9 ms·

Pursuing a Business I'll Love

159 points by luu 7y ago

tra3 7y ago
I really appreciate posts like these. One day I’d like to run a small SaaS. Posts like these provide a glimpse into how it’s done. The biggest insight is what makes me a good technologist, does not make me a good anything else (entrepreneur, SaaS proprietor). I gotta figure out how to get there.
ninetax 7y ago
I remember your first post about leaving Google a couple years ago, and it's been neat seeing the consistent updates since then. Congrats on the revenue!
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! It's nice to hear that you still remember my quitting Google post.
dhruvkar 7y ago
Awesome post, Michael! Love the openness and humility: >> I thought that rewriting the Zestful website as a static site would improve its SEO. Sadly, Google Search Console suggests that it had a negligible impact, the enterprise customer approached me only a few days after I rewrote the site, so I can pretend to myself that the rewrite was responsible for ~$3.9k in additional revenue. I had a chance to connect with Michael (about keto stuff) a couple years ago. He had reached out in a very humble, welcoming way. On the call, I recall I pompously gave him advice, not realizing how far ahead he was on his entrepreneur journey. He graciously welcomed it all, and let the conversation flow. Looking forward to learning from you and reading future posts!
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Hey, Dhruv! Good to hear from you again! I wasn't being gracious at all. You had a lot to teach me! You were great at building a community and an engaged following in a way that I still haven't been able to replicate for my keto site. When I write ad copy now, I remember the good tip you shared with me about writing it as if to a single person.
ilrwbwrkhv 7y ago
These days good posts on HN have very few comments. Have the hackers left?
- jimhi 7y ago
  I have also noticed a general trend of less hackers lately. I think there was a temporary surge because the social network movie and all these tech companies IPOing and making everyone rich that finally died down recently. I think the application rate to Y Combinator itself also flatlined or decreased in the last couple batches
  - r_singh 7y ago
    > I think the application rate to Y Combinator itself also flatlined or decreased in the last couple batches Would like to know more if you have a source.
    - jimhi 7y ago
      My source was estimating this with other YC folk, but here is what's publicly known. ~200 companies a batch and supposedly a 2-3% acceptance rate puts it at 6,600-10,000. They stopped updating their statistics: https://twitter.com/sama/status/618247698378985472 https://twitter.com/sama/status/618247698378985472 and https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats/ If it kept growing they would have proudly put that everywhere. At the same time they introduced startup school which got 15,000 applicants, many of whom would have applied to Y Combinator but chose the startup school instead. My bet is it peaked around ~8,500 and decreased when they introduced the startup school program.
      - mvanga 7y ago
        Startup school companies were required to apply to the YC main program in order to be eligible for the $15k grant, and there were 30k companies that were part of SuS in 2019. Also, from the figures presented at the conclusion of the program last year, there were ~23k applications to the 2019 summer & winter batch in total.
ErikAugust 7y ago
You could sell an unlimited local shows access pass. You could call it “InfiniteJest”.
- peteforde 7y ago
  Points for a good idea... but don't do this. Estate of DFW will sue you into the ground. The "no such thing as bad publicity" angle does not apply.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Haha, I love DFW and that book, so this made me laugh.
  - ErikAugust 7y ago
    Awesome, I figured since you are making a comedy site I might as well go for a joke.
ssivark 7y ago
I found this tidbit interesting: > Another recurring theme in interviews was that nobody wanted a managed service. This surprised me because so much of the trend in software in the last 20 years has been toward SaaS, managed services, and monthly payments. Sheet metal shops wanted none of it. [...] While SaaS businesses often highlight the advantages of low up-front cost and minimal IT maintenance, sheet metal shops didn't value these things. Independence mattered far more than convenience or cost. Multiple shops told me that they didn't want their businesses grinding to a halt because their software vendor went out of business or experienced a network outage. I asked if they minded maintaining their own servers, and I was surprised to hear consistent “no"s. [...] Given that some of these businesses have been operating for 70+ years, I see why they plan to outlast their software vendors. Still, this sentiment surprised me because it seemed to contradict most of the conventional wisdom about SaaS sales.
- m0zg 7y ago
  >> seemed to contradict most of the conventional wisdom about SaaS sales "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair Look at where this "conventional wisdom" comes from and it'll all fall into place.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - kristianc 7y ago
    There are SaaS vendors which are very successful at selling into contractors and subcontractors of all sizes. I know, as I work for one of them.
    - m0zg 7y ago
