Now my focus is moving back to the web, but I’ve moved on. Social bookmarking is not on the agenda. Which means it’s time to salvage what I can from Quocial. Therefore, I’m auctioning the Quocial.com domain, as well as some related domains and the @Quocial handle on Twitter. They’re all available as a bundle on Flippa. Here’s the link.

By bidding, you’re not just getting your hands on a great domain (one of only a handful of pronounceable 2-syllable .coms left). You’re also supporting my next endeavor, a webapp that promises to make science more collaborative, more democratic, and more fun. Please spread the word.

Well, whatever the outcome, I won’t be blogging or tweeting about it, and neither will my co-founders. Not for a few months, anyway.

Why? I’m a pretty candid guy. Keeping secrets isn’t natural to me. And in most cases, startups should be open about their achievements; the benefits of buzz outweigh the potential cost of fostering competition. That’s certainly the case for Theoryville. We want to get the word out as far and wide as we can that we’re going to change the way the world does science.

However, one YC-funded founder explained something to me: If you say you’re YC-funded, that’s news. If you make news, that’s a launch. And if you launch when you only have a landing page? That’s a waste. You’ve burned up the “exclusive” launch story that each YC-funded startup traditionally gets.

Of course, Theoryville is going forward whether we’re YC-funded or not, and I’ll keep blogging and tweeting about our progress. But if you want to know who’s backing us, you’ll have to wait for our exclusive.

Until a few months ago, I wouldn’t have believed such a thing to be possible. I’d tinkered with software as a hobby, but I hadn’t thought of it as a career. I was 24 and on track to become an academic, studying algorithmic game theory. On September 19th, 2008, in the third week of my first semester as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan School of Information, I wasn’t thinking about startups; I was thinking about science. Specifically, I was thinking about how scientists share their work; or rather, how they don’t. If you want to replicate an analysis that you read in a scientific paper, you’re in for a tough slog: First, you need to track down the data. Even if the data is ostensibly public, it may be impossible to find and convert to a usable format. Second, you’ll need a computer program for the analysis. If you contact the original authors, they might share their code, but you’ll probably need some expensive software (not to mention hardware) to run it. If you don’t hear back from them, you’re in for some harrowing reverse-engineering. And after all of that, you may find that the paper omitted several critical details.

That’s the sort of problem we talk about a lot at SI. So I proposed a solution: A YouTube-like hub where people can upload theories, formulate hypotheses, and test them. On the off chance that I might want to turn this vague notion into a reality one day, I registered the lengthy but friendly domain Theoryville.com. And I sat on it. It got lost in a slew of other ideas (I would wind up turning one, a social bookmarking site called Quocial, into a rough but functional app over the summer) and my focus was on being a student, at any rate. Certainly, the startup life appealed to me, and I loved Founders at Work, but I didn’t see myself dropping out.

That started to change last semester. My research was going nowhere. I had lots of ideas, but they felt unsatisfyingly abstract and remote from real applications. I began to suspect that my comparative advantage wasn’t in the academic realm. When a local summer seed funding competition (RPM10) was announced, I thought I’d see if I could recruit some co-founders. On November 17, 2009, I sent an e-mail out to an SI e-mail list, asking if anyone was interested in joining me to form a startup based on this concept: “X is to STATA as Google Docs is to Microsoft Office.” Obviously this isn’t the best way to meet co-founders, but I was extremely lucky: Among the replies, two of them stood out as serious, and both prospective co-founders—Noah Liebman and Tom Haynes, both SI Master’s students—asked great questions that showed that they understood exactly what I wanted to achieve, how this small piece of software could have grand, world-changing implications. They were also talented, design-oriented coders with previous experience working for small software companies. I proposed that we step up our ambitions a notch: Let’s not just apply to RPM10. Let’s start acting like a real company—having regular meetings, exchanging ideas and code—and let’s apply to every seed accelerator we can to make sure that we’ve got a roof over our heads this summer and some connections to VCs after.

With each application we sent in, our ideas got better. The first interview we did, back in February, was for the Frankel Fund, a UMich investment competition run by MBA students. The one who interviewed us had a lot of great questions that we had no answers for. We waxed exuberant about the easy-to-use interface we planned, and he asked us: “Well, is that something researchers actually want?” Of course! we answered, it’s easy-to-use! “But isn’t there a lot of inertia in the academic software market?” Well, yes… but that’s why we’ll use a freemium model! “Have you actually talked to any potential users?” [Pause] Um… well, at SI, we’re trained to… we’re really good at… we will do that! We didn’t get a second interview.

