Merry Christmas To Struggling Entrepreneurs!

It's been insane inside my head lately. I have so much going on. A hundred things I'm working on, truthfully three projects that I have a ton a passion for, and want to spend every day all day long on them, but I have life responsibilities, that I certainly must do. The day job, the bills, the reading to my blind mother. The responsibility list is way longer then the three things I have passion for.

All these things start the swirling inside my brain. It's like I need to shut down and force myself to lay in bed netflixing for hours, but I don't and the insanity spills out on my husband and kids. Mostly the husband. 

When I talk about struggling entrepreneurs, I don't necessarily mean 'struggling to make your startup work' cause that's a given. I often mean the way we are wired in the brain and how "normal people" interact with us. We are not anything like them and this causes a big conflict. It usually makes us look for sure insane, and them more normal.

What are my three things I want to do?

1. Continue learning code on Freecodecamp.com
2. Continue attending Toastmasters, writing and giving speeches and a lot more.
3. Bring and old product back to life.

None of which I've been able to dedicate any quality time to. It kills me, but I have to do those three things as it eases my pain. The pain of being a struggling entrepreneur. I have to do things that lead me to create. It's the only way the constant torture inside me can be satisfied. 

Here is my present for you! Totally loving this man Michael Kiwanuka.

Wow,You Are So Serious Startup -

The day I started this blog some three years ago I had no idea what a blog was. I did my research after, and found out some interesting things. Mostly those things pissed me off.

First thing I should do, is lure you into doing what I want.

Yeah, there are things I should do 'according to the blog gods' to get you to follow me and all kinds of other things I should be doing. Of course this is all in the search for success. If I do not do those things then I'm some kind of loser blogger chick who's not successful! Fuck that. I'm not going to blog to get you to do something. Personally I just feel that's evil. 

I may have a mere 40K views and ZERO followers, and no comments, but I don't care. I'm me. I don't blog to gain some fame. If that comes so be it, but screw these people who are masters of the internet and tell us how we should behave. I'm a regular Joe Schmo, and I'm good with that.

My last post was about homeless people In Startup Land. I am a bit sad that you could have really cared less. I got 4 views on that post even though I tweeted it out with the same cycle as all my other post. (Again I don't play games and post at high times and what not. I just post when I post) You seem to be a crowd of people who only like when I post about startup stuff. You really like the last startup I was in Kazamster. With this post: Nothing Better Then Working On a Startup That Has Something To Do With Music. Yeah,you like that that post. Problem is, it's another struggling startup, that I'm not even working on now cause the guys joined a pot startup. The potential of it is unknown.

I'll work on writing more about startups if you work on caring about humanity's problems. Deal?

The Problem Startups Cannot Solve

Here I was in San Francisco. So happy to see this first thing, five to ten minutes from the airport. 

I was in the land of startups, and filled with joy! Lyft had a pink Van on a pole in the sky! Y Combinator, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and so many more were in my realm, yet the center of my universe became the Homeless. My husband had booked his Salesforce work conference late, and the only hotel, well motel left within walking distance was The Alexis Park. Yeah, baby! We are talking smack dab our hotel was not on the dropdown list at registration for Salesforce. Nope! Certainly Salesforce knows there are a few hotels/motels in that area, but they were not on the list. We were the OTHER category. : - / Which meant to me the shame of San Francisco. 

So what's the problem? Every city has homeless people. Yeah, well that's the problem. We shouldn't have homeless people in America, especially in the startup capital of the world. The wealth, the unbelievable wealth that has been created there, and still with all our startup brains we can't help this group? We can't stop them from living on the streets, from doing drugs, and becoming alcoholics. We can't stop them, which means we can't help them. : - (

This is a profound sadness in me, as I kicked my alcoholic brother out of my house, and then watched him live as a homeless person in my city of Denver. It broke my heart,when he was found decomposed in his apartment a few years later. I still felt I failed him even though he had grown his responsibility to get an apartment.. I failed my brother!I failed the homeless. To be traveling to San Francisco, and to end up surrounded by extreme filth, and a urine stench greater then I've experienced in the healthcare industry, and to see so many people, street after street, everywhere homeless! Yeah, we could walk to the Salesforce conference and be in some alternate world, that just didn't help my soul at all. Living on the street and smelling like a pig, or freshly showered dressed casual;attending a conference to better your work life. The hopeless or the hopeful. My soul was terrorized with conflict.

