Jon Myers

 

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to be able to participate in the first Node Knockout. The rules are simple: you have 48 hours to code someone amazing using the Node.js platform. Planning ahead is allowed, however it has to be all on paper (no digital assets, designs, etc)

I’m not sure what it is about these weekend coding competitions, but they’ve always fascinated me. I love seeing real life demonstrations of the fact that technology has progressed to the point where you can go from a harebrained idea to deployed and functional product in a few intense dev days. Or maybe it’s because I remember my previous life as an ASP.NET developer where the first week of a project would barely cover the schema design and data access layer. Either way, it’s great for the Node.js community. If you want to convince the world that a language/framework is worth using, the best way is use it to build amazing stuff, amazingly fast.

Having also competed as a solo team in Rails Rumble the last few rounds with decent results, I had a good idea of what to expect. This time I was able to team up with some really talented local developers I met at MongoSeattle a few months ago: Grant Goodale, Damon Cortesi, and Aviel Ginzburg. I figured with a team of 4, we could really bite off something ambitious and might have a chance at actually completing it.

 

The Final Product

 

What we were able to build was a Massively Multiplayer Online Scrabble game. Tiles are placed in realtime, and each player competes with everyone else to build the longest chain of words and the highest score. Once you place a tile, it’s on the board forever and other players have to work around it. You can start your game on anyone’s tiles, but after you place your first word you will need to stick to your own tiles until you run out of lives (swapping tiles loses a life).

And yes, we know we’ll be C&D’ed by Hasbro very shortly . Just as long as they let us go till the competition voting ends, I’m happy. For some warped reason, we think blatant copyright infringement is quite hilarious. Especially since Hasbro has proven they have no sense of humor about these sorts of things. Worst case some time in jail would allow me to catch up on my reading. Anyways, we do plan on getting the name and url changed soon after the competition, so Hasbro: save your corporate letterhead and skip the stern warning.

The Tools

 

As soon as we came up with the idea, we knew exactly the right tool for this application. MongoDB geospacial indexing was a lifesaver here. We are able to store every tile thats placed on the board by its x,y coordinate and query a bounding box whenever someone changes their view. The resulting queries are ridiculously fast, even with a tile collection approaching over 90 thousand. Once we get too big for that, scaling is going to be dead simple given we can just use modular arithmetic to produce a shard key.

 

For the web server, we ended up using ExpressJS since it seemed like the most mature out of the NodeJS web frameworks. As a Ruby/Rails developer (no real node/expressjs experience before), I mostly avoided this aspect of the application, and just worked with static html files, javascript, and css. From what I did use of ExpressJS, it felt very young. Works well if you do everything exactly right and are willing to do some trial and error, but don’t expect edge cases to work, or any kind of comprehensive documentation. Just the simple act of setting cookies, or performing a redirect took dev effort. Node’s philosophy seems to favor that you avoid abstracting too much. This was frustrating to begin with but I soon realized that I really should be knowing the internals of these mechanisms anyways. Using node will force you to become an expert in all things HTTP, which is not a bad thing at all.

 

For the UI end of things, I figured I’d also stick to what I know. JQuery and JQuery UI handled the job just fine. I do have some issues with the codebase of JQuery UI, and it’s not very hackable, but it’s widely used and well documented. I felt I had to compromise a lot on the usability however and would have loved to rewrite the sortable component (for the Tile Rack) myself in order to make it work exactly as I wanted. But that just wasn’t possible in the timeframe we had.

 

 

Hosting wise we used Heroku (with pre-alpha node support). MongoHQ handled the mongodb hosting for us. It all worked like a charm. We had no issues whatsoever while in development, and everything deployed smooth as butter. After we started getting hammered with traffic, the Heroku node does tend to go down a few times a day, requiring a restart but I’m sure they’ll get that fixed up once they hit their actual release. In the meantime, after the competition we’ll probably move our servers elsewhere.

The idea meetup (2 weeks before NodeKO)

The first meeting we had was the idea session. I came prepared with my own idea (along with 3 pages of notes, use cases, and monetization strategies) for a variant on real time web chat. The team heard me out, but it promptly got rejected. It was too bland, and they figured everyone else would be doing it. And if we were going to do this for free in our spare time, they wanted to build something fun. I agreed as well, so we started thinking up game ideas.

As you can probably imagine, these were all over the place initially. Started off exploring the idea of building the card game “Set” (a real time card game). We decided we should build something everyone understands, and thought about doing an online Battleship. Then Scrabble. Then we started thinking about ways to combine them “You sank my Scrabbleship!”. After some additional debate, the idea of Scrabble on an infinite board started to seem plausible. An hour and a couple filled white boards later we had figured out what we wanted to do, along with some initial ideas for game mechanics.

We also came up with the name. We knew it wasn’t going to last, but Scrabb.ly seemed fun to use for the short term. Until the lawyers at Hasbro got wind of it of course.

The feasibility meetup (1 week before NodeKO)

After getting psyched up about the infinite Scrabble idea, we wanted to test out whether the game mechanics would actually work. What better way than to chop up and glue together 5 Scrabble boards. The result is pictured here:

 

Sitting down and playing with 4 people together on on gigantic Scrabble board allowed us to tweak the rules a bit, and test if it would actually be fun to play in practice. We had a blast, which was proof enough to me that this thing was worth building.

Unfortunately we also found out that one of our team members (Damon) had an important client meeting the next weekend so we’d be down to 3 people on the project. This was a bummer, but we pressed on.

The UI meetup (1 day before NodeKO)

Right before the competition, we met up one more time in order to really nail down the final user interface design before the competiton started. This time we brought some graph paper and colored pencils then started drawing.

 

 

 

 

We were also able to snag meetings with a couple of the Seattle Techstar teams to walk them through the paper prototypes and get feedback on what made sense and what didn’t. This was incredibly useful to finalize all our intro copy, button labels, and the general user interaction of the site before the competition started. We now had reasonable confidence that most users would understand and be able to use our app once it was built.

Finally, before we left for the night, we came up with a gameplan for each of us on what tasks we need to do in what order.

 

 

We decided that if we were going to win this thing, we’d need to have one person (Aviel) fully focused on design for the entire duration of the competition. That turned out to be a great decision as it allowed us to attain a level of design polish and multiple iterations of design ideas that wouldn’t have been possible without a dedicated designer fully obsessing over every pixel.

The 48 hours of coding

Like all the other teams, we started as soon as the competition went underway (Friday at 5pm PST) and worked well into the night. Our team of 3 was able to work together at the Founder Coop offices in Seattle (where TechStars Seattle is located). We took over a conference room and made it our home for the weekend.

I stuck to my gameplan, went line by line, and got each UI feature functional. Grant worked solely on the backend data (mongodb and nodejs), and Aviel was able to focus on designing a gorgeous game board and tiles in Photoshop. Since our interface was just one screen, we were able to spend a lot of time on each little piece of it, and go through a few different design ideas.

 

First Working Infinite Board UI

After going all of Friday night into Saturday morning, we felt we made great progress. The infinite board was working, along with the dragging tiles back and forth between the rack and the board. And we had some nice initial tile and board design psds to integrate. After about 5 hours of sleep on Saturday, we started back up.

 

Adding Board Tiles and Basic Rack Panel

 

Adding Rack Tiles and Drag/Drop

The Saturday night – Sunday morning was the toughest stretch of the competition by far. Low sleep, and lots of broken functionality definitely took a strain on motivation levels. After working through the night, on Sunday morning I was pretty much resigned to shipping a half broken piece of crap. The basic infinite board, tile placing, and design looked good, but the game didn’t work at all. We couldn’t validate placing a word onto the board, and we hadn’t even started on the push notifications. I toyed with the idea of cutting my losses and just going to sleep.

 

Adding Compass and Random Tile Generator

 

Pressing on, we found small wins here and there, and finally got the word placing to work. Integration with push notifications from the server was handled by a 3rd party web service called PusherApp, and it took all of about 15 minutes to get up and functional. After those 2 big features were in, I had the motivation to actually finish the thing. On Sunday from noon to 3pm, we basically built the entire game system within Scrabb.ly (end turn, score submission, restart game, etc). It was rapid fire. We went though all the missing features, spent 20 – 30 minutes coding each one, and on to the next. The rapidly approaching deadline meant whatever didn’t get done in a short window of development had to be cut.

 

Adding Play Buttons and Logo Panel

 

Adding the Score Panel, the leaderboard, and the jGrowl Alerts. Lightened up the Board colors.