      And I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying that SaaS vendors are going to do their best to convince you that SaaS is the only viable choice, whereas for many businesses on-prem is just fine and it isn't going anywhere, because it works.
curyous 7y ago
Fantastic, inspirational.
iantimothy 7y ago
hello from Singapore! I've been performing standup comedy for about six years as a hobby. Anyway, last year I went to London and Berlin and I found sites like https://www.opencomedy.com/ https://www.opencomedy.com/ and https://comedyinenglish.de/ https://comedyinenglish.de/ super useful in finding open mic gigs to perform at. I know in the post venue owners and bookers were mentioned but wanted to highlight that for comics who travel, sites like yours are super useful to us too albeit we aren't the ones really making the money.
- rwmurrayVT 7y ago
  Holy fuck, the opencomedy website took over 12 seconds for me to load.
  - war1025 7y ago
    Loaded basically instantly for me. Facebook, on the other hand, often takes nearly a minute for the UI to be fully rendered.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading and for sharing that! I didn't know about those resources, but they're helpful for ideas about directions to take the site. OpenComedy has a funny bug where it seems to think I live in Northampton, UK because I like near Northampton, MA, USA: https://imgur.com/BVEZWbA https://imgur.com/BVEZWbA One of the recurring ideas that comes up a lot in my discussions with bookers and comedians is that bookers have a hard time finding good comedians to fill their shows and comedians have a hard time finding out which shows need comedians and what the details are. I've thought about some sort of matchmaking functionality, but as you said, it's hard to make money from something like that. I'd still like to tackle that, but I feel like I should get the money part figured out first.
leommoore 7y ago
Thanks Michael, I appreciate your post. So much of being an entrepreneur is a series of small uncertain steps that keep you moving in the right direction
davnicwil 7y ago
Great post, as usual from Michael! One kind of broad lesson I get from it is that, though it's tough to resist the urge to just build stuff because that's the comfortable and seemingly most obvious way to make progress on an idea, it really always pays off better to figure out what people want first. The metal shop example was a surprising and good one - so some businesses actually don't really want you to solve their problem in the best way, they want you to solve their problem adequately but it's more important to give them flexibility and options for the future.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading David! I've been enjoying your blog posts as well.
gyvastis 7y ago
Love the One-Line summary. I wish more people would do that. Helps to decide whether or not to invest my time or not.
peteforde 7y ago
I found your discussion of the sheet metal concept really interesting because as you found out the hard way, there's an awful lot of behavioural science in play. The line about Word having too many features is that everyone uses 10% of the features... the problem is that everyone uses a slightly different 10% of the features. One thing you should try hard not to do is look at the competition and write it off as crap. It's highly unlikely that your antecedents set out to make a shit product. It's likely that when they were starting out, they wanted to create something efficient and streamlined, but then years of paying customer feedback took things to where they are today. The folks at 37signals always used to remind us that it's much easier to add a feature than it is to remove one. I wonder how much of the shopkeepers reactions were fighting change vs just not trusting someone who didn't come from where they came from. There's real class anxiety around the blue collars vs the 20-something software millionaire set (which is likely how they saw you, as the other, even if you're actually their neighbour). I wonder what would happened differently if it was the owner of the first shop leading the pitch. I often advise founders that they shouldn't get into any business where one of the founders doesn't have deep industry experience and connections. If nobody on your team has ever managed a hotel, it's highly likely that you will fail to disrupt hotel management. Anyhow, it's unclear from your writing but seems like your first customer guy was just that - a customer. In other words, he found someone to spend a month doing free fan service for an idea that if he was truly that excited about it, he would have hired you or at least proposed a partnership and been much more aggressively involved in doing the initial customer development conversations with you. I'm intrigued by the notion that they have no problem installing their own servers. This pretty much lines up with a certain segment of blue collar and [what I'd describe as Meyers-Briggs 'S'-type professions]... heck, I've seen those computers. They are always covered in a slick of oil and dust particulate. I wonder if they would have been comfortable with an on-site solution that is also connected to a central service, like Github Enterprise. In this way, they have working infrastructure even if you decide to ditch software for comedy, and you can both push new updates and offer remote backup (which is good for risk mitigation) as a paid extra service. Do sheet metal shops have a trade magazine? Is there an annual sheet metal trade show in Vegas? You might still find it interesting to attend. Note that of course you're not passionate about sheet metal. The entire premise is