Tom Preston-Werner, founder of Github, on adapting to your customers and their requests:

And that’s the secret. Don’t give your customers what they ask for; give them what they want.

via Ten Lessons from GitHub’s First Year

Spot on summary from Lance Walley of Chargify on what a startup should strive for:

We want to delight customers by giving them a great experience, from releasing improvements to answering phone calls & support tickets. But I want to do even better. I want customers to say, “Whoa, that is sexy! I never even thought of that!”

One of the primary reasons I moved to Boulder was the amazing community of startups here. So I was really surprised Boulder didn’t have an active edition of StartupDigest.

StartupDigest is a free curated email of the best startup events, what you need to read, and jobs at top startups in 57 cities and 6 universities worldwide.

Emailed every Monday morning, it’s a great way to know what’s happening in your area. As an entrepreneur and startup founder, I love hearing about new and upcoming events so I volunteered to curate the Boulder edition previously done by Andrew Hyde.

You can get an idea of what the list covers by looking at the latest issue that was sent out this morning. There’s also an archive of past issues.

If you’re interested in startup and entrepreneurial events in and around Boulder, please sign up for the Boulder edition of StartupDigest.

Also, if you organize an event or conference in the area (or know of any relevant events), please get in touch with me to make sure it’s is added to the list.

This is sad:

According to the 2009 Deloitte Shift Index, 82% of people who are firm employed aren’t passionate about their work.

via Rypple

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’m in the process of launching a new product and with a clean slate I’ve started to re-examine all my processes.

One communication aspect I feel the need to visit is how users of a service prefer to stay informed about developments and news. Specifically, I’m talking about new features and updates.

While there are many options, the main ones come down to the following:

• Email
• Blog – visit directly
• Blog – subscribe to RSS feeds
• Twitter
• View notifications when logging in to the site
• Facebook

Personally, I subscribe to the RSS feed of services I use and keep them all in a folder in NetNewsWire called “Products I Use” and then check them occasionally. Alternatively, I’ll sign up for email notifications.

How do you prefer to stay up to date with web services you use?