Justin's Blog

Google calendar just launched. Obviously that competes with Kiko calendar. Many people on Reddit and elsewhere on the web have hinted (or outright said) that Kiko (among others) will now be swept away in the flood that is Google.

About an hour ago, a friend asked if I was scared of Google calendar. And for months before today, various people have been asking the same question. And I can honestly say that the answer is no.

Does Google calendar make getting new users harder? Yes, obviously, Google has a much broader reach and can instantly push new products on its existing user base. Instead of just being a great online calendar, we'll now have to be the best online calendar, the calendar that is better than Google's.

That doesn't scare me. Google is probably better than us at some things (search), but we're probably better than Google at some things (else why would they have to jack our entire UI from us :P). It's not like Google can steal our revenue stream ($0 / day last I checked), and I doubt they're working harder than us (12 hour days for the past six months?). Google could poach all our users, and five years from now, I'd still be working all day every day for no money on making Kiko the best calendar on the web, if for nothing else out of spite.

We've already got more features than any other calendar out there, and we're pushing them out the door every week. Specifically we'll be rolling out a lot of features in the next few weeks that I think will lead us in a different direction from other calendars on the web, including a general invite solution, and a completely new kind of task list. And if those don't work, I guess we'll have to start selling to enterprise :).

What do I have to fear from Google Calendar?

last updated 2 years ago #

Last year in May I got my BA in Physics and Philosophy from Yale; three days later Emmett and I officially started work on Kiko and became entrepreneurs. We've been working on Kiko full time for the past ten months, and during that time I've learned a few lessons as a young (newb) founder that I thought were useful enough to share. I'm not claiming to know it all about starting your own company, or even most of what there is to know (I still haven't made a dollar of revenue, sold a company, brought a company to IPO, the list goes on...), but I wish someone had told me these things ten months ago.

Don't hire/co-found-with your friends just because they are your friends.

I said this at Startup School last October. Here's my reasoning behind it: You want your co-founders/employees to reside at the intersection of really smart and really hard-working. Most of your friends probably do not live there. I went to a pretty decent school that claims to have lots of smart people, and most of my friends are not both really smart and really hard-working.

We're naturally inclined to do things with our friends: play racquetball, drink beer, etc. This is no different for starting a company. However, when picking co-founders, its human nature to either overlook or make excuses for your friends' shortcomings. This is really bad, because it can lead to situations where you think things like this: I know my friend, Gideon isn't the hardest worker, but he's really really smart. It'll probably be ok if we bring him on, I might just have to pick up the slack a little bit...

This might not seem that bad, but in a startup, everyone needs to be doing 150% of a normal job. And if Gideon is only doing 50% of his job, then you will end up doing 250% of a job. This will probably cause you to become very resentful, and you really don't want to be resentful about something that you're spending 15 hours a day on.

Furthermore, when you've had enough and you finally want to get rid of your friend, it becomes a non-trivial task, because you have to carefully balance his feelings against your need to divorce yourself from his incompetence. With an employee who isn't your friend, you don't have to worry about whether you'll fuck up the weekly poker game.

Things take longer than you think. A lot longer.

I'm specifically thinking about two very different things: software development and deals. As an example of the former, I'll give the example of rewriting Kiko. When we started rewriting, we thought it would take a month. It took six months. Obviously experience probably has something to do with the ability to produce accurate forecasts, however, we still routinely underestimate the time it takes to produce features. Now, when I ask Emmett how long something will take, I take whatever length of time he responds with and multiply it by three.

Deals also take a lot longer than I thought they would. Three months passed from the time we first started talking to our A round investors to the time we had the money in our bank. I don't think this was anyone's fault, but rather, the nature of any interaction between busy people working on many projects. Still, it would have been nice to know about the time frame I could have expected at the onset.

You'd better be able to get along with your co-founders.

This probably seems fairly obvious. What was less obvious to me when I started out was the sheer number of hours I would end up spending with Emmett. For the past few months, while we were coding the second version of Kiko, we were working 10-15 hours a day every day. That is a lot of time to be around another person, no matter who he or she is, or how good of friends you are. Emmett and I have known each other since the second grade, and went to college together, and we still get on each other's nerves. Still, my friends are constantly amazed that we can spend that much time together and not end up clubbing one another to death with a keyboard.

My only advice on this is not to sweat the small stuff. Don't let a disagreement over the company name or the logo color turn into a huge argument. Most of the time, when someone wants the webpage to be blue, and you want it to be red, it really doesn't matter very much at all.

Start simple, then go complex.

I'm not sure this applies to any fields at all outside of web development. Basically, when we built the first version of Kiko, we ended up building a hugely complex structure all at once. The second time we did it, we started out by building a very simple scaffolding, and then increasing the functionality piece by piece. I think Kiko is a testament to the second method being the better one.

Don't forget to have fun.

Don't drown in work. For a while, while we were working on the Kiko rewrite, we were working all the time. But right now we're starting to try and do more recreational not-work stuff, and I think that's been a huge boon to productivity. My advice is to try to do something physical: we play racquetball against Aaron and Steve from Reddit. Well, not so much "play" as "beat them every time."

I'm sure this list will grow a lot in the future, but for now this is all the advice I have. Hopefully this list will be useful to at least one other beginner entrepreneur out there.

last updated 2 years ago #

As a founder of one of the first ycombinator funded companies, and human nature being what it is, I was interested in seeing how the sites of the other ycombinator companies were doing. Obviously, reddit is kicking ass on alexa, with a one week average rank of 4,096:

My own Kiko, doing a fraction of reddit's traffic, is at 17,822 this week. The weekend's kill us on alexa (apparently no one uses their calendar on the weekend!):

Infogami (now along with reddit part of not a bug) is following close behind at 23,757. Infogami exploded when it launched at the beginning of March:

Clickfacts, which just got a new site design not too long ago, is at 385,717 this week:

textpayme, which launched earlier this year, is at 552,642 this week:

Simmery seems to be dead now. Alexa thinks so too:

Obviously, alexa ranking is more relevent to some of these companies than others. The primary usage indicator of some of these companies' products, like reddit and infogami, is page views. Kiko, an online calendar, usually doesn't serve very many pages per visitor. Clickfacts and textpayme's websites are really only for supporting their primary product.

Let's add some of the companies from this year's Winter Founders Program into the mix. As far as I know, the WFP companies that have sites are wufoo (45,616), flagr (62,639), youos (113,331), pixoh (25,936), inkling (129,927), and audiobeta.

Out of all of these, pixoh (which is pretty awesome btw) is killing it. The WFP companies have only been working for 4 months at this point, so comparison to the SFP companies (who got a six month lead) is hardly fair. Who will rise to the top in the future? Only time will tell.

last updated 2 years ago #