December 15th, 2014 § Comments Off on MVP is not a shortcut § permalink
product development has been totally dominated in past few years by the ‘lean methodology’, preaching that we should all focus on less features, more iterations and a lot of customer interviews. all good and well, but i have also seen a lot of misunderstandings of this approach, leading to dysfunctional teams and products.
I believe the most problematic concept of all is the MVP – minimum viable product. everyone is pretty sure they know what MVP is, and yet, they continue to deliver either dysfunctional prototypes, or confusing ‘betas’.
sometimes, what people call the ‘lean mvp’ is actually just an excuse for sloppy design and coding. these i hate the most, and explain the fallacy with an engineering comparison:
MVP of a bridge is not made of two ropes, connected with occasional rotten wood planks that happened to be lying around. this lethal construction would serve only as a practical illustration of a concept, a sketch on the napkin, not even demo-ware yet.
MVP of a bridge is a healthy trunk carefully mounted over the river. you can use it to cross the river; you might have to learn how to walk it, but you can be sure it will carry your weight.
designing and building MVP is not a shortcut, it should take notable time and effort to do it.
August 29th, 2012 § § permalink
English: Spanish metal button circa 1650-1675, 12mm diameter. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Every blogger writing about technology and/or startups knows how important Hacker News is for promoting good, quality articles. The effect of being published there is comparable to more general sharing sites like Reddit and Digg and StumbleUpon.
Unfortunately, unlike it’s bigger cousins, this service is not supported by WordPress.com as an option for sharing buttons, after the post. Luckily we have an option to add custom sharing button, that makes it really easy to create a custom button yourself. Here’s how.
- In your WordPress.com dashboard, Go to Settings -> Sharing
- Click ‘Add a new service’ under ‘Available services’, a popup will show up
- Put ‘Hacker News’ under service name,
- Put “http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+%post_full_url%+%22&t=%22+%post_title%” under Sharing URL,
- Put “http://ycombinator.com/images/y18.gif” under Icon URL, and hit ‘create share button’
- Drag the newly created ‘available service’ button to enabled services
and you’re done, now you have a shiny new HackerNews sharing button under every blog post. relax.
August 28th, 2012 § Comments Off on Hacker News is for Kids § permalink
© 2007 See-ming Lee ( Blog / Facebook / Flickr / LinkedIn / Network / Orkut / Twitter / Wiki ) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve had an amazing blogging week last week.
I published a post about startup not being a job, that I’ve written in a very short moment when I was overwhelmed with disappointment over founders of a certain just-born startup that were not available for what could have been a life-changing meeting for them. we’ll never know now, but it made me realize just how different startup world I live in is from other forms of employment.
I didn’t think about it much more after I’ve written and scheduled it, so it was quite a surprise for me when I realized that another entrepreneur fried published it on Hacker News, and that it was receiving a lot of attention on it, as well as on Twitter.
The responses were amazingly different. While Twitter crowd liked the post very much, HN readership fell into a flame war against me, based on consistent misinterpretations that had one common topic – overworking yourself is hard, and you don’t need to do that in order to be a startup. I wholeheartedly agree with them, but that was not my point.
But a day later, I got this news in my inbox, and it shone an interesting light on the confusion: 50% of readers on HN are under 24-years old. the only other popular site that has younger audience is DeviantArt:
If you ever wanted to know the age and sex of social media users on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Github, Stack Overflow, Orkut, Quora, WordPress.com, Blogger, Flickr, Myspace, Tagged, Hi5, LiveJournal, Yelp, deviantART, StumbleUpon, Goodreads and Last.fm … you’re in luck.
via: venturebeat.com
Now, this is significant new information, that has an important consequence: HN readership obviously has a different value system than most of the rest of the ecosystem. we should be more aware of it, because it will shape our world in the next 5 years.
or as a friend commented on facebook: “it seems HN is used only by lifestyle businesses”
August 21st, 2012 § § permalink
Last few months we’ve witnessed a birth of an almost whole new industry. Here’s a good summary:
Native monetization is a fast growing form of digital advertising that is changing the complexion of the advertising industry in New York. Native advertising refers to ad strategies ad strategies that allow brands to promote their content into the endemic experience of a site in a non-interruptive, integrated way.
via: www.businessinsider.com
August 18th, 2012 § Comments Off on Slovenian Startups: it’s personal § permalink
Roughly three quarters of the webpages of Slovenian startups don’t say who the founders are. Not on the front page, not on the about page, nowhere. Most of the list the tax ID numbers and official address of the company, but not the names of the people running it.
This is a catastrophe! Are you trying to hide your head in the sand until the success ‘happens’, and only after that will you collect the credit? The founding fathers of America wrote their names on the Constitution, before it was a success.
