Level 1 – Nothing
I was comfortable working for The Man and spent my leisure time playing the role of Obedient Consumer.  I was content with punching in/punching out and then consuming shit.  Ahh, life was bliss!  Why worry when you can buy shit and be merry?!

Level 2 – Dreaming
The Man was becoming a drag and as an Obedient Consumer, I started desiring even more bigger shit to consume.  I began to think, “Hey I can do and buy more than this!”, and start telling myself and my friends, “If I only had an idea!”

Level 3 – Ideaing
And just like that, a superfantastic idea smacks me in the head.  I immediately get to work on a business plan with grand schemes of ruling the world with the assumption that people will fall over each other trying to hand me $20 million in funding.  I start telling everyone and their moms, “Dude, I have this awesome idea*!”

Level 4 – Executing
Having quickly learned than a business plan with an idea attached to it is meaningless, I take a new approach – build first, then ask for money (”Brilliant!” – Jung Lee).  With a new, more plausible idea, I strapped on my boots and put together a functional prototype and a working team.  In person I proudly claim, “I’m bootstrapping right now” but in my mind I continue “So can you please spare some change?”

From here on, I can only recount the fairy tales and legends, that have been passed on through generations of bloggers, of the few that reached the next levels of entrepreneuriness.

Level 5 – Funding (optional)
Through sheer will and determination and/or just knowing the right people, you’ve managed to score capital.  Not because the idea was frickin amazing but more likely because you’ve accumulated enough experience points/revenues to be taken seriously.  Great job…but you’re not out of the woods just yet.  Keep truckin baby!

Oh but if you can skip this level entirely, well what do you want, a cookie?!  But seriously dude/tte, that’s awesome!

Level 6 – Exiting
Congratulations.  You’ve been acquired or somehow frickin IPO’d.  Great success…ya bastard!  And I say that seething with envy.  The next option seems to be to go straight to Level 7 or go back to one of the previous levels to start over.  But at this point, I don’t really give a crap.

Level 7 – Investing
Who’s in control now, yatch?!  Yeah son, that’s right.

So yeah, I don’t really know what goes on in the brain during Level 7.  I mean, I know.  But I don’t know.

The end.

*seescout.com – World of Warcraft meets Google Maps. Control an avatar in a 3D version of Google Maps. Explore NY, interact with businesses, take on side-quests and compete with your friends.  Advertising, casual games and virtual currency, how could you go wrong?!

Update: Made Level 5 optional…cuz really, who needs it?! (Thanks Jason)

I got the chance to sit down with a few investors to discuss the viability of this little site called qrisper.com.  While I’m still new to all this, I was confident in my pitch and my value proposition.  Not once did I think I would make the newbie mistake of boldly claiming that I have no direct competition.  Man, the incredulous looks I got when I did say that…classic!

I weaved myself out of that little situation by explaining that yes, there are tons of Q&A sites out there but none of them aggregates answers…at least not yet.  They couldn’t argue with that.  But then they hit me with the apparently common investor hullabaloo of, “How will you protect yourself from competitors that have millions in funding that will most definitely copy your idea, which by the way is super duper fantastic?!” (Ed. – quote has been paraphrased and embellished for effect).

I guess that is something to be wary of but nothing that keeps me awake at nights.  Because that decision – to copy another company’s idea to make your own – is not an easy one to make.  Some things to consider before making such a decision:

• Where are you in terms of your own product development?
• How flexible are you with your product roadmap?
• How easily can you modify your existing infrastructure and user behavior?
• Are you willing to completely scrap your existing methodology, if necessary?
• Are you willing to take the risk of rebuilding your entire infrastructure, if necessary?
• Do you require board approval to completely change course?

My take is that it’s actually hardest for those well-funded startups to scrap their idea to chase another (endowment effect).  A small, nimble startup could come out of nowhere and try to run with your idea.  But that’s just called competition.  Those guys face the same hurdles that you do in building a brand/userbase.  And the big guys, they’re too busy actually making money (or trying not to lose money) to worry about things like innovation.

Bottom line – yes there is always a risk of copycats.  So what?  Just keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t fester and act accordingly.  Also note that this response won’t help you get funding.

To the uninitiated, that sounds like a tremendous compliment.  And while I truly appreciated the sentiment, I had fast discovered that taking that first step was merely a formality and, for the most part, completely meaningless.   Because once you’re over on the other side, you quickly realize that there are tens of thousands of people that are just as determined, if not more so, and they’re all a lot smarter than you.  They all took that first step months, nay years ago, and are already way ahead of you in terms of building the next great thing and pursuing that same pool of funding.

