I recently learned an interesting fact: Most of the fuel in a space shuttle is burnt in the first few minutes of launch, in order to bring the shuttle to enough speed and altitude to escape Earth’s gravity without falling back.

That speed is called escape velocity.

Once the shuttle breaks free, much less fuel is needed to make it to the orbit.

Why is it interesting?

Because starting something feels the same.

A great effort is initially needed to break free from the gravity of our inaction: thinking about the idea, talking about the idea, reading about other people’s ideas, and anything that’s not “working on the idea”.

During that gravity stage, much effort is needed just to get something off the ground. That’s why most people give up on their ideas too early, believing it’s going to always be this hard, and without seeing significant results.

But once we reach escape velocity, less effort is needed to keep pushing up. Our effort is then used to move forward, and to change direction. We have momentum, we’re getting results, and we’re improving them.

And most importantly, we have a new habit: action.

We shouldn’t feel intimidated by the effort it initially takes to launch an idea and get it off the ground, or frustrated from the lack of early results. This is normal.

Our biggest challenge is not failing; it’s starting.

Once we’re moving, and once we’ve reached escape velocity, it gets better.

Or at least, it feels better

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I recently had a very interesting conversation with a friend who recently launched an online business, and it surprised me how our fears are never what they seem to be

It went something like this:

B.: I need your help. I launched my product a few months ago, but I am not getting any sales.

Me: Do you have traffic?

B.: Not much, about 100 visitors a month

Me: Then you need to get more traffic. You probably need at least 100x that amount in your market to start seeing any sales.

B.: And how do I get that many people?

Me: It might take a while, but find out people who would love to have your product, or who are buying similar products and tell them about it. Start with people you already know, then ask them to spread the word.

B.: I thought about sending a blast email to my contact list telling them about the site, but I am afraid they’d visit it and never buy anything.

Me: Then at least you know that there is something that needs to be fixed or changed. In that case, you contact them and ask them why they didn’t buy and what you can do better for them to buy next time.

B.: hmmmm….

Short silence…

B.: OMG! I just realized that I am not really afraid that my idea would fail, I am afraid that people would think my idea isn’t good enough. I am not afraid of failure, I am afraid of rejection.

That was one of the fastest entrepreneurial epiphanies I’ve witnessed, and it made me reflect on my own fears as well.

Maybe what we’ve always believed to be a fear of failure is really a fear of rejection, which is a much more instinctive and concrete form of fear. Maybe that is the threshold that is keeping too many people from following their ideas: becoming outsiders, and being judged or ignored by others.

The other option is not to follow our ideas, which makes us automatically accepted among the multitude who never followed theirs, and that’s a very comfortable and safe place to be.

Because failing isn’t fun. And being rejected isn’t that fun either.

So how do I deal with it?

I keep some distance from my ideas and products. I love what I am working on, but I don’t identify myself with it. The fact that it fails or succeeds doesn’t make me a failure or success, it just means that I gotta keep improving it, or try something different.

So. What are you *really* afraid of?

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- Are you worried?
- A little bit.
- But you’ve had this done a couple of times before. You know it’s not dangerous.
- I know. I am not concerned about something going wrong. I don’t even mind that funny feeling I’ll get in the next couple of days from that camera going into my throat and down through my chest and stomach.
- So what’s the problem?
- It’s the anesthesia, I answered, I hate waking up from it. I feel that I am being pulled slowly from a dark abyss, and I get nightmares and say creepy things to people around me.
- “Well. Let’s skip the anestesia then,” My doctor said with a confident smile
- What? Are you serious? That would be painful, wouldn’t it?
- Not so much. It will be uncomfortable. But instead of making it less uncomfortable, you’re not going to remember anything about it.
I looked at him with interest and suspicion. “Go on,” I said

- You’ll be taking a drug that will cause very short amnesia. You’ll experience discomfort, and may be a little bit of pain during the procedure, but you won’t remember anything about it for the rest of your life.

I was both intrigued and scared, so I decided to try it.

And sure enough, one instant I am laying in bed looking at a cute nurse injecting a clear solution into my IV, and an instant later I am sitting on my bed in the waiting room staring at my doctor who was telling me that there are no stones in my galbladder.

He was talking, but somehow his words weren’t registering in my memory. It was as if every word he was saying replaced the previous word in a very short memory buffer. I looked at the clock on the wall. An hour had passed since we last talked, and yet I have no recollection of anything that had happened during that hour.

According to my doctor, I never went to sleep during that hour. I was fully awake and responsive. He even said that I laughed at something he said to the nurse, and almost choked on the endoscope.

Somewhere in my memory, there is an hour of my life that I have no access to. As if it were password protected, and that drug I took made me forget that password forever.

When I drove back home that day, I had a million questions in mind:

How can I be denied access to an hour of my own life? of my own memory?
What if there are many other parts of my memory that I cannot recall, that lasted hours, days or even weeks?
If I am given the option to suffer for a goal or cause, and never to remember that suffering for the rest of my life, would I do it?
Wouldn’t I be the happiest person alive if I had the option to deny myself access to any part of my memory that holds pain, anger or grief?
If I can’t consciously access some parts of my memory, do I still have access to them subconcsiously? In other words, would I act according to the experience stored in that part without being conscious why I am acting that way?