Every young company has two major challenges when it comes to public communication:
- how do I tell enough people we exist?
- how do I make them trust us with their money?
The best answer to the first one is – go out of the office and talk to people on events and in their native environment. It’s also a great way to get to know your core audience inside-out.
But for the trust issue, the absolutely best remedy is for the founders to be put up front, essentially saying loud and clear: “Trust Me”. Don’t just trust the words I’ve written (they are wrong), don’t trust the design (it’s bad), don’t trust what you heard on the street about us (it was probably wrong), trust ME, I believe in what we are doing, I believe we are changing the world into a better place, and should something bad happen, I will feel ashamed to death.
So startup founders, please, write your names everywhere you can and be proud of it. There is no other way your startups will succeed.
May 19th, 2012 § Comments Off on putting instagram into perspective § permalink
it’s always wise to check and keep in mind data from the wider field, not just the outlier. everyone fascinated by instagram and facebook should know all these other acquisitions by heart before talking about ‘the bubble’:
Instagram’s billion-dollar sale to Facebook raised eyebrows yesterday, renewing cries of a new bubble. But relative to other major acquisitions of the past, how does it measure up? I crunched the numbers, pulling together data from a selection of 30 notable internet acquisitions over the last ten years, from Broadcast.
via: waxy.org
May 18th, 2012 § Comments Off on Everything you need to know about digital marketing for your business § permalink
Dashboard 1 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Lot’s of entrepreneurs are struggling with marketing these days. in fact, I hear that marketing and user acquisition is the single largest bottleneck for new startups.
This is truly remarkable step-by-step how-to guide for kickstarting your online marketing. understanding this is bare minimum that every person should know and understand. if you hire a consultant, make sure you know all this, so that you can asses if (s)he knows more.
If I were a business person looking to understand how to use various digital channel making tools to build up my business, where would I start? What’s the right mix of tools to make this all make sense and work?
via: www.chrisbrogan.com
April 9th, 2012 § § permalink
Theme of Carmen's influence over Jose from Bizet's Carmen. Created in Lilypond using the G. Schirmer vocal score from 1895. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
interesting article, with one key point: “your klout score might not be accurate measure of pure influence, but it does show if you are socializing your influence” – and by focusing on it, klout is training us all to be more social online.
of course the real reason why ‘socializing influence’ is being popularized, is because it helps the brands and merchants sell more trough their evangelists.
but at the same time, as a collateral damage, i believe making us more social is a significant and positive contribution of several web services these days – they are making us into different, hopefully better, humans of the future.
It’s fashionable to feign indifference to your Klout score, which measures online influence. Some professionals think it’s uncool to seem too interested in their rankings; others believe all you need to worry about is creating good content.
via: www.forbes.com
April 6th, 2012 § Comments Off on multi-channel marketing and bad infographics § permalink
we all like infographics, because they make data and information value central, and then use visual storytelling rather than fancy words. in this act of replacing word compositions, with incredibly stronger visual compositions, we perform two actions:
- reduce the message to it’s core. this is always a combination of ‘extended puncline’ and ‘the context’.
- amplify the core
as infographics are becoming massively popular, the consequences of performing the first action badly are becoming a problem. it usually happens when the creator of the infographic is biased. here’s a very simple and benign case:
I find that a lot of people involved with social media tend to get into discussions about which platform is better with the ultimate goal of eliminating of one platforms they are discussing. This happens often with the Facebook and Google+ debate, with the goal of eliminating Facebook and totally defecting to Google+ or vice versa.
via: anisesmithmarketing.com
good marketing is always multi-channel, with the message adapted to specifics of each channel. yes, you should always do Facebook and Blogging, and probably a few others as well.
the original author of the infographic has noble goal though – to her the blog is the hub of your online life, a point I very much agree with, and a great argument to invest in it. but saying no to all other channels is just madness.
March 29th, 2012 § Comments Off on Using WordPress as your publishing hub § permalink
Personalizando WordPress 1.5 (Photo credit: juanpol)
Your blog is your online home. Even if you spend most of your day somewhere away, this is where your toot-brush is, where you are yourself.
I’ve been a proponent of this view since I started blogging, and it’s also the reason why I’m sticking with WordPress – I like moving furniture around.
This morning at WordCamp San Diego I gave a talk titled “Using WordPress as your publishing hub. It went well and lots of people had great questions. If anyone has followup questions I’m happy to answer them in the comments. The slides are included below.
via: andrewspittle.net
In a nutshell, regardless of what you are doing around the web, you will promote your posts on twitter, and not the other way around. That’s the core power of the blog!
