It was almost 15 years ago when I started iBuildMVPs. I built the basic website in a weekend and soon started building minimum viable products for aspiring startup founders. After doing this for a few years, I started a career as a software engineer. I worked for large publicly traded companies, three-person startups, and everything…
The Blog
Twitter isn’t changing the link image they show after you changed your meta tags
This happened to me today. I tried to change my link image for a link I posted on Twitter, and Twitter did not recognize the change in the image. 1.) You post a link to twitter. You notice the image doesn’t look quite right. 2.) You go and fix the image on your blog. Then…
Writing every day with 750words.com
I want to write more in 2020. One month into the year, I am still writing every day. As you probably know, I am Creating 12 products this year. Writing helps me gather my thoughts. It helps me organize what I did yesterday and what I plan on doing tomorrow. Coming into this year, I…
I’m bad at marketing
This is really painful to admit this. For years, I considered myself an expert marketer. I got a mobile detailing company off the ground by sheer force of will when I was in college using adwords campaigns. I have a degree in marketing and I graduated with a 3.75. But yet – 10 years after…
Print Design Learnings
Print design was a new experience for me. Here are some of the key takeaways from my recent experiences. Tools The tool of choice for print design is Adobe Illustrator. I tried numerous other options including source tools and online tools. No other tool gave me the ability to make changes quickly and reliably that…
Everything has hidden complexity
When I started on the bookmark project, I didn’t understand how difficult every step in the process would be. Designing a bookmark is hard. Tweaking your design for printers is hard. Determining the type of finish, thickness, and size of a product is hard. Taking product photos is excruciatingly hard. Selling a product online is…
Introducing Inspiremarks
I launched my first physical product about a week ago. It’s a set of bookmarks with quotes from startup leaders. Here’s the story of how it all came together…
All products are iterative
Most of the products I’ve created in my lifetime have been software related products. Software products are inherently iterative. You find bugs. You fix bugs. Customers request features. You build those features. Strategy dictates different features for different markets. You build those different features. I never thought physical products would also be iterative. But they…
Doubt
Sometimes, you second guess yourself. This happened tonight for me. I’m working on an application that tracks team health. It’s my project for February. Part of creating12.com. A few days ago, my friend Jay mentioned it would be cool as a Slack application. I thought that was an intriguing idea. I looked at the slack…
Creating12: 12 products. 1 year.
I am creating 12 products in 12 months.You can follow my progress at http://creating12.com How is this going down? This has already started. My first project has launched at Inspiremarks.com. It’s a printing of startup themed bookmarks. I love them! I think they are the perfect bookmarks – at least for me. I will continue…