College Group Projects made easier with YakGroups

YakGroups was designed to eliminate several common difficulties (or "pain points" as they're known in the "biz") associated with college group projects:

1. Gathering the contact info of group members
2. Ensuring that everyone knows the group ToDo list
3. Assigning ToDo's to group members and giving them due dates
4. Coordinating discussions about items on the ToDo list

In the following sections, I will elaborate on how YakGroups helps with each of the points above.

Problem 1: Gathering the contact info of group members

In every single college group project I have had, the very first thing I always did was gather everyone's contact information so I could email them later. This was annoying because it involved lots of tedious steps. For example:

1. Open Excel and expand the column widths
2. Have all the group members type in contact info
3. Save the file for later use
4. After getting home, open a new email message
5. Copy in everyone's contact info
6. Write out a long email explaining how we are going to use Google Docs or whatever

YakGroups eliminates this by giving you a tool to gather everyone's contact information with 1-click on the homepage. Literally, I'm not kidding! Follow the screenshots to see what I mean:

This is the homepage, you click the big red button.

And look! You are gathering everyone's contact information!

After your group members type in their contact info, YakGroups will automatically email them all, inviting them back to your new YakGroups site. Their user accounts will already be created for them, all they will have to do is set their password.

So with YakGroups, instead of 6 steps it is down to just 3 easy steps

1. Go to YakGroups.com and click the big red button
2. Have your group members type in their contact info
3. Click "Save and Email New Members"

That's half as many steps. No opening big, bulky Excel, no painstaking copying of email addresses, and (best of all) no writing a long explanation email. College group projects are getting easier already!

Problem 2: Ensuring that everyone knows the group ToDo list

Currently, most group projects are coordinated through a large number of email messages. This is ok if you have a small college group project and not more than two people in the group, but with even moderately sized college group projects the email method of group coordination starts to break down.

In my college group projects, many things start to fail using emails:

1. The ToDo list gets sent to the group, people reply back with modifications, and then nobody knows what the "real" ToDo list is anymore
2. People reply to old emails without having read the latest emails about a particular ToDo item
3. People endlessly re-copy old information into emails to make sure everyone knows the most "current" information about a ToDo, making them longer and more difficult to read
4. And the list goes on....

The point is, emails are not that great for managing projects that involve multiple people. That is why all companies spend big bucks on some form of project management software (be it MS Project or whatnot) and exactly why I have made YakGroups: to bring easy-to-use and FREE project management to college group projects! Everyone can afford free, I don't care how tight your college budget is!

To eliminate that mess of emails that plagues your inbox, your YakGroups Site has one simple group ToDo list. With the group ToDo List, you can:

1. Share one common ToDo list with the whole group
2. Drag to reorder the ToDo list
3. Ensure that everyone knows exactly what items are on the ToDo list
4. Mark ToDo items as complete
5. Write a "description" about the ToDo right on the item itself

Take a look at what I mean!

Just looking at that picture I breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that I'll never again try and manage a college group project using an endless mess of criss-crossed emails!

Problem 3: Assigning Todo's to group members and giving them due dates

Again, college group projects have traditionally been coordinated by everyone sending a bunch of emails to everyone else. Using that method, I have found that some of the most critical information often gets lost in the mess. Namely:

1. Who is responsibe for completing the ToDo item
2. When they should have the ToDo completed

I can't tell you how many times I have had people tell me that they didn't know they were responsible for a particular ToDo item. Making matters worse, since I'm usually the "responsible one" I get dragged into helping them complete the ToDo item through the wee hours of the morning so we can turn in that part of the college group project early the next morning!

With YakGroups, slacking group members can no longer claim "they didn't see the email!" To help college group projects, YakGroups has three nice benefits:

1. The "Quick Add" allows you to set the due date and who it is assigned to while you're typing out the ToDo
2. The ToDo item can be reassigned to different or additional group members with a few clicks
3. The ToDo item can be dragged onto the calendar to change the due date

See how you can set the due date and assign it to group members right through the Quick Add?

