Stop Dreaming, Start Planning» Our Story

Our Story #5 – Creating Gravity

Rob — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 10:33:50 +0000

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts which track the building of Escape the City from the original idea through to what we’ve built today.

This instalment covers September 2009 – when we just chucked ourselves into the fray and created early momentum for our idea.

We created a simple WordPress blog (the first incarnation of this blog in fact!) and posted a few articles about ‘escaping the city’ and ‘doing things differently’ (although Dom still hadn’t come up with our motto: Do Something Different!).

Then (eager to get some real life interaction going on the site) we drafted an email introducing our new concept (EsctheCity it was called) to a collection of our friends and contacts.

How do you get your first users?

We often get asked how we moved from 2 subscribers (Dom and Rob) to a mailing list of thousands of people we had never met. The simple answer was emailing everyone we knew and asking for their help.

You can read that first email here: http://bit.ly/KMesWT (it helped that our friends were our target audience so were more inclined to sign up / spread the word).

The email is probably too long and has too many requests in it. Perhaps we launched too early. However, the ripple effect that the email generated was incredible. It was definitely worth it.

Launch fast (even if, like us, your product isn’t ready yet and you are just introducing a concept, a blog and a mailing list).

An idea on your computer is nothing. An idea out there in the world starts interacting with the people you are building it for. It takes on a life of its own.

The results?

We were absolutely blown away by some of the early responses… people responded massively positively to what we were doing.

Here are some of the comments:

Wish you all the luck in the world with this, great idea! I will take the survey in the morning as I’m off to bed now.

I have an overwhelmingly good feeling about this idea. Well done! So, how can I help?)

This is a fantastic idea – why hasn’t any one thought of it before?! Can’t wait for the launch party.

As requested, I forwarded this on so hopefully you’ll have more subscriptions. Wishing you the best of luck.

The second circle

And then… within a day… we started receiving emails from people we had never met (usually friends of friends). People volunteering their stories or introducing contacts. It was spreading!

I thought I’d mention that I have just hung up my boots and am working out my notice period before flying out to live in India to work in microfinance. I just wondered if this could be incorporated into your website somehow. I would be happy to write articles on my venture.

Loving the website and entire concept. Done my bit and forwarded it on to 100+ people and also to two pals of mine who are currently out in (Congo National Park & Africa) doing wild life conservation projects & the other runs a charity. May be good opportunities etc.

The third circle

Then companies we didn’t even know existed we began emailing us with opportunities. Before we knew what was happening we were listing entrepreneurial opportunities in Rwanda and Land Mine Clearance gigs in Cambodia.

And within days we were already helping people find opportunities that they would never have discovered had we not decided to push something out into the world before we had even figured out whether it was just a project, a blog, or a business with serious legs.

It was incredible that an idea we had dreamt up just months previously was now a real thing out there in the world. This was the beginning of the ride that has taken us places we could never have imagined (and it’s only been 2.5 years!).

What did we learn from this stage of our story?

You won’t know if people will like your idea unless you show them something tangible. So get something out there into the world.
So many people you know will want to help you – you’ll get a massive buzz from it. Accept help gratefully. Receive advice gracefully.
Every email from a new person at this stage is a high five moment – enjoy it!
Use the odd naysayer or doubter as fuel and motivation – or just ignore them. It really doesn’t matter and they don’t know what you’re planning.
Follow up every lead, no matter how obscure. Later on you won’t have time for all the random stuff and you never know what leads to what.
Karma is real – so often people we helped in the early days have ended up helping us back. Clients, introductions and even investors!

We also learnt how true this statement is…

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

William Hutchinson Murray (1913-1996), from his 1951 book entitled The Scottish Himalayan Expedition.

Your idea will never be perfect…

… and you can always be better prepared to launch. But you need put something out there in the world to catalyse a reaction. And by doing so, no matter how small, you’ll start creating your own gravity.

