I was meeting with a smart VC yesterday doing a mini post-mortem on Aprizi, our “Pandora for shopping”. When asked what I would do differently a second time, the number one thing is I would have rolled out the e-commerce model right away. I think a special bond forms between a customer and a service when the customer parts with …
Failing Lean (Lean Ignite NYC talk)
How to talk about failure without killing the mood of a room? That was my dilemma leading up to last night’s amazing Lean Startup Ignite event (and I loved the Ignite format!). Lane Halley suggested that focusing on what I would do differently next time would keep it positive, and I hoped that my drawings could help lighten the subject …
Getting in the Way in a Good Way
As a general rule, I believe that you want to get users to the “goods” quickly and easily, reducing friction wherever possible. However, sometimes this can go too far, and sacrifice the needs of the business. I thought I would share an example from Aprizi where we did exactly that. First, for context: Aprizi was a personalized discovery engine for …
$9.4M? And Aprizi’s First Pivot
When Liz and I first started Aprizi, it was very different in concept from where we eventually ended up. I had become fascinated with Mint and Gist, and people’s willingness to share rich data in exchange for the right value proposition. I started thinking about other places where valuable data existed, but was relatively hard to get to. This led …
Prototyping for the iPhone with Briefs
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
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. …
2010 Musings
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 …
Designers, entrepreneurs and doing business on the Web
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 …
Design is always context-specific
I’ve had an interesting couple of days here at Altimeter’s “Rise of Social Commerce” conference. It was great being in the startup showcase with some cool companies like Swipely, Quorus, Open Sky, and 8 others. There have also been lots of case studies from bigger companies trying to make sense of “social commerce”. The diversity of what I have been …
Landmines on the Road to Product Market Fit
On Friday, I gave a 20-minute talk at a product design conference organized by Ty Ahmad-Taylor (CEO of FanFeedr) and Hard Candy Shell (the talk shared the same title as this post). I discussed mistakes and lessons from Aprizi’s journey. I don’t think it was videotaped, so I am going to take advantage of this flight to California to write …