Month / March 2014

by martha

A New Kind of Resolution

Since I was a teenager, I’ve had a mid-January ritual of reflecting on the previous year and making resolutions for the upcoming year. Mid-January, because I always feel I need to let the year sink in for a couple of weeks before I can properly digest it. I go through my journal, look at what my resolutions were from last year, and analyze each one in detail.

This year, I decided to change it up a bit. 2013 went very differently than I had expected and had a lot of unpredictability. Some of my resolutions didn’t make sense given the changes. I don’t think 2014 will be much more predictable, given that I can hardly tell you where I’ll be more than two-three weeks out at this point!

So I took a new tactic. For 2014 I decided to approach resolutions in an agile manner. Each month I am trying something different in order to see if it makes a difference as a habit or lifestyle change. I was inspired a great deal by Matt Cutts’ ongoing series of “30 Day Challenges.”

Since I came up with this idea at the end of January, I started in February, and for February I started with working out everyday. I like going to the gym, but since relocating to San Francisco in October, I have found that I often had early morning calls with customers or partners in Europe, and work demands often wrecked my attempts to work out in the evenings.

So in February I made a point to either get to the gym or do something physical corresponding to a workout every day. Running with an Americano to the train was not counted!

It wasn’t easy, and it required a lot of planning. I missed a couple of days – our Demo Day weeks in San Francisco & in New York were particularly challenging. But I wanted to address them head on instead of letting them “happen to me.” I picked up a book of resistance exercise workouts I could do anywhere, so that I wouldn’t have an excuse while travelling.

However I feel a lot better right now having done this. It’s always rewarding for me when I work out, and with a lot of the stress from the end of our accelerator and demo day crunch time, it was very useful to ensure I had an hour or so each day to not think about work and to do something good for me. I’m definitely going to keep this up for March.

What does March hold in store? Well – March is the beginning of Woopie seed round fundraising. I had a taste of this last year, as well as while I was converting our company to a US company. Although I feel I have a thicker shell and am more ready for it now, I know it will be incredibly stressful, frustrating and time-consuming.

To try to counteract some of that I’m going to adopt a regular meditation routine for March. Since I’ve been on a super tight budget in San Francisco, I haven’t been able to go to many yoga classes, so I think this will be an okay substitute for now. Not sure when makes the most sense to incorporate into my schedule, whether am or pm, but I’ll do some research over the next couple of days to figure that out.

Anyone been doing any meditation lately? Recommendations for websites or apps that have been useful? I’ve looked at headspace & calm.com but open to any recommendations that folks have found useful.

by martha

Forward March

A little over a year ago I stopped writing online, save for a few posts on the Woopie blog. I stopped writing for myself, for other people, for freelance work. What my startup needed at the end of 2012 was focus.

A year later, and what a year! I’m on a plane back to San Francisco from New York where we spent a week showing off Woopie to investors, media properties, friends, advisors and customers, and the reactions from people were incredible and invigorating. We have new customers on trial subscriptions, a queue of people looking to discuss their scenario more and how they can reach a larger audience on Woopie, investors ready to write cheques to sustain & grow our company, and supporters and advisors cheering us on the whole way.

I had been dreading the process of raising our seed round up until now. But at this point I realize we are 100% ready to take this step as a company. Moving Woopie from an Irish corporation to a US corporation was very painful, expensive and time-consuming, but it has prepared us both mentally and logistically to deal with the time-consuming and often frustrating process.

I promised many folks that I would write up an overview of what it took to convert our company, given that it’s really hard to find solid advice from other companies about when & how it makes sense to do so. I think it’s important to share experiences like this to help other people make informed decisions for their startups. I’m waiting for a few final things to go through before I do that, but hopefully will have that live over the next couple of weeks.