Finally - after weeks of basically no updates and a lot of sleepless nights - team 2x presents talkOlympics!

talkOlympics aggregates four of the best Olympics coverage websites so that you can always stay up to date on the latest sports buzz. While browsing the headlines, our Chatty application shows you other surfers and lets you talk to them or share links live! What's more, you can see what others are reading, watch Youtube videos, or start a a personal conversation with the click of a button. Try it out for yourself - be warned though, it gets addictive pretty quickly! Oh, and be sure to let us know what you think of the idea too!

 

How did we come up with talkOlympics.com? What we really want to do is introduce the concept of social browsing - i.e. being able to communicate with others that read the same webpage at the same time. Many others have tried to crack this nut, but so far there's really only minimal progress. And that is surprising, given that Web 2.0 is all about the people, sharing, communicating, etc. Wouldn't it be great to see others interested in the same topic and be able to engage with them?

But the real-time nature of this way of communicating is a serious hurdle - basically, the first user experience usually sucks, mainly because you don't bump into anyone! Turns out, the web is a huge place after all :) So we began thinking, how do you assemble people together in the first place in order to overcome the cold start problem?

talkOlympics.com is one possible solution. The application theoretically works for all websites (although in practice it can produce errors depending on the specific content), but we have defined a few webpages that deal with the same topic - the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics. The idea is really to test whether people like the experience in the first place. The incredible anticipation of the Olympics will hopefully allow us to get a decent shot at testing the concept in a few weeks time. Afterwards, if it still looks promising, we can easily extend it to more websites as well as rewrite the application to be more universal.

So go ahead, check out talkOlympics.com - Olympics coverage with a chat twist! and let us know what you think! 

Hey all,

Sorry for the lack of updates - for those wondering (thanks for caring!) - we have been working like crazy these last few days as we want to launch one of our ideas before the beginning of the Olympics. That leaves a bit more than 4 days.. wish us luck!

 

Deyan 

… So you have read Deyan’s part of the story or how everything started, with this post I want to introduce myself and tell you how and why I joined the team.

 

Who am I?

Hi, my name is Nikolay Kazmin and I was the third person to join Team2x(actually by the time I joined it wasn't called team 2x yet, we were just a group of people with the desire to change the world).

I am one of the three engineers in the team; my experience with programming and computers goes back to the days in high school where I was an active member of the school informatics team.

After that I enrolled in Jacobs University where I graduated as a bachelor of Computer Science. It was there when I met Deyan and Peter. I did a couple of projects with Deyan during his final year and with Peter we worked on the same bachelor guided research project, so I can say that I have working experience with both of them. My interests in computer science are mainly in the field of Software Engineering and this is where I think I will bring most value to the engineering part of our startup. Object oriented software design and design patterns are two of my favorite topics and the knowledge I have in these fields will be vital when trying to create clear, robust and extensible software.

After the summer I will start my master studies at ETH Zurich, specializing in Software Engineering.

 

How I joined the team?

Well, as I got to know Deyan better and better I had a feeling that he will do a startup. During his first months in Stanford he started talking about it more and more, I knew that someday he is going to call me about that, I just didn't know when. That phone call came in the beginning of January 2008, we talked for about 2 hours about the things he wanted to do and asked me if I wanted to join. I had a couple of days to think about it, but in fact this was one of the easiest decisions in my life (more on that in the next section). The first thing on the agenda when I joined was to find the fourth member of team 2x, on the top of my list immediately appeared Peter, who is one of my best friends and definitely one of the best engineers I know. And as they say, the rest is history...

 

Why I joined the team?                  

To learn and to grow as a person (in a very fun and pleasant way of course). Taking responsibility, making decisions, cooperating with other people, these are all things that are vital for the professional development of every person. Nobody is born with these skills, of course some are a little better, but in the end you can work and improve everything that you consider your weakness.

In the end however the most important reason why I joined is because I always wanted to create something big myself, to prove that with a lot of work and a little bit of luck the American dream is possible anywhere.

Since September 2007, when I had the privilege of joining Stanford, I spent a great deal of time thinking about what I want to do next. The business school’s extensive career information sessions certainly helped me in my internal debate and opened my eyes to a multitude of possible career paths, many of which seemed really exciting. However, one of my primary reasons to come to Stanford in the first place was that it is the center of Silicon Valley. The Valley’s entrepreneurial pulse certainly fascinated me the most and by December I had firmly decided to pursue my ultimate dream and focus on creating my own company.

But great companies are built by great teams and all I had by Christmas was naïve determination. Fortunately, I spent the next few weeks speaking with Anton – an old friend of mine who spent the last two years building his own consulting company, NovaTrend. As luck would have it, Anton was thirsty for an entrepreneurial adventure as well and had a plethora of ideas that we discussed for hours over e-mail and phone. We were (and still are) both fascinated by semantics and the amazing opportunities that this technology offers and spent a lot of time discussing an idea for a semantic platform, similar in spirit to what the amazing guys at Freebase are doing.

