horsepigcow

A couple of months ago, a mentor of mine pulled me aside and gently made an observation…

“Tara…you are a great presenter. You are passionate and can make any story or idea sound interesting. I’d want you to sell anything that I was trying to get out into the world…HOWEVER…when you talk about yourself or your company, you sound uncertain and nervous. You lose that passion. I just wanted you to know how you come across.”

It’s true. And it is the craziest thing. I DO believe passionately in what we are doing with Buyosphere. I’m excited and energized with how awesome the site is progressing and I know in my heart that we are solving a real problem with what is being launched in a few weeks. I’m so excited, I’m up at night feeling giddy and have great ideas on how to grow and monetize and build a really strong, amazing business.

So why the hell do I get sheepish when I talk about it to others?

Because braggarts are irritating and I can’t de-couple myself from my startup. The answer lies in how I tell the story. This is how I’ve been telling it since the beginning:

1. I’ve been dreaming about solving the purchasing experience online since 2007 (I have)
2. My co-founders and I are a tight-knit family who have grown together a LOT over the past 18 months (we have)
3. The broken purchase experience relates to a story from 2007 – a search for a black skirt online that took me 3.5 hours and going to 13 websites (it did)

But none of these things matter. Yes, they matter to ME. This IS where my passion lies. But all three of these things make my business WAY too personal for me. So when I pitch my company, I’m essentially telling a potential investor, “Invest in me and my dream.” Not a good sell. And, when that potential investor passes, he or she is passing on my dream, not my company, so it feels much more personal.

Buyosphere is my precious. And rejection of Buyosphere feels like a personal rejection.

I now understand that this is nuts. And I don’t know if it’s a ‘woman’ thing or what, but it’s definitely a ME thing that I need to un-learn. Yes, investors say they ‘invest in people’, but they aren’t investing in people’s dreams. They invest in people they trust to build a business, sell that business, grow that business and, ultimately, make them a lot of money. These are not charities. They could give a flying snake that I’ve grown or what my shopping woes are. They want to know the big picture and how we get there. No preciousness. I’m starting to understand what some (who are very helpful mentors) have referred to as ‘fluff’.

Someday when I write the chapter on ‘how to speak VC’, this will be the very first lesson (I have yet to know what the next lessons are). Very analogous to how the ring drove Smigel crazy and turned him into a paranoid Gollum, being too coupled with your idea will lead to heartbreak over time. Every rejection will become a personal wound. After a while, you will feel alone and hyper protective. It’s a selfish thing. I have two co-founders whose ideas, input and implementation are just as formative (if not more) than my own. Investors become partners who also bring ideas and input into the mix. It is not ‘my precious’, it is a company. A company that I believe in and I’m excited about and that I will work hard to help succeed and be a great tool that will help people.

I wanted to share this revelation because I don’t think I’m the only one who is stuck in this paradigm. I’ve heard others talk about their companies in the same way. And when you are so close to the idea, it closes you to input and growth. Knowing, instead, that this is your job (not your dream) and your job is to make your company wildly successful opens you up to more ideas and helps you see where you need to let go of others.

I’m working on shifting this paradigm now, but it won’t be easy. I’m seeking outside help from people who can take me through the withdrawal steps:

1. Reframing the pitch – de-coupling it from my ‘dream’ and speaking to the business opportunity
2. Rethinking my relationship with Buyosphere – if it’s not an extension of my identity, what is it? And really, who am I?
3. Becoming the biggest advocate for Buyosphere I can be

It won’t be simple, but it’s highly necessary. And it will release me of the pressure I feel when I talk about Buyosphere. I hope.

Jolie O’Dell, who is one of my favorite people in the world tweeted something yesterday that got the women of the tech world (and many men) up in arms:

It also ignited quite a lively backchannel conversation amongst the various women in tech groups I’m part of. The reactions (including mine) ranged from “I can see her point, but ‘embarrassment’ is a harsh way to put it,” to “OMFG &*#(&#)@#*@!” Mine was somewhere in between, but the biggest thing that struck me was how familiar it sounded.

