Seth Godin wrote a fantastic blog entry today entitled The Secret of the Web wherein he outlines the dangers of start-up companies who pitch their ideas, and then work as hard they can for a brief period of time to make the idea go big. To use a quote from Mr. Godin:

“I discovered a lucky secret the hard way about thirty years ago: you can outlast the other guys if you try. If you stick at stuff that bores them, it accrues. Drip, drip, drip you win.”

Using the “make it big, fast” mentality, if your site goes big, you’re a success without hardly having to try. If it fails (in that short period of time) call it a bad idea, blame it on your users, call the market “not ready” and move on. Ad infinitum.

I guess this is the reason we started this blog, really. David and I saw this happening before our very eyes, but by the time we recognized what was happening, we were too late. Had we launched our flagship product, been humble about our growth and fostered healthy community around a needed service, we could have made it.

However, just as the article indicates, we were trapped in an unhealthy mindset. We wanted to be good, and we wanted it now, but things just don’t work that way.

Over the next few months we’re going to chronicle exactly what that looked like for us. To be honest, we had both “the right way” and “the wrong way” right in front of us, and (call if lack of inexperience, overexcitement, or what have you) we took the latter.  Give the article a try, and then subscribe to our feed to watch what that looked like for us, and how we would have prevented it.

My experience at A* was certainly an eclectic one from the start to say the least, but the decision to join the company was not one that was made overnight. El Jefe, the company’s founder, was someone that I had worked with before. When I was in college he had co-founded another company, a web development and marketing company, which basically was where I began my career. His passion at the time was in web marketing and specifically in search engine marketing and optimization. Eventually this facet of online marketing became a passion of mine as well.

After a couple years of working with El Jefe and his company, things began to unravel a bit, especially in terms of tension and animosity that seemed to arise between El Jefe and his business partner. Eventually El Jefe severed ties with the company he co-founded to pursue projects on his own, and I too left the company. Despite the schism that broke apart this company, which is no longer in existence, my relationship with El Jefe remained strong as both a good friend and a mentor. I felt at the time that he had patience and a long-term vision when it came to each and every project he worked on, whether it was for a client or an internal project.

This is what seemed to separate El Jefe from his business partner who struck me as an Internet-business equivalent of a used car salesmen – impatient, always looking for loopholes and shortcuts to easy money, and simply being out of touch with sound, long-term business strategies and ideas. These business partners often worked on projects independently of each even though they were within the same company, and while El Jefe projects didn’t always involve making money within a matter of days, they all showed a mature insight into the ultimate goals and business models for each one.

Meanwhile, his partner’s projects resulted in him working on something for a couple days straight, pushing it live, and then after a couple days if it didn’t make any money the project would then be terminated before moving on to something else rather than seeing it through. For me, this mature insight was one of the main reasons that made me really respect and trust the decisions and leadership that El Jefe brought to the table.

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