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Cliff McKinney Work for PieJumpstart Episode 15: Cliff McKinney

Cliff’s 3 tips every entrepreneur needs to know

  1. Get something done. Build it!
  2. Listen to your customers.
  3. Don’t always do what your customers say.

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Jumpstart theme song “DLDN Instrumental (ft. Onlymeith, Mellotroniac)” by: St. Paul from ccMixter.

TRANSCRIPT

Dave: Welcome to Jumpstart. I am your host Dave Delany. My guest today is Cliff McKinney; co-founder of Work for Pie. Hi Cliff, how are you?

Cliff: Hey Dave, how are you?

Dave: I’m great, thanks! Welcome to Jumpstart. I’m happy to have you on.

Cliff: Thanks man, we’re excited about it too.

Dave: Cool man!

Cliff: It’s pretty cool.

Dave: Thanks! Thanks a lot. So tell us about Work for Pie.

Cliff: Sure! So Work for Pie is – in short, it’s an anti-resume.

Dave: Right.

Cliff: It’s something that we specifically built for software developers and – so rather than focusing on kind of all the fluff that you see on a standard resume or a linked-in profile, we decided to focus on work that you actually do.

Dave: Uh-hm.

Cliff: So we looked to open-source code repositories; places like GitHub and Bitbucket, and pull information from their APIs so you can now highlight your code on your own profile. And we also pull in information from two other sites: Hacker News and Stack Overflow which are both pretty big in the development world. And we aggregate all that information and give you a score, and that score basically validates your talent as a software developer especially if you work in open-source and participate in those communities.

Dave: So I was looking at your site and – so the communities score you or is part algorithm or – how does that work?

Cliff: So we develop the algorithm, so the score is basically – we pull information from APIs of all of those communities and the algorithms are our own, so we give to a score based on things like how many people have [Inaudible – 00:01:54] your repositories on GitHub and we take a look at your reputation score on Stack Overflow. We take a look at your karma on Hacker News and aggregate those things together.

Dave: That’s really cool. That’s really smart. How long have you been doing it for?

Cliff: So we were a part of Seed Hatchery which is Jumpstart’s sister accelerator.

Dave: Yeah, you’re out at Memphis right?

Cliff: Right, Memphis, Tennessee.

Dave: Yup.

Cliff: And so we started I guess towards the tail end of February. And we actually came into the Seed Hatchery with a completely different plan, so we’ve only really been working on Work for Pie in its current state for about three months now.

Dave: Oh wow! And what’s the – how’s the response been?

Cliff: It’s been positive. We’ve gotten some pretty good user feedback and we’ve gotten some pretty good adoption rate too. Given kind of the minimal amount of press that we’ve gotten so far, we’re really pleased with the numbers of people who’ve just kind of picked it up organically. We’ve gotten a lot of positive responses from the development community about it.

Dave: That’s great. What got you inspired to do this or kind of to go it along? Is this your first bite of entrepreneurialship?

Cliff: Well, yes and no I guess.

Dave: (Laugh)

Cliff: I’ve kind of always been a little bit of a different bird and wanted to start on my own thing. I kind of false started a couple years of ago with a group of guys. We were going to do an education based social network – you know, something for high school kids and college kids.

Dave: Uh-hm.

Cliff: And – so that didn’t work out so well. And one of the biggest issues was – back then, I didn’t know HTML from – you know, a hole in the ground. So I spend a couple of years actually teaching myself to write codes. And then kind of came up with the original idea for Work for Pie and submitted that to Seed Hatchery, and that’s really what jumpstarted to use you guys…

Dave: (Laugh)

Cliff: That’s really what jumpstarted this version. And I think – you know, I read a blog post about the first thirty days in the Seed Hatchery, and one of the comments I made in that blog post was – you know, the first couple attempts on entrepreneurship were really playing house. You know this last attempt is – you’re in there and actually running the business. So it’s definitely the first real attempt I’d say.

Dave: And how many people are working with you?

Cliff: I’ve got one co-founder; Brad Montgomery. He’s definitely the developer side of the house. I know enough HTML to kind of tick him off every now and then.

Dave: (Laugh)

Cliff: And he does the vast majority of the development on the site.

Dave: Right

Cliff: And he’s a super solid guy.

Dave: Great! And – maybe Brad – who inspires you? Who gets you going?

Cliff: It’s funny – so I’m a big fan of Ayn Rand.