And it isn’t a familiar because I’m a woman founding a fashion/shopping site, it’s familiar because in every single profession where the population of women starts growing, the same thing happens and the same sentiments get voiced.

As the number of women doctors grew, there was (and still is) an outcry because female physicians outnumber male physicians in pediatrics and female residents outnumber male residents in family medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pathology, and psychiatry.

I’ve heard the same said about women lawyers: they pick ‘softer’ forms of law to pursue such as non-profit, family, government and general practices. Women are less likely to run a firm or become partners at a firm and more likely to be in-house council.

But this isn’t the issue. Nature or nurture or interests or whatever, if more women choose to practice medicine, law or do startups around the stuff we are familiar with, I’m not too concerned. I figure as time goes on and our entrance into professions becomes more common, things will even out. What I’m concerned about is the sentiment around the decision to pursue more feminized versions of these professions. The feminine itself is negatively valued.

Feminine = Soft/Bad/Stupid/Shallow/Underachieving/Embarrassing ??

Think about how we assign value to certain things like: logical vs. emotional. Or independent vs. dependent. Or analytical vs. intuitive. I’ll bet when you read the words, you instantly understood what ‘gender’ was assigned to each (and when I say gender, I don’t mean men vs women. I mean masculine vs. feminine.). Neither is better or worse, but depending on the context, there is a differential in how they are valued. And in the tech industry, being emotional, dependent and intuitive is a death sentence…unless you are a man who has a ‘proven’ record (proven being the uber masculine differentiator).

The same goes for types of startups. Business tools = good. Analytics = good. Content aggregators = good. Productivity apps = good. Shopping = bad. Fashion = bad. Babies = bad. UNLESS…you are a man. Diapers.com was founded by two men. They are super rich now. Zappos.com was founded by men. They’ve done pretty well. Amazon, Bluefly, Kaboodle, Shopstyle, Stylefeeder, eBay…the list goes on. One could argue all of the founders behind these have done pretty well for themselves and even the sites that aren’t super popular were acquired for good money and had good exits. I don’t know…sounds like a shopping (baby and fashion) startup is a pretty solid, awesome, smart, hardcore, good, kickass type of startup to have.

So why is it so embarrassing to have so many women entering the startup world through such a lucrative entry point?

Because, well, it’s embarrassing because we are so few and there is so much hope pinned on our performance. We’ve been begging and screaming to get included and then we show up in high heels talking about designer snugglies and nailpolish. Damn these women being all womeny talking about women stuff! Who invited these ones to the party? Where are the serious female entrepreneurs?

Right here. In high heels. Wearing great nailpolish (I swear by this stuff…it’ll extend your manicure for…nevermind). I’m emotionally and intuitively navigating through this. And I’m dependent on more people than I feel comfortable with: my customers, my users, my co-founders, my advisors, my boyfriend, other startups, my friends, the weather, the economy…you name it.

When I moved to San Francisco in 2005, it took me about 6 months to deny myself my femininity. It wasn’t fashionable to be fashionable. I moved to SF with a closet full of designer dresses, suits and shoes and within 6 months all I was wearing were jeans and t-shirts. I am ecstatic to see photos of events filled with women in dress clothes and high heels. My only embarrassment lies in that I didn’t have the *erm* balls to be the woman I am back then.

Instead of embarrassed that there are so many women doing startups involving fashion/shopping/babies, I’m proud. I’m proud of a truly inclusive tech scene where women can women, men can men, women can men, men can women and all sorts of other genderific combinations thereof. And I, for one, welcome the pink ghettoization of the tech startup scene – at least for the time being – because it means women are making a grand entrance. And what an entrance it is!

I love shopping. I do. It’s no secret to the people around me. And it’s pretty much killing me right now to be a broke startup entrepreneur who looks at amazing, gorgeous new objects of desire every single day on Buyosphere that I cannot afford. So, of course, saving money on the stuff I want and need is a highly desirable thing.

Then why do the plethora of shopping discount, daily deal and coupon sites leave me so darn cold?

