3by9

3by9rulesChawlkSites

In 2005 I told Mike Rundle I had an idea for a blog network. He thought it would be cool and we figured we could build it up pretty quick and get it out the door, however it was never our final goal. 9rules was supposed to be what you see it as today, a place to aggregate content and connect bloggers with each other and that was really it. There were other projects that we always talked about doing. 9rules wasn’t going to be our claim to fame or help us reach the big leagues, but for some reason we stuck with it.

9rules was great to us, but it made me realize the killer resource in any company will always be time. You can have a million people with a million dollars, but time is always going to get in your way. With 9rules there was always time to work on an improvement, but never time to work on everything else that we wanted to do and although I love 9rules to death because it started in my head, I can assure it was never the pinnacle of my ideas.

This is what I said over 3 years ago:

We can build up 9rules and then use it as a springboard for our other projects.

As you know there haven’t been any other projects. It was always about adding to 9rules to the point where 9rules wasn’t even 9rules anymore. Then last month we relaunched 9rules and the division between it and Chawlk was complete. What’s funny is that the idea for Chawlk never even played into my mind until around last December. The idea to then break Chawlk up into 9 separate sites (the 9 just happens to be a coincidence) came to us maybe a couple months ago so you can see how fast of an evolution we made in less than 6 months.

We went from only having 9rules to breaking that out to 11 different sites. To reiterate here it took 2.5 years to get to the previous version of 9rules and 6 months to get to the current state of affairs now. I think we have a better understanding of time now. As it weird as it sounds now we have the tools to move forward with the projects that we always wanted to even though we have more sites to manage.

You waste more time working on the wrong things (making 9rules into a crazy, Yahoo-like behemoth) than you do working on the right things (focusing on your strength and helping it grow). Once you realize that square peg really doesn’t go into the round hole you can move on and instead of trying to jam the peg into other holes you can take the time to find the right one and get it over with.

I know this post might not make much sense, but I’m sure there is some meaning behind it somewhere. I meant to post it yesterday, but I let it sit to see if I could say it any differently. I guess in business or anything you do it can’t always be measured by success or failure, sometimes it is simply measured by if you are still moving forward.