Dave: Uh-hm

Cliff: The author; she wrote Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Dave:The Fountainhead, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cliff: And so, she’s really done an inspirational – a lot of her ideas have been an inspiration for me just to – you know, her idea that you’re judged based on your merit and you do things – and really, ironically enough, that’s kind of what we’re doing with our company. We’re saying – you know, forget all about the resume fluff and let’s focus on what you actually do, so it’s kind of a neat thing.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, I could completely see that. I’ve read Fountainhead so it’s definitely – I can see how that analogy works with that.

Cliff: Yeah, [Inaudible – 00:05:30] takes a little bit of digging in to, but if they’ve got a movie, it’ll probably be on DVD pretty soon because I don’t think it was that great.

Dave: Right.

Cliff: But if you want the Cliff’s notes of…

Dave: (Laugh)

Cliff: [Inaudible – 00:05:42] watch the movie.

Dave: There you go. What about blogs and websites that you would read regularly – you mentioned Hacker News – are there other blogs that you read?

Cliff: Sure. So clearly, Hacker News is something I read every day.

Dave: Uh-hm.

Cliff: It’s nearly open in my computer pretty much all the time. Also, I really like Tech Crunch. I like to see what’s going on in the world – in the startup world. I enjoy This Week in Startups; a podcast by Jason Calacanis. He does that twice a week. That’s a pretty cool podcast; I enjoy that. And I listen to a lot of books. I’m a – I’ve got a little bit of a long commute, so I’m a member of Audible.com.

Dave: Of course. Yeah.

Cliff: Two book to download every week. Right now, I think the book right now is Predictable Irrational.

Dave: Right

Cliff: I know I really like it – it’s the Stanford entrepreneurial series.

Dave: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s great.

Cliff: That one’s great. Some really, really great entrepreneurs have spoken in that, so I listen to that. They have an iPhone app too.

Dave: Ooh nice, I didn’t know that.

Cliff: Yeah, yeah. It’s very cool.

Dave: I’ll have to grab that. And of course, I’ll include links to everything we’re talking about in the show notes for our listeners, so if anyone’s interested, they can certainly go to the blog and find out more. So speaking of entrepreneurship, I usually close each episode asking for three tips that you would offer anyone. You got three tips for me?

Cliff: Sure man. I think I can pair it down to three. Really the biggest tip is: get something done – build it. I can’t emphasize that enough. You know we went through the three month program at Seed Hatcher which is very similar to Jumpstart. We go in the first month and really do some product discovery, and then we spend the second month building. And we stuck to that schedule pretty darn closely, and we built a really, really ugly product in a month’s time. But we put it out there and we got a lot of great feedback. And we’ve gone back to the drawing board and we’re making improvements based on what our actual users are telling us. And you can’t do that by taking surveys and asking people what they might like.

Dave: Right.

Cliff: nothing out there that exists. That would be tip number one.

Dave: Yeah.

Cliff: And tip number two just to follow onto that is I think – listen to your customers. And – you know, you get much more information from actually surveying and talking to people who might use your product than you do from your own brain.

Dave: Uh-hm.

Cliff: And then, you get a lot more information from actual users of your product than you do from people who might use your product. So…

Dave: Right.

Cliff: So kind of go in that progression, I would say is a great tip. And then the third tip: listen to you customers but don’t always do everything your customers say. I mean I think there’s a fine line between making your customers extremely happy and doing what you think is right for the company going forward. You know, we’ve gotten feedback all over the board, and so our job really is to take the feedback and determine which of those feedbacks make the most sense for us as a company, and is going to satisfy the majority of our customers — the majority of our users – so that’s a key thing.

Dave: Definitely! Definitely! Hey, where can people find you?

Cliff: Sure. We are at workforpie.com.

Dave: Right.

Cliff: That’s pretty easy. It’s the P-I-E; the food, not the mathematical symbol.

Dave: Sure.

Cliff: And we’re at @workforpie on Twitter. And we’ve also got a Facebook page, so they can find us in any of those three locations – and we hope they do.

Dave: Okay. Well, I will definitely add that to the show notes. And hopefully everybody will reach out to learn more about Work for Pie because I think it’s a really great idea.

Cliff: Well thank you very much. We’re excited about it. We think we’ve got a shot at doing something kind of unique and special – so we’re excited for sure.

Dave: Cool! Best of luck to you.

Cliff: Thank you very much.

Dave: Thank Cliff!

Cliff: Take care.

Dave: Bye!

Posted on July 17, 2011

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