I think it’s because, instead of helping me afford the stuff that I need and want, there seems to be an endless stream of messages tempting me to spend my money on stuff that is shiny and lovely, but that I never knew I desired before they appeared in my inbox. In fact, by spending my money on these lovely objects of distraction, I’m getting further away from being able to afford the stuff I really want/need.

Another issue could be that there are just too many shopping deal sites all at once. Or maybe the coupons/deals/offers aren’t what we need as consumers after all. Perhaps it turns out that I don’t need a new pair of cheap shoes or new accessories every month. Maybe I just need to be able to afford one or two pairs of really good shoes per season, or that amazingly unique accessory by that hard to find local jeweler that makes me look European in every outfit…even jeans and t-shirts. Or maybe I need a better way to find my way to these items.

Hmmmm…if only someone could come around to help us shop SMARTER instead of just MORE. Okay, that is a bit self-serving (as that is one of the core objectives of Buyosphere – egad, I can’t wait to unveil our next phase which I think will really help make this a reality), but it’s true and it is exactly the issue that all of these hot new startups are going to face.

At the end of the day, we don’t need anything that encourages consumption. We’ve done just fine on that level for years. What we need is a better/faster route to finding that perfect thing for me, which requires the sellers who have that perfect thing for me to figure out how to find me in that exact moment and the sellers that don’t to get out of my way. THAT will be the killer social shopping site.

note: stay tuned…

It’s a simple statement, but not a simple thing to do. Product/market fit is truly the ONLY thing that matters and achieving it before you run out of money is the key to winning. It’s why companies raise a whole bunch of money:

MORE MONEY = MORE TIME = MORE LIKELY TO WIN

…or not. Sometimes more money equals more waste, too. And we are seeing this a great deal right now. Sometimes more time is not the best thing to give an entrepreneur. Finding that balance of time and money will help us be hungry and creative enough to find the best product/market fit.

Finding that Product/Market Fit

There is no silver bullet here and I’ve found it incredibly enlightening to be on the product side of this one (not the pundit or consultant side). However, I’ve come across some really great resources that will help streamline the process of finding product/market fit:

1. SOLVE THE RIGHT PROBLEM – If this seems obvious, you are fooling yourself. One of my favourite stories of all time, retold by Aza Raskin, is that of Henry Kremer’s search for a human-powered flying machine. Read it. Turns out the problem wasn’t that they needed to solve human-powered flight. The problem was that the prototypes took to long to test. Fail fast and iterate often.
2. LIMIT YOUR MARKET – finding product/market fit for EVERYONE is like finding a pair of pants that fits everyone. It doesn’t exist. Seriously. Narrow your market. And not to 18-35 year old males. Figure out who that ONE person is. Not a profile or a fictional person, either. If you can’t find a single living being that is that person, you don’t have a market. Hell, solve it for yourself if you have to, but be careful because you are seriously biased.
3. EAT YOUR OWN DOGFOOD AND REALLY TASTE IT – do you really think what you’ve built is amazing? Seriously? I’m the first to admit that though Buyosphere is coming along nicely, it’s quite a ways away from being useful to anyone but someone who likes to keep track of the stuff they buy…and even then it is clunky as all heck. I can admit that. And I’ll continue to be my biggest critic and breaking my own product until I can honestly say, “This is freakin rad”. I won’t be happy until that day.
4. RESEARCH RESEARCH RESEARCH – Talk to your customers and potential customers. This one is hard because you have to know what information to filter and what to use. But I love the story of AirBnB’s early days of flying to New York every weekend and knocking on doors. Not only did they use their own service, figuring out what sucked and what worked, but they talked to potential customers, hosts and travelers to find out more information. This is where limiting your market can also come in very handy!
5. LOOK TO OTHER MARKETS FOR CLUES – I love reading outside of my field. Innovation can be found in other markets and examples unrelated to yours. Connect the dots. Hell, much of the innovation of the media industry has come from the porn industry. They solved the distribution of media to viewers before the rest of the industry realized there would be a demand. Who is capturing an audience that you can beg, borrow and steal ideas from?
6. UPDATE OLD IDEAS WITH NEW TWISTS – Groupon is just a new way to present coupons. That’s it. There is nothing seriously innovative about it. Except that it IS innovative in that it gives HUGE discounts and not just a $0.05 here and there. Oh…and the way it’s described as sexy instead of cheap to use a Groupon.
7. UNDERSTAND AND USE INTRINSIC MOTIVATORS – a company hitting the market with lots of buzz and activity does not necessarily mean there is a product/market fit. In fact, initial buzz and growth may be coming from extrinsic motivators (the ever-popular ‘gamification’ of today – as Kathy Sierra calls it “the high fructose corn syrup of engagement”). Motivators like badges and coupons and deals are temporary solutions and actually lead to demotivating your customer base as they diminish in value. Instead, think INTRINSIC motivations such as Challenge, Curiosity, Control and Competition. Motivation has loads of research on it now (I’m currently reading Dan Pink’s DRIVE, which summarizes much of the research). The key here is to match the RIGHT intrinsic motivators to your market.

