returned the love to our investors by buckling down and working an insane amount of hours over the next few months.  When we launched our virtual economy platform with BuddyTV in February, we went from 0 users to 8 million users in an afternoon.  This was an amazing accomplishment, and one that wouldn’t have been possible without an investment partner that truly understood the twists and turns most startups must navigate to be successful.

As we were in the middle of this strategy transition, Andy introduced me to Brad Feld.  Andy warned me ahead of time that Brad hadn’t been a fan of my last company, and as we met Brad eyeballed me as if he was searching for my pitchfork and tail.  Despite his preconceived notions, Brad heard me out because he and Andy went way back and Andy was insistent.  Andy repeatedly proved that Founder’s Co-op is the best pre-venture round investor in Seattle by being our loudest and most adamant cheerleader.  Brad intrigued me because he didn’t come across like any venture capitalist I had ever met.   Brad and Andy are cut from the same cloth, have the same “I’m not going to conform” persona, and are both passionate to their core about helping startups.  I know a number of people who had worked with Brad in the past and I began hearing stories about what he was like to work with, each of them confirming that he wasn’t your typical VC.  Brad is an early investor in Zynga the undisputed king of social gaming.    Our new strategy was to arm non-game websites and apps with a platform to add game-like mechanics to their site or app (notably, not at all competitive with Zynga).  With our recent shift in strategy we knew that having Brad as a partner would give us a huge amount of credibility with potential customers, so we began stalking him.

Brad’s process was simple, he told me that he wanted to get to know me and understand our company – and that each interaction had to be more interesting than the last.  That’s it.  When I told him that we didn’t have an investor presentation put together yet he quipped, “The last thing in the world I want to see is a fucking presentation.”  That moment confirmed that we wanted him to be involved with our company – the trick was to get him to share that sentiment.  Brad and I spent the next six months getting to know each other, during which Brad and his partners repeatedly drilled us on our thinking, our strategy, our technology and our market approach.  We told him we would invite him into the “sausage making” process, and he readily donned his hairnet and dove in.  We mostly went back and forth via email, where niceties were commonly replaced with a raw curiosity of how best to build BigDoor and how we would meet the coming onslaught of demand for our platform.  Brad was direct and often told me where he thought I was wrong, which laid the groundwork for me being able to do the same with him.  We found some common ground and a fair amount of areas to disagree and challenge each other.  We joked about 80’s bands, compared reading lists and shared paranoid rants about how machines will eventually take over the world (they will).  But what’s most notable is what we didn’t discuss.  Never once did anyone at Foundry ask us for projections or historical financials.  We didn’t talk about the deal, valuation or board composition and we never talked about exit timing or how much money they needed to make.  Product, customers and philosophy – that’s where we spent our time.

On two separate occasions Brad told me he was “out” and wasn’t going to invest.  Both times Andy gave me a strong (and encouraging) kick in the ass and gave me another of his favorite quotes, “The word ‘no’ is simply a milestone on the path to ‘yes’.”  This emboldened me to go back to Brad and tell him he was wrong and that he was the perfect partner for us.  I made no attempt at all to posture or play hard to get – and on more than one occasion I equated the whole process to a negotiation conducted with our pants around our ankles.  This wasn’t done out of desperation – we had multiple offers from other great VCs – we conducted ourselves in a completely transparent fashion because that’s how Foundry was toward us.

Our plan had been to wait until later this year to really begin seeking venture capital, but the conversations with Foundry continued until one day Brad sent an email that said, “Ok – I’m ready (and psyched) to do a deal.”  He then laid out deal terms in one very simple paragraph.  I responded with a very long email that ultimately asked for just one change, and he simply responded with “Deal.”  That was it, that email exchange was the extent of our term sheet.  Instead of grinding us on terms, Brad spent the three weeks from our agreement to closing making introductions for us to potential customers.

Jeff and I have raised just over $190 million in various debt and equity financings over the past 10 years, and I can honestly say that we’ve never had a deal go this smooth nor have we ever had anyone who was so awesome to work with on the other side of the table.  The reason for this is that like Founder’s Co-op, Foundry has a deep understanding of the stage of company they are dealing with.  If we were three more years down the road, the diligence process would have been completely different – but at this point Foundry knows that forcing us to spit out balance sheets and two year financial projections would be a complete and utter waste of time.  Instead we spent our time making sure we were aligned philosophically and strategically; knowing full well that there will be time for the serious business when we actually have a business to be serious about.  This has allowed us to focus on our customers and to be maniacal about discovering what they love (and hate) about our platform.

I’m sure many people will accuse me of being a “Sack and Feld Fanboy” (which I am).  Having partners that truly understand startups and create an environment where we can focus on what matters is worth every bit as much as the checks they write.  We currently have 27 different developers and publishers who are actively in the process of implementing our platform that are direct introductions from one of our investors.  Having great investors isn’t just about warm fuzzies, it should (and does) also result in real customers.

So that’s our story.  It reads (and feels) more like a romance than a venture financing.  Only time will tell if the romance will continue, but at this point I’m highly optimistic that we have two financial partners in Founder’s Co-op and Foundry that will help us through the many ups and downs awaiting us as we endeavor to weave the BigDoor platform into the very fabric of the Internet.