When we met with Dug Song later that month, he raised the same concerns. We’d been talking with each other about the idea, but we hadn’t been talking to the people we were going to sell it to. We’d figured that customer feedback was something you waited to collect until after you had a working demo to show them. But investors are wary of aspiring entrepreneurs who spend all their time tinkering with untested ideas—and rightly so! When that clicked with us, everything changed. We started asking for input from every potential user we knew and sending cold e-mails by the dozen to UMich profs to ask them to talk with us about their software needs. Based on the feedback we were getting, our understanding of the market completely changed.

Meanwhile, we’d applied early to YC—just a couple of days after the application became available—and Harj asked us to Skype just a few days later. We had a great informal interview, much longer and chattier than the official one that’s been compared to Guantanamo Bay. We mentioned that we knew Ben Congleton, founder of Olark, whose footsteps I’m inadvertently following in. (He withdrew from the PhD program last year, his second year. He was even on the same fellowship.) I’d barely known Ben while he was at SI—I was focused on coursework, while he was already doing Olark—but it was still something. A little while later, Harj sent us an e-mail suggesting that we chat with Ben, with the clear subtext that he wanted to get Ben’s opinion on us. We had a fruitful conversation, and Ben connected us to the founders of Lingt, the only YC-funded company (to my knowledge) that has experience selling to classrooms. I don’t know what Ben told Harj, but I’m sure it worked in our favor.

We built a crude demo in the two weeks before the YC application deadline, in hopes of showing that we can execute. However, this was our first time coding together, we had a lot of other things going on at the time (courses, midterms, an Ultimate Frisbee tournament…), and the result was far from stunning. Still, it was worth it for two reasons: It gave us some momentum, which we’re using to build a much-improved demo now (essential to the YC interview, by all accounts); and it led us to grapple with some design decisions that weren’t apparent when we were just using whiteboards and static mockups. That, in turn, gave us a more specific notion of what our product’s advantages are.

Noah and I went to TS4AD where, despite our introversion, we got to make some great connections and collect novel feedback. (Two separate people suggested that we tailor our product to the needs of MBA students, who currently—and apparently unhappily—use Excel for everything.) While TS4AD is a non-essential event (we were repeatedly assured that there’s no statistical difference in TechStars acceptance rates between TS4AD attendees and those who stay home), it led to some unexpected benefits. For one, a Boulder entrepreneur who saw my tweets from the event connected us to some high school stats teachers, allowing us to explore another potential market.

Other factors: I had karma of about 500 as TrevorBurnham on Hacker News, most of it from being the first to submit the fantastic Wired story on the slow, agonizing death of Duke Nukem Forever. I’d like to think that I avoided “karma-whoring,” resisting the temptation to link to salacious fluff. I doubt that was a significant factor in YC’s decision, but it couldn’t have hurt. I also read HN voraciously, via the RSS feed. I watched a lot of the Mixergy interviews, and the recent Jessica Livingston interviews. I’m an outsider to the startup world, so I felt that it was important to absorb as many founder stories as I could. That appetite for knowledge has definitely paid off during the various interviews we’ve had so far, and I’m sure it’ll continue to pay off as we build our product and our business.

And that’s the story of Theoryville so far. No matter what happens after this, it is, as they say, an honor just to be nominated.

Now, this assertion is absurd on its face, so it took me a while to grok what these veteran founders and investors were talking about. If the idea doesn’t matter, why does the application even ask for it? And even among the alums present, some (such as SendGrid) had succeeded with essentially the same concept they’d applied with. Sure, obviously the ability to execute—to write good (or, preferably, amazing) software in a limited timeframe—is more important than the idea. As one speaker put it, “An A team with a B idea is way more likely to succeed than a B team with an A idea.” But what’s this about ideas sucking?

That glib pronouncement finally made sense as the founder alums spoke about their experiences. As it turns out, most (like SocialThing) applied with an idea in a certain space (they’d wanted to create a competitor to MySpace), realized during the summer that there was a better opportunity in the same space (a utility that lets you sync information across multiple social networks), and built that instead. Aha! Now I got it: “Your idea sucks” is just a pithy way of expressing the following:

1. No matter how good your idea may be, do not regard it as sacred.
2. You need to spend time listening to (potential) customers and modifying your idea accordingly.
3. Having a good idea does matter, but only insofar as it a) shows that you are capable of generating good ideas, and b) shows that you’re interested in a market with potential.

