Why did we create Buckets?

Buckets.co co-founder Mike Smutka gives his firsthand account on how and why Buckets.co came to be.

It was the year 1991. I was 7 years old and the coolest thing that could ever happen, just in fact happened. My dad decided to bring home a Macintosh LC. Up to this point I had never really encountered a computer, but I took to it quickly. I remember seeing the sunrise that “night” while creating my first Sim City metropolis. Not long after the citizens of “Mikeville” turned against me and voted me out as mayor, I was off to 1st grade that day. Never would my life be the same. I was hooked.

Fast forward a couple years. By now i’ve become a certified Kid Pix artíst. That is when, in the words of Frank Costanza:

“I saw a provocative movie on cable TV. It was called The Net, with that girl from the bus.”

The very next day, I had to get online. So like any great hacker would, I went down to my local Barnes & Noble and got 100 Free Hours of AOL. At the time I probably had no idea that I was dodging 50 year old pedophiles while learning my way through this new world called the internet. I survived to tell this story.

As I got to be of high school age, I taught myself HTML and Perl. My greatest fete at the time was creating a Newsgroup spammer…err…“message sender”, that posted relevant Ebay auctions in targeted newsgroups, in hopes of earning a $5 sign-up bounty. Believe it or not it worked. It didn’t make me rich by any means, and I probably was in clear violation of every terms of service imaginable, but it opened my eyes to a new world.

To a world where the deck was reshuffled. A world where you didn’t have to conform to a set path. It was a world that literally had endless opportunity. And no Lloyd Christmas, I’m not talking about Aspen. I’m talking about the world that was the early internet.

It really was the wild wild west. Along the way, I would go on to start a video game review network, I played around in Shockwave gaming, but I settled in for the long haul when I became a consultant in the world of online advertising.

It didn’t take long before I had a healthy base of clients from all over the world. From DirecTV to ADT, many successful campaigns came out of our firm.

As a consultant, I needed a small army behind me to support the needs of our clients. So I went in search of the land of developers; and I found myself in Manila, Philippines. Some people come home from the Philippines with a wife, I came home with an office. Before we knew it, we had 25+ people working there, and a matching office in India to cover the missing timezone. We were literally going 24/7 . Which meant I was going 24/7. How on earth do you keep track of teams, literally around the world, across multiple timezones…and still sleep? This was the question that turned into my obsession.

The journey started with what at the time was the best Project Management system on the market. You may have heard of it? Outlook Express. Yes, embarrassing as it sounds, these were the humble origins of where it all began. I would literally write out everyone’s name in an email, and put a task next to their name. The next day would come…same thing. Ridiculous!

But…there was something to take away from it. By having a communal email, everyone on the team knew what everyone else was working on. There was no secrecy. It was like a birds-eye transparent view of the big picture. People could see how their task fit together with another person’s task. They could collaborate more easily, and could fill in gaps without coming to me. Maybe Outlook wasn’t so ridiculous? Okay, it was pretty bad — but there were good ideas to be had.

Next up for us was Basecamp. These guys wrote the playbook on “in the cloud” project management. The idea was simple, but brilliant. We had one-line tasks assigned, due dates dates for each (new concept at the time), and the kicker was that we could manipulate the software to drag these tasks into different “status” groups based what stage the task was in. Now technically that was not the correct use of Basecamp, but it didn’t matter because it was more than a great piece of software, it was a great tool. And if you make a great tool, then people can use that tool to get from point A to point B in the best way for them.

Basecamp wasn’t without its shortcomings. We couldn’t really expand upon the detail of a task for one thing. It also didn’t work well for managing multiple teams. I found myself forced into having multiple Basecamp accounts, and logging from one account into the other. Then getting confused which one I was in. You haven’t lived until you accidentally post confidential information of a client in the wrong Basecamp account!

But even in its faults, Basecamp taught me a lot. It taught me the need for simplicity. It taught me the importance of drag and drop. It taught me that a task needs more detail than a single line of text. And it really taught me how important it is to be able to easily manage multiple teams within the same interface.

In the years that followed, we found ourselves trying just about every task/project management tool that existed. We would spend some time in one, then go to the next . Each one continued to teach us important pieces of the puzzle:

• Wunderlist taught us the power of a simple checklist.
• Wrike showed us how useful 3rd party plug-ins can be.
• Evernote showed me how these systems can act as an extension of your brain “on the go”.
• BleamPM…**CRICKETS**…you’ve never heard of it. It was our first attempt at building a project management platform internally. It was not successful, but it taught me the most valuable lesson of all. The lesson that if I was going to tackle this challenge head-on, I couldn’t do it alone.

Enter stage left: Eric Greninger, my co-founder at Buckets. Eric was the creative director at our advertising agency. He saw first hand the struggles of team collaboration. He walked much of the same path with me, and was a natural fit to help lead the vision execution on our new platform. (And it didn’t hurt that while I was confined to drawing stick figures, Eric could build the beautiful UI’s that shaped and defined our product).

The team was set! The ideas were there!

…Okay, how we gonna make this thing?

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