EirePreneurZ: An interview with Infurious

EirePreneurZ is a new series of in-depth interviews with startup entrepreneurs in Ireland, north and south. Aidan Rogers and Matt Johnston, the co-founders of Infurious, were subjected to the second grilling - thanks lads for providing us with some great weekend reading. Oh, and don't miss the funny anecdotes all the way down at the bottom ;-)

1) Can you tell me what Infurious do and how you were formed?

MJ: At the moment we're a one trick pony. We make software which allows Mac users who use iCal to share their calendars across the internet with anyone they like. I think we were formed as a partnership back in November 05 but we didn't incorporate until June 2006 because there was a big issue with Aidan being in Australia.

Aidan: We write software aimed at solving specific business problems, primarily for Mac users (our first product is designed to help get around the limitations in Apple's calendaring program, iCal).  I guess we didn't so much form as spring into existence.  Matt dropped me a mail one day (on the 19th of November, 2005) talking about the big need in the Mac market for decent calendaring/groupware.  It all just kind of took off from there.

2) Who are the founders and how did you get to know each other?

Aidan: Aidan Rogers and Matt Johnston.  We met years and years (we worked it out to be around 1993) ago due to shared interests in science-fiction, role-playing and computer geekery.

MJ: Hmmm, true. Still do as well. Turned out that he went to school with my brother but that had no relevance.

3) Where did you get the idea for Infurious and what was the genesis to company foundation?

Aidan: I'd been toying with starting my own company for quite a while, and Matt's mail just provided the catalyst. I did a quick prototype over a few evenings to see if I could actually write the software that needed written, and from that point we were rolling.

MJ: How does any software company get started? A developer gets an itch he needs to scratch. We were just talking about software on the Mac that would be really cool if it did X or Y. I had to spend a little time selling Cocoa to Aidan and being a gofer for him when he wanted to know if something could be possible, but it was an exciting time.

4) How long was it between when you originally got the idea and when you actually set up the business?

MJ: We started a month later with the domain name, the web site and the blog. It took us 6 further months to get paperwork done so we could accept payments, have a bank account, be a real company.

Aidan: Yes, it's been roughly six months from inception to formation.  During that time, it's been all R&D.

5) What's are the academic and employment backgrounds of the founders?

MJ: I worked for Nortel Networks for 6 years in LAN engineering before starting an Apple Service Provider up in Northern Ireland and I've been running that AASP for 3 years now. I went to Queens University, Belfast for a degree in Genetics and then did a Postgrad in computing at the University of Ulster.

Aidan: I dropped out of university because I hated having no money and didn't enjoy the course.  After working in retail to pay the bills I got a chance to work at BlackStar (now sendit.com) as their first technical employee.

6) Is there a history of business in the family, other entrepreneurs?

MJ: Since I was a nipper, my Dad always ran his own business. I don't think they were madly successful but over the years he was an accountant, owned a record shop, owned a tyre business, owned a pub. I doubt he ever saw himself as an entrepreneur. My brothers and sisters seem happy with their 9-5s.

Aidan: No - my dad is a civil servant and my mum works in retail (I have no siblings).  I've got a few uncles who have their own businesses, but no close relatives.

7) How many hours per week do you work now?

MJ: My working week is (24 * 7) - (7*6) = too much. That said I do a lot of work for Mac-Sys still (40 hours?), and a lot of "work" would be described as "web surfing" as I read copiously, "blogging" or "chatting". Fact is that these three activities are important for both businesses. If we're talking about real work then I probably manage about 4 hours a week. Aidan will agree.

Aidan: I'm still working a "day job" which is 40 hours a week.  On top of that, I work on Infurious roughly 1-4 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Our first aim as a company is to make enough money to pay a full time salary for me so I can quit the day job.

8) Are those hours very flexible or do you stick to a routine?

MJ: Totally flexible, as needed when and if.

Aidan: They have to be flexible.  I'm married and have kids, so I have to work around them as much possible (this usually means after everyone has gone to bed).

9) I notice on your website that you say "because family is #1" - but surely running a business interferes with family / social life?

MJ: Perhaps, in the same way that sleeping or driving or going to the cinema interferes with your ability to interact with your family. At this point, we squeeze Infurious time between a lot of other priorities because Infurious isn't yet paying salaries. When it does, then things will change. Family, on the other hand, will always come first. I don't get to see my kids as often as I'd like and I've had to put off important work things so I can be there for them in the past and I fully intend to do the same in the future.

Aidan: Yes it does.  However, there are times when I have to say "I can't work on Infurious stuff" because my family needs me.  Even if that need is just to be there as a father for an hour or two before the kids go to bed.  I certainly wouldn't want to put Infurious ahead of the needs of my kids - they're too young to understand.  My wife is very understanding, although I know she's longing for the time when I quit the day job and work on Infurious during work hours.

