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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
The “anything” job (and our new product)
Big company people are used to delegation, resources at their disposal, and the benefit of a strong brand name. As startup people, we have none of that. Our job description is “whatever it takes.” Like most founders, I wear a lot of hats at Aprizi. While I had been creating the product mockups in Balsamiq and Photoshop, I had not …
Post-mortem on a UI “input” screen
Today I am working on some UI/UX changes to our product, and thought I would quickly talk through a UI example (soon to die under my axe) from our beta. Some context: in the spirit of getting a beta up as quickly as possible, our first user experience (FUE) was pretty crude. After registration (also soon to disappear), the first …
Into the Deep End: Notes from Julie, our HackNY intern
This is a guest post from Julie Dinerman, the Columbia University student interning with Aprizi as part of the HackNY program, which paired area students with startups. I think HackNY’s organizers Hilary, Chris and Evan are creating something very important to the NY startup ecosystem, and we are really pleased to be among a great list of startups to get …
Our Customer Development Journey, Part 4 (8 thoughts from our MVP beta)
Aprizi has been in open beta for six weeks now. These last six weeks have been an intense blur, a fire hose of information, and going open beta was the best possible thing we could have done. We are making some fairly big near-term changes because of this process. Here are 8 thoughts on the latest phase of our customer …
Monday Musings and The New York Times
Aprizi appeared in The New York Times today, in an article on privacy and innovation for consumers. In my quote, I tried to emphasize that this is about an honorable agreement with the customer, not some kind of bait and switch. There is a new wave of startups where everything is above-board and totally opt-in. As a consumer myself, I …
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