And the power of the internet – it’s just amazing!

P.S. it was good to meet your friend who joined us for the pre-screening event at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus a couple of weeks ago… the internet brings the world together in amazing was.

Cheers,
Ron

Everybody keep on keeping on. This is what makes us great!

BTW: I found this post while reading reviews on Earth Class Mail. I use it myself. It is an amazing service.

Ron – thanks for the notice – I am going to attend your premier in mountain view.

@Ron: Wow! Thanks so much for sharing your story – it’s a rare occasion to get to chat with someone like you who really has gone through the hard times and is making his dream come true… for the sixth time!

I’m sure your documentary series would be something extremely inspiring and educating to watch. Too bad I live in Finland, and can’t see the show… Well, I hope many others can still see it and be inspired by seeing you work out your business.

I whish you best of luck, and maybe on your seventh startup we’ll in fact be competing ;)

@Michael: Yeah, both of those reasons are important. As Ron said in his comment, you have to be persistent and fight through the hard times. It’s not easy.

man, i feel your pain. i have had many ideas that i have not acted on that could have made me a fortune (threadless, deviantart). two reasons why.

1) too much work
2) if i decide to actually do it i tell friends or family and they shot it down

so my advice is stop being so fucking lazy and buy new friends and family when you are rolling in the millions.

PEACE!

As the founder of Earth Class Mail I read your blog posting and lamented even more the fact that we had to overcome nearly insurpassable obstacles to get the business to be as successful as it now is. It was actually started in January, 2004, not 2005. For six months I couldn’t even get my closest business colleagues to say it was a worthy idea (n its manifestation at the time it clearly wasn’t ready for prime time). The magic inflection point was running into our CTO, Mike Miles, who by sheer luck happened to be the neighbor of a venture capitalist buddy of mine, and happened to have designed high-speed mail sorters for Siemens.

This was the “secret sauce event” but it still took two more years to get funded – we went without salaries for even longer than that to get the technology to the point that we could prove we’ve removed the risks of execution. When Mike helped me figure out how to make the automation happen in the summer of 2004 we spent two months working up patents and within a few months we started out on the fund-raising dog and pony tour which continues even today as we have to raise round after round to keep growing (you’re never done raising money in a venture-backed startup).

Let me tell you, it was anything but easy! People would argue from their perceptions versus fact that “but mail is going away” (it’s not, it’s increasing in volume every year), the technology would cost too much (we eventually figured out how to cost-reduce it and cemented it down with a huge portfolio of patents), and that no one would pay for it (well, proof’s in the pudding – we have customers in 130 countries now, from individuals to governments and F500 companies).

In fact the deal was not fully fundable in Portland, Oregon, where we started out… investors there were deathly afraid of “big idea” startups after dot-bomb decimated their nest egg accounts. We needed a game changer and decided to move to Seattle in Sept 2006 – this was the kindling point for getting serious financing and a serious shot at eventually becoming a major global enterprise. Seattle investors were used to startups like Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon, etc., and the startup investment community was better organized. We were on our way.

But this is my sixth startup, Jarkko, so I knew that it might take mortgaging my house to the hilt and selling off all my assets to endure the crawl across broken glass and barbed wire to get eough investors to believe it was an achievable business model that could be as big as the cell phone or search engine industries. Most people can’t endure this kind of personal risk, wouldn’t put their families through it (takes a supportive wife, too!).

Our journey has actually been chronicled in a uniques new reality/documentary TV show which airs on January 24th and runs for the entire season – 8 episodes in total. They’ve been following us for the past nine months, capturing the trials and tribulations of the process of actually executing an idea from early market introduction to major market traction and VC backing. See http://www.mojohd.com/press/view/23. For any of your readers in the Bay Area or Seattle I’d like to extend a personal invitation to come to our premier pre-screening at the Microsoft campuses: http://www.earthclassmail.com/media/email/startup_junkies_reminder_email.htm
I have a feeling you’ll really enjoy this show, Jarkko – perhaps it’ll inspire you to execute on the next idea that you conjure up.

On the one hand I’m glad you didn’t pursue your idea, Jarkko, or I could have had a competitor – but on the other hand I’d encourage you to pursue your ideas as far as you can take them. In all my startups the original idea was not fundable… it took some iterations to hit the business model that would get investor dollars, and succeed in the marketplace. Persistance and perseverence are the two ingredients you can’t leave out of the recipe.

Cheers,
Ron Wiener, CEO & Postmaster General
Earth Class Mail Corp. (www.earthclassmail.com)

But to answer your question I can tell what I do. It’s not a polished process but more of a gut feeling thing: I think about my ideas and play with them in my mind, and pretty soon I notice that some idea is occupying most of my brain – I just can’t stop thinking about it.

That’s when I decide that that’s the idea to run with.

Of course, as I told in this post, my gut feeling doesn’t always go right. I want to believe that in these 8 years I have learned something and become better at picking the ideas to implement. But just like you, I have to say that only time will tell.

So, I mostly go by gut feeling. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. What about you?