Back to Big Raise, Big Spend?

Giff Constablestartups

Mark Suster has an important post on his blog today called “9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month“. It may sound strange, but too much funding is just as dangerous if not more so than too little funding. Go read his post. I agree with so many of the things he warns against, and have unfortunately experienced quite …

Prototyping for the iPhone with Briefs

Giff ConstableAprizi, UI/UX

I’ve been playing around with the open source prototyping tool Briefs, and while it took a little hair-pulling to get through the quirks, it really is a great tool.  Briefs lets you script up an interactive mock-application, and then test it out on iOS devices.  The best part is you can create a prototype with your own images, rather than …

Bootstrapping Aprizi: the Pugilist Period

Giff ConstableAprizi

It has been a while since I have done an Aprizi update. The shorthand is that we are deep in the pugilist-state of the entrepreneur experience. We have had some wins, we have taken some blows, and we fight on. In the “fun news” department, Daily Candy featured Aprizi at the top of their national email one week last month. …

The Enterprise and Lean Startup: outsourcing app development

Giff Constabledesign, technology, UI/UX

(aside: I’ve made a promise to myself to try to blog more often. It was tough to find the time over the winter, but I’m going to start with something I meant to write months ago) Big corporations aspire to innovate with web and mobile products, but their end results are too often bloated or uninspiring. The list of common …

Immigration Idiocy

Giff Constablestartups, technology

Last night in the State of the Union address, Obama discussed our broken immigration policies, and how we train some of the brightest people in the world in our universities and then kick them out to compete against us. It almost happened with Aprizi.  Liz, my co-founder, is Australian.  She got her PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon.  When …

MVP is a State of Mind, not a Version Number

Giff Constablesocial games, startups

I am not the heaviest of Quora users, but last week I saw three game designers I like and respect (Daniel James, Chris Carella, and Adrian Crook) answer the question, “How can we apply the idea of “minimum viable product” to online games? … What and where is the “minimum” of MVP reached for games?” Definitely check out their answers, …

TBPP

Giff Constabledesign, UI/UX

What on earth does that title “TBPP” mean, you ask?  I received a nice surprise last week when Jeremy Horn, organizer of the 700-person strong “Product Group” meetup, said that I had been awarded “The Best Product Person of 2010” (after being nominated by Ty Ahmad-Taylor, so TY Ty). As much as I am proud of what Liz and I …

2010 Musings

Giff ConstableAprizi, startups

So much happened in 2010, and while I’ve been a bit too buried to write much lately, I wanted to take a step back and muse on a few topics. Aprizi 2010 was a year for a lot of learning, and execution, and evolution for Aprizi. Liz and I got the first alpha up in March and a couple of …

Selling your company – some core questions and answers

Giff Constablemanagement, startups, technology

A friend’s startup was recently approached by an interested buyer, which spurred me to write up some thoughts on M&A in hopes that they could be useful to other entrepreneurs. For those that do not know my background, I have both sold a startup and managed multiple tech deals as an investment banker at Broadview (now Jefferies). Here is my …

Designers, entrepreneurs and doing business on the Web

Giff ConstableAprizi, ecommerce

I regularly talk to small and medium-sized designers and business owners in the sectors where Aprizi plays. It is always interesting to hear about their challenges and tactics for success. They are entrepreneurs just like we are in the world of tech. Some of these interviews get converted into posts for The Tail, Aprizi’s blog. I wanted to highlight one …