tutorblog:

YCNYC Talk from Aaron Harris on Vimeo.

We don’t have Tutorspree tshirts yet. Shocking, no? We’re incorporated, launched, have users, growth…but no shirts! And there’s a simple reason for that: it hasn’t made it to the top of our priorities yet. We simply haven’t gotten around to it, and that really isn’t a big deal.

I’ve met a number of other folks in the startup space recently who, I think, would disagree.  My guess is that these folks have mistakenly begun to equate various milestones with success. “YC? You made it!” I was recently told. Another person asked me, incredulously/accusingly “You don’t have t-shirts?”. Each time that happens, I get a little sad because, while I’d love to have shirts, and I loved YC, they are not the things that define whether or not Tutorspree is what we want it to be.

There is, in reality, only one goal for Tutorspree: viable, scalable company that creates a paradigm shift in the tutoring market. Getting there is going to be a hell of a lot harder than anything we’ve done thus far. The amount of work it will take to do it makes what we’ve done so far look miniscule.

We’re ready and excited about that challenge. We’re better prepared for it because we have it squarely in perspective. Would I love to accomplish it with some great Tutorspree shwag? Sure. And we’re going to order some t-shirts pretty soon. But keeping those t-shirts in the right perspective, as just another milestone, a piece of company cohesion, a marketing tactic, is critical.

If the t-shirt or funding or YC is your entire goal, then stop now. If they are, you’ll constantly optimize towards them, and not towards your longterm viability as a company. And then, if you do achieve them, you’ll be left seriously wondering what comes next - not just from a product or marketing perspective (always a hard question), but from an existential perspective. You’ll start wondering why you’re doing what you’re doing. You’ll lose sight of the conviction you need to get to where you actually need to be. And that’s one more way your company could die. There’s enough challenges to winning (and I certainly don’t have all the answers, these are just my assumptions based on my experience thus far), so don’t create artificial ones.

In the meantime, if you do have a cool shirt, I’ll happily wear it. No such thing as too many good t-shirts.

A little over four months ago, we found out that we had gotten into Y Combinator. After we were done jumping up and down and shouting, we realized that meant we were going to have to pick up and move from NY to the Bay Area. Between running around and looking for subletters, buying tickets, packing, and saying goodbye to friends, we had glimpses of what the move might mean. We talked about whether or not we’d stay in California after YC - after all, it is the land of the startups. We were told that engineers were plentiful, investors eager, and the weather spectacular.

When we got here, we found that that was exactly right (well, aside from the fact that all the engineers had jobs and multiple offers). Josh and I were grilled on our business plan by the checkout guy at Trader Joe’s during our first week. Folks in coffee shops and bars not only thought that Tutorspree was a cool idea, they realized that we were not, in fact, unemployed. Strangers were able to give valuable advice on design, scaling, and marketing. In many ways, it was the perfect place to launch a startup.

And yet, here we are, in our last few days in Palo Alto, about to go back to the Big Apple. I keep telling people why, and I think it’s worth sharing. There are as many opinions about where to start and grow your company as there are people to ask. A lot of folks give unequivocal answers: New York, because you’re doing fashion! The Bay Area because you need super technical Stanford PhDs! Chicago because you’re Groupon! Blarg.

The truth is that every startup and every set of circumstances is entirely unique to that startup. We look at what we need in order to develop the next stage of Tutorspree - high density of students, focus on education, willingness to experiment with new technology and methods, design talent, engineering talent, etc. and we put that on the scale. For us, those factors all point to NYC as our optimal first market to conquer. But it’s not perfect. It’s 100% true that in NY we have to fight Wall Street salaries and a different view on new technology than we do in the Bay. It’s also true that our cost of working and living will be higher.

But there is never a perfect answer to a problem, and attempts to optimize for perfection generally result in iterative death. The only way forward is to weigh each of our options and decide on the best path for the company while considering every factor we could see - and hypothesizing on those we could not. And after a lot of long discussions internally and with our advisors, we decided what was best for the company.

And with that decision done, we also considered what was best for us personally. Part of the reason I became an entrepreneur was to gain freedom over my choices. Freedom to make my life what I want it to be. That runs from building an incredible company with great people to change the path of education to knowing that can make time for the things that are important to me which are often denied by the rigors of, say, strict market hours.

So we’re coming back. We’re returning to a burgeoning tech scene that is rapidly adding incredibly talented, interesting, and innovative people. We’re excited to add our voice to a rising chorus proclaiming NY as more than it’s most recent definition as the capital of Finance. We’re going to do everything we can to share the incredible lessons we’ve learned on the West Coast - lessons built on decades of success and failure in building technology companies. We’ve been exposed to different ways of thinking (and I now know how to wrap a burrito), challenges we’d never considered, and people who pushed us to the very edge of our abilities.

