Near Misses

by on March 4, 2014, 0 comments

Running a startup is hard… and in my experience, near misses take the cake for being the most tolling aspect.

I think a “near miss” is self-explanatory, but just in case, it’s when you think you’re close to closing something important only to see it fall through.

Near misses come in many forms for a startup: recruiting, accelerators, raising money, partnerships, marketing opportunities, etc… and I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing each.

  • I’ve had what I thought was almost a sure thing with a CTO candidate who would have been an excellent fit… Only to find out he was burnt out after a year and a half of trying to start his own company. He decided a more stable company is a better fit for his current stage in life.
  • I’ve been to the interview stage of multiple accelerators, only to get rejected for being a single founder or “we don’t think the market is there yet”.
  • I’ve had the first draft of paperwork for a major deal that would have had us porting one of the most popular mobile games of all time to HTML5 with exclusivity. Only to see it fall through after a lower-than-usual quote led the developer to do more research. He found it would be just me doing the port (opposed to the dev shops they were used to).
  • I’ve had a co-founder of a billion dollar game company say he was interested in investing, then weeks later found out his buddy from that company pivoted his new startup to the same market we’re tackling. He chose them.

Near misses suck.

What’s important to realize, however, is that there will always be more opportunities and occasional hits. Always stay positive and never let a miss affect the energy and optimism you put into a similar opportunity next time.

Optimism leads to more perceived near misses. For me, I think I have more of an impact on making something a guarantee than I actually do in some cases. I go all out to make things happen – whether it’s a custom game to grab a news site’s attention, or driving 3 hours to try and sway a potential co-founder’s decision. It’s important that I keep that mindset, regardless of the number of misses and failures, because there are some cases where I am able to will something into happening.

Even with all those misses, we’ve still had some big hits. The most recent hit for us was a new distribution channel that has brought in a million new users in the last two months. Those types of hits feel really good.

It’s also important to note that in hind-sight, sometimes a miss is a good thing. If we had closed the deal to port that game to HTML5, it would have killed at least 2 months of development time. Time I think we were able to find a better way to spend.

Near misses are also great learning tools. You get to experience most parts of a certain process and there’s a lot to gain from this. I’ve become a better recruiter, interviewee, salesman and presenter because of these misses. As a more concrete example, there was an obvious lesson I learned in the game porting deal. I need to not undervalue the service I’m providing… that sometimes charging more is a better thing.

Never let near misses bring you down for too long. They’re going to happen, they’re going to suck, and they’re going to affect you in some ways, but the extent it does can be mitigated. Stay positive, realize that this miss may be a good thing, and there will be more opportunities.

21st Century Carol of the Bells

by on December 25, 2013, 1 comment

As part of my Christmas gift to my girlfriend, Rachel, I wanted to do something interesting with technology – specifically the many devices I have at my disposal.

What I ended up building was a “symphony” with multiple phones, tablets, desktops, etc… playing different parts of a song Carol of the Bells.

EDIT: Node server taken down for now… Try it out here

This is the version where every device plays the same part – it’s a bit more visually pleasing than it’s ensemble counterpart:

And the ensemble version where there are four parts split between the devices:

This was hacked up on Christmas Eve, but if you want to dig through the code, it’s on GitHub.

The client connects to a Node.js backend which lets the clients know which audio file to use. Once the sound files are loaded on all clients, an event to play the audio files is sent out (adjusted for latency on each device). The only painful thing here was some of the differences in HTML5 audio implementations on each device… it was easy enough to get the audio files to play, but there were different delays when using audio.play() or audio.currentTime = 0 (and Web Audio isn’t supported enough on mobile).

The four mp3 files are generated from a Carol of the Bells MIDI. To add in the visuals, I converted the MIDI file to an XML format, and again to JSON keeping just the info I needed (when a note is played, and which note).

On Single Founders

by on June 23, 2013, 11 comments

Hi. My name is Austin Hallock and I’m a single founder.

I’m writing this after learning Clay.io was rejected tonight by StartX, Stanford’s Accelerator. Their reasoning was the fact that I’m a single founder, and this isn’t the first time that has been a road block.

As many of you know, being a single founder is mostly looked down upon, especially by most accelerators and investors. For good reason too – it’s incredibly difficult to handle the burdens of a startup alone. That isn’t to say it’s impossible. Successful companies can be built with just one primary founder, see Dropbox, Amazon and countless others.

My problem is the metric for number of founders holds too much weight. In my experience others will favor a company that has a well-rounded team on paper: designer, developer, business guy, even if they have achieved less in the same amount of time as a company with a single founder. Of course, the lone founder of a company needs to be a rare breed capable of all three of those things, but that does exist.

Single founders have the advantage of always agreeing with themselves. At times this can be a disadvantage, but one easily countered by having a strong advisory board.

With that said, building this company as a single founder isn’t something I want – it makes life more difficult for me. Ideally I’d have one or two others who are just as passionate and committed as I am and I just haven’t found that yet. I need someone who I know will do a better job with either the design, business, or the technical stuff, AND have a major passion for gaming. Until I find that person, I will work my butt off to fill those roles myself.

To everyone judging a startup for having a single founder: don’t judge on the fact that there is just one face behind it, judge on its merit. How has the company evolved over time? What has been achieved for the amount of resources put into it? The history and traction of the company along with what the founder has built in the past should be more important than having the traditional team of a designer, developer, and business guy.

Of course, I am one of the more biased people out there for this argument, so I’d love to hear what anyone else has to say!