The Launch

An Epic Tale of Misery & Triumph in the Face of Many Weasels

At 12:01 am Friday, my scrappy little team shipped a simple cloud-based word processor called Volta. It has no shortage of bugs and not all the features are operational, but it’s out there now. It’s a thing! It exists!

So as I recover from a long-anticipated night of serious alcohol consumption, I’m faced with some hard decisions I’ve consciously avoided in lieu of just building the product. But to get a better picture of where to go from here, I think it’s good to look back on how we got here…

Four years ago, if you would have asked me if I could ever see myself at the helm of a Silicon Valley tech startup, I would have thought you were a lunatic. Back then I was a recent Creative Writing MFA grad, dreaming of becoming the next literary whatever and working for Disney Interactive as a low-level… it’s not important. Suffice to say my vision of the future more or less involved simply spending my days on auto-pilot while working on my writing at night, and for a while that’s kind of how it was.

A few months in however, something unexpected happened. Out of what I now see as a pure need to fit in with my co-workers, I actually started learning about what they do. Here and there, I started designing product features, doing PM work, learning about metrics and KPI’s and frameworks and user funnels and all kinds of other tech crap. I took on more and more work, a couple years flew by and next thing I knew, I was managing the PnL for a multi-million dollar tech operation. It was strange for a guy like me, but fun and of course the learning experience of a lifetime.

Then one day my studio got spun off to another company, and I was faced with three options: 1) go to work for the new company, 2) look for a new job, or 3) go off on my own, maybe get back to work on my writing. Had I been a more practical man, I probably would have gone to work for the new company. I am not a practical man, thus, I chose number 3.

During this period, as I was working on my novel I found myself jumping from word processor to word processor, just trying to find one that clicked. For every new app I tried I kept thinking, ‘I wish it did this. I wished it didn’t do that. I wish I could write with the word processor that Doogie Howser had.’ And you can guess where it went from there.

I don’t know what the hell gave me the idea that I could design a word processor or start a company of my own. Over the years I had done some graphic design work to help pay the bills, but nothing full time, and I had never gone to school for it. I had the Disney thing, but that was totally different than what I was setting out to do here. But like I said, I am who I am, so I started floating the idea. I started playing around with Balsamiq Mockups, mapping out some user flows, talking to writers and engineers and investors, and doing a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember. I found a co-founder who could code, and suddenly, I was the CEO of Writerboy, a company who’s sole mission is to make the writing and publishing process more enjoyable. Nice, yeah?

Of course I had no idea what I was doing, and I knew that at the time, but I also thought who gives a shit? Just do it, man! “Now is the winter of our goddamned discontent!”

Knowing what I know now, I think that not knowing what I was doing was the only way this could have ever happened, but we’ll get to that later…

Fast forward another year and a half, and my life is a complete disaster! Nearly every single thing that could possibly go wrong went wrong in ways far worse than I could have ever imagined. I lost my co-founder early on (no one’s fault, just divergent views of the product). I probably should have got out then, but for whatever reason I kept at it, trying to piecemeal together any help I could get from whoever wanted to give it. Sometimes I made progress; most of the time I didn’t. Engineer after engineer flaked out on me. I ran out of money. I was working 80 hour weeks in addition to driving Uber, which barely got me by. People threw up in my car. I was in a severe state of depression, and I had back problems. And to top if all off, my mother died!

I never once considered giving up.

For a good stretch there it felt like my whole life was a wrecked car, inching along the side of the freeway — the driver refusing to accept the reality of the situation. And still, I kept going. Maybe it was because I wanted to pay back my investors. Maybe it was all the shit jobs I’d worked over the course of my life and the dire hatred I’d developed for working for other people. But mostly it was my godsend of a wife, who stuck by my side and supported me through every blunder and setback, and never once judged me. If she ever lost confidence in me, she never faltered in hiding it. For that more than anything, I could never repay her. In any case, no matter what happened, I always found myself working harder on Volta than I had ever worked on any writing project, and I never once considered giving up!

Eventually, the hard times started to pay off. I found some dependable engineers. I even taught myself a little code. I ramped up my design knowledge, I got some truly invaluable help from the fine folks at Tradecraft, and I put it all back into the product. And after enough frustration and suffering and misery, it started coming together. Remember we were building a word processor, not the next Halo. It was completely doable. One day you could open a new document, and it looked good, and it felt good. Then came word count, and so on. That brings us to now.

Despite the death of my mother, who was one of the most powerful women to ever walk this earth and undoubtedly the main source of my thick head and propensity for pressing on however foolishly, and telling all the weasels of the world to go fuck themselves, I was lucky, at least in terms of the project. And this was in large part because I was ignorant. As strange as it sounds, my ignorance is what kept me from killing this thing in its infancy.

I’m not saying this gives anyone license to go Gung ho about whatever ridiculous idea they’re completely unqualified to pursue, or destroying their lives in the process of trying to bring it to fruition. What I am saying is that you shouldn’t let your experience work against you, which I realize is easier said than done and probably one of the reasons why I’m still struggling to make it as a writer. But you know what? Here I am, writing this post on a word processor that I invented! I know my mom would have been proud of that. And no matter what happens with the product or my career, no one will ever be able to take that away from me.

So mom, wherever you are, you know as well as I that we‘re nowhere near out of this crazy shit, but if there was one thing you taught me that actually stuck, it was to just keep plugging away, so that’s what I’m doing.

Don’t let the weasels get to you!

So this I say to all you dreamers out there who want to chase down that… thing, whether it’s opening your own business, writing a novel, or going after that girl/boy who seems out of your league: I can’t tell you it’s gonna work out because statistically it’s not — no matter how much of an edge you think you have or how much you want it. Life just doesn’t work that way. There are too many variables, and there’s no real secret to any of it despite all the nonsense you hear from Hollywood or places like Est. But knowing that isn’t going to get you any closer to your dream. Just hang in there, keep plugging away, and don’t let the weasels get to you. That’s all you can do. I’ll be rooting for you! And there are a lot of us out there. Good luck!

Special thanks to Clay, Nick, Max, Brian, and Dad, to Meredito for editing, to Zac Halbert for throwing me into the pool, to Andrew Sarkarati for his infinite wisdom and support, to my wife for dealing with my neurosis with the highest forms of grace and compassion, and to my mother, Stephanie ‘Steffy,’ a truly implacable force from which epic tales are forged. We did it, momma! We launched!