Notes from the work
An archive of product, engineering, startups, and the decisions behind building software. Older posts stay dated; they are here as a record, not a publishing schedule.
In this consumption based world we live in, it’s often difficult to create habits of creating. It was assumed that it takes 21 days to create a habit, but newer research suggests it can take up to 200 days to form a new habit. No matter how long it takes to form a habit, I […]
I read this recent post about the author Turning 30 and has never created amazing art. He hasn’t created anything he is particularly excited about, but has over 30 domain names and countless finished projects. This made me consider my situation and the countless domain names and unfinished projects I never finished. In order to […]
Backstory – I started the railstutorial.org tutorial to learn Ruby on Rails (RoR) about a year ago. It was (and is) the hot language in the startup space. I failed. I failed big time. I’ve never been too familiar with the command line and all of the error and frequent stops made me stop trying […]
For the sake of this post, please make sure you read minimum viable test vs minimum viable product post. You must plan marketing before you launch your minimum viable product. If you don’t have a blog and other inbound channels while you are planning to launch your product, you will probably depend on a techcrunch […]
There has been a lot of confusion with the terms minimum viable product and what I consider minimum viable tests. The minimum viable product is a term that is based off of the “minimum feature set” that Steve Blank often refers to. Although Steve refers to these terms interchangeably, the minimum feature set is the […]
Writing posts for other entrepreneurs instead of their target market. Almost everyone does it and I don’t understand why. The only reason you should write posts targeted towards the startup community is if your product is targeted towards entrepreneurs. If startups are the meat and potatoes of your target market, that’s great – you’re doing […]
What often gets lost in lean startups and customer development is the talking to customers part. After reading “The Lean Startup”, one often remembers certain anecdotes about the startups. What they most often remember is the minimum viable products or minimum viable tests that sucessful entrepreneurs created. They often don’t remember the intensive customer development […]
After my last post, I’ve come to the realization that I don’t want to proofread these first twenty posts. It’s my firm belief that no one is going to ever read them. If they do, I will hire my girlfriend to proofread and let me know how often I misspell “the” as “teh”. As a […]
I’m sorry, this is a rant on blogging and does not have anything to do with minimum viable products. Well, technically a blog can be a minimum viable product, so let’s extrapolate a bit. Does your minimum viable product (or blog) really matter if no one is viewing it? Yes and no. Yes, because the […]
Public support forums make it very easy to locate problems with existing products. The easiest way to start a company is to find an existing company, niche out a specific underserved user segment, and build a product specifically for them. The easiest way to find an underserved segment is to locate an industry that interests […]