You can change the due date or who it is assigned to by editing the ToDo's details

Drag-a-mania! ToDo's can be dragged onto the calendar to set their due date or drag ToDo items already on the calendar to a new date to change its due date.

I am especially proud of the Quick Add because it is so flexible. Just type in the ToDo item, its due date, and who it is assigned to using natural everyday language! For example:

• Report on Paper Sales due next Monday by Jim and Pam
• At 3pm on Jan 22nd by Dwight: New Marketing Plan for Dunder Mifflin
• Accounts Report due in 3 days by Stanley, Phyllis
• 2/14 8am Michael Send Happy Valentines email to entire company

You get the point! The "Quick Add" allows you to easily type in ToDo's and assign them to people in your college group project!

Problem 4: Coordinating discussions about items on the ToDo list

Obviously, discussions about your college group project almost always take place over email. It is probably pretty clear to you by now that trying manage the college group project through emails is fraught with inefficiencies. YakGroups is expressly designed to provide a much easier and more structured (and more sane) way of coordinating your college group project.

What often happens with group discussions via email:

1. People are too lazy to type in everyone's email address, so they just reply to any ol' email that happens to have everyone's email address already filled in regardless of the subject or whatever was discussed in the previous email
2. Since they just replied to any old email, the subject and quoted text may not be at all relevant to what they are talking about and so the receiver either: (1) ignores it since the subject doesn't concern them or (2) gets confused since there is a disconnect with the quoted text
3. People reference a ToDo item in their email, but they can't remember the "official" title of the ToDo item and so they make up a new one, causing everyone that receives the email to be slightly unsure of what exactly they are talking about

Coordinating and managing college group projects through emails is simply a mess!

To help improve the situation, YakGroups provides threaded discussions. This is a huge benefit to communicating with your group members because:

1. You don't have to remember anybody's email address since YakGroups does that for you
2. Your group members are more likely to start new threaded discussions with relevant subject headings when the situation merits it
3. Your group members will reply to the appropriate discussion instead of just any old one since YakGroups has made it easier to do
4. You can drag ToDo items onto discussions to link the Discussion and the ToDo item together

Linking the Discussion and the ToDo item is a very nice feature since it allows you and your group members to be perfectly clear about which ToDo items you are talking about. No more hazy references to what the group member was assigned, now there's perfect clarity about the exact ToDo item they are referencing!

See how you can drag ToDo's onto Discussions to link them together? Now the Discussion will have links to the ToDo item and vice-versa!

Conclusion:

Group Projects, more often than not, are a horrible mess because the tool that is most commonly used, a huge jumble of emails, is not properly suited to the task! Why should you continue trying to use messy emails when a FREE alternative is available to help with your college group projects?

Try YakGroups now at http://www.YakGroups.com

Hacker News Frontpage Traffic Results: A Look Behind the Scenes

Hey guys,

As many of you know, my last blog post hit the front page of Hacker News on Wednesday, December 2 2009. We were super excited! Since many of you came from HN, I really want to thank all of you for taking the time to read my blog post.

The comments about my post on HN were a little hard on me, but I’m going to take it in stride and try to learn from the experience.

I have always been curious about how events like this would impact traffic. Well, now that I have a better idea, I wanted to share it with you guys and offer you a peek behind the curtain.

Here are some stats:

• ~8am CST submitted to HN
• ~9am CST made the HN frontpage
• ~1pm CST dropped off the HN frontpage
• ~4 hours on the HN frontpage

• 452 Unique visitors while on the HN Frontpage:
• 644 Total unique visitors on December 2, 2009
• 742 Total unique visitors since the morning of December 2
• 757 Total visits (so 15 visits were repeat visitors)
• 992 Total pageviews since the morning of December 2

To actually see the dramatic impact it had for us, look at the Google Analytics summary:

Sure, 992 pageviews is a mere blip on the radar for many sites, but notice the whopping zero pageviews we had before Wednesday and you can see why we’re so excited. All in all, I’d say it’s a great improvement.

On the down side, there was about an 85% bounce rate, but I've read that that's normal for the traffic from social news sites like HN.

