WordPress founder and TechStars mentor Matt Mullenweg on shipping your product:

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there.

By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.

This is also part of a chapter in the book Do More Faster.

From Steve Blank‘s Four Steps to the Epiphany:

The difference between winners and losers is simple. Products developed with senior management out in front of customers early and often – win. Products handed off to a sales and marketing organization that has only been tangentially involved in the new Product Development process lose. It’s that simple.

Two recent articles report that business owners and the self-employed are the most happy in their occupations. The results are from a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index poll data.

The findings, psychologists say, reflect the importance of being free to choose the work you do and how you do it, the way you manage your time, and the way you respond to adversity. Regardless of occupational field, the survey suggests that seeking out enjoyable work and finding a way to do it on your own terms, with some control over both the process and the outcome, is likely for most people to fuel satisfaction and contentment.

“Despite the recession, it still pays to be your own boss,” says Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. The survey, adds John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, “reaffirms my view that the more control you have over your work, the happier you are.”

Bingo. I love going to work each day and I think a large portion of this feeling is the knowledge that virtually everything is up to me. Succeed or fail, I have direct influence on every aspect of my career.

(via WSJ, NY Times)

Last night I attended the Lean Startup Dinner with Eric Ries hosted by TechStars. If you’re not familiar, Eric writes the Lessons Learned blog and actively promotes ideas for running lean startups based on his experiences.

I’m particularly fond of the minimum viable product (MVP) concept and have been using that from the beginning with my company’s new product, StatsMix. The essential idea behind MVP is to determine as early as possible the core set of features that solves a problem a customer is willing to pay for, build that out, and then continue to iterate in this fashion constantly creating something customers actually want.

Last night Eric spoke while we ate dinner at the Hotel Boulderado and then fielded questions afterward. The entire evening was an excellent opportunity to learn more about his ideas surrounding lean startups.

Here are few of my notes from his talk and the Q&A session:

• Eric advocates small companies split into two cross functional teams – one focusing on the problem and one on the solution. Startups are not just small versions of how larger companies are organized.
• What is the problem and is it worth solving?
• When doing split-testing or A/B testing, remember the AAA’s of metrics: Actionable, Accessible, Auditable
• A/B test anything you think will have a macroscopic effect.
• Have high level company metrics for evaluating split tests.
• Early adopters hate mainstream customers, but you have to go through them first if you ever want to reach the mainstream customers. A startup will eventually have to make a decision about which of these customers to continue to target.
• Many of these ideas come from lean manufacturing and the auto industry.
• StumpleUpon’s advertising program may be the new Google AdWords.
• Understand vanity metrics vs. actionable metrics.
• Actionable metrics – you know what to do to get more or less of these (A/B testing is helpful here)

If you’re interested in lean startups, definitely check out the Lessons Learned blog. There’s also an active Google group called the Lean Startup Circle that has been having some interesting discussions and case studies.

And for Boulder area entrepreneurs, Marty Haught is organizing a local meetup to regularly discuss lean startups based on these ideas.

Geoffrey Grosenbach runs a company called PeepCode Screencasts that produces outstanding screencasts for learning a variety of programming topics mainly around Ruby on Rails. I’ve purchased a bunch of them and they’ve all been fantastic learning tools.

Recently he posted a transcript of a presentation he gave on the lessons learned from three years of running PeepCode.

One skill that is important is being able to respond to change. I frequently think back to a quote I saw in a skateboarding video from a few years ago where photographer Grant Brittain talked about the changes he had seen in the sport and business of skateboarding over the past 30 years. He said that everything changes, and if it stops changing, it dies. I think that’s part of the stress and unpredictability of running a business: you can almost guarantee that a success one month or one year won’t be successful the next year. Your skill as a businessperson isn’t about finding one hit and riding it out, it’s about learning the skill of understanding the present, looking to the future, and making bets about what might happen.

I saw this video on Frank Gruber’s blog and had to re-post it here. Definitely worth watching and thinking about.

