My father contributed to the design and development of the Stealth Bomber. Growing up with a Lockheed Martin Engineer for a Dad I understand the need for secrecy in regards to the serious matters of Global Conflict. However, this same understanding lends me the pragmatic frame of mind it takes to build an effective web product.
If it isn’t online and operational, it isn’t finished.
If you operate a web business, this is the only way to judge the readiness of your products.
Over the years we’ve come up with this simple self-evaluation technique
1. What is your milestone?
2. Is it online and operational?
If you answer yes to number 2, you can move to your next milestone. If you answer no, then you must break the unfinished milestone into sub-milestones and repeat this process for each of those new milestones. If you cannot break the project down into its milestones then the project is not properly thought out.
Recently, I was evaluating the Project of someone who had asked for some technical input on a project they were working on. Initial email received follows:
Why don’t we meet tomorrow. I want to show you the site I’m working on and get some feedback as well as learn more about your flash solution
I was happy to meet and discuss. After all, this person seemed nice enough and I thought they had done some startup work before. Then this email came back.
I’m totally OK with 4pm. Sounds good. I am trying to talk to my developer guys to see if I can get access to the coding so that you can see it, too.
I felt this request was a bit out of order, I didn’t think looking at actual code was necessary because it isn’t possible to assess a web project unless it is online. So I replied that it would be hard to evaluate code, but I’d be happy to look at it and asked if they were having trust issues with their team. I then realized I was being forced into a consult so I explained that I could only spend an hour with this individual and reiterated that it wouldn’t be necessary for me to look at code that I had not written. Almost immediately, the following email came back:
I have been desperately trying to get this thing built over the past 2 years; it’s less of a trust issue and more that since I’m not a developer myself, I’ve had to pay for it to get done b/c most developers, like yourself, and others, are so heavily focused on their own projects/products that they don’t have time for anything else. I figured it would take forever to find the right person who was passionate about the idea to help me build it even though a very similar and less clever idea in the states is already valued at more than $250 million dollars and the fact that it’s not being done here yet is a travesty.
This first paragraph tells me that due to this person’s insecurities they are trying to operate in stealth mode. Also that he is copying a popular service from the states without actually providing details as to what that service does. Hence making it impossible to evaluate what they are talking about. The email continues.
They have a built a very “construction zone” type site that has no UI and no design. I need to sit down with someone over the next 2-3 weeks and really pound out how it will all flow and look for the users, the admin, the merchants whom we’ll be signing on board and the payment scheme. There are still so many elements to pull together and I feel that since the developer himself is actually in China, I don’t have face time with him and I’m going through my good acquaintance here in Tokyo. He has his own dev team and has charged me costs to build it. So he’s helping me out, but I feel like I’m not entirely sure what’s going on. Not that nothing’s built. A lot has been built. It’s getting it to the finishing stages with navi, usability, intelligence, transaction management, design and fraud prevention (i.e. people gaming the system)
This second paragraph tells me that the project milestones are unclear and that nothing is finished.The final sentence in the paragraphs states directly that nothing is finished. Please read on!
I’m doing this for the first time, so I’m feeling a bit lost in trying to pull it together. Also, need to make a team asap. Only have one person on board now..and he’s in LA and can’t do much now. Need to find more local people–two people are VERY interested and have been acting as advisors, the developer himself is interested which is why he’s doing it, but there are still a lot of loose ends. Anyway, let’s do tomorrow at 4pm.
This final paragraph is a cry for help. Again, there is no clear information so I could not get a good idea of what the team is like, therefore I can only conclude there is no team.
In short, this person turned a simple ‘OK, see you tomorrow’ into a 3 paragraph excuse for the projects lack of progress. This persons response to the trust issue in question was totally unexpected. I assumed this question would have been taken lightly, but given the measure of panic in their reply, I knew that I had probably struck a nerve. If I had known the project was is such disarray I would not have posed that question about trust in their team.
