To read the Green Pants Chronicles from the beginning, click here.
Act 1: Inception
“Call Me Back, I’ve Got the Next Idea.”
While history will not commemorate these words in the same way that it did with “Mr. Watson, come here…”, it was a seminal moment in our trajectory. We’d just killed the BuzzBox idea, and I pinged Brad back 5 minutes later with “call me back, I’ve got the next idea.”
The idea was to platform integrations between eCommerce systems and email marketing systems so that it was super simple to transform data into targeted marketing. I’d been exposed to the concept of Recency, Frequency, Monetization while in business school, commonly known as RFM modeling. I knew packaged integrations would make the hard work of integrating platforms much, much simpler. I knew that this would work.
Good Idea, Terrible Name
My working name for the idea was RFMConnex, which I’m a little horrified of today (did I really come up with a name that sucky?). We’ve taken a lot of good natured ribbing over the name Windsor Circle (which I’ll explain in a later post) but oh, man, was it better than RFMConnex.
Moving Quickly to the Next Idea
All kidding aside, this moment was critical to the journey for a non-obvious reason. After several months of work on BuzzBox, it would have been easy to just roll over and be done with it when we killed the idea. The drive to build something, however, was stronger than the idea itself, so moving from one idea to the next was important.
This played out later in our journey as well, because as we kept steering towards Product-Market-Fit, we had to keep morphing the idea, dropping what wasn’t working, and shifting towards what was working.
We didn’t realize it at the time, but the ability to let go was critical to moving forward. (Come to think of it, the writing of these Green Pants Chronicles is probably an act of letting go of the idea that has consumed me for the last 8 years).
The Next 10,000 Hours 