Inside Small Business » Blog Archive » Start-up Lessons Learned: JustinTV Part 2

Start-up Lessons Learned: JustinTV Part 2

Inside Small Business | March 7th, 2008

Things take longer than you think. A lot longer.

I’m specifically thinking about two very different things: software development and deals. As an example of the former, I’ll give the example of rewriting Kiko. When we started rewriting, we thought it would take a month. It took six months. Obviously experience probably has something to do with the ability to produce accurate forecasts, however, we still routinely underestimate the time it takes to produce features. Now, when I ask Emmett how long something will take, I take whatever length of time he responds with and multiply it by three.

Deals also take a lot longer than I thought they would. Three months passed from the time we first started talking to our A round investors to the time we had the money in our bank. I don’t think this was anyone’s fault, but rather the nature of any interaction between busy people working on many projects. Still, it would have been nice to know about the time frame I could have expected at the onset.

You’d better be able to get along with your co-founders.

This probably seems fairly obvious. What was less obvious to me when I started out was the sheer number of hours I would end up spending with Emmett. For the past few months, while we were coding the second version of Kiko, we were working 10-15 hours a day every day. That is a lot of time to be around another person, no matter who he or she is, or how good of friends you are. Emmett and I have known each other since the second grade, and went to college together, and we still get on each other’s nerves. Still, my friends are constantly amazed that we can spend that much time together and not end up clubbing one another to death with a keyboard.

My only advice on this is not to sweat the small stuff. Don’t let a disagreement over the company name or the logo color turn into a huge argument. Most of the time, when someone wants the webpage to be blue, and you want it to be red, it really doesn’t matter very much at all.

Start simple, then go complex.

I’m not sure this applies to any fields at all outside of web development. Basically, when we built the first version of Kiko, we ended up building a hugely complex structure all at once. The second time we did it, we started out by building a very simple scaffolding, and then increasing the functionality piece by piece. I think Kiko is a testament to the second method being the better one.

Don’t forget to have fun.

Don’t drown in work. For a while, while we were working on the Kiko rewrite, we were working all the time. But right now we’re starting to try and do more recreational not-work stuff, and I think that’s been a huge boon to productivity. My advice is to try to do something physical: we play racquetball against Aaron and Steve from Reddit. Well, not so much “play” as “beat them every time.”

I’m sure this list will grow a lot in the future, but for now this is all the advice I have. Hopefully this list will be useful to at least one other beginner entrepreneur out there.

Justin Kan is the founder and president of justin.tv. Founded October 10, 2006, Justin.tv is the destination site for broadcasting and watching live video online while chatting with friends.