Create ~/.inputrc and fill it with this:

"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set completion-ignore-case on

This allows you to search through your history using the up and down arrows … i.e. type “cd /” and press the up arrow and you’ll search through everything in your history that starts with “cd /”.

I still have my day job but I have worked on my startup every single day for the past 30 or so days.  Basically my schedule has been: gym (every other day) > day job (8 hours) > fishbowl (4 hours) > home (2 hours) > sleep (8 hours).  I take Friday night and only put in a few hours on Saturday.

Or in other words my schedule is: money > time > family – not in order of priority of course :)

Money, Time and  Family – the early startup triangle of death.

Time

To move my startup forward, I need to put in a lot of time to get the prototype up and running and build the foundation for a great company and product.

Money

I need money to pay my bills and fund my startup.  Whatever that source of the money is – be it investors or consulting work, it will take time to acquire.

Family

I can probably have more time AND money but then I will have to give up spending time with my wife, family and friends.  This is something I will never compromise on.  I would rather fail and be broke than compromise on this aspect of my life.  That’s a price, I will never pay and will always be an easy decision to make.

Choices

Choice #1: Put time into startup, spend time with family but have no money

Choice #2: Get money, spend time with family and have no time to work on my startup – this is probably the most common choice and is the reason a lot of people have jobs and only dream of one day starting their own thing.

Choice #3: Get money, work on startup and in the process lose your friends, family and probably soul too.  This is a no-go choice for me.

I choose #1 because I am passionate about my startup and love my family and I don’t know how or why or where or when but I have the sense that money will somehow be provided.  God, the universe, luck (or perhaps a bank heist) or something and/or someone else will provide.

Risk it all because it ALL means nothing.  Like someone said in the startup playbook, if you live in a first-world country, you owe it to yourself to take risks.  In the grand scheme of things NONE of these risks are life threatening.  Losing/downsizing your house, damaging your credit score, losing your car, inability to buy organic food, inability to take luxurious vacations and so on are NOT LIFE threatening, they are merely inconvenient.  You will live through all of them.

I quit to start my own company and in a few short weeks, I will have no paycheck.  That is scary.  I need money to build my startup and I have been losing sleep over it.

There are several options that I can pursue to raise some money and each one has its own pros and cons.

Consulting

I could do some part-time consulting to cover my expenses.

Pros

• I get to own 100% of my company.
• I don’t have to deal with any investors.
• Little financial risk

Cons

• It takes my focus off building my company
• It is not stable.
• I have to constantly look for the next contract
• It will cover my bills but won’t be sufficient to grow my company e.g. hire people, pay for services and “stuff”

Credit Cards & Personal Loans

I can just use credit cards and loans to fund the business and pay my bills

Pros

• I get to own 100% of my company.
• I don’t have to deal with any investors.

Cons

• I will run out of money very quickly
• Extremely high financial risk that affects my family and not just myself

Angel Investors and/or VCs

Pros

• Access to lots of money (potentially)
• The right investor can open doors that I don’t even know exist

Cons

• I have to share my company with others
• Finding the right investor is time consuming (pretty much a full time job)
• I will be working with strangers.
• Investors management overhead
• The wrong investor can be a pain in the ass that can hurt me rather than help me

Friends and Family

Pros

• Work with people I already know and trust
• Opportunity to make money for my friends
• Much easier to raise money than angel investors
• Share my success with friends

Cons

• Risk losing all my friends’ money
• Managing multiple inexperienced investors
• Risk of straining relationships that are very important to me.
• Share my failure with friends

My Gut Feeling

I am leaning towards raising money from friends and family but it is not an easy decision.  I feel like it will be a huge burden and will be constantly worried about losing my friends’ money (and trust).  Although, I have a great deal of confidence that I will succeed but there is no guarantee that I would and it would suck to lose my friends’ money.  What do you think I should do?  Any thoughts?

