Posts about startups
April 2nd, 2013
Startups are run by people who do what’s necessary at the time it’s needed. A lot of time that’s unglamorous work. A lot of times that’s not heroic work. Is that heroic? Is that standing on a stage in a black turtleneck, in front of 20,000 people talking about the future of phones? No. But that’s how companies are built. That person who did that for the iPhone launch at Apple, we don’t know who he is. All we know is that Steve Jobs came up with the iPhone. But he didn’t ship it. The person who bought the donuts did.

The Silent Partner, a really wonderful interview about Jason Goldman, product manager at Twitter, and cofounder of Obvious Corp.

March 29th, 2013
Entrepreneurs: build your product, not someone else’s. The most successful products execute on a vision that aligns with their product’s and users’ goals. It’s hard to put blinders on when your stats are slowly coming down and you see other startups skyrocketing around you with various tactics and strategies. For the love of god, put them on. It’s the only way to build what you should instead of chasing others’ ideas.
December 14th, 2012
The project aims to draw attention to the fact that if you have access to technical labor, the startup and operating costs for an online project in 2013 are negligible. The biggest obstacle to creating something useful is finding the time to build it and attracting an initial pool of paying customers.
October 25th, 2012

Do you ever worry your Flickr photos may vanish? Or wish that you had a better way to browse your old Instagram photos? Or that you could easily jump to a past date and see where you were on Foursquare. Or that Twitter’s archive wasn’t such a miserable wreck and you could actually search your old tweets or, well, do anything useful with your messages that were more than a few days old? Meet Recollect. It’s here to save your social media, in more ways than one, and it’s officially in an open public beta now.

Recollect acts as both an archive to back up your tweets, photos, and check-ins, and as a discovery engine that puts a pretty Web-facing skin on your social media services that’s both searchable and browsable by date. Right now, it works with Flickr, Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter, but the company says it has plans to add more services. Facebook, for example, is on its list of future services.

Recollect came from the founders’ vision that although we’re sharing so much as it happens, the things we post online tend to be ephemeral and largely vanish after a few days. ”We’re all sharing more now than anyone ever did in the past,” founder Chris Martin told Wired. “But for most of the services we use to share, the primary use is real time. But you’re telling your story, and we hope that Recollect can become a place where you can go back and revisit that story and all that content you created.”

Recollect works like this: Sign up for one of its (paid) plans and authorize it with your various services, and it imports all of your posts (or, in Twitter’s case, the most recent 3,200, the limit set by Twitter’s API), as well as the associated social data, such as comments and likes. After you set things up, Recollect continually collects your new tweets, photos and check-ins–as well as comments and interactions–and rescans your older posts. So if someone comments on one of your photos a few weeks after you posted it, Recollect will grab that, too. It’s built to take advantage of push APIs when possible, but it also has a nightly job that runs and checks for updates. It also lets you download all that data into a zip file to your hard drive.

Recollect Gives Social Media Ephemera A Permanent Home | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

My company, Recollect, is going into public beta today. Mat Honan at Wired did an amazing write-up.

August 4th, 2011
As mentioned above, Mint had a clear technological vision of how the product would eventually work (driven by simplicity and automation). As a consequence, they focused on finding the customer segment that would care about this technology (customer development) rather than focusing on one market segment and developing a solution for them (product development).

Jason Putorti • Mint vs. Wesabe: A B-School Case Study. Anybody else find this conclusion backwards? A clear technological vision indicates product development is paramount, and customer development is secondary, as Mint—according to the article—wasn’t tailoring their product to a particular consumer segment.

July 19th, 2011

We’ve now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company. The people who’ve worked for a few years do seem better than the ones straight out of college, but only because they’re that much older.

The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of conservative. It’s hard to say how much is because big companies made them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that made them work for the big companies in the first place. But certainly a large part of it is learned. I know because I’ve seen it burn off.

May 24th, 2011
There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about…The other thing I repeat is to give people everything you’ve got, right away. If you have something impressive, try to put it on the front page, because that’s the only one most visitors will see.
May 23rd, 2011
December 15th, 2009

These are the custom Moleskines I designed for Flickr. It was a bit tricky finding a debosser in the area (we didn’t), so if you’re interested in getting a custom Moleskine for your company, read on.

We bought the Moleskines on Amazon and shipped them directly to the debossers, C&S Printers in New Jersey. (They also debossed the Wordpress Moleskines).

A local company, Spotlight Design & Print, printed the wraps and shipped them to C&S for finishing. Edit: The artwork for the wrap comes from the Searcher’s amazing Rainbow Vomiting Pandas Of Interestingness, which he kindly agreed to let us use.

The whole process took about three weeks. The vendors were responsive, reasonably priced* and met their deadlines.

*They were reasonably priced for what we got, I mean. Neither Moleskines nor debossing is cheap.

November 6th, 2009
It really bothers me that the definition of success has changed from profits to followers, friends, and feed count. This crap doesn’t mean anything. Kids are coming out of school thinking, I want to start the next YouTube or Facebook. If a restaurant served more food than everybody else but lost money on every diner, would it be successful? No. But on the Internet, for some reason, if you have more users than everyone else, you’re successful. No, you’re not.

The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals, in Inc Magazine

I wince a little inside quoting Fried, but this is pretty much exactly what I think every time anybody talks about how successful Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are. Popular, yes. Successful, as in they have succeeded? No.

April 15th, 2009

innonate (via laurao)

Am I Fit for Startups?

Before I went to sleep a few nights ago, I sketched this out. It’s a test anyone has to pass before I want to work with them on a startup. When people pass the test, it makes me excited beyond belief. When someone doesn’t, I can care less about them. They’re furniture.

Is everybody either a potential coworker or furniture? I’m going to try this out for a day and see where it leads me.