Hello, it has been a busy few months for HelloMovies. Our office went from a meeting room in Stanford University’s Old Union to a room in Stan and Hamilton’s apartment, and now a space in downtown Palo Alto. But the fluctuating working spaces have not been a hindrance. In fact, the team has been hard at work on a complete redesign of the site, including modifications to The Movie Genome Project and the user community on HelloMovies. The team is busy with some very interesting things and I will update in the next few days with more information. — Tad the intern

Here at HelloMovies, we recently partnered with design firm DecisiveFlow to revamp our current website. If you had the privilege (or disservice) of seeing our initial alpha, most of you would probably agree that a design revamp had been long overdue. Natalie Ferguson has been leading the charge - she’s done work for many great websites including SocialMedia which has been gaining buzz given the proliferation of Facebook apps. Most importantly though, Natalie’s team is based in New Zealand - adding a newfound accent, culture and timezone to our current team.

I will be the first to admit, our team can get a bit antsy when it comes to seeing new designs for the site. So when we didn’t hear from Natalie yesterday, we were a little worried. Rest assured everyone- yesterday (Feb 6th New Zealand time) happened to be Waitangi day in New Zealand, the day the treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 by the Europeans and the Maori. I’m still not too sure who the Maori are, but I think they have something to do with the indigenous Polynesian people who inhabited the island at the time.

We’re happy that HelloMovies has grown internationally and to have made some new friends on the opposite side of the globe.

our short break is over and now on to the Beta. We are expanding the team, bringing in designers, and starting to push full steam ahead again. 2008 should be a great year, and we may even be able to expand our meager office and get a new futon cover.

At the start of the quarter, the team made a goal to launch an alpha version of the site before winter break. Little did we know that our goal would be complicated by the creation of a new atom, a team of high schoolers addicted to World of Warcraft, and a hernia. The road to alpha can best be described through pictures.

9PM, Friday, December 7: Blackout at Stanford, most likely from a late night experiment at the Linear Accelerator. Stan decides to take a nap and a visitor navigates the halls of Old Union with LEDs strapped to a beanie.

Without the ability to program, I decide to visit some team members and finish up some paperwork. David reads through his contract, while Laura offers up a flashlight and provides sound legal advice.

3AM, December 9, 2007: Code starts to get hazy and concentration starts to diminish. Wifi goes down and a new P2P network is created by a group of neighboring teenagers playing WOW: “DOTAONTHISONELOLZ” (DOTA stands for defense of the ancients, for those of you WOW newbs). Stan starts to get loopy. Chris inserts a small comment into his code, “I hate you Stan.”

3PM, December 9, 2007: Alpha is demoed to a group of awesome friends from Cal who have graciously volunteered to give us feedback and input.

People cheer (maybe because of the food).

December 10, 2007: Matt returns with a lengthy beard after recovery from a hernia. The team is now back at full strength.

Alpha invites are now on the way and we look forward to everyone’s feedback!

I showed the site to my mom tonight. She thought everything was really cool, although she wasn’t very impressed by the fact that we haven’t indexed the movies so that you can search for foreign movies by their English titles yet. But she did like our browse feature’s functionality and all the cool expanding forms. So take that, Internet! At least our moms thinks our website is cool!

Speaking of moms, I’d like to introduce you to some of the terrible Your Mom jokes that Stan has made while coding together the last few days. Seriously, out of all the people I’ve ever met, Stan is the absolute worst at playing the dozens.

Chris: Do you agree or not?
Stan: Your mom agrees.

Chris: That’s hilarious…though also kind of annoying.
Stan: Your mom’s annoying.

Chris: What’s wrong with the inner join part of this MySQL query?
Stan: Your mom’s an inner join part of a MySQL query.

Chris: Hey, what did I just say that you said ‘your mom’ to?
Stan: …shit, I don’t remember.

Tons of advice out there on how to best start a startup, just like you can get advice on how to do everything in your life (relationships, work, health, finances, and on and on). Well, much of it is intuitive, but not all, and it is always nice to have validation that you are doing things correctly - at least in one person’s opinion.

Eric’s article he shared “How to start a startup”, mentioned below, is a very good one. The one thing that stood out for me in the assertion that everyone in the startup should be described as an animal, in terms of their devotion and passion for their role in the startup - which is very coincidental:

Steve’s nickname is Fanimal.

Chris is always talking about ‘cool’ animals - he tried to rally around the name MovieLemur but that thankfully didn’t pass.

Stan, Josh, and Chris are all coding and dev animals.

Dave G. is a search animal.

Dave B. is an architect animal.

Eric is a viral animal.

John is just plain animalistic.

and I’m not sure I’m an animal at all, but you might say I’m a business animal - which the author of the article puts down quite a bit, especially since I have an MBA.

Of course as we expand the team we should only look to hire animals…

Matt

When I was an analyst at Goldman Sachs, a lot of my VP’s and MD’s had catch phrases they would use to keep us motivated through difficult times.

“You are living the dream.”

“Great work, guy.”

“U da man.”

“Let’s rage.”

