BobWarfield

Ctrl-xcv still work there, you can cut and paste.

Interestingly article, but it says more about how to be a Growth Hacker Advisor than how to be a Growth Hacker. Of course, that is likely what he learned since he presumbaly already knew how to be a Growth Hacker when he took the job.

Riddles are useless interview tools. When I am building a new dev team or adding to an existing one, I care about two things:

1. Did the candidate make a critical contribution to a piece of technology that I respect. I will start by asking them for examples of this in a lot of ways including asking them to present something they're proud of to the team. I will not rest until I have verified they did this through my network and back references.

2. Is their chemistry compatible with the team, or as it is more popularly put today, are they a good culture fit? That opportunity to present to the team is an important test. Another one is that the interviewing team has to catch them out being wrong about something and then see how they react to that. You can learn a lot about how someone deals with learning they're wrong about something. Lastly, we look for opportunities to socialize with the candidate. They can't be a good culture fit if nobody wants to spend non-work time with them.

Never met a recruiter who was as considerate of my time as I was of theirs. Interesting this one has the opposite problem.

The scary thing is I can't decide if this is more of a critique of people who hire programmers or of the different tools (e.g. woods and hammers) that programmers use.

A lot of the foundation of Agile is improving communication. Communication works better face to face. Whether there are mitigating factors such as not being able to get really awesome people to participate is another question, but I've no doubt that my #1 problem with developers is how to facilitate their communication.

You can only get so many people to communicate well on a team anyway. 10 at most and you're into the Mythical Man Month. That being the case, you find the 10 best people who have good chemistry together, that's job #1. Job #2 is to colocate them if you can, but let's say it is a less significant digit than Job #1.

BTW, developers also need to be able to concentrate. That's another thing that fights with the communication imperative. I'm all in favor of at least 2 of the 5 week days being work at home days.

Wouldn't it be nice if defending against frivolous patents didn't cost $1.5M. Unfortunately, it does cost that much.

There are 3 problems that make this so:

1. The courts are unpredictable. You can be right and still lose. The cost of losing is typically huge, else the trolls wouldn't have bothered you. So you have to prepare with quality counsel and pay them to do it right.

2. Settlements are entirely predictable.

3. Based on what #1 costs and #2, the troll simply negotiates to settle for less than just appearing in court for #1.

Last time I was at a company that was sued by a troll, counsel said it would cost us $1M to prepare for the first day in court. The troll had a bogus patent that basically said any application that applies business rules to a database infringed--I kid you not. I think we settled for circa $600K.

It sucked and wasted everyone's time like crazy, not to mention the wasted $600K.

Something needs to be done to either eliminate software patents or get rid of this ridiculous asymmetry of costs where trolls are rewarded for playing as many cheap lottery tickets as they can.

Less than 1000 visits and we're already going to start chalking up the wisdom that's been learned? This is way too early and the traffic achieved is well down into the noise.

CPC is mildly interesting, but what was the real conversion rate to something that yields revenue? That's the only one that matters, at least unless your site is going to be an ongoing destination for repeat visitors that will allow you to sell them at other times ones they get hooked.

And that's your next step: figure out how to make this site a destination for your intended audience that they come back to again and again for the great content you're publishing there. Don't count visits unless they buy something or sign up for your email list and become repeat visitors.

Building the MVP is the easy part. Establishing a sustainable growing level of traffic that matters is the hard part. Before I'd even bother with an MVP, I'd focus on a blog and see how successfully I could grow traffic for some audience along the way. The area you're interested in, photography, is ripe with content marketing opportunities.

What sort of content will attract the kind of people who want to rent your products? What other products will they sign up for? What are the SEO parameters needed to get you that audience for free instead of via paid advertising?

Those are among the key initial questions to answer.

Smart people are assholes, it goes with the territory. Not all, but many are. It's insecurity coupled with the incredible pain that comes when other smart people catch you being wrong.

Ain't innate primate behavior a bitch?

Agree with the sentiment.

It seems like sliders are there for gratuitous sex and violence (to paraphrase a line from Never Say Never). In other words, on commercial sites that don't have much to say, but they just want something even remotely flashy, they go with a slider.

Seems like if you're really into content marketing, you've got something to say, and a slider wastes way too much space versus say something more like the home page of a blog (albeit often laid out in multiple columns).

If you don't have much to say, I'd do something more along the lines of 37Signals and just pitch your products and vector them off to the appropriate one.

By comparison, sliders seem to be wasting the viewers time. FWIW, both of the two I looked at from links here, mobelux and infomedia were awesomely slow to load the pages too.

What a pity the lawyers have misinterpreted the patent to mean that the application's language itself should be non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art.

CNCCookbook is my solo startup:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/a-solo-bootstrapp...

If he can learn 37 programming languages, he can learn how to market well enough to bootstrap a company. This is just a long list of excuses not to even get started. There are so many reasons not to get started, so many reasons you will fail, and so many reasons to just go get a real job. If you're listening to any of that you're not really an.d entrepreneur and you probably should just go get a real job.