Great thoughts on building your products from A Whole Lotta Nothing:

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

(via Daring Fireball)

I’ve been trying to write about the lessons learned from the failure of my last company (albeit quite slowly) and I read a post this morning from Mike McDerment of FreshBooks that covers some similar topics.

His post is titled 7 ways I’ve almost killed FreshBooks and I can second every single point he makes. Luckily for FreshBooks, they’re still around and thriving.

I especially appreciated his first point – “Thinking we had to move faster than we did”

As entrepreneurs, we tend to immediately feel the pressure of getting our idea to market as quickly as possible. We have some paranoia (good perhaps?) and believe that another company will out-execute us and leave our company behind.

In the long run, it’s much more important to do things right as opposed to doing them as fast as possible. Obviously there’s a fine line here, but stepping back every once in a while to review before making that next move can be a good practice to follow.

A good idea is just that – an idea. It takes execution to build a great company and this is where many fail. Full execution of your strategy may take some time and there’s nothing wrong with that. Rushing forward as fast as possible is not always the best move.

With the new-found popularity of agile development and business processes (which I’ve been endorsing for many years now), I think some entrepreneurs are forgetting that an overall strategic plan is still important. You don’t necessarily need a full fledged, 200 page written business plan. But having a high level strategic plan will definitely enable you to stay on track and hopefully avoid some of the issues with feeling the need to take certain actions prematurely.

The lessons learned from the failure of my company are going to be in no particular order, so I decided to start with one that I’m already applying to my next project – creating admin tools as early as possible.

With FeedCraft, we took the approach of getting the application launched as quickly as possible with the main features we needed (which I think was wise, but I’ll have some thoughts on this in later posts). In the rush to launch, we put off developing admin tools such as user management, basic content management, and some support related items.

Simple database scripts written in SQL (that steadily ballooned) managed many of these tasks with the initial thought that 1) we didn’t have many users yet and 2) we would add in a robust admin system after launch when we had the time.

I think you can see the obvious problem here. You never have that time after launch to create these tools. The same logic that stopped us from developing them before launch (lower priority) kept them from being developed after launch. There was always something that appeared to be more important in the grander scheme of acquiring revenue.

Unfortunately, the ability to better manage your business, while not always directly correlated to immediately generating income, is often overlooked in the beginning. It’s quite easy to forget about the cost of our time, especially as founders, but it quickly adds up with each task that could have been automated or made more efficient by building admin tools.

Over time there were too many tasks that were not in one central location, enabling others a simple way to manage them.

Here are a few examples of some of the parts of an admin interface that could be added for maximum impact at the beginning of an application’s development as opposed to the middle or end:

• user management (add, edit, delete, activate, deactivate)
• role management
• content management – basic addition, updating, and deletion of content on the site
• CRUD functionality for relevant models – updating content that will be displayed throughout the site; ex. categories, account types, etc.
• support – ex. manage contact forms, feedback, support requests
• e-commerce support – within your own app and not directly on the gateway’s site

Adding admin tools does not need to be a major, separate project. The approach I’m now taking is to add admin functionality as needed along with the rest of the project.

I learned the hard way about putting administration off, so now they’re added directly on the product roadmap so we don’t overlook them.

I read this article on Mashable (via Fred Wilson‘s tweet) and had to post this quote on building web applications:

Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up.

It sounds simple, but it’s not; determining a basic human need, like the need to share photos or the need to communicate with short text messages is a hit and miss affair.

… I believe now that in many cases it is better to reduce the number of features to a minimum, open the application up via an API, and let the community build on what you have started. This synergy will make your application far more valuable than it would be if it had all these extra features itself.

37signals, Twitter, and a host of other applications are following this model. With the rapidly changing web landscape, I’m not sure there’s a better strategy when rolling out new applications. In the time it takes to build a feature-rich application, the market may have moved in an entirely different direction.

Read the entire article for their rationale, but I completely believe this is the future of building web apps.