ridiculous because even the sheet metal people see it as a job. The whole point of doing something unsexy is that in some ways it's hard because not everyone is willing to do it. I would change and do some things differently, like getting that first customer to put a lot more time and money on the line to explore the concept in a partnership capacity, but if you want to follow the FreshBooks trajectory you have to start with a fractional subset of functionality targeting a micro-demographic and THEN grow into the Intuit competitor over the next decade or so. There was never going to be an overnight success and you'll probably need someone to put in some adventure capital so that you don't burn out after a single month of customer development. While it's true that you failed to come to the table with a solution to a hair-on-fire problem the other sheet metal shops were having, try to remember that they have good reason for conservative skepticism about something that could turn their business upside down. A lot of this stuff is just an expression of the lowest levels of Maslow's Hierarchy. Everyone wants to be the hero of their tribe, but nobody wants to be humiliated in front of their tribe. The only way to sell into those shops would be for your first customer to make the leap, and then have someone else that already agrees with that customer make the leap and show everyone else that it's safe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V74AxCqOTvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V74AxCqOTvg It's not the first customer that is the most important. It's the second one! Also: flying doesn't kill you, landing does. In the end, his comments about how someday they might need the extra features is probably most telling. Deep down, people are scared of the future and they make a lot of irrational decisions based on things they've already done but also on things that they imagine they will do in a perfect future. People will double down on purchases that they've already made so they don't have to confront the quality of their first decision. And people will buy books on Amazon that they don't have time to read because in an imaginary aspirational future, they have an opportunity to real all of the books, and that person will be so smart and awesome compared to themselves today. A huge amount of purchasing in North America is aspirational. Kitchen appliances much? Onto the comedy app! Bandsintown/Songkick for Comedy is a really great concept. I agree that scraping is a fools errand. However, it's also really important that you replace scraping not with your time but with someone you hire from the internet. Not only is your time way too valuable, it's not a realistic test of what will be necessary to scale it even a little bit. I definitely think that you should find some comics willing to pay even a token amount to use your service to host a reasonably nice homepage for them. You might find it useful to watch this presentation by the founder of Bandcamp at #XOXO. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaUkS-lr-ZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaUkS-lr-ZM I do have a small beef: you say that you were making an MVP. What could possibly justify using Vue or any SPA to build something this simple? When did it become the default to start an MVP using tools that are designed to solve Facebook scale problems? I know that it's not just you and I'm probably farting in the wind, but this topic gets under my skin because the day absolutely will come where people look back on the SPAs-for-everything fad and profess that "not everyone was doing it, just the people who didn't realize they were conforming to the pack and reinventing simpler tech that already worked better than it ever had in the past". Your filtering needs were pre-solved by Isotope, for example. https://isotope.metafizzy.co/ https://isotope.metafizzy.co/
gbersac 7y ago
If you are into customer interview, I highly recommend this book which is about design process, and have a huge focus on cutomer interview : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32493686-when-coffee-kale-compete?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=QPwthiTs7f&rank=1 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32493686-when-coffee-kal...
RickJWagner 7y ago
Thanks for sharing all this, author. I've been a corporate coder all my career, but sometimes wonder what it must be like to run my own show. Your writings are highly interesting.
- mtlynch 7y ago
  Thanks for reading! I'm glad you're enjoying the posts.
mtlynch 7y ago
Author here. Thanks for reading, everyone! It's a surprise to see this on here because I mainly write the retrospectives as an exercise for myself and don't expect others to find them very interesting. I'm glad there were lessons I learned in this one that people found useful or fun. I'm running around today, but I'll be back on later tonight to respond to comments.
wazoox 7y ago
I don't see anything on this page but a couple of headings and some pictures, with large swaths of whitespace, bullets without any item, etc. Neither in Firefox nor Chromium. I had to switch to reader mode in Firefox to get any text? The same behaviour occurs on all the website... What gives? Here's a capture for anyone interested: https://demo.intellique.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/xM6QCQXReFSHzee https://demo.intellique.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/xM6QCQXReF...
- taysix 7y ago
  That is strange. I have nothing to share except that I don't have this issue. MacOS, Firefox 72.