Doing all of the above will not guarantee product/market fit. You still have to experiment and be agile…and be willing to persevere through until you nail it. The issue may be as simple as timing…or technology…or messaging…or being in the right place at the right time. But you increase your chances of hitting the sweet spot by being out there and agile.

The only guarantee of ‘winning’ is to find that product/market fit before you run out of money…or even after you run out of money to find a way to keep tweaking it. We’re still working on it ourselves and I’ll let you know the moment we nail it.

Welcome to one of my regularly scheduled attacks of futility. It happens about once a month if I’m lucky and once per week if it’s a really hard month. It starts with something small that triggers it. A comment from someone. A post. An announcement. The post or announcement usually surrounds some frothy statement like, “Look at all of the money being thrown around! Wa-hoo!” or something not quite as hyperbole, but points to the same thing. I read the headline and then look at my own experience and think:

“Geez. I must be doing something incredibly wrong if it is this easy to raise money and I’m not. I suck.”

This thought has a tendency to spiral into, “What business do *I* have being a CEO? I’m terrible at this!” Eventually, though, I kick myself out of my pity party and get creative and work harder. To date, I’ve pulled through each and every attack with new ideas and a renewed sense of purpose.

I just gave a talk on being a startup entrepreneur in the midst of looking for funding at NXNE Interactive called, “So you wanna do a startup, eh?” The gist of it is that all of this frothiness isn’t so good for startups that want to build something that means a damn. The advice is awful. The frenzy makes for poor short-term thinking. And the urgency caused by all of it means that everyone is making bad decisions based on no evidence. VCs/Angels are following the herd when most of them are smart men and women who didn’t get to where they are because of herd mentality. Entrepreneurs are pivoting away from the ideas that put them on their path in the first place and following trends that don’t really mean a damn (gamification or daily deals anyone?)

If we ARE in a bubble, and many people think we are, then the cash grab myopic activities will merely accelerate the bursting of that bubble. And sure, there are people who make money during these frenzies, but it’s a small number and you probably aren’t one of them. You’d need lower scruples.

But I think the biggest travesty of this time period is ideas. As Mark Suster said in his awesome presentation (which was misinterpreted by TechCrunch as a cash-grab statement), “Some good companies simply don’t get funded.” Those companies are usually the trailblazers. Think Pandora. Think AirBnB. Think Zappos (who struggled with funding during the first bubble). Think just about every startup who didn’t follow the pack.

Ideas are crazy hard to bank on. They are crystal clear for the idea-thinker, but are incredibly difficult to gr0k for the idea-listener. An idea doesn’t come out of a single eureka moment. It comes out of years of thinking about a problem and having small bursts of inspiration here and there pummel your brain until you are able to piece them together one day into a cogent thought. Without taking the listener on that long journey, he/she won’t be able to understand how x solves y.

Take AirBnB for instance. The founders had a need: paying their rent. There was a conference coming up that created an opportunity: people looking for cheap places to stay. They pulled ideas from their own experiences: sleeping on an air mattress is a good, inexpensive way to travel and couchsurfing has made it safer to open up one’s home to strangers. They added a sparkle of business acumen to solve their original problem and address the opportunity: what if we charged a nominal fee for conference goers to sleep in our apartment on air mattresses? And then, when the experiment was a success, they had their big idea: let’s create a tool to match people like us with travelers? Brilliant, right? Well, we know that now, but not many people thought so. In fact, they were practically laughed out of VC and Angel offices when they pitched the idea. They understood the brilliance of the idea because they lived it and experienced it unfolding. But it was a radical way to approach things and not so easy to wrap a brain around by someone who had never been there.