I felt guilty, I had a clean nice room to stay in. I felt guilty I was a responsible person who paid the bills. I felt guilty,and immense shame. I felt shame, shame, shame on me. How could I just walk past these people? I ignored them when we did, because I was afraid of them. Sometimes they would be fighting among themselves, and other times it was the mental illness spilling all over me like a waterfall of insanity. How can we have all this money in all these billion dollar startups and we can't solve this problem? It made no sense to me and to other founders who created startups and lived in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco. They too, felt this utter shame on us, and hopelessness to help, followed by the annoyance of the filth and smell. 

Is San Francisco hardened? Have they grown used to this endless battle? I think so. It's the hardest battleground to conquer. No one has made any ground in any city in my opinion. Oh there are a ton of help groups that help the homeless. They feed and clothe them. That's why the homeless live around the places that feed and clothe them.They do rehabilitate and help the ones who want to be helped. But there are the ones who will never be able to return to what we know as a responsible person. My brother was one of those.

My brother Mark

You could help him and he could be what we think is "normal" and responsible for a time. But he would always return to a homeless type of life. He couldn't live in our world of responsibility. That's the problem. The unsaveable, cannot live in our world of responsibility. 

I have ideas to help the homeless, and so do probably thousands of others. I don't know, I think we should start working on this problem from the tech view, yet I ponder, maybe that's a wrong thought to think, cause maybe, it only hurts us to see them live this way. Maybe they are perfectly fine living the way we see as repulsive. 

I never took any photos of these homeless people. I wanted to but my heart would stop my hands. As they lay strewn about the street sidewalks still asleep, I couldn't take photos of them because that's their bedroom. That's their bathroom. That's their living room, kitchen, garage, carport, yard. I wouldn't like someone wandering into my bedroom and snapping me. So I couldn't do it to them. To me that's the only thing I could give them. 

TechStars Elevator Boss

Yeah,my hopes bled all over survival. Would anyone be on hand to patch up my ego?  ........hmmm someone...help.

It was an unexpected 60 seconds of trembling. My hands could not stop the shake. What was consuming my body? Some kind of unknown fear? How could this happen when I practiced the speech over and over?

My torso was gutted in thirty seconds. Then my shame decided I should apologize for my lack of intelligence. A coward lurked inside of me. Possibility was, oh so far away.

Though the elevator had at least four other people in it...it was her and I that had the moment in time controlled. No one existed but us. Who was she? How did she get to be on the other side of me? How did she get to be the one who had the power? Why was I the one standing in the position of the thousands? 

Surly fate of life existed. A square moving box had nothing on that. Electricity, light up buttons, sliding metal mirrored doors, and her and I, and her and I...

I know my stats down pat! I know what I have is a weekly average of 16% growth,which is insanely high for a startup. I know that the market we are after is barely saturated, and we would be considered early. Yeah, I know a few things, and then she cuts me with the investors sharp knife. I'm dead. She killed me, and I wouldn't want it any other way. This is the brutal truth I needed. 

Until I master my ground. I cannot battle the Techstars Elevator Boss. For now she is the winner.  

My Elevator Pitch

Since June 3rd 2016 I've been smitten with a passion of love for the startup I joined. When Tom Wilson sought me out on CofoundersLab and told me what he had built, I instantly said "Hell Yeah I'll join your startup."

