My Dying Words: Please, Someone Build Passdown

Ahh, another long day at my pc, building the Passdown company. After struggling through the weekend, attempting to fix a website problem. The thought kept crossing my mind to scratch it. Delet it! Get rid of the mother fucker! 

I lived through the local area swat team pointing their assault weapon at me on Saturday.

As much as they seemed serious, in all honesty, I was so depressed about so many things in our startup that, I didn't realize till I saw the photo that I was a target, and that one pull on the trigger could have silenced my life. I probably wouldn't have cared much. My dying words would have been. Please, someone build Passdown.

On Monday I did it. I deleted my old website and started building the new one. More problems presented and irritated me, yet it was looking to be a better site. I'm no designer and I do not have knack for it. It's another one of the many things you have to do, because your startup has no money to pay someone to do it. The list is long in this area! What is the saying? I can do all, but I'm not the expert in anything? Something like that. 

Passdown has a great team now. Wael, Jie, Tesmond, and I. Yet we all have day jobs and other responsibilities. It's super hard to build a startup in the beginning. That borderline of keeping the day job to survive can almost never be let go of. It pushes the entrepreneur to extremes. When can you make the choice to commit to the startup one hundred percent? You can't, unless you get traction or funding. Super hard to get either of those. That's another mountain we climb. How do we get traction? Well we can, without funding. So I don't worry about traction as much as I worry about getting funding so my team can afford to quit their day jobs and go on a journey with me. It's hell. It's worse than getting an assault weapon pointed at you. It's way worse. Traction seems to be our only answer. Traction won't be easy but if we can nab that without funding, than we will have put ourselves in the best possible position to succeed.

That cold hard bullet pointed at you. That's a startup. The risk we take may not be life threatening, but we are always on this brink of life or death. Most of our startups fail. So sad. That's the death part. The ones that succeed,that's the life part. Most of us entrepreneurs know the death part pretty well. 

The Startup Graveyard.

Seek traction, and don't worry about funding. The key is TRACTION. And that can be achieved with minimal funds and no funding.

Looking For A Trailer Trash Accelerator

I was chatting with my lawyer and he was sorry my team did not get selected for Y Combinator's winter program. I was feeling pretty down about many things going on in my life lately, not just the YC disappointment. I was feeling as if I had lived my life as nothing more than a dreamer who always fails. I big fat failure. Some sort of white trash pathetic loser. Why do I think I can go up against all those other teams filled with brilliant people who know how to spell and write a paper with no grammar mistakes?

To think I would ever have a chance at getting into the number one accelerator in the world, well that's just a false dream of hope in my head. As we chatted I said that no accelerator would ever accept me into their program unless it was a trailer trash accelerator. I have a long list of skills and all of them are about as good, as useless. If any one of them stood out strong enough maybe it could carry me. As you can see, I'm still feeling sorry for myself! I hate falling into self pity, but when your entire life has a closet full of failed startups, among a long list of ofter disappointments, well maybe I'm justified to feel down for a bit.

My team is carrying on with Passdown. We are working on many things, including getting the app built and released. I'm building an alternate website to do A/B testing, I'm also deciding if we should split the company into two. A nonprofit for the data storage side and a for profit for the social network auction side. 

This morning I stopped by Fort Logan National Cemetery to film an info video about

Passdown. It was just a test day. It was a beautiful -4 degrees fahrenheit. The video test gave me some great info. First I recorded the entire thing upside down. That's because I rigged up a car cell phone holder to a pole and when I snapped in my cell, I didn't realize it was upside down. I suppose that's the trailer trash side of me at work. I could use my tripod and camera, but my cell seems to take better photos and videos. 

If you know of any trailer trash accelerators, let me know, I will apply! ; - )

My Minimum Viable Video Sucks [Language Warning]

I'm currently reading a few books at the same time. One of them The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, I'm not to far into it yet. Great book so far. So Eric Ries came up with the Minimum Viable Product. For startups this means, you make the most simple version of your idea and put it on the market quick, with bugs and all.

Surprisingly people tend to respond to these product releases without too much complaining. Eric says this way you can find out many things the customer wants, likes, or dislikes. It also saves you a ton of time and cash, if you find out your entire idea sucks sooner than later. You can trash it, and find something else to build. This is what my company Passdown is doing. The thing is we didn't even put anything out, and people were going nuts for just the idea spoken from our mouths. Super odd place to be in. 

As we want to reach a broader market than friends, family, and a few hundred strangers I set out to make a video explaining what Passdown does, of course I made the one with a warning language first, but I did not think that one would be good to put on the official website. Some people might not like the word fucking. So I made the clean one, and well, it kind of sucks. But I put it on there anyway, cause it does explain what Passdown is building. So I call it my minimum viable video. You can view it here: Clean Version

 It's complete with mistakes. Yeah, the foul language one is better. Hmmm It has pot, sexting, and the word fucking in it. I don't know why that makes it any better, it just came out better. It flows, it has no rough patches. Maybe I'm better at the real life stuff and not the clean stuff, I don't know. Yet, I think the clean version explains Passdown better, and it's a shorter version. Here is the dirty version It's not that dirty!

Originally I had 'You Never Know When' on Passdown's home page. I moved it to another tab. That video is important as it's the reason why I came up with the idea of Passdown. The video shows my brother Mark's apartment exactly how it was when they found his decomposed body in it. You can view it here: Leave Your Mark I removed it from the home page as I thought it might be a bit dark, even though it ends with a delightful little girl, my daughter smiling.

Ahh, I'm feeling frustrated. I want to make some killer video, some high quality video, that looks smoking professional, yet, I haven't found the right path to do this with my skills, and we have no cash to pay a professional. So it's lean building, and if that means I make a video that sucks but does explain the product, well, than that's a Startup! 

Cheers ~ Enjoy your Friday night.