Pixable

At Pixable we are still working from various locations (India, Caracas, New York) although Andres and I (and our interns over the summer) have been working from our apartment in NYC. We thought that it was time to move to an office in an incubator (i.e., shared space) as we are recruiting in NYC too. You may think that I am obssesed with offices (you remember my post about startup offices?)

We visited some office incubators in Manhattan and the truth is that there are very interesting options in cool places (Chelsea, Meatpacking District, Tribeca, West Village or East Village) for Internet and tech companies. The good thing is that they have the startup atmosphere (in terms of common areas to rest, decoration, etc.) and the prices are not that different to other incubators we know in Boston (Cambridge Innovation Center) or Silicon Valley (Plug and Play). Most places offer offices at around $500/person/month, including coffee, utilities, cleaning at night, furniture, internet, front desk, usage of meeting rooms, 24 hour access, etc. This means that for 2 people you should expect to pay at least ~$1000/month.

All of them have shared front desk and lobby, meeting rooms, kitchen, common areas for lunch/coffee, or bathrooms, Internet, printers, mail handling, are in hype location in NY, have the “loft” touch with cool furniture, are ready to move in (i.e., fully furnished), open 24 hours a day, and allow you to move to larger of bigger spaces within the incubator as your company requires it (usually they only require 1 or maximum 2 month commitment, so you can change later if you think you need it). They also organize networking events within the incubator.

Here is a list of the ones we visited:

• Eemerge: Awesome building, with great views in Chelsea. You can have private offices for 2, 3, or more people, and is very flexible to move across offices as you grow. If you get an office for 3 people, you can easily fit 2 additional temps in summer. There are a lot of common spaces like tables for lunch, coffee areas, sofas to watch TV, etc. Easy to commute if you are on the West side. We saw Freshdirect.com there too. Here you can see some photos.
• Techspace Chelsea: Great location in Chelsea. You feel that you have privacy (offices for at least 2 people) but at the same time it is very easy to feel you are part of the rest of the incubator (kitchen, common desks along the corridors, etc.). The incubator looks really new. Easy to commute. Here you have a slideshow with photos.
• Techspace Union Square: Probably the coolest in terms of decoration, and fantastic location (both, neighborhood and building). We saw that companies like Linkedin, Slide, Trulia, Adknowledge, or Pandora have offices there (all for more than 5 people). Here you have a slideshow with photos.
• Techspace West Village: same architecture/design as the Techspace at Union Square. Some media/tv companies had presence there. Great location (although I think you pay for it). Here you have a slideshow with photos.
• Sunshine: In Tribeca. We think it is ideal location for 1 or 2 people companies (cubicle’s). Very affordable too, compared to the rest. They also allow you to have a virtual office or coworking space.
• Spark Space: Same location as Rose Tech Ventures, from David Rose, an entrepreneurial figure in the NY internet/tech space. The building is a little bit old (compared to Techspace or Eemerge) but it has great entrepreneurs.
• NY 160 Varick: Sponsored by Bloomberg in NYC to promote entrepreneurship in other industries in the city (besides professional services, fashion, etc). It is a new incubator that requires a more formal process to be accepted, although it is subsized. Here you have more info.

• New Work City: Great for individuals, or for people that want to pay as you go (drop in and pay per day).

Here you have some pics I took with the iPhone:

During the last year, our team at Pixable has been scattered and working from various locations around the world: Boston (Harvard and MIT), New York, Caracas, India (Chandigarh and Delhi), Spain (Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid), Philadelphia (Wharton), North Carolina (Duke), and Buenos Aires. We are a truly global company, which in our case is not that fun because some of us need to be awake many days at night. This is not the ideal situation for a startup that wants to move fast, but we had to find ways to make it work as frictionless as possible, without spending much money. In this situation, coordination and communication require an extra effort. We have been using very basic software tools to keep us aligned without spending much money in hotels and business traveling.

