Chad Hutchins

This article, authored by Tony Wright, is a nice breakdown of the traits of two types of entrepreneurs; builder entrepreneurs and business entrepreneurs. Builder entrepreneurs are those who “designed, coded, played sysadmin, and played all sorts of other production roles for their startups”. Tony goes on to write that business entrepreneurs don’t “really have a useful role to play in the very earliest stages of a software startup”.

After reading the article and browsing around Tony’s site a little, I found a cool product that Tony’s current startup is working on, called RescueTime. It is the Google Analytics and Mint.com of “what I spend my time on when on the computer”. RescueTime calls itself “ridiculously easy time management software”. Just as in Google Analytics you see nice dashboards and graphs of your website visitor statistics and just as in Mint you can easily understand where your money is going without doing much at all, RescueTime allows a user to download a plugin (Mac or PC), the plugin then aggregates data while you are using your computer and with no extra work involved at all, RescueTime shows you charts and graphs about where you are spending your time. If you often complain about not getting things done during the day because of X, Y and Z. Use RescueTime to find what they are.

Interesting video interview with the Ruby on Rails founder.

source: O’Reilly

Also… testing to see if my Wordpress Twitter Updater Plugin is working.

What is that, you ask? Social Web Research is something for everyone. The world is changing. Traditional marketing mediums are losing their competitive edge. Look at how president-elect Obama took the election, with a grass-roots, very much web-enabled approach. By using the social web mediums, Obama and his team were able to mobilize volunteers and spread his campaign across the nation. Organizations try, over and over again, to engage their customers and opportunities with traditional mediums, with little luck and/or trackability. I hope you know or are becoming to know that you should engage all of your users and opportunities on the social web, but where do you start? You start with Social Web Research. Social Web Research finds where your users live (yes, live) on the social web across several social networking platforms. Using already public-facing information and given your client data set, we quickly provide a report showing a general overview of where your users are on the social web. Along with the results, we provide our suggested plan of action to engage your target audience. Our goal is to bring awareness of the social web to organizations and to show others how it will be an important and effective tool for their organizations in the future. If you have any questions, comments or concerns about the service, please contact me. I’ll be happy to answer. Oh yea… and this is another project from those Big Tech Onoins.

How about some practical examples:

I am associated with an educational institution. We know our students are actively using the web. We really want to find ways to enable and engage our students on these internet mediums. - We would love to help you out. Social Web Research is the right place to start. Don’t waste time spinning your wheels on ideas that don’t line up with where your students live on the web.

I am niche-market company who sells a gadget, but mostly to an older demographic. We see the changes in the world and understand that we need to engage this very mobilized and younger generation to keep business strong for the coming years. - With basic research and some solid recommendations, Social Web Research will show this example organization how to take their business to the next level.

I am in a band, currently have a MySpace page, and have seen positive results from it. But, that is all I have. I have a fan list that I email regularly. I would really like to see where else my fans are on the web. Would they benefit more from a MySpace application? a Facebook application? Interaction via Bebo or LinkedIn? - All of these questions will be answered from the results of Social Web Research report.

I am a politician, I am intrigued by the web tactics used by opponents engaging their constituents. We have been collecting data on our voters for years, surely it could be used for this research. - Absolutely. With Social Web Research, you and your team will have the information needed to know how to fully-engage your voters on the web.

Last night, a few friends and I had dinner with Michael Staton, a founder of Inigral. Michael has been in Abilene this week visiting ACU. ACU will be piloting Inigral’s Schools on Facebook. In our conversation, an interesting topic was brought up about the make up of a successful start-up. In my past, so far mostly unsuccessful, I have learned a few guidelines that I will follow on my next venture. Here are the first two: 1) All co-founders must have some sort of programming ability 2) All co-founders must be personally interested in the utility the project will bring; the opposite of being interested because it is a good idea, because it could make a lot of money or because it could lead into bigger and better things, etc. etc.

To me, having all co-founders with the ability to crank out some code is a very valuable asset, especially for the early stages of a start-up. The ability to work on the idea intensely and get out something as quickly as possible is very important for a web start-up. The web moves fast and more likely than not someone has either implemented or working on your idea in some capacity. Getting early feedback from potential users is also helpful and smart to seek out. To investors, a prototype with some alpha users could never be a bad thing. Michael only half way agreed with my first guideline, and rightly so. He explained that there will always be things that, as a developer, I will not want to mess with: payroll, accounting, HR, and the list goes on. These things will always be there, but in my mind it seems reasonable to believe that I can find a business-minded person, a great HR-minded person and a great you-name-it who happened to take the time to pick up some coding skills. Michael stressed to the other two at the table (non-developers) at how picking up a language would be the smartest thing they could do right now. He told them to find the right book on the desired language and lock yourself in a room until you get through it. Hopefully the guys at the table were listening. The business developer with coding skills will most likely never get to the level of the behind-the-scenes code monkey, in terms of software development, but having at least a knowledge of how things work will help in many places in business development. When a potential partner approaches my bus. dev. guy who has a sense of how development works, he/she can sift through the buzz words and bull crap he/she might hear. When we need to hire a new developer, my code-experienced HR person can handle the entire interview him/herself with minimal interruptions to the hard-core developers. The ability to throw some working code on the page goes a long ways.