UPDATE 2: Good discussion going on at hacker news

Download

Help

The advice is great. The playbook is informative. But my favorite is their stories. I just could not help being super inspired by these people and just wanting to put down the book and go build my company :)… I am about a fifth through the book and want to blog about some of the highlights so far. I am actually reading this with a highlighter in hand, marking it up and taking notes – I almost never do that. I am hoping that I can come back to these series of blog posts in the future when I am down and need some inspiration and I hope it does the same for you and maybe make you go buy the book

We are all familiar with heroic stories of entrepreneurs  These stories tell of easy, quick or inevitable success. In reality, there are almost always massive challenges, delays, setbacks, risks, and uncertainties  Indeed, entrepreneurs and pioneers have to believe that their journeys will be successful; they would never have set out without that belief. But the journey is almost always hard.

This is a great definition of entrepreneurship and what this book is about

…[entrepreneurship is] jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down. This book is about airplane assembly, weather patterns, and flying intelligently.

This quote describes how I feel right now.

[during the discovery phase]… founders are typically roaming around in the darkness, looking for intellectual light switches to illuminate how their ideas stand up to customer needs and competitive offerings.

The introduction to the book has a very “cut to the chase” section where the biggest and most critical ideas of the book are summed up… Here are some highlights:

Know thyself

Your startup company must be rooted and flow from the founder’s innate gifts.

 

Focus

Ruthlessly focus on your biggest ideas. This is a personal weakness of mine and I am constantly fighting the urge to chase something “new and shiny”.

…choosing a maniacally focused path and betting it all is one of the hardest parts of the job and it requires the most courage. But it is often what’s required to truly win a market.

 

Build painkillers, not vitamins

If you can’t describe you company’s value as a painkiller, then I recommend you redefine and refine your business thesis.

Be ten times better

…be ten times better than your competitors. You cannot be incrementally better.

 

Be a monoplist

…their intentions were not predatory or abusive… simply a way to focus on building market-dominating companies.

 

Take Risks

I have been to many third-world countries and I have to completely agree with the author that “You’ve Won Humanity’s Lottery; Be Grateful. Take Risks.” This is true if you live in any developed country, specially here in America.

…we have a responsibility to take great risks because in truth, we have few true risks at all.

 

Interesting Quotes

…if you cannot lead yourself, you cannot lead others.

 

startups are stupidly hard… the decision to pursue them is irrational because the experience can be such a torturous one.

Chris Anderson

Founder of TED - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Anderson_(writer)

Takeaways

Wherever you see rea engaged passion, that means there’s something worth investigating.

 

Don’t make big decisions at a time of weakness

 

Everyone knows that hiring the right people is critical to an organization’s success. But you won’t get the best out of them unless you let them help shape your vision.

Charles Best

Founder of DonorsChoose - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donorschoose.org

Takeaways

Scratch a personal itch
Get out of the way and good things will follow.
Crowdsource front to back

Sara Blakely

Founder of SPANX - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Blakely

For some reason, Sara’s section was covered with my highlighter. I guess I liked what she had to say. The only thing I didn’t agree with her on is not sharing your ideas in their infancy. I see her reasoning but I prefer transparency and openness. One of my favorite thing that she said is that her father used to ask her “What did you fail at today?” I am definitely using this with my future kids because it makes it clear that failure is an indication that you tried something and that you shouldn’t be afraid of failing but embrace it and learn form it.  Also, if you don’t fail then you are not trying hard enough.

…failures will eventually improve her efforts in a way that encouragement never could.

 

I was very clear in asking the universe to show me an opportunity and give me my own idea.

I love the following quote and completely relate to it.  I know I want to build an awesome software company and have a very specific vision for it – from the office space, to benefits to culture to the kind of people that I would hire… But I am not 100% clear on how to get there.

Whatever you can think, you can create; just have a very clear vision… I’m not clear on how I’m going to get there, but I’m 100 percent clear that I will get there.

 

…don’t be paranoid: ideas are almost never stolen until they’re already thriving in the marketplace.

