Next month, we have been working on Helishopter for a whole year (next month I will also be 30 years old, but thats material for a completely different post). There have been a really basic version of the site online now for a few months, and It’s really interesting to see how people start to use it. However, I don’t expect it to really start to take off until we reach our “minimum viable product” milestone which currently have a deadline in March.

One year is a long time though, so what have we been doing all this time if we don’t even have a minimum viable product yet?

Well, when we started working on the project we decided to be very ambitious and build a platform with a long-term strategy and we had some very specific goals:

• Helishopter should be available not only on the web, but also on “native”-apps, both on mobile and desktop.
• It needs to scale, even if we should become “the next Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/whatever” in terms of traffic it should not be a problem.
• Everything should be optimized for code-reuse. We are a small team and we do not want to write the same code twice for different platforms.
• We need to be deeply integrated with social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.
• All content posted needs to be highly search engine optimized to make sure that we generate a lot of traffic from Google.
• It has to be easy to integrate with our platform in new create ways and to use our data.

What lessons have we learned during this first year?

On the technical side of things, the tools available simply did not meet our requirements. This has forced us to build almost an entire stack of tools ourselves, and getting all these tools to work reliable across all different browsers proved to be a huge challenge. (Die Internet Explorer. die!). We ended up doing more-or-less complete rewrites of hsweb 4 times during this year, which of course takes some time. But it is a necessity to get this right from the start in order to enable quick growth in the future.

Other than technical challenges, it has been a challenge for me as manager that the development team spend so little time together. When you are working full-time in the same office it is easy to keep a coherent vision of what you want to accomplish and to make sure that everyone is on track with what to do. Last year I have been consulting full time besides working on Helishopter, Gustav (designer) have been doing a lot of photography gigs to support himself and Emil (lead developer) is the only one who have been working full-time with the site.

To address these challenges and step up the work with helishopter a notch, I have made some big changes in how I will work with Helishopter in 2012. I will:

• Only spend 80% of my regular working hours on external clients, giving me one more full day devoted to Helishopter each week.
• Spend less time coding and more time communicating, organizing and leading.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. ~ Albert Einstein

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit. ~ Aristotle

The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. ~ Albert Einstein

Yes, it’s a bit buggy on some browsers. And yes, it needs some styling. But either way it feels really nice to finally embed my latest stuff on Helishopter with a simple-cut-and-paste of HTML.

This also demonstrates the simplicity of our API and that easy integration is at the core of our Helishopter strategy. It will be very interesting to see what people come up with once we release the API to developers.

If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. ~ Mario Andretti

The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. Bought it yesterday and have read thru about 30% of it already. Very interesting stuff! I’m going to find out how well it will work for me in practice.

Kanye West – Runaway. 34.3 minutes of art. Watch in full screen.

Today, I consider myself successful. However, things have not always been this way.

I started my first company when I was 17, knowing nothing about anything other than computers and programming. I had little more than two empty hands and a lot of enthusiasm, but by learning by doing and capitalizing on my good ideas and programming skills I made millions in little time.

Life was good, but….. after a while I managed to not only loose it all, but also to bury myself deeply in debt. Refusing to give up, I picked myself up and started over.

This time it was a totally different game plan. No one would lend money to someone who was broke. The industry was in a downturn. I had used up most of my energy the years before so I could only work for a few hours at a time. But despite this I achieved success, to an even greater degree than before, and thereby proved to myself that no matter what the circumstances – success can be achieved.

The key to my success is a simple 4-step system and I follow this system rigorously.

The 4 Steps

My 4 steps to success are: Define – Plan – Act – Review.

Lets review them one by one:

1. Define

What does success mean to You?

We talk about success as something that we all strive to achieve, but we often fail to realize that success is not the same for all people.

According to Wiktionary, the definition of the word “success” is “the achievement of one’s aim or goal”. If you don’t know what your goal is, then how will you achieve success?

Therefore, the first step to achieving success is to define what your goals are, and to make sure that your goals are SMART. (George Doran came up with the idea of SMART goals, and should be credited for that).

SMART goals are:

• Specific:
  Phrases like “increase my quality of life” or “earn more money” are not goals, they are dreams. For example: “spend 2 more hours a day with my family” or “make a $1000 more a month” are great, specific, goals.
• Measurable:
  A goal of “loosing 10 pounds” is easily tracked by stepping on the scale, “making $1000 more a month” is also easily tracked at the end of the month but “being happier” is not measurable and hence is not a good goal.
  Achievable:
  Don’t set your goals too high. If you do it will ruin your spirit when it takes time to achieve them. Instead, set goals within reach and then set new, higher, goals when you reach your current ones. That way you will feel the thrill of being successful every-time you reach your set goal, and be even more motivated to reach your next goal.
• Relevant:
  Only set goals that will have a desired impact on your life and only set goals that you are prepared to pursue. If you are not prepared to pursue a goal, your initial goals should be to attain the skills and resources you need to tackle the bigger goal.
• Time-bound:
  Setting a clearly defined end date to achieve your goals by is extremely important. Your goal is to loose 10 pounds before the summer, not just any time in your life, am I right?

