Posts Tagged ‘winAround’

Starting Up and Finishing Off

Comments
Aug 2009

23

Team winAround 2007

If you read this blog, you probably know a little about my entrepreneurial spirit. In fact, I made a post earlier this year about the importance of acting now, saying:

Stop putting off your plans until tomorrow. Because if there really is no tomorrow, think of all the time you have wasted. Change the world. And do it now.”

 

I’ve also worked on and helped out with a few other projects (listed here).

 

As such, it brought me great joy to get in touch with a group of hungry, passionate entrepreneurs with a love for social media. Yu-kai Chou, Jun Loayza, Joseph Yi and Olina Qian are among those working on an new project called Viralogy, a website created to measure the rank and influence of social media users. In the Viralogy team I saw a group of people unafraid to work hard, take risks and develop a product that they were truly passionate about.

 

So when I was given the opportunity to join their team, I jumped on it. After multiple talks with Yu-kai and other members of the team, I agreed to help the team out in its efforts to develop its business in Seattle, as well as online. As part of my work for Viralogy I am also writing a weekly column on Social Media Tactics. I hope you’ll help support my new venture by adding your blog to Viralogy and following my posts on there as well. From time to time, my new endeavors may cause my posts on Techshots to slow, but posts here are far different from those that I will be publishing on Viralogy, so as long as I have the bandwidth to do so, I will keep making a couple posts here each week.

 

Unfortunately, this post also marks end of my very first startup, winAround.com. Started in late 2006 with Craig Barger, winAround was a gaming news and community website focused on bringing local coverage to competitive gaming tournaments and events. With over 70,000 visits and 750,000 page views per month in early 2008, winAround was the number two website dedicated to delivering eSports news for the game Counter-Strike: Source behind Gotfrag. Over a dozen volunteers (some pictured above) worked on publishing gaming news, organizing online tournaments and running a community forum. All of winAround’s success came entirely from that group of people. Later during 2008, winAround was taken down to begin repurposing the site to focus more on social and community aspects of online gaming.

 

Over the past year, a small team has worked on and off on developing an entire social networking website from scratch. However, with work still to go, and interest in such a network currently waning (my partner and lead developer) Mike Murray and I have decided to put the project on hold indefinitely. The continued rise in console games and the failure of predominant online gaming leagues such as the Cyberathlete Amateur League have changed the online gaming sphere in a way that diminishes some of our offerings. Though our product was close to complete, we decided that the additional investment in time and money was not worthwhile even though we had come so far. Over the next month or two, I will be releasing some screenshots of the concepts and ideas we had been working on, as well as describing some of the ideas we were hoping to bring to the table.

 

Though winAround.com may ultimately never see the light of day, Mike and I hope to use some of the knowledge and experience we gained from winAround to create new and exciting web projects in the near future, developed under winAround, LLC, the company under which winAround.com was created. I will continue to support the community gaming forums created for winAround as well.

 

To see some of the things Mike was working on, click here or here.

 

Though the end of my first startup in winAround.com is a tough pill to swallow, I am excited about the other opportunities at hand. It’s absolutely true that when one door closes, another one opens, and I am greatly looking forward to the new pathways that are opening up.

 

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Passionate People Can Do Anything

Comments
Apr 2009

27

Apathy Motivational Poster

Passionate people are willing to work 80 hour weeks for low pay and go the extra mile to make sure a project succeeds. Passionate people pay less heed to risks and believe more that anything is possible.* Take a look at the incredible grassroots marketing campaign done by the Obama team last November. If they asked a team full of realists to work 100-hour weeks on little pay to try to get an African-American president elected, Barack Obama would have had no chance. Instead, they took young, passionate people and told them that anything was possible if they worked hard enough and fought for every last vote.

 

Apathetic people will do whatever they can to tell you that something isn’t possible. Simple tasks turn into drawn-out ordeals, and it can be a nightmare to get anything done. I bet there have been a couple of projects that you’ve worked on in the past that you did for the wrong reasons*, and entered without passion. Lack of passion will hurt your productivity and apathy is the easiest way to kill a project in the water. Everyone must find ways to be passionate about your work in order to generate the greatest benefit out of their own skill set.
*see: Money, Fame.

 

I am eternally grateful that I have the opportunity to not only work in an industry that I am extremely passionate about, but that the current side projects I’m working on are of my own creation. It puts a jump in my step every day on my way to work, and makes me excited to take on new projects. Additionally, I am excited every day I get to work on winAround and try to come up with new ideas to improve a gamer’s experience. I’ve spent many late nights up talking with winAround’s CTO, Mike Murray, about how we can create the perfect experience for our users. There have been projects that I’ve quit because I wasn’t passionate about them. Figure out what you truly love, drop all the other stuff and do it.

 

Steve Jobs once said:

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

 

Treat every day like it’s your last, and love what you do, because passionate people can do anything.

 

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