At 3pm on Sunday we were able to focus the next 2 hours purely on bug fixes and polish. Adding an intro screen, putting in a leaderboard, and fixing a ton of bugs with resolving word positions. The frantic code, checkin, deploy, and swearing lasted right up until minutes before the deadline. Unfortunately some bugs caused us to have to strip out the leaderboard as one of our last checkins. But at that point I couldn’t really get anything working right as I was running on fumes and could barely think straight.

After the 5pm deadline, we took some shots of whisky, drank a bottle of wine, and called it a night.

To get a feel for how frantic the dev activity was, here’s the full git commit log: . Near the end of the competition I wasn’t even coherent enough to spell the swear words correctly in the commit messages.

 

Final released version!

Traffic Stats

In the 3 days since we’ve launched, we’ve managed to get almost 7 thousands unique visitors. Over 90 thousand individual Scrabble tiles have been placed on the board so far. Feedback has been fairly positive aside from the fact that the board has gotten way too large and it’s difficult to scroll far enough to find a place to start playing. We plan to iterate with some of these fixes and release a new version on Friday after competition judging ends.

Why we do it

Over 200 teams signed up for Node Knockout, and over 100 produced final judge-able products. The question is, why do they do it?

Anyone doing it to win the the Node Knockout prizes has their priorities whacked. Someone who can put together a nice functional app in a weekend should easily be able to make much more than any of these prizes consulting, or working on their own startup.

I think what competitions like this give is a structured way to “prove your chops” to the world. Having a successful entry, even if it doesn’t win, gets huge exposure from important people in the tech sector. Having a concrete example of your abilities in a public forum can mean a huge difference between a low hourly rate and a high one, the difference between a dream job with high salary and a a mediocre one. The tangible benefits of competing successfully can easily equate to tens of thousands of dollars over the course of year for a worthy competitor.

Another great benefit is the motivation that comes with working against the best and the brightest in the industry. You know right away you can’t be slacking off and have a chance. Judging from the results, this seems to help bring out the best in people. The high caliber of the final submitted apps support that.

Thanks for reading! If you liked our entry, please vote for us here: http://nodeknockout.com/teams/seattle-js

I am nervous, truly nervous. As the taxi bounces southward through the trendier neighborhoods of Manhattan—Flatiron, the Village, SoHo—I keep imagining the possible retorts of some incensed maître d’:

“What kind of establishment do you think this is?”

“How dare you insult me!”

“You think you can get in with that?”

It’s just after 8 p.m. on a balmy summer Saturday and I’m heading toward one of New York’s most overbooked restaurants, Balthazar, where celebrities regularly go to be celebrated and where lay diners like me call a month in advance to try and secure a reservation. I don’t have a reservation. I don’t have a connection. I don’t have a secret phone number. The only things I have are a $20, a $50, and a $100 bill, neatly folded in my pocket.

I’ve never bribed my way into a restaurant. I’ve never slipped a C-note or greased a palm. In truth, I’ve never even considered it. I’ve assumed, of course, that people do such things. I’ve seen my share of Cary Grant movies. I’ve heard—and wondered whether such old-fangled gestures would work in the high-stakes, high-hype world of New York City restaurants. For everyday diners in Manhattan, cracking the waiting list at Nobu is said to be harder than getting courtside tickets for the Knicks. But is that true?

Curious, I hatched a plan. I would go to some of the hardest-to-penetrate restaurants in New York armed with little more than an empty stomach, an iron-clad willingness to be humiliated, and a fistful of dough. Most people (including the editors of this magazine) assumed I would get turned down at half the places on my list. “You’ll never get into Daniel,” said one. “Union Square Cafe?!” said another. “Forget it.”

My plan was to show up between 8:15 and 8:30 on varying nights of the week. I would go with a different companion each night. I would try to get a reservation by telephone that afternoon and go only if I were turned down. And I would carry a twenty and a fifty in my left pocket, and a hundred in my right pocket. I did have an incentive: I could eat at any place I could successfully finagle my way into.

Balthazar, on this night, does not look promising. A few people are lolling around in the foyer when my girlfriend and I step inside the door. I glance at the maître d’s podium and panic: There’s more than one person standing behind it. To whom should I give the money? I approach haltingly and ask if they have a table for two. The man and woman appraise my appearance—black trousers, gray button-down Italian shirt, buckle shoes—and the woman looks at the man. He is obviously the person in power. “Perhaps we can seat you in about 20 minutes,” he says in a manner that suggests it will be closer to an hour. We retreat to the bar.

Seconds later the woman departs and the man is left alone. This is my moment, I decide. I reach for the twenty and positively bolt toward the podium. I crane my left arm around the side. “I hope you can fit us in,” I mumble, and slip the bill into his hand. I am sweating; my heart is racing. “Oh. Thank you,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

Two minutes pass—two minutes!—and the woman approaches. “We can seat you now,” she says, and leads us to a corner booth. “This is one of our best tables,” she adds. Suddenly I’m Frank Sinatra. I’m King of the Strip. I exude aftershave and savoir faire. Call it the fedora effect. My girlfriend looks at me in a way she hasn’t since I surprised her by uncharacteristically demolishing a friend on the tennis court.

In talking to people about slipping money, I found a clear split: People of my father’s generation seemed comfortable with the idea, knew the rules, believed it was part of the price of going out. People under 40, by contrast, thought it distasteful, degrading, and showy. (The restaurants seemed to agree with the latter. When asked for their policies at the completion of this project, responses ranged from “It’s disgusting” to “The maître d’ will be fired if he is caught accepting money for a table.” A couple of the restaurants had no policy for or against.)

A few days later, I walked into Nobu, the Mecca of nouveau Japanese chic, with a female friend. A couple in front of us, wearing golf clothes, were just being turned away. I asked for a table. Again the two people behind the podium (both women) surveyed our appearance—black from head to toe. “Actually, we do have a table,” one said at last. “It’s not one of our better tables. It’s by the kitchen.”

“May I see it?” I said.

The woman led me to the table and I asked politely if she had something else. “Hmmm,” she said, looking around. As she did, I reached into my pocket, pulled out two twenties and a ten, and moved them toward her hand. She continued—“I’m afraid there’s nothing”—when suddenly she felt the bills in her hand, claimed them, and announced cheerily: “Just a moment, I’ll go and check.”

Several minutes later she returned, holding the bills in her hand. “You might want to take your money back,” she said. “There really isn’t anything we can do.” Then she added, “In the future, if you want a reservation, call me,” and gave me her name. Just like that, I had bypassed the masses yearning to break in. I had become an insider. And it hadn’t cost me a dime, merely the willingness to indicate that I would tip for service.

I had already learned a number of lessons. First: Go. You’d be surprised at what you get just by showing up. Second: Dress decently. Third, and most important: Don’t be ashamed. They’re not, and neither should you be.

Soon I ventured uptown. I was wearing a jacket; my friend, pumps and pearls. We entered the hallowed seafood manor of Le Bernardin, where I spotted a few empty tables. “Could you wait 20 minutes in the lounge?” the maître d’ asked. Seconds later, with new confidence, I slipped a fifty toward his hand and said, “Is there any way you could speed that up?” The man felt the money, then pushed it back into my hand. “Sorry,” he said, “there really is nothing I can do.”

Four minutes later, though, we were seated at a table for two by the window. Moreover, the maître d’ came to our table several times to ask if everything was satisfactory. At the end of the evening, not because I had planned it but entirely because I felt like it, I gave him $30. He graciously accepted.

Outside, I realized I had just witnessed the gold standard. The maître d’ turned down the money when it was a bribe, gave us the service anyway, then accepted the money as a well-earned tip.

If Le Bernardin offered the gold standard, I quickly encountered the opposite, at Jean-Georges, a citadel of New French elegance. Once again, though the restaurant was fully booked, we were offered a table in the formal dining room and asked to wait 15 minutes in the bar. After ordering drinks, I stepped over to the gentleman in charge, eased a fifty into his hand, and whispered, “This is a really important night for me.” He took the money and slipped it into his pocket. Fifteen minutes passed, with no sign of him, and no table. Another 15 minutes passed, still no sign. Finally, one of his deputies escorted us to a table.

For the first time, I felt slightly oily. Here we were offered a table with no hint of money, then someone took my money and didn’t deliver on his original promise. Worse, he didn’t even apologize for what was probably a routine delay. Money slipped to a maître d’, I was coming to believe, is a quick way of establishing a relationship, of becoming a valued customer. When no relationship developed, I felt I had been taken advantage of. I was a stooge, not a player.

