December 05 2011
My Startup Is One Year Old
Tagged Under : canned chili, contently, hacking compadres, Startups, techstars
Where the balls does the time go?
Exactly one year ago today was my first full-time day working on Contently, the marketplace for freelance journalists and publishers who want them. I was sitting in my 300 square foot apartment in Manhattan – in the kitchen, because that was where my workstation fit – setting up email accounts and fixing up a demo video explaining what exactly my new startup was.
My longtime friend Joe Coleman had been talking to me for months about this prototype site he had been building, and how it was potentially a bigger idea than his current, 2.5 million member online business. My Philly-based hacking compadre, Dave Goldberg, was on the other end of my Skype window telling me he was “in,” while I was telling Joe in the other window that I was canceling all of my freelance gigs as of that day.
Tonight I’m sitting in my only slightly larger Manhattan apartment 2 blocks over; it’s 12:20 am, and I just finished a day of 4 meetings, 2 blog posts, a revision on a guest story I wrote for Poynter, a dentist appointment, a functional spec for our next phase of development, and about 100 emails.
Today was pretty mild, in startup terms.
In the past year, we took Joe’s dream of helping anyone become a publisher and fused it with my dream of empowering journalists to build meaningful freelance careers. We went from 3 guys in our apartments to 6 full time employees in New York, 1 in Boston, 1 in L.A., and 2 dudes somewhere in Romania (and/or Barcelona, I’m not sure where they are these days…).
We went from credit cards and canned chili for breakfast to annual revenues in the 7 digits. I took my excellent credit score down to somewhere on the scale between red and orange by maxing out 4 credit cards (which I’m still working on). We probably worked an average of 80-90 hours a week. Which is only 12 hours a day if you think about it. 14 if you take Sundays off…
We did TechStars (awesome), raised money from investors for the first time in our lives (awesome), fired people (not awesome), debated (frequently), and stayed up all night thinking about the business more times than is healthy. We brought our idea from a seedling to a sapling, and formed the vision of the massive forest it will one day grow into.
And we learned a LOT. How to grow a team. How to deal with investors. How to pitch Fortune 100 companies your 8-month-old startup. How to say “no” to features you really care about. How to let ego go in favor of your cofounder’s idea. How to fight your best friends tooth and nail on your own ideas when necessary. How to make time for important people in the middle of your 90-hour week.
But tonight as I sit here recounting what happened in the last 365 days, all I can think of is how we’ve got so far yet to go. And how tomorrow I have to bang out another spec, another 100 emails, and so on.
I turned down a stable job – with regular hours – as an editor at a major magazine, so I could run a startup. I can’t imagine how much less exhausted I’d be today if I had taken that job.
But I’m so glad to be doing what I’m doing now instead.
