Interview with syndeo::media

Our first interview is with Luis Buenaventura II, CEO and Social Architect of syndeo::media. He was kind enough to answer our must-ask questions for startup founders. You can subscribe to the RSS Feed so you know about our next interviews right away.

Tell us about your product/s and how you came up with the idea.

syndeo::media in its current incarnation is 95% a services company and 5% a product company. This is more for economic reasons than anything else. Since we’re completely self-funded (and indeed, started up with nothing but a bunch of empty bank accounts), we needed to build up enough capital to bring our ideas to fruition. At this point in time, we’ve made some progress in that general direction, but not enough to completely do away with the services aspect of the business.
Our first in-house product is currently in private alpha-testing stages, and is called moomai. It’s a social network with some small bits of innovation that we hope people will find interesting enough to try out. The core idea for it was inspired by a sociological concept from the early 1900’s called “the looking glass self” (yeah, I have a secret love affair with academic obscurities).

What made you take the plunge? How different is your life now with before founding your company?

I personally have no concept of working for someone else (problems with authority and all that), and this is my third startup in 4 years. Prior to that, I was freelancing since I was 18 so I’ve never held a steady job. My two other co-founders - Hunter and Hans - have also been in multiple startups themselves, so you could say that we’re fairly experienced bootstrappers. (Which is not to say that any of our previous attempts were successful though

How did you get the word out about your product?

We only have a little bit of time to work on moomai.com (mostly evenings and weekends, unless we happen to be working on client-projects during those periods) so progress has been really slow. As you can imagine, broadcasting its existence is not a huge priority yet.

What’s a typical day like for you/your team?

I think we’re fairly typical for a technology house. Work is pretty much around-the-clock because everyone on the team has slightly different sleep cycles. (Some of us sleep at 3 or 4am, which is right around the time Hunter in Australia wakes up. Work continues throughout the day, with most of us putting in 9-10 hours each. I usually do my last commits around midnight.)

Anything exciting brewing in 2008? Where do you see your company going?

Our roadmap is a dusty crystal ball right now. Client-work is going to account for the biggest chunk of our revenue for some time, so as far as anything exciting happening, it all depends on how much time we can spend working on our own products. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past 3 years, it’s that forecasting is largely a waste of time, particularly when you have no investors or board to b.s. “Big picture” discussions are best reserved for chill-out sessions at the local beer garden, because what really matters at this stage is making sure you survive day-to-day. (I suppose that my pragmatism is a function of our size as well. When there are so few people in a company, reorienting yourselves so that the big picture always stays within view is easy.)

How do you see the web startup environment in the country? What do you think holds back the growth of a Silicon Valley-like hub for web startups because there are still so few?

Investors don’t really know what to do with us, mostly because there’s no baseline for successful local web startups (i.e., no startup has become an unqualified success) as of yet. As soon as one company breaks through, it’ll be a lot easier, because there’ll be something to refer to. The real trick, you see, is believing you’ll succeed where nobody else has. And if you can do it without investment, then you’re pulling off a minor miracle I think.

3 points to think about for people with ideas for web startups

I only have one: An idea is only 0.1% of the solution (maybe less). The other 99.9% is comprised of hard work, patience and a healthy amount of luck. The fact of the matter is, ideas are really, really cheap. Don’t be lulled into the notion that the strength of your idea will carry you through. That didn’t work for Edison (2 years and over 3000 experimental filaments before he perfected the lightbulb), and it won’t work for you either. So I suppose the correct way to look at a startup (of any sort, not just web-based), is not whether you have a good idea or not, but whether you have the will to see it through to the end.

3 points to think of when taking on business partners for your web application

Again, I only have one: choose people who fill out your weak spots. This makes it easier to delegate responsibilities, because it’ll be more obvious who should handle what. This seems like an obvious bit of advice, but I see too many small companies where both of the leads are designers, or where the entire group are composed of programmers, or where the founders boast that they are “like-minded individuals”. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, because a business is enriched by diversity, not similitude.

3 points to think about financing your web application

Start really, really small. It’s not called “small enterprise” for nothing. The nature of business is that you will often find yourself in situations that were entirely unexpected, even after all your “meticulous” planning. This is another reason why I hate forecasting; events often conspire to render your prediction completely irrelevant, and usually in the most embarrassing manner possible. Taking small, measurable steps allow you to pace yourself, and hopefully prevent your actions from plunging your company into bankruptcy at every turn.
Try to keep in mind that it’ll take at least 6 months to build anything halfway decent, and over a year to make it really sing. So what you need to ask yourself is how you’re going to keep the company alive during that period. Sometimes the answer is to do other work on the side, and other times it means reorienting your product concept so that it has some means to generate revenue sooner rather than later. And other times it means deferring production until such time as you can ensure that you won’t kill yourself launching the thing.

Final words for young web companies starting out

About 95% of all startups never make it past their first year. And less than 1% will be around for their third birthdays. That’s not meant as a discouragement; merely a statement of truth. The reasons are as many and as diverse as there are startups, but at the heart of the matter is the fact that bootstrapping is, well, kinda tough.
I have one small bit of practical advice here — make sure you have enough personal funds to cover your behind during that first year. The very first thing to be sacrificed by startups are the individual salaries of the founders, so I can’t recommend it to anyone who relies on monthly income for their personal survival.
I guess the other more general bit of advice is to concentrate on what you know. The definition of “young company” is that you often will not have any idea what the heck you’re doing, so you want to focus on getting better at a specific thing first, before branching out to other areas. In syndeo::media’s case, that meant social networks. For other people, it might be business applications, or (god forbid) Flash websites. The idea is to build your human capital and make sure you’re good at something.