I'm Sean Johnson, the founder of Snooty Monkey.

This is Monkey Opus, the Snooty Monkey Blog.

  1. 4 months ago

    Snooty Monkey: Lessons Learned

    Snooty Monkey was started in 2008 as an experiment. The focus of the experiment? Can a CTO / Lead Developer / Product Manager type (that’s me by the way) create a hybrid micro-ISV / consultancy company? One that purposely stays small (just me? me and 2?), while serving a niche client base (bootstrapped entrepreneurs) with a niche service (temporary technical co-founder). Can doing this afford me the time to experiment with software products of my own without the traditional startup pressure that each one be a hit or the whole company fails?

    Unlike a good experiment, where things are tested one at a time and variables are controlled, by necessity this experiment had lots of variables and was chaotic at times. The grand experiment is far from over, in many ways it’s just begun, but some of these experiments have now run their course, their questions have been answered and the results are ready for review and confirmation by the rest of the scientific community. It’s time to refocus the lab on new questions.

    So, what has been tested so far with Snooty Monkey? What were the hypotheses? And what can now be concluded?

    • Experiment: Can I support my family without a “job”?
    • Hypothesis: Yes.
    • Conclusion: Yes. I’ve worked for myself since early 2009. I have yet to take the plunge and hire an employee, but Snooty Monkey is the main source of income for a few contractors (I call them friends though).
    • Experiment: Is there a market for a freelance “temporary: technical co-founder / CTO / lead developer / product manager” in the bootstrapped entrepreneur community?
    • Hypothesis: Yes.
    • Conclusion: I can say in no uncertain terms that many non-technical founders of bootstrapped startups will be willing to partner for some or all of the technical aspects of their business so they can focus on what they do best, eventually replacing Snooty Monkey with their own technical team when the business finds product/market fit and needs to scale. If you have the skills, drive, maturity and experience to make a good technical co-founder, there is a market for you services for cash rather than equity. In these 3 years, about 80% of the work and about 90% of the revenue for Snooty Monkey has more or less fit the experimental description. At times I’ve done work for big companies (mostly sub-contracted through interactive marketing firms) and for venture-funded startups, and almost without fail, this work has been less rewarding and fulfilling for me and less successful for the company. At the end of the day, I’m a technical entrepreneur. If I’m doing something else for you, you’re probably not getting as much bang for your buck as you should and I’m probably not having as much fun as I should.
    • Experiment: Can I pick and chose the projects I want to work with to fit my technical interests?
    • Hypothesis: Yes.
    • Conclusion: Yes. When I left the Biggest Blue Java shop, I made a promise to myself not to work with technology I don’t like. I’ve built many Ruby on Rails and Objective-C products, and I’ve got projects with Erlang, CoffeeScript and even Prolog in them, all of which I really enjoy. The couple of side trips into C++, Flash, Flex, and Java have been few, brief and mostly self-inflicted (Ouch, I forgot how much that sucks! Note to future self…).
    • Experiment: Can I pick and chose the projects I want to work with to fit my interests?
    • Hypothesis: Yes.
    • Conclusion: Mostly no. My main interests are self-improvement, philosophy, literature, sports, alternative software development technology, and education. I’ve had some luck building products in the field of sports, but other than that, I’ve not had much interest aligning my interests with my bootstrapped entrepreneurs’ product needs. I’ve built many branded marketing apps. I’ve built scientific apps, quality assurance apps, customer service apps, healthcare apps, etc. All of these have been very interesting in their own right and I’ve learned a ton with each one. But when I work on my own products as Snooty Monkey, I have a perfect fit with my own interests (Snooty Monkey’s two current products are in self-improvement and sports). This kind of alignment is a powerful force that should not be undervalued.
    • Experiment: Can I mantain my own high ethical standards while contracting my time to others?
    • Hypothesis: Yes.
    • Conclusion: Mostly yes. I’ve been extremely impressed with the character of the entrepreneurs I’ve been fortunate to work with. I regularly hear and read about startup horror stories starring villainous and greedy entrepreneurs. But the entrepreneurs I’ve met and agreed to work with have been some of the most upstanding people I know. They’ve been impeccably fair to me and to their customers. I’m close to suggesting a hypothesis that entrepreneurs are better people on average than society at large would lead you to expect. The one exception to charting my own ethical course has been in the area of software patents. Unfortunately I’ve not seen eye to eye with some of my very best clients about the nature, value and ethical standing of the broken US patent system. The work I’ve done in just the last 3 years has led to over a dozen patent applications, many of which I directly helped formulate (Snooty Monkey does work for hire so those patents belong to the clients). I’m not proud of this. It is a case of my deeds not living up to my thoughts and words. I’m considering declining to directly participate in software patent activities in the future. This could cost Snooty Monkey valuable business.

    In looking back over these questions, I find it a bit difficult to remember how scary and unknown they seemed at the time, I can’t help but be pleased at how things have turned out.

    The risk I now face is that I become complacent. I’m my own boss, I have a decent income, and I get to work with great people, my team of contractors and bootstrapped entrepreneurs, who want nothing more than for me to succeed. After all, me succeeding is the only way my clients get to succeed. There are no politics, no ulterior motives, and no bureaucracy. It’s the business of software in its purest form. Just them and their idea and me and my keyboard.

    In some sense then, I’ve become too successful at what I do now, which is helping others build software companies without taking or before taking investment. This is now an 80-hour-a-week job for me. I could do nothing else for the foreseeable future. But it’s not what I set out to do. It was all a means to an end. That end being to build my own bootstrapped software company. And not just any software company. I want to create software products that help me improve my life, and if all goes well, help others improve their lives in the same way.

    I’m ready to admit that I’m no longer making any progress on this. I’ve done some really amazing and cool things since starting Snooty Monkey. I wrote a book, I created some great products, I’ve even helped create what are now some great companies. But I need to get this train back on the original track. I need to better balance the two parts of my business. I need to manage my goals, my time, my tasks and my attention to achieve more. I need to improve myself. I need to be better.

    I owe this to myself, I owe it to my family, I owe it to Snooty Monkey’s contractors, clients and current and future customers.

    During the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with Andrew (one of said contractors) on the seeds of a new plan. This plan is going to germinate and change and grow (or shrivel and die) here in the open on this blog. Get your popcorn ready! It’s going to be an exciting show.