This morning as I was chugging coffee and crossing items off of my to-do list, constantly pushing my startup forward, when I found myself repeating the phrase "the next six weeks will be critical" each time I finished some small task. My initial reaction was, "Oh hell yes they will! I've really got to work hard and pay attention!"

Then it occured to me that there hasn't really been any time in the last year that I've haven't considered the next six weeks to be critical. In fact, it's highly likely that no matter what actually happens in the next six weeks, the six weeks after that will be critical. And the six weeks after that. And so on.

In reality "six weeks" is an arbitrary time period. I could just as easily say "four weeks" or "eight weeks" and still be pretty accurate in terms of how critical they will be. But for some reason my brain chose to focus on six weeks.

I'm taking it as a hint. From now on, I'm going to try to build planning and timelines in six-week intervals. That way, when I find myself thinking how critical the next six weeks will be, I will at least know what exactly is supposed to happen during those weeks, and what I should be thinking out instead.

 

Everyone wants me to play games. Foursquare, GetGlue, and a half a million other services want me to use them not because their service has value, but to earn some reward. All of this was well and fine. Games are important for learning. Games can be fun. I like games.

Recently, however, games have entered into my world in ways I could never have imagined and I really don’t like. A few weeks back a venture capitalist I admire tweeted that he was giving people 30 minutes of his time, so I hurried to find out how I could earn an uninterrupted half hour with him. I was shocked when I discovered what he wanted, and frankly a little bit depressed.

 

In order to be blessed with his time, I had to “earn” ten thousand imaginary “dollars” on his website. The only way to do it was to comment on his blog, retweet his tweets, repost his posts, link to his website, etc. That’s right, in order to get 30 minutes with a respected, nationally-known VC to pitch my startup, I had to work my butt off to make him even more prominent than he already is. Sounds familiar...

Maybe I’m too old to understand the way the world works these days, but I thought that the way you earned time with a VC was by working your butt off to turn a great idea into a great business. Not so, according to this guy. He expected me to make promoting him a top priority.

 

Needless to say, I didn’t bother. I have a business to build and a family to support. They are my top priorities, and will remain so.

 

Let’s fast-forward a week or two. As I was getting ready to head to Austin for SXSWi I received an email from a friend. He’d nominated WatchParty for “TechStars Startup Madness”, a ThisOrThat contest modeled after the NCAA Basketball Championship, sponsored by the TechStars accelerator program. Sixty-four startups go head-to-head in a single elimination bracketed contest, in which the winner would win $25,000 in prizes.

 

It was very kind of my friend to have nominated us, so I went to the site and completed the information necessary to enter. Then I promptly forgot about the whole thing. 

 

A few days later, in Austin, I noticed a few tweets from folks saying they had voted for WatchParty in the contest. So, I emailed a few friends and posted to Twitter and Facebook asking people to vote for us. I spent maybe 10 minutes on the effort. WatchParty won Round 1 with 54%.

 

When Round 2 started I tweeted and posted again, but didn’t have the time to send an email. With about 12 hours left to go WatchParty was up 64% on Sunday night. I went to bed.

 

Monday morning we were down to 27%. I went into CEO action mode: Facebook updates, emails, tweets - everything I could think of to try to save us. I commiserated with other startups in the contest who had also seen their commanding leads turn into insurmountable spreads overnight (nearly half of contestants experienced this). I spent a couple of hours focused on a contest I hadn’t cared about a few days earlier.
 

 

More fool me.

I still don’t know what happened. ThisOrThat is looking into it. But I don’t really care anymore. We didn’t start WatchParty to win stupid online popularity contests, we created it so people could have more fun watching TV. UPDATE: ThisOrThat confirmed that vote-fixing was occurring, and adjusted vote totals. WatchParty did win Round 2 and is continuing with the contest.

 

What’s really important here is the danger that this whole notion of “game mechanics” and “incentives” represents. Alfie Kohn, the progressive author and lecturer on education, argued over a decade ago in his book Punished by Rewards that people’s work is actually worse when they are enticed with incentives, and programs that use rewards to change people's behavior are ineffective over the long run. According to Kohn, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people the more they lose interest in what we're bribing them to do. I think he is right.