But on the up side, we gained 8 new subscribers to the blog!

From FeedBurner:

We had 1 subscriber before December 2nd, but I secretly think it might have just been Robert stealth subscribing to motivate me. He denies it, but I have my doubts....

I know it’s not much, but for us it’s really exciting! The knowledge that our efforts are actually getting seen by people is wonderful. It helps so much to motivate us, especially while college finals are completely stressing us out.

I will do my best to continue to update the blog and the YakGroups Twitter. Thanks to everyone who checked out my last post; I'll do all I can to continue to improve and write some good content for you!

If you have any questions, comments, or something specific you’d like me to address, please don’t hesitate to write a comment here on the blog or on the YakGroups Twitter! I wish I had a YakGroups email account to post, but Robert says they are still “coming soon.”

Anyway, thanks again! Have a great weekend!

Free, Easy, and Quick Ways to Market your Startup

In my last blog post, I tentatively proclaimed that I would be taking over the marketing side of YakGroups. In true geek fashion, I took to the tubes and spent the last few days reading around trying to figure out what to do next.

I came across a great quote by Dharmesh Shah:

"Instead of spending money trying to seek out your best customers, startups should instead focus on helping their best customers find them."

I think that's a great idea. Unfortunately, he didn't really elaborate on how to achieve it. This post is my attempt to brainstorm some ideas on how to do so.

I've noticed that there are a lot of great articles out there that will show you how to maximize the effectiveness of your paid online advertising. They are chock full of great information, but for me (and maybe you as well) it's all next to useless.

Let me elaborate:

1. Ads are expensive. As college students bootstrapping YakGroups, Robert and I definitely can't afford to be playing around with ads and tweaking until we get the best ROI.
   
   
2. Many people, especially the savvy internet-users that your startup may be targeting, are inherently mistrustful of anything that looks like an advertisement. We are so overwhelmed with ads these days that many will have learned to ignore them and the truly savvy are likely to have something like Adblock installed.
   
   
3. It takes a lot of practice and iteration to create properly-targeted ads. We want to target potential customers who are looking for the solution our startup provides, not bombard those who do not need our service with ads because they probably won't be interested.

So, how can we market our startup for free, as efficiently as possible, without spending valuable hours of coding time writing ad copy and pitching to tech blogs that our customers don't read?

My idea is to effectively utilize the long tail of social media. We are going to look for the low-hanging fruit -- the places too small for bigger companies to engage.

1. Forums
A great way to do this is by joining the conversation in the places where your potential customers already meet online. Find out where they congregate. What are their favorite blogs, websites, and especially forums? Find out what questions they're asking, and answer them.

For example, for us, our customers are college students. So there are already tons of great places for us to join in the conversation. Try to find out where your customers hang out. By participating in the conversation, you'll build trust and they are more likely to use your service.

However, make sure you're not just participating only when it's beneficial to you. This can be hard; personally, I'm a classic lurker, and will usually read forums for a long, long time before I ever post (hello, HN!). But it's important -- you have to build trust and a connection before you start asking people to use your service, or you'll start to come off like a spammer.

But what if your customers are more disparate or don't participate in forums much? Or what if they don't have very many places online that they can congregate? (Actually, this may be a great problem for your startup to address, but I digress.) In that case, you can try...

2. Question/Answer websites
Some great places to use are websites like Yahoo! Answers or Mahalo. Every day, people post there looking for answers to their questions. Chances are, some of these questions are problems that your startup is perfectly designed to solve. So answer them!

For example, our startup, YakGroups, will be a website designed to help college students organize and complete group projects. Here's a Yahoo! Answers question that we will be perfectly poised to answer once we launch.

There will probably be similar questions related to your own business. They don't even have to be as straightforward as that. Any question whose asker would benefit from using your product is a perfect opportunity!

There are tons of benefits to this method:

• The people using these websites are great potential customers: they're desperate to find a solution to their problem, and they will probably read and consider every response to their post. If you link to your startup and it's a good fit, you have a high likelihood of gaining a customer.
  
