A brief history of us.

Mark Molckovsky
CEO/Founder ClutterMe Inc.

Mark has just finished his undergraduate education at the University of Toronto, majoring in Electrical Engineering. He has received the University of Toronto National Scholarship - the University's most prestigious undergraduate award. He met HRH Prince Philip upon receiving a Gold Duke of Edinburgh Award. He runs the blog and is responsible for the front-end, marketing, and financial aspects of ClutterMe Inc.

Alex Curelea
CTO/Founder ClutterMe Inc.

Alex immigrated to Canada from Romania in 1997. He graduated from the prestigious Tops Program at Marc Garneau Secondary school and was awarded a University of Toronto National Scholarship upon entering his study of Computer Engineering in 2001. Alex graduated in 2005 and has spent two years working at the Ontario Telemedicine Health Network. Alex is knee deep in all aspects of ClutterMe's technology.

Why Pownce makes me happy

I like Pownce. I like the interface, it's clean, intuitive, and quite polished. I like the concept - it distills the "communicate with your friends" aspects of social networks into something simple, easy, and coherent. Even the name is starting to grow on me.

But none of that is why Pownce makes me happy.

The reason is actually a bit more selfish. In my last blog post I said that the lack of competition for ClutterMe.com is starting to worry me. Well, we can add Pownce to a handful of sites we've seen that "get" a certain aspect of ClutterMe. While Pownce's focus is somewhat different from ClutterMe, it's still the first site I've seen that addresses this aspect in a way similar to how we would. Needless to say, since the response to Pownce has been fairly positive, this makes me happy as yet another indication that we're on the right path.

More importantly, Pownce seems to confirm what I believe about the future of social networks. We're entering (to use a tired term) the "2.0" era of social networks. The past years saw Myspace and Facebook as the monolithic, winner-take-all social network existing for its own sake. The next year or two will see social networks starting to become a common web development paradigm, a commodity almost, similar to how "Reader's Comments" can now be found on practically every news website. This also means that there's plenty of room to grow alongside the giants - people won't as much be "part of a social network or another", they'll "use sites that also have social networking". We should see many interesting variations on the theme, as the concept of social networking matures and begins to reach its full potential. Pownce is one of the first out the gate; ClutterMe.com will hopefully follow not too far behind; and countless others will, I'm sure, join the party.

The Internet is far from mature, and far from its full potential. The next few years should be a lot of fun.

That being said... Anyone want Pownce invites? :)

Random musings

Close to one month into our mad venture, some of the initial excitement is starting to be replaced by routine, and reality sets in.

One of the biggest surprises for me so far is how confident Mark and I are in what we're doing. It's an ambitious project, many start-ups fail, and it's the first such experience for both of us. And yet we feel that we're firmly in control.

If there's one thing that's worrying me, it's the lack of competition. A lot of what we're doing already exists, scattered on various major sites, but the core idea seems blindingly obvious (to us), and is nowhere to be seen. The closest we've seen are a couple of start-ups which partially address it, but (in our opinion) stop way short of the full potential. So why aren't we seeing it everywhere? I see three possible reasons, and all of them worry me.

1) It's been done, but never caught on, so that's why Mark and I haven't seen it "in the wild". It's possible, but unlikely - we've both spent way too much time surfing the web.
2) It just can't be done. I find this extremely unlikely, since we already have close to a fully functional demo, and it's been relatively smooth sailing so far. It's always possible we'll hit some technological pitfalls, but I very much doubt that any will be showstoppers.
3) We're actually on to something new (and big)! Obviously the most exciting of the three, but in some ways also the scariest.

I'm one of those who works much better when listening to music... and sometimes a song eerily fits with my thoughts. For example, Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" almost sounds like the voice that is probably at the back of every entrepreneur's mind at times:

Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you, who do you think you are,

Ha ha ha bless your soul
You really think you're in control

Well, I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
Just like me

But too much introspection is never a good thing. The best way to show that our confidence isn't misplaced is to show everyone what we're working on - which we can't wait to do! For now we're keeping our heads down and hammering away at the code, as I listen to Daft Punk.

Work It Harder Make It Better
Do It Faster, Makes Us stronger
More Than Ever Hour After
Our Work Is Never Over

[end of ramble]

move ...

I said move

The first week of our start-up just ended and let's recap...

1) We're making a customizable homepage
2) We're quitting our jobs (and in mark's case not looking for a job) to start this company.
3) We have given ourselves until August to make something good enough to release.

