Ontic Oren

6 months in at my job, and the past two weeks I started feeling odd; I’ve been busy, cranking out more than ever, but feeling a bit burned out.  At first I chalked it up to working hard, and enjoyed my time-off for the holidays.  But I came back, and didn’t feel that same passion.  What’s going on?  I doubled down, cranked out more than ever, and buried myself in working hard.

Last week, an office mate was going over our expenses, and asked me about a really LARGE charge from Google.  Big enough I’m embarrassed to even post the number here.  I logged in to adwords, and sure enough we were hitting our daily cap every day, and that cap wasn’t low!  

Some history – Two months ago, the question came up: are our users representative of the market overall?  Since we’ve done no marketing to date and all our users come from blogs and word of mouth, we weren’t sure if they were self-selecting in some non-representative way. We had the idea to get a more random sample of users by using adwords – set up a campaign, and see how the usage of people from adwords compare with our general user base.  We ran the campaign, leaving google to it’s auto-bidding thing.  We grabbed a bunch of keywords, set a super high daily cap for the experiment, and watched it closely.  After 3 weeks, we were running about $20/day in ads, and getting 1-2 signups a day.  Then I forgot about the account.

Jump back to last week, and we have our huge bill.  I quickly shut adwords down, and moved back to getting stuff done off my todo list.  A day later, in passing, I mentioned the adwords SNAFU to James, one of our founders.  His immediate question: “At least we have a bunch of people – how do they validate our hypothesis?”  SMACK.  Kick to the head.   I had forgotten the whole reason we ran the experiment in the first place!  I got so caught up in doing things, I’d missed the whole point.

At a startup, regardless of your position, you’re there because you’re a self starter.  You like setting your own priorities, figuring out the right items to focus on.  The key is, not to get trapped in the work you’re doing.  For me, it’s great to get success stories out, push some marketing activities, get customer feedback, push forward the features through engineering, and drive process improvements.  That’s what I do.  But why?  And are they the right things to do now to answer those goals.  For me, the answer was no.

I’ve now got a clear set of goals I’m working towards: Better define and optimize our funnel.  Understand our customer profile.  Validate our hypothesis around customer segmentation.  I’ve still got my list of todos (Things rocks). Now they’re hyper focused on working towards those goals, not just working to checking off todo items.

I’m so excited to go into the office tomorrow, I can’t wait.

For the past month, during my nights and weekends, I’ve been working on a new fitness web application.  In an experiment on transparency, I’m going to completely over-share on the business plan, design, process, stats and feedback.  Expect to see some code snippits, anguished tirades on money woes, and maybe even a glimmer of hope here and there.

So where to begin?  How about what, and why? As will come as no surprise to any who know me, I’m addicted to gadgets.  Combine that with enjoying biking, running and working out, and I now have at least 3 different “human telemetry” (a term I love, and picked up from a collegue at Sun Microsystems, Tony Kay) devices.  A Garmin Forerunner 405, a Polar RS400, and a Nike+.  I use the Garmin when outdoors, the Polar when inside, and the Nike+ not so much anymore.  The Nike+ was the first device I picked up however, and opened my eyes to what combining human telemetry with a great social experience can do.  

For those who haven’t played with the Nike+ site, it’s quite frankly one of the best uses of social networking I’ve seen.  After each run, you upload your data to the Nike+ site, where you can see how you performed.  More importantly, you can enter into competitions with friends, no matter where they are.  Even strangers.  For example, my sister and I competed to see who could be the first person to run a total of 30 miles.  She could run on one day, me the next, and Nike+ would let us see how it’s going.  It’s motivating, fun, and interesting.

Eventually, my toy addiction meant I outgrew the Nike+.  It’s notorious inaccurate, there’s no HR or other real-time data, and it requires that you have an iPod Mini with you.  As I moved on to my other devices, I missed having the social aspects. There are vendor specific sites, like Garmin Connect, but if you have a Polar, I have a Garmin, and Tara has a Nike+, there’s no way for us to get the competitive juices flowing.  From that simple disconnect, Zed9 was born.

Zed9 is like mint.com for fitness.  The idea is to aggregate data from as many sources as possible, provide you with meaningful analytics, and compare and contrast your performance with others in your network, demographics, and interest groups.  I’m planning on launching a private alpha this week to start getting feedback.  

As I develop and launch this, I’m planning on blogging about the experiences, technical hurdles, marketing and product management challenges.  Next topics specifically will be around balancing hobby vs. job, moving forward (or not?) in the face of overwhelming competition, setting milestones for determining just how much of my damn time I should put into this, and what does success even look like.  If there’s anything you want to know, from trivial to intimate, let me know!  And if you’ve got a Garmin of Polar device, go sign up for Zed9!