It is a common mistake for start-ups (and people in general) to presume that if they would have more [anything] their product would be much better. More money, more people, more clients, more anything.

People complain ‘If only I had the resources’ or ‘If only my boss would support me more’. You see these obstacles and think that if in some way you could make them disappear, everything would work fine. We make the same mistakes at Fleck, regularly. But we are aware of it too and try to recognize our mistakes and fix them.

Funding is a good example. A lot of ‘would be’ entrepreneurs think that they can’t get started before they have their funding taken care of. They say ‘I can’t do anything before I get funded’. of course, they are wrong. Getting started is hard but also simple. You can register a domain name for $9.95. You can start a blog for free in 5 minutes. Can’t afford a developer? Go to php.net and learn PHP in two weeks, for free. There is no excuse for not starting.

So how do you shape the best circumstances for success? How would you motivate someone or a team?

A: get them all the resources they need, a great team of talented people to work with and enough money to buy anything. Get the whole company behind it and make sure no obstacles are in their way.

B: take away their resources, give them nobody, no money and publicly criticism them.

If you could chose in which team you would want to work you would take option A, right? Me too. But history shows that the greatest products are often the result of a situation that more resembles option B, not A.

Take the Apple Macintosh as an example. The developers make less money than all the other developers at Apple. They had to hide their consultants in a closet when they suspected the CEO would visit and if management found out what they were doing they were likely to be fired.

Think about that for a minute: would you work on a product in your company if it might get you fired if your boss would find out about it?

Who is more likely to be really motivated to build a boat?

A: a well fed and well paid employee

B: someone stranded on a deserted island

My guess, and experience, would say that the stranded person will be very motivated. Despite, or thanks to, his lack of money, food and resources. Hence, the Deserted Island Strategy…

So what does this tell us about start-ups? We at Fleck are constantly working on funding and improving our setting and resources. You want to have the best resources and the most money we can get and build the best product possible. But at the same time it must be very clear that a lack of resources, money and time can never be a reason to have a less than great product. The only thing that really has an impact is the dedication to the product and your personal motivation.

I spend the last two days on getting my Mac OS X Subversion client set-up. It’s one of those important things that you just have to do and you know are important but you still feel like you are wasting time.

Don’t get me wrong: making back-ups is important. But it’s one of those things that don’t seem to be constructive and when I look at my todo list I’d rather work on the user section of the website than back-up my stuff.

Anyway, it’s all part of the game.

On Sunday I was visiting my parents house to celebrate Easter Day. As we drove there we noticed a perfect white rabbit sitting by the side of the road. I stopped to show it to our children and told them it must have been the Easter bunny. My parents hid painted real eggs and chocolate ones in the garden, which the kids had to find, and then had lunch. After lunch I took a nap in my sisters room. As I woke up I looked around the room and noticed a drawing of a white rabbit. I stared at it for a while and noticed that that painting was actually a very good metaphor to starting a company.

When you start a company you have to know the answer to the question:

‘How do you paint a white rabbit’

In art academy (which I attended) you are taught to think different and one way to practice that is to think in negative shapes. You can paint a white rabbit, or an invisible form, or a bright light by outlining the outside of the form you wish to make visible. In the case of the white rabbit painting in my sisters room there is a background and a shadow which make the white rabbits stand out from the paper. In art academy they call that ‘inversion’ or ‘a negative’.

In Flecks case the white rabbit is our product. As you start to establish the company you build the background. We started with a patent, a blog and logo, then a website and a little funding. Then we hired developers and worked up a demo. You could say that we started working on all the stuff around the actual product and the more stuff you but in the background the clearer the white rabbit/our vision becomes.

This is a scary procedure. All the time you are building around, talking about and building upon something that simply isn’t there yet. You are constantly thinking “this is all background stuff, I want to see the actual product!’. But to get there you have to go through all that other stuff first.

It is strange to talk with investors about your dreams and vision. What you are actually trying to do is show them the white rabbit. The more stuff you show (Excel sheets, patents, demos and plans) the more clearer the white rabbit becomes.

Then one day, you wake up, and are suddenly staring at a very real and white rabbit and everybody can see it…

Warning: If you like cats and/or have strong feelings about animal cruelty you might be shocked by part of this story.

The first time I started a company I spend a lot of time writing a press-release. On the day we launched I faxed the press release to a few newspapers, relevant magazines and websites. I hoped the press-release would get picked up and make us famous. I was hoping for a spark to start my media engine. And it did.

These days things are different. Sure, I would still write a press-release but just a spark isn’t enough to start an online business and attract millions of users. What you need is (a great product or service and) a Burning Cat Strategy.

When I was in college there were a lot of fires in the city where I lived. Every month a shop that wasn’t doing very well burned down in an effort to collect money from the fire insurance. Most of the time they failed because the investigators, by looking at the source of the fire, could easily show it wasn’t an accident.

But then a strange thing happened. The investigators suddenly were confronted by fires that seemed to have started everywhere in the room. The whole room seemed to have caught fire at once. After a few months of similar fires the investigators started to notice one similarity in those unexplainable fires; they always found a dead cat.

It turned out that the arsonists poured gasoline over the cats and used them as living torches. The burning cats would run around the store and spread the fire everywhere in seconds. Cruel but effective.

You are now thinking ‘Who comes up with such a cruel thing’ and the answer might surprise you. Forrest fires and often spread by burning rabbits and other animals and sometimes fires are spread from one house to another by a burning mouse that tries to escape to the house next door. These criminals probably just watched National Geographic.

I thought of this story as I was trying to explain the marketing strategy of Fleck and other internet companies like us. We can’t rely on a single spark to get us noticed. To start our fire we need a Burning Cat. We use a blog to get users interested before we launch, promise journalists a first look at the beta, talk with potential users, give speeches at universities, design affiliate services, tools for webmasters, collect email-addresses for the beta program, organize a conference and do a hole range of other things to make sure that when we go live we are everywhere.

And even this post is part of our ‘Burning Cat Strategy’. I’m coining the term, partly to get mentioned in the ValleySpeak post on Valleywag, and hope you will use it too. So if you blog about it, please make sure you mention Fleck.com and link to it.

We need all the sparks we can get…

A friend just emailed us a link to the The Museum of Modern Betas Most Anticipated list. We are right there on number 9. Not bad.

A lot of people are very anxious to hear from us and more importantly to try our software. Or at least hear what it is about. We like the positive excitement but are also very aware of how a phenomenon like that can suddenly turn against you. We all know companies that created tremedous pre-hype and then took months to go live.

Some days we almost regret having gone live with this blog and the sign-up form. But mostly we are happy with all the support we get by mail and the positive feedback we get. And the pre-hype did get us noticed. We were contacted by investors, journalists and developers and are still benefiting from that every day.

So, if you feel anxious, multiply that feeling by 10 and then you will know how we feel. We as kfor just a little but more patience so we can finish the beta and go live with that

We love modern times. It used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollar to open an office. Now, all you need is a PC and Skype. We just bought a SkypeIn account with a San Francisco area code. Here it is:

(415) 315-9395 (country code +1, United States)

Our Skype name is ‘fleck.com’ so you can also just Skype us from now on. We have a dedicated iBook installed. If you want to sing us a song just give us a call and we will put you o speaker.

Now only if we could take a virtual trip to Sandhill road…