Advice

Don’t be afraid
Courage is acting despite of fear
Hire your weaknesses

The following is another favorite quote of mine:

Money makes you more of who you already are. If you are a jerk, it will make you a bigger jerk; if you’re insecure, you will become even more insecure…

 

You’ve got to have the inner confidence to believe in yourself when everyone else is telling you no.

Steve Blank

A serial entrepeneur and academian – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank

Note to self – read The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Along with the book you are holding [The startup playbook], The Four Steps to the Epiphany should be essential reading for every startup founder.

Steve says that Joseph Campbell recognized a pattern thousands of years old that recurs in mythologies across every culture: the heroic quest. Whether it’s Moses, Luke Skywalker, or Jesus “The hero puts together a motley team to heed the call… and sets out on his quest, undergoing trials, then a death and a rebirth”.

Startup Books

I setup a Startup Books group at http://www.shelfari.com/groups/102249/lists/read please join and add your books.

source: http://amzn.to/13i3TU1

source: http://xamarin.com/how-it-works

I couldn’t find anything like this on the Mac, so I had to hack it together.  I have never done any shell scripting on the mac before, so this could all be wrong.  Any help is greatly appreciated.  Here is what I did:

Create a launchd agent

Basically, I created a plist file and saved it in ~/Library/LaunchAgents and called it me.screenshot.plist – see below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>me.screenshot</string>
 <key>ProgramArguments</key>
 <array>
 <string>/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/timesnap.sh</string>
 </array>
 <key>StartInterval</key>
 <integer>10</integer>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

The file above runs my shell script every 10 seconds and it starts running as soon as I login.

Create a shell script

The shell script simply creates a folder for the day and then takes a screenshot and saves it with the date and time in the filename to make it easy to sort and find specific files.  I put them in folder for every day for better organization.  I also generate 2 filenames to take a screenshot of both monitors, if the second monitor is disconnected, only 1 image is created. Here is the script

#! /bin/bash
foldername=""`eval date +%Y-%m-%d`""
mkdir "/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername"
filename1="/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername/image_01_"`eval date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`".png"
filename2="/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername/image_02_"`eval date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`".png"
screencapture -x "$filename1" "$filename2"

What’s missing? I Need Help

I would like to detect idle time and skip saving the screenshot if I am idle to save some storage space.  Any ideas?

UPDATE

I figured out how to detect idle time, so my mac isn’t just snapping away all day…   Here is the updated script.

#! /bin/bash
x=20
if [ $((`ioreg -c IOHIDSystem | sed -e '/HIDIdleTime/ !{ d' -e 't' -e '}' -e 's/.* = //g' -e 'q'` / 1000000000)) -lt $x ]; then
 echo "taking screenshot"
 foldername=""`eval date +%Y-%m-%d`""
 mkdir "/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername"
 filename1="/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername/image_01_"`eval date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`".png"
 filename2="/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername/image_02_"`eval date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`".png"
 screencapture -x "$filename1" "$filename2"
else
 echo "idle - no screenshot"
fi

Basically, it will not take a screenshot if the computer has been idle for 20 seconds or more.

1. Homepage – http://angularjs.org/
2. Google plus page, the best way to stay up to date on Angular news – https://plus.google.com/+AngularJS/posts
3. Things built with Angular – http://builtwith.angularjs.org/
4. youtube channel – www.youtube.com/angularjs
5. Awesome Video Tutorials – http://egghead.io/
6. AngularUI – a companion suite – http://angular-ui.github.com/
7. Bootstrap components written in pure AngularJS by the AngularUI Team – http://angular-ui.github.com/bootstrap
8. Angular Textmate Bundle (probably works with Sublime too) – https://github.com/angular-ui/AngularJs.tmbundle
9. Stackoverflow – http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/angularjs
10. Angular JS Meetup Groups – http://angularjs.meetup.com/
11. Angular JS Books – http://amzn.to/VbRfDW
12. Angular Modules – http://ngmodules.org/
13. Awesome Chrome Plugin for debugging - https://github.com/angular/angularjs-batarang (thanks Nadeem)

