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{{User:Sam Odio/Top}}
[[Image:10_office.jpg|left|thumb|300px|The "office" (read: apartment) we worked in during the summer of '06]]

This is what I put most of my 2006 summer into.  There were three of us, me and two other great guys:
*Phu Le, UVA CS
*Shanif Dhanani, UVA CS & Systems

We were all basically living & working in the same 2 bedroom apartment. It was crazy, one room was the office - and the other was our shared bedroom.  Of course, the bigger room was the office.

It wasn't as successful as I had hoped, and much of that was my fault.  I learned a lot about myself that summer, as well as a number of good lessons about starting web startups:
*'''Motivation''' - I learned that it's A LOT harder to motivate yourself when you're working with 3 other guys, verses when you're working for yourself.  '''Motivation is key''', you really have to think about ways to keep everyone motivated and dedicated to the project. 
*'''Perseverance''' - I learned that I'm not able to sit down for 10-15 hours and program.  I need to be able to do that.
*'''Program design''' - Halfway through the summer, we had a project that worked 95% of time time.  But it really wasn't worth much, it had too many bugs to be usable.  
*'''Focus on the end product''' - We lost focus of our vision, and got bogged down in the details of the site.  We cared too much about the user preferences page, and not enough about whether the site actually delivered any value to the user.  Once we finished the project, we realized it wasn't even something we would use.



==Links==
*[http://www.webidealist.com/blog/ Our Blog] - Not really active anymore.
*[http://www.helpuschoose.com/ HelpUsChoose.com]  - we put a few of our ideas online, so that our friends could vote on their favorites
*[http://www.webidealist.com/ WebIdealist.com] - This was going to be our company site.  I've now commandeered it for a new company.
*[http://6starts.com 6Starts] - our first product.  Designed to be a better start page.  Never really completed.  Update: [http://twitter.com/omarish @omarish] has done some work on this.  Now we have something usable, but we still never really saw the idea to fruition.
*[http://wamily.com Wamily] - Halfway through the summer, we abandoned 6starts.com and joined Wamily.  Hopefully it will be successful. I probably won't be able to stick with it this year, though.  School and OdioWorks are just taking up too much time.



[[Category:Business]]