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.”
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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So for the Mac, which was developed for far less money than the Lisa, Apple turned to third-party developers. And here’s the line they used, which I believe was the work of Alain Rossmann: “It’s obvious that graphical computing is the future, whether the Mac is a success or not. This is your chance to learn how to develop for such an environment. Choosing not to develop for the Mac, then, is choosing for your company to eventually die.”
via cringely.com
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Sean Ellis uses surveys to judge how well a team's product fits the market:
I ask existing users of a product how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. In my experience, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product. Admittedly this threshold is a bit arbitrary, but I defined it after comparing results across nearly 50 startups. Those that struggle for traction are always under 40%, while most that gain strong traction exceed 40%.
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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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Daniel Tunkelang reports a sad and true story of a startup threatened by patent lawsuit. A much larger competitor called to say "shut down and come work for us, or we’ll crush you with a patent infringement suit." Yikes!
Whether or not you believe that there should be software patents–and there is room for reasonable people to debate this question–I hope you agree that the situation my friend is facing amounts to legalized extortion. I understand that no system is perfect, and that our legal system requires compromises that have inevitable casualties.
Nonetheless, my friend’s story does not feel like an isolated incident, but rather evidence of a systemic problem. There are a lot of software patents floating around right now of dubious validity, many of them granted to companies that have since folded and have unloaded their assets in fire sales. It would be sad for this supply of ersatz intellectual property to impede the real innovation that the patent system was intended to protect.
The legal or patent appeal systems can to deal with this, of course -- eventually. Unfortunately, a firms options for recourse take time and money -- both in short supply in startup land.
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Knight is rethinking how to deal with projects funded by the foundation that are later sold. “It’s a safe bet that grant agreements are going to change in the future,” [Gary Kebel] told a large crowd gathered to hear about the Knight News Challenge. (He also described EveryBlock’s sale to MSNBC as a “multi-million-dollar deal.”)
When a Knight-funded project is acquired in the future, Kebbel said, the founders may be required to relinquish some of that money: “It might be a certain percentage, it might be a certain dollar figure, it might be the amount of the grant…What we’re thinking about is creating another nonprofit that would receive that money, and that money would be either for the future development of open-source software…or it might be for community news.”
So for-profit acquisitions would still be allowed — even encouraged — but not in the same way that EveryBlock found its way into the hands of MSNBC.
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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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