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I was scrolling through the press we've received for remind101 and came across the first piece of media that picked up on us from the State News. I was on a 2 week camping trip with Jon & Glenn, about to go on the most ridiculous Mountain Biking excursion in Moab Utah I've ever done (16 Miles, Kona full suspension...a thing of beauty). 

My eyes widened as I read the article...holy cow, is this real? #cool. 

As I sit here a year later and reminisce about what we've went through with remind101 I realized 3 very simple things that my lack of experience and quite honestly, pride stopped me from doing.

1.     Make your product simple

2.     Talk to users 

3.     Solve a problem 

From the look on our  home page design, you'd think it was simple. However, when you got in the system users were often confused. This is an easy fix if I would have talked to users.  But we didn’t. I didn't take enough time to actually sit down and watch users go through the site. I wrote about my first lessons in California last week on how I've been doing user testing. It's not rocket science and I've read all the blogs that say how to do it, but I didn’t. Of course the most important lessons is to solve a problem. We've really had to buckle down and ask ourselves who's problem are we really solving. Turns out, we were making MORE work that solving a problem and providing value to our users. 

The good news is, I learned and we're fixing the issues. We've done a hefty amount of user testing and are honing in on the real problem we're solving. If you are about to start a company, don't make the same mistake I did and follow 123! 

I never wrote a blog post talking about what I learned at SXSW. No no no, I don't mean specific tactics like what time to tweet, product iteration, how to raise money etc... If you want to hear that, see this or this.  I'm talking about intangible learning. The type of learning that gives you perspective, clarity and focus. That's what I got out of SXSW. 

Allow me to explain. SXSW is overwhelming. Internet stars unite to learn and build.  In their presense, half way through the experieince I started to get a little down on myself. I was surrounded by such great success. I felt inclined to step back and say, "man what have we really accomplished?" My life's work (thus far) is remind101. We've done fine, but by no means have we seen the type of success I want yet (but we will!) (: 

That resignation setting in while surrounded by such amazing people gave me a lot of perspective on what's REALLY important. Not the blogs about raising money, or if Chrome will beat out Mozilla. What's important is focusing on making our users happy. What's important is implementing a viable business model that makes money so we can grow. What's important is staying true to our values and saving students from missing assignments. I don't think I ever lost sight of these things, but that doesn't mean SXSW wasn't a nice wake up call.

The experience gave me a great deal of focus and clarity. A few days after, our business model hit me like a brick. We are executing it as we speak. I wrote this post because I'm a strong believer in sharing mistakes and lessons learned. What's the lesson in this? Focus on what's really important, rather than comparing yourselves to others. Especially when they are totally unrelated. 

Thanks to @CAgarland for checking this