Rob (co-founder – Escape the City)

@escroberto

Our Story #4 – Initial Commitment

Rob — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:54:37 +0000

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts which track the building of Escape the City from the original idea through to what we’ve built today.

This instalment covers August 2009 – when we realised that the best way to see if our idea really had legs was to commit to getting it out of our heads and into the real world.

If the beginning of the process of getting excited about our idea had seen us ‘Stop Dreaming’ and ‘Start Planning’… then the summer of 2009 saw us ‘Stop Planning’ and ‘Start Doing’.

We still maintain that the most important thing anyone can do with an idea is to take the scary step of introducing something tangible into the world.

It’s not necessarily about quitting your job and spending lots of money. It’s about committing enough to understand more about the potential of the idea you’re sitting on.

Great idea – who cares?

Without action an idea is worthless.

Derek Sivers says that even the most amazing world-beating idea isn’t worth more than $20.

It’s all in the execution.

We’ve had lots of emails from people from around the world saying ‘I also had an idea for something like Escape the City’.

This is fantastic not only because they usually say ‘well done for starting this’ but also because it shows that there are people out there who have been thinking about solving the same problem that we are working on.

However, the point is… no one can care about your idea until you turn it into a reality.

And in August 2009 no one gave a damn about our idea for a community of corporate professionals who wanted to do something different.

How could they? It didn’t exist. There was nothing more than a logo and a powerpoint presentation.

You can only turn something into a reality when you commit.

A romantic park bench

So Dom and I sat on a bench on Wimbledon Common in south-west London drinking a couple of beers in the setting sun discussing our idea:

“So… what are we going to do with this idea?”
“How on earth are we going to pull this off?”
“Is it a business or just a project?”
“How do you even build a website anyway?!”

What we did realise was that we had nothing to lose by getting something off the page and out into the world.

I was already out of my job and Dom was beginning his saving and escape plan. We agreed to commit to at least starting something – even if it was only ever an online project or a community (rather than a business).

Call it a project to start with

I suppose we took the pressure off by religiously following Seth Godin’s Tribes idea to start with.

This meant that Escape the City didn’t have to be a business in order to help people and that’s really what motivated us at the beginning (and still does) – the prospect of helping people to escape corporate jobs that make them miserable.

Obviously it would have to be a business if we were to run it full-time (in order to support us)… but more important than that at this point was to understand more about the potential of the idea itself (rather than the resulting business opportunities).

Looking back on it, we didn’t have a clue what it would take to make the idea a reality and there’s a huge amount to be said for naive optimism.

Don’t over-analyse (but don’t over-commit either) – just take the first few logical steps and see what happens.

Do this from the safety (and tedium?) of your job.

See what happens.

The fantastical world of blogging

A few things we read around this time really helped give us that kick to realise that we could actually get our idea online without spending a bean (or even needing to make one) in order to modestly commit to the idea.

We didn’t need to the bet the farm, we didn’t even need to risk anything more than some of our time (I was going to quit my job anyway)…

To cut a long story short… we committed by starting a free wordpress blog and began writing about the ideas that were the core inspiration behind Escape the City.

A blog is all you need to test your idea. I don’t care whether you want to import Turkish carpets or start an eco-recycling business… put your ideas down in words and see whether they are convincing.

Evolve your idea in public even if it’s scary.

There is no such thing as a finished product – even if you’re building physical stuff – so just commit to a v0.1 and get it out there.

Some information that was really useful for us at this stage:

Idea meets World

Something amazing happens when your idea has its first interactions with the real world.

a) It’s terrifying… because it is a raw idea… not a finished product.

b) The idea changes as soon as people come into contact with it.

c) Positive reactions make you feel like you are being rewarded for taking a brave step.

Little did we know when we wrote our first blog post about escaping the corporate world but we were in fact committing ourselves to a roller-coaster journey that has defined the last 24 months of both of our lives.

The great thing is that it didn’t feel as momentous as that at the time – but in hindsight that’s how it has worked out.