It's been a whirlwind of a summer. My brain has been working overtime, as my sleep is filled with the search to build the best playlist conversion software. My days are filled with the day job, and of course my family, my dog,and chores. Somehow I find a way to work on the startup AMAP. 

Startups are not without problems, in fact a startup usually is a problem you are solving, and you have to solve four hundred million other problems you didn't plan on solving, but you have to, to get the startup to move in a positive direction.

Startups Start As A Tangled Web Of Problems

Today I pitched Kazamster in an elevator to Venture Capitalist,and Angel investors. It was an event for Denver Startup Week. The city I live in. It's the 5th year of this amazing week. Whoever started this startup week thing, I thank them. This is a great benefit to Denver's entrepreneurial community. There are tons of learning courses and all kinds of cool things offered and the best part is that, it's all free! 

I wrote my pitch and memorized it yesterday. We had about a minute to ride the elevator down and up, so my pitch was 53 seconds. Well, I was so nervous that I was done by the time we were halfway through the ride. I must have spoke so fast that, they probably didn't even understand what I was saying. The thing is, this one woman kept asking me questions when I was done. It was like she didn't care the ride was over and there were one hundred other startups pitching. She wanted to know more about me, and more about this Playlist thing. 

The weird frozenness that had encapsulated my body somehow answered her questions. I think they all knew I was terrified. But I also think, they knew exactly the truth I told them. Kazamster has this magical draw to it, and this is the problem I'm having with the creator of it. I don't think Tom knows what he created. Maybe he is self conscious like I was with the startups I created. I couldn't push them, because I created them, and I didn't believe in them if people judged them. Well I did, but If someone said something negative about the product I created, I'd fall to pieces. I just couldn't stand behind my ideas. Yet when I joined Kazamster it was the most freeing thing ever. I found that I could stand behind someone else's idea one hundred percent! It is so much easier to do, then believe in what you created.

Cheers! to everyone who has the courage to pitch! I applaud you! It's very hard to do. 

My Take On My Blogs Ten Most Popular Post List

I am patiently waiting for the day my post Titled: 5 Days On Whisper, gets knocked out of the number one spot of my blog. Not because I have any ill feelings towards Whisper App. It's because It's been there too long! I'm sick of it being number one. Surely I can take down any of them if I wanted to. Yet I don't pick the spots readers do. I have to honor this sacred ground.

Here Is The Number Of Views And My Take On My Top Ten Post

1. 5 Days On Whisper.....1260 views. Almost all the hits to this post came from China. It got pounded from the entire country of China for a long time. I suspect the reason for this was that Whisper had hired a woman (who was famous in China) to work for them. I think she was and maybe still is in charge of getting traction. All she had to do was reach out to her China fans and ask, and they did it. I suppose it helped Whisper to grow, and maybe it still does. Maybe someday WhisperApp will help me out? I'm not famous in China, but I did adopt a beautiful girl from China. You Might like, Beautiful Tech Girl Growing Up which has 294 views.
2. An Entrepreneurs Timeline To Success: 784 views. ThankYou for liking this post so much! It means the world to me. 
3. The Dream Continues To Torment: 551 views. I was pretty down when I wrote this post. It's kinda weird I think. I think it came from those dark places in my brain. 
4. The New Frontier Of Suicide: 522 views. Woah Kind of intense. You also might like Invisible Suicide: The Tortured Soul: 168 views
5. An Entrepreneurs Beautiful Love Story:483 views. Incredible sad time. Still miss my brother-in-law and fellow trep. Sara is doing great raising Ariele. She is the best mom.(This post should be #6 and #6 should be #5) As this has less views. Must be a bug in the blogger software.
6. The Yellow Book Of Skills To Get Traction: 503 views. Whew! So happy this is on the list. This is the first printing and I see Gabriel and Justin changed the cover and maybe some of the book. I'm so grateful they wrote it. I told Tom and Sean that if I joined Kazamster I would  be using this book. I did and we are. It's literally a blueprint for how to grow your startup.
7. Startup Porn: 419 views. Another amazing book for startup builders Venture Deals. I have no idea why I named the post startup porn. I took the class that goes with the book. Super hard and very cool class.
8. My Funny Dream About Gary Vaynerchuk: 406 views. This is a true story. I did dream this. I also met Mr. Vaynerchuk on WhisperApp. Yep, you think you are all anonymous, and there was some glitch in the software, and I found out who I was talking to. I had put a Whisper post out asking for investors, for my idea, I didn't even have a product! I had no traction! I had no idea what I was talking about,but Mr. Vaynerchuk was very kind to me and told me that I had balls! I took that as a compliment. I am confident the next time I ask him to be an investor, I'll know what I'm talking about, and I will have traction! 
9. 87 Edits and Counting On My Y Combinator Application: 399 views. Ah yes, I think this was my second time applying for the YC. It's a good experience to apply to accelerators, you'll learn a ton and yes, practice being disappointed perhaps. Who knows you might get in.
10. Nothing Better Than Working On A Startup That Has Something To Do With Music.283 views. Hallelujah! This is a record. I have never had a post get on the top ten list in such a short time. Seven days! I'm shocked, especially since the title is super long. 

