Via Josh Porter, I just read Aral Balkan’s rant about a recent article that made the rounds on hacker news called “How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour“. The thrust of Aral’s rant is “design is not veneer”. And yeah, I get it. My colleagues and readers here have heard me… Continue reading
Date Archives December 2012
It is easier for e-commerce to embrace content than vice versa
Erin Griffith’s article on content and commerce in PandoDaily got me thinking about the space, now that I’ve had a couple more years of observing players in the market. Some initial observations: Great e-commerce businesses are not affiliate businesses. Rather they have their own products to move (whether branded or third-party vendors). Commerce businesses want… Continue reading
A Great Example of Persistence
Yesterday I wrote about persistence. As fate would have it, I later caught up with an entrepreneur who was evidencing a great kind of persistence. His startup is an enterprise SaaS play, and he has an initial base of happy paying customers. So far the local VC community hasn’t fully realized his great potential, so… Continue reading
SSH keys and multiple heroku accounts
When you get stuck on tech ops problems, the web is your friend. So I figured the least that I could do is contribute for the next person banging their head on this issue… I have multiple heroku accounts for personal and work. Yesterday, I found that I could not push from git to heroku… Continue reading
Lean’s Great Dilemma: Persist or Pivot
The Lean Startup Conference finished with a discussion between Marc Andreessen and Eric Ries. Two points rose to the fore: “lean is not an excuse to avoid sales and marketing” (side note: agree, but lean helps you decide when to scale up those efforts); and “persistence is still really important.” The last point is the… Continue reading
12 Tips for Early Customer Development Interviews (Revision 3)
Update: check out my book on customer development Talking to Humans Note: also see my 11 Customer Development Anti-Patterns post. Each time I give a talk introducing people to qualitative “customer development” conversations, I try to revisit my points. A few months ago, I gave this talk to an entrepreneurship class at Columbia Business… Continue reading
Wufoo’s customer support insight
From one of LukeW’s Warm Gun summaries. It was too long to tweet but I wanted to record it as an interesting insight: “Wufoo asked people about their emotional state when filling in a customer support request. This resulted in less emotional language and clearer descriptions of issues in customer support tickets.” – original post