I came across an interesting article from 37 signals yesterday. It talks about how there is a very natural progression from side project to full time business that people often overlook.

The natural evolutions from side project to full-time business.

You don’t often hear about this side of the entrepreneur’s story. The popular story is about the pitch, the business plan, etc and perhaps VC is involved. You hear about taking off, full-steam ahead, living in the one-room office, and working 120 hours a week.

But, this idea of starting out with a side project and maturing it into a business while keeping your day job is nothing new to us. It’s how we did it. Sure, it helped that our “day job” was being students. But, as a couple of young guys bootstrapping a business, it made sense to us.

That is not to say that starting up was not a challenge, I mentioned basically living in a one-room office (yeah, we’ve done that) and working 120 hour weeks (check).

Now that we’re afloat we need to figure out how to turn this organic growth into strategic growth so we can really take off.

Recently, I added the following tag line to my blog: thoughts and experiences in starting a career as an entrepreneur. (I thought by placing the focus of my blog on the single thing that consumes nearly 80% of my waking hours I would be encouraged to post more frequently while still capturing things that are important to me, but that’s neither here nor there).

I think the spin I am puting on things is an interesting one. It’s not just about being an entrepreneur, it’s not just about being a first-time entrepreneur. Rather, it’s about being an entrepreneur at the very start of my career, which, if you think about it, is an interesting problem.

You may have heard something along the lines of, “academics are important, but there is no substitute for experience.” [Explitive deleted]! This is so [explitive deleted] true!

I’ve found that in all businesses, but in marketing and interactive especially, the common path for the entrepreneur is to spend a good chunk at one or more big agencies, build some good relationships, work on some cool projects, and sooner or later spin off an agency of their own.

And this makes perfect sense. It’s much easier to do something after you’ve watched someone else do it first. It’s even easier if you’ve assisted that someone in the task. All of that base business-running knowledge that you get by working at different businesses surely helps a great deal when building your own.

So what about us?

Well, the one thing we lack is any real experience. The core at dynamIt are not only first-time entrepreneurs, but we are first time professionals. This lack of experience has put us in some tough situations before, there have certainly been a lot of “wow” moments along the way.

Take for example the concept of pricing. What is an appropriate hourly rate for the type and quality of work we do? This is a tricky question, price yourself too high and be precieved as a rip-off, price yourself too low and do not expect to be taken seriously. Now, imagine trying to answer this question when you’ve never worked in the industry and never purchased from the market.

So, how do we do it? How do we get up to speed? Answer: we imbibe, we soak it all in. Nick spends at least four mornings a week getting coffee or breakfast with various professionals both industry related and not. We’ve got an outstanding advisory board (yeah, they’re good). We surround ourselves with excellent mentors at every chance we get. And, if that doesn’t quite do the trick we try, fail, try again.

When people talk about the importance of (industry) experience, believe me, they’re not making it up. We’ve come a long way already, but those “Ah ha!” moments never cease.

WordCamp, a conference surrounding the open source blogging platform WordPress, was held today in Columbus. As promised, I gave a talk at the conference (for more details on my presentation check out the dynamIt Blog, to which I will post details soon). I must say, the event really exceeded my expectations. I am really glad that I participated. As a local entrepreneur in the industry, I found it beneficial for various reasons.

A networking event.

Although quite feeble, I did make an attempt at networking. I met a handful interesting people some of which are doing some cool things here in town, others on a higher level.

Putting our name out there.

I gave a twenty minute talk presenting a case study on a recent dynamIt project that implemented WordPress. So, if I did not talk to you personally, you were certainly introduced to me. Plus, when you’re introduced to me, you meet dynamIt as well.

So, my decision to speak was admittedly two pronged. I was able to say, “hey, look at us we do good work.” But, I was also able to offer insight into ways to leverage a great tool like WordPress.

Learning from the group.

I did not just come to talk and peace out. I spent the entire rest of the day listening to the other speakers. Here is a run down of what I liked, what I didn’t, and what I learned.