I was immediately reminded of the nightmare clients I’ve dealt with early on in my career. This client calls everyday to reinforce the importance of the project. When it seems like you are starting to make progress the client changes direction and wants to start over. Into the second month the project loses traction, the client blames you, and abandons the project in a huff. The type of client all freelancers fear: “The Time Waster.”
The reply to my question about trust issues is very painful for me to read. I feel blessed to have a founding partner to keep me going in a steady and consistent direction. If there is anything I learned from the hundreds of funding applications and pitches we’ve done, is that unified team makes all the difference once the project starts coming together. The CTO/CEO team is the ultimate combo in motivation and support.
Eventually, without any further input from me – the following email arrived in my inbox:
My developers are using GIT and Rails. I’ve given them $11K, so the first question I have is if they’ve done $11K of work AND then after that I want to see if it is so difficult to add on facebook connect so that users of the service can spread the word to their network
The time waster theory was confirmed with the classic: I paid X amount of dollars, but have they done X amount of dollars worth of work? This is when I decided to cancel the meeting. Here is my reply:
Facebook connect took me about 3 to 4 hours to implement, very simple. If you made a contract with your developers and their product matches the spec in the contract then they did 11k of work. If its still not complete, then they didn’t. If your system is not up and running, then the work isn’t finished. How about this, you send me links to your GIT page and product and I’ll look at it. It seems that we don’t have to meet to discuss your product. My time will be better spent developing my own product.
I stuck to my rule of thumb: If its not online and operational, its not finished. Plain and simple. This person came back to me with the following:
The lead developer/mediator guy says he wanted to do it Agile style, so it’s been on an as-we-go sort of basis, and it seems to me that the idea is more on a cost-basis. $15K for 3 months, one guy, full-time. But I think one could get a lot done in that time–that’s my point. It would be better to meet face-to-face, but if you’re pressed for time, perhaps we can do it tomorrow instead? I should have the links by then anyway, and I’d like to be looking at it with you. If I get them today, you can look at them ahead of time. I need to understand more fully what’s going on. If you’re that pressed for time and can’t help at al, then I’ll try to ask someone else.
My question is not about a specs vs. execution of those specs because of the “agile” development process I was told we were doing. Also, lines of code are lines of code. And if only a few lines of code have been written, then it’s obviously not 7 weeks of work full-time. These are some of the questions I have and wanted to discuss.
In this reply I get the feeling there is no contract. There are no milestones, just a $15,000 pool of money so the developer can get told what needs to get done for 3 months. At this point I have honestly lost all hope in this project. In my frustration I reply with the following email:
Most of those questions sound like contractual issues. If agile development was chosen then the contract should be based on timely milestones. Feature A in allotted time, feature B in allotted time, etc. and payment made as milestones reached. If the contract is not understood then there is no way to judge how much the finished work is worth. I’m sorry but I’d rather not get involved. Thank you for understanding.
I thought my reaction was justified. Perhaps a little insensitive, but running a startup is not for the faint of heart. Here is this persons final reply:
These are not contractual issues; I, not being a developer, am not familiar with GIT, can’t assess what’s been done, etc., I am asking for help in understanding not to jump on any side in a legal battle.
Finally I replied to this with the following:
If the product or milestone is not online and functional then it isn’t finished.
That was the end of the communication. Some time wasted, but mostly averted.
However, after all those emails and all that explanation of what they needed done I still have no idea what the product is! This is a common problem in the startup world. Where stealth and secrecy goes past the point of absurdity – even when you’re dealing with someone that is asking for your help, their need to keep their ideas close creates bad communication and zero knowledge shared.
Perhaps if I knew what this $250 million idea was meant to be I could have given more help to solve the problem or perhaps gotten involved, or maybe I could have given an example of a non-american product that has the added features they’ve already thought of for their product.
Stealth means not sharing knowledge in a worldwide business community, an equal waste of time and resources to throwing money at a foreign developer for a project that has no milestones or a solid road map.