So instead of wacky new ideas like this getting funded, ideas that look like other ideas get funded quickly. Of course, once the model is demonstrated/proven, it makes it much easier to gr0k. That’s why the ‘high level pitch’ is so popular. “We are Mint.com for Products.” “We are Foursquare for relationships.” Etc. It’s essentially:

“We are -insert company that is wildly popular here so there is no question as to the business model- for -insert slight variation of market/product/vertical-.”

But the issue here is that we start to see a market glut of products that are x for y instead of thinking about creating products and services that actually mean a damn. Not saying that x for y doesn’t ever mean a damn, but by and large it becomes a bit of a cash grab. Just add the frothy money slinging market we are seeing right now and it gets even worse.

Bring on the feelings of futility.

Why would anyone want to enter a frothy market that has an idea that comes from a real place of “let’s make stuff work better for people AND make money?” It’s heartbreaking. And no, I don’t want to pivot and grab onto cash cows. It’s distracting and dishonest and will lead to another crash. And that isn’t good for anyone.

That’s why I find it necessary to keep talking frankly about reality. It’s probably not popular or doing me any favors in my journey to raise money to fund Buyosphere‘s ability to build something that helps make stuff (in this case, commerce) better for people (and make money). But I’d really like to open up the conversation on how we can take a step back from the frothy frenziness of today’s startups and talk about real solutions for real entrepreneurs with real passion for their ideas who want to serve real people’s needs.

I’ve embedded my deck below. I’d love your feedback and your own stories. I’d like fewer journeys into the pits of futility and more into conversations about solutions.

Photo taken by Carlos Pacheco (aka. the very patient man who keeps me strong through this) while we were out looking for a good coffee at NXNE Interactive.

There are multiple schools of thought on raising money. And no, I’m no authority on it (as I am still yet to be successful), but I have spoken with many startup founders and observed many others. But the two major ends of the spectrum of raising early money is:

• Raise the basics of what you need to get to your next goal (usually 12-18 months)
• Raise as much as you bloody well can

After witnessing some extreme examples of the latter (Color and Blippy are two that come to mind) get hyped and then fizzle, while watching companies like AirBnB and Sonar get really creative with smaller amounts, I have a tendancy to favor leaning more towards the former.

There really is not a rule to anything — and I’m not a fan of that type of thinking — but I heard a story the other day that made me pause and wonder how much it applies to startups. Basically, it goes like this:

A guru gives a young boy a butterfly forming in a cocoon and tells him not to help it, no matter how much he wants to but the boy does it anyway and the butterfly dies. The guru tells the boy:

“You don’t understand. You didn’t understand what you were doing. When the butterfly comes out of the cocoon, the only way he can strengthen it’s wings is by beating them against the cocoon. It beats against the cocoon so it’s muscles will grow strong. When you helped it, you prevented it from developing the muscles it would need to survive.”

It may or may not be a true story, but I like the sentiment. With every struggle we’ve been through, with every set back and with every challenge I am learning something about myself, building a business and I am growing. I’ve made mistakes, but learnt to fail fast, learn and move forward. I’ve learned to be agile and to ask for direction. I’ve sought out mentors to guide me. I’ve learned that I am stronger than I thought I was. I’ve learned what I didn’t think I’d ever need to learn. I’ve discovered I can sacrifice and the depths of my commitment to Buyosphere and my team.

And, sure, I may be justifying all of my struggle to make myself feel better, but I truly believe this is all part of the startup story. I fell in love with AirBnB because of theirs (the campaign cereal). And as I feel like I’m getting closer to the ability to hit the road running, I’ve learned some fundamental lessons on how to run so that we run faster, smarter and more efficiently. In the shadow of the Goliath funding round we just found out a potential competitor (that came out of nowhere) raised, I feel our team is well-equipped to face the future battle.

