Starting Ask Earnest – Journal
Zac and I both took the weekend off last weekend. We each went camping with our own families. After going hard for three months, it was a much needed break and we’re both back at it today with renewed energy. Boom!
I took my family to Kah-Nee-Ta, a resort in the Warm Springs Native American Reservation. We saw wild horses, got to ride some horses, hit the pool every day, even three times on Saturday. We read alot. It was perfect!
Zac and I met with a CPA to help us with the finances. We both, and Mike, are very conservative when it comes to handling finances and taxes. We do not want to get into any tax trouble. The CPA we met with seems like she’s knows what she’s talking about. We read Profit First earlier this summer and plan to implement their suggestions. The CPA was familiar with that method of budgeting, which is promising.
We also met with a lawyer that our CPA recommended to get us registered as a business. He’s a small town lawyer basically, and we will likely outgrow him, but he is personal and will get us rolling. We also talked to an IP lawyer. She gave us great advice, but wasn’t able to take us on as clients. So we’ll need some other method of IP protection.
This business stuff is a little time consuming and isn’t cheap, but going through this process shows that we’re looking long term and are doing this right from the start.
I loaded the last of the data that our guy from Upwork was working on tonight. I started the data pull project on May 24 and just closed it out on July 17. It took forever! But our guy stuck with it and worked every single day for the past, what 7 weeks exactly. We still have alot of work left in verifying the data, but what a milestone!
I started building out Zac’s vision the first week of May. Nine weeks later we are almost ready to go live. I’ll summarize here since I’m looking back in time.
The Name: Zac wanted to call our website Ask Michael. The reason being, Michael was the most common name among baby boomers, and he felt our website visitors would be able to relate. AskMichael.com was taken, and surprisingly quite a few Ask[fill in a name].coms were taken as well. I purchased hcconcierge.com, for Health Care Concierge. This is our business name, but for a product, the name isn’t very catchy. The name Earnest showed up as one of the top names of baby boomers. I saw it was available, so put some more thought into it. Earnest also means truthful, sincere, having conviction. Our website visitors need sincerity, integrity. I loved it, floated it to Zac, and off we went. AskEarnest.com
Sausage making: I bought a cloud server on GoDaddy to start building out the site. I’m coding it using HTML5 with php scripting and a MySQL database. About a month in, I picked up a dedicated server from GoDaddy (a substantial investment for a startup) and moved the code and database over.
Data: Zac says there are 784k healthcare agencies in America. I have yet to see where he came up with that number, but regardless, there are alot. I hired a guy in Morocco through Upwork to pull the data for me. He’s been doing them in batches of 10 states, and I’m loading the last 10 states tonight. We got all healthcare agencies in every city in America with populations of 10k or more. It took about 6 weeks to pull all of that data, and it came to me pretty bloated. I’ve gotten 2.5M records from the data pull and have had to trim it down substantially.
People have asked us, why not just Google to find what they’re looking for. I’ve learned that Google is less than 50% accurate. You search for Assisted Living homes and you get Nursing Homes. They are not the same thing at all, and it points people to the wrong place; it’s a time killer.
I have a gal in the Philippines that has been verifying our data. She finished Oregon in about a week (3,075 agencies) and she got us to about 75% accuracy. She doesn’t know the intricacies of the industry, so I was happy she got us that far. Zac and I looked through Salem thoroughly and we have it about 90% accurate. Getting the nation to a 90% accurate will be a challenge. It will be a fun one to solve, and it will be ongoing through the life of Ask Earnest as things change.
We’ve invested about $1,000 so far in our data (which is less than I originally estimated). To get the nation to 75% accuracy will cost us around $25k. To get to 90% we will need help from the agencies themselves.
Data has been our biggest challenge, but it’s also one of our biggest assets. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished in such a short time and the investment we make in our data will be well worth it, and fun!
We brought Mike on board with a 10% ownership stake to be our marketing guy. Mike has been an entrepreneur since college, 20 years. The last few years he has been focusing on perfecting social media marketing, which is what we will need when we do our nationwide launch.
