Crank that Product. Product. Product.

The past 3 months feel like they’ve been a year. Everything in the Facebook business game moves at the speed of light. After experiencing a lot of early success with my company, I started getting flooded with offers from all sorts of people. From journalists to advertisers to marketers to other companies, etc.  My e-mail inbox, my Facebook account inbox, my company’s e-mail inbox — everyday with new people/offers. Just non stop bombardment of offers. Most of it was a waste of time right off the bat and I just ignored things, but I still spent a lot of the past 3 months heavily engaged in business development (i.e. revenues, working on partnerships, advertising, raising capital, etc.) It’s been really draining and it’s definitely shifted my focus away from the end goal of my company: PRODUCT.

I’m really going back to just doing what I excel at: identifying needs of users, designing product, and launching applications. Product. Product. Product. All the other business stuff just makes you lose track of what made you start out in the first place: Product. Ok, I think you get the idea. I’m still going to put in time on business development (in a startup you have to wear many hats), but I will always know my priority is making sure we have outstanding product.

Back in July of 2007, my mom sent me an article from Inside Facebook which interviewed one of the makers of Quizzes in the early stages of the Platform (feels like just yesterday I was launching my first application). Here’s part of the interview, which I think really hits home with me now:

**IF: Have you been receiving offers from potential acquirers?

JW: Yes, we have received numerous interesting offers from outside organizations and individual investors. We are exploring the different opportunities being presented, however, at this time our priority is still focused on the continued development of our products.

IF: What is your advice to other application developers hoping to emulate your success?

JW: Focus on your product. There has been much discussion about scaling issues, acquisition offers, revenue generation, etc., etc., but as the developers behind Quizzes, we have decided to concentrate our efforts on improving our application. We think that this mindset is very important for the success of any application developer and we highly recommend it.**

My end lesson is this: don’t lose focus on how you gained success. In my case it was by making exceptional product and providing service/value to the customers/users on Facebook.

And now I’d like to end with a quote from the famous Rick Ross:

“Everyday I’m hustling”

Traveling time is over

I haven’t taken a real vacation/break in far too long.  These past few weeks, I took myself off the grid.  It was fantastic to get away from everything and to travel outside of the US.  Met a lot of great people and made some fantastic memories.  Learned a bit about myself and learned some interesting perspectives about the world.  To keep it short and sweet: my travel time rocked.

It feels nice to be back home, but I’m going to let the feeling of travel sink in a bit further before I pour myself into a nice overflowing inbox and a seemingly infinite list of unread news articles / RSS feeds.

Then it’s back to the hustle.  Back to the flow.

Mark Cuban: Golden Lessons

3 straight posts from the one and only Mark Cuban. 3 straight slam dunks. I read as much as I can about successful companies, successful people, and business. I especially love reading about people with passion, fire, and unstoppable drive. Mark Cuban still has more than enough of all 3 after all he’s done, and he’s a billionaire.

His past 3 posts are reflections from his earlier days when he first ventured out and started working for himself. Some fantastic lessons and really good reading. My favorite by far is his 11 page Success and Motivation post. I religiously spend the first 2 hours of each day reading, but of course Mark Cuban has me beat:

“To this day, I feel like if I put in enough time consuming all the information available, particularly with the net making it so readily available, I can get an advantage in any technology business. Of course my wife hates that I read more than 3 hours almost every day, but it gives me a level of comfort and confidence in my businesses.“

I’ve always valued reading (especially the news/blogs), but this post really helps emphasize the idea of knowledge advantage and puts it in perspective for me. Just one of the many lessons he talks about. Here are all 3 of his posts:

Success and Motivation (one of my favorite posts of the year)

The One Thing You Can Control In Life: Effort

The Best Equity is Sweat Equity