  
• On top of that, other people with the same question or with the same interests will often read the thread and be pointed to your startup.
  
  
• Bonus: these places are huge websites and have great Google-Fu. I know that when I'm looking for an answer to something, Yahoo! Answers is usually one of the first links that pops up, and I almost always click on it. If other people are like me (and I suspect they are), this is a great resource to get the word out for your startup!

**However, please be careful. People tend to trust these websites since they are answered by real people. So don't be sleazy and don't spam; only answer questions that you genuinely feel would benefit from the service that you have to offer.

I love this method, because it fulfills my most important requirements:

1. It's free! You don't have to pay for any ads.
2. It doesn't require a huge time investment. Answering a question will take 3 minutes or so.

I know the programmers are going to start complaining here that this is tedious, but...

You can even batch this method to make it more efficient:

1. Set up a Google Alert for people asking similar questions on the relevant websites.
2. (optional) Create a general template for how you're going to answer those questions and a short blurb about your startup (you do have an elevator pitch, right?)
3. When you have 10-20 minutes free, go through your Google Alerts and answer some questions!

I find this to be a great form of productive procrastination. Often, I'll have a small chunk of time that's too short to really get into "programming mode" or do any large piece of work. Instead of wasting time clicking through email or checking Facebook, I can use this method to help potential customers find YakGroups.

Here are some other popular Q&A sites I've found:

• WikiAnswers
• HelpGlobe
• Amazon's AskVille
• AskPedia

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So what do you guys think? Has this method or something similar worked for you? Do you have any modifications or suggestions that might make it better? Thanks for reading and commenting, and good luck with your startup adventures!

Techie girl does PR: Doing my part to help

Hey guys!

So far, I've been playing the "supportive girlfriend" and "design consultant" roles to try to help Robert build the best product we can, but as YakGroups gets closer and closer to launching, I want to take a more active role in making it a success. There's so much to do!

Robert's doing a great job of finishing the coding and design, so I'm going to do my best to handle other aspects of launching YakGroups that are being neglected. Namely, the marketing and customer-facing parts of the business. Yikes!

Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, oh my! First, let me say that I have no idea what I'm doing here -- I'm a shy techie girl, not a marketer! -- but I'm going to try my best. I'm sure I'll make lots of mistakes, but from following Hacker News and others I know the startup community is super helpful (and super knowledgeable). So I'll probably have lots of posts in the future asking for advice on where I'm going wrong!

I'm going to try to update the blog and our twitter as much as I can to let you guys know what we're up to and then, hopefully, you can let me know where we can improve. I would love to hear from you guys!

About Robert

The Texas A&M Years
I did my first two years of college at Texas A&M as a Computer Engineering Major. I really loved the school itself, but I grew to dislike my major and I wasn't able to change over to Computer Science. I thought I could grin and bear it and just get through college, but I started to resent going to classes more and more. At the end of the spring semester of 2004, I'd had enough and so I unceremoniously withdrew from the university.

I only told my parents after the fact....it wasn't pretty.

Starting My First Company
Even though I dropped out of A&M, I was able to keep my job working IT at the Aersopace Engineering Department. It was a great job and they even allowed me to increase my hours. Now that I had enough to live off of and more free time, I decided I wanted to start a web startup.

I really liked programming, but I knew almost nothing about web programming at the time. My old high school friend had been creating custom web sites for people, and so I invited him out to lunch so I could pitch him my startup idea.

I figured that even if he liked the idea, it would take us a week or two to get started. That was plenty of time to do a crash course in web programming so I wouldn't seem completely clueless. To my suprise and dismay, he liked the idea and we were in business the very next day!

It was the middle of summer and my new co-founder came over to my tiny little apartment with horrible AC and we started programming in the sweltering heat. It was both horrible and absolutely great! Within that first day, I realized my new co-founder was actually a really great web developer. I could explain to him what I was imagining and within minutes he'd have a working mockup. I was in complete awe. I started to fear that he would realize that I had no idea what I was doing and would call the whole thing off.

