Paul Grahm wrote a great essay a few months back called, “What Startups Are Really Like“. If you haven’t already read it, go read it now, its an incredibly on point article about some of the things that surprise founders most when starting companies. Collectively the SocialGuides founding team of Scott Campbell, Christian Gammill, and myself have been involved in at least a dozen startups and would most definitely echo nearly all of the things in the article. They also echo many of the things we heard in the Shotput Ventures program that SocialGuides has had a pleasure of being a part of. One of the things however that I feel hasn’t been articulated as well is the length of time it takes for things to happen at startups. (At least) twice as long as you expect. Heck even this article, predictably enough, I was originally planning on writing two months ago. But alas, getting around to blogging again has taken me twice as long as expected.
So what is the twice as long theory? It simply states that everything you do will take twice as long as you think it will. Yes, even if you are focused, yes even if you have smart people on your team, yes even if you subscribed to “modern methodologies” like agile. Why? Simply because founders are inherently aggressive in what they believe can be accomplished (you have to be) and incredibly resource strapped at the same time (well you should be anyways).
We basically started working on SocialGuides at the beginning of 2009. At that point my timeline looked a little something like this: have a demo in 2 months, have a private alpha in 5 months, a beta in 8 and start commercializing by month 12.
What actually happened?
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It’s been an interesting few months here at SocialGuides. The location space has heated up to say the least. This is in large part due to the success of check-in apps (Foursquare and Gowalla). We love what those guys have done and we couldn’t be more excited about it all – Location is our business…
