Ain’t nothing wrong with making your ugly site suck a little less

Giff Constabledesign

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 make that same grumble. Some …

It is easier for e-commerce to embrace content than vice versa

Giff Constabletechnology

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 growth and engagement, but most …

A Great Example of Persistence

Giff Constablestartups

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 he has been bootstrapping. I …

SSH keys and multiple heroku accounts

Giff Constabletechnology

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 for a new work project. …

Lean’s Great Dilemma: Persist or Pivot

Giff Constablelean, startups

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 great dilemma of lean. When …

12 Tips for Early Customer Development Interviews (Revision 3)

Giff Constablelean

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 School, and once again the …

Wufoo’s customer support insight

Giff Constablestartups, UI/UX

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