This article assumes all knowledge is equally valuable, equally hard to gain, and decays at the same rate, but none of that is true.

Frameworks change constantly, computer languages less frequently, and architectural notions much less frequently. Yet the value and difficulty of learning is exactly reversed.

The nature of the media that defines the marketing strategy changes relatively slowly compared to tech. Successful business strategies change still slower than the marketing, and the actual behavior of people much more slowly.

Most of the facts that are changing the fastest are very cheap to "re-discover". So cheap that there is a term for it: the Google Effect.

I can't see any particularly good lessons for startups from the article as a result.

Nooooo. They are being managed by software. Facebook has 1 admin per 1000 MySQL instances. You can't do that except with software. If the DevOps guy is spending much time touching servers, you got the wrong guy.

I've been through this multiple times. In each case, I hired a good Devops guy and told him to work his way out of a job ASAP. Typically, he was down to spending 1/3 of his time on ops of any kind, including DevOps, within 6 months. At that stage I had him helping Prof Svcs, QA, and the Developers by directly writing product code.

The scariest thing in the article is the unemployment graph from Calculated Risk. Isn't it interested at how Wall Street has gotten better and better at inflating bubbles that take longer and longer to recover from.

I just wish the gov't was more focused on creating jobs instead of all the other BS they're fighting with each other over.

Wealth is not revenue, it is income that comes about in abundance. To increase income either increase revenue or decrease expenses. It turns out that decreasing expenses is nearly risk free and is easier. Hence the Millionaires Next Door are good at that strategy. Not sure why this book is having a resurgence, but the other big point it made was the value of owning your own business versus working for someone else.

A close corrollary of the expense thing is to evaluate debt as an investment with a guaranteed return equal to the interest you're paying. Once you see it like that, it's very hard to argue against paying off all of your debt as quickly as possible. Those returns are hard to come by on the revenue side.

At this late stage in the game, learning a new language for me is a matter of deciding on a project and building it while keeping some appropriate reference at hand. If I read a book linearly at all it's to read just enough to get the "Hello, World" going.

BTW, it doesn't take very long to become usefully productive in a language. When I hire developers who've never worked with a language before I budget 6 weeks for them to start being productive and 6 months until they're truly proficient.

Because of that, I place a higher premium on their raw talent and level of interest in the platform and type of work we have than on the particular stack they're already familiar with.

"VC-istan innovation is over"

Maybe. Much as I'd like to believe it, there are some things that can't be bootstrapped. Actually there are many things. We just don't do them because the VC's aren't funding them either. Perhaps they'll go back to it.

OTOH, VC access is one big reason innovation gets centralized to places like Silicon Valley. Reduce that friction and it can spread out more. Still doesn't fix the issue of networking for talent which is another network effect that clumps innovation.

I did my first startup in Houston, Texas. It was great. Extremely cheap. Built a product and got to profitability on about $600K of capital. Moved the company to Silicon Valley before ultimately selling it to Borland (it became Quattro Pro).

Houston worked for development because I could get talent out of Rice University and Univ. of Houston. Infrastructure was cheap because they were having a real estate crunch at the time. You could get free rent for 2 years in exchange for signing a 5 year lease.

What was hard was the marketing and networking. After riding planes to go to the East and West Coasts to get the product reviewed, I decided we had to move the company.

In the Internet age, that may be a lot less true. No particular advantage to doing my current bootstrap (CNCCookbook) in Silicon Valley other than that's where I live. Houston would be a lot cheaper.

You can live off a laptop, but that's not what mobile first is about.

The desktop is not at all dead if the alternative is only reaching pad and smartphone users. Not even close to mortally wounded for business or home. My kid's school switched them to iPads and they immediately identified the problem--they hate typing on the things. My son takes paper notes. They're fine for consuming, but that's it.

Then there is the problem of app discovery, not to mention the pricing and business models that exists in the mobile world. They pretty much limit success to the few at the top with a lot of sharecroppers scratching out a living down below. It's even bad enough that Fred Wilson backed off a tad from the mobile first mantra.

More here: http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/mobile-first-for-...

Oh golly, a PermaBear blog. That's going to be upbeat now isn't it?

The trouble with Eeyore's and Chicken Little's is they are always right. That is they become right if you wait long enough and then they are only right for a short time. That brief window is when they perk up all happy and smiling and point out, "Hey, you should've listened, I was right."

Never mind the opportunity cost of waiting for the right timing. It's a good thing the stock market charges interest on a short position so that there is a cost to not being right NOW.

With that aside, the Consumer Internet focus has resulted in tremendously less innovation in recent years. I've worked for 6 VC funded startups including 3 I founded. Not one of them could be funded today because they were all started with a slide show and a team.

The VC's of today want a product, happy customers, and even momentum before they put much in. It's literally harder to do much within that window. See my post:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/you-cant-do-crp-w...

