Here’s a pop quiz for the Minnesotans out there: what does this photo depict?

Give up?  Ok, what if I show you this view instead?

The two views are, of course, the same location.  The only difference is that they are separated by 53 years of construction.  The first image depicts the southeast corner of Maple Grove, MN in 1957, and the second image is the same area from 2010.  I chose these crops because they are roughly centered on the house I grew up in.  That house would not exist for almost 20 years after the 1957 shot was taken.

It turns out that the University of Minnesota maintains an online interface to its extensive historical map collection, which is where the 1957 aerial photo came from. (The 2010 photo is from the always excellent Google Maps.)  I was especially pleased to find that the collection includes numerous photos from before the era of freeways.  The Twin Cities look so oddly foreign without their belts of asphalt.

(This is the second in a three-part series. Start at the beginning)

So there I was in the spring of 2010: a consultant. I was a hired gun, albeit one with substantial experience in The Company’s industry. It was bittersweet. (In keeping with tradition, I do not name employers or clients on this blog.)

All consultants are contractors, but not all contractors are consultants

By any objective measure, the gig was fantastic: good people, good project, and good money. I was useful and appreciated. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that by failing to get Blurity to “ramen profitability,” I had embarrassed myself.

Time passed. Spring gave way to summer, and that in turn led to autumn.

I became increasingly comfortable with my role at The Company. There was a thrill from building something new. Likewise, there was camaraderie from working on a team with capable peers. It was –- dare I admit it — enjoyable.

The consulting gig made possible many good things: paying down student loans; replacing my old Subaru with a new Subaru; and visiting Canada, South Dakota, Baltimore, Boston, and New York City. Most importantly, the reliable income allowed me to rebuild my savings in preparation for another startup effort.

Unfortunately, saving for the future and doing work in the present were two different things.  Blurity withered from neglect. I didn’t commit any code for it from March 19, 2010 to September 6, 2010.  From about November 2010 to January 2011, the site’s payment pathway was totally broken; it’s rather telling that nobody noticed.

No commits on Blurity for six months

I was embarrassed by having to go back to Corporate America, but instead what I should have been embarrassed about was ignoring Blurity for six months. Sure, it was hard to go back to a computer in the evening having spent all day staring at one, but I should have been able to allocate at least a few hours a week to my startup. Had I invested just an hour a day between March 19 and September 6 in Blurity, that would have been the equivalent of working on it full time for a month. A lot can be accomplished in a full-time month. Maybe I wasn’t hungry enough.

Life was comfortable as a consultant.  The hazard of becoming too comfortable loomed large.  Fortunately, I took steps to ensure that the consulting engagement would not be extended indefinitely. The contract was specifically crafted so that I would be there for a short time, help my client, make some money, and then get out before I got hooked on the easy life. I wanted to make sure that I would go back to Blurity.  Having certainty about the sunset was helpful for non-Blurity reasons, too.

I can’t understate how important it was to know that, no matter what happened, I would be gone in a year. Not because The Company was a bad place to be, but because it enabled me to approach nearly everything from an outsider’s perspective. I didn’t worry as much about office politics. I didn’t try to ensure my next project would be one of the “good” ones. I didn’t get too emotionally invested in product design decisions. It was fantastically liberating being a consultant instead of an employee, and moreover, being a consultant with an expiration date.

The end came on Friday — yesterday, as I write this. It’s hard to believe that 12 months went by so quickly. I’m technically on retainer through April, but I am no longer going in to the office on a set schedule.

I started the consulting gig reluctantly, came to terms with it, and grew to like it.  Goodbyes are tough even when they are preordained.

As I walked out of the building on Friday, I couldn’t help but feel a bit sad. But then I reminded myself that the contract was always temporary; moving on was always part of the plan.

The sun peeked out from behind the clouds as I reached my car. I got in, opened the sunroof, and drove away.

I knew a new challenge was waiting for me on my home PC.

Update 8/22/2011: Almost five months have passed since I wrote this.  I struggled with the third part, discarding several drafts, and in the end I decided that the setup I left at the end of this post won’t flow smoothly to the third part.  Sorry about that.

(continue to part 3)

“We were going to do a startup and get rich. Ha. Hahaha.”

— Matt Gordon, telling me about his startup experience

Back in September of 2009, I made a declaration on this blog that I was “going for it”: forget the job hunt, I said; I was going to follow my destiny of being an entrepreneur! Fame, fortune, and world-changing progress were sure to follow.  My ticket was going to be Blurity, a tool for removing the blur from blurry photos.

Publicly, I gave myself two and a half years to get my company off the ground, but my private spreadsheet showed that I would almost certainly be kicking it in the Caribbean by the following Easter.  Everything seemed to be lining up, and there was excitement in the air.

“I’m going for it.”

— Me, 18 months ago

I went through the steps like I was checking them off a list:

• Make minimum viable product? Check.
• Be embarrassed by the product? Double check.
• Talk to customers, then make changes?  Indeed.
• Apply for various tech accelerator programs? Yup.
• Get rejected by said programs? You’d better believe it.

Little by little, the initial euphoria wore off and doubt began to creep in. I attempted to set that aside using euphemistic rationalization, which was made all the easier by my being a single founder.

