Working Relationship

I haven’t yet written about what it’s like to work with my husband. Mostly, it’s fun. I’d say that 97% of the time, we get along just fine due to the following reasons (more on the remaining 3% later):

However, being together in the same house now 24×7 with two kids 2 years old and under does present challenges. We have to remember to carve out time for the two of us that is not related to work. So far we don’t do this enough. We were going to schedule a date night every other week but at the most we’ve managed to take a break and watch a half hour of TV twice in the last month. Our Tivo is running out of room to save any more unwatched Daily Shows and Colbert Reports. But we do have a babysitter lined up for this Friday’s Warriors-Wizards game — combining our first night out with our first feet-on-the-street marketing event! We made up some baseball-style trading cards to hand out.

The other big issue right now is that our son has figured out that Daddy is upstairs and if he cries loud enough, he’ll eventually come down. No slight to Jason, but this behavior is driven equally by wanting one-on-one attention from anyone and wanting Daddy in particular. So we’ve got a bad cycle going here — Jason isn’t used to hearing the kids cry very much and therefore responds too quickly, and our son is crying more than he used to because he gets a reaction. The good news is that Jason and I have talked about the need to nip this early before it becomes established habit, and I think given a couple more days, we’ll all be comfortable with the new routine.

I will admit that while I enjoy working on Ballhype more than any other (paid) job I’ve ever had, there are times when I’m really tired, or wish that we could just be like *normal* people and eat dinner, put the kids to bed, and watch a movie or sit around and talk. And if I’m cleaning up at such a moment and Jason is back at the computer, then a fleeting thought crosses my mind: Did he ask me to do this start-up with him so that I couldn’t complain about him working all the time?

Posted by Erin 17.Mar.07 Parenting, Relationship Read more Comments (0)

Ballhype, Inc.

We took the plunge and incorporated so we are now Ballhype, Inc. The other option was to save the money and remain a partnership until we knew for sure if this was going to take off, but we wanted to let our advisors knew we were serious about the business, and the risk of getting sued and losing our house, however small, was enough to make me vote for spending the money. So now we are in the process of issuing stock, opening a Ballhype bank account, and after 4.5 years at Intuit, I finally have a reason to learn QuickBooks. My copy is probably a couple of years old so I will have to hit up my former colleagues for an extra NFR.

Our office set up is not great and the filing system needs help. The amount of paperwork generated by this little business that hasn’t even taken in any money and has a couple hundred beta testers is rather ridiculous. Thank god for lawyers, although it’s lawyers in the first place that made the language and guidelines so difficult that you need lawyers to navigate the process. (There’s a business model for you.) I do have to give a nod though to Yokum at WSGR who has been very helpful and surprisingly responsive. I had assumed that one cost of working with a large law firm would be having to wait for days whenever I had a question, but that has absolutely not been the case.

Posted by Erin 15.Mar.07 Legal, Business Read more Comments (0)

What Happens in Vegas Happens without Us

Tonight Jason was supposed to make his annual pilgrimage to Vegas for March Madness, but late yesterday he decided not to go. The number of features and bug fixes remaining is going to require every waking and non-waking minute of the next three weeks until launch. And as more beta users sign on, more feedback comes in. This would seem an easy decision to make - get your business off the ground, or go to Vegas - but for the following: Jason’s last day at his old job was yesterday, a buddy had scored a free suite at the Venetian, and the airfare was cheap and nonrefundable. So right up until yesterday he was still planning on going but taking the laptop (those who are skeptical that he would actually work while in Vegas do not know the guy). But is it worse not to go to Vegas, or to go and be stressed out by not not going to Vegas?

Turns out it was the right decision. Our 2-year-old developed a fever that by 2AM hit 104 degrees and had me convinced he was about to die of bacterial meningitis. Not the case, thankfully, but we ended up talking to a nurse on the phone at 3 in the morning about every possible symptom and condition, including, “Has he been in contact recently with any lizards, snakes or other reptiles?” Answer, yes! He actually touched a snake last week at preschool when Lizzie the Lizard Lady brought in her menagerie for the kids to touch. (When he told me he had pet a “ake” I assumed that one of us had the wrong animal in mind.) To get back to the point - our son will be fine but is sick, so better for all of us to have one extra parent around the next couple of days to dispense baby tylenol and watered-down pedialyte on demand.

