Why not do the real thing?

Finding my own “real” thing.

This was the question left hanging in the air between him and me, like the smoke between our cigarettes. It was a common enough question for me to hear, especially at a convention filled with startups, but it still felt like I was squaring off in some old western movie, ready to show him how fast I could draw.

You see, I founded a mobile strategy, design, and engineering services company, meaning that we teach, consult, and execute on multiple products for multiple people every day for contractual agreements. The level of spit and polish and worry free execution our service provides demands compensation commensurate of that expertise, but we deliver what we promise. In short, my firm helps people execute.

So as you can see, I’m proud of what we do and I have no fear about telling anyone that, even the super successful startup guy smugly standing in front of me, asking me: “Why not do the real thing?”.

I hope you’ll note, the word “real” in that sentence has no “air quotes” around it. That’s because I’m fully certain he thought this way was the real way (tm) and thus the only way to do business respectably on this planet.

And in the moment between his question and my answer, I wanted to tell him about all the product envy and gritty failures from rapid growth and market forces, the lessons we learned, of how we created our hard won culture and own it with no strings attached. How we grew and learned and iterated and executed just like him.

But mostly, I told him that we like the work and like creating our own environment, or something equally not awesome or inspiring.

If I could go back now and answer the same question, I would explain it to him like this:

My company has helped dozens of customers go from idea to launch to market, and successfully iterate on the feedback they received. I get to work with so many smart people every day, both in my own company and external to my company, that a single thing just doesn’t seem attractive to me, and I can’t imagine knowing everything I know right now by helping only a single idea launch.

Because of those successes, we understand what expert talent looks like, and what sort of culture is needed to foster that. We’re now working on ways we can work with local institutions to offer training to recent graduates, and get them up to speed in as little as 12 weeks, ready to contribute to their first real product because we see opportunity to provide real value to our customers there, as well as to all stakeholders involved.

This is only one of our initiatives for expansion and growth. All without any strings attached to our decision making power.

So we are successfully providing a product (our services) to a market with real customers (who are paying us), creating value for them (our unique value proposition), creating salaries with benefits (to employees who have families), and iterating on how we provide that product while discovering and implementing other new ways we can help our customers, always seeking better product/market fit.

At least, that’s what I would have told him was the “real” thing, right? I mean, isn't this what our precious techno-blogo-spherical-cyclical-news-feeds tell us is the “real” thing?

Isn't the real thing happy customers who are paying money to a company filled with excited, happy employees run by motivated, happy leaders who want to make it a better company for all the stakeholders, which include customers and employees?

Now, looking back, it makes me wonder what kind of company he meant by that word — real — without the air quotes.

But I’m glad he asked.