I don't think I ever told him, but that first month I studied web development around the clock in hopes of being able to produce a fraction of what he could.

By the end of the summer, we had somehow completed version 1 and we even sold some customers on it. Things were looking good! This excitement was short lived though. Almost immediately, we started seeing some major problems with version 1. For version 2, we planned a complete re-write plus the addition of some major new features. We were gonna make version 2 great!

We toiled away on version 2 for a year and a half. We got bogged down by trying to make version 2 "great." We obsessed about the smallest of details. It became routine to throw hours of work away and start completely over. Nothing less than "amazing" was acceptable. In retrospect, this really hurt us and was the root of our failure. We we were working hard, but we rarely allowed ourselves to declare anything as "complete" - we always found some reason to start over or to endlessly try and improve things.

We never finished version 2.

Both my co-founder and I had this unofficial agreement with our parents saying that we had until the summer of 2006 to start seeing some returns on the startup. Early in the spring of that year, we realized we would never finish version 2 since our overall pace was absolutely glacial, despite the fact that we were pogramming like crazy. It was a little disappointing to realize that we would never see our efforts come to fruition. Our chance had been lost.

In the end, my co-founder found a job as a web developer and he moved to Dallas. A couple months later, they were hiring another web developer. He recommended me, and so I quit my job and moved to Dallas.

Back to School
Within a few months at the new company, we both realized the company was crazy and did not provide a healthy working environment for its employees. I decided I was going to quit and my friend followed suit. He quickly found a job down in Houston and off he went while I decided I was going to finish school. I applied and was accepted at UT Dallas (UTD) for the Spring 2007 semester.

School didn't start for a couple months, so I decided to kill time with a solo road trip around the country. It was great fun, you can see the pics here.

At UTD, I actively tried not to think about startups and to stay focused on school. That lasted until Andrea and I started dating at the beginning of the fall semester. Eventually I told her about my previous startup, and her excitement reinvigorated my enthusiasm for startups. You can read about how we came up with YakGroups on my previous post here.

Starting YakGroups
We had the idea for YakGroups finalized by the beginning of the Spring 2009 semester and I started working on a prototype.

Then two things happened:

1. My senior project sucked up all my time.
2. Andrea and I decided to hike the Appalachian Trail (AT)

I was kinda anxious to start on YakGroups, but I'd also wanted to hike the AT for a long time. I figured the chance to hike the AT didn't come around very often, so I better seize it while I could. I had my whole life to do startups.

I decided I wasn't going to let the idea die though; instead, it would just go into a holding pattern until the end of the summer. Eventually I graduated and we were off to the middle-of-nowhere, Georgia to start hiking through the woods. Since the AT forces you to primarily focus on food, water, and shelter, we hardly brought up YakGroups the whole summer. We had an absolutely great time though, you can see the pics and read the twitter we used to update friends and family of our progress.

As soon as I got back, the only thing I could think about was starting YakGroups. Trying to do a startup while using Graduate School to "fund" the startup and cover my own expenses has been quite a challenge.

Regardless, I soon dove in and started programming like a man possessed...and I'm still going like that. There are so many days where I've spent all morning programming, gone to classes in the afternoon, come back to a couple hours of homework, and then only to jump back into programming until 3 or 4 in the morning.

So far so good though: I am proud to say that YakGroups is developing very nicely and we are still on schedule for a January 2010 Beta release.

We will post screenshots soon!

About Andrea

The idea of startups was first introduced to me in high school, when I discovered Paul Graham's essays. Before that, I had never even considered the concept of entrepreneurship, but I devoured his essays pretty fanatically. At the time, I didn't really have anyone to talk to about startups, and I am not the type of person who is so incredibly motivated and productive that they can start a startup on their own. So the startup dream died…for a while.

I took my very first college programming class in the summer of 2007, where I met my cofounder (and boyfriend). His embarrassing first attempts to catch my attention notwithstanding, we developed a strong relationship, and he soon told me about his previous attempt to start a startup (he'll tell you that he didn't discuss this with me until about a year into our relationship, but I remember it differently).