Still, I was growing fearless.

There were 50 people lingering in the foyer of Sparks Steak House, a bastion of male power, when I entered at 8:15 with a male friend. We were told it would be 9:45 before we could be seated. I asked to be put on the list.

Given the size of the crowd and the length of the wait, I decided to reach for my right pocket. I waited until the man behind the podium was alone (Rule No. 6) and rested my left hand lightly on his back. Suddenly, I was Fred Astaire and he was Ginger Rogers. He knew exactly what to do. He pivoted toward me and turned his right hand from face down to face up, giving me a target. I slipped the bill into his hand and said again, “This is a really important night for me.”

He disappeared briefly, then 45 seconds later, he reappeared at my elbow. “Right this way,” he announced, and led us to a table. I had jumped a 50-person line and saved myself an hour-and-a-half wait. Forget Frank Sinatra. I was now James Bond.

Increasingly, I was struck by how much impact the experience was having on me. Surmounting this challenge night after night was actually giving me a certain self-assurance, a feeling of having grown up. Some might find this disillusioning: “You mean life is not first-come, first-served?” I found I had a different reaction: “You mean all it takes to crack one of New York’s most daunting thresholds is fifty bucks?” Even if I chose not to do it on a regular basis, just knowing how doable it is brought the whole puffery of New York restaurants into perspective. Bribing, it turns out, has as much effect on the briber as it does on the bribee.

A few nights later, the effect of this newfound glow became clear. I walked into Le Cirque 2000, the gilt-edged establishment on the East Side. “Sorry,” I was told. “We don’t have a table tonight.” No problem, I thought. I took a step back and tried to identify the person in power. Seconds later, a gentleman in a tuxedo approached. “We were wondering if you had a table for two?” I said, clutching a bill in my pocket…but not handing it over. He bowed. “Your table is ready,” he said, and led us into the dining room.

This was a new benchmark: I had bluffed my way in. Just by being prepared to bribe, I had achieved my goal. Was there some change in my appearance? Was I swaggering a bit or walking a little taller? Perhaps. A couple of days later, I bluffed my way into Aureole.

Despite my luck, I knew I had saved the hardest places for last. Union Square Cafe has, according to the Zagat Survey, been New York’s “most popular restaurant for four years running.”

“You’ll be eating at McDonald’s tonight,” a friend said.

When I arrived at 8:30, the gentleman in charge said, “We can seat you in an hour.” I told him my name, took a few steps back, waited for him to step away, then approached and slipped him a $50 bill. “This is a very important night for me,” I whispered, and waited for the rebuff. To my surprise, the man seemed positively giddy. “No problem, sir,” he said, clenching the bill with boyish abandon. “I’ll check right now.” Ten minutes later we were shown to a corner table in the back. The deed had been done with such effortlessness, such quotidian blaséness, that my friend was nonplussed.“It feels so normal,” she said.

By this point, with the quick addition of Daniel, where $50 got me bumped up from the lounge to the dining room in 30 seconds, I had demystified the act. I had learned a new skill. I had gained ten pounds. And I seemed to be breeding followers: One friend called for advice on how to “tip” her super; another friend announced she had slipped a twenty to a clerk at the Charlotte airport. Also, people were bribing me to take them out to dinner.

But it turned out I still faced my biggest hurdle.

“You must try Alain Ducasse,” declared my editor. At first, I thought this was a cruel joke. The press was buzzing about the new restaurant from France’s maestro-chef that boasts a $2 million interior, a $160 tasting menu, and a bill for four approaching $1,500. Although the phone lines weren’t yet open, the word on the street was that the 65 seats a night were already booked for six months, with a 2,700-person waiting list. According to The New York Times, “Ordinary diners have less than a snowball’s chance of landing a table at Ducasse.”

I was clearly in another league of exclusivity. Lay eaters wouldn’t dream of trying to enter a restaurant where if you order verbena tea they bring the plant to your table and a white-gloved waiter snips the leaves with silver shears.

Still, I had no choice.

It was just after 8 p.m. on a Monday when I entered the ornate foyer. With gold columns, shiny black walls, and eccentric art, the room seemed one part Paris, one part Vegas, one part Decline of the Roman Empire. Within seconds, a French gentleman approached. I bowed.

“I was wondering if you might have a cancellation.”

“Oh, no, sir. We are fully booked.”

I slid a $100 bill toward his hand. He was overcome with the look I had expected all along: complete and utter horror. “No, no, monsieur. You don’t understand!” he exclaimed. “We only have 16 tables. There is absolutely no way!”

“In that case,” I said, changing tacks, “I was wondering if you might have a cancellation later in the week.” As he moved behind the podium, I reached for my business card (which lists no affiliation) and tucked the $100 bill underneath my card. I handed both to him, adding, “I am here all week.” He accepted them, and pressed the card onto a small leather folder with his index finger. He was shaking at this point, and I realized I was calmer than he was—a switch.

He then took a piece of paper and asked me my name (even though it was on my card), the size of my party, and my telephone number. “How about lunch?” he said.

“I would prefer dinner.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

We shook hands, and I left. The following day, every time the phone rang, my heart leapt. The end of the day came, however: no call. The next day, 42 hours after I had walked into the restaurant, the telephone rang. It was a woman from Alain Ducasse. “We have a table for four tonight,” she said. “Can you find three guests to join you?” I asked if I could make a few calls. She said yes and gave me the private number. A few minutes later I called back and accepted.

For as little as $100—that’s $25 each for a meal that would ultimately cost close to $375 per head—I had jumped what was rumored to be a 2,700-person waiting list and gotten into the hardest restaurant in the world that week. Also, I had shot the moon. And I had done it by following a set of rules so old-fashioned that my grandmother could have written them: Dress properly, act dignified, be polite, smile. And spend a little extra for good service—it will pay you back in droves.

Forget Frank Sinatra. Forget James Bond. For the rest of that day, for the time it took me to call everyone I know, for the three hours and 45 minutes it took me to eat my 11-course meal, I was the lights on the top of the Chrysler Building. I was the smile on the Statue of Liberty. I was New York.

I was money.

Tips on Tipping

1. Go. You’d be surprised what you can get just by showing up.
2. Dress appropriately. Your chances improve considerably if you look like you belong.
3. Don’t feel ashamed. They don’t. You shouldn’t.
4. Have the money ready. Prefolded, in thirds or fourths, with the amount showing.
5. Identify the person who’s in charge, even if you have to ask.
6. Isolate the person in charge. Ask to speak with that person, if necessary.
7. Look the person in the eye when you slip him the money. Don’t look at the money.
8. Be specific about what you want. “Do you have a better table?” “Can you speed up my wait?” A good fallback: “This is a really important night for me.”
9. Tip the maître d’ on the way out if he turned down the money but still gave you a table.
10. Ask for the maître d’s card as you’re leaving. You are now one of his best customers.

Many people ask me, “How can I get started in web design?” or, “What skills do I need to start making web applications?” While it would be easy to recommend stacks of books, and dozens of articles with 55 tips for being 115% better than the next guy, the truth is that you don’t need learn anything new in order to begin. The most important thing is simply to start.

Start making something. If you want to learn web design, make a website. Want to be an entreprenuer and start a business selling web based products? Make an app. Maybe you don’t have the skills yet, but why worry about that? You probably don’t even know what skills you need.

Start with what you already know

If you want to build something on the web, don’t worry about learning HTML, CSS, Ruby, PHP, SQL, etc. They might be necessary for a finished product, but you don’t need any of them to start. Why not mock-up your app idea in Keynote or Powerpoint? Draw boxes for form fields, write copy, link this page to that page. You can make a pretty robust interactive prototype right there with software you already know. Not computer saavy? Start with pencil and paper or Post-it Notes. Draw the screens, tape them to the wall, and see how it flows.

You probably don’t even know what skills you need, so don’t worry about it. Start with what you already know.

You can do a lot of the work with simple sketches or slides. You’ll be able to see your idea take form and begin to evaluate whether or not it really is something special. It’s at that point you can take the next step, which might be learning enough HTML to take your prototype into the browser. The point is, go as far as you can with the skills and tools that you have.

Avoid self doubt

Many times the reasons we don’t start something have nothing to do with lack of skills, materials, or facilities. The real blockers are self-criticism and excuses. In the excellent book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the author, Betty Edwards, discusses how we all draw as kids but around adolescence, many of us stop developing that ability.

