For those who missed it, here are the earlier parts of the story:

• The Story of Synapp.io, Part 1
• The Story of Synapp.io, Part 2

Flashpoint

So Mike’s new idea from Part 2 was to apply to Flashpoint, a startup accelerator here in Atlanta led by Merrick Furst. Apparently, to hear Mike tell it, Merrick was present at the Startup Weekend where Mike pitched the original idea for Synapp.io, and Merrick chased him down to suggest that he apply to Flashpoint. My thoughts were, “hm, ok, sure, why not?” I didn’t know much about the Flashpoint way of doing things (Startup Engineering), about Merrick personally, or really much about startups at all. I know that another of my fraternity brothers Rob had gone through Flashpoint, so maybe it was valuable.

So Mike put together an application, and then we had an interview. I know that both Merrick and Sig Mosley were in the interview with us asking questions, and that there were others, but some of the details are somewhat unclear 3 years out. What I do remember are two things that Merrick said. First was after Mike pitched the idea: “We will use big data to derive actionable insights to help small and medium businesses optimize their digital marketing.” Sounds cool, I guess. It was definitely enough to convince me to join, after all. Merrick’s response, as near as I can recall, was “that sounds compelling and plausible, which is how I know that you’re almost certainly wrong.” Hm. That was unexpected. (Merrick is good at “unexpected,” I would come to learn.)

The second thing about the interview that stood out happened during an exchange concerning my work history. At one point, I had worked for a small local company (it’s bigger now) building retail analytics software. I had some technical disagreements with the CEO that I felt pretty passionately about, and decided that it would be best if I resigned and went elsewhere. As it turns out, that was one of the things that pushed Flashpoint to accept us into the program. Huh?

If you’ve met Mike, you may have guessed why that was a plus for us. Mike enjoys the gift of presence when he enters a room. When he pitches, you want to believe him. When he debates, his opponent starts to doubt all his own premises. And when he says “this is the way we should go,” the natural response is to follow. What Merrick knew is that while that is undoubtedly a gift when running a well-defined business, it can be a liability when discovering a business because you start to believe your own story. Flashpoint is many things, but some of the most important things you learn there are techniques to fight your almost unlimited capacity for self-deception.

So why was my resignation from my old employer important? Because it meant that I had some chance of actually standing up to Mike if the data contradicted his story. This doesn’t mean that my ideas are less wrong than Mike’s, it just means that all the cognitive errors I make (or anyone makes) aren’t 100% correlated with his. So if we both agree an idea is bad, we probably won’t consider it, and if we agree that it’s good, it has a chance of being good (and should proceed carefully). If we disagree, it’s time to stop and think, because one of us is definitely wrong (and quite often, both of us are). It turns out in hindsight that most of the progress we actually made at Synapp.io, particularly at Flashpoint, came from those moments of disagreement.

So that was the application process. As you may have guessed, we got in, without much of any idea what to expect. What did we find? A difficult, sometimes harrowing journey that was nonetheless invaluable in moving Synapp.io from a pitch to a product to a business. But you’ll have to wait till next time to hear that story.

For those who missed it: The Story of Synapp.io, Part 1

Starting up our startup

When Mike and I hitched our wagons together to form Synapp.io, Mike suggested an equity split of 75/25 in Mike’s favor. Not having any experience in such things, I sought advice from the Google as to how much equity a technical co-founder should receive. Obviously this is a contentious topic, and unfortunately there are no clear answers. What I found when I searched, however, was a nifty flowchart on Nathan Hurst’s blog. Following the chart, depending on exactly how I answered questions, it looked like 20-30% was about right, so I accepted the offer, and we got to work.

I had read Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, and I figured that Mike had already done the necessary customer discovery, so we set out to make a minimum viable product (MVP) based around a few key ideas:

1. Customers would “link” their email service provider (i.e. ESP — e.g. Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc.) accounts with us
2. We would look at what they’re doing and tell them how to improve (“actionable insights”) using all the stuff their accounts tell us about them (“big data”)
3. ???
4. Profit!

