Spencer Fry

So I’m feeling a bit sick today. I woke up with a sore throat and a bit if a headache. However, I’m trying my best to not let it get to me. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today and three networking events to attend over the next three days (including the MindPetals event later tonight). I think I’m going to be able to shake this thing, but it hasn’t really gotten much better so far during the day. How do you guys work through the period you’re not feeling well? Do you just take time off/rest, and hope it passes or do you work through it?

I don’t know about you all, but I need my rest and I haven’t been getting any lately. I think since early last week, I haven’t slept more than 5 hours a night and some nights I haven’t even gotten 5 hours. I’ve had insomniac issues since college, but this past week has been really bad — sometimes not falling asleep until 4 AM. Taking my queue from Fred Wilson who felt similar this past week, I’m hitting the reset button on Monday and going to get back to a normal schedule. Wish me luck.

My parents live in Connecticut, which is about two hours from me in New York City. I see them about every three weeks for a night or two. I don’t have a car, so I take the train. I found that I somehow do some of my best work on this train ride. The train is fairly comfortable, but nothing special. Just your standard train. It’s typically packed, so there are tons of people around me and I usually get squeezed in. But with my laptop on my knees and my iPhone’s earbuds in my ears, I type away as ideas flow into my brain like nowhere else I’ve worked.

I really don’t know what it is about this damn train ride, which I loathe, because it’s “boring,” but maybe it’s being surrounded by working people? Maybe it’s the noise? I have no idea, but the train is a godsend to my work and I wish I could replicate the experience elsewhere. Yesterday I pumped out four pages full of concrete, usable ideas in the two hour train ride for something nterface is working on. Choo choo!

Found a cool way to track what people might be saying about your website. Check out Google’s Blog Search. You can search by your company’s name and then click the RSS link on the left hand side to follow it through your RSS reader. I’ve been following Carbonmade for a while now and it allows me to respond and interact with our community.

You may have heard of Startup School, it’s an event run by the Y Combinator people. It’s a free yearly conference run out of Stanford. And this year they’re sharing the videos on the Web. I’ve seen three so far and they’ve all been great: Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com, David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals, and Greg McAdoo, Partner at Sequoia Capital. It’s really worth your time if you’re interested in startup stuff. A full list of the talks can be found here.

WOW, getting something out feels so good. We released our first update to Carbonmade in well over a year. It was just a little something, but we all feel great that we got something new out to the world. We added PayPal support (a lot of our customers are overseas), overhauled our entire billing system, re-designed several forms (sign in screen, billing screen, and a few others), updated our Privacy Policy, and a few other things.

Most of the credit goes to Jason for learning the PayPal API from scratch and coding things: a big shoutout to the self-proclaimed eater of oranges! The majority of the changes were behind-the-scenes coding changes as mentioned above, but Dave and I contributed a lot too. What a huge sigh of relief to get something out. I really can’t put it in words how good it feels.

I’m such a huge advocate of rapid iteration for web applications, so this long tenure was killing me. You need to release early and release often to be competitive in this business. Dave often uses the idea of putting something in an “incubator” to allow it to grow and for us to study it. We can see how it’s being used and change things through customer feedback. To be able to do this, though, you need to be constantly iterating. Releasing often also gives you that sense of accomplishment that helps keep you sane. I think we were all going a little batty without a recent release. There’s certainly a lot more we can do, but even something as boring as an overhauled billing system feels satisfying.

I never want to have to go so long without an update again and I don’t think we will. We all agree that we’re going to focus on smaller chunks of work from here on out. Don’t try and perfect your website out of the gate, but let it grow through an incubation process. Find a feature or area you can improve on, spec it out, design it, code it, and release it. As Nike’s famous slogan says: Just do it!

I finally folded and joined LinkedIn. I just had enough inquiries by people if I had a LinkedIn account that I just gave in and signed up today. I’m not really sure what I’m going to use it for — or if I’ll use it at all — but now I can at least answer “yes” when people ask me. I also heard that it had a nice, clean UI and so I wanted to check that out too. So far, I’m impressed.

I’m feeling a bit constrained with the blog posts I’ve been making. I’m going to switch it up a bit and just post with my gut. I want to use this blog as a stress reliever, so I don’t want to feel compelled to have to write on interesting entrepreneurial topics all the time. That being said, I’m going to take a much more casual approach to things overall, but still try to mix in serious topics every now and again. Off to meet up with some friends for a late dinner and some drinking afterward. Enjoy your evening!

I filed an extension yesterday to give me extra time to wrap up a few things. I’m coming off a year where I sold my last company in early 2007, so it’s a bit more complicated than normal years. I’ve learned a few things in the process of gathering my taxes for this year that I should have known before. The first thing is to stay organized throughout the year. I made a mistake of not staying on top of things and it’s made the last few weeks a lot more hectic than they should have been. Second thing is to contact your accountant well in advance of April 15th. I dropped the ball here as well and waited until about one month ago when almost everything was booked up. So for this next year, I’m staying a lot more on top of things by generating monthly reports and keeping my accountant in the loop with quarterly updates. By keeping better organized, you won’t see me having to file an extension for 2008 and I’ll probably spend 1/10th the amount of time trying to locate things as I did this year.

I’m not speaking of great entrepreneurs here, but rather the Masters golf tournament. I’ve been following it quite closely this year — as I do every year — as Tiger Woods is someone I look up to and watching him is a treat. His determination, dedication, and focus are unmatched. If you’ve been watching this weekend you’ve seen all three things at work for him. He’s likely going to lose to Trevor Immelman, who is having a superb Sunday, but this doesn’t take away from how Tiger is handling his game today. Tiger has had no luck at all, but fights through it with amazing grit. He’ll likely lose this tournament, but he certainly isn’t giving up. All entrepreneurs should look to Tiger Woods as an inspiration especially when the going gets tough.