Ricardo Solar - Start-up Journal

1 year later

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:41:21 -0800

Hi my dear friends,

So it has now been one year, one month a few days and several mortgage payments since my last day at Mattel in February 2nd 2009.

When I run into ex-colleagues at restaurants, airports, ex-Mattel-holicsupport groups and social events, the question they usually ask is, “How is the business going?” In their eyes I can see a desire for positive news because I know they wish me the best and also because it means that a good life after a corporate job is actually possible. But I can also see a morbid desire for gruesome descriptions of how tough the world is out there in the entrepreneur jungle, so that they can feel reassured about their cozy benefit packed corporate jobs.

Well, yes, feel reassured, it is tough out here. Selling a completely new web application is not easy. When I speak with potential customers which can sometimes take weeks to schedule, I usually start off by explaining that last year we launched a website that helps people make any type of decision. They ask, “Any type?” Yes, any type. I show them that “Should I get a Tattoo” is a top 10 popular decision among our 20 thousand users. After a look of disbelief and intrigue, I tell them that the website is free, and the immediate question is, “But how do you make money?” Followed by, “Is this another funny .com bubble business? Because I lost a lot of money in businesses like yours…” Then I explain to them that Simon is just our online decision making lab and that the real business is Ayax Systems Inc., which develops “Custom Online Decision Systems” for companies. By this point, they start getting it, but many times they don’t even know that they or their customers need help deciding on their products or services. That’s where my creativity and my experience at Mattel help me dig (and build a dazzling power point) and find out how they would benefit from our services. If I can’t imagine how we can help them, then Samuel Holtzman, my partner, who is a professor at Stanford and has devoted his life to decision making, helps me figure it out.

So far we are doing pretty well. We are working with Honda on a system to help their potential consumers select cars based on their lifestyles (e.g., family of 4, likes the outdoors, eco-friendly) vs. the technical specifications of the car. We are working with a global technology company on a system to help consumers select a printer based on their printing needs such as: “I need to print my kid’s homework or my family photos.” I just came from a 3-day meeting in San Francisco with the largest bakery in the world, where we are working on a global decision system for buying commodities like wheat. We are presenting projects for talent selection for human resources, financial decisions for banks, academic major decisions for college students and some others. If you think that you or someone you know, may be interested in our services, please let me know.

My team and I still have a long way to go to get back to the income levels we had in the not-so-distant past, but at least we now see a clear path ahead of us. We are having fun creating completely new products and services, and every penny we deposit or spend is a penny we have worked hard for. The team is growing: we are snatching great talent that has been let go from big companies, and we are opening a small office somewhere in Silicon Valley and a subsidiary in Mexico. I’m also learning a lot about things I had no idea about just one year ago: software as a service, social media, Facebook advertising, iPhone applications, etc.

Speaking of hard earned pennies, Apple just approved our iPhone App, which went live last week. Take a look at it at the link below and let me know what you think. It is just 99 cents.

Simon's iPhone App

Come on, download it, and support SERF “Solar Entrepreneur Relief Fund”.

Until the next one, have a great week!

Your friend

Ricardo Solar

Quick update

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:43:52 -0800

I'm just going to stop apologizing about not blogging! It is lame. I will do my best to keep the writing flowing in 2010. So far things keep rolling, life is good, no regrets about my decisions in 2009, no corporate nostalgia, no post executive depression or pill intakes. Things are going according to plan at Ayax Systems; we now have customers for our Custom Decision Systems which we need to deliver in the first quarter of next year. January will be a critical month for the company, as we are waiting for several project approvals. Man, sales are tough!! I now value more than ever my friends in sales at Mattel and their passionate struggles to get those deals closed.

Simon is doing well. He is 6 months old, has close to 16 thousand users, and is growing everyday. We are about to launch a contest on "Your best and worst decision of the decade." Check it out. Just finished my 13 week class on Search Engine Optimization at UCLA--very interesting, I recommend it to all of you. I Also helping my friend John with a very cool event TEDx Manhattan Beach, for all my local friends, go to the site and apply to attend.

Ok well, just wanted to wish you all a great Christmas and a 2010 full of good decisions. Thank you all for your support and good wishes in 2009

Latest News (or what I did over my summer vacation)

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:18:04 -0800

Yes, I know, I have been a very bad blogger lately. My teacher at UCLA's social media class once told me about the responsibility of having a blog and that once you start there is no turning back. So despite the long pause, I am still here! Okay, so where should I begin?

