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.

Happy Birthday Contently

Happy birthday, Contently!

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And so, with all that work behind me, I decided to pit some local New York tech geeks head to head and see what happened:

Rockstar founders

Prolific blogger/investors

Outspoken first time entrepreneurs

Investors you see everywhere

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A little background: I own a big blue cargo van. It costs about a million dollars a day to park in a garage in Manhattan, so I usually end up fighting for a spot on some side street where it’s free. The catch is that twice a week the street sweepers come by, and if you don’t move your vehicle, they ticket you $65.

So on Thursday I parked the big blue van on 71st St and Central Park West and waited with the other New Yorkers for the sweeper to come. It came, we moved, we moved back. And then we waited until 9:30 (because that’s what you have to do in case they come back and ticket you). As long as a person is in the vehicle and ready/willing to move if the sweeper comes again, you’re allowed to sit there.

While I was waiting, some guy pulled up in his own van and asked us if we could squeeze in so he could fit. I happily did so. But some guy in a BMW was talking on his bluetooth and refused. The van guy got angry and started yelling at him. Bluetooth guy got angry back and got out of his car, taking off his jacket and ready to fight. After about 10 minutes of yelling insults in each others’ faces, they got back in their cars and parked.

Since I was nice to the van guy and moved for him, he came and thanked me. We made friends. His name was Abraham. All of this is important because it means I have several witnesses that I was there all the way up until 9:30.

9:30 rolled around, and people started getting out of their cars. I waited until 9:35 for good measure, waved goodbye to Abraham, and walked home.

When I went back to the van today (2 days later), I found this parking ticket:

The violation was for not being there during the street sweeper time frame. Notice the time? 9:18 AM.

9:18 AM? The only way this could be possible is if the officer ticketed me the SECOND I left the van, and if his watch was a full 17 MINUTES slow. Which is absolutely absurd.

In other words, the traffic cop lied. He or she is named A. Robertson (according to the ticket), and straight up falsified a government document in order to get me to pay money.

That, my friends, is what you call fraud.

Needless to say, I’m going to dispute this ticket in court. I don’t care if it’s not worth the time for just $65. This is about corruption.

A. Robertson and New York City cannot get away with screwing the law-abiding, tax-paying, hard-working citizens of Manhattan.

Please pass this on if it infuriates you too. And if you know someone in NYC city government, pass it on to them!

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Here is the SpeakerTexted video (click on the text below the video to jump to the important parts – there’s lots of fluff up front):

I’d love to hear what people think of Dino.sr and what ideas you all have for it. Thanks, friends!

Shane

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Now that I’ve made it through grad school, and my band mates are off having kids and working their lives away 9-5, my dreams have crossed over to a different platform. I’m building tech startups and dreaming of making it big, landing VC funding, and having geeky Rails programmers whisper as I pass them in the hall at NerdCon.

Perhaps it’s not as sexy, but it’s glamorous in its own way. And I’ve realized the parallels between starting a rock band and starting a web company are pretty spot on:

I can see the natural progression I made in the music world closely parallels my progress in the tech world. My first band was a crappy punk band, Lynette. We thought we were awesome, but we weren’t very unique. We just played local venues until other bands stopped inviting us when they realized we sucked. Then I started an electro-punk band, Jersey City Fire, which was more innovative, especially in our live show setup. We got to play some shows out of town, but the team didn’t work out in the end. Then I started a dance/pop-core band, K&TK, and we blew people’s socks off (at least comparatively). We toured across the west, recorded some songs, and had a lot of fun. We had the perfect combination of team members, a unique but poppy sound, and lots of drive and hard work. We would play our songs acoustically at random parties to gain fans when we weren’t playing real shows, run online campaigns to drive traffic to our Myspace, and practice relentlessly.

Then people got married and stuff, so we let that dream die peacefully, knowing we might have had a shot if we wanted it.

My first website post-college was a sort of Digg for UFO nuts, AlienUFOBelievers.com (I made it after one of the band guys “saw” a UFO in Montana). It was a cool idea, but there wasn’t a whole lot of market potential. The site was buggy and got hacked, and I sold about $200 in stickers by the time I quit. I started some other sites, which were better constructed and had more potential for ad revenue. They still make me a little money, but I won’t be buying a yacht anytime because of them. Then I started PrintingChoice.com, a Travelocity-style search engine for business card, flyer, postcard, and brochure prices. It has a solid revenue model, and has done quite well. I put that on autopilot and started Scordit.com, a social site that pivots around products people are obsessed about. Users joined, creating thousands of pages of content, and I felt vindicated when sites like GDGT and Hollrr launched with similar ideas and gained a lot of attention. My bands were starting to suck less and less.

Now I’m working on two projects pivoting off of Scordit: mainly Dino.sr, a site for gamers that revolves around games you’ve beat/played/want and lets you created game-specific microblogs of your game progress (and the site is a game itself); and on the side I’m helping with isWearing.com, a real-time stream of people answering the question “What are you wearing,” which aims to help people dress better. Both of these have clear paths to monetization and sort of culminate the experiences I’ve had in my previous ventures. I’m sure these won’t be the last web products I create either. I’ll keep working hard and building better stuff every time, and one day one of my “bands” will get picked up by that major label — I have no doubt about that.

Starting a rock band is a very entrepreneurial experience. I’d be interested to see how many tech companies have been started by people who played in bands. Really, I think being an entrepreneur is all about executing creative ideas — being the guy (or girl) who actually starts a band rather than sitting around with friends and talking about how cool it would be, or being the one who actually sits down and builds a prototype rather than just talking about it for years until someone else builds it.

Sorry Lollapalooza, but NerdCon here I come.

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My personal blog/life details/random personal stuff is now http://shanesnow.tumblr.com

My portfolio/resume/social media hub is now http://www.shanesnow.com (shanesnow.net now forwards there, too)

My wife and I have a family tumblog at http://www.kristenandshane.com

Television Sky is now officially an entertainment extravaganza of delight and woe, updated as often as it can be.

If you don’t own a feed reader to keep all your blogs straight, go to http://www.google.com/reader

Much love,

Shane

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Here’s to being too busy and/or lazy to blog.

And here’s to all my friends who check back anyway! You rock!

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Happy Halloween!

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