Winning in Business Realize your potential. By Boris Revsin.

A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.

A man convinced against his will
is of the same opinion still.

I was re-reading (for the 10th time) Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People when I ran into this un-attributed quote. It struck me as pertinent, though, because of the serious activity going on at CampusLIVE regarding the new release we have planned for July 1st (dubbed “Raptor”).

Raptor is a complete overhaul of the look of the site, with a STRONG focus on usability and search. Our focus groups confirmed our beliefs that users are looking to get to places quickly, with as little clicking and scrolling as possible. This seems obvious, but this was not reflected in our current release (dubbed “Viper”). So, in order to get things right this time around, we hired two developers (Mike, our all-star programmer/product mgr and Sean, our illustrator and designer) to help make it a reality.

As you can probably guess, 9 guys in one 1,400 sqft. office will have PLENTY of disagreements about the product they’ve been building, re-building, marketing and selling for over 2 years. Now, there is no way to stop people from having disagreements. It’s natural, and healthy debate is KEY to building a successful product.

Look at it this way:

Ryan - has been LIVING with our demographic for the last year. Literally, he lived in a dorm room. He knows what the students want, and he did all of our focus studies.

Jared - designed the first 3 versions of CampusLIVE. He knows what he’s doing and has seen the site go from old-school to new-school to web 2.0.

Mike - Mike is an excellent front-end guy. He can build anything, and make it look appealing. He’s also in charge of adding functionality to our designs. Fade-ins? Scrolling? Stylesheets? All on him.

Sean - He’s our artist. We depend on him to make things look professional. He has to “see” the light.

The key is to ensuring all of these players can play together. The title of this blog post seems to me a perfect fit for this situation. Even though all of us are debating the merits of each feature and each stroke on the site, we ALL have to keep in mind that at the end of the day the final product will be a MIX of all of our thoughts.

If you are a founder of a company, and can’t accept the fact that your vision will change, you are making a huge mistake. Remember, a start-up SUCCEEDS because the people are (allegedly) more PASSIONATE about their product. If you stifle creativity, and force your own way, your stifling passion.

I think we’re doing a good job letting people input their own advice. Let’s see how it turns out in July…

Cheers,
Boris