10) Is it worth all the sacrifice or would a 9 to 5 job be easier?

MJ: I don't think I've ever had a 9-5 job where I could leave the job at work when I left the building. I've been on-call since 1996. I've worked extra hours in the evenings since then as well. I guess it's whether you consider it to be a sacrifice. Right now my hourly rate is a LOT lower than it was when I worked for someone else but I'd not trade it.

Aidan: The feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction is well worth the effort.  Yes, a 9 to 5 job would be easier, but less fulfilling (as is the case with my current 9 to 5 job).  It's very draining working two jobs.

11) How do you balance your lifestyle - gym, sport, hobbies?

Aidan: I don't :-)  I have three things in my life: family, day job, Infurious.  I've sacrificed my hobbies in order to get Infurious off the ground.  Otherwise I'd be sacrificing my family time which is never going to happen.

MJ: I don't do the gym or sports. Aidan and I have discussed that we need to, moreso because I'm the fat one. As for hobbies, I'm lucky in that computers is a hobby for me so in essence I'm being paid to work at a hobby.

12) Do you always take weekends off or does it depend?

MJ: Sometimes weekends are the only times to work.

Aidan: I rarely take weekends off, but then I rarely work all day on either day - it's usually a few hours here or there, depending on what suits my family.

13) Do you find it stressful and if so how do you deal with the stress?

Aidan: I've found it stressful at times, especially when there are bugs that I just can't figure out.  I find it very useful to have Matt around to help me deal with stress.  He has only a peripheral understanding of the code, and so asks questions that I might not think of asking myself to help me understand.  He's also not afraid to reduce the scope of what we're trying to accomplish in order to help accomplish it.  If I get really stressed I just turn off my computer and go take a bath.

MJ: For six months I lost huge patches of my beard and now it's growing back which is a good sign. I was obviously under a lot of stress though I couldn't have identified it. It didn't seem to affect my performance and my blood pressure was fine. When your body objects to stress like that then you know something has to give. In that case I stopped caring about everything other than the day job, Infurious and my kids. Everything else became secondary.

14) Do you work from home or an office?

MJ: Hm. Neither really. We sometimes work at home, sometimes at the office of my other business and sometimes we chill out in Starbucks or wherever though we're looking for some GOOD cafés to be all Bedouin at.

Aidan: Home, cafe, on the train, wherever :-)  Offices are expensive and unnecessary for us at the moment.

15) If from home, what are the advantages and disadvantages?

Aidan: The downside about working at home is not having a separate area to work from.  This means the kids think its fine to come bug you when you're working (and that my wife sometimes uses me to babysit while I should be working).  However, after you've done it for a while, everyone gets used to it.

MJ: Working at home is good for the family, but can be very bad for productivity. When my (ex)wife was pregnant, I was there to cook and support and for the first year of my daughters life, I was at home as well. It was the best, honestly. Okay, some teleconference meetings were held using a VOIP phone from my bedroom while I tried to get my daughter off to sleep for her afternoon nap, but that's just even better. It's less of an issue now, but at home there are still a lot of distractions.

16) Could you run the business independent of location?

Aidan: Absolutely - we can and do.  When we started off, I was living in Australia.  Now I'm back in Ireland it makes things easier in terms of communication with Matt, but that's about the only real difference.

MJ: Absolutely. We don't have a fixed location. To be honest, we just need power and internet. Our office moves wherever we are.

17) Did you find it daunting to begin with? What issues caused most headaches?

Aidan: Daunting?  Not really - it was pretty exciting because I was making a lot of progress.  It was tough just not having enough time to work on it while holding down a regular job, so training myself to be able to stay up a few hours more than the rest of the family was probably the hardest part.

MJ: At first, time zone. Aidan was 11 hours ahead of me. His mornings were my evenings and we have very different time pressures as a result. Now we're in the same time zone we find we have the same pressures of time.

18) What part of entrepreneurship do you love and What part do you hate?

Aidan: I love working for myself - being able to shape the direction of where the product and the company are going.  Of course, Matt has his views on that also and sometimes we differ - usually I have to let him have his way or he sulks ;-)  As for 'hate', I don't think I've been doing it long enough to feel that strongly about it.  I certainly wish we were making enough for me to do it full time (first we have to launch a product tho!)

MJ: I love the ability to make sweeping decisions and then see what happens. I hate the transition between everything being slow to start and then suddenly everything speeds up and you're hit with deadlines faster than you can cope.

19) Do you find yourself dreaming up other business ideas or are you too busy with this?