In the midst of these discussions, Anton and I both realized that we need to expand our team – we both had big dreams that would ultimately result in a LOT of work. What is more, we didn’t really want to outsource any part of this experience – we both see team 2x as an opportunity for personal and professional growth. Thus, we needed to find like-minded people that wanted to learn with us and help throughout the journey.

Fortunately, my college is fertile ground for talented hackers, who are looking for a challenge. I first approached Nikolay and then Petar, both of whom I knew from my undergrad education. After a few conversations the guys were excited to join us and by March we collectively decided that our team is complete. Wrapping up the very time-consuming recruiting process allowed us to focus 100% on finding the “right” idea and we spent the next three months researching extensively a number of interesting fields such as social shopping.

Ultimately, none of our initial ideas satisfied our criteria and we ended up starting from Stage 0 in June, when we banded together in the beautiful city of Bourgas. More on our plans for the future as well as the members of the team coming up soon!

Thanks for reading,
Deyan

One of the topics I find most fascinating is studying building sustainable businesses on the internet. In particular, I am seeking better understanding of what constitutes a competitive advantage on this new and unique medium¹:

Generally speaking, the academic literature says that competitive advantages in business are usually based either on position or capabilities. 

Position-related competitive advantages are things that you have and your competitors don’t: for example, Apple’s iPod enjoys 90% market share among music players and that certainly gives them a lot of negotiating power with suppliers and distributors. And, of course, it doesn’t make life for their competitors easy. 

But the iPod didn’t start as a ubiquitous gadget – instead, Apple had a capability-based advantage: they managed to create a beautifully designed player with many innovative functionalities that eventually allowed them to capture the market.²

The above is a nice mental exercise, which can be summed up as: you are better than everybody else, because you either have something others don’t or can do something others can’t do. However, I find such exercises largely pointless for practical entrepreneurial purposes. The real question is, how does a startup build a competitive advantage in the first place?

Quite often, I hear arguments that first mover advantage plus network effects are the sources of success on the internet. But such statements seem short-sighted to me. 
First, there are simply too many examples where first movers did not succeed, while late-movers did very well – Google, Youtube, Facebook come to mind easily. 
Second, having network effects³ presents a chicken and egg problem – you need users to get more users. A classic example is eBay as well as all the social networking sites, which only really work if there are others using them – and the more, the merrier!

Instead, I believe that there are three startup characteristics necessary for gaining a competitive advantage in consumer internet: responsiveness, flexibility, and speed.

Responsiveness: why try to guess(timate) what the market wants when you can simply ask the market? Create an early, incomplete version of whatever product you are building and simply listen to the feedback that your early customers give you, act on it, then rinse and repeat!

Flexibility: customers know what they want best – so you need to be flexible when it comes to prioritizing which features to focus on. 

Speed: given how cheap and easy it is to develop web apps these days, you need to be quick in acting on user feedback – the internet truly is an “adapt or die” market. 

Combined, these three characteristics allow you to understand what consumers want, change your priorities accordingly, and execute on these new demands quickly. Naturally, that’s not all there is to building internet-based business, but I think it is a good place to start.

Thanks for reading and let me know what you think!
Deyan

Notes:

1. Some of the unique features of the internet are the zero marginal cost of production and distribution, unlimited shelf space, and tendency towards natural monopolies. 

2. This simple framework can be applied to all businesses. Obviously, the iPod example is not from the internet - but there are many other cases that easily come to mind such as Google (started with a capability of delivering great search results, have a huge positional advantage now that they are an established player with 70% market share), Microsoft, etc.

3. Network effects are often misunderstood, so let me define them as demand side increasing returns - i.e. the value of a product increases for each consumer as more consumers use the product.

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Software development has changed significantly since Bubble 1.0. For one thing, it's faster - agile development has gained momentum more than ever and together with it we've also seen the advent of rapid development tools like Ruby on Rails. We can start building above the foundation and we have the management and development practices necessary to quickly implement changes as they happen. Do things really change more often nowadays?

They do, but more importantly we've learned a lesson since the dot-com era. Endeavoring into new ventures, we strive to better prepare our development plans. But it isn't until we hear back from our first customers that we realize we've designed a great interface, yet for the wrong audience. All requirements can be satisfied by a good design, but initial constraints do not reflect the real world life of a system. In my consulting practice, I've dealt with clients asking for multiple redesigns of a project that matches initial requirements. Most startups do fail, and we have no illusions about that. But at team 2x, we aim to be agile and responsive so that we go through iterations quickly.


Development has also become cheaper & easier. Free open source tools became more featureful, scalable and not to forget - today also well known to us. Two examples - CakePHP is a popular Rails clone and Drupal is a PHP-based content management system with hundreds of community-supported add-on modules. We can use the content management as it is while developing additional functionality with Cake and joining them via a special module (Drake). No need to reinvent the wheel.

