ihateit & The Founder Institute — Part V: Special Assignment

In our last episode, ihateit almost failed in getting the minimum marks to stay in the 2016 Founder Institute program. We knew that our name was going to be criticised, but not to the point where mentors would disqualify us for good. As for building a revenue model based on advertising, though one mentor viewed it as complete ludicrous, we were more concerned about testing our riskiest assumption: Can millennials be so delighted after venting on our app that they keep on coming back for more? Having not proven that yet, we felt that worrying about the name or revenue model was premature, which could potentially derail us from focusing on proving that single first assumption. All in all, one thing was for sure: We had a good goddamn special assignment on top of the normal one. Hoooorayyyyyyy…

Do You Believe In Magic?

Identify an expert in naming businesses, and conduct a one hour interview with this expert about the characteristics of a strong name for your particular company. Ask the expert for best practices in surveying techniques to determine the best name for a business. Using feedback from the interview, develop 10 alternative names for the company that are (1) short, (2) easy to remember and (3) have an available domain name. Register the domain for all ten company names, including logical misspellings. Research additional best practices for surveying about business names, and develop a survey to test your ten name candidates. Survey at least 600 respondents, and study the results to pick the final three name candidates. Review the final three candidates with the expert in naming, as well as try saying each name to at least 50 random people in person and ask for a quick response. Select a final name based on all of the feedback. Write a 10+ page PDF report using a branded company proposal template with your findings.

I won’t hide it, receiving that special assignment really pissed the shit out of me! I came up with the name ihateit for a very good reason: I’m really short tempered, I’m a true hater, and I hate stuff every day. Receiving that love letter didn’t really make me feel warm and fuzzy, and in that moment I would have really loved to have the ihateit app in my hands. Unfortunately, we didn’t have it yet, and the best place to vent my frustration was still the good ol’ Slack channel full of like-minded FI fellows, who, like me, had received a big fat special assignment.

Venting On Slack With My FI Peers.

That venting felt pretty good. I thought my assignment was painful, but man… some of those poor souls had really won the lottery. After a few minutes of venting, I felt a bit better, but not by much. I was still pretty angry, but there was nothing I could do about it, except going to bed. The next morning, I simply didn’t want to leave my bed. Work, the normal assignment, the special assignment, and on top of that, our MVP felt like it was light-years away.

But then, the strangest thing happened.

I always start my day by checking my phone for Facebook, Slack, or Medium updates, and this time, there was a lot of Slack messages. Most of them were from Team Grey. I couldn’t believe it. There were so many supportive messages. All those wonderful people asking me how they could help us with our special assignment. I felt so supported at that point that all of a sudden, my anger was gone. On the contrary, I felt more pumped than ever, and ready to see that through. I immediately responded to them on Slack and wrote them:

You guys have turned my hate into joy. Thank you SO MUCH.

As I was writing that line, I realized that this was what we should really try to achieve with ihateit. I’m the number one hater, but venting like a freak didn’t really get me anywhere. The last think I wanted was to stay in that shit mood. Deep down, what I ultimately wanted was to get a good time out of it. That personal experience changed everything, and we decided to change our blurb from Just say it to Turning hate into joy. Thank you so much Team Grey. Now, let’s tackle that good goddamn special assignment.

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Part IV: Getting Demolished ← P R E V I O U S

N E X T → Part VI: 2 Days To Interview 600+ People