My typical day running a startup
Info: Style Guidance is basically a Q&A site for fashion and style. So basically style questions, social shopping and decision help. If you are a techie, you’ll probably hate our current design, but you aren’t the target audience(and yes we are already working on a redesign)
My day begins at 10 am, and ends at 2:30 am. That’s 16.5 hours, of being up.
For those 16.5 hours I’m mostly working. The only times I’m physically away from the computer:
- 30 minute break to eat a full supper(steak etc) in front of the TV. Give me a little time to unwind. I use one of those grilles to cook, so I just throw the meat on the grille, and go work until I hear the ding.
- 1 hour break to work out. I kinda let myself go over the last couple of months(haven’t worked out since September), so getting back in shape is my New Year’s resolution. I follow the P90X program, since it’s a good one, and doesn’t require going to the gym. All you need is some weights and a pull up bar.
- 1 hour break to watch Daily Show/Colbert Report. I know I can watch this online, but by that time my brain is more or less fried, so I gotta unwind in a more comfy chair.
That’s 14 hours of work. Poor me right? Not really, I’m actually enjoying what I’m doing, so I don’t even notice it as the day flies by. You gotta have 3 things:
- Food: I mostly stick to a sandwhich in the morning, a steak dinner at night, and a ton of junk food in the middle. Usually I run out of junk food by Monday(I shop Sundays), so Tuesday-Saturday I’m on a “diet”. The key is to drink lots of water. On my desk right now there are 12 water bottles, which accumulated since yesterday.
- Good Music: Gotta have music, I have music running 24/7. Grooveshark is awesome for that.
- Routine: the key is to have routine; mine is as follows:
- get up at 10, check everything that accumulated over night, blast out a few messages/emails
- ~10:30 shower/brush teeth, and prepare myself a sandwhich or some scrambled eggs
- 11-2 work non-stop, things popup here and there write an email, ask a few questions, answer a few questions, blast off a few emails, promote the site. etc.
- 2-3, turn on mixergy and listen to that while working(at 70%). Lots of interesting stuff, I already changed a lot of things on the site/business plan, based on things I’ve heard on there. Sometimes I pop into the comments to ask a question.
- 3-7, work non-stop at full blast.
- 7-7:30 relax, go watch TV, eat a steak dinner(grilles make it easy to cook)
- 7:30-8:30 work a little bit more
- 8:30-10:00 work out (sometimes its 43 minutes, others its 1:30)
- 10:00-11:00 work some more
- 11:00-12:00 Daily Show/Colbert Report. Although I do check on the site during the commercial break.
- 12:00-02:30 Work on the actual code/features and the redesign for the next version of the site.
- Obviously in between, I do things like check HN, Techcrunch, Reddit, but it’s mostly tiny 5 minute breaks to see what’s going on in the world.
My weekends on the other hand are a lot more relaxed. That’s why I created a promotion around getting my users more active on the weekends.(they get a bonus on the weekends for asking/answering questions).
This way I can take it easy on the weekends and the users can pick up the slack.
Don’t get me wrong, I still work on the weekends, but thanks to our users, I don’t really have to. On the weekends, I usually put in 8-10 hours a day. But I don’t really have to.
Has all this effort paid off? You tell me: we’ll be celebrating the 2 month anniversary on Monday, but we are now a top 25K site in USA according to Alexa, we have PR5 according to Google, we had 26K visitors this month and are now getting 500 people a day from SEO.
Sure it’s not much, but we aren’t a lolcat site, so it’s a little bit harder to grow. But there is plenty of time, you don’t grow a site overnight, it takes a long time to do it.