These messages didn’t have as much of an effect on me when I was sleeping on a drool-stained couch in our “quiet room” at 5AM (a power nap before an 8AM conference call). But one phrase has stuck with me through my ride at HelloMovies — “Stay laser-focused.” Smart people will always have brilliant ideas, and the temptation to work on all of them is incredibly strong. I’ve had my share of execution stumbles, but I am laser-focused now. Start basic, launch quickly with something basic, and iterate. Let’s rage.

How’s the rest of the team doing with this philosophy, you ask?  Let’s consult one of my developers’ roommates, the always cool Mr. Aaron Elias Berhanu:

“It seems that every time I come in here, Josh is looking at a black screen with lots of little writing, and Stan is looking at 300. And Chris…Chris is sitting there in the corner rambling or playing Guitar Hero or something.”

….

=(

Recently, I shared a famous article with the HelloMovies team called “How to Start a Startup”. The author, Paul Graham, ran a successful enterprise software startup in the 90s which he subsequently sold for millions. In 2005 he wrote “How to Start a Startup” to chronicle his success and philosophy on entrepreneurship; since then, this article has become somewhat of a Silicon Valley manifesto to all aspiring entrepreneurs.

Graham makes a lot of great points about finding the right ideas, making the right sacrifices, recruiting the right people, etc.–but there is one discussion that particularly struck me when I read his article a few days ago:

Graham asserts that you don’t need to start with a particularly good idea in order to have a successful start up. The idea doesn’t need to be that original, but it just has to “suck less” (borrowing Graham’s words) than the competitors. An example that he cites to support this argument is Google. When Google entered the search engine business, this industry by many measures was already mature. There were tons of big players at the time (Yahoo, Altavista, Excite, Lycos), but Google entered the arena because Sergey and Larry thought they could do search more efficiently than the rest–and they were right.

Bringing it back to HelloMovies–I think that our team has lots of non-sucky ideas, some of which are truly revolutionary and some of which are improvements on what our competitors can do. To draw parallels between HelloMovies and Google (hubris, I know)–our team is also venturing into a relatively mature space, but we feel strongly that we can shake up this market with our fine ideas and excellent products.

Nevertheless, these days I’m not too concerned about the ideas, people, or sacrifices we need to make for our startup; I’m concerned about execution.

As our advisor John Merrells recently warned, it’s easy to start but it’s really difficult to finish. Graham sort of implies this point throughout his article, but he didn’t explicitly address the problem of execution to my satisfaction.

Just to be clear, HelloMovies is chugging along at a decent pace these days and our team is confident that we can execute–however it’s frustrating at times that we can’t move faster and that we have to spend time filling some skill gaps in our team. These are common gripes for all startups, I’m sure.

To those of you who want to start a company: don’t be scared of the initial phases of the project–coming up with an idea and forming a team–that’s the super easy part. Be afraid of the execution! It takes huge commitment across your team and lots of emotional strength to move from idea to product.

Steven drove the meeting, sticking to a tight agenda of discussion items. As you can see, Steven was thinking really hard (indicated by the hand on his chin):

Chris showed up to the meeting late, but still had time to strike a pose for the camera:

Dave sat back in his chair and gently scolded us to get our act together:

Meanwhile, the team continues to build great chemistry. The proof? We are no longer weirded out by the fact that we’re five dudes sitting on Stan’s bed (left to right: Stan, Steven, Eric, Brown Bear, Chris, Josh):

I work at a very large Silicon Valley corporation as a product manager. Being a PM at a big company is great in many ways (access to resources, serving a developed market, etc.), but at times it can be a frustrating role–mainly because the pace of work is much slower and it’s difficult to innovate.

In the worst case, a product cycle can look like the following: you come up with a product idea, meet with key stakeholders to get initial buy-in on the idea, prepare a presentation to sell the broader upper management on the idea, finally get signed off on implementing your idea, beg your VP of engineering to provide developers to create your idea, wait until next quarter/next year for the business unit to allocate money and people behind your idea, create a product requirements document, spend weeks debating with your engineering manager and developers over the feasibility of your product requirements, convince your team to put together a proof of concept to test in usability, run usability, use usability data to convince your team/other stakeholders about the pressing business need for your product, achieve shared vision on your product idea, spend months building the product, run more usability, beta test, find critical bugs in your product, strip features, iterate–finally you’re ready to launch!

In this worst case, it can take many months–perhaps even years–to get your idea to market. By the time you launch, you may find that your smaller, more nimble competitors had been innovating other cooler things while you were dragging your feet with process and red tape. (And just to reiterate–I’ve presented the worst case scenario, it’s not always like this.)

Working with the HelloMovies team has been a refreshing change from my day job. Some things I absolutely love:

• The pace of the work is lightning fast. There’s no red tape or product requirements docs–we just talk about ideas with the engineers and they go off and code while figuring it out on the fly.
• We are definitely innovating. I’m not really at liberty to describe in detail what we’re building, but our team is definitely in the forefront of creating a new technology that can benefit a lot of people.
• We are young and ambitious. This team is scrappy and truly believes that we have the capability to build anything we want. Plus, the team is full of great personalities!
• I love movies! This is just my personal thing–but I absolutely love movies, and I feel privileged to be on a project to help other people–YOU–improve their movie watching experiences.

Being at a startup is thrilling and absolutely satisfying. That’s why it’s easy for folks like me and Steven to work a full day on our day jobs and then spend another 7 hours at night in a Stanford dorm room building out this website.