“The beginning of adolescence seems to mark the abrupt end of artistic development in terms of drawing skills for many adults. As children, they confronted an artisitc crisis, a conflict between their increasingly complex perceptions of the world around them and their current level of art skill.”

At that age kids become increasingly self-critical and equally interested in drawing realistically. When they fail to draw as well as they know is possible many give up drawing at all.

This feeling continues into adulthood. We want to design a website or build an application but if our own toolset doesn’t match up to the perceived skillset we never start. It doesn’t help that the internet gives us nearly limitless exposure to amazing work, talented individuals, and excellent execution. It’s easy to feel inadequate when you compare yourself to the very best, but even they weren’t born with those skills and they wouldn’t have them if they never started.

Do—there is no try

People who succeed somehow find a way to keep working despite the self-doubt. The artist, Vincent Van Gogh was only an artist for the last ten years of his life. We all know him for masterful works of art, but he didn’t start out as a master. Compare these examples from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain showing an early drawing compared to one completed two years later:

Vincent Van Gogh Carpenter, 1880 and Woman Mourning, 1882

He wasn’t some child prodigy (he was 27 when he started painting), he learned his craft by hard work. If he’d listened to his own self doubt or despaired that his skills didn’t compare to Paul Gauguin’s it’s likely he never would have even tried.

This is all to say that there are many things that can get in the way of the things we should be creating. To never follow a dream because you don’t think you’re good enough or don’t have the skills, or knowledge, or experience is a waste. In fact, these projects where there is doubt are the ones to pursue. They offer the greatest challenge and the greatest rewards. Why bother doing something you already have done a hundred times, where there is nothing left to learn? Don’t worry about what you need to know in order to finish a project, you already have everything you need to start.

 

Introduction

I receive essentially the same reaction when I mention that I use virtual assistants, and that I recommend them for anyone starting a startup. It's a mix of shock and excitement.

They're shocked I've been able to pull it off, and excited at the thought that they might be able to do the same. The conversation almost always turns to questions about where to find virtual assistants and how a startup can use one.

This article intends to answer those questions.

What is a Virtual Assistant?

A virtual assistant (VA) is a remote worker hired to complete tasks you should not be doing as the founder of a startup.

These can be research tasks, like finding every tech blogger who blogs about cats, repetitive tasks like creating 100 affiliate links for products in a Word document, or ongoing tasks like monitoring a handful of job boards and posting new jobs to your website.

The term VA has grown to describe any remote contract worker, including people who help with audio editing, video editing, bookkeeping, webmaster tasks, link building, and so on. A VA can be domestic or international, as long as they have a computer and an email account.

Why Should My Startup Use a Virtual Assistant?

Outsourcing to a virtual assistant will dramatically reduce the time you spend on administrative tasks, and increase the time you can commit to growing your business.

The value proposition of a VA deals with how you monetize your time. If you monetize it at $50/hour and you can pay a VA $6/hour to handle administrative tasks, this frees up time for you to create real value in your business by developing new features or expanding marketing efforts.

Performing tasks you could pay someone else $6 to accomplish is a foolish use of an entrepreneur's time.

My VAs have saved me literally hundreds of hours over the past few years.

[Editor's Note: This is especially true for you starting up while still employed where your time is scarce and your existing income should be used to buy more of it.]

Case Study: How I Launched One Month Earlier Using Outsourcing

More than two years ago, my business partner and I discussed launching a hosted version of our ASP.NET invoicing software, DotNetInvoice.

We developed the plan and task list, and estimated the effort at around 160 hours including development time needed to make DotNetInvoice a multi-tenant application. But given the heavy competition in the hosted invoicing software market and the level of effort of the task, it was continually placed on the back burner.

The Shearing
After our initial estimate, every six months for the past two years we've revisited the idea of a hosted version until one day in November of last year.

On this day we stopped looking at the hosted version as a new product line, and started looking at it as a market test; to see if we could build enough of a customer base to warrant a major investment in the hosted invoicing market space. With that in mind, things started flying off our "must-have" list.

One large piece we removed was automating sign-up and provisioning of a new hosted installation.

In an ideal world, when a customer wants a new hosted account they would fill out a web form with all of their information and their new hosted version would be ready in 30 seconds. But that amount of automation ñ given the fact that we have to create a new sub-domain, a new database, and copy physical files ñ would take a substantial amount of time to develop and QA.

So we tossed it.

Another feature we left on the cutting room floor was the need for a custom purchase page; a page where someone enters their details to make the purchase. In a desperate attempt to bring this entire project down to less than two days work we simply utilized PayPal subscriptions.

Not the optimal approach, but it works quite well for testing out an idea before we invest another day into this project.

Iteration vs. Automation
As a developer, the features we dropped seem like a necessity from day 1. Not automating this process creates the ongoing repetitive work that computers are designed to handle. Manual workÖthis is what computers are supposed to save us from!

But by getting over the need to automate everything to infinite scale and putting a VA in charge of manually creating new hosted accounts, the time investment to get this feature launched dropped from 160 hours of work to about 10 hours.

I can hear the cries of developers around the world as I write this: "You can't launch a half-baked solution! You'll never go back and fix it!"

Most of us have worked in corporate environments where you're never allowed to go back and refactor code. This burns into our psyche that you don't want to launch a semi-functioning solution because you'll never have time to go back and fix it.

But the benefits of being my own boss and being a tiny software company are that I can come back to this anytime. In fact, the day the amount of money paid to my VA for handling this task exceeds a certain amount, I will be very motivated to automate it.

Ideally, by the time I code it up, we'll have many customers using the platform which means I'll be working on a product I know is viable, and that's paying for the time I'm spending to automate it.

Agile Development, meet Agile Business.

Through a bit of outsourcing to a VA, you can get to market with less up-front expense and in dramatically less time than if you try to automate everything.

Had we chosen to automate everything, the worst potential outcome would have been investing 160 hours of time (a huge amount of time for a startup), and then scrapping the whole thing. When you're working on a small team you can't afford to throw away that much time.

The Lesson
The lesson is that before you launch your product, think about the processes you can avoid automating.
How about reminder emails? How about monthly billing? Could a human being run a report once a month and send emails or charge credit cards?

This is not the paradigm we typically think of as developers because we're used to enterprise IT shops where everything has to scale infinitely.

As a startup, you'll have plenty of time before you need to scale, and you may never need to scale if the idea doesn't work. Every hour spent writing code is wasted time if that code could be replaced by a human being doing the same task until your product proves itself.

The Two Points When a VA is Most Helpful

There are two key points during the life of your startup where your life will be much easier if you use a virtual assistant (VA):

1. While proving out your product/market
2. After your product launch

Let's look at each one.

Point #1: Developing a Proof of Concept

In the DotNetInvoice case study above, I used a VA to short-circuit my product development time so we could begin to prove out the product's concept with much less effort than if we had built everything in code.

As I've automated pieces of my businesses, I've noticed an interesting trend: nearly anything I try to automate is easier to outsource first, then automate down the line once the volume warrants it.

The reason for this is that at any given time you're likely to have, say 30 tasks on your plate, and you should be trying to remove as many as possible from your task list; both one-time and ongoing tasks.

Out of 30 tasks you might be able to outsource 6 or 8 of them tomorrow if you spend 2-3 hours today writing up the processes. Compare that with automation, which can take a week or more to get each task off your plate since it takes a lot of code to automate a task.

As a startup, one of your advantages is that you move very quickly. You can roll out new features much quicker your competition. And being able to manually process some parts of a task can often reduce your development time by 50-80% which allows you to get the feature out the door and in front of customers.

If customers decide to use it, then you can automate it. If not, you can throw what little time you spent on it away. You develop the minimum required functionality to make the bare bones feature work; nothing more. You scaffold the rest with a human being; your VA.

Then, as needed, you improve the back-end automation iteratively.

Your startup time plummets to near zero even though your maintenance costs are a bit higher since you're paying someone an hourly rate to handle the task.

But that's ok, because every task you outsource to someone making $6/hour is a task that frees you up to develop new features and focus on marketingÖthings that make you a lot more than $6/hour.

In addition, outsourcing provides you with a written process for the task that serves as a blueprint if the time comes later to automate it.

Point #2: After Your Product Launch

The next most important time to use a VA is once your product has launched and you need to begin supporting customers.

Customers make it necessary to put processes in place for marketing, sales, support, and back-end admin tasks. Any ongoing work that can be described in a written process can be outsourced to a VA and save incredible amounts of time for the founders.

