Ilya Semin

I go to a lot of meetups here in the Bay area and one of the questions that I hear quite often is “How to come up with a business idea?”. It happens really often when you go to a meetup where most people have full time jobs, but want to start their own business some day.

If you try to google it, you will find a lot of articles about that, like this one, but in my opinion most of them don’t offer a really good advice, because they are written by journalists, not entrepreneurs.

During my college years at Babson I took an ‘Entrepreneurship’ class and one of the requirements was to come up with my own business idea. I used the approach, similar to what’s described in these articles and my idea was selected as one of the top ideas during the course. I was really excited and even started to think that I could create a real company around this idea.

Then one day I came to professor Bob Caspe, described my idea to him and asked him what he thought.

BC: “Why do you want to know what I think about your idea?”
Me: “Well, you’re an experienced entrepreneur and professor here at Babson, I thought you could provide some good feedback on that.”
BC: “You know, it does not matter what I think about your idea. It does not matter what other professors here think about your idea. It does not even matter what you, your mom or your best friend think about your idea. What matters is that what your customers think about that and whether they are willing to buy your product. How did you come up with this idea?”
Me: “Well, one day I was browsing the Internet, looking for a video game. Came to the website that was selling this game, but there were no user reviews. I went to Amazon to check the reviews and ended up buying from there. That’s when I realized that smaller websites really need product reviews in order to keep the customers on their websites and thought that I could solve this problem for them.”
BC: “It’s a really bad way to come up with an idea. Although, I doesn’t mean that the idea itself is bad.”
Me: “Well, how else can I come up with a good idea?”
BC: “Watch my webinar and come back again if you have any questions”.

Yes, he had a pretty rough approach to teaching, so all of his students either hated or loved him. I decided to give it a shot and watch his webinar. Looking back, I think that this quick meeting with Bob and his webinar were more valuable to me than my entire MBA degree.

If you’re familiar with Datanyze and understand its business model – you will understand how much influence this approach had on me personally.

I don’t think Bob’s approach is the only way to come up with a good idea, but this approach will definitely increase your chances for success. It’s a well known fact that 95% of new businesses fail. In my opinion, most of them fail because they try to create something that nobody will ever pay money for. Want to come up with a good business idea? Invert your process: Start with finding your ideal customer first, figure out the best way to charge them, create a prototype, iterate, and finally make sure it’s repeatable.

Freedom is one of the most valuable things we have in our lives. What is freedom? To me, it’s choosing what to do, how to do it, and who to do it with. Freedom is doing things not because you have to do them, but because you really want to.

One year ago I became free.

I used to wake up every day with my alarm clock, go to the office, work for 8 hours with 1 hour lunch break and come back home. Although I really liked the stuff that I was doing, there was one problem with that. Everything that I did was done because I had to, not because I wanted to.

It all changed on Friday, April 27th, 2012. I had a normal work day when our CEO and CTO asked me to have a walk with them. When the CEO started with “There’s no easy way to say this really” – I knew that my life was going to change…

For most people it would have been a devastating event, but for me it was… liberating. I met my wife later that night and told her about what happened with a huge smile on my face. She was upset, we could have been kicked out of the country. I had 4 weeks to find another job and our Green cards were not ready yet. But somewhere deep inside I knew that it’s going to be just fine and luckily I was right.

…

It’s been a year since I was fired from my job and it’s probably been the best year of my life. Every day I get to do the things that I really, really love. No, I did not find another, better job. On April 28th I woke up at 6am and wrote the first lines of the code that later became Datanyze. I’m extremely lucky that in less than a year Datanyze became a successful, profitable company with a great list of customers, whom I really love. I don’t know where this journey is going to end, but I’m absolutely in love with this feeling of freedom. I choose what to do, how to do it and when. Today is the anniversary of this feeling and I’m going to celebrate it.

Babson just announced that its MBA Program is ranked No. 1 in Entrepreneurship for the 20th Consecutive Year.
I think it’s amazing how they picked up their niche and totally crushed it leaving ‘elite’ colleges like Harvard, Stanford and MIT behind. In my mind, this is very entrepreneurial approach.

I’m very proud to be a Babsonian, I hope they will continue this trend in the future

I love this quote:

First and foremost, a start-up puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced. You flip rapidly from day-to-day – one where you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again. Over and over and over. And I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs.

– Marc Andreessen

This is absolutely one of my favorite videos created by the guys from Grasshopper (Babson alumni).
Everybody who needs some inspiration should watch this.

