Short story

I’ve co-founded a new company, rocket, with the designer I worked with on Concentrate. Over the next month or so all roobasoft products will be transitioned over to rocket and will be sold through rocket’s online store. This is mostly a name change. I’ll still be the man doing the development and support, but now I’ll also have Dave helping to make things prettier and more user friendly.

More details

Shortly after hiring Dave to work on Concentrate I asked him if he was interested in partnering up in some way. At the time he was working full-time-ish for a startup with potential to be a big deal, so although he was interested, the timing wasn’t right.

4.5 or so months later and the timing was better, so we decided to talk through it. We ended up meeting at least once a week for lunch for a good month or so talking through details. Then in early September we met with an accountant and worked through business details. At this point it really started to take shape. Finally, on September 22nd, 2009, the secretary of the state of Idaho stamped our articles of incorporation and made it official, we were business partners. We’ve now got a fancy website, all sorts of official documents, a bank account and two names (our official company name is Made By Rocket, Inc., but we have a legally assumed business name of rocket).

Why?

• Our skills are complementary. I now have access to a designer without having to worry about hours spent, and Dave has access to a programmer without having to worry about hours spent.
• We worked well together. Regardless of how we did it, it was clear we’d be working together in the future. So partnering up seemed like a solid choice.
• Two is better than one. We’re both excited to have each other to bounce ideas off of, help keep each other on track and to help make better business decisions (or at least make sure we talk through things first).

How?

I’m guessing some of you are interested in how things are structured, so here’s a short explanation:

roobasoft, LLC will still exist and will remain 100% owned by my wife and I. All existing roobasoft apps will remain owned by roobasoft. roobasoft will license the rights to sell the apps to Made By Rocket, Inc. (an S-corp). rocket is co-owned 50/50 by Dave and I. That’s it. It’s really all a bit simpler than we thought and probably simpler than it sounds. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions or want to know more, I’m happy to provide more details.

That’s it. So roobasoft still exists, but it won’t be publicly active in a month or so. Our plan is to put a page up on roobasoft.com explaining it’s now rocket and pointing to madebyrocket.com. However, I do plan to keep this blog and will probably even continue to post things here. We’ll see.

Sometime in April I was chatting with Andy Kim, of Potion Factory and The Hit List fame, over IM and I asked him how he, a one-man shop producing some awesome stuff (both code and design work), got things done. His advice was pretty simple: Always make sure you know what to do next. I’m convinced that advice, along with a lot of other things, helped make the next three months extremely productive for me.

This really wasn’t anything new. I’m sure I had heard this before, but hearing it from Andy was apparently just enough to make me actually try it for reals and experience it for myself.

It wasn’t long before I noticed how serious the change was. If I either didn’t have my “to do today” (more on that later) list available, or I had let myself finish everything without adding to it, I would almost immediately procrastinate when a task was done. However, when I crossed something out, if there was another task to pickup and do right there without me having to think about ‘what now?’, I almost always immediately got to it. So simple.

How I manage my lists

I use two list systems. One for my to do today list, and one for planning at a larger level. The to do today list is paper based. I carry a small Moleskine squared notebook for this list. My other lists are stored in The Hit List organized into folders and releases and stuff like that. Every morning I scan my lists in The Hit List and write stuff down in my to do today list. I put a large square to start each item and then write the task next to it. When I complete a task I put a check in the box and strike out the words. If I decide to not do something, I use an X and strike out the words. This has worked great for me.

If I notice my to do today list getting small, and I know I have a lot of available time left in the day, I try to make sure I re-scan The Hit List for things to add. This is because I know if the list is empty before I’m done working for the day I’ll find myself watching YouTube videos of babies laughing or on Wikipedia reading about a Country I’ll never visit.

More on To Do Today

Concentrate was heavily inspired by a productivity method called The Pomodoro Technique. Part of that technique involves a To Do Today list. You pick from your larger list and put down what you think you can do today. The technique also has you estimate tasks and some other stuff that I don’t do, but are probably worth checking out. The Pomodoro Technique gave me the idea for the to do today list vs. working off one master list. I highly recommend it. Being able to look at a, relatively, much smaller list makes a huge difference compared to staring at your endless list for a project.

Feel free to drop a comment here with your own take on this. I’d be curious if others are using a to do today list or if you try it and how it worked for you. Good luck!