From Pixable, we want to help other entrepreneurs with some basic tips about FREE tools we use and when and how we use them. It may sound too basic but encouraging for the entrepreneurial teams in the same situation:

• Google docs as a white board: Ideally, one team should have a white board in which to structure and write the list to to-do’s, assign taks to people, assign priorities, delete or aggregate comments, deadlines, new info. However, we could not use a white board and Google docs was a good solution. The real time document editing is really useful during calls.  Additionally, we use Google docs for almost any type of info and list we want to keep shared and updated frequently in real time (e.g., list of bugs, list of addresses, list of coupons, etc.). For SW development (Software Project Management, Issue Tracker, Bug Tracker) we use Gemini from Countersoft and we have heard of many other people using Basecamp or Pivotal tracker(thanks Seph). For overall project management we starting using Zoho Project, but given the amount of changes and the small size of our team, we decided that we do not need so much structure and project planning tracking/documentation until we have a larger team. So we keep using Google docs.

• Demoing new features, usability, bugs, etc: We frequently do demos, where one person uses the application, and the rest of the team sees remotely what he is doing (i.e., live screen sharing). There are many sophisticated tools out there, like webex. The best we have found is Mikogo. It is very simple, with not may functionalities but you can start a meeting right away. Other users can point with the mouse and also take control of the mouse. The standard in the industry I guess is WebEx. And the standard among bootstrappers is Go2meeting (we actually started using Go2meeting). However, Go2meeting takes much longer to start. I highly recommend Mikogo: You just click on start meeting on mikogo, you get a number that you can share with IM with your team, and that’s it! less than 3 seconds! We use Mikogo to share the screen and skype to do the conference call.

• Skype IM, voice, and video: Our skype desktop clients are always on. We countinously ping each other, even when we sit next to each other (e.g., to share links). We also have many conference calls with the developers, international collaborators, investors, etc. In our particular case, skype video works pretty well to share designs. Two typical examples:
  • you draw a mock up on a paper, and instead of scanning it and send it to another person, you just show it in the video
  • we also work with physical products. During the testing phase of our printed photobooks, skype video was very useful to share visual results and things we wanted to change or were incorrect. 

• Screen capture tools to show bugs on the site: you might be laughing at this but when we find a bug on the site, we just do “printscreen” and paste it on Paint, and then share it with the development team via email. As simple (and old fashion) as that. Now we have migrated to Snipping tool, which is already installed on Windows Vista (we didn’t even know). It allows you to capture the screen (or a selected area in the screen), highlight text and add text. If you use MAC, there is even a better tool called Skitch (thanks Seph from Propercloth for the recommendation).

• Free conference call numbers: very useful for meetings with partners, suppliers, and third parties. There are plenty of free supplier and you can keep a permanent number with your private passcode.

• Store and share files: Mesh.com. We have not used it very frequently but it has been useful when needed as a repository of data or to share large files. Here you have an evaluation and comparison of various tools to store and share files, including box.net, filedroper, yousendit, or drop.io.

• Software to create design mock ups: most developers and designers still work with photoshop, powerpoint or just drawing with pencil/paper+scanning. Balsamiq (a YCombinator company) is an amazing software that can accelerate a lot your design phase. It costs only $80. In future posts I will talk about it because it is really impressive how much we have accelerated our development.

We know that these tools may sound neither sophisticated nor professional (compared to project management tools, sharing repositories, versioning safes, etc that I have used in large corporations in the past). But they work for us. We even tried with easy to use tools like Zoho project but given the size of our team and the speed at which we iterate, simple things like google docs seems more suitable. I have also seen super cool video conference products used at McKinsey or Microsoft, but we cannot afford those either. 

I hope this info helps to other entrepreneurs bootstrapping and working in remote locations. If you have other tips, please share with us and the rest of the entrepreneurial community leaving a comment in this blog!
 

We just came across Photojojo, a great photography site with an awesome newsletter, plus a store with neat little photo related gadgets and toys, such as tripods, fun photo frames, a white balance lens cap and more.

The newsletter is really awesome. It has very interesting ideas for the casual photographer.

Disclaimer: we do not know anyone at Photojojo (although they seem to be cool guys)