I just picked up a copy of “The Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki (founder of Garage.com).  Just a few pages into it and I can already tell I'm going to love this book.  Many of his suggestions are contrary to all the “common wisdom” that's out there on how to start a new company or product.

Let me explain.  In my previous start-up, Vitrix (now Time America), at the advice of our “seasoned” management and board members, we spent countless hours writing and re-writing business plans, coming up with Mission Statements and creating rosy financial projections that somehow always showed us becoming a $100 million company within 5 years.  Year-after-year, we missed these stupid projections, employees made fun of the mission statement and we were slow to create something great.

Even though we started with good momentum at Vitrix, eventually, the conventional wisdom and seasoned management that we brought in slowed us down to a crawl.  The company, which is now an OTC publicly traded company (TMAM.OB) has stagnated over the past several years and has never made a profit.  I left this misery about 5 years ago and I've never regretted my departure for one minute.

Getting back to Guy's book...Guy spells out many of the things that I've always known but never had the right words to explain.  For example, he talks about having a “Mantra” instead of a mission statement.  A mantra is not necessarily something that you write down, it's just something that you and all your employees simply know and follow.  For example, Axosoft's mantra has always been about “developer productivity”.  It's not something we've never needed to write down, but it's something we all know and operate by.  We help developers be more productive, period.  That's how we determine which features go into our products and which features stay out.  It's a simple test: “Does doing [X] help developer productivity?” if the answer is yes, then [X] makes the list, if the answer is no, it's out!

Another great piece of advice he offers is “Get Going!”  Forget about taking weeks and months to come up with a perfect business plan and financial model.  Just create the damn thing first!  Figure out everything else later.  This is contrary to all the advice I received when I co-founded Vitrix.  Fortunately, I didn't make the same mistake when I started Axosoft.  Although we now have a solid financial model and business plan to help us grow the company and project future revenue, I did away with all that stuff at the beginning.  When we released OnTime V1, we released it for free - unlimited users!  The free product was a huge success and helped launch OnTime into quick adoption by thousands of developers world-wide.  I was never worried about making the product free because I knew V2 would be better and we would make up the lost sales for V1 when we release V2.

Could you imagine if I had tried to explain a “free” product in the business plan?  I could just see the potential investors scratching their heads and saying “OK, lets say you sell 10,000 copies of your software...how much are you going to charge for it again?  $0?  Hmm...10,000 x $0 = $0, I'm out!”

Anyway, I love the blunt advice that's given in Guy's book and I highly recommend it to anybody considering a startup.  I'll be blogging about The Art of the Start many more times as I continue to read it (bare with me, I'm a slow reader :-)