At that time the Dotcom Bubble had recently burst and though there were some ragged survivors like Amazon, the majority of the high flying, aeron buying, dotcom elite had come and gone. I used to sit in my internet cafe waiting for the nonexistent customers and think, “If only I had gotten into this web stuff five years ago, then I could have been part of all that excitement!”

In my youthful naivete, I was convinced that the time for web startups had passed and I’d missed the boat. Sure it was a boat that eventually crashed at full speed right into the docks, but what a ride it must have been!

Fast forward five years, and after two jobs as a web designer and a stint as a freelancer I found myself at the dawn of that second great web era – Web 2.0. This time around I discovered I was suddenly at the right place at the right time with the right skills. Yes, it’s missing the crazy hype and some of the premature enthusiasm and energy of the Dotcom bubble, but ultimately it has turned out to be a better time for little startups like mine.

In his fantastically readable book “Outliers – the Story of Success“, Malcolm Gladwell illustrates how there have been ideal times to be working in particular industries. He shows that programmers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not just brilliant entrepreneurs, but that importantly they took advantage of being around at a particular time with a particular set of skills and opportunities.

Now I’m no Gates or Jobs, but I do know that this is a golden period for the web. These are the years that our future selves will look back at and say “Boy that was an exciting time online!” There are simply so many opportunities for people with the skills to create great products. The barriers to entry are exceedingly low allowing developers, designers, bloggers, and all manner of people with particular enthusiasm, skill and drive to build successful businesses online.

But it won’t last. Over time the more obvious opportunities slowly dry up and the barriers rise. To get in on the action you have to be increasingly advanced, well funded and creative.

I would argue that the web right now however is still wide open. Just look at how Twitter has come out of left field to become a massive internet phenomena in just three short years. There are still many, many untapped opportunities.
So I’ll end this post to say that if you’ve wondered whether you should make a go of a particular idea you have, I say yes! If you’re going to go for it, go for it now! Sure we won’t all be Twitters or Facebooks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t build some neat little startups, grow sustainable businesses and live to tell the tale of how we helped build the internet in the heady days of 2009!

Motivation is a rather complex subject so in this post I’m going to talk about just one motivation tool that I use, namely other people. Heroes, role models and rivals are three types of people that keep me focused.

Heroes

I think everyone should have a hero in life. Someone you aspire to be like, who you look up to and whose actions you pattern yourself on. Having a hero is a good motivator because not only does it push you to keep a high standard to your own actions but when you feel dispirited you can ask yourself how your hero would respond.

For me, my hero is my own father. He is a man with complete assurance as to what is important and what is not, and he always keeps these values foremost and lets them dictate the events and character of his life. I admire this and try to model myself in the same way. So for example, I feel that honesty and truthfulness is very important. That means that in business I try to make sure that they are key values for both myself and for our company Envato. Sometimes it’s a very difficult standard to live up to but I try to keep in mind how my dad does things and what he would think of actions we might take and it helps keep me on track.

Having a hero will keep you on the right course when you’re unsure of what to do, motivate you to perform at your peak and will be a source of strength when you need it.

Role Models

While I only have one hero, I find role models everywhere. They are people who exhibit some characteristic I admire and try to emulate. Thus I think it’s possible to have many different role models, each excelling in a different field.

When I was training for a long distance running event some years ago, I would keep in mind a famous Australian footballer named Shane Webcke who was known for his stamina and endurance. This guy looked like a tree trunk with a head made from sandbags, and no matter how many times he’d get tackled, no matter how many charges he’d led and no matter how exhausted everyone else on the field was, Webcke would still be going. So every time I felt myself flagging I’d think about this footballer and find a burst of energy and renewed commitment.

A business role model I have is the company 37Signals. I very much admire their general philosophy, particularly some of the ideas in their book ‘Getting Real’. Whenever I encounter difficulties and barriers I remember the page on Embracing Constraints that goes:

“…Let limitations guide you to creative solutions

There’s never enough to go around. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough people.

That’s a good thing.

Instead of freaking out about these constraints, embrace them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to your advantage…”

This is a wonderfully inspirational passage that is brilliant advice for startups, and there are many other gems just like it in that book. So while I may not always use or sometimes even like the 37Signals products, I do aspire to many of their values.

Rivals

Enough of this namby-pamby feel good stuff, what about good ol’ capitalist competition? Rivalry can be a very powerful driver to keep moving, innovating and pushing forward. It is a useful motivator because you can find great rivals in any industry or field of work. When you identify rivals you track their progress and their successes and push yourself to outdo them.

I usually pick out rivals for pretty much every website or project I work on. I will choose the best competitor around, the one I admire the most and then keep them at the back of my mind as the standard to beat.

Rivalry keeps you on your toes, pushes you to go further or harder than you might otherwise. It stops you from getting lazy or overly contented and ensures that even if everyone else is patting you on the back saying what a good job you’ve done, there is someone out there driving you on.

When I find a consistently awesome rival site or company I will keep track of their traffic, their activities, their prices, their size, their community and what ever other information I can get, and I use this as a motivator to improve our own sites as much as possible.