Our progress thus far,

We've.. well, set up this blog. No, but seriously, our code chest is moving along quite well. Since last Sunday (I'm writing this on Sunday night) we've worked 4 full days on the project and have probably spent the remaining three days thinking and planning the project. Everywhere we look on the web we keep wishing things had our interface. It IS that cool.

What about the title 'move' what does that have to do with anything? Well tonight is my first night at Alex's house. His family is great. We are probably going to go into a system where Sunday-Tuesday is spent at Alex's and Thursday-Saturday is spent at Mark's.



Alex has decided to keep going part time at his job until mid July, which means we probably won't have an amazing deliverable until mid-August.

We played some street hockey today for our break, we practiced tip-ins from the point.

here we go again,

It feels really good to be back at it again. The sun-is-a-shining and we're hacking away at our 19' inch LCD and 4 week old MacBook, Alex and Mark, respectively.

A personalized get well message goes out to our close friend and almost co-founder Derek Shaw who was involved in a terrible bicycle accident.

Derek, we both wish you a safe and speedy recovery.

In tech. news most of today is going to be spent documenting and coding. We need to precisely define our interface. A lot of our homepage interface hasn't been done before, so the code we are writing is going to be 100% original. We're not worried though, we code borrow in other parts of the site *cough cough*, we'll meet our quota. Getting it right the first time however is a major concern.

These guys get it, most of the time. What does 'getting it' mean? It means making a sexy and user friendly interface, making site navigation intuitive, and not putting off users with unneeded eye candy.

We're bringing sexy back to homepages.

Score of today's street hockey game: Mark 76, Alex 2. Only one fall each and numerous swears.

que pasol, que pasol

I just want to get back at it.

I hate standing around and blogging about our website. It's been 2 and a half days since Alex and I last worked full time on our start-up and it sucks. We cannot start a company if we let this much time pass between our productive work sessions.

I've been promised by Alex that this won't happen again, or at least it won't be like this till after mid-July but I can't help but question his commitment to the project.

In much funnier news, I feel like these guys...

Natural light, it burns!

I'm convinced that the only time to start a successful start-up (in Toronto, at least) is early summer. Being able to work outside, catching some sun, and going for a run or roller blading in the park when you feel your brain is getting full is amazing.

What's even more amazing is the feeling of clarity and focus, which only gets stronger every day. We shared our ideas early on with some of our friends, and since then the beast has grown and morphed in our minds... but in some indescribable way, it doesn't feel like it's changed (even though it has), it only feels like the details that have always been there are revealing themselves to us, one by one.

Toughest parts so far? Finding a "home run" domain name (I don't expect this to happen for another month or two). And for me (since I put on my project manager hat), finding a good task tracking tool. I went through maybe 30 options, and they were all either too basic, too elaborate, or not free (and not worth the money). In the end I settled on http://www.dotproject.net/, which has the advantage that I could set it up through our webhost's control panel. The interface is somewhat clumsy, but it'll do.

Since I'm the resident geek, I feel like a bit of technical babble is called for. And what better subject to babble about than the many benefits of Rails! (I can see other geek readers rolling their eyes right about now. Yes, you.)

This is nothing new to Rails users, but I always thought the way routing is handled is very neat. A very basic example is something like:

http://www.clutterme.com/pages/show?name=username

which we might want to condense to the much friendlier

http://www.clutterme.com/username

Nothing fancy, all it takes is the following in routes.rb:

map.connect ':name',
:controller => "pages",
:action => "show"

Now, the fun part is more complicated paths:

http://www.clutterme.com/users/account?name=username
http://www.clutterme.com/users/settings?name=username
etc.

would ideally go to:

http://www.clutterme.com/username/account
http://www.clutterme.com/username/settings
etc.

I expected this to be fairly complicated to do on top of the first rule, since I now have a parameter as the first part of the path, sometimes followed by an action, and the controller is inferred from the context. Yikes! Well, it's not all that complicated. All it took is one extra line in routes.rb:

map.connect ':name/:action',
:controller => "users"

The best part? I'm far from a Rails or routes.rb expert; the above code just "made sense", and it just worked. That's how computers are supposed to work.

Day Two

So big progress thus far... we've changed our blog address.


For more visibility and for users being able to leave comments we've switched from hosting our own blog (iWeb) to Blogger.com.

We hope the extra visibility from google and other bloggers will attract some more traffic to our blog.

Today is also one of our founders Birthday. Happy Birthday goes to Alex who turns 25 today. We're going out to celebrate, or at least we bought a cake.



In tech. notes there was and will be some more progress in the overall look of the main page. Perhaps tonight we could start 'adding friends'. Look for updates tonight for those with user accounts.