If you do not outsource these tasks, they will get in the way of work that's truly productive for your business.

While most entrepreneurs feel like they need to keep the reins on level 1 email support, level 1 sales questions, manning the live chat window on your website, directory submissions, minor HTML tweaks, keyword research, link building, following up on canceled subscriptions, and running month-end reports, getting these tasks into the hands of a competent VA frees up vast amounts of time that can be spent growing your business.

And the cost is negligible.

Don't fall into the trap of needing to handle everything yourself. You are now an entrepreneur.

Case Studies

Here are two case studies to give you an idea of how you might use a VA in your own startup, whether serving a core business function or as administrative support.

Case Study #1: Market Research

In 2009, I launched the Micropreneur Academy, a private membership community for startup founders. For the launch event I wanted to contact several bloggers in the startup and microISV space.

I have a list of blogs that I read and quickly added them to my list to send a personal, targeted email to each. I receive enough pitches each month to know that sending a mass email to bloggers doesn't work.

In the back of my mind, I knew there were other startups/microISV blogs out there that I don't read, but I didn't want to spend the time to track them down. More importantly, I didn't want to spend the time trying to find their contact information. Enter my VA.

I tasked my VA with finding blogs that deal with startups/microISVs and rank in the top 100k in Technorati. The deliverable was a Google spreadsheet containing the blog URL, blogger's name and blogger's email.

The final spreadsheet contained 28 blogs. It was up to me to go through each one and become familiar with their content, determine its relevance to my message, and craft a targeted and personal email. Many blogs dropped off the list after a quick glance, but in the end the time saved by delegating this research task to a VA was well-worth my $12.

Case Study #2: JustBeachTowels.com

JustBeachTowels.com was an e-commerce site I purchased with hopes of a high level of automation.

The problem is that beach towel dropshippers are not the most high tech businesses, and none of them offered any kind of API for order placement. All orders had to be manually placed through their web-based shopping carts.

In the early days, I planned to build a screen scraper to pull orders from my database and automatically place them with the four dropshippers I used, but realized the level of effort and QA that would be required for this were substantial and the resulting interface would be brittle due to the screen scraping.

Instead, I assigned a VA to place all of the incoming orders. I never revisited automation due to the lack of ROI on the time it would have taken to build the screen scraping interface.

Running the site using a VA instead of automation saved me time in the long run, as I would never have made back my initial time investment on the 50 hours required to fully automate the order placement process.

Easing Into a VA

Outsourcing is a learned skill, just like writing code. If you rush into it too quickly, you'll wind up disappointed with the results. This is most often due to the fact that you don't yet know how to work with a VA.

One of the plusses of having a VA is that you can ease into them over the course of several months. Since utilizing a VA is a learned skill, you are best to start slowly by finding someone who will work on individual tasks, then move to part-time if needed, and finally to full-time.

These hiring arrangements are described below:

• Task-based — ($3-10/hour overseas, $12-50/hour in the U.S.) You assign your VA an individual task and give them a deadline and maximum time to spend on the task. Since your VA works for other clients, they are in charge of prioritizing all of the tasks they receive. Task-based VA's are a great starting point to learn the ropes of delegating.
• Part-time — ($2-7/hour overseas, $10-$40/hour in the U.S.) Part-time VA's are dedicated to you for a certain portion of their week (typically 10, 20 or 30 hours). Part-time VA's are cheaper by the hour than task-based VAs, but you need enough work and experience to keep them busy during the time you are paying for.
• Full-time -- ($1-$5/hour overseas, $8-35/hour in the U.S.) As you might imagine, a full-time VA is a lot of responsibility. While offering the lowest hourly rates, you need 160 hours of work to keep them busy. If your VA is self-managing, you can lay out tasks a month at a time. If they need supervision, it's probably not worth bringing them on full-time.

The Steps

The key to learning how to work with a VA is experience. The question is: how can you get started easily and with little risk? The steps are:

1. Find a VA
2. Start with a single task and gradually increase the amount of work as you gain comfort
3. If things don't work out, find a new VA

When I began outsourcing three years ago I found that when I received the finished product I was elated that I hadn't spent 3-4 hours doing it. This made me realize how many other tasks I was able to accomplish during that time frame.

Step1: Finding a VA

I've had the best results hiring VA's in the Philippines. This is not to say that the U.S., India, Bangladesh or other countries do not have quality VA's, but the Filipinos learn English in school, do not tend to be entrepreneurial (thus are less likely to steal ideas), and are culturally service-oriented.

You may find another country to be more compatible with your management style, but after working with 10 VA's, I now work almost exclusively with Filipinos. The main exceptions are my audio and video editors in the U.S. and Canada.

In my experience, you will be best off with one of a few choices when looking for a VA:

1. Task-based VAs
   • Search ODesk under Admin Support -> Personal Assistant or Other.
   • Search Google for "virtual assistants." Typically the best looking websites are the firms that have their act together.
   • Search Elance under Admin Support -> Admin Assistant.
2. Part-time VAs
   • Search ODesk under Admin Support -> Personal Assistant or Other.
   • Search Google for "part-time virtual assistants"
3. Full-time VAs
   • Search ODesk under Admin Support -> Personal Assistant or Other.
   • Search Google for "full-time virtual assistants"

I've had positive results and have personally hired a VA using every method listed above.

My current favorite is ODesk.com. I've had exceptional luck with them, and their project management tools are helpful in making sure your VA is working on your tasks. Their time clock takes screen shots of the VAs screen at random intervals so you can see the task they are performing.

A Note: Solo vs. Team

Many VA's work in teams, whether under the umbrella of a single company, or in a loose affiliation.

Solo VA's tend to be cheaper than team or larger firms.

For recurring work that's critical to your business, it's nice to work with a team. You will typically have a primary VA but when he's on vacation his replacement will step in.

For ongoing work that's not terribly time-sensitive, I've found solo VA's work out well.

When getting started, my advice is to stick with a larger VA firm. You will pay a little more but you will have more reliability, higher security and will be able to easily find a replacement when you need one.

How to Evaluate a Potential VA

My first piece of advice is to avoid spending too much time worrying about screening your VA before you hire them. In the end, how well they work out depends entirely on how well they accomplish their tasks.

In other words, reliability and the ability to understand your instructions and ask good questions are the key factors. Without hiring someone you can't get an idea about their reliability; only about their ability to understand and ask questions.

To do that, you need to evaluate their written English (or whatever language you will be working in). This includes hiring U.S.-based VAs; competent written English skills are not a given even for native speakers.

If you're looking for general help, the only noticeable difference between the 10 VA's you are screening is their hourly rate and their ability to speak and write English.

If you need specialized work performed, you may have an additional requirement that they also know how to edit audio, for example. In that case, ask for samples of past work and experience doing the exact task you will have them to do.

The best way I've found to evaluate English skills is to email back and forth a few times, asking 2-3 basic interview questions. This will be a good indication of how well they will be able to understand your instructions, and their responses are a good indicator of how well you will be able to understand their questions. The best approach is to email with 3-5 VA's at once to speed up the process.

If you're working with a VA firm, I recommend requesting someone with excellent written English, and performing the step above with that person. If they don't live up to your standards, request a new VA and repeat the process.

In the past I've asked for writing samples but this has failed me. The problem with asking for writing samples is a VA can easily send something that's been heavily edited, or a piece written by someone else. During an email exchange you can be certain that you're catching a true glimpse of their English abilities.

Step 2: The First Task

Properly utilizing a VA is a learned skill. Very few developers will do it right the first time, which leads many who try it to give up after the first attempt. To keep you from falling into this trap, we're going to look at the best way to delegate, describe and limit tasks in the section below.

After determining your VA has solid English skills, the next step is to send them your first task. You should be able to tell after one task if they are going to work out.

If you've never worked with a VA, you should assume they are not technically minded. They will have basic computing skills but are nowhere near techies, so you have to prepare instructions for them as if they were your mom or dad (or at least my mom or dad).

The following is unlikely to work:

Open a command prompt and type 'ipconfig'

But this should:

In your start menu go to the Run menu, type 'cmd' and hit enter. Once the window opens type ipconfig and hit enter.