Creepy!

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Photo Credit: Pranav Mistry

Being a good hacker is an invaluable skill. But is being a coder the same as being a hacker? Is it possible that coders are at a creative disadvantage to hackers who don’t know how to code?

Here’s a story that helped me see the difference.

I was recently invited to mentor at Startup Weekend. On Friday night, we gathered to eat pizza, pitch ideas, create teams and discuss launch plans. At the end of the day, everyone was feeling great about what they’d be working on for the rest of the weekend.

I arrived Saturday morning to find people hard at work. Some people stayed overnight to jump start their ideas. That’s the startup spirit!

But I was surprised to see so many teams already writing code! It seemed that the rush to get something up and running by Sunday evening made most teams focus on implementing their first ideas, rather than exploring different ideas and hacking the best ones.

Sounds familiar?

One team stood out because they didn’t have any coders. So they spent their time creating prototypes with PowerPoint, going around the room testing them with other teams, getting feedback, and returning to their table to discuss and refine their ideas. They were the loudest, most animated, most outgoing, and they seemed to be having lots of fun. Most importantly, they were progressing much faster than other teams because they weren’t lost in the details of figuring out how to make something work in Rails or PHP.

On Sunday morning, they had an epiphany that made them abandon all their previous prototypes and go back to the drawing board. I saw them creating a new concept in a matter of hours. Because they didn’t write code, they didn’t feel bad about throwing away previous day’s work (that’s what prototypes are for, anyway). And because they were using PowerPoint to "hack" their concepts, they were able to get new idea done quickly.

On Sunday evening, they didn’t present a working application, but they walked the audience through a great presentation with a click-thru prototype of the final concept. Not only did they present the final idea, but also took the audience through all  the previous ideas and iterations that led to it.

The result? They won first place!

They didn’t win because their idea was significantly better or more functional than other teams’ ideas. There were many great ideas that weekend. But when other teams were focusing their limited time on implementation detail,  that team stayed focused on high level aspects of their ideas, and spent more time hacking it and less time coding.

They weren’t coders, but they were hackers. And that ended up working great for them!

Many founders believe they are at a disadvantage to someone who knows how to write code.  They believe they are not hackers because they are not coders. The truth is they might have a creative advantage because they won’t be jumping into code too soon. Instead, they’ll be forced to "hack" their ideas and test them using high level tools and platforms that will keep them at the level of detail. They’ll be focused on solving user problems, rather than solving implementation problems.

Hacking isn’t just about coding skills. it’s a mindset of getting things done while focusing on what matters the most at each stage, without getting lost in the detail too soon.

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Today, Keynotopia is two months old. What started as a single blog post last June became a product that got over 1,500 customers in the first 60 days. Before jumping into the story and lessons learned, here are some quick stats:

• Total time spent creating the minimally viable product: less than 3 hours
• Total startup cost: $47.50 ($5 hosting, $7.50 domain, and $35 wordpress theme)
• First paying customer within 10 minutes of launch
• Copies downloaded in the first 60 days: 1,491
• Page views on the original blog post: 40,894
• Unique visitors to Keynotopia: 19,235
• Link backs/mentions: 769
• Total product returns: 2
• Total variations/tests on the landing page: 29
• Made it to Google’s first results page in less than 2 weeks for the following search terms: iPad prototyping, iPhone prototyping, Android prototyping, Keynote prototyping, Keynote wireframes, …
• I’ve never sold any products in my life (except my old laptops on eBay and CraigsList).

The story:

I pressed the update button and took a deep breath. The website was finally online, and a surge of questions rushed to my head: What if it’s not good enough? What if people call me an opportunist for redirecting the blog post to a product page? What if no one wants to buy it?

I reminded myself that it took me less than 3 hours to put that website together, and it wouldn’t be so bad if no one buys the product. I glanced at the time on my laptop: it was 1:38 am, and my stomach was growling loudly. I put the laptop on the couch and went to prepare my favorite late-night-raisin-oatmeal.

Few minutes later, I was staring at the boiling water  on the stove, entertaining the thought of taking down the website to do some more work on it, and re-launch it few days later when it’s more ready for the public. I wasn’t used to putting half-baked products out in the wild, and it made me feel uncomfortable. Then I remembered a quote from Reid Hoffman: "if you shipped your product and you’re not ashamed of it, you’ve probably shipped too late". Pouring the oatmeal into the pot, I started thinking how this all started…

It had been less than a month since I wrote about how I’ve been using Apple Keynote to prototype iPad applications. I debated whether or not I should publish the post, thinking there was nothing new or useful about it. Yet, I decided to do it for the fun of it. What I didn’t expect, though, was for the post to be picked up by some of the most respected bloggers, becoming popular among the design and iPhone communities. In less than three weeks, the post generated more than 10,000 visits and 500 downloads of the iPad keynote templates I posted along.