When your goals are set and you have made certain that they are SMART, you should move on to step 2:

2. Plan

“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” — Pablo Picasso

In order to become successful you need to have a plan of how to reach your goal. When planning, remember to never reinvent the wheel! Whatever your goal is I can promise you that someone else has achieved it before you, and what’s even better (for you): many people have tried and failed! Study both the successful ones and those who failed. Learn from their mistakes and what they did right.

Keep in mind: It is always better to learn from other people’s mistakes than from your own.

Transform this information into a simple step-by-step checklist of what you need to do in order to get where you want. Keep your checklist action-oriented. Don’t put things like “create a website” on there, instead split it up into actionable items like “1. Create a sitemap, 2. Call the web designer, 3. Buy web hosting”. You get the idea.

Once your plan is defined as an actionable checklist, move along to step 3:

3. Act

Just do it!

You know what it is you want. Now you even know how to get it. There are no longer any excuse for not taking what you want! Just go ahead and start checking of actions on the checklist you created in step 2, acting them out one by one.

One thing you need to keep in mind in order to efficiently act out your plan, is that it is much easier to reach goals one at the time than to pursue many goals at the same time.

Multitasking is a myth. When you make up your mind to do something then do that one thing right, make it the focus of as much of your attention as possible.

Obviously it’s never possible to only work on one single thing at the time. We all have commitments and duties that needs to be taken care of, but the less things that are on your mind, the better you will be able to perform and the sooner you will reach your goals.

During this phase of acting out your plan, you need to take a pause every now and then, and take look at the next step:

4. Review

“The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein

Are things going according to plan? Are you making progress? What have you learnt so far? These are all questions that you need to ask yourself from time to time when acting out your plan.

If you need to make adjustments to your plan, don’t hesitate to do so, but keep in mind that if you constantly change direction it will only slow you down and perhaps prevent you from ever reaching your goal. Sometimes you need patience to see the desired result.

The most important thing to remember when reviewing your progress is that we all make mistakes, but in order to be successful you should never consider your mistakes to be failures! Instead, take a step back and review them objectively, turn your mistakes into feedback, and adjust your plan to avoid making the same mistakes again.

When you have reviewed your progress and made any necessary adjustments, go back to step 3. Keep moving between step 3 and 4 until you reach your goal.

Summary

I honestly believe that you can accomplish any realistic goal by following the strategy above. Why don’t you give it a try and let me know how it goes?

One of the most prestigious and influential books of strategy in the world today is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It is eagerly studied in Asia by politicians and executives, just as it has been studied by military leaders and strategists for at least two millennia before.

Especially in Japan, which was transformed directly from a feudal culture into a corporate culture virtually overnight, contemporary students of The Art of War have applied the strategy of this book to modern politics and business. Some people say that the success of postwar Japan is the perfect illustration of Sun Tzu’s dictum of the classic, “To win without fighting is the best.”

The Art of War consist of 13 chapters, each composed of several Chinese idioms, these are:

Strategic Assessments

• Doing Battle
• Planning a siege
• Formation
• Force
• Emptiness and Fullness
• Armed Struggle
• Adaptations
• Maneuvering Armies
• Terrain
• Nine Grounds
• Fire Attack
• On the use of spies

One of the key principles of The Art of War is, like I wrote above, “to win without fighting is best”. This ideal strategy, to accomplish the most by doing the least, is characteristic of Taoism, the ancient tradition of knowledge that fostered both the healing arts and the martial arts in China.

The Book of Balance and Harmony, another chinese classic, explains:

To sense and comprehend after action is not worthy of being called comprehension. To accomplish after striving is not worthy of being called accomplishment. To know after seeing is not worthy of being called knowing. These three are far from the way of sensing and response.

Indeed, to be able to do something before it exists, sense something before it becomes active, see something before it sprouts, are three abilities that develop interdependently. Then nothing is sensed but is comprehended, nothing is undertaken without response, nowhere does one go without benefit.

Read that quote again.

Think about it for a minute before continuing reading…

To comprehend this principle is especially important for an Internet Entrepreneur. The climate and conditions on the Internet change more quickly every day.

Just imagine what you could accomplish if you where able to sense trends before they occur and reach your goals with minimal effort.

The Tao-te Ching, or The Way and Its Powers, also says something along these lines that has heavily influenced my work, from the first day I read it:

Plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small. The most difficult things in the world must be done while they are still easy, the greatest things in the world must be done while they are still small. For this reason sages never do what is great, and this is why they can achieve that greatness.

Planning and knowledge is the key. One should not try hard to achieve success, instead you need to assure your success by careful planning and understanding of what you are trying to accomplish.

The Art of War contains all the principles you need to understand to become a successful Internet Entrepreneur. I intend to write a series of articles covering each of the 13 chapters, how I interpret them from the Internet Entrepreneurs viewpoint, and reveal how I have applied these principles to achieve my own success.

I will base this series of articles on Thomas Clearys translation, which is available on Amazon. I strongly suggest that you order yourself a copy. Not only because that is an affiliate link and will make me some money, but also because it will give you a lot of inspiration and be of great value for your as an entrepreneur and business strategist.

I would like to point out that I am not interested in any military or religious applications of the Taoist principles or The Art of War. I read and apply The Art or War solely from a business strategy viewpoint.