• Jane Wells of Automattic gave the keynote about the future of WordPress. Very cool to get the behind-the-scenes look on where the platform is going. I dug this talk, really got my mind thinking about how we can utilize WordPress to a greater degree in the future.
• Alex Brown of Bricker & Eckler spoke on legal issues in blogging. Also, a good talk, I was able to take away some general thoughts regarding copyright laws and placing content online.
• Mike Krotscheck of Resource Interactive gave a developer-friendly talk about advanced WordPress install which I found to be pretty rockin’. He introduced me to WordPressMU, which I had been meaning to jump into for a while.
• And Finally, Noel Jackson, also an Automattic guy, talked about the future of themes. Noel was an interesting guy with an uber-fresh perspective on design and development. Great talk.

In short, really excited about how the day at WordCamp unfolded.

As a Christmas gift last year, I received a 6 months subscription to Netflix. It’s perhaps the best thing ever. (I could end the post right here and feel good about it, but simple praise is not the real reason I’m writing).

I utilize the Netflix online streaming probably even more than I do DVDs by mail. It’s great, a huge library of online movies I can stream whenever I want. Well, two nights ago I went to throw on a movie and found that their streaming service was down. I was a bit disappointed, but Hulu filled my movie-watching void for that night.

What really makes Netflix special to me is the e-mail that I received this morning. It was a simple letter of apology attached to a 2% credit on my next bill. In a few short paragraphs they said, “I’m sorry we screwed up, let us compensate you for the loss in service.”

It’s not much, I know, but equate this to when your cable TV is out for a day or two (which has happened to me more often than I think it should, thank you Time Warner.) Does the cable company ever make an effort to apologize? Would they ever adjust your bill for loss of service? Simple answer: No.

Thank you, Netflix.

So, I got this crazy idea back in late March that for the summer I was going to do something fun, exciting, risky, scary, and cool all at once. That was, get a motorcycle. Most would agree the motorcycle does not exactly fit my personality. I’m typically quiet, reserved, and cautious. Nevertheless, I do have an adventurous side that yearns for excitement, he talked me into it.

When this idea first popped into my head, I had never been on a bike before, I had no idea how to ride, and the even thought of zipping down the road at 50+ mph had my stomach churning. It was not something that I had be waiting to do for a long time, the thought never crossed my mind in the past.

Long story short, I am proud of myself. When I came to the conclusion that riding a motorcycle would fulfill my criteria (fun, exciting, cool, risky, scary), I just did it. I got my temps, took and passed the Motorcycle Ohio course, purchased a bike, licensed the bike (and myself) and started riding to work, all within 6 weeks. I didn’t waste any time debating it, talking about it, thinking about it, musing over it, etc. I made the choice and then sprang right into action.

To often, I see people talk about some brilliant idea for the longest time and never take it anywhere. I’ve seen this in business on an occasional project where one will dote on an issue that is not all that important anyway thus hurting progress and blowing up timeline and budget. Sure, some critical thinking is essential, a little more can be beneficial as well, but after that, the quicker you can get to an action point, the better.

Luckily, the guys that I work with at dynamIt have a knack for finding that great balance between thought and action.

My advice: Do work. Get shit done.

Have you ever been on Twitter and read something from a follower and thought, YES! that is awesome. Maybe they said something hilarious, maybe they did something cool, or perhaps they found a really good link. As a result of this, a natural reaction is to want to give them credit, award them in some way.

The other side of the coin is also true. When someone makes a bonehead mistake or a jackass comment, who doesn’t want to knock them down a peg?

Enter tweetpoint.me. I created tweetpoint to quantify these notions. By sending a twitter reply to both @tweetpoint and @someone you can award (or takeaway) a point to this person. The syntax is simple:

@tweetpoint @whitman +1 for creating tweetpoint.

@tweetpoint @whitman -1 because tweetpoint sucks.

You will notice that after the point value I have added context to the action. This will make watching the tweetpoint stream fun because we will see what cool things are earning points and, better yet, what dumbass happenings are losing points.

Visiting tweetpoint.me allows us to view the tweetpoint stream, see the leader board (aggregated by hour, day, week, or all time and optionally filtered by a location search), and see an individual Twitter user’s tweetpoint profile.

