Startup thinking for the social sector.
Code to help nonprofits do web 2.0+.
Plus photography.
(And reading aloud.)
More about Eric Johnson.
Jeremy Toeman has a fantastic analysis of the Twitter experience for new users. Lots of lessons here for Twitter -- and for anyone putting together a new user experience.
Twitter needs to thoroughly overhaul the new user experience. Forget “suggested users” and focus on “suggested uses.”
Fabien Agranier wrote:
"1) You can't have top and bottom menu in web apps !!!!!
2) You can't get rid of the safari bottom menu
3) You have to use a trick to hide the url bar and it's really not pretty (bar is showed during page loadings)"These are all incorrect. Apps written using HTML5 can be indistinguishable from native applications on the iPhone in all respects except the installation and update process. Examples:
http://blog.threepress.org/2009/11/02/ibis-reader-and-bookserver/
http://mrgan.com/gb/
http://www.jqtouch.com/
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Apple's 4-week approval for iPhone apps interferes with bug fixes. And that interferes with making the best software -- and inspiring the best people.
An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it’s not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren’t the ones that win.
via paulgraham.com
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There are roughly 20 times more people playing FarmVille these days than there are actual farms in the U.S.
via businessweek.com
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Fifty years ago, if you were had a $1 billion market capitalization, you had 5,000 employees. Now you need 50.
It makes sense that those 4,500 forced to look in should be able to bitch and moan and offer suggestions.
It’s why talk radio mixed with sports has always been such a hit…with everyone BUT the athletes.
As blogging and now microblogging have grown, the armchair quarterback has evolved and mutated to something I call ‘The Armchair Entrepreneur’.
Most calls I handle about Stocktwits start with….so how will you make money?
Even my mom asks me. It’s why I had to block her.
Guilty here...
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Great recipes (zillions of them) -- and in-app advertising done right.
Back in the web 1.0 days, Conde Nast put all of the recipes from Gourmet and its other food magazines online at http://epicurious.com. The recipes were searchable and over time Epicurious added ratings and other community features. It's been a fabulous resource for cooks. They are great recipes, and there are lots of them -- including the 1955 recipe for steak au poivre that keeps me from going vegetarian. Epicurious has now come to the iPhone with the free "Epicurious recipies and shopping list" app http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=312101965&mt=8 . That whole recipe database is now searchable from your iPhone. And, yes, it will make a grocery list from the recipes you pick.
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Seth Sternberg, Meebo CEO, on Getting A Product Out The Door. To a startup, product is all that matters. Everything else: users, partners, connections depends on speedy execution.
At the exact moment you had your idea, ten other people had the exact same idea. There was just something in the environment that made it the right time for folks to think that one up. The race has already begun! Who’s going to execute first? Who’s going to execute best? If you want to waste nine months trying to raise VC money for that idea, great. But six months in, you’re gonna cry when you see someone else put out that same product you’re pitching me right now. Like I said, forget everything else and just get your product out the door. Now.
via techcrunch.com
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In the lean startup, product and management team build quickly, then iterate based on statistics gathered from real users (that's Eric Ries's excellent description below). When Seth Godin gripes about lack of vim in the nonprofit sector, this is the approach he's missing.
Why does it seem so rare in the social sector?
In parallel to this work by the “solution team” (engineering, ops and QA) there is a new kind of “problem team” (what we used to call business development, marketing, and sales) that is asking the bigger questions, such as: Who will our customers be? What problem does our product solve for them? How many of them are there? And how will we reach them?
via gigaom.com
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We didn’t have money for advertising, so we started a blog. We didn’t have money for writers, so most of our original blog content then was guest posts from other personal finance blogs, plus a couple of columns on people’s worst financial disasters.
To build demand, we started asking for email addresses for our alpha 9 months in advance of launch. Then when we had too many people sign up, we asked people to put a little badge that said “I want Mint” on their blogs to get priority access. We got free advertising and 600 link backs which raised our SEO juice.
When it came time to launch, we choose TechCrunch 40 – why pay $20k for DEMO?
We decided not to do SEM – it’s too easy and too additive. Instead, we relied on press. It’s where I spent 20% of my time. I’m spending it right now while writing this.
The net result has been millions of visitors and 1.5m users essentially for free. Mint is not inherently viral like a social network – but all good things are viral by word of mouth.
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Any new startup can watch and learn from the 12seconds.tv struggles. Focus on generating high-quality content in the first three phases of your life cycle. Integrate with third-party channels and applications only when there’s a high percentage of relevant, high-quality content being generated on the channel.
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