~ I Truly Thank You ~

Nothing Better Than Working On A Startup That Has Something To Do With Music : - )

Here I am helping to build a fresh new startup, and feeling so grateful to Tom Wilson and Sean Weas for choosing me to help them build Kazamster. 

It's this beautiful software startup that lets you bring your playlist with you to any streaming service of your choice.

Okay it's in Beta, so it only has the option to convert Spotify to Google Play Music right now. But hey, 500 users have logged in since the launch just four months ago. It's pretty clear to me that Tom and Sean have built something people want. 

Playlist are so very personal to us users. We build them with mounds of passion, creativity, and love. Of course the streaming service's would like you to stay with them forever, but like any free enterprise system us users have choices. Maybe we want to switch over to another service for whatever reason. It's not like we're saying we don't like the one we're in,we just want to swim in the music waters of another streaming service, and we want to bring our playlist with us. 

I can't say what the streaming services are thinking, but surely they don't want to let users take their playlist with them, it's one of the main things that keeps users locked into their service. I don't blame them one bit, it's business. Keeping customers is doing good business. Yet, disruption was bound to happen. 

For me, besides all the cool things I'm learning and doing to help Kazamster, I'm listening to a ton of music! This is so good for me, as sometimes, as an adult, I get caught up into all work, and forget how to have fun. 

From what I've been reading I can say the Playlist is going to have a giant impact on all of our futures. It's going to turn into something amazing, and you and I are apart of that. In fact you've been creating it. You've been helping to shape it. 

Update: As of 10/18/16 This startup is running itself. It's still up, but Tom and Sean have joined a marijuana startup called GrowFlow, which looks intensely exciting to me. I don't know what to do. I can't run Kazamster by myself. I looked into buying it, but still that would leave me alone searching for a developer. I'm working on learning code and Salesforce. Two things I can do for free and on my own time. 

Keep building your startups ~ 

  

#Slack:How You Show Up For Work

I was surprised to see a major television advertisement for a product I had used just two years ago.  As far as I knew, Slack was an unheard of internet tool to help people collaborate on a business idea. I had no idea it WAS the new way we run a company. Or more to the point, the new way we show up for work.

Yes, I used Slack very briefly. I didn't know how to use Slack, yet I knew it was a tool to help people build companies.

It was one of my startups DigiThin. I dabbled in Slack a bit with one other person. That startup ended and I never thought about it again until I was asked to join the startup Kazamster! Immediately they linked me to Slack. It was different then what I had seen previously. I was sort of scared of it. I didn't want to screw up any work Tom and Sean had done. I wanted to be accepted to the team. Therefore I was hesitant to post, share, click, or generally use Slack. 

