No, I’m not talking about Heroes, the awesome new show on NBC, I’m talking about my personal heroes. One of the perks of starting a little company is that you have an excuse to reach out to people you’ve admired from afar. I’ve gotten to talk to and meet Paul Graham, the founder of Viaweb which later sold to Yahoo! and the man behind YCombinator. If you haven’t heard of Paul before, I highly recommend reading his inspirational essays. During the early stages of forming Fanpop, his essays were extremely helpful and insightful. They give very practical and tangible tips for anyone thinking about starting a tech company.
Another person’s writings and advice that inspired me was Guy Kawasaki, the managing director of Garage Technology Ventures and the chief evangelist for the Macintosh at Apple Computer. His blog, Signal Without Noise, was a constant source of entrepreneurial wisdom and guidance. The thing I loved about his book, The Art of the Start
I started an email exchange with Guy last month and this past Monday Guy was nice enough to invite me to breakfast. Needless to say, I was a little nervous about meeting him! All those fears were allayed right away when we started comparing notes on our Motorola Qs within the first minute of meeting. It’s always nice to meet a kindred spirit. 
We talked about a lot of stuff, but eventually he wanted me to give him a demo of Fanpop. He was impressed with what he saw and posted a “reality check” about Fanpop on his widely-read blog. Digg it! We’ve gotten a ton of traffic from the post and hopefully I’ll get to see Guy again real soon.
Some of my favorite heroes in recent months have been some of our passionate users. One that stands out in particular is Joshua Olson. He joined Fanpop as monkeypup and instantly just “got it”. He reached out to us with some constructive feedback that was almost a carbon copy of our product plans along with some other really good suggestions. It was amazing to me that a user would go to the trouble to write such detailed suggestions! But it was obvious to me that he liked the site and wanted to make it even better. I really admired his passion and commitment to things he believed in regardless of what he got in return. Joshua posted this awesome blog entry about Fanpop. But he really blew me away when he offered to spruce up our pathetic MySpace page and start a Fanpop campaign via MySpace because he loved the site so much. I personally think MySpace is garbage and the UI is horrendous which made me throw up a little at the thought of even having to go back there. I never thought I’d use the words beautiful and MySpace in the same sentence, but Joshua worked his magic and converted the ugly default template into a beautiful MySpace profile for Fanpop. I could hardly believe it myself, but he pulled it off and for that we are grateful to him. If we could have even a handful of users as dedicated as Joshua, we just might make it in this crazy web world.