Essentially, tweetpoint is a subjective version of TwitterGrader. At tweetpoint.me your value as a Twitter user is evaluated based on the opinions of others rather than usage statistics.

When someone says or does something that I value, I feel compelled to give them credit. On the other hand, when one says or does something idiotic, I believe they need to be knocked back down.

This is how I came up with the idea for tweetpoint, my first Twitter application. I was really excited by my idea and when I ran it by the guys in the office Thursday afternoon, these feelings were reciprocated. So, this increased my excitement and when I am pumped up about something, I have this tendency to dive right in and attack.

So, here the rundown of how tweetpoint went from concept to completion in just about 20 hours.

Thursday after work I engineered the app. I decided on a function list and built a database schematic. The user flow diagram never left my head as I went right into wireframing the entire site.

Friday, I pretty much took the day off of work to build tweetpoint. I borrowed Phil for about an hour so that he could give tweetpoint a logo and a graphic framework. While he was designing away, I setup my database and wrote all the queries.

After a Chipotle break around noon, I wrote the markup for Phil’s design. He laid out the homepage and I extrapolated from there to create the other views. I hooked up the queries with PHP and so it was time to dive into the Twitter API and load data into my local database.

Although I am bothered by the fact that it doesn’t use oAuth, the Twitter API is pretty powerful. It’s super easy to use and it let’s you do anything you want with Twitter. So, creating a script to load in all replies to @tweetpoint and parse their content was really a piece of cake.

Friday evening was spent in the office with Nick doing some stealth testing to see that things were being loaded properly and points were being added up appropriately.

Saturday afternoon then was cleanup and minor improvements, I had to rewrite some CSS to make IE6 act right (but that’s nothing new) and I added some cool little bits of functionality like the ability to award points to multiple people with a single tweet (@tweetpoint @guy1 @guy2 … @guyN +1).

Then, Saturday night, before I went out, I launched it into the world of Twitter.

Often when using an unordered list for navigation, I desire the <li>’s inside to be floated left. This affords me the ability to style them in any which way possible (margins, width, backgrounds, etc), but also have them arrange horizontally.

It is also likely that inside these <li>’s I will have <a> tags that I have chosen to give display: block. Again, display: block gives me the full gamut of CSS styles.

Upon doing this, I always open up IE6 and see that it appears the float: left did not apply to my <li>’s.

Since this only occurs when the <a> has display block, here is what I believe is happening. The display block from the child forces the floated <li> to take the full width of its parent instead of only the width necessary as is customary with floats.

SOLUTION: It is simple. Just give the <a> tag a float: left as well and it will fall inline (pun most certainly intended).

I own an iPhone. I love it. The things you can do with it are seemingly endless. Being a web developer, I naturally have a nagging urge to open up the iPhone SDK and go to town.

But, Apple has only released the SDK for Mac OS X with an Intel chip. Being one-part PC user and one-part Linux user, that will not fly. Ok, so I’ll load it up on the Intel-based Mac in the office.

Nope. Not happening. Our Mac runs OS X 10.4, the iPhone SDK requires 10.5.5. Duh? Why didn’t i know that? That makes sense, right?

Thanks Apple, I may have some really awesome app ideas that will greatly improve your device, but you’ll never know.

Being a young entrepreneur I am often faced with the question of my age. Is he for real? Can he get the job done right? On time and on budget? And, it does not help that I look like I am about 5 years younger than I actually am.

I was recently featured in an article in Xavier Alumni Magazine on the subject. See it here.

Allow me to reiterate. Yes, we are young, but we do have experience. We have released numerous sites, many working with big brands. We let the portfolio speak for us.

In fact, our youth is actually an advantage. Web is a fickle beast. Being in this industry, we have seen many shifts. For example, when we started out, there really wasn’t much in the area of social media. There was no Facebook API to develop for because there was no such thing as Facebook. It’s things like this in which our youth actually enables us to be on the forefront of our industry.

We’ve seen design trends change along way. We’ve seen the rise of various web services and web platforms, many of which we’ve leveraged to our clients’ benefit.

We get web. We really don’t know what it is like to live without it. Honestly, for these reasons I’d be wary of a firm whose every member is over 35. Just sayin’.