Startup Journey Part I: From R&D to Commercial Release

Founding a technology startup is no trivial matter. Managing it through various research & development stages to an actual commercial release was fraught with countless successes and failures. Some have heard me mutter, if I could only start over again I could have done it in a 1/3rd of the time and for a 1/3rd of what I spent. But alas, a requirement of bringing a startup to fruition is staying grounded in reality, not dwelling on time travel, and assigning the lessons of the journey to experience gained.

Today, Thursday April 9th 2009, the commercial version of our technology has been officially released, and the startup begins a new set of lifecycle stages. To our advantage, as we move from an R&D technology shop to a commercially available technology, we actually have a business model. That might sound like a prerequisite to some, but as you may have read, there are still a number of well-funded startups that do not. We built the business model in parallel to the technical architecture stage, back in January 2007. During that time of infancy, we produced a significant amount of paper, burned through two projector bulbs, and used up many sets of dry erase markers. From my past experiences at IBM and other “process and procedure intense” organizations, I knew we needed to go into this as prepared as possible. Our business plan was roughly 30 pages long, the technical architectural documentation and diagrams were over 100 pages, and we had a massive spreadsheet containing our business model, changeable assumptions, and cash flow forecasts. With that, we were ready to go out and conquer the world, or, at least a particular technical niche – cloud messaging, also known as message-oriented cloud middleware.

Cloud messaging is a very exciting, behind-the-scenes infrastructure technology – the importance of which often gets overlooked. It is a necessary foundation for any cloud operating service model. Our goal when we started in January 2007 was to dramatically simplify the creation of communication-based products and services by taking care of all of the communication plumbing. What Linxter offers is all of the complexities of a well-governed, secure, reliable, asynchronous, stateful messaging framework, wrapped up in a very easy to use service package for developers. Each of those terms used above is not just a buzz word, but in fact have specific meanings to those that have worked in this space before.

So, with that much planning, what could go wrong? Well, my advice to anyone thinking of launching their own startup: just say no, don’t do it. That is said of course in jest, but, with significant warning behind it. Remember that old adage of success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration? Well, there is great truth to that. It feels like we have been on an episode of Survivor for over two years. Startups are one major endurance contest. You must maintain an energetic and engaged mental state while on the verge of running out of food, fearing elimination from both known and unknown threats, and suffering from constant sleep deprivation. It becomes even more arduous when you are married and have two young children whom you wish to spend time with. Of course, if you actually beat the odds (and they are heavily stacked against you), the thought is one day you get to look back on it all and say, “wow, what a great time that was”. Well, we are still working on getting to that point, so, I’ll get back to you on that…

I frequently hear people commenting about the pros and cons of outsourcing various technical work. From my experience (scar tissue) on the subject matter, my basic comment is that it’s all about the individual or group of individuals you have contracted. Whether they work in your office, the next town over, in another state or in another country does not matter. It comes down to an individual’s actual skill set and character (work ethic and integrity). There are of course various organizational issues, but I have always found that these are more readily addressed than the former.

Another old adage you hear, aside from the perspiration one, is to not hire your friends. Unfortunately, you don’t always get to hear the follow-up from that which is “why not?” Well, here is the answer. Sometimes you have to let people go. Maybe because of budget cuts, maybe work ethic …there are many unexpected things that can happen. If it is a friend that you have to cut, it makes things that much more difficult. From a business perspective, the choice may be very clear, even unavoidable. But emotionally, that’s a tough situation. If you do want to lead a startup to success, you have to make decisions for what is best for the startup.

We began to emerge from the dark tunnel of R&D and see real sunlight beginning in October 2008 with articles written about Linxter by both Michael Vizard of eWeek and Chris Kanaracus of IDG News Service. Shortly after releasing our 4th and final public beta in December 2008, we were chosen by Microsoft as their Startup of the Day, which, despite the name, it is not an everyday occurrence. We were also sponsored into their BizSpark program which is resulting in huge cost savings and networking opportunities for us.

I cannot stress enough how important networking is. It’s never too early to network (be careful not to confuse networking with marketing – marketing too early isn’t good – save those resources for when your commercial product is ready to go). I’ve found that networking early has been advantageous – talking about my technology while it was still in R&D meant my listeners didn’t have to fear a sales pitch was headed their way. This has made it much easier to form all kinds of mutually beneficial relationships – not only with individual developers, but with organizations and corporations as well.

Early next week our press release goes out, and the following week we plan to release our first open source sample program that uses the Linxter technology – Boat Battle. It is a multi-player virtual naval battle game. The idea is to show developers how easy it is for them build their own multi-player games. In the following weeks and months, we’ll release a series of open source sample apps that hit various vertical markets, which I’ll cover more in a Startup Journey Part II post about the challenges of taking a technology into the marketplace.

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