In my consulting career, I’ve been fortunate to see similar problems multiple times — hopefully, I’ll learn from each one and not make the same mistakes the next time I encounter that particular situation. One situation in particular involves a conversation with an entrepreneur, and it goes something like this :
Entrepreneur: I have an idea for a web app that will revolutionize the [blank] industry, and make us bajillions!
me: That’s great! I can tell you are passionate and excited, and that’s critical to your success. But do you have enough cash to pay for this coffee?
Entrepreneur: Yes, we have some funding to get started. And I have a business plan explaining our strategy, and I have a powerpoint deck of what the product does.
Me: That’s even better! I’ll have another espresso then.
Entrepreneur: We’d like you to get us started on our website development. Here’s our feature set for beta release. How long is this going to take? How many people, and what other stuff do we need?
Me: Ummm….and that’s where the conversation gets difficult. Because the business plan doesn’t go into great detail about the product (it shouldn’t), and the powerpoint slides have a bunch of boxes and arrows but don’t show what the screens look like or what actions the user takes, we can assume the founding team hasn’t thought much about how people actually use their product.
So at this point in the conversation, I face an uphill climb. I have to explain to (and convince) my client that they have a lot of hard work figuring out how their users are going to use this tool to accomplish their tasks, what those steps are, and what they look like. I have to tell them I don’t know how long this is going to take, and I doubt anyone else knows either.
Most of these conversations end with me suggesting some homework for the founders. It’s kind of a toolkit of useful things that you probably need, but it’s definitely not everything you need. But it’s a start.
- read “Getting Real“, the 37signals book. PDF, online, or print version, I don’t care. Read it, and know it. When in doubt, consult this book. When not in doubt, consult this book and make sure you are still on the path. I hate to use the word ‘bible’, but it’s the closest thing we have. It lays out the process of building a web product, from concept to delivery and beyond. If you’re under 25, I guess you can real Paul Graham too.
- setup a server on slicehost for development (for rails, anyway). Easy, cheap, and upgradeable.
- likewise, set up a subversion repository to hold your source code on svnrepository.com. You could host your own, but I like the peace of mind I get knowing my source is backed up and secure. As a bonus, you get a Trac instance for bug tracking, and it includes a wiki and other tools to make developing your web app easier.
- hire a designer, probably a freelance one, to draw some wireframes for you. Give them lots of your time, because that’s how you’re going to figure out what exactly your app does. This is probably the most important person on your team right now, and you should be focused on this. Ideally you can find a good reference through your network, but if not post a well-crafted ad on craigslist and look at their portfolios.
- At the same time, you probably want a developer to start working on your site. Maybe the developer came first, and she’s found someone designer-y to work with — even better. Just get some stuff down on paper so you can discuss it, scrutinize it, see what works and what doesn’t. If your designer is good, and you’ve spent enough time with them describing what you want, they should have something workable.
- Start building your product. Get your developer, or outsourcer, or nephew or whatever to hack some code.
- Your developers are probably following some sort of Agile process like Scrum. You should be seeing new features and changes on a daily or weekly basis. This is important, so you can play with your app as it is being born and give some feedback, change it, and make it better. If you’re waiting weeks or months before peeking, you’re doing it wrong. Good chefs taste as they cook.
- Once you have something you like, and works, and does what it’s supposed to, consider doing a limited release. Announce to your friends and families, have them play with it, ask for their feedback. If you can’t get your loved ones to pay attention to something you’ve been slaving over, well, that’s not a good sign.
- While you’re at it, put some site monitoring on it like site24×7.com — so you’ll know if you get swamped with too much traffic from Digg or Slashdot or nytimes.com, should they write about your site.
- Go slow. look how your userbase is growing, if it is at all. Get some more users — email more friends, or blog about it, or buy a few Google ads. Setup Google Analytics to track visitors to your site, and learn what is working and what isn’t. Measure, always measure.
- Get more feedback. Listen to your users. Make them happy. As your userbase starts to grow, spend some time thinking about how you can handle the extra load.
… and that’s about it. You’ve just built and launched an app. Hopefully, you have some users and they like it,maybe even willing to pay for it. Maybe it sucks, and is a stupid idea. But more likely, it works, has some flaws, and could use some work. So work on it. Improve. Iterate.
Of course, what is considered ‘best practices’ today may not be the preferred methods of tomorrow. So I read a lot to stay on top of where the industry is going. A have a million feeds in my Google Reader account, but only a handful I consider invaluable — including TechCrunch, Found+Read, Read/Write Web, and Signal vs. Noise.
Written by todd on January 1st, 2008 with 1 comment.
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I’ve long been a fan of Guy Kawasaki. From the early days as Apple evangelist, to his current role as early-stage VC, Guy has always had keen insight into technology and social trends. He’s written a few books with some practical advice on building successful companies, drawing upon his own experiences in the trenches.