So to summarize, being an entrepreneur isn’t glamorous, it does nothing for your health and you will most likely fail.  Yet for some reason, I want nothing more than to keep going and prove everyone wrong.  That researcher who said that entrepreneurs aren’t risk tolerant, just overconfident in their abilities…think he had something there.

Slightly off-tangent but this is probably why the U.S. has such a history of entrepreneurship.  We’re instilled into our identity starting from grade school that we can accomplish anything, as long as we put our minds to it and ignore all of the naysayers.  And if you believe this article, that could also explain why Americans have the highest rate of depression in the world.

Anyway, to end on a pseudo-positive note, last night I dreamt that I was climbing a mountain covered in poop.  Each time I went to grab onto something, I got nothing but a palm full of sticky, brown poop.  It was the largest amount of poop that I ever handled in my dreams, ever.  Touching poop = $$$ (in Korea anyway).  Looks like I have a mountain of cash headed my way!  Yay!

But before I even got to the implementation bit, I had to ask myself, was I asking too much from the users?  First, they would have to answer a question.  Then if they were further inclined to add validation to their answer, they could upload an image.  Well, after having gone through the process, I can say with a clear conscious (and with not a bit of biasity) that uploading images onto qrisper.com was more fun than I expected.

There are similar features in Facebook where you can become a fan of certain things and add a jumble of images to your profile.  But I never felt a connection with those random images that quickly became clutter.  On qrisper, I feel like there is an emotional attachment , where the images you upload are tied to the opinions you provide.  And that adds a level of enjoyment to uploading images that I haven’t felt in other sites.  That concludes the self-promotional portion of this program.

Syke!  Another feature that has just become available is the ability to choose the 5 primary topics that you’re interested in and customize the top navigation bar.

Finally, I had been looking into getting a Linode to host qrisper.  However, I quickly learned that maintaining my own server is something that I’m not ready to tackle at this moment.  So Host Nexus, here we come!

My understanding of how Aardvard differentiates themselves from their competitors is that when you ask a question, Vark will dive into the profiles of your friends and their friends to find people that will most likely be able to answer your question within 5 minutes.  John Battelle’s spidey sense went off the charts for this company.  Mine is going off too…albeit for different reasons.

The first assumption that Vard is making is that the answers you get from your social graph are better than anything else available to you.  Two questions: why is it better and what if your social graph isn’t that big or it’s actually very big?  Example: Ashton Kutcher (with 2 million followers) and Joe Bloggs (with 126 followers) asks for recommendations for some really good mutter paneer in NYC.  Will either of them get a better answer than searching Google for “best mutter paneer nyc”?  (I’d recommend Haveli)

Basically your answers are limited to the extent of your social graph.  So the more popular you are, the better answers you’ll get.  Well, I’m screwed.

The second assumption is that their answers are so good that you’re willing to wait, on average, 5 minutes to get an answer.  5 minutes in internet time is like 5 billion years.  If I’m on the street with a bunch of friends, looking for a good Indian restaurant, here’s the conversation that I’m likely to have.

Me: Hey guys, I’m really jonesing for some peas and cheese in a savory curry.  Do you know a place?
Friend 1: Nope.
Friend 2: Nope but I’m on aardvark.com!  Let’s ask there.
Friend 3: Isn’t it Vark.com?
Me: I think it’s aardvark…isn’t it?
Friend 1: It’s aardvard like Haarvard.
Friend 2: Dude, you’re useless.  I just sent the question…just have to wait 5 minutes for an answer.
Friend 3: What?! 5 minutes?! Dude, 5 minutes is like 5 billion years in internet time!
Me: Yeah and don’t you only have like 50 followers on Twitter?
Friend 1: That’s you dumbass.
Friend 2: Better than asking qrisper.com.  What do you have like 50 users now?
Friend 3: Oooh burnnn!
Me: I haven’t launched yet!
Friend 1: I’ll try Hunch while we’re waiting.  I hear they’re good at helping us make decisions.
Friend 2: Yeah, only after answering questions like, “Are you menstruating right now?”
Me: Screw this. (types mutter paneer nyc into Google/Yelp/Urbanspoon/etc., gets an answer in 0.09 seconds).  Let’s go here.
(5 minutes later)
Friend 2: Hey, vardvark’s saying we should go to where we are now.
Me: (muttering) I haven’t launched yet is all…

While I can see people using Vark to complement a web search for answers, it won’t replace it.  The criticisms for sites like Yahoo Answers are valid, but intentionally limiting your answer pool to your personal social network isn’t the answer either.  Targeted social networks, such as Stack Overflow and Chowhound are doing a better job of providing answers.  But they aren’t the be all, end all.  That would be qrisper.