We’ve been debating for some time now about when to open Ballhype up to the public, and whether we should go from closed beta to open beta and then launch, or just launch. As the marketer, I am of course oblivious to the reality of how much development work and testing are required to launch a public, scalable application, and so my position in these discussions has been that we need to get out there before (yet) another competitor does. Jason is more conservative and realistic because… well, because he’s doing most of the work.

The outcome? We’re putting a stake in the ground to time the launch with the opening day of baseball season.

Posted by Erin 14.Mar.07 Beta, Parenting Read more Comments (2)

Rubbing elbows with Gilbert

Well, not really. But Jason made Jamie Mottram and Dan Shanoff’s Top 20 list of influential sports bloggers. Here at the Gurney household, we’ll be celebrating tonight with one Corona each and then getting back to work. Still, it’s great to know that the effort into building those sites (and the backbone of Ballhype’s tracking functionality) is paying off.

Posted by Erin 01.Mar.07 Publicity Read more Comments (0)

The First Demo

On Thursday, we got a chance to demonstrate Ballhype for a couple hundred people at the first year party for Yahoo’s user interface library. It was a good time–much more low-key than the last Yahoo event I attended, though. One of the more interesting demos was from Jeremy Gillick, who presented a YUI extension that produces some cool effects in a very clean way.

We’re still in closed beta, so it was the first real public exposure for the application, and from a technical perspective, it was a great forum. We use YUI extensively throughout the site to handle AJAX requests, auto-complete fields, drag and drop customization, calendars, tabs, and more. It’s a great library with great documentation, and I love the fact that it includes *almost* everything I need (a WYSIWYG editor is my only outstanding request).

In a panic, we printed up some temporary business cards at Kinko’s the night before the event. They ended up looking like the kind of thing you’d cut out of the side of a cereal box. As it turned out, we really didn’t need them. The demo went over reasonably well, and we got several beta invitation requests the next day, which is a good sign that the name is at least sticky.

Posted by Jason 24.Feb.07 Milestones, Publicity Read more Comment (1)

In beta

We launched closed beta for Ballhype on February 1st. I think technically it was 2am February 2nd when Jason deployed, but I’ll give him credit for hitting the deadline. Right now one of my challenges is to keep the beta testers engaged. There is a core group that you can tell has already incorporated Ballhype into their regular online consumption of sports news. The others have been checking out the site but not participating actively. It’s a classic example of Jakob Nielsen’s 90-9-1 Rule:

  • 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
  • 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
  • 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

His point is that you can’t eliminate participation inequality, but you can take measures to avoid a total imbalance. I find it interesting that we’re already seeing this among our beta testers, a group that I would have thought would all be in the top 10 percent of active users — at least. It’s a good lesson for me though not to take any user or her interest level for granted! And to take steps to make participation easier, more fun, and more useful — even in beta.

Posted by Erin 05.Feb.07 Beta Read more Comments (2)

Yes, We’re Crazy

From many perspectives, it’s a dubious time for us to be starting a new business. Erin was in a great situation at Intuit–doing interesting work for a team and company that was willing to accommodate a part-time schedule. I had the best job of my career–working with a strong team and exciting technology at Biz360. We have two young babies, a sizable mortgage, and college funds that need, well, funding.

But in other ways, it’s the perfect time. There’s a market need that we think we can address (more on that later), we have some industry goodwill, and we aren’t getting any younger. Plus, thanks to excellent frameworks like Django and YUI, building applications requires a much smaller investment these days compared to even two or three years ago.

In the end, though, we really had no choice. Once we realized that the venture was a possibility, we couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t be more excited about it. There will be a lot of long hours ahead (there have already been plenty of long hours), and there is no guarantee of success, but I’m confident that the journey will be worthwhile regardless.

We’ll try to find time to jot down some thoughts and experiences here for the benefit of our families, colleagues, and any other interested observers. If you have any feedback, don’t hesitate to share that as well.

Posted by Jason 31.Jan.07 Milestones Read more Comments (0)

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