Articles

1. Using RESTful Controllers In An AngularJS Resource
2. AngularJS: Common Pitfalls
3. Rendering DOM Elements With ngRepeat In AngularJS
4. 3 Reasons to Choose AngularJS for Your Next Project
5. 8 Tips for Angular.js Beginners
6. Build Chrome Apps with AngularJS
7. AngularJS: the beauty of concision

Evil Subscriptions

Subscription services are evil.  No matter how good and valuable the service is, you will always use less than what you really need it for.  That is why I love it as an entrepreneur and hate it as a customer.  So I went through my mint.com records to try and figure out where all my subscriptions are.  All I gotta say is WOW!!! I was pretty pissed off at the money I have been wasting all this time.  Here is some of the services I cancelled to save money.

1. Lifelock – $10/month
2. Experian credit report/monitoring – $10/month
3. Audible – $15/month
4. AT&T Cell phone, called to cancel and the reduced my bill from $260 to $150/month for a savings of $110/month (good discussion on hacker news over here)
5. Cable (Verizon Fios) – reduced plan and saved $30/month
6. Hulu & Neflix – decided to keep Netflix and will cancel Hulu – $8/month
7. AppHarbor Hosting (moved to MS Azure for 10 free websites) – $20/month
8. XBOX live – $60/year or $5/month
9. Crossfit $135/month, switched to Koko Fitness $125/month then switched to Liftime Fitness for $83/month – it’s a regular gym but I get free access to yoga, group excercises, swimming pool, jacuzzi, volleyball, rock climbing, basketball and a full gym and I end up saving $52/month
10. Silver Eagle – shooting range – $35/month
11. Massage Envy – $59/month (this was a waste because I always forgot to schedule a massage)

NOTE: It is not very easy to find recurring fees in mint.com and I had to manually read through my transactions.  I added an idea over here, if you think this is a useful feature then please vote for it.

Hard-To-Replace Subscriptions

There are some services that I want to cancel but I “sort of” need them.  If you know of cheaper or free alternatives then let me know.

1. Balsamiq Online – $12/month (considering the desktop app with no subscription)
2. Mindjet – $15/month (considering the desktop app with no subscription)
3. Bitbucket – $25/month (considering hosting my own server or reducing user count to get to the free plan limit)
4. Evernote – $3.75/month (very cheap, I could just keep it or I can change my usage habits and live within the limits of the free account)

Other Charges

“BUSINESS QUICKEN BANKING” charge of $10/month – I contacted wells fargo because I don’t recall signing up for that and they have been charging me for a year.

Tolls – since I will be working from home and driving less, I will probably save about $75/month

Gas – again, less driving – so, I will probably save about $125/month

Car Insurance – according to mint.com, I could save up to $900/year or $75/month.  It’s on my todo list.

Mortgage – I refinanced while I have a paycheck and saved $250/month

Total Savings

Overall, if everything goes as planned and I don’t back down and change my mind or worse, add new subscriptions, the total savings will be around $950/month.

Do you have any money saving tips that could help me cut down expenses even more?

With that said, we had a BBQ setup on Wednesday night to get together with all of my wife’s cousins so they can talk of good old memories which ironically they proceed to erase said memories throughout the night. Let me tell you something, when I saw the amount of beer we bought for the fiesta, I thought it was ridiculous and we would never finish it. I was wrong. I also told my wife that there is no way I can drink more than 3, maximum 4 beers. Keep in mind these are not regular-size beer bottles. These are large – probably 1 liter or 750ml bottles. There is just no room in my stomach for that much beer…

In Bolivia, they seem to pour the beer into a glass but only half way. So I did the same. Drinking half a glass is very easy. It’s practically a shot. So, I shoot. Easy. Then I shoot again, no problem. Another shot… A couple more and oh, the bottle is empty… Wow… It’s only been 10 minutes. 4 more hours to go… Long story short. I drank, probably 6 to 10 bottles. I think. I am not really sure because I stopped counting after a while.