The overall gist of the feedback was that the colors sucked and that the previous landing page was confusing/not informative.  So I totally switched up the color scheme and added more content to the landing page.  Opening up the page layout allowed me to play with a different navigation flow to and from the homepage.  Here’s what the site looked like a few weeks ago.

One major difference now is the open availability of users’ answers across the site and more emphasis on user activity.  Will this draw more users to sign up?  Let’s hope so.

A couple of other things that have been keeping me busy:

• Finally figured out how to add the question text into the url using mod rewrite.  Downside to that was I lost all of the SEO juice I had already accumulated because I didn’t bother with a redirect.
• Created a star reward system for users – now users can get stars for being active qrispers, hooray!
• Added Facebook Comments but immediately removed them due to performance issues (debating whether or not I should create my own comments).
• Users can now change their answers.

Coming up next: photo galleries, personalized categories and Linode!

This may just be semantics but I think all of this sudden interest in real-time data is misplaced.  I might be stating the obvious here but real-time data has nothing to do with time.  It’s about published static content vs. conversational dynamic content.  Whereas Google search is about information created by humans, real-time search is about human thought.

Umm…so what?  Well, conversations aren’t just happening in Twitter.  Think of all of the chats, forum discussions and blog comments that are permeating from every orifice of the internet.  If you could aggregate and somehow filter all of those thoughts into easily consumable thoughtlets, well that would be like having a search engine for the internet’s stream-of-consciousness.  We’ll call it…The Matrix.

As soon as I left the office in my previous life, I ceased to care about the ordeals within the 9 to 5 (partly aided by my refusal to carry a Blackberry).  But now, from the minute I wake up till my second or third round of REM sleep, I just want to qrisper all the time, qrisper all the time, qrisper all the ti~ime~!

Problem was, amidst the stress and planning involved in creating my own business, and without the weight of other people’s money propping me up (yet), I was enjoying this life a little too much.  I mean, to create a product using only your brain and a few appendages, that’s some hot stuff right there!  If I wasn’t tempted by modern, materialistic goods, I’d be a carpenter right now.  But alas, I like shiny things.

Anyway, as soon as I became cognizant of the monster that I had become, all it took was a little self-control and a bit more planning to transform from qrisper mode into whisper mode, if you get what I mean, wink wink.

Yeah that was pretty gross.

Anyway, back to the qnas.  What?  You didn’t know that there was a rush to become the first Yahoo Answers (because, really, Yahoo just can’t be the first of anything these days).  Well, in addition to Mahalo Answers, Aardvark and Answers.com, there’s Blurtit, Answerbag, Hunch, Sodahead and probably dozens more.  Like holy crap it’s a crowded arena!

With so many sites competing to solve the same problem, you’d think they could do a better job of answering questions.  Two overarching issues with most of these sites are

• Lack of question management (leading to the same questions being asked repeatedly)
• Focusing on the question-asking aspect as the social engine

This is why I like Hunch’s approach of utilizing machine learning to answer questions.  Too bad their user experience sucks.

As for the latter issue, qna sites would fare better by following Yelp’s model and creating a community of answerers.  Because no one cares about your question.  But I’ll gladly tell you what I think about your question.

A better experience can be had with question and answer sites.  Answers are the key.

The problem is that not everyone thinks so methodically when making decisions.  Hunch would make sense for when making life-changing decisions like relocating to a foreign country or buying a house in an unfamiliar location.  Here Hunch has the potential of asking questions that you might not necessarily come up with in your own research.

However, the fundamental issue is that Hunch ignores the emotional aspect of decision making.  Hunch makes the assumption that people think things through rationally before making decsions.  We humans are not rational beings.  Sometimes it’s just a gut feeling.  Sometimes it’s just the time of day.

After taking Hunch for spin, “Wow, I know answering all of these questions will eventually lead me to a much more rewarding answer!” was not what I was thinking.  It was more like, “Why am I wasting my time populating Hunch’s databases by answering these useless questions?  Is this really helping me make a decision?”

Yes.  Hunch.  Fail.