Start a company that survives longer than 2 years

I’m going to rerere-try this. The “not the reason of failure” mantra derived from previous attempts:

• It’s not lack of time.
• It’s not lack of technology.
• It’s not lack of knowledge.
• It’s not lack of money.
• It’s execution.

Prelude:

• I wrote my first elearning tool at age 14 in 1985. A math trainer for my younger brothers, on my Commodore 64.
• My first “income” from elearning was a bar of chocolate given as a prize by my Latin teacher for a working vocabulary trainer for Latin later in 1985.
• Got an Amiga 500 in 1989 primarily to develop elearning tools for my Abitur (German high school degree)
• Somewhere between 1989 and 1993 decided that I wanted to do elearning professionally. In the end of 1993, by then I was studying computer science, I invested basically all the money I had into a 486 and NeXTSTEP and registered a company to do this. I did some smaller projects, but money primarily came from selling hardware.
• In 1997, now working as a part time system administrator, I founded another company with two student friends of mine. We managed to build a language trainer prototype in Java, but then switched to consulting and developing a CRM system for a furniture dealer. Company folded about a year later due to lack of interest and time constrains.
• In 1999 finally quit the admin job to commit myself to elearning 24/7. Ended doing a lot of different jobs, mainly consulting and became involved into a startup doing internet radio as CIO (and sole developer). That one went belly up when the bubble burst in 2001.
• To get back on track in 2001 got a job as lead developer for a company developing data management systems for clinical research while I intended to switch to biotech. Continued to work on language trainers, now web based, in my spare time and put a first prototype online in late 2001.
• Quit the job in 2003 and registered my third company. Since it was obvious that the elearning tools would not bring in enough money in the near future, I started consulting medical companies about data management based on my old contacts. Made a lot of money that way, but it left no time for developing the elearning site, so I hired four people half time to do this. My job from 2001 to 2003 had taught me that I work much better together with other people, so I tried to “buy” this situation. It didn’t work, I got stuck with 100h weeks, permanently traveling between my office in Berlin and my customers in the western part of Germany, a deteriorating health and an inefficient, expensive development process and no break even in sight. When my largest consulting customer was bought and the projects I was working on folded, I ran out of cash within a few month and had to fire my last two employees in 12/2005. Since then I’ve done a number of smaller jobs and basically tried to survive.

I obviously tried before and have some insights in what my problems are:

• I’m a techie. I’m horrible at anything that involves money, accounting, taxes etc., since I don’t really care about it. The same applies to marketing, business strategy, networking etc.
• I do not program for fun, I’m not a hacker. I’m interested in the concepts and good at projecting things, but terrible at executing them. So I know a lot about what I’m doing, what others are doing in that area, what is possible, what technology is available etc., but seldom do anything with it.
• I’m a bad project manager. I myself work best in projects that are already late and basically lost. This provides enough adrenalin for me to focus and I can use my talent to improvise. Without stress the focus gets lost almost immediately and nothing gets done. In 2001 this got a name: ADHD
• My business model does not work. Or at least it will not work until there are a lot of users and I care more about actually making money.
• Partners/coaches only help for a short time, after that anything will drown in chaos.
• A lot of other things

So why the hell do I even intend to (re)*-try, when it seems that I’m the wrong person to do this? Well, because:

1. I am very passionate about the subject of elearning,
2. am very stubborn and not easily scared away by the perspective of recurring total disasters,
3. not sufficiently attracted by financial security, wealth, vacation, social status, career or anything a possibly wise decision based on the experience of the last 20 years might lead me to and finally
4. there is nobody in sight who will do it for me.

And the time is now. After half a year of apathy I started improving the site again, I most likely will get a new project (elearning system for a Russian movie production house) that will support me for half a year and pay off my debt, and have been playing with a lot of ideas lately (while most of the features planed since day one still aren’t implemented). I have some new ideas how to handle my weirdness, especially by involving the users, just short of 8000 now and currently answering about 700,000 vocabulary questions each month. Maybe enough time has passed so that the “stay focused” is burned sufficiently deep into my brain and the hundreds of time management, development process and similar books have left enough scars.

If not, I’ll probably re-crash, re-burn, stand up again and rererere-try in a couple of years.

Or get smart and change something fundamentally. We’ll see. First another sacrifice to the gods of business.