Somehow during my happy stage (the stage between not drunk and drunk, you know the stage where you could drive home but shouldn’t but if you had to, you would get there without hitting too many road signs), it occurred to me that what I thought was impossible or at least not doable was actually very doable – as a matter of fact I was doing it right there and then. By breaking down the more difficult task of finishing a bottle of beer into smaller and easier tasks of just drinking half a glass, I was able to drink more than I imagined I could.

This was achieved because I took small steps. What seemed insurmountable  when broken down into small bite-size steps becomes very achievable and attainable.

So no matter how large your project is, break it down, then break it down further, then work on those small tasks inching closer and closer to inebriation, I mean completion.

So that’s what I learned from drinking beer in Bolivia.  I also learned that I should have stopped at 5 bottles.

Tip: when someone offers you Chinese vitamins – do NOT take them.  They are not Chinese and they are NOT vitamins.

Right before the trip, I sold my MacBook air and have no other laptop and my only option was the Surface. So, I dragged along with me the freakishly amazing Type Keyboard – the touch keyboard is terrible (although cool). I couldn’t justify carrying the iPad just for movies and games since I can get games and movies on the Surface. So the night before my trip, I rented Bourne Legacy which downloaded overnight. I also downloaded a couple of games – Sudoku and some other quick games.

Renting the movie was pretty straight forward and it downloaded without a hitch. Games downloaded just fine too. The plane took off and I started doing some work – for the first time on the surface. Microsoft Word and Excel are freaking amazing. Nothing comes even close on the iPad. Full office capabilities with some nice “touch” niceties. I wrote 3 blog posts in Word and created 3 spreadsheets in Excel – simply amazing.

NOTE: So amazing that I had to blog about. I am writing this blog post in Word on Surface on the flight back.

On the trip out, after working for a couple of hours, I decided to take a break and watch the movie I rented. I switched to the Video app, tapped the movie, hit play and to my dismay – I got an error. I can’t remember what the error message was but it had to do with “inability to play video format”… WTF? I rented the movie from Microsoft. I am using Microsoft player on a Microsoft operating system on a Microsoft device. How is that possible? The only explanation I could think of is that the app needed internet access to verify the movie rental – but then that would be just stupid of Microsoft to require Internet access to play a rented movie… I restarted and messed around with different setting to no avail. It was FRUSTRATING and left me wishing I had the iPad. How could Microsoft screw up something so simple that Apple has been doing for several years (and doing it very well)???

While messing around in the video app, I saw an “open file” icon. I tapped it and navigated to the videos folder where I found my rented movie file. I clicked it to open it and voila, it started playing. WHAT!!!! This makes no sense. Very frustrating experience but at least I got to watch the movie and got some work done. It did waste an hour of my time but wasting an hour on a nine-hour flight is not really a bad thing.

Microsoft: this is inexcusable!!! If you want me to replace my laptop and iPad with Surface then get your shit together and make sure stuff works the way it is intended to. I am pretty nervous taking just my Surface on my next trip but overall I got done what I needed to get done.

So, yes Surface is MacBook Air + iPad + more but it is still missing something – the “it just works” feeling.

Once the Surface Pro comes out, I can run Visual Studio and linux in a VM and get real work (programming) done.

What do you think?  Can the Surface replace your laptop and iPad?

As a developer, I get to create my app once and it runs on all computers (and potentially tablets and phones).

As a user, I get to have all my favorite apps on all my machines with all the same features and release consistency and I pay for them once.

As Microsoft I get to make a ton of money and be relevant again and I don’t care what machine the user has or if they buy windows or something else because I am going to make money regardless.

I understand that Microsoft will have to port its underlying framework but they have already ported it to Windows RT so it can’t be that hard to port it to Mac & Linux. This is an insanely large and ambitious project which is why it needs a company like Microsoft to make it happen.