 

I’m not arguing that the ideas like competition and completion have no place in services and applications. Things like progress bars and even badges can be very useful to get users to do what you want them to do - at first. Eventually they are just fluff (unless your service or app actually is a game).

 

The problem I’m addressing is what I see as a movement to make everything a game, even things like startup funding and business development. When everything we do becomes a card from SCVNGR’s game mechanics playdeck we all become nothing more than Pavlovian lab rats. Every action we take becomes nothing but a reaction to an external stimulus created by someone somewhere to get what they want.

 

When VCs and incubators - and any other non-game businesses for that matter - use rewards and punishments to get people to act they may get short-term results, but in the long run they’ll be left scratching their heads when people stop pressing the bar to get a badge or to keep from getting shocked. People participate in life because of the joy life brings, and entrepreneurs turn ideas into businesses because of the thrill it brings. No one loves their kids because an app gives them a badge for it. No entrepreneur should expend effort on winning anywhere but the marketplace.

 

Today is Election Day, so I thought it would be fun to explain how political campaigns are just like Web startups. But first, a PSA:

DEMOCRACY TAKES EFFORT. GO VOTE.

Since I started WatchParty earlier this year I've had to learn a lot about how to take an idea and turn it into a business. Like everything else, there are a lot of different theories about the best way to do that. The theory that is most applicable to WatchParty is the theory of the Lean Startup espoused by very smart people like Eric Ries, Steve Blank, and Ash Maurya (among many others). For those of you who don't know, the basic idea behind Lean Startups is this:

A Lean Startup takes ideas and builds a minimally viable product, then measures the success of that product by looking at discreet data, from which it learns more about its customers and business model, producing valuable ideas it uses to build a more advanced product, which it measures, and so on and so forth. While this model doesn't work for every kind of startup business (e.g. biotech), it is extremely successful for Web businesses like WatchParty. The idea is to iterate like mad to find a product/service people love before you run out of money.

Last week I attended a Bootstrap Maryland event where I was fortunate enough to hear Jared Goralnick, Paul Singh, Tawheed Kader, Hooman Radfar, and Aaron Batalion talk about pivoting to a product or service that works. When I left the event I felt a bit down, because knowing when and how to pivot is no easy task, and being new to startups I wondered whether I have what it takes to pull it off.

And then I started thinking about the 20+ years I spent running political campaigns. 

I realized that I have been running Lean Startups for 20 years, because political campaigns are Lean Startups. They start with a candidate (or proposition), and build a message. Usually, in order to get on the ballot, they have to gather a certain number of signatures on a petition. The number of signatures the campaign receives, plus the number of volunteers who were willing to collect signatures, plus the money it costs to gather the signatures, all constitutes data from which the campaign learns. Then they modify the message, raise more money and recruit volunteers, put out product in the form of flyers, signs and ads, measure the results of their efforts and gather data through processes like polls. Then they start the process all over again.

In fact, I'd argue that political campaigns must be Lean or they cannot win. The worst example I ever saw of a campaign failing to be Lean was a statewide race in California in the 1990s. I joined the campaign about five months before the election, and my candidate was about 15 points ahead in the polls. At that point our campaign and the opponent's campaign adopted completely different strategies. They went Lean, and we went Big. Guess who won?

We were up in the polls, had plenty of money, and seemed unbeatable. The folks at the top decided that the best approach was to use that advantage to inundate the market (voters) and create the impression that the opposition simply couldn't compete. So they produced a booklet explaining our candidate's position on all the big issues and delivered it to every registered voter in the state.

Our opponent's campaign, on the other hand, focused on understanding why their supporters were supporters. They picked the positions they thought would scale best, and made those the focus of the campaign. They gained additional supporters, focused on understanding what messages were working with the new supporters, and pivoting to gain even more supporters. We focused on writing, publishing and distributing a comprehensive position paper. Things started to go badly.

While they iterated and pivoted, we thought bigger and bigger. We believed that when every voter in the state saw how awesome our candidate was on all these issues, we would be guaranteed to win. We were wrong. When voters started receiving the issue book, they started turning against us in droves. How could this happen?

