Startup Life – My New Typical Day

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It’s Monday morning at 7:55AM (or at least that’s when I started writing this post) and I have to say I am more excited than ever about the week ahead. Both Daina and I have stripped all of the noise from our days so that all day, every day our focus is on Fashion Metric. The amazing thing is, I’m waking up earlier now with my mind racing with ideas. We’ll typically start talking right away about an idea we had or something that inspired us and – boom – we’re going!

I know that many of my readers have been interested in understanding my typical day which has changed quite a bit over the last couple of months. So I thought I’d share our plans for today since no one day is like the next, and in fact I think the word typical is quickly going out the window.

We start out each morning talking about our idea, the business model, algorithm, market, etc. Typically we will read some of the latest news in the space and make sure we’re up on the latest and greatest trends. As founders we are also always on the lookout for nice juicy data, things like how a particular segment of the space is growing or what percentage of the market a particular company is. Data like this is published all the time and it is critical for us to be complete experts in our market.

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I can tell you things like J. Hilburn is the largest online custom shirt maker. They have gone from $1M in 2010 to $10M in 2011 and are expected to hit between $17M – $20M in 2012. Players like Proper Cloth and Blue Flamme are also in the mix and we’re constantly looking at how the custom shirt space is evolving. That being said, we’re not in the custom shirt space, we are focused on the overall Mens’s dress shirt market which is a roughly 2.8 Billion dollar market. Data – it’s addicting and we’re adding more of it to our collective knowledge every day.

Today we have some things to do with our lawyer. Yes – startups deal with lawyers a lot and it’s important to have a good lawyer. We are using one of the top firms in Silicon Valley that has worked with other very successful online fashion ecomm solutions. I highly recommend them and if you want to know more about them don’t hesitate to shoot me an email.

After talking with our lawyer we will then shift gears to our alpha program which is currently running with a small segment of our beta applicants. We are capturing fit and style data and sending shirts out to our first customers over the next few weeks. This has been a lot of fun and since we are very interested in the lean startup methodology getting customer feedback and using this to learn is very important for us.

We have calls with other startup founders, investors, and experts from the fashion and tech space almost daily (or several times a day) and are constantly trying to learn as much as possible from people with expertise in the space we are working in both from the startup side and the fashion side. At the end of the month we are coming to NYC and this week we are also confirming those meetings as the events of last week definitely did not make it the best time to be firming up on meeting days/times.

Throughout the day we are reading TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and a number of other publications in the startup/vc space. We go to startup events in the evenings usually at least a night a week but tonight we will be staying in and probably going for a bike ride on the beach around 7PM to enjoy the sunset then come home, make a dinner and sit outside watching the boats and talking about our day. I typically write a blog post at night now too so I can keep consistent with two posts a day on my blog. I spend about 20 minutes each morning on my blog posts and about 30 minutes each evening. The evening posts I schedule for usually the afternoon of the next day and you can expect to see the post I wrote last night coming up this afternoon.

Now it’s 8:16AM, with no commute we are at work, time to go, another exciting day awaits!

Note: Oh and for those that think I’ve abandoned by Domain business make sure you’ve read Understanding Who I Am And What I Do. Linton Investments is still going strong, we are buying more names than ever, selling more names than ever, and continuing to build-out great sites, I’m just not involved in any of the day-to-day any more thanks to the great team I’ve built over the years.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton