The good folks at Venture Hacks tweeted a piece from the WePay blog about things a non-engineer founder should know. His points tie in nicely with the struggle many business people have in taking their grand idea and shrinking it down to an actionable, minimal first version. I wanted to touch on tasks for a… Continue reading
Date Archives April 2010
Coming up with a startup name (i.e. the 6th circle of hell)
Few things are more painful than coming up with a good yet inexpensive name for a business on the Web. Somehow you need to find something that is “cocktail party friendly” (i.e. someone can hear it, spell it, remember it), search engine friendly (i.e. type it in and have a shot at appearing high on… Continue reading
Our Customer Development Journey, part 3
Aprizi is about to enter that crucial phase of open beta, so I wanted to pause and write down the latest installment in our customer development journey (part 1 and 2). For anyone new to the blog, Aprizi is building a personalization engine for online shopping — a Pandora for e-commerce, if you will. My… Continue reading
$160 million in the bank
I was just catching up on the Chirp conference care of GigaOm when I stopped dead at this sentence, “With more than 100,000 applications created on its platform to date, it’s frankly amazing that Twitter hadn’t formalized its road map and addressed competition with developers before … [t]hough with $160 million in the bank you’d… Continue reading
Enthusiasts vs Normals
First Chris Dixon tweeted, “Does anyone really want to have a “conversation with brands”? I I want my relationship to Starbucks limited to buying coffee.” Roger Ehrenberg then responded with a great post on authenticity in brand conversations. I would argue that they are both right, they are just talking about two different people. Just… Continue reading