I believe it’s critical to keep rivalry friendly. Choosing rivals isn’t about deciding some unsuspecting person out there is going to be your whipping post, rather it means finding the strongest competitor in the room and deciding that they are the benchmark you will measure yourself against. A friendly rivalry even allows space to link to and support your rivals, understanding that this isn’t about them, it’s about you doing your absolute best.

The great thing about benchmarking yourself in this way is that there will always be someone to aspire to. This fluidity will keep pushing you to new levels of achievement as you outgrow old rivals and find even greater ones.

Staying Motivated

Whomever you might choose as a hero, role model or rival, the important thing is that they help you to stay motivated to excel and succeed.

For some weeks now I’ve been working on a large upgrade to our popular freelancing site FreelanceSwitch. The upgrade includes a complete overhaul of the design, some large changes to the functionality of the site and coordinating a few different sub-projects. It’s been taking a lot of time and energy and as I write this, we’re only half way there.

This morning I was reflecting that if I’d known quite how much work was involved in the upgrade, I think I might have been a little less ambitious. And in many ways that makes me glad that I didn’t know.

A bit young, a bit naive

Three years ago when starting Envato I wrote out a business plan for our fledgling enterprise. It wasn’t a particularly solid plan, at least it didn’t have any hard numbers, or organisational charts, or many of the other things I’ve since learnt are meant to be in business plans. But it did contain our strategy for how the business would grow, and to put it mildly, it was an ambitious plan.

Being very excited, my cofounders and I showed it to my father who has a little more experience under his belt. He read the plan, thought for a while and told us it was a good plan, but warned that it would take us five to ten years to accomplish. He also said something which was a little odd, he said:

“…Right now your greatest strength is that you are young and a bit naive. To you, anything is possible…”

I can still remember mentally dismissing this and thinking “Bah, of course we know it’s going to be difficult to execute, but we can do it, for sure!”

Well suffice to say I don’t think I really understood. So far my father’s estimate of five to ten years is looking about right, we’ve still got a long way to go with our plans. And so far he’s also been right about how fraught with problems growing a business is.

It’s the details

When starting out I had a simplistic idea in my head that went something like this “We build some sites, they are awesome, people visit them, money comes in, we expand and build more.” In a way that is what happens. What has been illuminating though is all the myriads of details and byproducts of growth.

As a small startup we initially didn’t have much to do in the company besides focus on making a product and then operating it. But as we’ve grown there are all sorts of logistic and systemic issues that crop up. How do you hire? How do you fire? How do you get legal advice for countries you’re not in? How do you setup accounting systems that accurately model the business when most accountants have a hard time understanding it? How do you grow teams? How do you manage them? How do you ensure that you have scalability in the business? … The list goes on and on.

One foot in front of the other

So there’s a lot of complications that come up, happily they are (mostly) as a cause of things going well. If I think about all of them at once it gets a bit much however. The problems seem too overwhelming and it’s hard to process it all.

What does work is thinking about the next step, maybe the next five steps, and only occasionally glancing at the horizon. You concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other for a while, and oddly enough very soon yesterday’s problems start fading in the distance.

I still try to think about future problems, and to make sure we plan for turns and twists the business might take – to do otherwise would be foolish. But for peace of mind and to make sure we stay optimistic and surrounded by possibility, I try not to worry about exactly how much there still is to do. Sometimes I find it’s just better not to know.

Case in point, on our site FlashDen we have to have someone reviewing every file that comes in for quality, functionality, pricing and approval. That person used to be me. Now at first that was probably a good idea, because I got a great feel for the types of files, features and pricing. I also interacted with the community and it was a very personable experience for early authors whom we really needed to get on board.

Fast forward a year and the file queue was permanently stretched out for days and days at a time. I would do blocks of file reviewing when I had time but increasingly that wasn’t very often. On top of that, I’m not sure I was doing a very good job of the file reviewing because a combination of time limitations and the wrong personality for the job led to me taking shortcuts.

And yet whenever it was suggested that someone else should take over, I kept resisting saying “It’d be too hard to explain everything to someone else”, “Only I can make sure it’s done right”, “No-one else will be able to price things how I want” and so on.

Eventually the pain of reviewing became so great even I had no choice and we hired one reviewer, then another and another. These days we have a team of about 15 and in retrospect my reasoning is very obviously flawed. But somehow it seemed real enough at the time.

Initial Cost = Long Term Freedom

I don’t think it’s uncommon to fall into the trap of believing only you can do something, or that you’ll never manage to find a replacement. But in fact pretty much everyone is replaceable and even if the replacement doesn’t do quite the same job as you did, in the long run it’s the only way to grow.

What I’ve discovered is that every time I’ve replaced myself there is a short term loss followed by a huge long term gain. The loss is the initial cost of finding someone, training them, answering questions and the time it takes for them to grow into the job. But the long term gain is that once it’s done, you (hopefully) will never have to do that job again.

It can be very difficult to let go, especially if you are a perfectionist or are giving up doing something you really enjoy. Currently I still design all the sites at Envato and I can see this is going to be a problem soon. What other company has the CEO also pushing pixels? But for now I love design a little too much, and I’ve got a barrel of excuses for why I can’t be replaced there!