Update

I am too fucking lazy to make a daily journal -- yet every day I lament the fact that I have no record of my life.  You could call it a Catch 22.  You could also call it lame-as-fucking-hell-you-lack-drive-you-stupid-indolent-son-of-a-whore.  (no offense mom, it's a term of art.)

So the gist of it is this:

• I had received semi-bad advice that I could build this platform entirely on Wordpress and then either handle the math manually or I could have someone build a plug-in in PHP that would do the math so that the website was responsive rather than static.
• I pursued this path for 3 months.  In month 4, I brought in one of my best friends M., an asp.net developer, to build this program in PHP.  He spent a month learning PHP and prepping for this weeklong hackathon.  
• He arrives.  It is great.  We spend 5 days trying to build a PHP plug-in. 
• Turns out Wordpress is a pain in the ass.  Learning how to plug-into PHP is as big of a problem as actually building an entirely new platform.  And it's gonna be buggy no matter what. 
• We pivot 5 days into his weeklong visit.  Scrap the entire Wordpress concept, move to a completely custom built web application in Ruby on Rails.  M. has never coded in Ruby on Rails before.  
• M. spends 4 days furiously learning, synthesizing and building the Ruby on Rails app.  He gets to about 70%.  The difficult 30% lies ahead.  He goes home, leaving me grateful.  
• We are left rudderless.  No developer, just a front-end developer, and a web application that requires Ruby on Rails.   Four months and nothing to show for it, and now I need a fucking developer. 
• We talk to the single developer who finds promise in our concept.  He thinks it is compelling.  He is a great developer.  We have dinner with him downtown to discuss customer acquisition with the secret hope to somehow get him involved in our project as a developer.   He is a ruby on rails guy.  He is extremely intelligent and articulate.  He understands what we are doing.  
• He tells us, in nicer terms:  What the fuck are you doing?  You guys know what you're doing.  You know the law, you know the economics, you know the market, you are more prepared than anyone I've met.  What is the hold up?  Why haven't you launched?  Is your concept validated?  Why not set up a dummy page that makes people pledge to a local business and then have it lead nowhere, just so you can validate the concept?  Just go and do it.  Do it.  Doesn't have to be pretty.  Doesn't need bells and whistles.  It just has to work.  It has to be validated.  Get your own friends to fund the loan if need be.  Just do it.
• Stunned.
• That is a very good point.
• What the fuck have I been doing for months?
• Immediately pivot again.  Launch now.  Launch now.  Get it in the world.  Learn from it.  ASAP. 
• Set up an appointment with a major venture capital firm for a product feedback session in exactly one month. 
• Attending Slow Money National Gathering for a week, the week before the meeting with the venture capital firm.   Have the prototype ready so you can talk about it.  Describe it.  Demo it on an iPad.  Get investors.  Have a product to sell when you hit the ground.  That's three weeks away.
• Holy shit, October is going to be fucked.  
• But the malaise is over.  It is balls to the wall, get this shit built time.  

Hence, slightly less time for the blogging and the updating.  I spend my days looking at html mock-ups, mark them up, build the contracts, write and re-write the copy for the website.  Think about models.  Think about businesses.  Think about how to get the money.   Figure out how to calculate debt coverage ratios.  Everything it takes. 

Yay.

New Rules

No rockstars
No gurus
No mavens
No annoying bullshit

I would consider this a pretty good day.  I have shed my lethargy, self-doubt and mild depression for a day and we have made some good progress.

I was busy all day, did some good work for my new part-time lawyering gig, and we have somehow gotten the opportunity to get some intense product feedback from brilliant minds at a major VC firm.  It is very exciting.

Today marks the beginning of a descent into UI/UX and product management.  This should be good. 

September 15

We are midweek (or a little past) in our weeklong Hackathon to get the website up and running.  The original plan was to build with a wordpress front-end and build some sort of hybrid back-end which involved manual entries and a PHP wordpress plug-in to run some of the instantaneous calculations that had to be built.  The original plan was to go fully in php and work with wordpress, but after three days of toiling and figuring out what he could do, my buddy M. (who traveled up from Charleston to help out), had a long conversation with me about next steps...and together we all decided to scrap the entire wordpress build out and have M. build a completely custom web application with Rails.  A little scary because of the huge pivot and change in how we are going to progress, but I think it makes sense.

First, we are no longer going to be fighting wordpress for beta.  Second, the manual nature of the website is unacceptable.  If users do not have instant gratification with the least possible friction, then the website is dead.  A single annoyance kill the experience.  Third, this will allow J. to focus more strongly on UX and UI components and mapping out the best ways to improve the way the site works and feels. Fourth, I think the web app, although primitive and basic, will be far more responsive than wordpress.  This was the way to go.  Ultimately, it is a difficult transition to suddenly make 4 months in, but it had to be done.

Today was also the crowdfunding hearing before the House Oversight Committee.  The panel was pretty persuasive and pretty excellent at putting together their argument.  I thought I would be annoyed to watch it, but i was actually pretty impressed.  I will certainly watch it in full, take notes and put up a full blogpost on the company blog.

I also spent a couple of hours going over Slow Money NYC documentation relating to setting up a loan fund for food-related businesses and investments.  I had been putting it off, but I took the time and finally put pen to paper.  Hopefully it's helpful.  Realistically, all I do is raise a bunch of problems no one cares about.  Some part of me is still a lawyer I guess.

