dcheong

User Mastery: https://usermastery.com

A unified platform for product teams to announce updates, maintain a changelog, share roadmaps, provide help documentation and collect feedback with the help of AI.

My goal is to help product teams tell users about new features (so they actually use them), gather meaningful feedback (so they build the right things), share plans (so users know what's coming), and provide help (so users don't get stuck).

Doing it as an indie hacker + solo founder + lean. Started 13 days ago. Posting about my journey on Youtube every week day https://www.youtube.com/@dave_cheong

I believe you are referring to http://saasy.com/

It is a bundled payment gateway+merchant. You don't have to get PCI compliant and you don't need a merchant account (no min transaction volumes, fight chargebacks for you etc).

The down side is they only offer hosted payment pages and not suitable for everything... You need a finite set of goods/services you want to sell (eg monthly plans). You can't automate the process if you're building an online store where your customers can upload items for sale (eg AppStore).

For non-subscribers:

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I built the site using the PlayFramework (Java). I'd say it is as rad as Rails, Django, Grails etc and for me much more pleasurable to code in. Who says Java is clunky and deprecated?

Link with video - http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/iPhone+4G/news.asp?c=2...

For non-subscribers:

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For non-subscribers: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/0...

For non-subscribers:

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/0...

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Rod Johnson has a blog post explaining the acquisition.

Homepage link - http://blog.springsource.com/

Post link (appears to be down at the moment) - http://blog.springsource.com/2009/08/10/springsource-chapter...

It's basically a move into cloud service offerings, so that they can move up the vertical chain - build, run and manage.

I thought it was a little strange at first, but it's quite exciting if they can bring simple hosting and scaling to Java apps, in the same way Spring has made enterprise development easy with Java.

Hi ahoyhere,

Thanks for the advice. I'll digest your comments and see what bits I can tweak. Hopefully, the end result is I get to ship soon!

BTW, freckle is a nice app. It helps to have have legendary Thomas Fuchs et all on your team.

Love it if you and team can evaluate my app for me?

dave

Hi ahoyhere,

Thanks for the great feedback - and great blog entries. I see where you're coming from especially if the guilt makes you avoid working on your startup.

For me, it's not so much as guilt. It's more about a question of focus. How does one consider an open-ended task done? Is it when it is at a quality we are satisfied with?

If my startup has 100 bugs, can I say it is finished? I guess it'll depend on the bugs, priority, importance of these bugs and what type of product it is. Early adopters are probably also more forgiving of using a buggy system, so it's probably ok to ship with known bugs.

The problem with time boxing is we allocate fixed amount of time to work on something, but if the time elapses and the task isn't finished, we're likely to schedule more time at it. The problem is without proper focus (maybe being conscious of some reward or penalty) if we're late, we might continue the blow out.

You're right though, as everyone around us is on our back, we don't need us to get on our own backs too! So perhaps, it isn't a black/white situation, but case-by-case instead.

Thoughts?

dave

Agreed to a certain extent. Yes, blindly increasing the pain will limit your possibilities, but appropriate application of it is a good move.

If you're in the planning phase or design phase, you don't want to needlessly time box it and/or punish yourself for failing to meet a deadline, because it will limit what you come up with.

However if you're in the building phase, say all the broad stroke type of decisions have been made and the main task is plain old coding / grunt work, you can use the pain to motivate you from distractions and procrastination.

dave

Hi ahoyhere,

Thanks for the comment and excellent advice. I like what you said and where you're headed and would love to hear from you or anyone out there on what they are doing to motivate themselves to finish their product/service and get to the launch pad.

All I'm after at the end of the day (I assume others are the same), is to find tools we can use to help improve the chances of our startups succeeding.

Loved to hear from the more experienced folks out there on what keeps them going. My article was only intended to help others by sharing what my present thinking is, but if I'm wrong, I'll be the first to admit it and reshape my mental picture.

thanks, dave

Hi DannoHung,

Thanks for the great comment and I agree with your point. In fact, I experienced the same myself. There have been weeks where I didn't want to look at the code and subsequently nothing got done. There are other times though I fired up the IDE only to tweaked little things like a CSS style or refactor a simple method, only to find I had built up momentum and got lots of little things done.

This however wasn't the point to the article. The point I was trying to get at (perhaps not well), is the importance of setting a penalty when we didn't make a self-imposed deadline. So instead of just spending 20 mins tweaking a CSS, perhaps my time was better spent on the tasks which would actually contribute to the completion of the task. This focus on the end goal I believe can be a powerful force in helping us finish.

I can attest to that as I am the perpetual tweaker. Everytime I look at a site I'm building, I get more and more tired of its look and feel. So before I finish a project, often I'd have switched styles 10 times! For me, having the penalty clause helps me keep in focus.

Thanks for the great comment.

Hi there,

Thanks for commenting and you make an excellent point. In fact I wrote a little piece awhile ago about how one can overcome distractions and in it I describe there are essentially two motivating factors: one is pleasure and the other is pain.

http://www.davecheong.com/2006/09/13/how-to-overcome-distrac...

The same analogy can be used here. In order to accomplish something important to you (say your startup), you can either increase the pleasure or satisfaction you get when you achieve it, and/or increase the pain associated with failure.

