TempMine

Temporary staffing done right.

Archive for May, 2008

Stops and starts

May 26th, 2008

A little while ago, I fired up a few terminals, Textmate, and a browser. After nearly a week, it was time to get back to writing code. It’s been strange to take such a long break, as I was roaring ahead prior to break.

The break came in the form of our first child, my son, hitting the scene. All I’ve done since then computer-wise has been process and upload photos and update his blog. Well, he’s now 5 days old and comfortably sleeping on my wife’s chest. Even through the sleep deprivation and emotional roller coaster of his birth, I’ve still been thinking about TempMine. Now, with us happily home, and him in a lull between feedings, it just felt like time to start coding again and it feels good!

This break has also had another great benefit, it’s reassured me how absolutely rocking this project is. How great it is after all the projects I’ve been a part of, to be working on something that will truly improve many, many people’s lives. Something they will love. Something they will rely on daily. Something that will change the lives of their families. Something that is good.

What I also love about this project is the few people who know what we’re really doing, keep sharing conversations they’ve had with all sorts of random folks – potential clients and users. Conversations that inevitably come down to their summing up to me how this person needs TempMine, how they don’t even know how much pain they’re suffering because it’s just the way things are. That is a good place to be.

So what is it that they need that we’re going to provide? Not quite yet, not quite yet. But I will say this, we are going to crush the temporary staffing industry. It is fundamentally broken and we aim to fix it in. I want to write so much more about it, but I best get back to coding. The little one will be awake before I know it.

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Posted in start-ups

Tags: Temp workers

Something new

May 15th, 2008

I’ve been a part of 5 start-ups since 2000. The first was a B2C play that worked it’s way through $30M while becoming a B2B solution. That one was kinda of neat, but we had a hard time convincing folks that they needed us. Not a good place to be in, but great experience.

Shortly after that I spent some time working on a personal publishing tool. The theory was people / companies wanted sites that didn’t look like boring templates that were as easy to maintain as a blog. How could we lose? Easily apparently. Again, kinda neat, but didn’t go anywhere.

Later I found that what I really needed was a job, so I got one. Then I got the itch and started something new on the side. It was just what the world needed – another social networking site. This was was focussed on readers. Imagine book clubs that 1. were online, 2. were dynamic communities, not hacked up forums (are you hearing this BN.com?), and 3. weren’t trying to shove new books down your throat. The real play there was in mining the data to trend consumer purchase direction and cluster it until the cows came home. Maybe someone else will do it.

Then I worked on a photo-sharing site with a friend on the West Coast. Being on the East Coast, collaberating wasn’t as easy as I’d have hoped. Oh, and it’s a really busy space and the thought of a gorilla in the space adding the differentiating features that we were running with, in like a weekend, and then shooting us right out of the air … yeah, that wasn’t very appetizing. But it was in Django, so I got to see what the other side of the fence is like. I still prefer Rails.

So here I sit. TempMine v 1.0 is coming along. There a few of us working on it. We’re going after a real pain point, a real market, a really good thing. This one should be interesting.

Rather than do this all in super steath mode (how about only mildly stealth?), I’m going to blog it from start to finish. Maybe it’ll help me with my sanity, maybe it’ll push me closer to the edge. In any case, it’ll at least be good read if you’ve finished the rest of the internet.