For those who just want to download a working example, please use this link. The content was downloaded from lifehacker.com and modified to be compatible with Google’s Manifest 2.0.

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Last week I needed to write a very simple extension for Chrome.
I started on this page, but so many things were broken (links, files) that I had to search for another solution.

Finally I found a pretty good step-by-step process Lifehacker’s website. Usually the easiest way for me to develop something is to take a working solution and modify it according to my needs. LH’s extension was working, but the problem was that it was using an old Manifest 1.0 and Google would not accept it to the store. So the task was to rewrite it compatible with Manifest 2.0.

Step 1: Change manifest.json.

First thing here is to add this piece of code at the end of your manifest.json
,
"manifest_version":2


When you do this – Google is going to complain about “background_page”, since it’s not compatible with Manifest 2.0. Solution: change it to

"background": {
"page": "background.html"
},


Step 2: move all inline Javascript to your .js files.

Google change its security policy so you can’t run the scripts directly from the code. I’ve created two separate files – background.js and popup.js and put all inline scripts inside.

That’s it. You can download my working code here.

One more thing that I found extremely useful is Chrome’s console to debug the plugin. You can use it for both your popup and background pages.

I just recently got my M-1 driver’s license in California and I wanted to share my experience.

Here’s the step-by-step process how to get your license in the easiest possible way:

1. Sign up for motorcycle courses. Even if you know how to ride and have a lot of experience – DO THAT. I went to these guys and was extremely happy with the results. The thing about these courses is that you will get their certification which will allow you not to take the test at DMV which is MUCH harder. Plus you will get a good discount on your insurance. Plus you will get a lot of knowledge about motorcycles and how to ride them safely. If you’re just starting – these courses are MUST have. They will teach you how to ride a bike even if you’ve never seen one before.
2. Courses have 2 parts: evening theory class and 2 days of riding for 6 hours. Do that first before going to DMV, you’ll learn A LOT. You will have to pass written test at the end of that evening class and also show your skills after 2 days of riding. It should be easy enough – every one from my group successfully passed.
3. Safety is #1 importance for them, so pay attention! Some people were not admitted to ride a bike, because they did not wear proper boots (have to cover your ankles), so they had to come some other day. Don’t worry about the helmet – you can use one of theirs.
4. After the courses you will get a certificate that you should bring to DMV.
5. Get the handbook and read it. Seriously, read it! The test is not that easy and ALL questions are in this handbook.
6. Go to DMV to take the written test. You will have 3 attempts. There are 25 questions in the test. You can make 4 mistakes on your first attempt and only 2 on your 2nd and 3rd attempts. I highly recommend you come prepared (read the handbook).
7. That’s it. Now you have to give them your orange certificate and they will mail you your new DL.
8. Don’t forget to mention your certificate when you get your bike insurance – it will save you some extra money.

Drive safely!

I had a problem recently when I had to copy a pretty big InnoDB database from one server to another.

Doing import-export through MySQL dump was taking forever, so I found this easy way to do that.

1. First of all, stop MySQL on both servers (service mysql stop)
2. You need to copy several files in your MySQL DB folder. Mine was /var/lib/mysql/
3. Locate the folder with the name of your database and copy that. I highly recommend rsync for copying files between two servers.
4. Copy ibdata1, ib_logfile0, ib_logfile1, mysql_upgrade_info
5. Start MySQL (service mysql start)

That’s it! Now you have your entire DB copied and it probably took 100x less time.

Please note that you must have the same architecture on both machines. I.e. if you have 32-bit on one server and 64-bit on another – you will have to use MySQL dump.

Yesterday I read a post on TechCrunch that Walmart bought ‘Social Calendar’. In most cases I ignore this kind of news, but this one was particularly interesting for me.

The thing is that several years ago I was working at a small company and we built the same application. Yes, I mean exactly the same. I spent several months developing it, we were very careful about our ‘launching strategy’ and finally the day had come when we opened it for public. I was really excited. What happened next? Well, nothing really. Several months later we had 100 customers, most of whom were our friends.  Did that mean that the idea was not very bright? For my boss that was definitely the case.

The lesson that I learned yesterday is the same lesson that I learn every day by looking at people who say “I’ll tell you about my idea but you have to sign this NDA”. Your idea is worth nothing. NOTHING. Exactly 0. What’s worth millions (sometimes billions) of dollars is the implementation. Our company and ‘Social Calendar’ had the same idea, but what the difference was in the execution. The guys from ‘Social Calendar’ could execute it right and they are probably millionaires by now. We could not. That makes all the difference in the world.

So, “How much is your idea worth?”. Zero.