Featured Solopreneur Bill Dwight: His Small Business Helps to “Prepare Kids For the Wild”

This is “Featured Solopreneur,” an ongoing series that gives all of us a glimpse at how other solopreneurs operate their small businesses. Click Here to read more Solopreneur Success Stories.

Name of solopreneur:
Bill Dwight

Name of business and city:
FamZoo, Inc. Palo Alto, California

Web site address:
www.famzoo.com

Type of business:
FamZoo is an Internet application that allows parents to set up a “Virtual Family Bank” as a hands-on way to teach their kids good personal finance habits and introduce them to philanthropy. Our mission is to help parents prepare their kids for the real world.

When did you officially go into business:
Day one on my own as a solopreneur started at 4:30 a.m., August 5, 2006 which I kicked off with this post. I officially incorporated on August 29, 2006.

Why did you start your own business:
I grew up in Silicon Valley in a very entrepreneurial family. My dad founded a pioneering company in the laser industry in the early 1960s. So, I’ve always had this latent entrepreneurial gene, I’ve always loved to build stuff and I’ve always admired the spirit and determination that entrepreneurs possess. I have worked for five software startups over the years, but I never really got up the gumption to start my own thing from scratch. Finally, almost five years ago, at age 43, I felt like the time was “now or never.” At the same time, I had recently built something as a weekend project for my kids that I was realizing could have broad appeal and value. And, I loved the mission of helping parents become better mentors in preparing their kids for the real world. So, it was pretty much the perfect alignment of timing, my passions and my skills as a (somewhat rusty) software developer.

What was the best thing you did when you were starting up your business:
I think one of the best things I did was open up the initial unpolished application to a group of “charter” families very early on, but simultaneously resist the prevailing “common wisdom” of throwing it out there too early to the general public. It’s a slight variation on sentence two in this excellent Paul Graham essay entitled “Startups in 13 Sentences.”

I think it was the right compromise: I wanted to get a lot of hands-on feedback to steer us in the right direction, but I also wanted to launch with something we could be really, really proud of. I hate visiting a “launched” site and getting the feeling that it’s hacked together quickly, or, worse, that I’m doing their quality assurance for them. We made sure our charter family members knew that they were guinea pigs, and that they were O.K. with helping us refine the service prior to launch.

What is a mistake that you made that you have learned from:
I waited too long to find a great outside graphic/Web designer. I know great design when I see it, but I sure don’t know how to produce it myself (you should have seen the first versions of the FamZoo UI that I designed—yech!). Design is a real craft. It also takes quite a bit of time and attention to detail to implement the design once you have it. So, I probably set us back by a good 6-12 months by waiting too long.

To give proper credit where credit is due, we work with Lea Alcantara. She’s terrific and a pleasure to work with. You can find her at www.lealea.net

When did you become a duet?
I morphed from a solopreneur to a duet after a year on my own. Day 366 to be precise. (Uh, yeah, I’m an engineer.) Here’s my post on when Chris Beaufort joined FamZoo.

What advice would you give to people who are considering a duet?
Find someone who is aligned with you, yet complementary. Often, solopreneurs are on their own because they’re determined to run a business in a way that’s true to their personal mission, vision and values. So, if that’s the case for you (like it was for me), you better be darn sure that your potential “duet partner” is in alignment with you on those core aspects. This was pretty easy to insure in my case, because Chris and I had known each other since the first day of college, had already worked together in a business context, and shared similar views regarding our mission. But, the good thing is that we also have complementary skills, and we’re completely comfortable pointing out when the other is being an idiot. This leads to much more thorough and effective decision-making for the company.

What is your biggest current challenge in the business and what are you doing to try to solve it:
Our biggest challenge is to very quickly communicate what our Virtual Family Bank is, and how it can truly help parents as they raise their kids. It’s a very new product space, so our target audience typically doesn’t have an existing mental model that we can quickly tap into. Even more challenging, they’ll often get a glimpse of our application and think “Oh, that’s just like Quicken, but for the family.” Unfortunately, this association implies that our application is a lot of effort, when it really isn’t. And finally, we’re a subscription service in the “gee, everything is free” world of the Internet. Why not go with an ad-driven business model? Well, encouraging impulse purchases (“Click Here!, Buy Now!”) and doing wacky things to garner lots of “eyeballs” isn’t really consistent with our mission. So, you can see, we’ve got a lot of convincing to do.

What are we doing to solve that problem? We’re creating lots of short, accessible content on our site/blog to warm people up to our product and our brand. We’re offering a long trial period (two months minimum with lots of coupon offers for extra months) with no payment hassle up front and super-simple payment/cancellation terms to encourage families to give us a try. We’re focusing on very personal and attentive customer service to our FamZoo families. Satisfied customers and word-of-mouth will be critical to our success.

What are your goals for 2010:
Grow to more than 1,000 member families and maintain our personal touch. Also, add a nice mobile UI experience for our Droid and iPhone users beyond our texting-based mobile access.

Where do you want to be with the business in five years:
More than 100,000 member families.

What are your main software programs:
In general, I’m a huge fan of the whole cloud computing model. So, my goal is to run as little software as possible on our own machines and minimize our hardware and software administration hassles.

Some of the key software services that we run our business on are:
• Quickbooks Online from Intuit for accounting and payroll: I love the fact that our outsourced accounting and tax professionals can just sign in from anywhere to access and manage our books. This saves us a ton of time and money. It also integrates nicely with our online banking at Wells Fargo.

• Basecamp from 37signals for project collaboration: Basecamp is particularly handy to use with outside consultants. We use it for collaborating on graphic design projects, marketing programs, end-of-year accounting/tax wrap-up, technical projects, etc. It’s nice and simple and keeps everyone on the same page.

• Highrise from 37signals for customer relationship management: Also nice and simple, and, so far, completely adequate for our needs.

• Skype for voice communication: Chris and I are on Skype non-stop using simultaneous voice and chat since we’re in different parts of the state and work out of our homes. We’ve also started using the integrated screen sharing which is very convenient. I use Skype for all my customer calls as well. It’s a truly excellent piece of software.

• Etherpad for collaborative writing: I absolutely love this simple tool for collaborating on a piece of writing in real time with other folks. Tragically, they’re shutting down the service because they were bought by Google. I’m looking for a good alternative, perhaps typewith.me.

• TweetDeck for staying on top of the Twitter firehose: a great tool for monitoring multiple twitter streams and searches all at a glance.

• Screenflow from Telestream : if you’ve got a Mac, this is a really nice program for putting together videos that combine screen capture with audio and external video (I use it with my Flip). Very easy to use, yet very powerful.

• Google Analytics for our site/blog traffic analysis: a fantastically powerful tool and free to boot. To get a handle on how you can get the most out of your analytics tool, I highly recommend that you check out Avinash Kaushik at In particular, I really enjoyed his analytics presentation.

What’s your advice for aspiring solopreneurs:
Be determined to succeed, but be prepared to fail. Maybe it’s the engineer in me, but always have a backup plan so you don’t leave those who depend upon you in the lurch.

Are you glad you became a solopreneur? Why or why not?
I’m ecstatic. I’m learning a ton. I’m pursuing my passions. I’m working with good friends. And, I’m able to work from home. This last one has two key benefits: I’m able to enjoy flexible time with my family, and my kids are able to observe my work (and my work ethic) firsthand.

Life is good!