FMYI | For My Innovation

One of the goals I had when creating FMYI was to grow the business while offering worklife balance for our team members. This seems paradoxical and insane. But if you think about what a startup is all about, it’s putting ideas into practice. And the only way to come up with ideas or think strategically is to make sure your brain isn’t fatigued. Worklife isn’t just a nice to have, it’s essential to coming up with new ideas and tackling all the challenges that come your way. You need to be able to take a step back constantly to evaluate where the startup is headed in order to make needed course corrections along the way.

The irony of this blog post is I put it off in order to spend time with my family. Our second child was born a week before our FMYI 6.0 release, which presented some challenges. I touched on this topic briefly in the The Oregonian recently. I want to live a full life with family and friends, while contributing to the economy by helping to create jobs in a sustainable way. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive, but it is a challenge to balance them.

So how do you enable worklife balance in a fast paced startup environment? Fortunately, technology makes so much possible these days. A lot of attention is on real time tools like live videoconferencing, but most of your day isn’t meetings (and if it is, maybe it’s time to work somewhere else =) ). It’s emails and “water-cooler” chats. This allows you to reflect on what’s being said, rather than the immediate reaction required at meetings. Most of the FMYI team members were telecommuters in the early days and many still are telecommuters, and we rely heavily on our own collaboration system to make everything run smoothly. Similar to the phenomenon of Facebook where you can stay up to date with what your old friends are doing in between phone calls and seeing each other face to face, browsing your FMYI site keeps you up to date on what’s going on — but at work.

In the end, it’s all about the quality of your work, not how many hours you’re investing, and whether you’re in the office or not. This applies to startups and big organizations (definitely check out Best Buy’s successes with results-oriented work). We’ve found that offering your team worklife options like telecommuting, flexible schedules, fewer meetings, family leaves, and involving friends and families with events and work opportunities can help. Of course, there are times when balance is difficult due to new projects. But it’s the new projects that enable you to grow and provide worklife benefits.

Next up in my series on starting a business: leveraging technology and social media. In the meantime, have fun enjoying your own worklife balance with friends and family!
-Justin

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The idea to tackle workplace collaboration in a whole different way started back in the early days of the blink tag back in the mid 90s. I was an intern at Nike working as an intranet developer and immediately realized that there had to be a better way of collaborating beyond custom developed static intranet sites. Throughout my career at Nike, I worked with and in numerous countries, divisions, and projects which underscored the urgency of better collaborative tools. In my mind, the experience could be more friendly, easy, interactive, and community-oriented. And I had a suspicion that potential customers would feel the same way.

So when I realized it was time to start FMYI, I followed these three rules to grow the business and go after my dreams:

1. Have a point of view.
2. Know your customer.
3. Build your product/service around your point of view and the customer’s needs.

The key is the balance between your point of view of how you’re going to improve things and what the customer is telling you their need. First you need a foundation and launching pad which you can run by potential customers to refine the product/service. And ideally you can initially fund the startup through client revenue and a few credit cards.

From the beginning, based on my observations of workplace collaboration across multiple sectors, FMYI’s point of view has been:

1. “No headcount software” approach to lower the barrier to entry.
2. Design, usability, social media look and feel to drive user adoption.
3. Empower teams to work anywhere with essential workflow functionality.
4. Quality, free support from collaboration specialists for change agents.
5. Platform to inspire innovation and sustainability.

And over the past five years, we’ve constantly refined our service through customer feedback to grow the business, all the while keeping true to our point of view. The POV is what gets people interested, and our adaptability to customers’ needs that help keep things growing. We’ve been growing with the flow…

Coming up next: sustainability and startups.

-Justin

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So you have an idea. And some plans, energy, people interested in helping out, and a healthy dose of optimism. What next? How do you go from dreaming to making it a reality?

The very first decision is to start going after customers or investors. Not only is it hard to do both well at the same time, but strategically there’s a difference. Do you relish having control over your creative idea and the autonomy in commercializing it, or would you rather put the priority on scaling quickly with the help of others to run the show?

For me, it came down to what I felt most comfortable doing. I love talking with potential clients, understanding how they operate, and building solutions that address their needs. It was a no brainer to go after customers first, rather than investors. And I felt like we had a different take on collaboration software that we wanted to stay focused on and grow through client input.

So five and a half years ago I started FMYI in a coffee shop. I interviewed Eric, our first employee, over a cup of joe. Later I found out he kept wondering when he was going to see the office. There wasn’t one. Eric spent the first week working out of my wife’s store having to answer questions about her handbags and baskets. We laugh about it now (he’s better at leading our tech team than hawking housewares), but it was consistent with our mission to focus all of our resources on the product and what customers want.

Our team has grown FMYI through client revenue, which has made the journey more of a walk than a sprint. But if you’re passionate about your idea, and a laser-like focus on what people want, you’ll have what it takes to take on a marathon.

“Are you ready bootstraps? Start walkin’!“

Coming up in my next blog post: how to grow.

-Justin

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