Child Entrepreneurship and Parenting in the MVP and Lean Startup Age

If you know me, you’ve probably heard me proclaim that I’m a late bloomer numerous times. From childhood sports, to dating, to a vocation, to becoming a parent, heck, even to adult sports. And while I have loved playing soccer and mountain biking at the best of my abilities in my middle age, the adult sport of my choice is entrepreneurship. I’m not alone in this apparently. We live in an age where there are more startups than at any other time in human history and it’s just launching, or starting to scale. Sure, there will be more bubbles and all that, but we’ve all caught the bug already. If you have access to the internet and some perseverance, it’s impossibly difficult not to make money one way or another. Couple that with stories of overnight millionaires, businesses, products and entire industries built at hackathons, and companies that only exist in the cloud but are valued at billions of dollars, it’s no wonder a lot of Americans think they have a chance at creating the next unicorn or at bare minimum, working for themselves creating products for customers from the comfort of their own beachfront bungalow.

I knew that the youth are even more opportunistic due to their disregard for risk and years they’ve been told they’re precious snowflakes :) — or more realistically, they’ve seen with their own eyes a rapidly changing world where career stability and security is hard to come by but where personalized lifestyles and schedules can allow people to produce some of their best work and enjoy life at the same time — but I didn’t know how driven and adaptive they could be, until I received what I thought was a typical domain purchase request email from another ‘tech dad’ father who works ‘on the net’. But before I share it below, I wanted to note that as a late bloomer, I’ve also been late to entrepreneurship. I mean, I’ve had a web services company for years and I’ve always talked about ‘productizing’ my business, but I had been completely blind to the startup culture that had sprung up all around me. I’ll admit, my ego had prevented me from seeing a lot of it. While I was out trying to figure out the secret to success all by my hardheaded lonesome, I missed out on several important things: mentorship, free resources, and community.

I’ll save the details of these for another post, but one of the things/people I recently learned about was Eric Ries and Lean Startup. I wouldn’t have found out about this or many other must-read business bibles simply googling. The real gateway or catalyst for me had been when I discovered This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis just over a year ago. From the first episode, I could not get enough of the rush I felt listening to successful entrepreneurs teaching me what I had been doing right, but more importantly, wrong all these years. So much so, I made it out to the LaunchScale Conference (with complimentary tickets, thanks Jason!) a couple months ago, but which really deserves its own post as well. Needless to say, I had just recently listened to what could be the best episode of TWIST evah! I do caution you though, that both I and the show’s host, have professed many a times, that this show, no, that show, or any one of these, are the best ones ever. Suffice it to say, he was dropping knowledge like Galileo dropped the orange. Ok, I’ll stop. Which brings us to the point of this whole thing. I get this tender email the other day:

Subject: Interested in a domain you own Body:

Hi, I am trying to reach Alexander Khanukov. I am interested in a domain you own — *********.com. My son wants to start a game blog and thought of this as a name. I wanted to see if you are interested in selling us your domain name.

Please let me know, I know it would really make my son’s day if we are able to get the name he came up with.

Thank you for your consideration,

***** *********

Isn’t that just the sweetest thing you’ve ever heard? On the other hand, I thought, what do I say to that? I’m going to destroy this kid’s dreams. Great. But then all of the lessons I’ve been learning listening to TWIST and the subsequent other podcasts and books I’ve consumed in the last year poured out. There’s no doubt many of the people who’ve helped educate me on these things had read and/or used the Lean Startup method, because the terminology used in the startup world — MVP, KPI, continuous deployment, pivot — is as ubiquitous as startups themselves. So, I tried as best to respond without sounding like a Grinch:

*****,

Thanks for contacting us. I’ve sent out a few of these emails in the past myself, but this one draws at the heartstrings, especially for me, as I recently had twin boys. Unfortunately, the domain, behind the scenes, is tied to a number of test environments and is also a registered LLC for several projects our firm is doing, so simply, the amount of work and cost alone in moving would be tremendous and we just can’t part with it.

With that said, having thought of many great names myself that weren’t available or worse, just being sat on, and being involved in the startup world, I’ve learned from the masters that the domain is secondary to the product and that the alternative ones such as play*********.com or get*********.com or whatever, carry just as much weight if not more, especially when the product is great. Which is again, awesome, that your son is already designing products and concepts! I see you’re in tech so I hope I don’t sound like I’m ‘splainin’ stuff either! So again, sorry we can’t part with the domain, at least not for the next year or so, but I do hope your son is able to see his goals materialize, and perhaps make us an offer we can’t refuse! :)

Sincerely,

Alex Khanukov

I leaned back, kind of half-smirking at my Godfather reference, but I still felt like the person grabbing the toy from the poor kid’s hands in the Walmart stampede videos from this recent Black Friday. A day or two later I received a response, and it made my day! Enjoy:

Hi Alex,

Thank you for your response. I appreciate it. I totally understand that the domain is tied up. I was hoping you were just holding it and not using. It is very exciting and inspiring to see your child have these ideas that they want to bring forward and make a reality. This is all part of the experience and he is already brainstorming a new name. I love his tenacity.

I really appreciate your recommendations and after sharing with my son, has triggered more ideas for his site. Really, thank you for your interest and depth in your response. I know you will have some of these great experiences with your twins. It is awesome. To see their brains reaching beyond their years and ideas becoming a product is just mind blowing. He is really excited about this venture.

He has definitely gotten my entrepreneurial spirit, plus more. I also hope his ideas take off and he is able to reach out to you with a better offer. Till then, thank you for your consideration. Wish you and your family a great holiday season.

Happy Holidays everyone!