That being said, first impressions are one thing, but once you’ve been successfully doing business with us for a period of time, I expect to treated with the same respect as any older colleague.

Time and time again, however, we see otherwise. In the past, we have had partnerships for 2+ years where we had successfully launched multiple projects for our partners largest clients, only to still be treated like children.

Recently, we have been trying to expand our office space only to be ignored and bullied by our building’s lease managers. We asked are “older” guy to talk to them and suddenly we have the lease signed and construction beginning a week later. And, when they need something they pretty much ignore the rest of us and go straight to him. This one really frustrates me. I’ve been paying the rent on time, every time for the last 16 months and I’m now looking to double my rent and they can’t take me seriously?

I just don’t understand it. Do we need to act more professionally? Do we need to perform better? Or is it a simple as us needing to age 10 years before this nonsense ends?

This was fine then, but as our business matures, we find that this is ultimately just plain wrong.

Your relationships need to be based on mutual beneficiality. The work we do should provide good solutions that impact our client’s businesses and in turn they should value the work we do appropriately.

Touchy-feeliness aside, this makes business sense when it comes to bottom line. We have some clients that don’t really value our work, we see this when they try to suck every last minute out of us for free and expect something for nothing. This is shit. And, this is not a good relationship.

I believe that if you truly value something (whether it be a product in general or a certain property of a specific brand), you’ll pay what it’s worth, even if the opportunity is there to get it free. For example, I ran over my 40 hours of Pandora for this month. I could have switched to Grooveshark.com, or hell, even signed up for another Pandora account and had 40 more for free. On the contrary, because I value the service provided, I paid for the unlimited hours.

Lesson: Expect no different from our clients and only get into relationships where the work we do is truly valued.

As young entrepreneurs we don’t have all the answers, in fact we don’t even have half the answers. Decisions we make come from our sense of logic and the limited related experiences we do have. And though we are fairly intelligent young men and rapid learners, we still struggle with many business decisions: should we pursue this project or that one? When do we hire on additional staff? The list goes on.

Thankfully, we do have an excellent advisory board, a small panel of true business experts that are kind enough to sit down with us once a month and help us grow our company. These guys are more than just legit business minds, they are also trusted friends that care about our success.

I think that makes all the difference. We know that no matter how much one course of action makes sense, if these guys say otherwise, we should listen.

Recently, our board has helped us form a plan for future growth and has put us on the path. More on this later.

In brief, having knowledgeable, trusted advisors allows us to work with confidence toward the success of our business as a whole.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.