Aidan: No, we come up with one or two business ideas a week it seems.  We just don't have time to execute any of them at the moment.  Matt keeps them all on file.  I hope.

MJ: I think both of us have other ideas we'd like to pursue. Definitely. And yeah, on file....somewhere....

20) Is this a business for life or do you have an exit strategy?

MJ: I don't intend to sell off to GMY or anything but I have an exit strategy for me as a person from the job I'm doing now. To go and do the next big thing as the next part of Infurious (or whatever) is very exciting to me. The challenge of finding someone who can take over the reigns of this little part of the business will be something we have to address. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard. People are our best resource, they're also our biggest expense and therefore our biggest risk.

Aidan: No, it's for life.  We have some exit strategies but they're around products or parts of the business, not the business as a whole.  We see us starting more companies, either as subsidiaries or sister companies, as part of our 'grand plan'.

21) How do you find the 'red tape' side of running a business? Do you enjoy the accounting and admin side of things or do you 'outsource' it as much as possible?

MJ: I don't mind it at all. I hate the sending of vast amounts of money to the government but then who doesn't. I especially hate it because they've done sod all to help us. Just get a good accountant by the end of the year and keep good records.

Aidan: Haven't really reached that stage yet.  Thankfully, Matt's been through this before with Mac-Sys, so I'm relying on him for advice in this area.

22) Please reorder the reasons for being an entrepreneur listed below to reflect the most imporant at the top of the list and least important at the bottom -

(a) money / wealth

(b) being your own boss / independence

(c) determining your own future / destiny

(d) flexibility in working hours / lifestyle

(e) ANY OTHER?

MJ: I'd say:

Destiny is tops. I'm to blame for my successes and failures.

Next would be OTHER -  satisfaction in having scratched that itch, helped people, whatever.

Independence is next because, honestly, I don't want to have to work for anyone else ever again.

Flexibility is useful because my kids are young and I want to be able to be with them.

Money brings up the rear because I'm not doing any of this to be rich.

Aidan:

(c) determining your own future / destiny

(d) flexibility in working hours / lifestyle

(b) being your own boss / independence

(a) money / wealth

23) Tips & Tricks: Please tell us about any other lessons and you've learned from your time as entrepreneur, not covered by the questions above. Any tips or tricks for dealing with business partners, etc?

MJ:

1. Pinched from Guy Kawasaki, "Don't let the bozo's get you down"

2. Pinched from Steve Jobs, "Real Artists Ship"

3. Pinched from Bob Dylan,"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."

and for dealing with business partners

"Take a step back. Breathe deeply. Chill the fuck out"

I guess you might bleep that, though :)

Aidan: Set yourself achievable goals.  Write them down.  Then achieve them. If you find that you can't achieve them, set new goals that you can achieve.  I found that the only way to stay constantly motivated was to have something I could aim towards and see my progression as I got there.

24) What was your biggest mistake so far? What was your biggest brainwave?

MJ: My biggest mistake is probably yet to come. In past dealings I've been way too trusting of people. Some people just don't want to work for a living. They'll lie to your face about having done paperwork, having submitted that VAT return or there being no problems. I think our biggest brainwave was the product itself. We get a huge amount of traffic and feedback from people who just want it immediately. We are, at the same time, providing Exchange-like functionality to Mac users who have been denied it for so long, but we can stretch SyncBridge across different organisations so we're even exceeding the Exchange model.

Aidan: Mistake: nothing really major as yet - we've had a few issues with third party service providers, but I guess that's really par for the course. Brainwave: the name of the company.  We were in the middle of an instant messenger discussion about the company name when Matt's girlfriend did or said something that really infuriated him - so he said "is there such a word as infurious?"

25) Anecdotes: any funny stories about your dealings with customers, suppliers, etc?

Aidan: I'd been developing our first product almost in isolation in Australia.  A few days after I came back to Ireland, Matt and I met up and I demoed it to him on his own computer.  I wish I'd had my camcorder running, because the happy dance he did would have made great blackmail fodder in later years :-)  If nothing else, it would have been something that his kids could have laughed at.

MJ: At the beginning of June we went to a seminar attended by a few VC-types and heaps of people who wanted funded by them. We were going out of interest really - just to see what it was all about. We were introduced to a nice lady VC and we handed over our freshly printed business cards. The look on her face was priceless as she looked at the card and at the single word it held. I think the poor woman flipped the card over three or four times to see if she was missing anything. We blogged about our cards - we rely on the end user to google us and only have the company name on the front. I've used them again recently to be all mysterious - and that makes people more likely to google you. The cards - well - they're a bit of a joke but they polarise people and that's important for our marketing strategy.