Guy preaches what I have understood for a long time: the cost of starting a web company has dropped dramatically in the past 5 years or so, to the point where the economics of funding and launching a startup are drastically different. Old and busted: $5M in series A VC funding, years of technology development, then hopefully some revenue. New hotness: bootstrap on credit cards or angel investors for <$100K, launch in 3-6 months with immediate revenue, and hopefully positive cashflow soon after.
The evidence that Guy holds up for these trends, to say "all of this is true, and here's how I took advantage and launched something big on a shoestring budget" , is his site truemors.com . Truemors is a news site with various categories (business, gaming, health, etc) and content submitted by readers. It sports a digg-like ‘X users interested’ scheme for users to vote up their favorite stories. And there’s some editorial posting at work too, by the staff of ‘truemorists’ inside and outside the company.
Guy claims (and I believe him) that the Truemors site was launched on a $12K budget. He marvels that this is orders of magnitude less than dot-com era startups, and credits open-source software and easy hosting providers in making this all possible. And he’s right.
But it’s a blog, Guy. A freakin’ blog.
Now, it’s a pretty cool blog. It has some nice features, like being able to post by phone or email. And it certainly ‘democratizes information’ , such that “the many can create too”. This is all great, and it’s probably a good business in that you get plenty of traffic to monetize via ads on the site.
But it’s still a blog. Guy even tells us it’s built on Wordpress (as is the blog you’re reading now), and he spent as much on legal costs as on the software development. You can probably guess that this blog, although not as well-designed, technologically advanced, or revenue-generating as Trumors, was launched on a much smaller budget.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to advocate spending millions on building a product when you can spend a few hundred — this is just good business sense. But what exactly am I supposed to marvel at? That it *only* cost $12K? I wonder why it didn’t cost less than that? Really, do I need to invest even $12K to launch a profitable blog site? If that’s the barrier to entry for this most virtual of industries, it’s too high. Why can’t a high-school kid with an idea for a niche news site (again, leveraging existing tools like WordPress) get started on his allowance money? What does it say about the state of innovation if we need to spend 80% of our startup costs paying off a lawyer to file incorporation paperwork?
Guy argues that a good lawyer now will save you trouble down the road. That uncle of yours who is a divorce lawyer might not understand all the nuances of setting up a c-corp to handle your high-tech blog company. That if someone wants to buy you later on, they’ll discover you’re clueless because your legal i’s are not dotted and t’s crossed.
This is probably true, but I can’t help but wonder why. And since I can’t change it, I should probably just suck it up and pay the legal ransom. And great lawyers, esp in media and technology, can provide introductions to investors and partners and help your company out in amazing ways. But if I want to do something so run-of-the-mill these days as start a company to publish a blog and take in advertising dollars, why should that cost so much in legal fees? When that exact same process and knowledge was used on countless identical clients before me — no new research was needed, no new legal techniques discovered. Why aren’t we leveraging that?
In reality, what ensured Truemors success wasn’t the technology base of Wordpress and MySQL and reliable interweb hosting. It wasn’t the $5K in legal fees that Guy paid the top-tier Silicon Valley firm to file his paperwork. It was Guy’s reputation and popularity, which ensured a wide readership of whatever he published, a reputation built over decades in the industry. Guy is a brand, an icon, and without that Truemors would not have garnered much of the attention it now deservedly holds.
So we’re back to square one — $12K is too high of a ‘floor’ for launching a web startup, and it’s too little in terms of the equipment you need — namely, some brand recognition or other competitive advantage (content, technology, etc) to make your site rise above the noise.
At heart, I think Guy is right about the trends, and right that the barriers are far lower than they used to be. But I’m not sure Truemors embodies all of this, simply for the fact that it’s unique to Guy’s situation. Other entrepreneurs will take very different paths to arrive at a similar destination — some will use less cash, others will have more or less brand recognition. But they will all benefit from a marketplace that is drastically different than it was even 5 years ago, when these opportunities were mostly out of their reach.
Written by todd on November 30th, 2007 with no comments.
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Today Google made available the Android SDK, which makes it possible for developers to build applications for the Android open handset platform. There is a new section for Android on code.google.com, and a video showing off the capabilities of the platform.
I haven’t yet installed the SDK, but it looks promising. Google also announced a $10M prize purse for developers building Android apps, although I’m not sure the fires really need all that stoking — the media buzz around this platform has captured enough interest that I’m sure we’d see some amazing handset apps even without the prizes.
If you haven’t read my previous post, be sure to check out the Android demo at the upcoming MoMo Boston event.
Written by todd on November 12th, 2007 with no comments.