The answer is simple. They focused on what voters (customers) wanted the candidate (the company) to do. We focused on what the candidate (the company) wanted to do. Voters like some of what we had in our book, but either didn't like or didn't care about most of what was in there. Given the choice between a candidate who seemed to care about what they thought was important and a candidate who seemed to want to be everything to everybody, voters chose the former. And we lost.

That's the way it goes in business, too. A Lean Startup, like a campaign, has to figure out what the people really want (not what it thinks the people want or should have, or even sometimes what the people think they want, but what the people truly want) and give that to them before time and/or money run out. Today, in almost every race, the leanest campaign will win.

So, while I've never run an entrepreneurial Lean Startup before, I think I have more experience with running lean that a lot of other folks. And I think WatchParty will succeed as a result.

SUPPORT A LEAN STARTUP. GO VOTE.

UPDATE: Really nice article in yesterday's WSJ about others who, like me, have ditched politics for entrepreneurship.

Okay, this is about the goofiest blog post I've ever done. But I gotta do what I gotta do, right? WatchParty has to succeed, or me and my family will be living in a Prius down by the river.

So here goes. If you happen to be reading this, and you know or are connected to any of the people listed below, and you are willing to introduce me, please contact me. I'm exhausting every possible means of connecting with them, and I'm shameless in my efforts. So check out the list, find your friends, and send me an email or tweet (@rfawal). Thank you.

• Mark Suster
• Dave McClure
• Babak Nivi
• Naval Ravikant
• Brad Feld
• Eric Ries
• Ben Horowitz
• Dave Troy
• Joshua Baer
• Jason Cohen
• Bill Boebel

PS: I have met some of the folks on this list, but not all. I just want to maximize the potential for impressing them. If you happen to know someone you think I should meet who is not on this list, let me know that, too. Thanks again.

PPS: Yes, I'm completely aware of AngelList and OAF, and I'm going that route, too. As I said, I'm exhausting every possible means of connecting. That means you. Thank you, thank you, and again, I thank you.

Last Sunday on our way to my daughter's soccer game I gave her some last minute coaching. I said, "Don't run to where the ball is, run to where it's going. Otherwise you'll just keep chasing it and never catch it."

Later that day I was catching up on some reading and I saw that Mark Suster had just posted Skate Where the Puck is Going. Not only did he say essentially the same thing (yes, Wayne Gretzky said it first), he even talked about how the idea of "check-ins for TV, with badges" isn't really innovation, something we've been saying at WatchParty since the beginning.

Suster talked about how the latest buzzwords always get put into pitches and plans - in other words, playing to the puck at one's feet - without any thought to truly innovating - playing to where the puck is going. Since I spend so much time thinking about where the puck will be, I thought I would share some of those thoughts.

I'll start with social networking; specifically Facebook and Twitter. Right now their limitations are beginning to show, and can be stated simply: TOO MUCH.

Having hundreds of friends on Facebook and following hundreds of people on Twitter was great, but for most of us it's simply become too much to handle. We have to sift through too many updates to find relevant information in the midst of what is, frankly, a whole bunch of garbage. Facebook and Twitter both recognize the problem; Facebook added groups and Twitter added lists to help people manage the information, and both have plans to add more features that address information overload.

Even with new features, the core problem will continue to exist: Both Facebook and Twitter want you to form essentially permanent connections with other people. That's fine for people you actually care about, but it creates problems around privacy and too much personal information when most of your connections are really just acquaintances. These tools, great as they are, force users to be cautious about using them.

The potential for The Next Big Thing has opened up.

The Next Big Thing, in my opinion, will be social networks that allow participants to interact with one another without requiring them to commit to being permanently connected. I call them micro-networks.

Micro-networks are rapidly-formed networks that spring into existence in response to a specific catalyst, and which dissolve as soon as the catalyst is removed. They exist everywhere in nature, from the large numbers of normally solitary bears who gather to feast during salmon runs to the small group of strangers who suddenly feel close to one another because they witnessed the same unusual or traumatic event.