It’ll be hard. It’ll be invigorating, fulfilling, mind-bending, heart wrenching, and glory making. It’ll be the best thing I’ve ever done. In short, it’ll be a very New York kind of story.

(oh, yeah, and we’re hiring - engineers and designers. jobs [at] tutorspree dot com)

I was a huge fan of Ducktales growing up. I can still sing the majority of the intro song, recall most of the characters, and was always willing to allow for the physical impossibility of both Scrooge’s ability to swim through money and the existence of Duckburg as a city where dogs and various billed fowl lived in cross-species harmony.

The really interesting thing about the show, looking back, is the perfect embodiment of the Horatio Alger ideal in Scrooge McDuck. In fact, He seems to have been a thinly veiled stand in for Andrew Carnegie - a poor Scottish lad who made good through his wits and work.

As a kid, of course, there was always the repeated message told in Scrooge’s origin story: Work Smarter, not Harder (he discovers this while earning money as a shoeshine…there’s a great scene with a bicycle powered shoeshine device, but more on that another time), and success and riches will follow. But now I’m actually running my own company, and the lie of Scrooge’s words becomes obvious.

Much as I try, working smarter as opposed to harder is never a clear trade off. More than that, smarter isn’t necessarily what I made it out to be. Oftentimes, clever is a much better categorization of what we have to do - from prioritization decisions on features to design choices, to customer interaction methods. And even if you’re as clever as can be, you still have to work harder.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that even if you’re working smarter, you still have to work harder. And harder isn’t the only other piece of the equation. Harder is, I guess, a measure of time spent times the difficulty of that task (T*D). But the real issue is how fast you can do it. Throughput ((T*D)^RPM), in this kind of an environment is critical because, odds are, there’s someone else just as smart, clever, and hard working as you out there, so you need to keep one step ahead all the time. You can’t do that by working hard on lateral problems, you can only do it by solving the problems that are absolutely necessary to getting that next customer, and to keeping the majority of the ones you already have.

If anything, Scrooge was selling it easy. That’s fine, because he could swim through solid matter. I’m not so lucky, so I am constantly working with Josh and Ryan to figure out how to figure out what we need to do next, and how to execute on it without killing the 20 other things we have to do. That challenge has only gotten bigger as we’ve started to grow, and it’s only going to get bigger as we grow some more.

I’m ready for it.

AT&T had me locked in as a customer the other day. As far as I knew - following quite a lot of research on the interwebs - they were my only choice for broadband. I had just spent an hour getting bounced around by Comcast (including one woman who sounded like a Russian expat living in Delhi) before being told they could not help me. So, I surrendered to the less good DSL being promised by ATT.

Which is where they totally screwed up. I spent 45 minutes trying to get to a real person, but the website runs in circles, and there are no numbers to call. So I drove to an ATT store (to get DSL in my house). I waited for 30 minutes, and started tweeting my displeasure - which led to very nice and totally ineffectual responses from ATT. Fast forward to my discovery that, not only can ATT not deliver the faster version of DSL to my apartment (1.5mbps max down is what I’m offered), but they can’t “install” it until February 8. Install, mind you, meaning someone at a remote location pushes a button.

So I said fine, angrily, and then talked to the previous tenants and neighbors and discovered a much better solution.

This isn’t meant just as a rant against some of the worst customer service I have ever seen. It’s meant more as a cautionary example of what scale often does to customer service organizations. A lot of what we do at Tutorspree as it relates to customer service will be hard to scale. And, as you get larger, inertia can convince you that you don’t have to service your customers in a quality way. But to that line of thinking, I point out Dell. Once the pinnacle of their industry, and the best customer service around, they lost their customers in large part by treating them like crap.

We have a challenge - maintain that quality of service and interaction (5 different tutors thanked me today for prompt/good responses to questions) while continuing to grow. I haven’t yet figured out how we do that, but I’m sure as hell going to keep trying.

Turns out that picking up Craigslist items and using the wrong parking spots can be a hell of a way to network. Recently bought an air mattress and a futon from two different startup CEOs. Then, when Josh and I got back to the apartment, we parked in a spot that turned out to belong to the head of the science department of a local high school who loves the idea of Tutorspree and wants to talk more.

I won’t even get into the Trader Joe’s checkout guy who grilled us on our business plan. Turns out you really do have to be ready to talk about your company at the drop of a hat whenever, wherever, and no matter how tired you are.