Today's Entrepreneur: Ariel McNichol

I founded & built mEgo.com, an avatar-based portable profile used by millions before Facebook's dominance & market crash of '08. We raised over $5mil, brought-on adidas & the NBA. 
I ran creative for PCCW Interactive based out of London, UK, where I was able to build a cross-platform portal that brought content and applications into diverse markets on 4 continents. 
I single-handedly create, test and iterate prototypes, for clients like AOL, Disney (THQ wireless), and multiple start-ups.

The relentless drive to get a product to a level of mass success is both incredibly invigorating and frustrating. When I'm working on a concept that I believe will be widely successful and helpful, I can work all the time and not run out of energy -seeing each small milestone come to pass feels rewarding. Yet, at the same time, this drive can cause great anguish when development gets delayed, contracts are signed too slowly, etc.

We know we have to make sure we keep bringing in customers at multiple stages to make sure we're answering a market problem - but entrepreneurs must realize that answering a market need is not enough. You have to make a great user-experience....because every market need eventually spawns new companies, so your product must be easier, faster, funner, more addicting, more beautiful product and/or better marketed in order to thrive.

First, as a 'nice woman,' I've learned that even if it feel funny, I must exude extreme confidence. It has taken me years and multiple real-world examples to realize that my ideas are usually 'right' and better than other people's and that I owe it to products I'm working on to make sure it's known. I have worked for wildly successful people who got to their status not from talent or wit, but because they were so incredibly confident that people felt at ease to follow them.

Second, seemingly crazy ideas are the best - and they'll take the longest to get off the ground. When your idea is genuinely new you may not get a lot of early support, but you will be more determined than with a mere 'improvement' product to get it out there and prove that it's needed and wanted.

Third, it takes 3x as long to get things done as you think they will. I hate to write this because I deeply wish it were not true.

In the past 10 years, I have been a serial entreprenuer. Most notably, I founded mEgo.com, an avatar-based portable profile, we raised $5mil, brought in sponsors like adidas, NBA, had millions of users, but was made obsolete by some bad turns and the dominance of Facebook. I have been a software designer since 1994, making websites, apps, kiosks, games, iTV and mobile products for clients such as Yahoo, AOL, Apple, Wells Fargo, Rockwell Collins, Lucas Arts, Disney, @Home, The Annenberg Institute, and more. I was the Creative Director for Lotus Interworks and PCCW/Now.com, both multi-national corporations focused on serving the expanding needs of a cross-platform international consumer base. 

My passion is to build helpful products from prototype to mass use. I took a few years off to obsess over my human babies while doing freelance UI/UX work, but I missed my entrepreneurial life far too much and found myself trying to reinvent motherhood. Now the kids are in school, and I am ready to take my obsessive love and knowledge of behavioral science, self-help and usability to make a better way to self-help apps.