There are a number of companies flirting with this already. Ning isn't too far off by letting you set up your own social network around some specific identity, but it's not quite micro-networking - yet. The Social Collective builds social networks around conferences - true micro-networks in that they are networks that are formed temporarily around a specific catalyst. WatchParty is building a platform for micro-networks formed around specific TV events. I know others who are building micro-networking platforms around the bar scene, sporting events from high school to professional leagues, and festivals. One very interesting component of this is the fact that mobile technology makes the formation of online micro-networks extremely easy.

I may be wrong. But I may be right. We'll know in a few more years. But I'm willing to bet my future (in fact I already am) that in a couple of years the Web is going to see an explosion of platforms that let people come together and interact for a short period of time around a specific topic or event, and then let them all peacefully go their separate ways.

 

As I've said before, I read a lot of books and blogs when I first started my adventure with WatchParty (which was called "WatchWord" back then). Guy Kawasaki was an early favorite, and of course the brilliant gents at Venture Hacks, and many more. One of the great things I learned from all my reading was how to be prepared for failure, since they all stressed repeatedly that the vast majority of startups do fail, often through no fault of their own.

This knowledge helped me considerably in the first couple of months. Knowing that my idea would most likely fail, I lived by the mantra "Not today." I had a ritual every morning when I woke up: I acknowledged that WatchWord would most likely fail and listed in my mind the things that could kill it (too much competition, a bad business model, no investment, poorly-chosen co-founders). Then I would say to myself, "Not today. WatchWord will not die today." I wouldn't let myself think about the next month or the next year - just what I needed to do to keep WatchWord alive that day.

It worked. WatchWord became WatchParty, then WatchParty, Inc.  We bootstrapped development of a product, got some investment, decided our first product wasn't viable and killed it, and started again from scratch. WatchParty won't die today, or tomorrow, or even in a few months. And that's a really exciting - and scary - prospect.

You see, the daily recognition that I would probably fail was incredibly stressful. Failure was almost inevitable, so the only way to go on was to find hope in the future. "When we get investors, things will be easier. When we have a product, it'll be more fun. When we have customers, things won't be so stressful."

Today WatchParty isn't an idea, it's a company. We've reached important milestones. We have investors, and bills, and developers who are actually the writing code that really is a product. I'm constantly thinking two, three, four months into the future. Failure now couldn't be written off with "Oh, well, we tried." Failure now means we've squandered other people's money - and our own. Failure now won't be determined by things beyond my control, it will be determined by things entirely within my control.

So now there are no silver linings. Every day is so stressful that the stress I experienced three months ago looks like bliss in retrospect. And it's only going to get worse. Now I cannot imagine any time in the future that might be less stressful than today. I have come to understand that success can be much more stressful than failure.

But I love it. I wouldn't have it any other way. Nothing I have ever done in my life, except fatherhood, has been more exciting, more challenging, or more rewarding than starting WatchParty and building it to where it is today (which isn't really anywhere, I know, but it's a long way from where it started). I know tomorrow will be more stressful than today, but it will also be more invigorating and thrilling. I can't wait.

 

I've started and bootstrapped several businesses during my career, but when I started WatchParty I knew right away that it would require major investment. Having never raised capital for a business, I recognized quickly that I had a great deal to learn. So, naturally, I started reading every book I could find.

I read good books and bad books, but one of the things all the books had in common was a strong recommendation to choose investors carefully. It was a recommendation that made sense, but frankly when you're struggling to turn an idea into a product and a company into a business, there isn't too much room to be picky. If someone is interested in investing, it's hard to turn them down when you don't know whether a "better" investor will ever come along.

Nevertheless, as we've moved WatchParty from concept to wireframes, and are moving on to coding, it has become easier to simply walk away from potential investors without looking back. Without really intending to, we've developed a litmus test that makes it easy to determine whether we should continue a dialogue or say goodbye. So what is that litmus test?

I'll call it the "Better Idea" test. Essentially, if after hearing the pitch, a potential investor tells me he has a "better idea" for our feature set or our business model, I listen politely, thank them for their time, and get the hell out. A variation on this is the "Should Be" test, in which a potential investor tells me what we "should be" doing instead of what we are doing.

I know that this probably seems arrogant, but it is not based on a belief that the WatchParty team has everything in our business model right. In fact, we're pretty sure we have at least half our plans wrong. The problem is we don't yet know which half.