I got over myself. It doesn't matter if I screw up using Slack. This is the new way the workforce communicates. I'm learning a ton with this new business model. It's extremly weird cause you don't get to walk past the people you work with in some art filled hallway and make a traditional comment, like "Hey, how is your summer going?" instead you look at your feed from Slack and wonder. 

• I wonder if they like my work ?
• I wonder if what I'm doing is making an impact for the company?
• I wonder if they think I'm crazy?
• I wonder how many people work from home?
• I wonder if they realize how much work I'm doing?
• I wonder if they realize how valuable I am?
• I wonder why they don't answer my questions?
• I wonder what they are working on?
• I wonder if I will run a company with Slack?
• I wonder why my brain ticks and quivers with excitement!
• I wonder how Slack became so big they could put an ad on T.V.?
• I wonder if Slack is how 90% of the workforce will show up for work?

Startups: Like Straw Bale Gardens

I planted my first ever straw bale garden. I did it a bit late so I might not get a good crop. The first thing I had to do was get the bales. Then for two weeks you have to condition the bales. This is a process of putting high nitrate fertilizer on top of them, and watering the bales each day. The bales weigh around 70 pounds dry and 150 when soaked. 

After about two weeks the bales start heating up, supposedly to around 130 degrees or more! In fact they can ignite spontaneously! So be careful. Then you have to put on less fertilizer and keep watering. What's happening, is the straw is starting to break down. It's becoming compost.

The reason I decided to grow a straw bale garden is upon reading an article about it, a few key factors stood out to me. 

• The crop should grow twice as big as when in soil.
• Very few weeds to weed out.
• You can almost never over water.
• The bails hold water so you can skip a few days and not kill the plants from dehydration.
• You can put the garden almost anywhere: on cement, on a deck, on rock, it doesn't have to be on dirt. 

Okay, I'm sold. I want a garden twice as big with hardly any weeds! So far my garden is tiny. The growth has been small. But I did plant it the 1st week of June, and most of the seeds I started. 

When I walk the dog in the neighborhood I'm surprised to find that, many gardens are giant. Three times the size of my growth. I guess if straw bale gardens are like startups, I'm right on the mark. All the neighbor gardens are big companies that started small. They have had time to mature. I'm just at the beginning, just like the startup I'm in now, Kazamster. I just joined at the beginning of June, and they launched April 1st 2016. 

So far it seems to be growing like my garden, a tiny bit each day that you can hardly notice. Tom tells us that Kazamster is getting an average of 5 new sign ups a day. Wait! That's noticeable! That's huge to me! We have hardly done any marketing. I'm myself have been getting up to speed as to where they are when I joined, re-reading the Traction book, and developing the traction plan.  

There must have been some startup fertilizer sprinkled on Kazamster. Sprouts are coming up! It's so beautiful to see a startup growing. Just like my straw bale garden, it makes me happy.

I'm hoping my giant pumpkin will take off and grow a grand champion, and that Kazamster will too!

 Enjoy your gardens ~ and keep building your startups!

.

Trep Enjoying The Day Job

Today was a great day at my day job, which I consider my side job. My startup work is always my real job. I have an interesting day job. I work in the Central Monitor room of a hospital. We monitor the patient's heart rhythms; you would be surprised at all the different human heart beats. 

It was a slow day so we had time to talk amongst ourselves a bit, as usually we do not. It was a great opportunity to bond with each other and build a stronger team. We were making up funny things and laughing at just about anything. Silly crazy stuff. Then Megan asked me "how's your new startup?" I told her I don't know. I really love it and want to be a part of Kazamster as I can get behind the founders smart idea! (Playlist converter) 

Yet, I'm not college trained. I'm not typical, I'm most likely not what these two brilliant men expect or hoped for. I'm off the map in many ways and I often consider myself an outlier. I've had some mishaps or not sure what to call them 'not good interactions with them in respect to my work' so I sweep my soul across the floor dreaming that learning disabilities don't exist, that I graduated college, and my oddness wasn't so easily seen.

