Step One

Welcome to Creating MiNext. I'll be contributing to this column with my co-founders, Charles and Angelique. As Charles explained, we'll be discussing our little adventure together. For my part, I'll talk about the tech and management side of the equation.¹

Every successful (and unsuccessful) business starts with an unfulfilled need. These unfulfilled needs can be the most basic of things like food and water. They can also be wants like a luxury car or a high-end laptop. These unfulfilled needs/wants are generally very focused on an individual. There is a single person that wants this particular product or service. So they come up with an idea or solution to the situation. They take some time to refine the idea and eventually they enter the marketplace.

So how did we get to today?

I like to think I have smart friends and acquaintances. There are lots of ways to measure their intelligence but I feel that the best demonstration is their ability to have thoughtful, engaging, well-supported discussions. The topics range from a politician's position on DADT to the quality of a pop superstar's accompaniment to the psychology of a 10 year old video game to a brunch pitch for a new business. I'm afraid to lose the ability to have these conversations. I find them challenging but also relaxing, and it was when the first of my college friends started moving away that I discovered the need that led to MiNext.²

I (or we) needed a place to continue these discussions after the physical distance became too great to overcome with an hour car ride. There are other companies that provide services to enable communication between geographically disparate individuals. To me, none of them were appropriately constructed. Facebook and Twitter promote short social sharing. Skype allows for real-time one-to-one video chats. Other large websites are too focused on a particular topic or too broad for deep discussions. And so the original, very basic idea for a website that could provide a forum for continued relevant conversations amongst my peers was born.

This idea doesn't sound very much like the current incarnation of MiNext and that's mostly because this idea has sat around in my head for about two years now. There was an attempt to start something similar about a year ago. The idea had matured a bit more into a public forum and blog written by Millennials. We realized it didn't just have to be written or directed at people we personally knew. Also, I had been writing some short stories and wanted a place for people to share those as well.

Not long after, however, I found myself transitioning out of college life and into a full-time career. All my personal projects quickly got shunted to the side.

It's May 2011 when, while wasting a bit of time on Facebook³, I stumble across one of my friends who has started a blog. Another year has passed and more of my friends are moving away as they begin to pursue their careers and yet I still haven't done anything to keep in touch. I take a look through a post or two on Charles's blog and deem it worthy of an RSS subscription. It isn't until a few days later that I realize that he is the perfect person to help start this venture.⁴

Please forgive me for not remembering exactly how I pitched the idea to Charles⁵, the few months have been a blur of planning, designing, discussions, pitches and programming. But the gist of it boils down to asking him to team up with me once more⁶ by putting our two blogs underneath the same brand. We could then leverage our shared readership to promote other writers. But then I expanded on the idea, explaining how I really wanted it to an ongoing conversation between people of our generation. Charles has since refined the idea more and more. We've laid out goals, most attainable, but a few truly lofty (we'll see); started forming processesand standards; opened up a text editor and made some posts; and picked up some verbal commitments for future contributors. I believe us to be well on our way to making it over the first hurdle of getting out of our heads and making MiNext a reality.

Next time in "Creating MiNext," I'll talk about pitching the idea to other people and getting verbal commitments.