I was pretty surprised and excited, and we began discussions about entrepreneurship and startups. At this point, I still wasn't really considering being involved in a startup myself, but I encouraged him as much as I could to try again. He was pretty committed to school, though, so any startup ideas we discussed went into the growing "idea notebook" and were shelved for the time being.

The summer after my first year in college, I got an internship working for a telecommunications company, where I wrote code all summer. The work wasn't terribly difficult, I was well paid, I had a great boss, and I was unsupervised most of the time. For a college internship, I really can't complain...except I'm going to anyway.

That was the summer that I realized I was never going to be a software developer for a large company. I was bored out of my mind and dreaded going to work every morning. I felt that my code (which, granted, wasn't very good back then) was just floating off into the ether -- no one was ever going to use it or even read it. The pace of development was as slow as molasses; in fact, I couldn't fathom that anything ever got done at that company at all!

I realized then that I never wanted another job like that. I still love software and technology (I am a geeky girl, after all) but I couldn't imagine myself coding for a large corporation like that again.

That seemingly endless summer reinvigorated my interest in startups, and Robert and I continued our discussions about them. We came up with the idea for YakGroups and started fleshing it out. Robert even started coding a prototype, but we got caught up in analysis paralysis and had a bunch of other things to focus on (Robert was graduating and I was busy planning our upcoming summer trip), so we didn't get very far.

The next summer, we went crazy and decided to spend three months walking through the woods. Hiking the Appalachian Trail was one of the best experiences of my life. Among other things, I realized how little stuff we actually need to survive and be happy. I realized that I could probably handle the startup life; being poor for a while in order to do interesting things was an acceptable tradeoff.

As soon as we got back, work on YakGroups started in earnest. Robert's been coding like a fiend ever since, and I'm struggling to keep up with his pace! We're on track to launch in January of 2010 -- stay tuned for more updates!

Finding a Business Idea

Everybody knows that starting a business is hard, but it is hardly ever mentioned that it can be just as difficult to simply select what business to start.

First, let me say that I am not a wizened, old entrepreneur with several successful businesses under my belt. I am simply a grad student in Dallas, TX and this will be the second business I have started. That being said, I will not try to sell you on some "magic formula" or the "best way" to find a business idea; instead, I will relate some of my experiences and what helped me find a business idea.

Support network
This story starts in the summer of 2008 and I had been dating Andrea for about a year. I had just told her I had once before started an internet startup when she, much to my surprise, got all excited and wanted to know everything about it.

I was surprised because when I told people that I had started a business, they would usually look at me like I had just told them I was carrying some sort of easily contractible disease!

Ok, that may be a mild exaggeration, but not by much. Sounds weird, but it's true...as a startup entrepreneur, you have to get used to the idea that most people will think you're crazy.

As a result, when it came to my previous business or my hopes to start another business, I had always felt pretty isolated. I didn't have anyone to bounce ideas off of and it discouraged me from pursuing a new business idea.

Over the years since my last business, I had tried to keep my eyes and ears open for other similar minded people, but I never had any luck. Suddenly, Andrea, the girl that I was already dating, was really interested in my past business and became even more excited when I told her that I hoped to start another business one day.

I could talk to her. I didn't have a business idea yet, but I now had someone I could talk to about any crazy ideas I might dream up. That was big: I now felt like I could take that first step and actually start looking for a business idea to pursue.

Lessons Learned:
Everybody needs somebody. It's not impossible to start a business as the sole founder, but it would be difficult. At the very least, you should try to find someone that you can talk to on a regular basis about the business. Maybe an old professor or a mentor, as long as they will be completely honest and frank with you.

Very few people could start a business completely in a vacuum. The internet startup community largely agrees that your choice of co-founder will have the largest impact on the outcome of your startup. So choose wisely.


Idea Generation
I was now feeling very encouraged and extremely enthusiastic, so I dove in head first. I started a month-long personal brainstorming session.

I started an idea notebook and carried it around in my backpack with me all the time. If an idea struck me while I was without my backpack, I would pull a 3x5 notecard I kept in my wallet just for such an occassion.