Committing was the only way we were going to find out whether the idea had legs… so commit we did.

Next instalment: “Learning By Doing”

Photo credit: Anything You Want – by Derek Sivers

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The story so far:

Our Story #1 – A spark
Our Story #2 – Research
Our Story #3 – Eureka!
Our Story #4 – Initial Commitment (this post)

Our Story #3 – Eureka!

Rob — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:35:10 +0000

This is the third in a series of blog posts which track the story behind Escape the City from the original idea through to what we’ve built today.

This instalment covers – June 2009 – when we read something that showed us how to turn the beginnings of an idea into a workable reality.

Eureka moments…

We spent a lot of time in pubs after work, on the grass by Tower Bridge during our lunch breaks, and (on the odd occasion) in meeting rooms at work feverishly scribbling ideas on scraps of paper.

This was a really exciting time for us as we were learning so much about the world we were about to enter. The more we learnt, the more we understood about what we could potentially build.

From our point of view there’s nothing more powerful than watching relevant videos and reading interesting articles with your own idea in the back of your head.

We were casting our net really wide in order to refine all our different thoughts into a viable plan. Every time we read a little nugget that was relevant to our idea we would send it to each other (or log it in a spreadsheet!).

We were constantly having lots of exciting little eureka moments. Tiny in the scale of things, but significant enough for us to start building some real momentum.

Our bible?!

Then, in June 2009, we both read Tribes by Seth Godin. The book is about a pretty simple concept: that anyone with an idea and the energy to make something happen has all the tools they need to assemble a group of people around their concept.

The message resonated on two main levels:

It validated what we personally were doing (i.e. quitting our jobs to work on something that we’re passionate about)
It showed us HOW to go about building what we wanted to build (i.e. from a practical perspective: how might Esc work?)

It’s not a ‘how-to’ book – it’s quite high-level and relatively anecdotal – but it really worked for us.

We realised that the two of us wouldn’t have the power to sell ‘just an idea’ to exciting organisations (our target clients). However, Tribes showed us that the influence provided by thousands of talented professionals using our site (i.e. our tribe members) would give us the credibility and authority to be listened to by our target organisations (and, through doing so, get the entire concept working properly to help our members escape!).

It was a real penny-drop moment for us. We weren’t going to build a business… we were going to build a tribe, a community, a movement.

This felt like a far more authentic way to approach the challenge that we had set ourselves (i.e. how to help thousands of people working in unfulfilling corporate jobs to find something more exciting?) and really gave us the confidence to begin thinking about taking some serious forward steps.

Taking it to the next level…

By mid-June Dom had set off on his Yukon Canoe adventure and his parting shot was: ‘I dare you to have resigned by the time I get back’.

Not known for making careful decisions, Rob duly handed in his resignation. He actually had another plan back in summer 2009 and that was to do a Masters in Oenology (wine-making) in Adelaide, Australia. So his resignation wasn’t quite as brave as all that.

It was only later, when the Esc blog was taking off, that the Australia plan was retired and we both committed 100% to building a business around this concept.

So, despite not knowing it at the time, we were escalating (like the pun?) our commitment month-on-month… building a base that was going to be the beginning of quite a rollercoaster for us over the coming months (and years).

Chicken and egg

As we began to get our heads around what we were going to build, we realised that it would be chicken and egg: you can’t build a proper business until you have a tribe… but how to attract the tribe in the first place?!

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The story so far:

Our Story #2 – Research

Rob — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:57:42 +0000

Hi everyone – this is the second in a series of blog posts which track the story behind Escape the City from the original idea through to what we’ve built today.

This instalment covers – April and May of 2009 – how we set about working out how an idea might become a working reality.

April 2009

We both spent the Easter break searching the Internet for similar ideas and inspiration for our concept. In true management consulting style we drew up spreadsheets and categorised likeminded websites (which we never really used again) and we drew up a PowerPoint presentation that outlined our plan (really embarrassing looking back on it and again, we haven’t used them since).

