Almost everyone knows who Steve Jobs was before he died from cancer 10 years ago. The charismatic leader of Apple was instrumental in creating the $ Trillion behemoth. Nearly every company would love to be lead by someone with his skills and industry clout. Investors and customers would beg him to take their money and thousands would flock to carefully listen to every word he spoke at a conference or other presentation. Any idea that he shared gained instant credibility.
But as a startup founder, I don’t want or need someone like Steve Jobs was at the end of his career. I need the younger Steve Jobs who sold his car to get a fledgling computer company started along with co-founder Steve Wozniak. He was excited about making the company a success and dove in head first. I need someone who can take a good idea in the form of a working model; realize its potential to change the world; and have the drive to bring it out of obscurity.
The young Steve Jobs probably faced a lot of skepticism and rejection from potential investors and customers, but he didn’t let that stop him. Even Wozniak doubted that the first few models he built would turn into an immensely profitable business. The ‘Woz’ may be a brilliant engineer but if the stories I heard are correct, he didn’t know much about sales and marketing so if the venture relied on his skills alone, a few dozen of his friends and colleagues would have been the only ones to ever experience an ‘Apple’. But it was Jobs who was able to envision how personal computers could change everything and he backed up that vision with determination.
Any successful product startup needs at least 4 things. 1) A good idea (but lots of people have these). 2) Someone with enough technical expertise to actual build it and get it working well. 3) Some working capital to get a company off the ground. 4) A company leader who can take the early product version and exploit its advantages in the marketplace. This is especially true if the product is something complex like a personal computer that was not easily understood by the masses early on.
I am building a new kind of general-purpose data management system called Didgets. Like personal computers and the Internet; it is a platform that has the potential to transform society and drive $ Billions if not $ Trillions of revenue. Thousands of companies and products could leverage its features to change how data is stored, manipulated and shared across the globe.
Like Steve Wozniak, I built something because it was the kind of system that I personally wanted. I have decades of experience working with all kinds of data management systems such as file systems, databases, and the like. I learned from their strengths but also saw their weaknesses so I designed and built a system that I think solved many of those problems in an elegant and efficient way.
I won’t go into detail in this post about what Didgets are and how they work. Stay tuned for further information. The project is far from complete, but enough of it works to show how it is far superior in terms of speed and flexibility than other systems. Instead, I wanted to just focus here on the challenge of bringing an elegant solution to a complex problem to the point where it can gain mass adoption.
I have realized for some time that I can’t just ‘build it and they will come’; although I had hoped that once I got it to do some amazing things, that more people would catch on much quicker than they have. I really need someone who can take what I have built so far and get others excited about it. Like Wozniak, this is a skill that I simply don’t seem to have.
I have tried to find someone with the needed skills. Over the years, I had two different people who told me they could help in this regard. Neither one ended up adding much real value to the project and both quit within a few months of starting. The few programmer friends who helped me build some parts of it added way more value.
I actually paid a monthly stipend to my first business partner (a big mistake!), but he left the minute the money ran out. In spite of me spending many hours showing each of them how it worked and how to set it up, neither one actually tried to use the product personally. Imagine if Wozniak found out after 6 months that Jobs had not even bothered to ever turn on one of the Apple computers he was supposed to convince others to buy!
We often hear about success stories where a couple founders took a good idea and one built a good product based on it and the other successfully raised some capital and got the first customers to sign on. This is how most companies that started in a garage got off the ground. But that is not a simple thing to do and so many fail. It makes you wonder how many really good ideas and prototypes never saw the light of day simply because the chemistry and the drive of the founders were lacking.
I am still hopeful that I can find someone who will see the value of this project and stick with it long enough to see some success. In the meantime, I will keep plugging away by adding features, testing them, and trying to get the word out myself.
www.Didgets.com is the project website (complete with demo videos).