Well, I went to Mexico with the family over the summer. I was planning on staying for only 10 days and ended up staying for 5 weeks. My friends in the US thought I was not coming back, but to their disappointment, I did. How could I leave my big, fat mortgage payment behind? Well, the reason I stayed 5 weeks in DF was that my lovely Mexican friends and family started introducing me to people at multiple companies and institutions that were interested in the services my company (www.ayaxsystems.com) provides. So I spent a lot of time talking, eating, and drinking--and wearing the same suit for 45 days. As a good friend of mine told me, 90% of business deals in Mexico are closed around food and drinks. After 7 years in the US I almost forgot this important cultural fact. But it only took me a couple of days to readjust to this great tradition. I went back to being an expert faster than you can say taco. One day I went to visit a friend for both business and pleasure and end up in a "Cantina" where the "meeting" started at 2:00 pm and ended at 8:00 PM (you can imagine how much strategic thinking came out of that place).

In the end, I was very pleased with my trip. I managed to spend 5 weeks with the family (the longest I've been in the last 7 years) and at the same time work from my laptop, while sipping the famous micheladas. The result: 6 new proposals that we are working on with my team and 6 pounds that I can't get rid of.

Salud!

I'm back !

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:39:34 -0800

Hi to all,
Sorry that I have disappeared for the past several weeks. It’s amazing how much time it takes to launch a website and how quickly time goes by. The last 60 days have been very exciting; we launched Let Simon Decideto the world on May 5th and the site received tons of PR coverage. We were featured on Life Hacker(in the US, Japan, and Germany), Tech Crunch, Mashable, Thrillist, NBC, CNN and many others. We have 1,200 links pointing to our site and tons of Delicious bookmarks favoring our new web 2.0 application. The peak of our PR whirlwind came when Ashton Kutcher (the Punk’d dude) recommended Simon to his 2.7 million followers, check it out here Twitter. That was the day our e-mail servers went down. Over the weekend, the team, including my lovely wife, had to take turns all night long to accept new users manually.

All this media brought us thousands of new users from 145 countries. We have visits and users everywhere from Brazil to Oman and Sri Lanka. I’m amazed at how Simon is helping people with many types of decisions. Our most popular one is “Should I change my career?” (no surprise with the economy these days), followed by various college and major decisions, or “Should I go back to school?” (Simon says, Yes, you will have more fun). In the top ten we have the classic “Should I get a tattoo?” (a very permanent decision by the way--I agree that it is better to think it through carefully). We also have very life-critical ones, like the one from the reporter from Urban Daddy: “Should I wear boxers or briefs?”. (Check it out here Urban Daddy)

Now that the launch party has slowed down and we have created this little monster, I realize that we have reached the point of no return. The website requires constant upgrading and content generation. I’m working with the team on new features, new PR and social media campaigns. BTW, today we launched a new re-design of the entire page, check it out and let me know what you think. Simon has become our two-month-old baby, who requires constant feeding, hardly goes to sleep and when he does manage to doze off he ends up waking up frantically at inhuman European hours. He needs constant monitoring; one of my fears is that someone will use Simon to decide if he should chop his girlfriend into pieces.
I am now focusing more on the sales aspect of the business. Somewhere in our biz plan is a slide that says something about generating revenue (Why is it always the money? Can’t we keep on playing??). Through Ayax Systems Inc., the parent company We are working with colleges, CPG companies and service providers on customized decision making tools, similar to Simon to help consumers, employees, students with many types of decisions. We are also delivering lead generation systems and shopper research (back to the old days) through these tools for some of our customers.

Life continues to be good. I attended a 6 week social media class at UCLA on Tuesdays with my mentor and friend John, (I totally recommend this class to all my marketer friends--it’s the hot new thing!). John and I feel pretty cool walking the campus surrounded by students 100 years younger than us. For them, the whole subject of web 2.0 and social media is like talking about the microwave (a given!), but in reality there are no real experts. All of this technology moves so fast, that by the time you have dominated Facebook, in comes Twitter, and just when you have started feeling cool with your friends using the word Web 2.0, you are already late: “Dude, it’s all about Web 3.0.”

Maybe Simon will grow fast and the baby will become a 3.0 man. I hope so, because he needs to start working to pay his tuition and my daughters’ 6.0 virtual colleges as well.

Have a great weekend!

Simon's social media coverage has been amazing!!!

Sat, 09 May 2009 03:46:34 -0800

TechCrunch, Mashable, LifeHacker wrote articles on Simon, RedOrbit gave us the "Website of the Day" award , SOCAL Tech and more just published and interview, and more. We have receive tons of great reviews from users. Our PR agency, The Bohle Company has done a fantastic job with the launch!. Our servers crashed already twice, our e-mail system reached it's limit and we are happy for having all these problems.

http://lifehacker.com/5246247/let-simon-decide-makes-tough-decisions-easy

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/05/letsimondecide-takes-on-lifes-tough-choices/

http://www.socaltech.com/letsimondecide_com_looks_to_help_decision_making/s-0021500.html

http://mashable.com/2009/05/06/let-simon-decide/

http://tweetreach.com/reach?q=LetSimonDecide

SIMON IS OFFICIALLY LAUNCHED!