With that in mind, here is how I suggest you assign your first task:

• Back everything up before you let them touch production files. It's unlikely they will be malicious, but they might accidentally break something.
• Provide detailed instructions in bulleted/numbered format.
• Screenshots help enormously. Screencasts are even better. I record multiple screencasts each month for my VAs. Jing is perfect for this.
• Timebox your requests. As an example, let's say you have twenty blog URLs and you want your VA to find the contact information for each one (whether it's an email address or a contact page). Provide the list of URLs to your VA and indicate they should work for 1 hour and then update you on their progress. In this manner you can both check if they're doing it right, and see how long it's taking them. If it's taking longer than you think it should, ask how you can help.
• Assume they are not as fast as you are. If 1 URL takes you 1 minute, assume it will take your VA 5 minutes at first and they will eventually get down to 3 minutes. They will never be as fast as you are. But at $4-6/hour it's hard to complain.
• If you have a timeline, spell it out (e.g. "I need these by tomorrow"). If not, let them know you can wait 2 days for the results. They work when we are sleeping so you'll never get anything the same day.

Step 3: If Things Don't Work Out, Find a New VA

Finding a VA is about trial and error. I've worked through more than 6 VA's to find the folks I work with today. It's a similar process when finding a designer, developer, or any outsourcing partner. You can only tell so much from a resume; the best way to evaluate is to try them out, and this means if they don't work out you should make the decision quickly to find someone new.

It's critical that you feel comfortable with the person you're working with. It's better to cut someone loose early in the relationship before you've trained them on the inner workings of your business.

If you're working with a VA firm it's easy: simply ask for a new VA and if you can, give a specific reason why the first one did not work out.

If you're using an individual, head back to your stack of candidates from Elance, Google or ODesk. The odds are low that you will find someone great on your first try. But finding someone great will make a huge difference in the success of your outsourcing effort.

Did you make it this far? Awesome, let's talk some more.

I apologize in advance for spelling mistakes, because I am writing this on my iPad on the bullet train to Tokyo. Wonderful device, not so great for writing lengthy blog posts like my usual.

I am on the way to Tokyo because a high school friend is there this week. As soon as I heard, I told him to pick a day and I would be there. What day? Literally any day. My schedule is infinitely flexible.

That is what scares me the most about this job. Like most people, I have lived an entire lifetime conforming to schedules. They exist like the Greek gods: you didn’t ask for them but they are there, there is no negotiating with them, and prolonged association means you are likely to get your dignity violated by a bovine.

But schedules are structure, and structure helps. Be at school at nine AM. Seminar starts at 10:30, do not be late. Work starts at nine, Patrick, waltzing in at ten annoys people even if you are contractually permitted to do it and even if you will still be here at 2 AM. (Regardless of start time. If you thought the gods were rational, you have been reading the wrong mythology.)

At the very least, schedules put you and everyone else on the same page as to what you should be doing. Gainfully employed young men should be working at 2 PM on a Wednesday. I was having a late lunch and reading a novel at the coffee shop. The waitress asked me, confused, whether I was a student or not. Students have social license to do bugger all for a few years prior to working for a living. I told her I run a software company, and one of the perks is that I get to have lunch whenever. She was impressed, but asked how my customers and employees stand that.

That’s the the thing about schedules: once you have one everyone else needs to, too, preferably as close to yours as possible. My customers do not share my schedule: most use my software when I am asleep, and mail me with their urgent issues at 3 AM in the morning Japan time. I spend lots of effort decoupling their happiness from my personal availability. This does wonderful things for site uptime but it also means, perhaps regrettably, that there is generally no compulsion to work today.

My freelancers largely don’t share my schedule either. I just got the front page for Appointment Reminder redone after several months with placeholder graphics. The extraordinarily talented designer I worked with (Melvin Ram at Volcanic Web Design) “met” with me for a total of perhaps twenty minutes, and we worked (him on having graphical inspiration, me on wrangling it into a functioning product) in temporal isolation for the rest of the project. This is the arrangement I almost always use for freelancing. It is wonderfully productive except in that it lets me off the hook for causing forward progress.

That is the other part about scheduling: with the debatable exception of my consulting work, I am terrible about setting and keeping multi week schedules for milestones. This never came up when I was employed, since I had managers to crack the whip and avoided doing anything multi week for my business, but it is now biting me with a vengeance. I wanted to have AR in beta six weeks ago. Between consulting, vacation, and BCC, I haven’t made almost any forward progress on engineering.

I know that to be true for AR because code isn’t getting written, but I always think it to be true for BCC. It turns out that I am smoking something: I ran a shell script to compare my productivity (commits, A/B tests, etc) prior and post quitting. I thought it would show me spinning my wheels. Turns out I am getting more done than ever. This is normally the point where I would paste a graph but, sorry, iPad. Suffice it to say I have run more A/B tests this summer than in the last year. (Interesting finding of today: Google Checkout really does increase conversion rates over having only Paypal as an option. I strongly suspected that, but now I know.)

Sales are up, too. Why doesn’t it feel this way? I think after a couple of decades of living by the clock I have become habituated to measuring my productivity that way. Insane and irrational, I know.

I am looking for ways to hack this: the discipline and social validation of having a schedule, without actually having to work at nine. I have been considering getting an office just to have mental separation between work and non work. (They give them away in this town if you work in tech. I could pay the rent with the savings in my iced cocoa budget.) Plus, if I have an office, I have an offsetting factor the next time I am accused of being unemployed. Sounds funny until it happens from a police officer who does not quite understand immigration statuses. (You know that controversial immigration policy in Arizona? Don’t ask me my opinions about it around sharp implements. Suffice it to say I can vividly imagine what getting stopped under it will feel like.)

Another way is, and you might laugh, a little iPad app called EpicWin which gives me fake RPG loot for making progress. Will it work? No clue, but one week in, I seem to be getting more of my “boring” chores accomplished. (I had considered building this into my business for a while, but resisted because I thought it would cause neglect of my nonbusiness priorities. It turns out that, if anything, I have the opposite problem now that I have infinite scheduling flexibility.)

And I just earned 100xp for this blog post.

When starting any enterprise or business, whether it is full-time or part-time, we all know the value of having plenty of capital (money). But I bet we both know or at least have heard of people who started with no capital who went on to make fortunes. How? You may ask.

Well, I believe there are actually some things that are more valuable than capital that can lead to your entrepreneurial success. Let me give you the list.

1. Time.

Time is more valuable than capital. The time you set aside not to be wasted, not to be given away. Time you set aside to be invested in an enterprise that brings value to the marketplace with the hope of making a profit. Now we have capital time.

How valuable is time? Time properly invested is worth a fortune. Time wasted can be devastation. Time invested can perform miracles, so you invest your time.

2. Desperation.

I have a friend Lydia, whose first major investment in her new enterprise was desperation. She said, “My kids are hungry, I gotta make this work. If this doesn’t work, what will I do?” So she invested $1 in her enterprise selling a product she believed in. The $1 was to buy a few fliers so she could make a sale at retail, collect the money and then buy the product wholesale to deliver back to the customer.

My friend Bill Bailey went to Chicago as a teenager after he got out of high school. And the first job he got was as a night janitor. Someone said, “Bill, why would you settle for night janitor?” He said, “Malnutrition.” You work at whatever you can possibly get when you get hungry. You go to work somewhere — night janitor, it doesn’t matter where it is. Years later, now Bill is a recipient of the Horatio Alger award, rich and powerful and one of the great examples of lifestyle that I know. But his first job — night janitor. Desperation can be a powerful incentive. When you say – I must.

3. Determination.

Determination says I will. First Lydia said, “I must find a customer.” Desperation. Second, she said, “I will find someone before this first day is over.” Sure enough, she found someone. She said, “If it works once, it will work again.” But then the next person said, “No.” Now what must you invest?

4. Courage.

Courage is more valuable than capital. If you’ve only got $1 and a lot of courage, I’m telling you, you’ve got a good future ahead of you. Courage in spite of the circumstances. Humans can do the most incredible things no matter what happens. Haven’t we heard the stories? There are some recent ones from Kosovo that are some of the most classic, unbelievable stories of being in the depths of hell and finally making it out. It’s humans. You can’t sell humans short. Courage in spite of, not because of, but in spite of. Now once Lydia has made 3 or 4 sales and gotten going, here’s what now takes over.

5. Ambition.

“Wow! If I can sell 3, I can sell 33. If I can sell 33, I can sell 103.” Wow. Lydia is now dazzled by her own dreams of the future.

6. Faith.

Now she begins to believe she’s got a good product. This is probably a good company. And she then starts to believe in herself. Lydia, single mother, 2 kids, no job. “My gosh, I’m going to pull it off!” Her self-esteem starts to soar. These are investments that are unmatched. Money can’t touch it. What if you had a million dollars and no faith? You’d be poor. You wouldn’t be rich. Now here is the next one, the reason why she’s a millionaire today.