Get on it Microsoft. Can you get me a beta by September 2013?

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” ― Mother Teresa

Looking Back at 2012

The first thing that comes to mind is all the awesome travelling we did this year.  We went to Cancun for a week at the beginning of the year and later in the year we traveled throughout Europe for 2 weeks.  This was a bucket list item for me and was a fantastic time.  We visited London, Paris, Geneva, Florence, Rome and Amsterdam – it was an AMAZING trip.

Maged and I started our startup – we were lost for a while but after several pivots we figured out what needs to be done.  We released the best GTD app for windows – Taskorami.  It received and continues to receive great feedback and reviews from users and we are very proud of it.  It is still not a financial success though but we think that will change once Windows 8 takes off.

I am almost completely out of credit card debt – the debt I accumulated during my last startup experience.

I quit smoking.

I worked out a lot more than 2011 – 4 months of CrossFit, 3 month of Koko Fitness, soccer once a week, some racquetball here and there.

Looking Froward to 2013

This was not as simple as I expected and there was a lot of reflection and thinking involved. I tried to break it down into basic blocks/categories:

1. Work (day job)
2. Work (startup)
3. Wife
4. Friends & Family
5. Me Time
6. Sleep

A week contains 168 hours, so I decided to split it into 3 equal sections:

1. Work – 56 hours
2. Sleep – 56 hours
3. Everything else – 56 hours

Then I opened up a google calendar and tried to plan my days based on this criteria.  The first version of the calendar looked like this (click photo to enlarge):

This gave me the following weekly breakdown:

Of course this is not 100% accurate and I am not going to ABSOLUTELY STICK to it because we all know that life isn’t that predictable…  One day, I might not feel like working or an out of town friend could be visiting or I might just want to watch a movie or take my wife for a night out, etc…  This is meant as rough guide on how I should use my time to achieve my goals and I will continue to review it and tweak it through out the year.

Goals

Speaking of goals…  There are several goals I would love to achieve in 2013.  Some of them are personal and I won’t go into details about them but here are the BIG ones I would like to accomplish or at least start.

1. Get physically healthier – workout, soccer, eat better, etc…
2. Get mentally & spiritually healthier – meditate, yoga, read, etc…
3. Release a new version of our internal software @ my day job
4. Raise money for our startup – the goal is $500k
5. Community service
6. Other personal goals.

Each of these goals has several sub-goals and/or projects that need to be done to achieve them which I am capturing in Taskorami and no need to bore you with the details.

Thoughts

Dividing up my days and weeks made me realize how precious time is and how little of it we have.  If I were to live to 80, I only have about 16000 days left and I plan to make them count.

This leaves me with one possible new year resolution.  My new year resolution is to get into a startup accelerator and/or raise 250k or more for our new startup.

If you can’t see the form below, go here.

One app that comes to mind is Omnifocus.  It is a great task manager and GTD application and I used it for a long time.  The only problem is that it only runs on the Mac and I spend 90% of my time on Windows.  This makes it very hard to stay productive when my productivity app is on a different platform.  Omnifocus is so good that I was actually willing to suffer through the inefficiencies of 2 platforms.

This is exactly why we created Taskorami.  The best GTD app on Windows 8.  Our goal is to make Taskorami THE app that will make you want to switch to Windows 8.  Give it a try and if you think we achieved that goal, let us know publicly and if not, let us know privately :).

I am back at it again, but this time armed with wisdom, scars, experience and an amazing cofounder (Maged).  We started a few months ago with the goal of building a software company focused on productivity tools/apps/solutions – Divine Bytes.  We are not really sure where exactly we are heading.  We have an idea but we are not certain.  Oh, nothing is ever certain in startup-world.  Let me say that again – NOTHING IS CERTAIN.