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Next week (Nov 13) my good friend Alan Blount will be demonstrating what the press has been calling “the gPhone”, or “Google Phone”. In reality, what Google has been working on is the Android mobile phone platform and SDK, not a specific phone. Also in the discussion is the Open Handset Alliance, the industry organization (including tech and mobile companies) to bring about a better user experience by leveraging the Android platform.
The event is being held in conjunction with the Mobile Internet World conference in Boston — free passes are available, details on the MoMoBoston site. This may very well be the first time the public gets a glimpse at the Android platform, so it should be a fun evening.
Written by todd on November 11th, 2007 with no comments.
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I feel like it does little good to blog about events after they happen. But better late than never, right?
This weekend was Harvard Business School Cyberposium 13, a conference of technology and business leaders. It’s interesting in that the entire conference is organized by students, and draws a pretty diverse crowd of MBA-types, tech-types, and startup entrepreneurs.
The Philip Rosedale (founder of Linden Labs, makers of Second Life) talk was more interesting than I expected. His talk walked us through the virtual world of Second Life, as he described how the simple rules of the world led to some very interesting emergent behavior when the user population began to grow. For example, SL users can earn real money by creating and selling virtual goods within the SL world, to a truly global marketplace of buyers. Unlike the web there are no currency or language barriers, since SL has its own currency and a visual mode of interaction.
I didn’t stay for the whole conference, instead I wanted to see John Palfrey speak at the Leadership Institute on the other side of campus. Palfrey heads the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law school. He’s been involved with internet and intellectual property law, which is how I met him during the S-DMCA hearings on Beacon Hill. But he also does some interesting research with his group at the Berkman, which I would call “social media” — how the internet and related technologies are changing the way people communicate and interact. Blogs, social networks, podcasting, RSS — the Berkman examines how all of this is affecting and changing our culture.
So Palfrey gave a talk to the Harvard Leadership Institute, about some of his own personal leadership stories. One such story was about how he was elected co-captain of his squash team, even though he was the worst player, and how he had to lead by example (playing well). Another was the idea of “managing up” when he worked as a political campaign manager, and how to push back instead of trying too hard to please. These are very familiar concepts to me, as I’ve hit my head against them numerous times. He also mentioned the importance of selling, as that is often what a job entails (even when you think it doesn’t). I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, and how beneficial those skills would be in many careers.
He segued from that into a discussion about his new book Born Digital , about the generational differences in how we relate to technology. It was a very interactive session, which I always prefer with such an engaging speaker. He was teaching Internet and Society: Technologies and Politics of Control” at harvard extension, but it looks like someone else is teaching that course this spring.
Written by todd on November 11th, 2007 with no comments.
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I’m not a designer by training — in fact, I can barely draw stick figures. But often on a project I need to start laying elements out on a page and seeing what works, and what doesn’t belong. I used to do this on paper, which is quick and easy to iterate. Then, start mocking up the layout in HTML. All this is just to get the features and placement right, and leaving the visual design for a professional.
The problem with this approach is, there’s a huge gap between paper-prototype and HTML mockup. Paper is quick and easy, but not very compelling to look at. HTML looks better, but it’s not very malleable — once you place something, it’s often a pain to move it around and get it right again.
So I’ve started using a drawing tool to do these wireframes. I may sketch something out on paper first (because that is still the fastest), but before I share it with anyone, I’ll open up my drawing program and draw boxes and text on the screen. I’m on a Mac, and so far the best tool I’ve found for this is OmniGraffle Pro. Usually used for drawing flow charts and the like, there are some add-ons that make it great for wireframing. Like the OmniGraffle Web Design Template by Michael Angeles. He also has a wireframe palette containing a bunch of useful shapes and text, and a greeking stencil for ‘lorem ipsum’ text.
Using these tools, you can draw some useful mock-ups of web pages for your next project. I do not know my way around Photoshop or Illustrator, but I am fairly comfortable using OmniGraffle with these extensions after only a bit of trial-and-error. Now I can create drawings and mail them around to colleagues without fear of them laughing at my stick figures.
OmniGraffle is a commercial product, but you can get a trial for their Pro version. You need the Pro to take advantage of the plugins I linked above. It’s about $99, so it’s far more affordable than Photoshop and other art-oriented drawing programs.
Written by todd on October 28th, 2007 with no comments.
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BetaHouse, the co-working space I am involved in, was featured in this NetworkWorld article on the rise of co-working. BetaHouse co-founders Jon Pierce and Greg Gibson were interviewed and talk about the benefits and challenges of working in such an environment.
Written by todd on October 23rd, 2007 with no comments.
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I’ve been following Larry Lessig for several years now, and much like many of you I was… entranced by his writing and presentations. He has a speaking style that reminds me of an impassioned minister from my childhood, that of someone who cares deeply about what he is saying and can make his audience care too.
