Its been about a month since my last proper post and you may (or may not) have been wondered what has been keeping me busy. Well in short we’ve been trying to crystalize the ideas we had around Face Your Cause into a useful social application with an attractive business model. In doing this, we came to the conclusion that Face Your Cause would operate really well as a social enterprise, and I have now decided to take a back seat on the project in order to investigate new ideas and opportunities.

I feel like a big mistake I made when getting involved with Face Your Cause was jumping at the idea without considering any alternatives. Having been stuck in the application process for graduate jobs at the tail end of last year, I was raring to get involved in a project in January and as a result I jumped on board without too much consideration. Over the last few weeks it became increasingly clear to me that while Face Your Cause is very likely to be a successful venture in the social enterprise and charity domain, it wasn’t appealing enough to make a full time commitment.

It’s impossibly difficult to commit 60 hours a day to a start-up and give it 110% without being passionate about it. At the beginning of this week, before it was too late, I was faced with the difficult task of telling Tom about my concerns. After a few long discussions on Monday and Tuesday, we came to a decision: Tom is going to carry on with Face Your Cause, outsourcing the rest of the development, with my help on the technical side. This leaves me back at square one, with a new team and new ideas.

This time I am working with Dilan Jayawardane, an MIT CompSci graduate who was previously working at Oracle. We’ve just started brainstorming, and our shortlist of potential projects is growing steadily. Hopefully we can come up with a disruptive innovation rather than a pile of chindōgu.

If it all goes belly up, maybe Dilan and I could open a Sri Lankan curry house?

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My daily activities over the last few months have largely consisted of sitting at home, watching Scrubs, playing guitar and procrastinating on the Internet in between numerous job interviews and impromptu visits to Oxford! That is until this week, which came as a bit of shock to the body and mind, because for the first time since last summer I have actually become busy again. Tom and I are now working in 5th gear to revitalise his idea and get the project off the ground - there’s a lot to do. Having been out of the start up loop for a while I decided to do a bit of research first to get clued up on what’s going on. I found e-consultancy’s 25 top resources for internet startup founders particularly useful and it’s definitely worth a read if you are considering going down the web start up route and aren’t sure where to begin.

With an idea in hand, the important thing for us now is putting together a complete team. Vishal Kapadia, a fellow Oxford graduate and marketing psychology ace, has joined us this week as the third slice in the pie that is Faceyourcause. We’re relying on Vish to use jedi marketing mind tricks to make faceyourcause viral! This leaves us with one big gaping hole in our team: we still don’t have anyone to build the website. With 3 guys on the business side and no coders we can put together a kick ass business plan but that’s no good without a product so our priority is to get a lead developer on board, which means we have a lot of networking to do.

Using my wit, Tom’s blagging skills and Vish’s powers of persuasion, we were confident we could get a developer who would be willing to work for free in our non existent office and we’ve spent the last few days searching London’s start up community for our man (or woman). Our first port of call was the Facebook Developers Garage, on Wednesday night. This is a monthly gathering of London’s Facebook application developers, consultants and religious followers. After 2 hours of presentations and a shortage of free pizza we left without many leads and a serious case of Facebook fatigue! Thursday morning’s Open Coffee wasn’t much more promising but we did meet the guys at Intruders.tv who gave us some useful tips on how and where to find these elusive developers, who aren’t already working on a project and don’t mind taking equity rather than cash.

They say you can’t beat a founder’s passion but by Thursday evening I definitely felt like it had been beaten out of me! Remaining determined, the three of us headed to PizzaOnRails, a gathering organised by Cominded for London Rails developers. With pizzas in plentiful supply this time around, our luck did finally turn around and we managed to find some developers interested in what we were doing. We also had the privilege of witnessing the launch of yabb.com, which offers users the opportunity to talk to total strangers (on skype) about topics that they share an interest in. In the words of Paul Birch, yabb’s founder, the website is about re-inventing the ‘art’ of conversation, but like Paul, most of us couldn’t work out who would want to use it. One to keep an eye on I think.

Finally on to Minibar on Friday, which I attended on my own because my partners in crime were slacking off! Held every month in Shoreditch, this event had the most buzz out of the few that I had been to. With developers, designers and entrepreneurs in attendance, this was the best event of the week for anyone new to start ups. I accumulated a few more Moo cards and enjoyed some testing conversations and after the re-run of the yabb presentation, it was definitely my cue to leave.

With a few meetings lined up for next week and some really useful feedback, the last few days of networking were productive, despite the slow start. One thing I have noticed is that unlike the nightclubs which my social life had been revolving around, at start up networking events the alcohol is usually free and there’s always a queue outside the Gents.

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