OTOH, it is possible to bootstrap like never before. Maybe there's innovation to be had there. And there is talk of the VC's going back to Enterprise. We'll see if anything big gets built or if they focus on the consumerization of IT (aka more Consumer Internet sold B2B).

Aside from the bit about loneliness, which I regard as his personal problem, this is the lifestyle I aim for. I don't want to be on the road constantly, but my life and I love travel. I'm early on the path (see: http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/a-solo-bootstrapp...), but it's totally doable. With a laptop and an Internet connection, I've run my business from an Alaskan Cruise Ship Cabin, a Cozumel Mexico dive trip, and a recent trip to Waikiki. Met one of my co-conspirators in Waikiki for dinner.

It's good stuff.

The flip side is I work 24x7. When I'm on a push to get a product out, I've been known to forget what day it is. And I have had to limit myself to doing all my marketing work after 7pm. I do customer service from about 8am-9:30am. So that's a lot of hours in a week.

Wait. How's that different from a startup where I own only a small equity stake instead of 100%?

Hmmmm....

While I am skeptical about a continuous release cycle, Agile methodologies work well for Enterprise software. I've used them at all of my Enterprise gigs, including selling multi-million dollar license mission critical sales compensation software.

There are two things that should not be conflated with Agile: Software Quality and Willingness to Accept Change

In many ways, Agile can make life better for both if you have a SaaS rather than On-prem business. For example, when building the business plan for Callidus Software's foray into SaaS, I surveyed Customer Service departments at a number of Enterprise companies and asked 1 simple question:

How many of your open tickets are fixed in the most current release?

The answer was staggering: 40-70%

So, ensuring customers are always on the latest release can eliminate 40-70% of trouble tickets with commensurate increase in customer sat. Sounds like Agile can help.

The need for SaaS comes about because Enterprise software has the nasty reputation of needing an expensive re-implementation with each new release, at least for On-Prem. With SaaS, you can do more frequent and less traumatic releases.

Agile works extremely well for Enterprise if you do it right.

Talking to people who just bought or just quit is great, but if that's all you do, a lot of key insights will be missed:

- Talking to people who didn't buy, but instead bought a competitor.

- Talking to expert users who've been with your product for a while to learn what they're doing with it you never even considered a possibility. Or to learn what they thought they'd be able to do, but could never quite make work well.

- Talking with all sorts of people to refine your elevator pitch and figure out how to secure the earlier parts of the funnel. Just because someone bought doesn't mean they're the only oracle of why people might buy. They could simply be early adopters after the latest shiny thing.

These are all things I've done with success.

#1, talking to competitor's customers, is what led me to invent spreadsheet notebook tabs on Quattro Pro at a point when most everyone thought the world wanted 3D spreadsheets instead of formula linking across sheets. By talking to folks who had bought Lotus 123 and asking why they wanted a 3D spreadsheet, I quickly discovered it had nothing to do with summing along a z-axis and everything to do with grouping multiple spreadsheets together as a single file.

I've gained all sorts of insights from #2 by talking to power users. This is particularly true of products that have programmability through scripting and API's. But it's also true when you hear about someone doing something amazing you'd never dreamed the product could do, and then you hear about how many flaming hoops they have to jump through to get it done. Yet, solving the problem is so valuable that even making it a little easier makes them thank you. Suddenly, you see how to make it a lot easier and a lot more accessible to a broader audience. Depending on what you've discovered, you might even open a whole new sub-market this way.

#3 just comes from the realization that the more you pitch an idea, the more you learn about how to present it. It is extremely helpful for the people calling the design shots to get to go through the full two way interaction of trying to sell the design. Engineers, especially, quickly learn that prospects aren't going to give them a blackboard and 2 hours to prove that the laws of physics insist they must buy.

I like it!

Now how do we put a similar incentive in place at the corporate level to get them to hire onshore?

Start with an audience, not an idea: Agree!

In fact, start with a Content-Audience Fit if you really want to get somewhere:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/the-very-first-th...

All good stuff!

This sort of thing is what led to my bootstrapping a company instead of staying with the VC Startup Scene:

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/a-solo-bootstrapp...

I got a trek desk for Xmas. It's a cheap but decent desk that mates to a treadmill. I use it for email reading and breaks from heads down coding.

Love it.

Amen!

If we can bootstrap on 10 hours a week with a day job we can do same from college.

Keep in mind Jason is very much talking about a VC-funded SaaS company rather than a bootstrapped SaaS company. A boostrapped company may take quite a lot longer than 24 months to hit $1M and no harm no foul. Many of the famous bootstraps took 24 mos to be big enough for 3 founders to quit their day jobs.

The difference is the $1M VC funded SaaS company will have been wildly unprofitable while the bootstrap will have been profitable every step. The VC world rightly regards SaaS as a landgrab and some of Jason's other posts approach it that way. Hence the companies are run unprofitably so they can be grown faster.

My impression from his posts is he doesn't have a lot of experience with the bootstrap world or doesn't think much of it. I frequently write counterpoints to his posts on my Smoothspan blog.