Lawrence Lessig suggested: “This is the most important, most profound, more powerfully argued 7 minutes of this campaign.”

General Powell recounts a specific photograph in a photo-essay near the end of his endorsement.  I wanted to find it.  I needed to find it.  What moved him so deeply to articulate what good Americans have been thinking throughout this campaign?

I personally feel either campaign hasn’t really made an effort to address this issue of anti-Muslim bigotry.  I am not naive to the games politicians play to pilfer votes, but I wonder what would have happened if one of the candidates spoke what General Powell so eloquently delivered.

We’ve both worn white coats and delivered medical care - and have a deep understanding of how efficiencies in those interactions can be improved.

We’ve also worked in the medical affairs department of a specialty pharmaceutical company - where we met - traveling 150000 miles a year visiting thought leaders. Our responsibilities included strategy and facilitating phases 3 and 4 research with academic institutions.

We’re using those experiences and relationships to build an online service for doctors - predicated on ideas and concepts popularized by Facebook and Linkedin to streamline information flow between physicians. Our pharma experience probably seems tangential at the moment. It’s not. More on that later.

We’d like to think that we have above-average intelligence and we’re certain that we have difficult-to-procure insights into both medicine and pharma, the core of what we’re building is entirely plugged into the World Wide Web. It would have been nice if either of us had developed a web site, built a database or two, and perhaps ran a couple of online communities.

Not a problem. We just fast-forward a year or two to leverage future experiences today by bringing in advisors and consultants to bridge the knowledge chasms.

We’re currently building an entire advisory board - and we signed our first member just a few weeks back. Planning to write a note about him next - he’s wicked cool and amazing.

Andy’s area of expertise is on point. Cool. It’s in Chicago. Score. It’s a thousand bucks. Crestfallen. We can afford to send half our team (one of us, but not both).

After a bit of clicking around their site, I find: the Gaspedal crew reserves a few seats for “scholarship” attendees. We apply and get one, and that helps us cover the other’s way. Awesome, as my father would say.

The course was amazing, interactive and mind-bending. We left with ideas that altered our road map - some of them could be implemented the next day.

Would I recommend this course? Yes, yes and yes.

Is the course right for you? Honestly, I truly believe that every employee of a small business or a large company should be an evangelist for that entity, and I certainly plan to send anyone who works for us to Andy. If you’re some dude working for the man, the man, marketer or C level, you need to go. Our course included bloggers, trim/ molding sales and marketing peeps, a Yahoo! community manager and a lasik doc.

If you can’t make it, or it’s too expensive, then I suggest getting Andy’s book.

A final thought regarding the cost… If you have a marketing budget, seriously consider redirecting some of the spend on yourself and go to the course. You won’t be sorry. If you are, call me - my number is in the footer - I’ll buy you a drink.

Slow, sustained and measured community growth is actually aligned with the product development process from multiple standpoints.

There will invariably be problems for some of the first users - interface issues, a dearth of content, perhaps not enough trusted colleagues are members. Early adopters however are placable, and most will stay with us as we navigate through the iterative improvement processes. This will help make the experience better for the middle and tail, who are less forgiving. Any serious concerns that those latter two groups have would likely result in a permanent exodus, so we need to ensure that we’ve addressed their issues before their first visit. Engaging in an unfocused marketing campaign would capture individuals from all three groups - that would be suicidal during the site’s infancy.

So how can we get early adopters who become true believers to express their advocacy? I’m smart enough to know that there’s got to be a methodology to do these things - it certainly isn’t rocket science - but it would be nice to see some sort of defined plastic template that could be personalized to our specific situation. It cannot simply be “build it and they will come.” We would be waiting around forever. I never got around to researching this much, kept it on the backburner until… I heard about Andy.

Monetization is predicated on cultivating an active community, as it is in any other social or professional networking site.  So how is Sermo growing their community?

They pay existing members to refer their colleagues.  The price per head is 20 usd (link opens new window), paid via an Amazon gift certificate.  This is spam, stealthy, but still spam.  True believers are going to promote a product or service if they think it’s really that good, with no incentives, and they will make sure all of their friends know.  Sermo is probably having difficulty identifying evangelists, so they’re trying to grease the wheels.  That may mean that the product isn’t being received as well as they hoped.

This begs the question: how many of Sermo’s 70K registered users are actually active?  Are their registrants coming back a second time?  Sites define active users in several ways, I like Facebook’s: at least one visit per month.  Sermo doesn’t publish this information, which is curious.  That’s a stat you really want to promote if it’s solid, and keep under wraps if it’s not.

Does that mean Sermo has a paucity of active members?  I’m not sure, but they’re giving cash incentives to promote user generated content (link opens new window): submitting case studies (100 USD), the first to correctly diagnose the disease or identify a radiographic finding suggested by the case study (100 USD), and voting on the “correct” answer among several submitted answers (50 USD, awarded randomly, not to the first voter).  Sermo also pays their members for participating in certain surveys (30 USD). This is all bad news from a community building perspective.

I suppose if the cash award is significant, then it does matter.  Resident physicians who make between 30K and 50K USD may contemplate selling out their friends for 20 bucks or being active members for cash incentives, but certainly not attending docs who make 120K USD or more, depending on the specialty. Maybe Sermo is focusing on residents, hoping they’ll continue to use the site once they become attendings. I don’t think that will pan out unless the service proves to be useful within the context of a medical practice - it certainly isn’t now. If docs found it valuable, Sermo wouldn’t have considered doling out cash.

It’s easy for me to rail on what Sermo’s doing wrong, but people with serious money have backed them.  And technically, I work for a competitor in their space, so take what I write with a grain of salt.

A few of them hadn’t seen our office before, so I thought I’d take a minute and write about the space itself. (FYI: Our friends are awesome and gave us their personal time to help us out, and we can’t thank them enough!)

It’s a real office, on the top floor of a building in a happening neighborhood in Chicago, easy access to public transportation, not far from Wrigley Field.

Our floor mate is a couture bridal designer, who shares space with an event planner. One level down is a photography studio and a lawyer who shares space with a realty. The ground floor has a popular restaurant, and retail shops that sell wine and women’s accessories.

We can have clients over in a professional office environment, even though our fledgling company has no revenue. We love this.

How do we afford it? Simple. I’m a squatter: I live in the back of the space and cover its rent out of my pocket. We use rolling partitions to keep Subbu’s side separate from SugarSnap’s. (FYI: The building is zoned for live and work…)

There are lots of ways to save money, this is one that we’re happy to share.

I intend to document most of them in hopes that you’ll find some of the information useful. I wish we had a network to leverage during the earliest of days to help us through some of the difficulties faced - but it’s hard when you leave the cradle of security for the first time, and you don’t know where to turn. Once I’ve caught up and written about the many mistakes we’ve made, I’ll continue to write about them prospectively.

I shouldn’t sell myself short just yet either. Things are looking bright for our startup. Very bright. We’ve often been nimble and doubled-back quickly after making certain missteps, and we managed to keep ourselves alive after proceeding a bit too far down one particularly explosive path. From time to time, our first instincts proved to be correct, decisions categorized under “dumb blind luck” really, that validated themselves in interesting ways - I can’t wait to write about those as well.

FYI: It’s been nearly one year since I’ve stopped working for the man. I feel liberated living in this strange alternate universe. I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had. I’m meeting other first-time entrepreneurs, C levels and founders in early stage companies, and every now and again, I’ll even cross paths with someone who’s walked the walk all the way to a successful exit. I’ll try to get some of them to post here as well, so you get more substance than just my naive musings and poor prose.

Stay tuned!