Secondly, all co-founders need to have a genuine interest and users of the final product or application. I think this quality in a start-up team helps significantly with follow-through and the hard times. The reasons a group wants to start a company is one of the first things I like to know about when talking to start-ups. I think is an important indicator to speak to their future success. When someone tells me making a ton of money is their primary goal with their start-up, it is an instant red flag to me. Money is a big influence on most people in most situations, but it will only get you so far. For those of you that have made that website, under-priced with scope-creep off the page, for an acquaintance that you thought would be easy and some nice cash on the side, you know what I mean when the “how much I’m making” wears off. On the other hand if I were working on a cause I believed in, plus getting paid (in cash or equity), my personal feelings towards the project are easily positive and I want to see the project through to the end even more. Michael Staton has a passion, he wants to solve big higher education problems by being creative with the social web. He has been working hard at Inigral for several months now and has just recently found out how they will do exactly that; solve higher education problems. Had Michael thought co-founding Inigral would be simply a way to make a name and a fortune, I have a feeling he would have been done a long time ago. Now don’t get me wrong, I hope making a name for himself and a fortune along the way are by-products of Michael’s efforts, but let it be known he has a much higher chance of being successful at Inigral in the long term because he has genuine interest in the cause he is working for.

It has been a crazy week and a half. Starting with FOWA, Jon Hinson (code monkey and co-founder of TeacherHubs, sole-developer of Get a Roomy) and I had a great time listening to all of the speakers. We were able to meet Kevin Rose of Digg and Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary TV. The networking opportunities were great. At the FOWA after party, we were able to meet the creator of CakePHP, Blaine Cook the developer of Twitter, one of the Ustream guys and many others.

Being in Miami was a first for me. Missing my flight from Miami to DFW was also a first for me. How in the world do you miss a flight? Well, after a really late night with the Villij and Socialthing! guys. We had to be at Miami International Airport at 4:30am to catch our insanely early flight. Jon and I got back to the hotel around 3am, and somehow I thought I would be a good idea to sleep for an hour. One hour turned into four hours, and it was quickly 7am. So, we hurried to the airport, waited in a few lines, explained our situation, and we were on our way in no time. I have to say, I have been impressed with American Airlines this past week.

Once I got back to Abilene Saturday night, I was able to hang out with Carla for a little while. I can’t wait to take her with me on these trips! Sunday morning, the rest of the TeacherHubs team and I got up and started our journey to Boulder, CO. Arron of villij was a huge help by giving us a few rides and letting us stay at his place for the week. During our stay in Boulder, not only did we crank out a lot of code and get several things lined up for TeacherHubs, we attended Boulder Open Coffee, Boulder New Tech Meetup and most importantly TechStars for a day. I was able to meet so many people. The community in Boulder is quite incredible. It is definitely a future Silicon Valley. I talked to more entrepreneurs and investors during those three days than I have my entire life. Unfortunately, Thursday morning finally came, and I had to head back to the reality of all the school and work I had missed, but hey, I got to see Carla again

For a few more firsts, Jon, Jordan and I left Boulder by bus at 10:30am. Once we arrived at Denver International, we learned that all flights in and out of DFW had been canceled for the rest of the day. Who would have thought a huge snow storm would have rolled through Texas in March?! This was the first time a flight of mine was canceled. So after a couple of hours of being in and out of phone calls with American Airlines, we had all nailed down new flight arrangements. Another first, I would be spending the night in an airport. As the night progressed, Jon left on a lucky route from Denver to Houston to Abilene, and Jordan and I actually found a United Airlines flight from Denver to Dallas at 8:30pm. So we took it. After riding the sky tram at DFW a couple of times and checking out the international hub (which is extremely nice and looks like a mall) of DFW, we headed back to our gate, found a few airport supplied cots, and slept.

The next morning, Jordan flew off to Shreveport where his parents would pick him up, and I had a flight to Abilene at 9:30am. Due to all of the planes needing de-icing and other delays throughout the states, my plan didn’t pull out of DFW until 2:00pm. I finally arrived in Abilene and was picked up by Carla at 3:30pm on Friday.

During all the time at the airport, I did manage to get some work done. I created a simple twitter mashup for a very active web-savvy teacher, who goes by coolcatteacher. She had found Pulse of Open Source one day and thought it would be cool if there was a Pulse of Education. Having stumbled upon her comment, I thought it would be simple enough. So I bought the name and made it happen. Check it out: Pulse of Education.

All of that was a ton a fun, but as I said earlier, I did miss over a week of school and work. It is going to be crazy for the next week.