I became curious to find out whether people were reading the post and downloading the templates because it was a useful idea or just a cool one. I wondered if they would pay for these templates, and how much they would be willing to pay. Since I asked people to subscribe to the blog before downloading the templates, I could just email everyone and ask. I could create a survey and ask them to fill it out, promising some freebies in return. But people are generally too busy to fill out surveys.

Then I thought about building a minimally viable product that would help me answer that question, and concluded that I could put something together quickly using WordPress. Three hours later, I had a WordPress website with an e-Junkie shopping cart and few screenshots of the templates.

DING!

My thoughts were suddenly interrupted. It was the Mac Mail client, which I’d set up few minutes earlier with my Paypal email. I walked back to the couch and stared at the laptop screen. I had an unread email. The subject: "Notification of Payment received".

Keynotopia was in business!

Lessons learned:

Sell your byproducts

Become aware of the value of internal tools, processes, or even hacks that you developed while working on your main product. In my case, I’ve been using many of these templates for my client work, and hadn’t thought about selling them until recently.

(The guys at 37Signals have a great post about this)

Kill the "Coming Soon" page

Many startups are technology focused, believing that a blog is a way to tell customers about their product once it’s launched. Before launch, they put out a "coming soon"page with an email sign up box. But that page has no value for potential customers, and little incentive for them to give out their email address.

Instead of a coming soon page, start a conversation: talk about your story, share your process and findings, and provide value even before the product is ready. There is no reason to wait for a product to be ready in order to have customers.

And if you write a blog post that becomes popular, use it as a conversion funnel for your product.

Focus on benefits instead of features

I tested over 10 variations of the tagline on Keynotopia’s landing page. The ones that performed best stated some tangible measurable benefits for the user (interactive prototypes in 30 minutes or less). The ones that had the worst performance stated what the product was (a collection of interface templates for Apple Keynote).

Give away a valuable freebie

I gave away the original toolkit I’ve been using for my work. In return, I asked for people to subscribe to the blog. The perceived value was worth giving out an email address for.

Later on, I created another wireframing set and released it for Free on SmashingMagazine. This helped tremendously with traffic and branding, and many people who downloaded the free templates come back to buy the full bundle.

Create a list, and start talking with customers

Many companies use lists to inform people about new features. I end up unsubscribing from most newsletters because they feel like ads: they feel like they are sent from a business to a business, not from a human to a human. In their attempt to sound professional, companies ignore the human side of business.

In my case, I wanted to have a conversation with everyone who’d signed up. I wrote a simple, personal text-only newsletter, I told them what I’ve been up to and asked them for feedback and ideas. I wrote it the same way I write an email to a friend, and many subscribers replied back thinking I sent them a personal email.

Create embeddable media

Almost every blogger who mentioned my original blog post embedded the youtube video I posted along. Having a YouTube video or a Slideshare document in a blog post helps spread the word: In addition to being good for SEO, it provides a good snapshot of your post to be embedded by anyone who wants to link back to it.

Never stop testing

For the blog post, I tested about 5 variations for the sign up form. Changing the title from "Enter your email to download the files" to "Subscribe to this blog to access all downloads" increased sign ups more than 500%

For Keynotopia’s landing page, I had over 29 iterations for the language and arrangements, reducing the bounce rate from 59% to 12% in less than 30 days

Don’t be afraid to charge for your product

Having a product is a good excuse to talk to your customers. Charging for your product is a good excuse for customers to talk to you. When people pay for a product, they become invested in it. In my case, many people who bought the templates email me frequently to share requests for missing UI components, or ideas for new templates that I wasn’t even considering.

Additionally, charging your customers helps you find out if there is a real pain point that your product is addressing, and if people are willing to pay to solve that pain point.

Keynotopia may not be a "startup" in the typical sense of the word. To me, it was an experimental project to teach myself many things I’ve always wanted to learn. It shifted my perspective from a service-oriented mindset (getting paid for my time) to a value-oriented mindset (getting paid over and over for a value that I used my time to create). My true epiphany happened when I woke up one morning to find few hundred dollars deposited in my bank account: while I was asleep, the value I’d created was hard at work

If you have a similar experience, leave me a comment below; I’d love to hear about it.

Related Posts:

        How  I launched a profitable product in 3 hours – part 2: The nuts and bolts

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First, let me thank you for all the feedback that you provided about the iPad keynote prototyping. I hope that the hundreds of developers who downloaded the theme template are finding it useful.

As promised in the last post, here are some additional assets (all created in Keynote) that I’ve been using to rapidly prototype web applications and demo them within my presentations.

Once you download the Keynote template file ( link at the bottom of this post), install the file “Web Theme.kth” into <UserName> -> Library -> Application Support -> iWork -> Keynote -> Themes. Alternatively, you can double click the file to open it in Keynote, and choose file -> Save Theme. This will create a theme in Keynote that you can reuse to create new presentations, as shown below.

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