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kottke.org posts about Svpply

Tech startup CEO has no idea what he’s doing

Ben Pieratt is the CEO of Svpply, a social shopping startup. He recently wrote a great post subtitled “I have no idea what I’m doing” that reveals the rarely seen flipside to the macho show-no-weakness tech startup scene.

My situation is blessed and I rarely let a day go by that I don’t say a silent prayer in thanks for the position in which I’ve found myself, but good gracious is this hard.

The most frustrating part is that it is difficult to get into a rhythm in your work when you have no real understanding of the next steps you need to take. There’s no opportunity for flow if both outcome and process are foreign experiences. There’s just a lot of poking around and mystery and inadvertent negligence.

Svpply has been open to the public for six months now. Our progress has been slow for a variety of reasons. We have not launched as many new features as I would expect, or even drastically improved the ones we launched with. I own these problems, they can be traced directly back to my inabilities and inexperience, sometimes directly, other times in the form of my not having anticipated or recognized situations for what they were as soon as I could have.