I am a busy guy. I probably always will be. We all have our own stories of busyness, and since this is my blog, I will tell you about mine: I have a lovely fiance who I love to hang out with! I work 25+ hours a week at Milsoft. I have eight hours of upper level computer science courses at ACU (who randomly made Engadget today), which easily translates to another eight hours of outside homework. I am active in intramurals with my fraternity, Gamma Sigma Phi. I am the acting Treasurer of my fraternity. My business partner, Jon Hinson, and I have been staying up until 2 or 3am every night and getting up at 6am in the morning trying to complete everything that needs to be completed for our various activities we are involved with. (I feel like I have mentioned all this before…) The list goes on…

So how do I make time for the two business ventures I am working on? It is a simple concept, but tough to carry out sometimes. I constantly find ways to combine what I want to do with the work that I have to do. Get creative with it. For example, in two of my computer science courses this semester I have managed to convince the professors that I should be working on my business ventures as the final projects of the classes. TeacherHubs and my other venture happen to work well with the course work, and with a little smooth talking, I am able to be working on what I want, while accomplishing the goals of my classes. There are also plenty of ways this can apply to the jobs you might be working at. I have always wanted to dabble with the Google Maps API. It just so happens Milsoft needs a map-like tool to visualize and interact with their customers. So, I suggested we use Google Maps on the project and away we go. Now, I get to learn something about Google Maps’ API and help out the company. Making time for fun new ventures is all about finding ways to combine what I want to do with the work that I have to do.

You might say, “well my boss/professor would never let me do that.” Have you asked? You don’t know what he/she will say until you ask. You have nothing to lose, only time and freedom to gain. Even if your first time of asking your boss/professor doesn’t work out, shape your idea a little differently to fit more with the goals of your business/class and ask again. It took me three go-arounds to convince my Object-Oriented Design professor to let me work on my own project. Go ahead, give it a try. You won’t know until you ask.

I cannot wait to graduate!

I am tired of homework. I am tired of class breaking my work rhythm. I am tired of working on assignments that have nothing to do with any of my current ventures. I am tired of teachers who won’t look at the bigger picture and let me apply my current ventures to our course topics.

I am ready to graduate. I am ready to get married! I am ready to work full-time on TeacherHubs and another start-up I can’t really talk about at the moment. I am ready to move out of my crappy old house and move somewhere nice, hopefully Boulder working at TechStars (fingers crossed).

I have had these feelings for quite a while now, but they really kicked in beginning with the FOWD conference in New York City in November. I have seen how close I really am to having my own web start-up. I read the blogs of successful entrepreneurs and investors, such as Mark Cuban and the crew at Colorado Startups. At FOWD, Jon (one of my roommates) and I met some awesome guys from Boulder, CO who founded SocialThing! (they are doing some really cool things, head over there to sign up for their private beta). They were one of the companies to benefit from the TechStars program. After attending ACU’s Leadership Summit, Jon, Jordan (a fellow business partner), and I were able to hang out with the SocialThing! guys for a few days. They showed us around the Bunker and introduced us to some really cool people, notably the guys from Villij. Visiting Boulder blew my small-minded outlook that location is irrelevant these days because of the internet. The networking possibilities were infinite. Whether or not our company gets selected by TechStars, Boulder is at the top of my list for where I want to live come May 10th.

I’m sure it seems apparent, but all of this excites me! I want it all, and I want it now. I have to continually remember to slow down. Keep a forward-looking vision, but complete the job that is at hand today. It is going to be a crazy semester. I am headed to San Jose, CA to SugarCon next week for my job that pays the bills at Milsoft. Jon and I will be attending the FOWD conference in Miami towards the end of February. Jon and I (and hopefully Jordan) will be driving (yes, driving. to save a few badly needed bucks) back to Boulder for TechStars for a day. Shortly after that, we are trying to head down to Austin, TX for SXSW to support SocialThing!’s official launch.

It will be an awesome semester, minus the whole school part…

As I was cleaning my room tonight (a very rare occasion), I was trying to organize all of the stuff that didn’t need to be washed or thrown away. I came to my jackets, and I needed a place to put them. My first thought was “just hang them in the closet”, but I don’t want to open my closet door, re-hang my jacket, and close the closet door every time I come in and out of the house. So I knew right away what I needed, a coat rack.

Yes, my walls are a very feminine color. I am out of this rent house in five months. I and you can deal with it.

From what I have learned about myself the last twenty-two years, if I don’t get a coat rack right away my jackets will continue to be left on the floor. So, like any good wanna be entrepreneur, I improvised. If I can’t make a coat rack out of my immediately available materials, what good am I? After searching around the heavily cluttered room for a while, I found a roll of duct tape, two flimsy metal hangers, and a heavy duty plastic hanger. After using most of the tape and destroying a few hangers, I feel like I have a fairly decent coat rack. We shall see how long it holds up.

On another note, this sort of thing just reminds of the need I have for creating things, things that are useful. It is challenging. It is practical. It isn’t a waste of time (I saved at least five bucks). I have been working for quite a while now (my entire college career, which is coming to a close very soon) on brainstorming and implementing ideas that help people do things easier. Even though I only have several mock-ups of failed ideas, a few implementations of concepts I didn’t even want to use, and an idea that actually is helping some teachers out at the good ole Whitehouse High School, I truly believe I will find an idea that I will design and implement (Create!) that people will enjoy using because it enables and empowers them to do something special.