As it happens, I read Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany on the flight over, on Dug Song’s recommendation. Blank’s theme is similar to the above, saying that startups should center their efforts on “customer development” rather than “product development,” lest they develop a first-rate solution to a problem no one has. To cite one of his examples: The Segway had a great engineering team, but they fell in love with their idea rather than getting feedback from the folks they were planning to sell the thing to.

So, how does this relate to Theoryville, the idea I’ve been fleshing out with my teammates since November? Based on early feedback from potential customers, I believe that our strategy should be to resegment the statistical software market into “collaborative” and “non-collaborative” software by introducing the first collaboration-oriented stats app for professional researchers and students. That’s the space we want to go into. But beyond that, our ears are open. We’ve designed a non-linear graphical workflow interface that we all think is quite clever, but we won’t really know if it solves a problem until we start showing it to people. We think our initial target market will be social scientists, but we’re also considering classrooms, and some of the folks we talked to at TS4AD suggested that financial analysts and MBA students would love our easy-to-use interface. We need to test those assumptions, and we can’t wait until the end of the summer to do so. We have to do so constantly.

I have to admit that Paul Graham compressed all of the above down to just seven words in What Startups Are Really Like, #10: Fast iteration is the key to success.

Meanwhile, following the Theoryville team’s surprise chat with Harj of Y Combinator, we’ve received more and more positive signals. First, we were invited to TechStars for a Day; so, one week from today, Noah and I will be networking up a storm in Boulder! (Tom had a conflicting obligation.) We were named as Momentum MI finalists, and awarded free summer office space by TechArb, putting us into contention for the TechArb Accelerator (this year’s successor to the RPM10). We’ve received encouraging queries from the folks at DreamIt Ventures and BetaSpring. And all the while, we’ve been building our first functional demo, set to go online before TS4AD.

On Tuesday, Noah and I had lunch with Dug Song, the central hub of Ann Arbor’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. The guy is a walking gold mine of startup business knowledge. The thing he emphasized most was Paul Graham’s highest principle of startup success: Know your customers. It’s an obvious rule, but we realized that we haven’t been giving it the priority it deserves. Sure, a working demo is nice, but input from prospective customers is priceless. We need to fill in the blank in “I’d pay for Theoryville if it let me _________,” and convince investors that there are tens of thousands of researchers with that same blank.

We also realized during our conversation with Dug that a secondary market we’d only been glancing at might actually be our primary market: education. These days, introductory courses on statistics are typically taught using Stata, SPSS, or R. Many of those students have never written computer code before in their lives, so they’re encountering both programming and statistics for the first time—a harrowing experience! Wouldn’t it be nice to have a code-free environment that could be used for rigorous hands-on data analysis in the classroom?

So, our strategy right now: Finish our rough, built-in-two-weeks proof-of-concept demo (what we’re calling Version 0.01a). Then contact as many potential users as we can (not just the handful of profs and grad students we know personally) to find out how we can make their research/teaching simpler, faster, and more fun.

And what about you, dear reader? How might Theoryville make your life better?

When I first came here, I liked to tell people that in five years I’d be an absent-minded professor, most likely of Economics. My advisor helped me to find novel areas of research, and I started perusing the literature and creating theoretical models. But I soon found that I was much more excited about building stuff that people could actually use than I was about writing academic papers. Last summer, when I built a social bookmarking app called Quocial (now defunct), I thought the two interests could co-exist. Since then, though, I’ve gradually reached the conclusion that the optimal allocation of my time is 100% software development, 0% academic stuff. Which means leaving grad school and seeking funding for my dream: To create an amazing, web-based alternative to STATA.

Now, of course I don’t expect to attract investors on the basis of my idea alone. (What do you think this is, the 1990s?) To quote a trope that’s rightly permeated the startuposphere: “Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. Execution is worth millions.” And I know I’m not the only one who’s had this idea. Someone posted a rough prototype to Hacker News just two weeks ago that was very similar in concept, in fact.

Fortunately, I have more than just the idea. I have two amazing SI Master’s students as teammates, Noah Liebman and Tom Haynes. We call ourselves Theoryville. We’ve been meeting since November to flesh out the concept and do some basic market research, and we’ve recently started pitching our idea around.

Today we got a nice call from Harj Taggar, founder of Auctomatic and currently a part of Y Combinator, asking us some informal questions about our application. One of the things he encouraged us to do was to build a demo before it comes time for him and the rest of the Y Combinator folks to pick finalists. Coincidentally, I’d told my team the same thing earlier this week: We need a demo. We need to show that we can execute.

And that’s the story so far: Leaving grad school. Two weeks to show that my team has the potential to turn our idea into a useful, slick-looking app this summer. No pressure.