7. Ingenuity.

Putting your brains to work. Probably up until now, you’ve put about 1/10 of your brainpower to work. What if you employed the other 9/10? You can’t believe what can happen. Humans can come up with the most intriguing things to do. Ingenuity. What’s ingenuity worth? A fortune. It is more valuable than money. All you need is a $1 and plenty of ingenuity. Figuring out a way to make it work, make it work, make it work.

8. Heart and Soul.

What is a substitute for heart and soul? It’s not money. Money can’t buy heart and soul. Heart and soul is more valuable than a million dollars. A million dollars without heart and soul, you have no life. You are ineffective. But, heart and soul is like the unseen magic that moves people, moves people to buy, moves people to make decisions, moves people to act, moves people to respond.

9. Personality.

You’ve just got to spruce up and sharpen up your own personality. You’ve got plenty of personality. Just get it developed to where it is effective every day, it’s effective no matter who you talk to – whether it is a child or whether it is a business person – whether it is a rich person or a poor person. A unique personality that is at home anywhere. My mentor Bill Bailey taught me, “You’ve got to learn to be just as comfortable, Mr. Rohn, whether it is in a little shack in Kentucky having a beer and watching the fights with Winfred, my old friend or in a Georgian mansion in Washington, DC as the Senator’s guest.” Move with ease whether it is with the rich or whether it is with the poor. And it makes no difference to you who is rich or who is poor. A chance to have a unique relationship with whomever. The kind of personality that’s comfortable. The kind of personality that’s not bent out of shape.

And lastly, let’s not forget charisma and sophistication. Charisma with a touch of humility. This entire list is more valuable than money. With one dollar and the list I just gave you, the world is yours. It belongs to you, whatever piece of it you desire whatever development you wish for your life. I’ve given you the secret. Capital. The kind of capital that is more valuable than money and that can secure your future and fortune. Remember that you lack not the resources.

At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found. But she was drawn to what she calls “all the computer and math stuff” that was part of the job.

“People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis,” she said.

Now Ms. Grimes does a different kind of digging. She works at Google, where she uses statistical analysis of mounds of data to come up with ways to improve its search engine.

Ms. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician, one of many who are changing the image of the profession as a place for dronish number nerds. They are finding themselves increasingly in demand — and even cool.

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.

Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. “We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”

The new breed of statisticians tackle that problem. They use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for cancer research and analyzing sensor and location data to optimize the handling of food shipments.

Even the recently ended Netflix contest, which offered $1 million to anyone who could significantly improve the company’s movie recommendation system, was a battle waged with the weapons of modern statistics.

Though at the fore, statisticians are only a small part of an army of experts using modern statistical techniques for data analysis. Computing and numerical skills, experts say, matter far more than degrees. So the new data sleuths come from backgrounds like economics, computer science and mathematics.

They are certainly welcomed in the White House these days. “Robust, unbiased data are the first step toward addressing our long-term economic needs and key policy priorities,” Peter R. Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, declared in a speech in May. Later that day, Mr. Orszag confessed in a blog entry that his talk on the importance of statistics was a subject “near to my (admittedly wonkish) heart.”

I.B.M., seeing an opportunity in data-hunting services, created a Business Analytics and Optimization Services group in April. The unit will tap the expertise of the more than 200 mathematicians, statisticians and other data analysts in its research labs — but that number is not enough. I.B.M. plans to retrain or hire 4,000 more analysts across the company.

In another sign of the growing interest in the field, an estimated 6,400 people are attending the statistics profession’s annual conference in Washington this week, up from around 5,400 in recent years, according to the American Statistical Association. The attendees, men and women, young and graying, looked much like any other crowd of tourists in the nation’s capital. But their rapt exchanges were filled with talk of randomization, parameters, regressions and data clusters. The data surge is elevating a profession that traditionally tackled less visible and less lucrative work, like figuring out life expectancy rates for insurance companies.

Ms. Grimes, 32, got her doctorate in statistics from Stanford in 2003 and joined Google later that year. She is now one of many statisticians in a group of 250 data analysts. She uses statistical modeling to help improve the company’s search technology.

For example, Ms. Grimes worked on an algorithm to fine-tune Google’s crawler software, which roams the Web to constantly update its search index. The model increased the chances that the crawler would scan frequently updated Web pages and make fewer trips to more static ones.

The goal, Ms. Grimes explained, is to make tiny gains in the efficiency of computer and network use. “Even an improvement of a percent or two can be huge, when you do things over the millions and billions of times we do things at Google,” she said.

It is the size of the data sets on the Web that opens new worlds of discovery. Traditionally, social sciences tracked people’s behavior by interviewing or surveying them. “But the Web provides this amazing resource for observing how millions of people interact,” said Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist and social networking researcher at Cornell.

For example, in research just published, Mr. Kleinberg and two colleagues followed the flow of ideas across cyberspace. They tracked 1.6 million news sites and blogs during the 2008 presidential campaign, using algorithms that scanned for phrases associated with news topics like “lipstick on a pig.”

The Cornell researchers found that, generally, the traditional media leads and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours. But a handful of blogs were quickest to quotes that later gained wide attention.

The rich lode of Web data, experts warn, has its perils. Its sheer volume can easily overwhelm statistical models. Statisticians also caution that strong correlations of data do not necessarily prove a cause-and-effect link.

For example, in the late 1940s, before there was a polio vaccine, public health experts in America noted that polio cases increased in step with the consumption of ice cream and soft drinks, according to David Alan Grier, a historian and statistician at George Washington University. Eliminating such treats was even recommended as part of an anti-polio diet. It turned out that polio outbreaks were most common in the hot months of summer, when people naturally ate more ice cream, showing only an association, Mr. Grier said.

If the data explosion magnifies longstanding issues in statistics, it also opens up new frontiers.

“The key is to let computers do what they are good at, which is trawling these massive data sets for something that is mathematically odd,” said Daniel Gruhl, an I.B.M. researcher whose recent work includes mining medical data to improve treatment. “And that makes it easier for humans to do what they are good at — explain those anomalies.”

Andrea Fuller contributed reporting.

More Articles in Technology » A version of this article appeared in print on August 6, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.

When Carter Cleveland, the CEO of the art-trading website Art.sy, moved his fledgling company from Palo Alto, Calif., to New York City he left behind arguably the best place to start a tech business in the U.S.

Home to giants like Facebook, Google, Apple, Intel and eBay, Silicon Valley is well known as the Mecca for high-tech companies – and entrepreneurs hoping to start one. One third of US-based venture capital investment happens in the Valley, according to PriceWaterhouse Coopers and the National Venture Capital Association. By Cleveland’s own admission, he “couldn’t go into a cafe without hearing pitches” in San Francisco.

So why go east? A recent Princeton grad, Cleveland said he left primarily because of his customers. Art.sy is an online trading post for fine art and, according to Cleveland, over half of his market is in New York City. But Cleveland added that location isn’t everything. New York’s tech scene is booming, and Cleveland wanted to join the party.

“Palo Alto is like Google,” he explained. “Big and established. New York City is like Foursquare. Not as big but tons of hype. It’s going through a growth period and very exciting.”

Below are seven reasons that tech entrepreneurs are increasingly setting up shop in New York:

1) It’s an exciting time to be in New York: Today the city is full of prominent up and comers like craft marketplace Etsy, online TV hub Boxee and blogging platform Tumblr. New York based start-ups luxury retail shopping Gilt Groupe, file sharing site Drop.io and location-based social network Foursquare have also garnered considerable attention.

Silicon Alley’s resurgence has been chronicled in the pages of The New York Observer and New York Magazine, and founders like Tumblr’s David Karp and Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley have received profile treatment typically reserved for celebrities. With Foursquare’s recent $20 million Series B and $90 million valuation, New York’s tech scene may have officially arrived.

2) A growing, supportive community: Cody Brown, a newly minted NYU grad and the founder of the social-networking start-up Kommons, recently lamented the lack of affordable apartments in New York City. Brown said he was “totally willing to live in poverty with a food budget of $5-10 a day,” but that the city’s high rental prices made even that difficult. Fortunately for Brown, a network of techies came to his rescue. Not long after blogging about his dilemma, Brown was tipped off to a $300/month place in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Brown’s story is a small example of the now vibrant start-up culture in New York. Every month entrepreneurs and VCs mingle at a wide range of events. The New York Tech Meetup is the most popular with about 12,000 members. In the blogosphere local voices like Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, prominent VC Chris Dixon, and First Round Capital’s Charlie O’Donnell have emerged as community leaders and mentors. According to Dixon, also the co-founder of recommendation engine Hunch, this “growing ecosystem” is driving the industry’s growth.