The reason we walk away from "Better Idea" investors is that they claim they do know which half is wrong, and they expect us to replace those plans with their ideas. Of course it's possible - maybe even likely - that their ideas are better, but if we changed course for every potential investor with a "Better Idea" we'd end up with a hodge-podge of different, often competing models and plans, along with grumbling investors. And it's become pretty clear that the "Better Idea" investors won't consider investing in WatchParty if we don't adopt their "Better Idea".

So what's the alternative? Is there a litmus test for investors we do want? I think there is. If, after hearing the pitch, a potential investor tells me that we should "next try" this idea or that, I really want to keep that dialogue alive. Those are investors who see WatchParty's potential and recognize that some of our ideas won't work, but are willing to let the market (not their egos) dictate which should be replaced. They have ideas and are willing to share them, but are aware that their ideas are just as likely to be bad as good, and are comfortable with that. If we make sure all of WatchParty's investors are "Next Try" investors, we'll always have someplace to pivot when an idea doesn't work out, and investors who encourage our success instead of controlling it.

So, if you are a "Better Idea" investor, I'm sure there are plenty of startups out there willing to chuck their approach in favor of yours. We're just not one of them. If, on the other hand, you are a "Next Try" investor, you should give me a call. I'd love to hear your ideas.

 

Lately I've found that certain people ask the same question when I tell them about WatchParty; mainly kids below the age of about 25. That question is, "What's the user incentive?" 

The first time I was asked I just babbled an answer about features and interactions, but after being asked a few  more times I finally had the intelligence to ask what they meant. I must admit that when I heard the answer I felt very, very old.

Kid: WatchParty looks awesome! How do you reward people for using it?

Old Man: WatchParty makes watching TV more fun. The reward is more enjoyment from the TV experience.

Kid: No, I mean what do you give people.

Old Man: Enjoyment. Pleasure.

Kid: Sounds like a porn site. So, your site doesn't have a reward system?

Old Man: You mean, like badges?

Kid: Yeah! You gotta have badges! People have to get rewards to incentivize them, otherwise they won't use this.

Now, some type of award system has been debated hotly by the WatchParty founders, and we will very likely introduce something that issues prizes to top users in one of the early iterations (although not in the official beta). Game mechanics have very real value in online activity, and we do plan to utilize game theory in the growth of the product.

What I found completely appalling was these kids' belief that without a Foursquare-style rewards system as a fundamental part of the product my idea was doomed to failure. In essence they believe that they (and everyone else) should receive a "participation trophy" for using WatchParty, and if they didn't get one they'd simply bail.

I'm not sure if it's simply a reflection of a trend in the consumer web or a reflection of American youth culture, but the idea of getting rewarded for showing up seems to be pervasive these days. Personally, I think it's bullshit and I refuse to build WatchParty on the basis of participation trophies.

The fact is, if I can't produce a product that truly makes watching TV more fun, then I deserve to fail. If I succeed just because I give users a nicer trophy than my competitors, I haven't succeeded at anything more than making a nicer trophy, and i didn't start WatchParty to make nice trophies. I started it to make watching TV more fun. That's the incentive, and that's why we'll win.

Time to get my Twitter act together. I have 4 useful Twitter accounts, but I’m not using them well. Over the next few days I’m going to try to organize them into a useful information stream.

I have my personal account, @rfawal. It’s of course the oldest account and is where most of my interaction happens. I need to make it a true personal account, where the focus is family, hobbies, and other things that I love simply because they bring me joy.

I have the @CandidAide account for my candidate consulting company, so I’m going to do all my political following there. Then there’s @MyJunto, my blog, which is a diary of my experiences as Intry to start a new social media company from the ground up. I’ll be following anyone who can give me advice or support there.

Finally I have @WatchParty, the account for the previously mentioned startup. It’s the company account, and for now will follow Angel and VC investors as well as everyone in the social media space relevant to our market.

I’m hoping that this will make me a better informed individual, by organizing my Twitter-fed information stream. I think most people haven’t figured out how to control Twitter. I sure haven’t, but I’m going to give this a try to see how it works out.

I do not have very high hopes.