Sadly, the past two weeks, I didn’t show up.  I got caught up with programming and inundated with emails about feedback for Snpptz and everything else faded to the background.  I got caught up and so focused on programming that I missed an important email and therefore missed two important events.   I didn’t show up (quite literally).  To counter this, I’m going back to something that i’ve strayed from since i’ve been focused on shipping Snpptz, which is getting back into a normal schedule and more importantly, getting organized.

So, how am I going to do this?

- Back to my to-do lists! I use a to-do list system that I built in my spare time called Simplizt.  It helps me get organized by just dropping all my to-dos in my head into simple lists.

- Back to a regular sleeping schedule. While I was focused on launching, I would stay up to late hours to fix bugs and get the product launched. I think I need to get back into a regular sleeping schedule to help me stay on a regular schedule

- Scheduling my own time. Part of the reason i missed the email was because I was multi-tasking and scanning twitter/facebook/email/coding.  This has been shown to NOT work.  Instead I’m going back to a scheduled time for each of those tasks and shutting down every other distraction.

- Getting back into ‘Getting Things Done’.  David Allen’s Getting things done really has helped me prioritize and organize my own tasks.  When in coding mode I tend to stray away from it.  Now that i’m out of shipping mode, I need to get back to getting organized and getting things done!

- Working out again. I tend to find when I ignore my body, everything else  seems to get disorganized.  Not sure why this is the case, but it’s time to clean up, get healthy again and start working out again!

Hopefully, all of this will help me so I can follow my own advice, and just show up.

So what did this show and teach me?

1) It’s all about heart. If you’re getting punched in the face for four rounds, you still never give up.  It’s the same thing I face everyday as an entrepreneur.  I get looks at social gatherings and people asking me when I’ll get a real job.  I have people telling me my ideas are stupid.  I see other entrepreneurs succeeding while I’m still struggling.  I’m constantly getting punched in the face.  But you can’t stop, you just need to keep fighting, to keep taking those punches and waiting for your moment.

2) It’s all about work ethic. If you got heart and no work ethic you won’t be around in the 5th round.  One of the hardest things in MMA is to keep your cardio up.  You just have to keep plugging away at it, always pushing your boundaries and making yourself uncomfortable.  I’ll be honest, at times you think you’re going to have a heart attack and pass out, but you know what?  You never do.  It’s the same thing with entrepreneurship, you gotta keep plugging away making yourself uncomfortable.  Personally i’m a very introverted person, but I know in order for this to work, I have to keep getting out there and meeting people.  This is also why I stopped training MMA (which i’ll talk about later).

3) It’s all about technique. No matter how tired you are, you better be able to pull a triangle choke out of your ass when you’re exhausted. You know what that shows?  Silva’s practiced that move, probably hundreds of thousands of times.  It’s one thing to do perfect technique when you’re full of energy, but busting one out when you’re exhausted and have gotten punched in the face 100 times is pretty impressive.  You have to constantly learn and hone your craft.  If you’re just sitting at home wondering why things aren’t working, then it’s time to start honing your craft.  There are about 50 books out on entrepreneurship and dozens of people who write and talk about it.  I’m constantly watching Mixergy and TWiSt to learn from other entrepreneurs’ experiences, constantly reading books like Steve Blanks Four Steps Epiphanies or learning about customer behavior through the book Influence, the psychology of persuasion.  You have to be learning and honing so you can bust out your triangle choke in the 5th round.

Ok, that sounds awesome and inspirational, so why’d I quit training MMA?  #2.  It’s all about work ethic.  My main goal in life isn’t to be an MMA fighter (altho i’d love to).  It’s to be the best entrepreneur out there.   Anything detracting from that goal, I decided to cut from my life.  MMA was taking about 3 hrs of my life on days that I trained and 1 1/2 hours on days I wasn’t training.  I hate losing and getting my ass kicked, so I was constantly reading and studying moves on my off time.  It kept me up at night thinking of things I wanted to try on my opponent the next day.  I became all consumed by MMA.  Paul Graham posted about having a top idea on your mind, and MMA always seemed to be creeping in.  I decided that it was time to stop and really take that time to focus on my business instead (besides, as an entrepreneur, MMA was too expensive anyway!).

I hope this inspired some other entrepreneurs who are in the same spot as me!

You feel burnt.  You think ‘Holy Crap! That was fucking hard!’  You do that for a couple of months.  Next thing you know, you’re benching 180, 200, 210… Now you’ve got pecs that would make Hulk Hogan proud.

That’s how I look at it.  Sometimes it just hurts to hear the feedback of your product.  It burns.  It feels like the bar is going to drop on your and you’re going to die.  But you know in the long run, you’ll be on the beach walkin’ around like you’re the ‘Situation’.  yo!

1.  Speed – If your application is slow, people won’t use it.

2.  Instant Utility – the service is instantly useful to the user. no long configs.  it just has to work. (posterous comes to mind)

3.  Software is Media – your software has to have a personality, like media does.

4.  Less is more – keep feature sets trim and grow over time.

5.  Make it programmable – API API API – this is the one thing that Simplizt needs.  it’s coming… i swear!

6.  Make it personal – allow your users to infuse their personality into the application

7.  RESTful – make sure everything in the application has a clean callable URL. i think this lends the application to spread virally and have better SEO.

8.  Discoverability – SEO.  I think every entrepreneur needs to know the basics of this, even if you’re not a developer I would argue.

9.  Clean – the application cannot be busy on the page

10.  Playful – he describes this as: mobile, social, global, playful, intelligent.  I think this is the one i’m having the hardest time with.  I’m trying to figure out how to make a task management system playful.  I have some ideas that maaaaay work.  we’ll see.

So there are the 10 things that Fred Wilson believes will make a successful web app.  I’m pretty excited to my site directed toward these things! If anyone who comes across this posting has some feedback, please check out Simplizt and tell me what you think! I’m all ears!

The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Overall the problem I have is that I’m willing to dedicate my entire time to working on a project, night and day, and I’ve already given notice at my part-time job to work on Simplizt, my task management tool.  However, I generally don’t find the same dedication in my counterparts.  Since I’m the technical person, I expect my co-founder to be a person who’s willing to write all the blog content, write articles, focus on product features, and marketing/sales while I’m coding.  it’s surprising, but this really isn’t easy to find!  I’d actually love finding another technical person so I could focus on everything I wrote above!

Some resources for everyone to go date:

Founder Dating – a way for you to meet other co-founders in seattle and cali right now

Startup Weekend – a way for you to meet other people and decide together to conceive and launch a product in 54 hrs.