Welcome to the Magical World of Computers

Starting a technology company is harder than it looks. Maybe that's an understatement. Starting a technology company is a crazy endeavor that requires everything that you've got to give and a bag of chips. Starting a tech company is like giving birth to a child; you get drunk one night and before you know it you're a parent all of a sudden. Turns out we didn't really know what we were getting into. In fact, we didn't even have a cluetrain.

We're almost a year into it now, and one of the big lessons so far has been finding out how much we have yet to learn. And we learn every time we take on a new project. We've started to accumulate some of the ideas that have helped us grow over the past year. For every mistake we make, or goal we accomplish, we collect another piece of a bigger philosophy that is only starting to unfold.

Starting Small

I'm proud to say that we've started to develop an authentic approach to technology, and a better understanding of the challenges we face as a company. Now the question I ask is who else is facing the same challenges? And how can we learn from each other? Is our approach awesome? Are there other smart people out there doing things the way we are? Or perhaps doing them better?

Finding other companies like us has been really hard. We've been doing our best to get out into the community and start meeting and talking with other people, and it's already paying off. We're currently developing relationships with a few other small web companies, mostly in Toronto, who share our priorities, challenges, and hopes, and having them around is really exciting. Every time we get to talking and sharing stories about our experiences, we feel emboldened and awake and hungrier to do better work. Sometimes we talk about what worked well, other times we talk about our failures. Sometime we talk about our fears, our hopes, and our pet-peeves.

We still need to find more people to talk to. We can't be insulated. We realize how much we have to learn. I've tried many times to write a blog post encompassing our identity and purpose. Those are the hardest questions in the world to answer. Most of the time those posts end up in the recycling bin.

Get at Me

What I'm hoping to do is break that huge task into multiple, smaller tasks. My hope is by sharing the small lessons that we've started to accumulate, and writing about how we do business, these posts will reach other companies like us via the magic of the internets. If the people who find us like what they're reading, and agree, then I hope they'll take a moment to get in touch. It could be on twitter, skype, a meet-up, conference call, email, IM, other blog posts, fax, snail mail, whatever. The point is that we keep trading ideas and experiences back and forth we will all benefit as a result.

It won't be an easy task, and it's not going to happen overnight. But we'll get there.

Here's the first nugget: Website Minimalism in the Age of Too-Muchie