WordPress founder and TechStars mentor Matt Mullenweg on shipping your product: Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they […]
Category: Entrepreneurship
The Difference Between Winners and Losers
From Steve Blank‘s Four Steps to the Epiphany: The difference between winners and losers is simple. Products developed with senior management out in front of customers early and often – win. Products handed off to a sales and marketing organization that has only been tangentially involved in the new Product Development process lose. It’s that […]
Study Shows Self-Employed Most Happy in Their Occupation
Two recent articles report that business owners and the self-employed are the most happy in their occupations. The results are from a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index poll data. The findings, psychologists say, reflect the importance of being free to choose the work you do and how you do it, the way you manage your time, and […]
Lean Startup Dinner with Eric Ries
Last night I attended the Lean Startup Dinner with Eric Ries hosted by TechStars. If you’re not familiar, Eric writes the Lessons Learned blog and actively promotes ideas for running lean startups based on his experiences. I’m particularly fond of the minimum viable product (MVP) concept and have been using that from the beginning with […]
Lessons Learned from a Screencast Business
Geoffrey Grosenbach runs a company called PeepCode Screencasts that produces outstanding screencasts for learning a variety of programming topics mainly around Ruby on Rails. I’ve purchased a bunch of them and they’ve all been fantastic learning tools. Recently he posted a transcript of a presentation he gave on the lessons learned from three years of […]
Entrepreneurs Can Change The World
I saw this video on Frank Gruber’s blog and had to re-post it here. Definitely worth watching and thinking about.
How Social Media Really Works
Great thoughts on building your products from A Whole Lotta Nothing: So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent […]
More ways to kill your business
I’ve been trying to write about the lessons learned from the failure of my last company (albeit quite slowly) and I read a post this morning from Mike McDerment of FreshBooks that covers some similar topics. His post is titled 7 ways I’ve almost killed FreshBooks and I can second every single point he makes. Luckily for […]
Lessons From a Failed Startup: Create Administration Tools Early
The lessons learned from the failure of my company are going to be in no particular order, so I decided to start with one that I’m already applying to my next project – creating admin tools as early as possible. With FeedCraft, we took the approach of getting the application launched as quickly as possible […]
The formula for building web applications
I read this article on Mashable (via Fred Wilson‘s tweet) and had to post this quote on building web applications: Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up. It sounds simple, but it’s not; determining a basic human need, like the need to […]