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Well, it's certainly been a busy two months!  So much so that we got distracted from writing a second monthly update earlier in September.

Recently, we've had some pretty interesting developments:

First, we're incredibly happy to share that our little startup has grown by 50% in size.  Or, in other words, a third person has recently decided to join Jeff and me on our adventure!  I'd better skimp on the details for now and let him post his own introduction and story as soon as he's had the opportunity to wrap things up at his current gig and settle down here.  But suffice it to say, we're all incredibly excited.

Second, we're moving!  The initial plan was to work out of space in my parents' home in Los Angeles for the first six months, but Jeff and I felt that having three of us living and working full-time would be a bit overkill (despite their awesome level of support in offering to make it work).  Luckily, Jeff's family graciously offered us an empty apartment to live and work out of on their property on Beaver Island, Michigan.

So, in a move that has left some of our friends and family scratching their heads, we're taking the show on the road for roughly another three months while we burrow away and continue to develop technology together from the island.

Here are some pictures of Beaver Island in the winter (courtesy of the Beaver Beacon):

If you would like to come visit us, there are daily and charter flights available through Fresh Air Aviation and Island Airways (Jeff developed the flight reservation system), or ferry rides through Beaver Island Boat Co (until the lake freezes over).

Is this startup suicide?  Paul Graham and The New York Times both might have you believe so!  But the argument that all startups must begin in Silicon Valley seems to hinge on "all other things being equal", which they rarely if ever are.  We're hoping that our divergent path will enable us to invest more time early in developing differentiating technology, bootstrapping all-the-while for as long as possible.  And then, eventually, we'll return to a metropolis, rejoin the tech world, and start going to trendy "Lunch 2.0" style events again (if they still exist).

So, with that, we'll be departing LA over the last weekend in October.  Jeff will be driving his car another 2,000 miles back to Michigan.  I'll be sticking around for my Dad's birthday on the 28th, and rendezvousing with Jeff and secret agent #3 at the airport in Flint, Michigan.

Before we go, we'll be hitting up this month's October g33k d1nner, and we're planning a quick visit to the bay area.  If you're up there and know us or wanna meet us, drop us a line!

A wise man once said:

Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.

And so has been the theme of month one. After roughly 9 months of sporadic brainstorming sessions about what our company might do should Jeff someday decide to stop pursuing his Ph.D. and I to leave my job, we chose on day 1 to table any further planning discussions and start hacking.

This continued for roughly 25 days (or 32,000 lines of code), at which point we were able to take a step back with a greater understanding than ever before of the beast we're attempting to tame -- what's easy? what's hard? what's been done before and what never has? how long should it take? what kind of people should we attempt to hire first and how soon? and so on...

We then decided to invest some time over roughly 3 days to revisit some of the "businessy" stuff. We jotted down all the company/product names that had been thrown out over time on our beat up whiteboard and evaluated them according to the nine dimensions suggested in the Igor Naming Guide, then discarded them all in favor of something else we came up with on a whim and decided we liked better.

We threw together 3 slides of the 10/10/15 that Guy, David, and Brad recommend, as a sanity check as to whether we could clearly and concisely articulate our vision/value. We explained what we were were building to a handful of friends in no more than 2-3 sentences, and listened to whether the response was a "What?" or a "Wow!", refining our vision down to a simple 5 words until the "What"s were no more.

As the weekend progresses and month 1 comes to an end, we're continuing to wrap up our first stretch of coding -- getting various disjointed pieces to fit together, grepping for BUGBUGs/TODOs, and ensuring we have something that works end-to-end however small in scope. Then it's on to another month of code, with a new set of goals.

In closing, I'll pose a question that's been on my mind lately to anyone out there who follows our journey:

How would you convey the value proposition of one of our favorite products, the Ambient Orb?

What kind of ROI can its customer expect by buying it?

What kind of pain does it eliminate?

Is it a vitamin, aspirin, or antibiotic (i.e. a luxury, nice-to-have, or need-to-have)?