More than a living

Part of being happy at work is finding ways to sustain your personal growth. One way to ensure you’re sustaining your personal growth is finding a mentor.

Ideally, that mentor has some sort of relationship with you. However, when push-comes-to-shove, perceived mentors or role models work equally well.

Guy Kawasaki tends to fall in this role model camp for me.

And as such, it’s not very often that I can compare myself to Guy without feeling like a complete liar. But, after reading his post, By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09, I realize that–thanks to Kumquat–we have some actual similarities with Guy and Truemors.

To wit:

1) 0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).

We wrote 0 business plans for Kumquat, as well! Just a few hours spent jabbering in a coffee shop.

2) 0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

We don’t even know any venture capitalists!

3) 7.5. 7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.

We’ve spent 5 times that amount of time! Take that, Guy!

4) $4,500. The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work. Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.

We’ve spent $4,500, as well! And then some! With a remote team!

And last, but not least, the one we’re really gunning for…

22) 2. A mere 2 days went by before Truemors was called the “worst website ever” by the Inquirer.