Mike has been great. He recommended a few books. Rework, by the Basecamp guys. Profit First, which explains a visionary way to manage accounting.
The trio of Zac, Dan, and Mike make up the nucleus of our project. We are all ‘A’ people that are bought in to the project and are committed to seeing it through.
Dennis (not his real name). Dennis had worked with Zac in the industry of elderly healthcare for 7-8 years. He has 16 years experience in the industry. Dennis and Zac had been talking for a couple of years trying to find a new opportunity, something to take the senior healthcare industry to the next level. They’re both very passionate about their work.
Zac wanted to bring Dennis in as an equal partner to our new venture (yet to be named). We met for lunch one day in mid April, the three of us. Dennis showed great enthusiasm towards the project and he also expressed frustration with his career that had seemed to plateau, which was a driving factor for him to pursue this project.
I’m looking back in history for this blog post, so I will summarize this quickly.
Dennis missed our first two meetings after that lunch and was not responding to any of my correspondence. I finally pressed Zac about this, he talked to Dennis, and Dennis bowed out of the project. He wasn’t ready to take the risk of time and financial.
Zac and I moved forward and started sketching out the website features and I started coding the first week of May.
Six weeks later when we had a working draft of Ask Earnest, Dennis expressed that he wanted back in. He was ‘fully in’. Zac went to bat for him asking me to bring him back in and we went back and forth on whether it was a good idea and for how much ownership stake. After a few hours at Denny’s one night (last week), we decided to bring him back in for a 10% stake, with an additional 5-10% if he met certain goals the first year.
The very next day, Zac and Dennis learned of some competition already in the market. A new company, two years old, but with millions in venture capital money. Dennis bowed out again, saying he would have more success launching a homemade cookie company than with Ask Earnest.
That’s the end of Ask Earnest and Dennis. What we learned from this is we need to surround ourselves with only ‘A’ people that are fully bought in and dedicated to our project. The defeatist attitudes can stay home. I will also add that Zac’s energy level was extremely high when Dennis was out of the picture, and dipped substantially when Dennis was in the picture. I was glad for Zac when Dennis dropped out this last time so we could plug away with high energy!
Around March/April we started talking again about his vision. We started drilling in to the concierge piece and left the scrubs and CPE credits off the table. With that focus, Zac started articulating his vision really well and I immediately saw how potentially big this could be. We were having lunch at HOB in downtown Corvallis and I finally saw it.
It took nine months to get there. Partly it was Zac fleshing out his vision and articulating it, partly it was me coming around to understand his vision. But once we got there, I was sold.
Round one was during the summer, culminating in August. Round two came in December. The website Zac was looking to purchase was off the market. We talked for a week and he continued to express his interest, but we were not meshing. Zac’s vision was so grand that I couldn’t piece it together.
He was talking about creating an online concierge service for the elderly. That made alot of sense, this is what Zac has been doing. But then he would talk about professional coursework and CE credits for healthcare professionals. Selling scrubs. It just didn’t feel like his vision was focused enough to be successful. After a week, the conversation tailed off.
Zac invited a bunch of us to his house for a night of cards, something that we hadn’t done in quite some time. I rode my motorcycle up to his house (45 minutes from mine) and played cards till past midnight. I felt I had a few too many and decided to sleep it off on his couch.
The next morning Zac made me some coffee and sprung his first pitch on me. He had been working in the senior health care industry for 7-8 years and saw a void in software and internet services for that industry. The pitch was that he and I come together and either create a website or purchase a website that he had found.
We met a few times after that, did some research. After a month I finally decided it wasn’t the right fit for me. It didn’t seem worth the sacrifice of time and financial.
Yesterday Zac and I had a meeting with the Salem Hospital Care Management leadership group. The meeting was a great success and our little project is starting to feel very real. I’m going to go back in time and chronicle our journey that led us to our meeting yesterday, and then continue writing in this journal as we launch our company.
Ask Earnest 