I have been doing a daily blog to track the return of sports since my startup is in sports and sports are toast right now - https://wherearesports.com/
Feeling a kindred spirit with all my startup friends in the travel, hospitality and live event space.
We started ScoreStream from zero to last month where we hit 2.5 million uniques. I would echo a number of things that others have said but the key things for us were:
1. Doing things that don't scale. We have a community of fans following local scores and we wanted to get people to crowdsource scores. Initially that meant us seeding the community and then finding ways to onboard folks to scoring games.
2. There was an existing community of people who cared about local sports and with the death of newspapers we thought there was a chance to get them to crowdsource and share the information with others.
3. We made a lot of tools that created incentives for folks to score games and share that information with others.
4. We did a lot of partnerships with potential consumers of the score data which made an incentive for folks to share scores to highlight their teams.
Ultimately one thing that we thought that would motivate people was money, fame and narcissism and since we didn't have a lot of money we focused on the other two.
It's been fun seeing it grow and there are a ton of other good thoughts from others in this post. Thanks for posting...great to see others experience.
I like the sentiment. When I started my first true startup, after being an executive in a high profile one, we put our own capital in and then literally 6 months later, we conceived triplets spontaneously while having a 2 year old son.
While I was terrified of what would happen with the startup and the family, there was no question to me that we had to stay on the path. That startup ultimately was sold in a good outcome and I am now two startups past that. My kids are now 11 and 9*3. They know that I work in startups and many times they visit the office and hangout.
While I have some regrets, like flying to Europe every 2-3 weeks post acquisition for over a year, I want my kids to know that I do what I do because I love it and it is how I put bread on the table. While I don't wish my life choices on them, I want them to know that being the master of their own destiny is a choice their dad has fully embraced whatever they decide.
All of that said, even when I was flying to Europe, I made it a point to move heaven and earth to be home with them every single weekend during that period of time and was actively and highly engaged while at home. While you can choose to work hard, you also have to choose to be a great father and role model IMO.
Its pretty fascinating to think that in the US there will now be really only one GSM choice until 4G is ubiquitous. Only one carrier where you can use unlocked phones etc.
I was just in Shenzen looking at factories and one of the interesting things that I realized was that while they spent time making our product according to our designs, they also have to innovate on how to actually make the product in a factory. There is actual innovation in the production process and it would seem that we don't want to entirely lose that over time.