Megan promptly noted that I write great post and my style is awesome! And what I do is amazing! (now that's a good friend) Then she of course, as funny as she is,she brought up the day the staff looked up all of us on Urban Dictionary (when I was not at work) She said: Jana we could not believe that you were the only one that actually fit the description, and we all thought it was AMAZING. 

Oh oh, let me look this up I said. 
Urban Dictionary: Jana 

Yep, pretty much sums up who I am. : - ) Not really a spy though. All this is true of me. Especially the part that people think "I'm crazy, dangerous, powerful and straight up weird. Even the people at work were surprised and trapped in awe of it. Cause their urban dictionary descriptions of their names didn't fit them at all. When they read mine they all knew it was true! Now that's weird!

I laughed with them. It' so funny. I am who I am. I will never be some polished professional, but I may achieve high places. 

From Python To A Startup In A Week

I stopped using the internet. I stopped posting on this blog. I stopped chasing startup dreams. I had hit the point in my last startup Passdown, that I was forced to admit to myself. This one is not going to make it, and I had to accept failure and shut it down.

Two startup failures, some personal failures, two handfuls of friends and or family members dying in the span of just over a year. The knife was digging into my psyche. It was a painful mix of hopelessness and worthlessness filling up my existence. 

During my eight months away from building startups and the internet I did a ton of soul searching. What the hell was my point in life anyway? This damn nagging inside me, always whispering

 "you're supposed to do something on a large scale"

"you're supposed to contribute to humanity"

I don't know what I'm supposed to do I'd yell at those thoughts! I'm just going to go to my day job, come home, do the laundry and repeat for now. 

I knew if I ever started another startup, that I'd have to know code. Finding a developer most likely won't happen unless you can pay them. I couldn't. So I decided I'm going to learn code, even though my husband said "you don't have the aptitude for it" slightly hurtful, but I was into proving him wrong! So I started Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw  I made my flash card deck and was memorizing the lingo. I was happy. It seemed to be the path I was supposed to be on to get me back to building startups. Even though startups are hellish nightmares of uncertainty. Packed full of joys and disappointments. Full of countless unpaid hours. Getting demoralized and ground up like deviled ham. Yep, it's my kind of work. By the time I learn all kinds of code I thought it would be years before I'd return. 

Then the email showed up on my phone. Someone on CoFoundersLab had sent me a message. First I didn't even think I was on CoFoundersLab any longer. I hadn't renewed my pro membership.

It was an offer to join a startup. I've had a few offers here and there and none sounded like a fit for me. Some college startup to do some college organizing thing. Nope, no thanks. But this one was different.

I read every word of what Tom Wilson wrote. Without hesitation I said "Hell Yeah, I'll join your startup" I didn't have to research it, or think about it. I knew he had done what Paul Graham has said to do "Look into the future and build what's missing" Tom had done that. Tom had also done another one of Paul Grahams suggestions. "Build something people want". Then Tom said another thing to me. He was solving a problem that he had.

I don't even know if Tom knows who Paul Graham is or reads his essays; but I do, and every qualification for a great startup according to Paul Graham, was in the words Tom Wilson wrote to me. It was like a yobibyte to the 3rd power running through my veins kind of startup. 

Today I had my first phone chat with Tom and the other co-founder Sean Weas Okay it was a little nerve racking talking to two brilliant men. I felt a bit intimidated. Overall I think it went well. I think we are going to be a good fit. I think that voice in my head telling me I have to do something big. Well, maybe it's

"I have to help do something big"

The only downside to jumping into this startup is that I won't have the time to learn code. I won't get to prove my husband wrong. Darn it! It's okay, I'll prove him wrong someday! For now, this is how I went to learning Python to a startup in a week.