I also interviewed another student intern from Columbia.  This time, the student was aiming to work in equity research for a large investment firm, as a goal.  As well as to learn about working in an American work setting.  Unfortunately, we don't really offer either of those things.  He was a nice kid though.  He just wanted something else.  This will be my first time having to reject someone outright, so that'll be interesting.

In more interesting news, I got a part-time job today.  I will be working as a flex time out of the office immigration attorney.  Now I have some income to supplement my life.  Whoo.

September 12

Today wasn't the greatest day. 

It isn't that today was an exceptionally bad day either.  I am not unhappy and I am not distraught, but it just didn't feel great from the very beginning. 

I woke up at 7 am this morning, awakened by a mistaken alarm setting by K, and I quickly began thinking about the progress I have made on my business.  I began to worry that I was not nearly as close to my goals as I had hoped.  I entered the half-delirious dream state where anxiety dominates clear thinking and you float along on the surface of emotion, not able to surface into wakefulness and rationality.  What if this is me failing?  What if this was not the right choice?  What if I'm just not really cut out for doing something meaningful in my life, and I am doomed to some sort of lazy mediocrity?  What is holding me back?  Why can't I stop being such a goddamn coward and get out there and push and fight and shout at the world  It's not in me, but it needs to be.  And it will be.  But jesus christ am I not inherently built for this. 

Anyhow, I woke up at 7 am and ran straight to the gym.  My workout was lackluster at best.  I gave up on sets one or two reps too early, I didn't push too hard, I didn't work up my lungs at all during the lift.  It was just going through the motions.  Strike two. 

I came home and roused M., who is in town for the week, in theory to help me code an application plug-in for my website, which is being built in Wordpress.  I had intended on introducing him to the immense joys of riding a bicycle over the bridge to work, but my bike, Leopold had been stolen the night before.  I walked into a football game at 8:20 pm, locking my bike on busy 3rd Street, with my helmet attached to the lock.  I walked out at 10:30, lock laying coiled around the signpost, helmet still appended, bicycle gone, lock cleanly cut through with a single chop.  FUCKING SAVAGES.    This is the second bicycle I've had stolen.   First, Marjorine.  Now, Leopold.  What do these people look like?  Who is stealing MY bikes?  What type of person walks down a street and steals a deeply personal possession from another human being?  What savage am I going to beat senselessly if I ever see them?  It is so deeply disappointing. 

The real issue today was the disaster resulting from examining the front end/back end issue in depth.   I spent 2 or 3 hours today just hashing out whether the back-end of the website could be an application appended to the Wordpress front-end or whether we had to build an independent web application with a pure html/css front-end.  We were beset by a plague of problems on all sides.  No matter which way we turned, we were completely blocked and facing painful and potentially disastrous consequences.  We went from a Wordpress Front end with php backend to a full asp.net back-end with html/css front end back to the wordpress/php compromise to a full ruby on rails backend with html/css front-end, with 3 days wasted and 3 weeks of ruby education completely squandered.  Moreover, I faced my third month of work on Villager and have realized that we are completely starting over and I am still no closer to a company, a product, a team or an alternative model.  It's scary.   Everything is in flux. 

I have not lost faith in the model - not for a second.  I'm just losing a little faith in my own courage.

September 2

Pretty good work day.  Woke up at 7, got into the office by 9.  Ate a variety of bagels with salmon and cream cheese, whitefish, and egg, cheese and bacon.  Drank too much coffee.  Got bizarrely woozy.  Began working on aggregating large numbers of businesses and reaching out.  Compiled big spreadsheet of more business contacts.  Drafted a dozen emails to various businesses in the east village.  Compiled another 10 businesses that I will walk into cold and just talk to.

Front-end developer was in the office today for the full 12+ hours:  Worked on the landing page, applying styles to the company blog, setting up basecamp accounts for the developer and just prepping the server for all of my needs.  K. also came to the office today to help build revenue projections (turns out we need to originate lots and lots of businesses to make any appreciable revenue) and do the data analysis necessary to really dig through the questionnaires we sent out to our friends.

Also drafted the operating agreement for the country and delivered signature pages to my father.  Will deliver the remaining signature pages to the partner tomorrow when he gets back from a 2 week vacation in Europe. Hopefully we can have the bank account set up and fund it entirely in the next week or so and begin making payments and setting all accounts to the business account and get them extricated from my personal finances.  In other words, obtain a veneer of legitimacy!

September 1

Well today was alright.

Got up, shot off a few emails to business owners asking me to follow-up at a later date, took a 3.5 mile run (which was depressingly not easy), cleaned the apartment, made a double kale, ginger, triple apple juice, and went off to S'mac, a local beloved Mac and Cheese restaurant in the East Village, to talk to the owner. The place was packed and crowded with happy families gorging on incredible selections of Macaroni and Cheese.  We sat on the stoop of the apartment building between her two locations, in bright sunshine, and had a 45 minute conversation covering topics ranging from financing options to leaving engineering to open a mac and cheese shop to "community" in NYC.  It was a great talk.

Then, I went to the office, rewired the internet, did some paperwork, and had some beer.

I didn't say it was a super productive day.  I just said it was alright.