Stop Dreaming, Start Planning

I suppose the most valuable thing about this exercise wasn’t the quality of the thoughts or ideas we were having but the fact that we were giving ourselves the confidence to get the idea moving. We were essentially talking ourselves into it.

May 2009

Early summer, Rob was working in Belfast and Dom was still plugging away on Fleet Street. Although we were both reading masses about the idea (and sending each other hundreds of emails), we weren’t actively progressing with our planning either.

Some people say that you should start your business from the safety of your current job. This might work for some people but it is an incredibly difficult thing to do. We find you only have a certain amount of productive hours in a day and expecting to make creative advances in a project or business that requires a lot of ‘thinking time’ just didn’t happen for us.

So from that perspective there was only one way that Esc was going to become a reality and that was for us to escape ourselves…

No one likes a moaner

Escape the City has never been about bashing boring corporate jobs and nor do we look back on our time as consultants with any regret.

There are plenty of exciting opportunities in ‘the city’ and plenty of talented people doing interesting work that makes them tick. Unfortunately for us we weren’t amongst them. The traditional career ladder wasn’t a game we wanted to play and the work didn’t see us jumping out of bed in the mornings.

Undoubtedly naïve and clearly idealistic we wanted to work for a cause we were genuinely passionate about. We also wanted to have control over what we worked on, and where and when.

We realised we were both becoming those annoying people who moan about their jobs. No one wants to hear your complaints…

We also realised that if we wanted to turn just another idea into a reality there was only one thing for it…

… to stop dreaming and start planning…

… and to actually escape ourselves and do something about it.

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The story so far:

Our Story #1 – A spark
Our Story #2 – Research (this post)

Our Story #1 – A Spark

Rob — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 12:24:28 +0000

Hi everyone – this is the beginning of a series of blog posts which track the story behind Escape the City from the original idea through to what we’ve built today.

Starting at the beginning – February and March of 2009 – this post tells the story of the original idea.

How did it start?

It all started with a Google search. Actually, no it didn’t. It all started with a canoe race. The longest canoe race in the world actually. It’s called the Yukon River Quest. Back in 2008 and 2009 Dom started spending more and more of his time setting himself challenges for his weekends and holidays. It helped him forget that he was finding his job increasingly unfulfilling.

He ended up building a small website to help him raise charity money for the Yukon adventure. The website was called www.fleethecity.co.uk…

February 2009

One slow Friday afternoon Dom and Rob were sitting in neighbouring cubicles on the 9th floor. Dom leaned across and whispered to Rob about the canoe race and the website. He also said that he thought there was a business opportunity for a website that helped bored office workers find exciting challenges and short-term adventures to distract them from the fact that they didn’t enjoy their jobs.

He said that perhaps he could turn FleetheCity into such a business when he got back from the Yukon in July.

Rob, not being such an adventurer, but possessing a similar feeling of ‘surely there’s more to life than this laptop, PowerPoint and Excel’, said that he thought it was a great idea.

March 2009

The Google search… For reasons now forgotten (perhaps desperation) Rob found himself sitting at work and typing the word ‘escape’ into Google. The first image that came up on the Images search was a photo of a little escape key running away from the keyboard. Try it yourself, it still comes up.

By this stage Dom was working at a client’s office over on Fleet Street. Rob copied the image and sent it to him via email. He didn’t intend anything more than to say the word ‘Escape’ to Dom through the medium of a Googled image. A strange and unintended thing then happened. Dom replied with a crazily enthusiastic email saying ‘Yes, that’s it! Not Flee the City, but Escape the City!’. By that evening he sent through a rough logo to Rob’s mobile phone.

Crazy and naive as it sounds, but as soon as the little Esc man was born we both felt like we already had a business. Little did we know that that logo was the beginning of an adventure that would see us both quit our jobs and start a business together!

{next stage of the story coming next week – watch this space}