“The product doesn’t work worth a hill of beans? No, no. It works fine in this unicorn special case.”

“Customers not flocking to the site? I just haven’t promoted it enough.”

“Friends getting annoyed by my talking about the product? That’s just part of the game, right?”

I believed myself for a while – six months, in fact. In the end, though, I could not fool my bank account indefinitely. My product wasn’t gaining traction.

That was hard to admit. I’m usually pretty good at finishing things, so the prospect failure was as unappetizing as rotting potatoes.

What was the problem? In my mind, I didn’t have a market problem so much as a product problem.  I was the exception to the rule.  People clearly wanted their blurry photos deblurred. I figured that if I made the deblurring good enough, the world would beat a path to my door.  At least at first, I thought that my only problem was that the product was… how should I put this… the product was shit.

“It doesn’t take a formal process to figure out that there will be huge end-user demand for [a drug that cures cancer].”

— Steve Blank

“You’re not curing cancer. Did you even read the book?”

— What Steve will think if he reads that quote here (Hi Steve! MSE273 Fall ’07 alumn here.)

What I ended up discovering was that I had both a product problem and a market problem.  I wasn’t special after all.  Sure, everybody had blurry photos, but not everybody cared, and even fewer people were willing to pay to fix the problem.  Even among the people who did care about blurry photos and were willing to pay to make them sharp, I could serve only the subset that had photos that were blurred in a particular deblurrable manner.

About the time I realized all of that, I got gun shy.  I was too embarrassed to talk about the company with strangers because of the poor output quality, so I did very little promotion.  That, of course, is like a death sentence to a company.

It wasn’t all bad.  Even with limited promotion, I managed to attract a handful of customers to give it a try. Many of them were even willing to part with some of their hard-earned dollars for what small improvement Blurity could offer at the time.

I spent months trying to make the deblurring algorithm better.  I managed to achieve some minor advances, but there were no major breakthroughs.  I was hitting walls and burning out.

And so, with Blurity a plane stuck on the runway, and the end of that runway fast approaching, I swallowed my pride and reached out to some contacts in industry. Yes, in March 2010, I followed that well-trodden post-failed-startup path:

I became a consultant.

(continue to part 2)

Shivering in the cold night, I stood with a dozen others as we awaited the arrival.  It was a bit less than an hour before sunrise on a cold January morning in northern Minnesota.  I was bundled in my heavy parka, hat pulled low, and was drinking hot tea from a thermos, but the stress of a night spent driving instead of sleeping was catching up to me, making me cold.

Still, the excitement around me was contagious.  Many of those present had camped there along the Sawbill Trail near Tofte, MN since the previous day.  They were the enthusiasts, the ones who were passionate about their chosen sport: dogsled racing.  We were all there awaiting the mushers of the 2011 John Beargrease Sled Dog Race.

The ancient art of running dogs was once critical to life in the northern environment, but it was virtually eliminated in the early 20th century by the arrival of the snow machine and the airplane.  Its last popular hurrah was the 1925 serum run to Nome, Alaska to deliver diphtheria antitoxin.

Then, in the 1970s, the Iditarod race in Alaska was started, and by the 1980s dogsledding had once again entered the public imagination.  Rugged, athletic, and indomitable, the mushers were viewed as true Americans — never mind that many hailed from Canada.  The Beargrease race follows the same tradition as the Iditarod, albeit over a slightly shorter and considerably warmer 370 miles versus 1161 miles.

We made idle small talk in the night as our noses grew numb and our breath hung in the air.  The temperature according to my car was -5 degrees Fahrenheit, though if I’m honest, the lack of wind made it feel more like a balmy 10 above.  We waited.

Then, out of the darkness, a light.

“Team!” went the cry, and our group shuddered with anticipation.  A musher and his dogs were coming towards us on the trail.  His powerful headlamp — literally on his head — backlit the dogs into otherworldly silhouettes.  Closer and closer; first 200 yards; then 100; then they had arrived.  A handler stepped out to control the lead dog as the musher halted his team.  The race officials noted his name and status before sending him to a spot in the snowy woods for a few hours of mandatory rest.

In from the night

Other teams arrived.  Dawn broke, and soon most of the 17 teams were enjoying their temporary convalescence at the remote checkpoint, so far removed from civilization that all communication was by ham radio and satellite phone.  The dogs slept in the woods while the humans worked like dogs, replacing sled runners, cooking food, and fighting off fatigue.

Sleeping dogs

Before the final team had arrived, the first team had left again.  The next checkpoint was 51 miles away, just shy of the Canadian border, a distance that would take about 6 hours to cover.

To see the dogs at the restart from the checkpoint was to bathe in the ether of enthusiasm.  Big grins, big jumps, and big effort abounded.  The mushers, though more subdued, were also happy to get moving again as the they sped off into the wilderness.

Rounding the bend

Gradually, team by team, the snowy checkpoint in the forest grew quiet again, and the revelers settled in for long-delayed rest.

New on one of my other blogs, “Stopping in Every State”:

“Backpacking has a fundamental trade-off: the more stuff you carry in your pack, the more comfortable you will be in camp, but the less stuff you carry in your pack, the more comfortable you will be on the trail.

I subscribe to the comfort-on-the-trail school of thought. That was not…”

Continue reading on SiES –>