None of this would have been possible if someone dumped a boatload of money on us from the beginning. And when we finally do raise the money we’ve been looking for (which is enough for the next 12-18 months), I’ll really appreciate it.

My muscles are strong. It’s time to fly.

Big ups to Paul Mooney (aka @moon) for recording our panel and then posting the video from our SXSW Interactive session. It’s long, but the discussion was good and led to a longer discussion afterwards.

(with Doc Searls , Christopher Carfi and Adriana Lukas)

I love this quote by Marc Andreessen found here on Tim Ferriss’ blog:

“First and foremost, a start-up puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced. You flip rapidly from day-to-day – one where you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again. Over and over and over. And I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs. There is so much uncertainty and so much risk around practically everything you are doing. The level of stress that you’re under generally will magnify things incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash speed and huge magnitude. Sound like fun?”

Yep. I’ve said it before…and pointed to other references. Startup entrepreneurship is one helluva rollercoaster.

I love rollercoasters and I always have. And not only the literal sense of the word. My mother used to accuse me of being manic depressive. Although I think that pathologizing it may be taking it a little far, I certainly am a person who experiences highs euphorically and lows despondently and very little in between. I’m a woman of extremes: I work hard, I play hard, I love hard, I hate hard…I don’t know how to ‘kind of’ think, feel or do anything. I’ve smoothed out the highs and lows a little bit as I’ve aged, but I’ll always be who I am.

The other day I was having a conversation with someone who brought up the fact that she had heard from several sources that they were concerned about my level of commitment to running my company because I “am always posting my runs to twitter.” Yes, I have become a little more than obsessed with running these days. It’s about the only thing that keeps me sane and even-keeled enough to function on my little rollercoaster. I also don’t have much of anything else going on. I live alone. I don’t have a partner/boyfriend (yes, I’ve tried, but that is short-lived at best and I’ve decided I can’t add that extra curricular stress to my life at this moment). I hardly have a social life (unless it involves my startup circle). My son is off and out in the world on his own. I have a dog, but he’s a pug so he spends 23 hours a day sleeping. Running is my outlet.

I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but running has helped my lizard brain evolve quite a bit. I used to chew my nails. It was a disgusting, nervous habit. About 2 months into training I stopped and I haven’t bit my nails once since then. Stress used to completely disable me. When faced with rejection, I would go into hiding for days. Since I’ve started running, my crisis coping skills have increased one hundred fold. I get over rejection in hours and even minutes. My thinking is clearer. My focus is stronger. My concentration levels have increased. I feel more creative. And I’m definitely more grounded in reality.

People talk about the runners high. I love it. It’s that one moment of my day where my brain goes into absolute zen state. I recently told my training partner I couldn’t talk during our sessions because that ‘downtime’ for my brain acts as a big recharge. It starts with a tingle, then a wave of something I can’t quite describe sweeps through my entire body. At those moments all I think about is how perfectly in flow my body is. Foot after foot, I fly. I no longer feel the ground beneath them. Every muscle is in alignment like a perfect orchestra. Right after I finish my run, my brain comes back online and it is fired up. I get my best ideas and clearest thoughts in the hours right after I finish.

I don’t feel that my running (and I run 3-5 times per week, not every day) interferes with my focus on running Shwowp. I feel that it helps me run Shwowp. I honestly don’t know if, with my history of manic depressive like mood swings, I could have gotten this far without running. I certainly know that it’s going to get me through everything else. Nothing seems impossible and no problem seems insurmountable when I finish a run.

Consequently, I look around me and see many CEO’s and startup founders running. I’ve also worked with many executives in high pressure companies who ran almost every day. Now I understand why and I understand how they handled the kinds of pressure they were under in stride….so to speak.

So, if you are one of the people who question my commitment to my company because I post my runs to Twitter, I hope I’ve explained how beneficial it is that I run. Also, you should be more concerned when I don’t get my runs in. Just recently as I was traveling in the cold and snow and couldn’t run, I started to panic a little more and feel a little more anxious again. And if it’s merely posting these runs to Twitter that poses the problem, I’d ask yourself, “What of the startup founders who don’t post anything?” At least you know how I’m spending my time 24/7. You should feel secure in my level of radical transparency.