The “Startup Two-Step”

Posted in: BigDoor news, Blog, Game Mechanics, Our Thesis, Startups, Virtual Currency on May 16, 2010 | No Comments

If you’ve been following this blog you may have noticed that we’ve gone completely silent for going on five months now.  The reason for our silence is because we’ve been heads down on some very interesting things, but it’s time we pick our heads back up and start telling everyone what we’ve been up to.

There is a wonderful axiom among startup companies that “no business plan survives its first encounter with a customer.”  Ours was no different.  We started BigDoor with a very big vision and a core thesis – and while those remain our guiding principles, we’ve significantly shifted our business model, our product and our strategy.  The Lean Startup folks (lead by the incredibly bright and talented Eric Ries) call this the “pivot”, but we’ve always referred to it much less eloquently as the “startup two-step”.  Call it what you will, but it is all part of the process a startup goes through in finding the right strategy, the right customers, the right technology and the right business model.

The “two-step” is a critical part of the “Lamplighter” methodology that Jeff and I have been utilizing for the last dozen years.  Our Lamplighter Theory states that that as a startup we need a large and guiding thesis that tells us where we want to go, yet it recognizes that we really have no idea what the incremental steps will be to get there.  I envision Lamplighter as if I’m standing on a hilltop and off in the distance is another hilltop that is drenched with sunlight, flowers, rainbows, butterflies and unicorns – yet between us is a dark valley filled with bogs, moats, thorns and other scary things.  The sundrenched hilltop in the distance represents our business when it is profitable and scaling – the valley in between holds the pitfalls that kill most young companies.

There is undoubtedly at least one path through the dark valley, but the paths are obscured and unknown from our current perspective.  To get to the fluffy, magic hilltop in the distance we must light a lamppost which will allow us to see just far enough into the dark valley to get to the next lamppost, which we will light when we get there and so on until we ultimately make our way through what seemed like an impossible barrier.  Looking back at the lit lampposts that lit our path will show the route we ultimately took may have been a bit windy with a fair amount of severe turns, but thinking one knows the path intuitively through the dangerous and dark canyon will most often lead to ruin.  The light from the lampposts are provided by many sources, but often the most important source is from current and potential customers.  Speaking with and listening to our potential customers is something we love to do, and we want to say a huge thank you to each of you who have helped enlighten us so far.

So it was in keeping with our Lamplighter methodology that we decided to take a severe turn last year.  We did the “two-step”, took a sharp left turn and began developing a platform that helps publishers build loyalty programs and game-like mechanics into their site or app through points, badges, levels, virtual currency and virtual goods.  We quietly launched with our first customer in March, and currently have an additional 18 companies that are in the process of implementing our platform.

We predict that by 2012 half of all sites and apps will employ some form of game mechanics or virtual economy components.  We are working to build a platform that is as powerful as it is extensible in order to help make this prediction a reality.

How to Succeed In A Startup

Posted in: Blog, Startups on December 3, 2009 | 1 Comment

While this blog discusses the elements that have helped me succeed in a startup environment it could just as easily be titled “Suggestions for success as a recent graduate” as it’s good advice for anyone entering a new field.  These points have also been written with a slant towards those in the software development world, my own area of expertise.

Find A Mentor:

Your first job is one of the greatest learning opportunities of your life and you should be prepared to make the most of it. When you find someone to learn from, everyone wins. It gives the mentor a sense of fulfillment and provides you with the chance to continue your education in a less formal environment. Try to learn from the design patterns that they use, how they leverage different technologies and the organizational patterns they follow in their code. This does not mean you should duplicate them exactly, but if they have been at the software development game for a while, there’s a good chance they know what they’re doing.

Require Transparency:

Young or old, startup or massive corporation, by accepting employment at any company you are trusting your livelihood with those who are employing you. They should respect this trust by keeping you informed of the financial status of the company as well as any uncertainty regarding your employment. Anything less shows a lack of respect for employees and poor character on the part of those employing you.

Take Ownership Of Your Product:

Your first software development position affords you the opportunity to establish a reputation as a quality coder and employee which will follow you for the rest of your career. Make the most of it! This is your code, your product, your culture, your time to shine. Particularly if you are fortunate enough to be on the ground floor of development, you have the opportunity to cement yourself as the “go to” engineer.

The benefits reach beyond your reputation as a software engineer and into the areas of job security, respect and success.
These are all simply points that I have picked up in my own short time as a software engineer. If you have any to add to the list, please, comment!

–Ben

A Dream and a Chasm

Posted in: Blog, Public beta, Startups on October 28, 2009 | 2 Comments

Ever notice that when you are insanely passionate about something it tends to occupy every space in your brain, including your dreams?  I’m certainly in that position right now as we are working like crazy to improve upon the BigDoor beta and continue to scale and add more partners.  So it’s no surprise that our product is playing a starring role in my dreams as well, and last night’s was particularly entertaining.

In my dream I was standing on the edge of a windblown cliff, staring across a massive chasm that seemed to have no bottom.  The wind was blowing so hard it was difficult to hear a thing and there was a distinct chill in the air, apparently because there was no sun above – just angry clouds.  Across the chasm was another cliff edge that was equally as hard and sharp, but then beyond that were meadows with green grass, gentle rolling hills, plenty of sunshine and I believe even a bunny rabbit or two.  Any casual observer of my dream would have instantly understood the meaning of the chasm, and apparently the goal of getting a customer or two to get across this thing is deeply rooted in my subconscious.

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