After an unsettling outcome in Eldred v. Ashcroft, Lessig is now turning his attention to the problem of corruption — of our political process, of policymakers, of drug salesmen and doctors — and has dedicated the next ten years of his life to this problem. To Lessig, the other problems (like copyright extension in Eldred v. Ashcroft) won’t be addressible until we remove the underlying corruption which plague our lives.
So that’s a bit of background to what I’m about to ask you to do — go now and watch the 1 hr Google video presentation of his latest creation, “The Corruption Lecture”. He claims its in alpha version, as I imagine it will be tweaked and modified extensively as he gets practice giving it again and again — but it deserves a look now, as it is.
Watch “Lessig on Corruption” on Google Video now.
This talk presses a lot of my buttons, both because of how it relates to current politics and issues, but also my own personal philosophy about accountability, social equality, the responsibilities of the individual, etc. I need to find a way to involve myself in the things I care about, lest I stand on the sidelines and go crazy. As Lessig says at the end of his story, fear of failure — even the certainty of it — is no excuse. If not us, then who?
Written by todd on October 14th, 2007 with no comments.
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Now that I’ve been baptized in the 4HWW, I’ve been following the author Tim Ferriss’s blog. One post I found very practical was “5 World-Class Vices for less than $5“. In it, Tim describes a few items that are the best in the world of their types — wines, chocolate, etc — but are very low cost. I’ve been trying to find all of the items mentioned in the article and many more in the comments.
But more abstractly, this got me thinking about value. I define value as ‘high quality for a relatively low cost, relative to other options’. For example, the Bugatti Veyron is an amazing car. It has some of the best engineering ever devised by man, it is incredibly fast, and at $1.4M pretty expensive. However you measure it, it is of very high quality. But it is probably not a very good value. If you use your car to go to work and the grocery store, a $10k used Nissan is probably a much better value to you. The Nissan has less quality than the Bugatti, to be sure, but the utility, performance, and maintainability make it quite valuable (at least, in the context of everyday driving).
So Tim and his readers list some great values for <$10 or so. Wine is a common one, as there is a huge selection of wines ranging from <$5 to hundreds of thousands of dollars, so there's a lot of room for value to appear. Trader Joes happens to carry a lot of sub- $5 and sub- $10 wines, some of which are quite good. The same goes for chocolate -- you can get some of the best chocolate in the world for less than $10 per bar. So most of the items on Tim's blog post are about wine and chocolate, but are there other items that you've discovered that are of great value?
I enjoy good (really good) beer, and I think it falls into this category. Some of the best beers in the world can be had for less than $10 for a 1 liter bottle, which means you can sample lots of them, or drink your favorite every day. The most highly rated wines in the world cost hundreds of dollars, and even if you can afford it you probably don't make an everyday occurrence of it. Beer comes in just as many varieties and can be had in single bottles at many grocery or liquor stores. Even Whole Foods or TJ's carries a decent selection of beers from all over the world.
Tim's list:
also recommended were Argentine Malbec wines and Gamay wines. TJs carries some of both varieties.
commenters on Tim’s post mentioned some more values:
wines:
- Tesco Premier Cru champagne is only £14.24 (UK only)
- South African Pinotages (TJ’s and others)
- 2 buck chuck (Charles Shaw) (TJs)
- Trumpeter Cabernet Sauvignon — Buenos Aires (greatcorks.com)
chocolate:
coffee / tea:
I’ll add to that some of my favorite beers (many also available at TJ’s):
- Ommegang brewery — Hennepin, Three Philosophers, and others
- duvel
- La Fin Du Monde
- Sam Smith porter
- Young’s double chocolate stout
- Dogfish 90-minute IPA, raison d’etre, and apricot ale
- Allegash
So what other things do you consider to be of great value, especially on the low-cost end? It doesn’t have to be food or drink, either — those were just some examples. But I’m sure if you look around, you’ll find some things you love that don’t break the bank.
Written by todd on October 12th, 2007 with 3 comments.
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last week MIT announced a $50M gift to form a new entrepreneurship and development center. The donation was made by investment firm Legatum. The center will focus its efforts on products and technologies to solve problems in developing nations.
Joost Bonsen, who has long been involved in fostering entrepreneurial activities at MIT (including the Developmental Entrepreneurship seminar, the Nuts-and-Bolts of Business Plans IAP seminar, and the 50K / 100K competitions) is on the exec team for the new center. I’m very excited for Joost, his hard work in this area deserves this kind of support.
I ran into Joost Monday night at the Muddy Charles pub, where he was hosting an event for MIT entrepreneurs and friends. Also present were Cory and Erica of IntutiveAutomata, makers of Autom, the weight-loss coach robot. It’s an interesting idea, that a human-like device pushes our social and behavioral buttons in a way that keeps us motivated — more so than a website or other low-touch support system could. I’m curious to see what the results of their clinical trials are.
Written by todd on September 27th, 2007 with no comments.
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