- Ricardo Varela and Ernesto Jiménez talked to Tom Gatten.
Ricardo and Enernesto run a startup – Espresso Collective – and hold down full time jobs at the same time.
It’s just not going to be easy. If you have a job and a startup at the same time, avoid procrastination and sleep very little!
The most important thing is to fix on one concept and get it out to a strict plan. Most cool ideas if they are cool enough will have lots of branches and possibilities. Focus on some functionality, get version 1.0 out the door and delay the decision on extra features as long as possible. That’s the best way to think – once you’ve got a deadline, when you can ask yourself, should I be doing this, or this? Is in needed for the next deliverable? No? Then don’t do it. It’s great to think about the potential of your product, but you can get caught up with thinking about the things you need to achieve all that. Usually you don’t need very much to get the first version out.
Once you have something working you can use the data you get from it to develop other features. Don’t look at facebook and think, wouldn’t it be cool to have x functionality? Facebook can do what it likes because it has a core of users. Think how did Facebook start, what did it offer to get itself off the ground.
Plus if you’ve got a really complicated back end, but the interface looks a bit alpha, users won’t appreciate what you’ve done.
It’s almost like you have to make yourself more stupid: agree to a delivery date and switch to execution mode. That means you stop thinking of amazing ways your product could rule the world, and get something out.
In our case the stage 1 project we’re bringing out is what Ernesto wanted initially, I wanted to do some different things, but we discussed it and agreed. Once you’ve made that decision, don’t worry about whether it was the right decision, once you have launched you can validate it by iteration.
We work mostly at weekends. We go to hack days and take part in fast development competitions because they show you how much is possible in a really short time. Some people say, ‘oh I don’t have time to do this or this’ and I say, OK but you are keeping up with all these TV shows. Sometimes you have the time; you just need to reprioritise how you spend it.
We have a saying in Spain, if you like what you’re doing it doesn’t hurt! Find your motivation; ask yourself why you are in this startup? Motivate yourself with the promise of pots of money by all means, but it’s not the only important thing.
You have to achieve the perfect balance of self-esteem – I feel good about what I’m doing – with a lack of ego – I may not always be right.
If you’ve worked for a big company in your startup’s field it’s generally a good thing, you know what works and what doesn’t, you know good people and good practices. Good technical practices, things like code review, are more widely known now, but often people neglect standard industry procedures in a startup. Ernesto always goes through my code, and He goes through mine. It’s one of those things that attack your ego! You don’t always want someone else seeing the horrible hackwork you’ve done on your alpha release. But it just produces a better product.
Most of all, you have to be open minded. You’ll have to do things that aren’t in your ‘core skills’, things you don’t really like. Everyone has to be a salesman for your company, even the developers. And it helps if the business developers at least understand what the developers are doing.