So I take your point about focusing on the negative, but I never claim that "the only motivation that works is negative". In fact I believe both positive/negative and pleasure/pain play important roles as motivators.

Having said all that, don't underestimate the power of the fear of failure/pain/punishment, as it is a major component of the human condition. I disagree that only "mediocre" things can be created out of fear and punishment for failure.

In fact, experienced entrepreneurs will tell you that a "big unstoppable desire to build things" is a terrible thing to build a sustainable business on. Sure, it's great to kick start things, but building a business is 99% hard work. Can you truly build a business on sheer desire alone? What if that desire went away? Ask yourself that question the next time you are up at 3am trying to fix an obscure bug in someone else's code.

Thanks for the great comment! I would love to hear what everyone else thinks also given the diverse background of people here on HN.

I've previously written two popular articles on the same topic which may also be helpful:

http://www.davecheong.com/2007/06/15/waking-up-early-15-tips...

http://www.davecheong.com/2006/06/14/waking-up-early-and-con...

Thanks for the follow up. I'll stress again, I'm not implying there are any hard/fast rules as you can see from the comments I've made here. If I have set the wrong impression, my apologies.

We all know here that being an entrepreneur is more like art than science. There is no one true way. Something which worked for someone in one instance may not work for you even if by rationale it makes sense and all the stars are aligned.

Good point. I'd like to add though that while there are merits to launching early and often, you only get one shot at delivering the right first impression. This is especially true if you've lined up the "press" to talk about your app, only for it to receive "bad press" because it's not ready or crash under the heavy load.

I think it was Paul Buchheit who said "launch your product if it's better than anything else out there". To me, it means launch when it's ready but not before.

Hi koraybalci - thanks for commenting!

I agree with you totally and echo your sentiments. There is no one absolute right way. There is a bunch of relative right ways - some more appropriate than others. Given enough vigor, perseverance, sweat, tears, luck and timing, the right team can make most things work.

The thing which quantifies how "successful" they are is the equity they walk away with. It doesn't have to be 100% (because 100% of nothing is worthless), but you sure hope it isn't so diluted to no longer be worthwhile.

I subscribe to delaying external financing as long as possible to build up the business and maximise the mileage of the equity (ie trading 10% when you have nothing costs more than 10% when you have a healthy/profitable business).

Hi tom_rath - Thanks for the advice.

This is bang on target for me as I've been a real "tightwad" lately. Instead of focusing on the outcomes, I've been counting the pennies. It's tough when you're leaking your own money and that's before you've even launched anything! I think it is just something I need to adjust to - that in order to make money, one must first spend it.

I've also realised that marketing early is so important. I've been getting more active on Twitter lately and though I have a decent blog (been on Digg front page and Lifehacker), I haven't given it the love it deserve all year. I wish I had ramped these two promotion avenues up 6 months ago. This way I'd have a ready audience on launch day.

I thought I'd echo your reply for the other budding entrepreneurs out there. Don't be afraid to spend money! Start creating your story and marketing your brand early!

Thank you! You're totally right that if all things fail, we can simply go back to what we did before (ie contracting), slow the business down but at least continue trading.

I hope though it doesn't get "terrifying" ... (play scary music). Heh.

Hi tptacek - thanks for this comment.

I'm in 100% agreement with you. Also, there's something to be said for a company that is totally autonomous and free from the pressures of an investor.

Though not a hard/fast rule and clearly a generalisation - Building a company with investors shifts the focus to helping maximise shareholder value. Building a company free from investors encourage the founders to think about the customers.

I've always believed if you focus on the customers and build solid products that add real value, the money bit will come naturally.

While I don't deny the benefits and advantages of having investors (money, networking, advice etc), there are many ways to "skin the cat" and build a business.

Hi there, thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it.

I don't mean to suggest that money == spend like crazy. All I'm suggesting here is there is merit to "embracing constraints". When you don't have money, you can't spend it. When you do have money, you may spend it. There is a difference between the two statements.

This is especially important for people who think throwing more money at something is a solution. Some managers tend to think if a project is behind, simply throw more developers at it. We developers obviously know that isn't a viable solution in some cases. In fact, more people means more communication, training, procedural overheads etc which could actually slow down the rest of the team.

Being money constrained, helps us focus on what's truly important so we deliver the best bang for the buck. We're small so we can't afford to spend 2 weeks on a feature nobody needs. The lack of money here helps us see that.

Also thanks for the comment wrt marketing. I'm not marketing god by any means (and this blog post isn't about marketing anyway). I certainly do not know all the channels available to me to market my product. But that's part of the learning experience which is one part of why I'm doing this.

Thanks again for the comment.

We've setup our website, at http://mobiusly.com which briefly describes who we are, what we do, our company credo and commitment to the Company/Customer Pact.

You'd have to wait till Jan 2009 for our product launch. I'll try over the xmas break to prepare a blog entry describing it, but that might depend on how much beer I end up consuming.

Hi ardell,

Thanks for the well wishes. :)

I shall remember your advice - I'm sure I'll need them in the years to come! It's pretty exciting and scary at the same time. However, I think that's why so many of us (esp at HN) become Entrepreneurs. The lessons to learn and the fun to be had are truly intoxicating.

Keep the commments coming. Would love to hear from everyone here what your personal experiences have been like so far.