Wed, 06 May 2009 05:36:54 -0800

Today was an exciting day for the company. We officially launched our geeky friend to the world with an article on the front page of the very prestigious and very cool TechCrunch Weblog.

Founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington, www.techcrunch.com has rapidly become an authority in the internet blogsphere. The company is dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies.

The article was written by Jason Kincaid, who covered in detail the functionality of the site. I believe he objectively and elegantly captured the essence of what Simon offers to users.

My wife, my partners, my sr. editor, the PR agency, and I were waiting all day in front of our computer monitors, our fingers numb from constantly refreshing the screen to see if the article had popped out. Finally, after one brief telephone interview with Jason and 10 hours of waiting, the article suddenly appeared. It was so exciting to see our website name and logo in the middle of the screen with a big title that said: LetSimonDecide Takes On Life's Tough Choices. I was so happy that I screamed. It was our big moment, the 1 minute Super Bowl commercial.

Immediately after the article was released, I started receiving Skypes and e-mails from the team and friends. Our inbox was showing all these notifications from the server of hundreds of new users from all over the world signing into the page. This is very exciting to witness, the magic of the internet and the power of the social media.

I believe our servers started to slow down because of the traffic. Tomorrow the tech guys may have to increase our server capacity (one more bill to pay!), but this is one I will be happy to cover. We also received several Twitter followers on our @LetSimonDecide account, and other sites requested links to our page which is always nice.

Like i any other public announcement, the article has received positive and negative reviews from Tech Crunch users. We are closely following each of them, since they represent opportunities to learn and improve our product.
Our press release to other media outlets was distributed minutes after the launch and tomorrow a biz wire will be uplodaded for other media sources to pick up.

Couldn't be happier and more charged to continue with this adventure.
Well, tomorrow night I may not have as much energy, since my dear dentist will extract two wisdom teeth. Probably not the best decision to schedule this operation now...next time I will consult with Simon!

Take a look at the article at www.techcrunch.com, if you can't find it, do a search for LetSimonDecide (all together).

Let me know your thoughts!

Meet Simon !

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:15:08 -0800

I'm excited to finally show you the mysterious website. This is an early beta version of the site and we are still working on it.

It's incredible how many things and how many people are involved in the development of a web 2.0 site. Investors, programmers, writers, psychologists, lawyers, PR experts, mathematicians, decision making experts, video producers, designers, quality assurance experts......aaaah!

The premise is simple: We live in a world with too many options and too much information. Simon helps you analyze your decisions from a fact based and personal perspective and recommends you the best course of action.

We want to provide a real solution for a real need, the need to make better, smarter decisions in our lives. Our goal is to deliver the best free, easy to use, online tool for decision-making. How we will make money? Believe me, this is what keeps me awake at night. We are following Google's strategy of
"if we build it, they will come," but we are also exploring business opportunities by providing customized decision-making solutions and research to educational institutions, CPG companies, and small businesses.

We still have a long way to go, but we have an extraordinary team and, with your help, we are confident that we will get where we need to be.

So far, we have received very encouraging comments and I would love it if you could sign in, test the site, and give me your thoughts, good or bad, so we can improve. Please send your comments to contact@ricardosolar.com or you can leave your comments here at this blog.

Thank you very much, and happy decision making!

Please visit: www.letsimondecide.com

Top 5 things we are doing to save money

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 07:25:51 -0800

Yes, I know that some people think that we are creating our own economic crisis by not spending the way we used to. But I believe that what is happening, even though it is tough and we will suffer, is good in both the short and long term. I think that as a society we were living way beyond our means and that an adjustment was long overdue. This is a great wake up call for this amazing country, and I'm sure that we will come out of this one pretty strong.

Now that our family is on its own, with no more payroll coming in bi-weekly, we realize how many things we don't need, how many things we could avoid spending money on, how little you need to live a great life.

Like many, living in the rat race drives you to buy that big house, that new car, the best vacation. Expenses grow along with your salary, your family, and your ego. Instead of saving more or investing in businesses that could generate income, we spend money on things that are a liability and, in many cases, that lose value.

Since there is nothing we can do about our big fat, rat racer LA mortgage, my wife and I have decided to analyze the rest of our expenses and cut where it makes sense.

Here are 5 things my wife and I are doing that I would like to share with you:

1- Canceled NetFlix ($30): Instead, we go to the supermarket and rent movies from Red Box for one dollar a pop. We figured that we would never watch the 30 movies a month that would make NetFlix worthwhile. And it gives us a good reason to walk to the supermarket together.

2- Sharing my car and loan payment and riding my bike more ($250): I have a car that has 6 years and only 35K miles on it. I rarely use it, and my mom didn't want to spend money on a new car. She is happy, and I'm sweating more.