[photo from Flickr Commons]

As I’ve outlined, my life has been a bit of a rollercoaster lately. One day, I’m up in the air – we push a new release and people respond positively, there’s an article written about us, we have a great meeting with another startup or angel or vendor, etc – and the next day I have a hard time keeping it together – we are told someone is going to pass on investing we were sure were interested, something major breaks on the site, etc. From one day to the next, there is no way I can predict whether it is an up day or a down day. But every day, I get out of bed and strive to make it the best day possible.

“Stay strong” is something I’ve heard from many friends. Yep. I have no other choice. I have nothing else to fall back on. I am, as my good friend Erica O’Grady put it, “All in”. Sure, I could quit and “go get a job”, but that’s not an option for me. I think of quitting akin to laying down and dying. I know where we are going…or rather, I know we are going somewhere amazing…and this is just part of the journey. And it’s not supposed to be easy. If it were, it probably wouldn’t be as rewarding to get there in the end.

But something baffles me along the way. It’s how people react to the bad days. Lots of people ask me how I’m feeling/doing/holding up. Most days I say, “Staying strong” or “Moving along” or “Things are looking up”, but occasionally, they catch me on one of those down days. The frustrating moments. The day when rent is 2 weeks past due, we can’t pay our employees, the rejection is piling up and the money coming in is not happening fast enough. On those days when someone asks me how I’m feeling, I just can’t bring myself to say, “Staying strong.” So I get honest. I say, “Feeling frustrated” or “Something’s gotta give” or “Losing a bit of steam.” The reaction to this is not incredibly heartening: “Everything will be fine.” Yep. I know that. But it won’t be fine by the essence of me hoping it will. It’ll be fine because I worked harder. Persevered. Thought more strategically. Found that one thing we needed to do in order to get over the hump. Etc.

I don’t believe in the law of attraction. I don’t. I don’t believe that you can say, “Today everything is going to work out fine” and then it happens. But I do believe that you can roll out of bed in the morning and say, “Things are sucking right now…what can I DO about it?” Quite often we know the answer to that question before we even ask it. It may be something we’ve been putting off or that seems ridiculously trivial (like changing the name of the company), but it’s something. It’s actionable and, if you haven’t tried it, it’s worth your while to tackle it in order to see if it moves the needle forward. And sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s not about believing, it’s about doing.

I suspect that even though they don’t really talk about it, every entrepreneur out there has gone through days like this. The ones that are successful aren’t the ones that are smarter or have better ideas, they are the ones who persevered through these days until they found the right mix that would take them past the pain into the progress. In fact, an article in INC Magazine pointed out to me by Jen Wojcik, talks about entrepreneurial creativity. People with entrepreneurial minds have the ability to adapt and shift and tweak in agile ways. If something isn’t working, why not just tweak it just a little? Where are the other opportunities. I’m not a fan of the word pivot because adjustments are really part of the everyday life of starting up anything. We test our assumptions. If the assumption is off, we look for clues as to how we can improve our aim. As one entrepreneur says in the article, “I always live by the motto of ‘Ready, fire, aim.’ I think if you spend too much time doing ‘Ready, aim, aim, aim,’ you’re never going to see all the good things that would happen if you actually started doing it.”

My favorite responses to my assertion that ‘today is a hard one’ include feedback. “Hey, I see you are doing this thing…but have you thought of doing this other thing, too?” Those are the people I instantly pounce on. I’m eager for input. I know that I may be caught up in the inertia of things. My best contacts and leads have come from those who help me see past my own tunnel vision. What’s been amazing is the number of smart people in my own personal network who constantly give me the tools, ideas and contacts I need to keep on keeping on. I honestly don’t know how anyone does it without that amazing input. I assume they don’t.

Yes. Everything IS going to be alright. But it isn’t a matter of the power of positive thinking. That being said, wallowing doesn’t help one get out of bed and get the day started, either. But I believe more in strategic thinking than positive thinking. Affirmations only go so far. Action is where it’s at.