3) Universities are stepping up: New York has plenty of tech jobs, but one of the biggest complaints leveled against the city by entrepreneurs is that the best universities send their top talent to Wall Street. While the city’s financial sector continues to lure the majority of graduates with lucrative contracts, Nate Westheimer, the CEO of movie-clip site AnyClip and the director of NYMeetup, said that is beginning to change.

Westheimer commended the work of two professors — Evan Korth, who teaches computer science at NYU, and Chris Wiggins, an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University. Both have teamed up with Bit.ly scientist Hilary Mason to create HackNY, a project that connects New York’s best students with the city’s the startup world.

4) Growing access to venture capital: Although nationwide VC investment dropped in the first quarter of this year, in New York City it was up almost 20 percent, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. The second quarter saw investment in media, entertainment and software triple in New York compared with last year. And the recent establishment of seed funds like Founder Collective and IA Venture Strategies is just another sign that New York companies have access to capital.

5) Government support: Mayor Michael Bloomberg has thrown City Hall’s weight behind the burgeoning sector with a city-funded incubator and seed fund. The Bloomberg administration even invested in an iPhone app NYCWay.

6) New York is medialand, and the media love the Internet: Two of New York’s biggest industries are media and advertising, so it’s no surprise that online publications like The Huffington Post and Gawker are based in Manhattan. New York’s density also makes the city a perfect testing ground for social-networking sites. Foursquare and Hot Potato are both based in New York.

7) The anti-B.S. factor: Silicon Valley is a town where the tech industry dominates the conversation. In sharp contrast, New York is home to many industries so it’s difficult for an entrepreneur to get caught up in what the investor Fred Wilson calls an “echo-chamber groupthink.” Bottom line — entrepreneurs have to be creative and can’t get caught up in their bubble.

Not so fast…

Matt Mireles, the founder and CEO of †he video transcription service SpeakerText, started his company in his Harlem apartment but recently jumped ship for the Valley. Mireles said he’s making the move because of a “chokehold” he believes Wall Street has on technical talent in New York. In his experience, entrepreneurs are stuck fighting over a few start-up-minded developers.

That said, Mireles admits his long-term plan is to eventually return to New York. “If I wanted to be where there are more hot girls and nightlife I wouldn’t be in Mountainview,” Mireles said. “But I’m doing this [move to California] so in five years time I can live in New York in a big pimped out loft or something.”

 

The mindset of the entrepreneur doesn’t come with a genetic code or a zip code, it comes with deliberate practice. You don’t have to come from an entrepreneurial family, or even come from an entrepeneurial culture.

You can cultivate your entrepreneurial mindset from anywhere… and you don’t have to do it alone.

Think like a Chess Grand Master

Did you know that there’s a measurable cognitive difference between Chess Grand Masters and novice players? Surprisingly, the difference isn’t in processing power, it’s in memory. Show a Grand Master a board in play, and she can memorize every piece in a couple seconds. Try the same trick with a novice, and you’ll be lucky if he manages a third.

Show a jumbled board — with no logic behind it — and suddenly the Grand Master and novice are equals.

Welcome to the chunking theory. A “chunk” is the cognitive science term for elements that can be bunched and remembered as a single piece of information. A Grand Chess Master can’t memorize any more random bits than a normal person, but she can reduce non-random chess piece positions to understandable moves (or chunks) — and memorize just as many chunks as a normal person can remember random pieces.

Then, working from there, the Grand Master is better able to decide what to do next. All because she spent hours and hours pouring over old chess games in her youth, one chunk at a time. Her fast memory and pattern-matching abilities work together.

She’s not stuck playing old patterns. A Grand Master uses her immense library of patterns to invent new strategies.

This is a recipe for startup success. Not sure what to do next? Need advice on pivoting to a different use case, for reaching your audience on a shoestring, for soothing ruffled cofounder feathers?

Well, if you just read and digest a thick stack of case studies, & biographies, you can put chunking and pattern-matching to work for you.

How to Create Your Own Chess Master’s Brain

Read. A lot. Don’t cherrypick things that seem to apply to you — read it all.

Read startup stories; read B2B stories; read books on strategic marketing, read books about pricing for the enterprise. Read productivity books for entrepreneurs and creativity books for artists.

Take notes. Draw comparisons from story to story, and to what you’ve personally experienced. What would you have done? How could you apply that to your business?

Learn from others’ experience, see the patterns, draw conclusions, chunk, chunk, chunk.

Then reap the rewards.

Your Contagion Network

But, you’re thinking, even if I train my brain — I can’t do everything alone. If only I lived in Silicon Valley or London, I’d have an instant network.

I won’t lie: who you know is important. But not the way you think.

What you should really worry about now is social contagion.

You’re Infected with Your Friends & Family

Did you know that, statistically speaking, your smoking, investing, eating, and exercise habits — even your overall happiness! — can be accurately predicted by looking at the habits of the people close to you?

Sure, it could be peer pressure — it could be a selection effect. It could also be simply that we tend to subconsciously look, think, and act like those we care about.  Normal, in other words.

What to do, then, if entrepreneurship is abnormal where you are? If you live outside a tech hub, were born to a risk-averse family (or society)? If you’re surrounded by normal people enjoying normal jobs?

You can override this negative social contagion by reversing it: Surround yourself with people you aspire to be like, virtually and physically. Create on purpose what you lacked by accident.

Expose Yourself to the Good Germs Long Distance

No need to pick up and move. Get intense from afar, with role models you might not ever meet in person:

• read their books, blogs, tweets
• analyze what they do (not just what they say)
• hang up inspiring quotes or lists
• hang up a photo of a particular role model you admire. What Would Seth Godin Do? What Would Jason Cohen Do?
• take a few moments every day to think about their traits you admire

Cheesy? Hell yes. But who cares, so long as it works? And it definitely works. Research shows that simply writing a short essay about a friend’s act of self-control can increase your own self-control.

That’s cheese you can take to the bank.

Create Your Own Mastermind

Man cannot survive on netstalking alone. Once you’ve got a strong vision of what you aspire to, plant your feet on the ground by creating your very own mastermind.

A mastermind is a tight-knit group of people who get you, who’ve got your back… and who’ll kick your backside if you let yourself down. In other words, exactly the type of thing you need to keep going in a tough entrepreneurial climate.

First, aim for a local mastermind. You only need three people to start. Try all the usual suspects — HN, Reddit, Craigslist, tech meetups and hangouts, even small business associations. Your ideal members may be keeping a low profile.

If you can’t find find three locals, no worries. That’s what the internet is for.

This will be your group — it’s okay (even essential) to be choosy. Are you aiming for a juicy acquisition target? A paying SaaS? iPhone or mobile? Get specific.

Then it’s up to you to set the agendas, the regular meeting times, and the culture of productive prodding. That’s what makes a mastermind so incredibly powerful.

The Bottom Line: Be Proud

Being an entrepreneur is all about being different — even if you were born in a Silicon Valley garage. Being yourself in a risk-averse family, city, or country just makes you slightly more different than most.

To succeed, work hard — and embrace being different.

You didn’t choose to be an entrepreneur because it was the easy route.

I spent a few hours yesterday at the Founders Conference, an event dedicated to teaching entrepreneurs the core skills needed to start a company. When Aaron Patzer spoke of Mint's early days, he embellished the importance of delivering an effective pitch. After all, it was his serendipitous dinner and 30 second pitch which landed him his first $750k check.

Throughout the event, the speakers focused the audience on the components of an effective pitch. The most effective venture pitches have:

• a very brief introduction of the speaker
• a clear need/problem
• evidence that the problem presents a $1B+ market opportunity
• a viable solution to the problem
• a revenue model
• a distribution plan

Each of these elements should be a single sentence lasting about 7-10 seconds for a total pitch length of 45-60 seconds. The most important characteristic of this anemic structure is the creation of a single story line with one message. That message paraphrased is "My team is uniquely positioned to solve a big problem representing a large revenue opportunity and you should invest." Nothing more.

The pitch must be produced on demand, always with a demo and business plan within reach. The pitch is your chance for a first impression: make it count.