Let’s build stuff!

So we set out to build a multi-ESP optimization platform. (If we’d actually been insightful at that stage, it would have been clear to us that we just gave up the “M” in “MVP” — and probably the “P” as well, since we weren’t 100% sure how to charge.) At the time, we had a couple of other folks helping us part-time: my fraternity brother who initially did startup weekend, and another friend of his who was going to do the front-end of the platform. We had no money, so we offered to figure out an equity compensation at some time in the future. (It turns out, when you don’t pay people, they have to spend most of their time doing things for people who do pay them, so the other 2 eventually had to drift away.)

Now Mike had a business before Synapp.io that was tangentially related called DataValidation. What they did is remove undeliverable email addresses from databases, reducing bounce rates and getting more email in the inbox. Seemed pretty simple, and as a developer, I figured I’d attack the problem as our first “optimization.” I will say that, while it’s not rocket science, email list cleaning is not trivial, either, especially at scale.

Baby steps in the Atlanta startup scene

So in early 2013, we were in build-build-build mode, meeting at coffee shops, Regus business lounges, and wherever else we could meet. Eventually Mike mentioned that there was this thing called Startup Gauntlet at the Atlanta Technology and Development Center (ATDC, a local startup accelerator/incubator) that we should check out. Basically we got up in front of people and said what we were doing, and were told we didn’t know what we were doing (fair point, and it was the same for everyone). We did a few customer interviews as a result of the Gauntlet, but eventually the 7am start time was too much for Mike and me (we both live a bit north of the city), so we dropped out, thinking that we’d discovered something (but not knowing exactly what we’d discovered).

So Mike’s first idea of a “startup thing” (the Gauntlet) we could do didn’t quite lead to riches and glory. He had one more idea that he’d been sitting on since startup weekend that he’d bring up to me next that made all the difference….

Background

I’m a geek. Some computer hardware design, but for most of my career software. I always thought I’d be the “individual contributor” who brought in so much value that he became rich and retired early to do some as-yet-unspecified Important Work that didn’t pay much (or anything). That was around 1996, when I first graduated from Georgia Tech.

A couple of jobs and a Master’s degree later, I ended up in a startup doing software for computer hardware design. I was a “Senior Systems Engineer,” but that was mainly due to title inflation at startups. I discovered that I liked the startup vibe. I liked knowing that my work was appreciated and made a huge impact on the trajectory of the company.

I did not like running out of money and getting laid off. Nor did I particularly enjoy failing at making a go of the technology of the business on my own. And I especially didn’t like going back into corporate America, into a career track that terminated as a Corporate Software Engineer. Ick.

So I worked a couple of other jobs. I read The Four Hour Work Week. I wanted to build a business now, not just work in one. I started speaking at (software) conferences and wrote a book. I quit my job and became a consultant/trainer, hoping to find that golden idea that would make everything come together. I wrote another couple of books. It was the fall of 2012, and the “pipeline” of contracts started to dry up. Was I going to need another job?

Enter the Business Guy

Out of the blue, I get a call from a fraternity brother who had just done a Startup Weekend. He’s also a geek, but he’s a geek with 4 kids (I only have 2) and a steady job, so he couldn’t take the idea further. He offered to introduce me to his partner Mike for the weekend, where they took 2nd place despite being a team of 2.5 (their other programmer left). They had a business model. It was lean and validated. Sounded great, so we decided to get together and I’d hear him out.

Mike came in with an idea for marketing optimization. Not automation, but optimization. The idea being, lots of folks are automating their digital marketing but have no idea whether they’re even moving in the right direction. Mike had run a test, and it said he should be able to get $20k revenue per month. I did the (very simple) math — assuming a 50/50 split (it wasn’t) and immediate $20k revenue per month (it wasn’t), I’d have plenty to live on from day one. So Spring of 2013, we formed an LLC and started work on this thing which we called Synapp.io (like synapse, but with applications, and the .com was taken).

Stay tuned for what happened when the idea met reality….