[photo lifted from Tara Whittle's inspirational quotes stream on Facebook]

THE BIG IDEA: “Cookies and tracking software? Who needs em? People are creating taste-signals daily with what they choose to buy. Why not let the customer go directly to the brand/vendor and get rid of this guesswork?”

[this is based on an amazing project spearheaded by Doc Searls and housed by The Berkman Center (Harvard) called VRM or Vendor Relationship Management, which I have been a participant in since 2008]

THE BIG ISSUE: “It is a big drag to sit and enter one’s entire shopping history. The incentives are fuzzy and don’t really matter to the average consumer. In order to make this happen, we need to create incentives as well as benefits in the near term while we move towards the big picture.”

The social shopping sphere is in the midst of an explosion right now. What we are seeing are multiple sites emerge that allow people to gather products together in fun and social ways to create everything from collages to collections of the beautiful stuff we aspire to. These sites seem to have a good amount of pick up with all sorts of influential types posting beautiful objects.

So, it’s really daunting as a startup in this crowded space to try and navigate through everything to position ourselves as something ‘different’ altogether. How do we know we will break through the noise and actually achieve our goals?

Well, for one, aspirational is not where we fit. Sure, I really really love that $3,500 Sliding Sofa at Design Within Reach that I’ve coveted for a good 5 years now, but I’m still not in a position to buy it. What I *did* buy, however, is a simple sofa from Ikea that cost me $499. Certainly, the styles are similar, but the price points are very very different. If I’m collecting data on my preferences that will be consumed by future brands and retailers, it behooves me to get back recommendations based on what I can afford rather than what is way out of my reach. When I can afford that DWR sofa, and if I still love it (as long as my taste preferences don’t change), I’ll post it. We do have an option for WANT!, but that data is weighted differently than the ‘haves’.

Other sites are collecting EVERYTHING we buy, which we don’t see as incredibly datalicious either. I may or may not define my taste profile through the stuff that I regularly spend money on. Certain products I buy and stores I frequent are merely because of convenience or sales. Others are because I’m loyal to them. It’s really difficult for any database cruncher to gr0k which is which and what really drives my buying decisions. Groceries, for instance. I would totally define myself as a Trader Joe’s girl and if I lived anywhere near one today (even 3 hours away), I would go out of my way to get to it to do all of my shopping. But I’ve lived in Montreal for the past year and a half and I’ve just gone where it’s convenient to go. Same with Zappos. Living back in Canada forces me to buy my shoes at the mall these days as the selection online isn’t the same as when I was in the US. It doesn’t mean I’m all of a sudden in love with Aldo. Crunching my credit card data doesn’t give an actual picture of my preferences.

Lastly and most importantly, we are focused on putting the customer at the absolute center of everything we do. That means that we are completely vendor/brand neutral. Even if we can’t ever collect affiliate revenue from an Etsy.com store, we work hard to parse emails and make our bookmarklet work for Etsy because many of our current users buy loads of amazing things there. And that is valuable data in itself. Buying from Etsy means you probably like unique, hand-crafted items that aren’t bulk produced. Maybe you would prefer recommendations from more local artisans. This is also why we want to get cracking on a mobile version of Shwowp sooner than later. The ‘buy local’ movement needs to be served as well and is a big part of the way many people vote through buying.

So at the end of the day, how do we differentiate ourselves from the flurry of social commerce sites popping up (what seems to be daily!)? We are about:

• the ACTUAL (not aspirational – no out-hipstering one another!)
• the MEANINGFUL (more interested in the stories behind why you buy and will soon be adding the ability to talk about life cycles of products)
• the TASTE SIGNALING (helping people tell the world how they vote through what they buy)

The customer and the future of the customer’s data is at the center of everything. And though data may not seem to be something incredibly sexy, I believe we will be an incredibly important part of our online identities in the future. We are just trying to make it meaningful and interesting for people to gather it in the meantime. Social is at the core of us being individually interesting beings and that is the most interesting part of the data at the end of the day. Because consumerism, after all, is less about the material objects we buy and more about the signals we send.