Two years ago today, on Wednesday, July 25th, 2012 I published a blog post that officially launched Seed-DB. I had been working at it since March 2012, and though it wasn’t 100% ready to launch I was able to push it out the door.
Since launch, Seed-DB has grown from >1300 companies to >4000 companies, from >100 accelerators to >200 accelerators, and from >$1billion to >$5billion in funding tracked.
What does that mean for Seed-DB today? I just checked Google Analytics to check the stats. In the last six months Seed-DB saw:
- >34,000 user sessions from:
- >20,000 different users
- >118k pageviews
- >5minutes spent per session
- 59% of users were new
I’ve spent the last two years constantly adding more data, more features, talking to founders of companies and accelerators, and even a reporter or two. It’s been an interesting journey and I wanted to share some reflections on what I’ve learned.
#1: You CAN teach yourself to code in your spare time
Seed-DB was the first web application I had ever built. It was the first time I’d:
- used Python for something other than a simple script
- really used a DVCS (specifically Mercurial/Bitbucket)
- installed/customized a Bootstrap theme
- implemented jQuery plugins
- and many more similar new tools…
While I had an engineering background, it was in aerospace/nuclear and even the projects I coded for my classes (in Matlab!) were over ten years in my past. I had picked up an O’Reilly book on Python and had created a few Python scripts the previous year, but without a project I didn’t really learn very much. By following example code, carefully reading error codes, reading more documentation and asking questions on StackOverflow, I learned everything I needed to build Seed-DB.
Creating something new from scratch is fun, and can keep you motivated despite mountains of problems. As long as you’re willing to do the hard work, it is possible to teach yourself to code. Think of something that you really want to create and just start building it.
#2: You CAN thread the needle
I just looked up and found that my very first commit to the Seed-DB codebase happened on March 27, 2012, so I built Seed-DB in my nights/weekends over the course of just four months. And I didn’t think it was really ready to launch. (I had to keep reminding myself of Reid Hoffman’s famous advice.)
But I was rushing to complete Seed-DB in time for some fairly big deadlines. I live in London and the London 2012 Olympics started on July 27th, so I committed to myself that I would launch Seed-DB before then. (My wife and I had family in town for it and tickets to a bunch of events… I HAD to launch before the Olympics started.) Launching on the 25th was literally the last day I wanted to launch, so I just made it in time.
Just after seeing Jess Ennis, Mo Farah, and Greg Rutherford all win gold for Team GB! (My wife is just a few weeks away from giving birth.)
Another more important deadline is that my daughter was due in early September. I had a ton of travel for work between the end of the Olympics and her due date, so there wasn’t a realistic option to launch later. (She arrived a couple weeks early, so this was an even wiser choice in hindsight!)
Me and my daughter (at a few months old)
Needless to say, launching created a lot of new non-coding work: responding to entrepreneurs and program founders, congratulations and criticism, and fixing bugs. But somehow the launch was the biggest needle to thread, and once that was done everything else does seem easier.
I learned that it IS possible to thread the needle between what may seem like impossible obstacles.
#3: You CAN do more than you think
In the course of a month, I launched Seed-DB, had an amazing time at the 2012 Olympics, traveled all over Central/Eastern Europe for work, and watched my daughter being born. After launching Seed-DB, I was getting… quite a lot of feedback.
What I tried to do was commit to spending 30–60 minutes a day (often while my daughter was sleeping and my wife was napping) responding to queries, implementing small features, and making progress on bigger features (like the Seed-DB Investor Graph). I found that was absolutely key: I didn’t have to complete a feature or fully respond to e-mail each day: I just needed to make a little progress each day.
#4: Building useful things brings you opportunities
People respect people that build interesting things, particularly in the world of startups. In my case, I started building Seed-DB out of frustration around a couple of job opportunities that had fallen through. I realized that I needed to do much more work that I initially thought to drive my career to where I wanted it to go, and that I needed to build something.
By creating Seed-DB, I suddenly had lots of people approaching me… and interesting people that I wanted to know! It led to lots of interesting job opportunities, too, and directly led to me getting hired by Techstars this summer.
One of the big principles at Techstars is to Give First. At the time I built Seed-DB, I hated that founders were making important decisions based on anecdotal data and what programs the press chose to cover, instead of researching from data on a full directory of programs. In hindsight I see that by building the site, I was doing my part to give first by giving entrepreneurs an honest, data-driven view into accelerators around the world.
Giving first generates goodwill; building something generates respect. When I launched Seed-DB I had no idea how powerful these two forces were, but they have totally changed my career and life.
Jed Christiansen 