Maged is a very productive person and is always on top of his stuff.  I am also a productivity nut and always trying to squeeze every second out of the day and optimize everything.  I also happen to be a huge fan of Getting Things Done (GTD).  We decided to create a Windows 8 GTD app because windows 8 was coming out in a few months and we figured why not get in early and ride that wave.  Taskorami was born.  Our goal is to build the BEST GTD application on Windows.  We are very happy with where we are now and are very passionate about Taskorami and want to see to it that it is the best GTD app on Windows.

Maged has never started a company before and although this is my second one, I am far (very very very far) from knowing what the hell I am doing.  But, hey, how hard can it be!!!  We decided to read startup books, lots of them.  We got an audible subscription and listened to books during our daily commute at 1.5x the speed.  Plus we read tons of blogs and get a ton articles from Hacker News.

This is not a comprehensive list of startup or business books but here is a list of the books we have read/heard so far:

• The Lean Startup
• The Startup Owner’s Manual
• The Art of the Start
• Business Model Generation
• Free: The Future of a Radical Price
• Free Marketing
• Do more faster
• Great by Choice
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Getting Things Done
• Rework
• Getting Real
• The 4-hour work week

This is the list of books on our “To Read” list:

• The Synergist
• Drive
• The personal MBA
• What books do you recommend?

We have also decide that in order to stay sane and healthy, we will alternate between “business” books and “non-business” books.  I already read Bossy Pants and planning to read America Again (Steven Colbert).

As you can imagine the amount of information in these books is staggering, but a lot of it is also common sense – or at least it seems so after you are done reading them.  You also start to see common themes between these books…  If you started a startup, starting a startup or planning to start a startup, you should definitely read these books (and many others)…

But if you are lazy and don’t feel like reading tens of books, here are some things to ask yourself before starting a startup:

1. Are you lazy?  If you are lazy do NOT start a startup.
2. Why are you building a startup?  Define why you want to do it.
3. Can you handle uncertainty?
4. Are you comfortable with failure?  Because you will fail.
5. Are you comfortable with more failure?  Because you will probably fail again.
6. Can you take criticism?  Because your product sucks
7. Is your wife/husband on-board?  You are going to need their support and understanding.  This one is CRUCIAL otherwise you are doomed.
8. Ask yourself “what is the worst that could happen?”.  Can you live with the answer?
9. How will you finance your startup?  Stock up on Ramen Noodles
10. Are you passionate about whatever it is you are building?  If you are not, it will show. Your customers will know it.  You will know it and you will not be happy.
11. How do you plan to make money?
12. Is anyone going to buy whatever it is you are selling?  Other than your mom and maybe a few of your friends.
13. Are you willing for your startup to consume every minute of your day -?  This is a tough one for me and I try to “turn off” specially when spending time with my wife – it’s not easy.

I hope these questions will help you decide whether to proceed or not and remember startups are not for everyone and there is no shame in admitting that.  The most important things to remember are:

• Family & friends come first otherwise it is all for nothing.  If your wife/husband wants to hang out the night before a big release.  You should hang out with her/him.  The release can wait.
• Aim for happiness because again if you are happy doing whatever it is you are doing then you are already successful and nothing else matters.

I find startups to be a lot of work but also very easy.  I find it easy because I love what I am doing and I am happy doing it.  I am happy working on it for 2 hours after an exhausting 10-hour work week.  I am happy working on it at 6 am on Saturday morning while my wife is sleeping.  I am happy working on it for 30 minutes while my wife takes a nap, showers or even walk the dog.

Improved Snapped View

You can now edit tasks directly in snapped view.  Simply tap/click on a task and start editing, then hit enter when you are done.  Here is a 10 second video on how to do that.

Improved Quick Add

You can now choose the project and context while adding the task.

Improved Project Status Changes

You can now change the status of the project without having to go to the review screen.  Click on one of your projects then click the appropriate status button.

Coming Soon…

Here are some upcoming features:

• Tasks with No Project association
• Automatic sync on every change
• Separate Inbox
• Filter to show on hold and completed projects