The Startup Spouses

My husband and I are opposites on many fronts, which is a good thing in many cases, and certainly in our business ventures. We tend to balance out each other’s strengths and shortcomings. Kris is definitely the CEO type; he’s creative, inspired, unafraid of failure, interested in throwing ideas out and seeing what sticks. I probably am more the COO type; I am strategic, systematic, organized, and interested in understanding how things work. He’s the idealist; I’m the realist. It’s a nice combination, when in the right balance. What happens when it gets out of whack? Plenty, as it turns out. We’re trying to operate in the rapid prototyping mode; get a product together quickly, get feedback, edit, repeat until satisfied/gazillionaires. But we’ve each managed to create roadblocks to our progress that are just byproducts of our personalities.

It might have sounded flattering when I described Kris above, it was not intended to be. His manic creativity and idea generation is sometimes more of a problem than anything else. For example, just as we were poised to be ready to get a site up on schedule in mid-February, Kris had another idea. A good idea, one that if implemented correctly could at least be a short-term win in a less competitive space. So we dropped everything and have spent two weeks developing this. The inherent problem is that this could go on infinitely, as I have seen in the past with Kris’s ideas. He comes up with an idea, is quick to start implementing, and promptly abandons it when the next idea comes along. I am only lucky that he does not do this with wives. Will the idea-chasing ever pay off? Not without some serious follow through somewhere.

I have certainly created some bumps along the way myself. Because I am so concerned with how things work, I often think more about the process than the product. And because I’m a long-term thinker, I’m not a great short-term doer. Bummer, because I’m currently the main resource in developing our product. To date, I have created a few delays. The first was that I didn’t feel comfortable contacting vendors without an @domain.com email. Nevermind that we don’t have a website or anything yet. So I delayed a task for three days because I didn’t have the “right” email address. Absurd. I also agonized for days over what systems we would use for communicating, tracking, planning, and project management. I mean, we are a married couple who live and work in the same small space, and I’m obsessing over setting up my Outlook calendar and deciding whether we should use Basecamp, or if Google docs is sufficient. Systems thinking is useful when you actually have something to organize, but apparently a handicap when you have no content.

So we’re still experimenting and trying to find the best way to make use of our respective skills. We have a lot of potential as business partners, but we both need to stop looking at our different big pictures and start working already.