I couldn't trust myself to just remember an idea for later. I had to write it down as soon as I got the idea or I would usually forget it. There was nothing so frustrating as being able to remember that I'd had a great idea, but having absolutely no clue what the idea itself was.

No idea was too small or too big. Any and all ideas got written down immediately. More than once, I jumped out of the shower with an idea scrambling for a towel, a pen, and my notebook simultaneously!

I found the easiest way for me to come up with ideas was to listen to people's complaints and problems, then come up with an idea, any idea, that could potentially solve that problem. Andrea talked about how grocery lists are a pain and half the time you don't have them on you when you suddenly decide to go to the grocery store and, immediately, the grocery-list cell-phone-syncing web app of world domination went into the idea notebook!

Nothing was too silly or farfetched. I just kept writing them down in the notebook.

After a month of this, I had come up with a good number of ideas. I'll be frank: most of them were....less than stellar. But it didn't matter, I now had a bunch of ideas I could take to Andrea to start the discussion.

Lessons Learned:
Sitting down to come up with the "next great idea" is really difficult. Instead, I would simply go about my day and try to draw inspiration from people's problems. I figured that if they're having a problem, then probably others are having the same one and maybe I could base a business around solving it for them.

In addition, just like with anything, the more you do it the easier it becomes. Not all ideas are gems, but the act of finding an idea gets easier over time. Sure, the first five or so might be a bit of a struggle and might take a week or more, but before you know it you're coming up with two or three a day.


Idea selection
When Andrea and I started dicussing the ideas in my notebook, we decided to start by making a few simple (unrealistic) assumptions: we'd have infinite time, unlimited resources, and guaranteed success.

With these assumptions in place, it becomes much easier to brainstorm about an idea. Instead of worrying about how to fund the company, we could focus our brainstorming efforts on fleshing out the product idea and what value we would provide to the customers.

Only after we had done this with all the ideas in the notebook did we start to go back over them and start looking at them through the lens of real-world limiting factors.

Eventually, we came up with these criteria:

• Money required
• Time needed
• Customer types

Money Required
Since Andrea and I are still both in school and we did not want to drop out, we decided to focus on ideas that we could bootstrap with very little initial investment. Nothing wrong with going the Venture Capital route, but it just wasn't for us.

So all ideas that needed Venture Capital were out.

Time Needed
Since we would both be finishing grad school in about 2 years, we wanted a business that could hopefully provide us with a job and at least the minimum to live off of by the time we graduated. After discussing it a bit, we decided the absolute minimum time needed to build up a sufficient customer base (and this is with a lot of elbow grease and luck) would be 1 year. So that left us with a maximum of 1 year to build the product.

All ideas that would take longer than a year to develop got the axe.

Customer Types
By this point, we were down to just 2 or 3 ideas and I remember one of them was actually Andrea's idea. They were all good ideas. In the end though, it came down to who would be our customers.

My last business catered to a small number of niche clients. I hadn't been opposed to going down that road again, but when presented with the possibility of building a product that would have broader appeal to a larger number of people, I simply couldn't resist.

We decided that building a product with (hopefully) lots of customers would simply be more fun. That narrowed the decision down to just 1 idea.

We didn't have a name for it yet, but the idea that would eventually become YakGroups was started that day. A lot has happened since then, but we have made great progress. We are planning to launch YakGroups in January of 2010.

Lessons Learned:
Everybody knows you are going to need time and at least a little money to start a business, but there are many factors involved with not only making a business successful but also one that you'll enjoy working on over the long term.

Some other requirements might be:

• Technology - who will do it and how much do you need?
• Marketing - what marketing avenues will be available to you?
• Customers - who are they and how many will you have?

My last business catered to a small number of customers that all required customizations. The business was fun and I learned a lot about customer relations, but it can be quite stressful when all your customers have your cell phone number and don't hesitate to call you.

In the end, for each person the requirements will be different. Identifying what type of customer we wanted to serve allowed Andrea and me to pursue an idea that we thought had a good chance for success as well as keep our personal cell phone numbers private.