3- Letting my wife go to Costco alone ($200): For some reason, every time I went to Costco I ended up spending $300. Half of it was in the electronics department. My wife is much more focused and goes straight to what she needs.

4- Canceled the gym membership; run at the park or beach ($45): It is fun, the weather in LA is beautiful (which is why we pay that insane mortgage), and you don't have to see all the people who are in better shape than you.

5- Eating at home more ($200): Because of this new situation, my wife added several new dishes to her list (of only 2 dishes before!), and they are healthy and delicious. Now that we are eating all together, she feels proud and we feel full.

There is one more thing we did that I didn't include in the list. For about 1 week we were saving on napkins by cutting them in half. The napkins ended being way too small, so we needed to use 5 pieces instead of 1 to clean just one finger. Minor detail, we bought a $250 paper guillotine to do this (...and other things) so half of our savings were spent. Yes, I know it doesn't make much sense, but transforming a rat racer takes more time than one economic crisis!

Why I Think My Dog is a Mutant

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:44:17 -0800

His ears bend backwards and are pointy like a bat's--aerodynamics?

When he goes pee he doesn’t raise his leg, he just kneels down. Surrounded by too many women?

...and my wife sings to him so he can go pee: “Potty Time, Potty Time.”

He doesn’t respond to his name; either he is deaf or doesn’t like his name (what's wrong with the name Dorito?!).

When he is sad he makes strange noises, like a cat.

He barks at big dogs like he is going to eat them alive but then at the dog park he hides behind my wife’s legs, trembling.

He is the only dog I know that lets himself be carried belly-up like a baby in breast-feeding position (see exhibit A in photos)

He has an active social life of regular play-dates with another dog. They play some strange games.

He is schizophrenic. Every night at 11:00 pm his sugar level skyrockets and he starts running from side to side of the house, dragging his bed with him.

DAY IN THE LIFE OF A CORPORATE REFUGEE

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 13:58:36 -0800

7:20 AM
My wife and I prepared breakfast and lunch for the little monkeys, then walked them to school with Dorito.
8:20 AM
Cleared my agenda. When I used to hear people say, "I cleared my agenda and went to my daughter's soccer practice," I was always very envious. My wife, a successful entrepreneur, would get to do the same. For me, it was impossible. My meetings would always pop up like hideous guac-a-mole heads and even if I was able to smack them, where would I go?? To my office to answer e-mails, but only until another meeting from my boss would pop up. I finally had the joy of clearing my calendar for the following day, just like that, to go on my daughter's field trip.
9:30 AM
When I can, that's the time I go to the gym, a big change for me. I noticed how different the mix of people was at that time of the day vs. at night when I used to go. At 7:00 PM you have all the people that come from their 9 to 6 jobs. They are goal-oriented, trying to burn as many calories as possible, tackling their workout like they might tackle a corporate project. 9:00 am, on the other hand, is another world. The parking lot is empty, the 7:00 am rush is over, and the vibe is much less frantic. I like to group the gym-goers at that time into 5 categories and, for fun, try to guess who is in which bucket: the successful business owner, the layoff-still-with-package guy, the model, the stay at home wife, the banker and the limbo lunatic that you don't have a clue what they do (like me).
11:00 AM
I have confirmed that sometimes my wife needs a break from me. I started noticing that she would take her laptop and run to her friend’s house every other day, normally during the time I was working at my home office. Finally, after a Guantanamo-type interrogation, she admitted that even though she loves to have me around, I was invading her “alone” time and she had to look for it somewhere else. I felt like one of those old couples where the husband retires too early and drives the wife crazy. So in a demonstration of love, I called my only .com startup wizard and friend John, and asked for asylum at his house. We had a great morning of entrepreneurial chat and work and we went for lunch at a Peruvian restaurant at 10 dollars a pop. My friend doesn’t know this but I’m planning on doing this every Monday.
2:00 PM
I had a conference call with Mexico, Colombia and San Francisco, simultaneously--very exciting. We were discussing a major changed in the algorithm of the website. In the middle of this critical call, my home phone started ringing nonstop. My mom was calling to see if I wanted her to bring some of her home made Puerto Rican soup, my wife was calling my cell phone because she thought her credit card was lost, her friend was looking for her because she wanted to help find the credit card, my daughters were dancing with signs outside of the office asking me to pick up the phone. At some point I lost it and screamed at everybody. Needless to say, next time I will schedule these calls in the morning.
8:30 PM
Read Harry Potter to the girls and, after remembering that I had cleared my agenda for that field trip the next day, I went back to the computer to continue working until 1:00 AM. In a company where you are the boss / owner / employee there are no excuses. Work has to be done and there are no meeting rooms to hide in.