I saw an article on TechCrunch today about an interested start-up called Snooth. It essentially a very comprehensive Web 2.0 database of wines. While I cannot claim myself to be a wine connoisseur, I admit that I stuck around for a while just browsing the selections and seeing what I can do. It turns out that they do a lot of cool stuff, like user reviews, ratings, and tags, all of which make the experience much more rich than just a database of wines. I wouldn’t know where to even start searching when it comes to wines, but I quickly discovered that you can search for things like “good with pork” or “dessert” or “from france”, which I thought was really cool. Plus, their user interface is elegant and intuitive, which made browsing the site very easy and enjoyable. While I still can’t reveal exactly what we’re doing at HelloMovies, I’ll say that we really like a lot of the elements on Snooth and will seek to replicate the experience to some degree.

Stan

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.

I used to be a healthy, happy, well-nourished young boy.

Now, as I sit here feverishly coding, my face has sunk into a waxy pallor, and my left hand trembles ever so slightly as it reaches to my tray to pick up the slice of watermelon I am eating in the hopes of gaining some measure of revitalization. I also picked up some broccoli, but it tasted so bad that I just couldn’t bring myself to finish.

But it will all be worth it in the end. In just a few short months, the average Joe and Josie will be able to easily find a movie they both want to watch, saving them from a fight at the rental store, a subsequent evening of sitting on opposite sides of the couch with furrowed brows and crossed arms, a grumpy morning afterwards with dark looks at each from across the mirror as they gnash their toothbrushs against their teeth in a furious show of just how angry they are, and a series of escalating arguments that result in a bitter marriage that negatively affects young Joe Jr., who later grows up to sit alone in his room listening to Nine Inch Nails and brooding about how much he hates life, and how the only solution to all his problems is finding a movie that captures the angst he feels inside.

This start-up will save them from all of that.

This is the hope that keeps my spirit alive as I sit here, nursing a belly full of kidney beans and peas as I stare at my screen in a mixture of melancholy and despair. “Why won’t this Javascript work?” I ask myself repeatedly, banging my head against my desk. “Why oh why?” And I realize: These are the forces of evil working against me. Satan himself does not want you to watch a good movie. Satan wants you to rent the utter crap foisted upon us by elaborate marketing campaigns and rental store displays. Satan wants you to cry after watching movies — you know, in the bad way, the way that says “The utter lack of art and entertainment in this film makes me a little more dead inside” and not “My soul has been moved to new heights of human emotion.”

This is a holy battle, my friends, and I will wage it with a vim and vigour unlike any before witnessed in Silicon Valley. With a keyboard in one hand and a stalk of utterly disgusting cafeteria broccoli in the other, I shall fight on for the freedom of movie-lovers everywhere. Nourishment is no object, and health is no obstacle. I have a dream, ladies and gentlemen, and maybe that dream isn’t as grand as the ones you typically hear about in dramatic speeches about racial equality, but it’s still a good dream and we will fight for it, from the shores of Blockbuster to the beaches of Century Cinema, from the jungles of stale popcorn to the valleys of Netflix.

Unless, of course, this broccoli kills me. Damn you, broccoli. Damn you.

Find a movie: simple, sweet, seemingly easy to do and yet we’ve all been to blockbuster or shown up at the theater and looked at the rows and rows of movies and blankly wondered which one to choose. And so you think about the marketing you’ve seen, how you liked an actor in one movie so maybe you’ll like him/her again, or a friend of a friend apparently really liked it.

Finding a movie is a big problem and the goal of our site it to solve it. Easy right?

Not at all. Think of all the genres of movies, the mood you are in and how you’d like to feel after the movie, the sophistication, factor in what you’ve liked and disliked in the past, and on and on…..and all the choices, hundreds of thousands of movies and thousands more each year.

So we’ve dissected the whole process…and we are going to help you find a movie to watch.

 - Matt

A colleague in the venture business recently sent me a quote:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt

“Everytime I read this, I think of entrepreneurs,” she says. I hope that now, in the time of college midterms, company deadlines and travels for work, that our team keeps this in mind despite being stretched thin.

A Summer pose (Me, Josh, Matt and Stan)

I was actually going to write this yesterday, but I somehow ended up coding instead of blogging. This happens a lot, and not just with this project. Most of the time, I procrastinate by coding. It’s awesome because I get a lot accomplished this way, but also not so great because (as you might expect if you’ve read Josh’s previous post) I am falling behind in full-time recruiting and classes. Not that I should worry about recruiting, though - this would be an awesome company to work for. Classes, however, I’m not sure. I only have 11 units right now, and that’s including two tennis classes.

I think this past week has been somewhat of a revitalization of the project. Chris, Steven, and I came up with an interesting twist on what we’re doing on Sunday (a week ago). Over the several meetings we’ve had this week, the idea has been polished and refined, even in details of implementation and launch strategy. It’s defined pretty well now, and I think it really is a much better reflection of our vision than our original design. I can’t talk too much about it, but I can tell you that it requires a pretty significant revamp of the site’s design and a compressed timeline for some of the modules. Nonetheless, the whole team is (I think) really excited about this new development, and we’re working hard to bring it public.