It all sounds great, but: open source software is continually developed which also makes a large part of it work in progress. There are cases of features which are documented, but missing or unfinished. Different open source products follow different conventions and even where bridging solutions like Drake exist, integration can be tough. Working around bugs in Drupal cost 20 additional hours on 39-hour project I recently worked on. Without extensive experience, technological risk is hard to estimate and can potentially double development time.

This is why we aim to carefully weigh our alternatives when choosing the foundations of a project. As a team, we can share our development experience and make more informed trade-off decisions.

Thanks for reading! See you next time ;)
Anton

 

Yep, we are not dead - we have just been totally swarmed with work and regretfully didn't really have time to update the wiki. But our efforts seem to be paying off so far - we are zeroing-in on a project that can change the way people browse the web and interact with others. It is still too soon for more details, but bear with us and we promise to keep you posted.

 

Also, a few interesting blog posts are coming up too. Again, apologies for the lack of activity and thanks for your support!

 

A lot of people have been asking me how 2x actually works - so I decided to describe the process that we use in our small venture.

We differentiate among several distinct stages - Stage 0 (Brainstorming), Stage 1 (Analysis), and Stage 2 (Prototyping and Release).


Stage 0 is the brainstorming phase. In the beginning, we would list all of our ideas, regardless of how viable, big, or tech-heavy they are. 

Ideas generally come from two sources: problems that we have encountered in our personal or professional lives (e.g. I don't have an easy access to the expertise of my friends when it comes to seeking advice about online purchases), and technologies that excite us (e.g. semantics, location-based services, etc.). Naturally, we try to use such exciting technologies to solve innovatively the problems that we have noticed! 

Once we have generated such list, we do some preliminary research and try to discover red flags that signal that we are better off focusing on one of the other ideas. Our approach to research is pretty straight-forward: we ask our friends, clients, colleagues, and of course we also turn to the Internet and professional market research companies. Taken together, these sources give us a wealth of information that is usually sufficient for our preliminary research. 

Ultimately, we classify projects into discontinued (does not move into Stage 1) or approved (moves into Stage 1). Our ultimate goal is to shortlist very few (e.g. three) concepts and develop and research them more in depth. 

Perhaps a quick additional note: we try to generally stay objective and sober with respect to the "cool" gadget of the day - Facebook, the iPhone, and Twitter easily come to mind. I don't mean that we discard these (undoubtedly) super cool tools, but rather we try to use a combination of good old common sense and research to differentiate between hype and reality. Check out the hundreds of failed Facebook apps to see how many people actually have such an approach.


Stage 1 is our analysis stage. We generally do some additional research and try to pick the one idea with the highest potential. Then we take a deep dive and further refine the concept, map out the competition, look at market metrics, figure out who our potential customers are, etc. Most importantly, we try to develop a distinct vision for the product, which we want to be useful, compelling, and innovative. Naturally, we spend a lot of time collecting data for our potential customers and the market in general [and waste a ton of time navigating through the awfully designed websites of the market research companies]. In general, we are looking for red flags - show-stoppers on the technical, market, product, etc. sides.


If all goes well, Stage 2 is our prototyping phase. This is finally the exciting part where we get to do something tangible (well, technically, it is only as tangible as software or webware can get, but you get my point). So far we have not managed to reach this stage, so I will stop here.

Which bring me to another point: the above framework doesn’t follow the nice linear pattern that I have outlined above. That is, we have already gone all the way to Stage 1 (Analysis) with one of our ideas (in the realm of social shopping) but after quite a few red flags, we went back to the drawing board. So our framework helps push us forward, but ultimately creativity is not a linear process. We are currently wrapping up our new Stage 0 (Brainstorming) and will be focusing on one product soon.

Thanks for reading and will keep you posted :)
Deyan

 

Hello there and thanks for visiting our blog! team 2x will be using this webpage to provide all those that are interested with updates on what we are up to during the summer and beyond. But let's cover the basics first:

• Who: team 2x is a group of four friends - Anton, Nikolay, Petar, and Deyan. All of us are fascinated by technology, in particular by software and the Internet.
• What: team 2x is spending the summer together and will use this unique opportunity to develop and prototype a few of our consumer internet business ideas.
• Where: we are currently located in Bourgas, Bulgaria, in an office downtown (some pictures have been uploaded to Facebook).

There's a lot more we have plans to write about in the next few weeks: why we think what we do is a good idea; what is our philosophy in approaching this summer; how we started and came together; what is our perspective on post-summer opportunities; our take on consumer internet, etc. As you probably noticed, this webpage is split into two parts: Blog (updates about day-to-day stuff) and Thoughts (core articles which touch upon fundamental issues about startups, entrepreneurship, leadership, the Silicon Valley, consumer internet, team 2x, etc.).

 

Stay tuned and please keep supporting us - it is very highly appreciated!

Deyan