159 points by luu 7y ago

tra3 7y ago

I really appreciate posts like these. One day I’d like to run a small SaaS. Posts like these provide a glimpse into how it’s done. The biggest insight is what makes me a good technologist, does not make me a good anything else (entrepreneur, SaaS proprietor). I gotta figure out how to get there.

ninetax 7y ago

I remember your first post about leaving Google a couple years ago, and it's been neat seeing the consistent updates since then. Congrats on the revenue!

mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading! It's nice to hear that you still remember my quitting Google post.

dhruvkar 7y ago

Awesome post, Michael! Love the openness and humility: >> I thought that rewriting the Zestful website as a static site would improve its SEO. Sadly, Google Search Console suggests that it had a negligible impact, the enterprise customer approached me only a few days after I rewrote the site, so I can pretend to myself that the rewrite was responsible for ~$3.9k in additional revenue. I had a chance to connect with Michael (about keto stuff) a couple years ago. He had reached out in a very humble, welcoming way. On the call, I recall I pompously gave him advice, not realizing how far ahead he was on his entrepreneur journey. He graciously welcomed it all, and let the conversation flow. Looking forward to learning from you and reading future posts!

mtlynch 7y ago
Hey, Dhruv! Good to hear from you again! I wasn't being gracious at all. You had a lot to teach me! You were great at building a community and an engaged following in a way that I still haven't been able to replicate for my keto site. When I write ad copy now, I remember the good tip you shared with me about writing it as if to a single person.

ilrwbwrkhv 7y ago

These days good posts on HN have very few comments. Have the hackers left?

jimhi 7y ago
I have also noticed a general trend of less hackers lately. I think there was a temporary surge because the social network movie and all these tech companies IPOing and making everyone rich that finally died down recently. I think the application rate to Y Combinator itself also flatlined or decreased in the last couple batches
- r_singh 7y ago
  > I think the application rate to Y Combinator itself also flatlined or decreased in the last couple batches Would like to know more if you have a source.
  - jimhi 7y ago
    My source was estimating this with other YC folk, but here is what's publicly known. ~200 companies a batch and supposedly a 2-3% acceptance rate puts it at 6,600-10,000. They stopped updating their statistics: https://twitter.com/sama/status/618247698378985472 https://twitter.com/sama/status/618247698378985472 and https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats/ If it kept growing they would have proudly put that everywhere. At the same time they introduced startup school which got 15,000 applicants, many of whom would have applied to Y Combinator but chose the startup school instead. My bet is it peaked around ~8,500 and decreased when they introduced the startup school program.
    - mvanga 7y ago
      Startup school companies were required to apply to the YC main program in order to be eligible for the $15k grant, and there were 30k companies that were part of SuS in 2019. Also, from the figures presented at the conclusion of the program last year, there were ~23k applications to the 2019 summer & winter batch in total.

ErikAugust 7y ago

You could sell an unlimited local shows access pass. You could call it “InfiniteJest”.

peteforde 7y ago
Points for a good idea... but don't do this. Estate of DFW will sue you into the ground. The "no such thing as bad publicity" angle does not apply.
mtlynch 7y ago
Haha, I love DFW and that book, so this made me laugh.
- ErikAugust 7y ago
  Awesome, I figured since you are making a comedy site I might as well go for a joke.

ssivark 7y ago

I found this tidbit interesting: > Another recurring theme in interviews was that nobody wanted a managed service. This surprised me because so much of the trend in software in the last 20 years has been toward SaaS, managed services, and monthly payments. Sheet metal shops wanted none of it. [...] While SaaS businesses often highlight the advantages of low up-front cost and minimal IT maintenance, sheet metal shops didn't value these things. Independence mattered far more than convenience or cost. Multiple shops told me that they didn't want their businesses grinding to a halt because their software vendor went out of business or experienced a network outage. I asked if they minded maintaining their own servers, and I was surprised to hear consistent “no"s. [...] Given that some of these businesses have been operating for 70+ years, I see why they plan to outlast their software vendors. Still, this sentiment surprised me because it seemed to contradict most of the conventional wisdom about SaaS sales.

m0zg 7y ago
>> seemed to contradict most of the conventional wisdom about SaaS sales "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair Look at where this "conventional wisdom" comes from and it'll all fall into place.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- kristianc 7y ago
  There are SaaS vendors which are very successful at selling into contractors and subcontractors of all sizes. I know, as I work for one of them.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    And I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying that SaaS vendors are going to do their best to convince you that SaaS is the only viable choice, whereas for many businesses on-prem is just fine and it isn't going anywhere, because it works.

curyous 7y ago

Fantastic, inspirational.

iantimothy 7y ago

hello from Singapore! I've been performing standup comedy for about six years as a hobby. Anyway, last year I went to London and Berlin and I found sites like https://www.opencomedy.com/ https://www.opencomedy.com/ and https://comedyinenglish.de/ https://comedyinenglish.de/ super useful in finding open mic gigs to perform at. I know in the post venue owners and bookers were mentioned but wanted to highlight that for comics who travel, sites like yours are super useful to us too albeit we aren't the ones really making the money.

rwmurrayVT 7y ago
Holy fuck, the opencomedy website took over 12 seconds for me to load.
- war1025 7y ago
  Loaded basically instantly for me. Facebook, on the other hand, often takes nearly a minute for the UI to be fully rendered.
mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading and for sharing that! I didn't know about those resources, but they're helpful for ideas about directions to take the site. OpenComedy has a funny bug where it seems to think I live in Northampton, UK because I like near Northampton, MA, USA: https://imgur.com/BVEZWbA https://imgur.com/BVEZWbA One of the recurring ideas that comes up a lot in my discussions with bookers and comedians is that bookers have a hard time finding good comedians to fill their shows and comedians have a hard time finding out which shows need comedians and what the details are. I've thought about some sort of matchmaking functionality, but as you said, it's hard to make money from something like that. I'd still like to tackle that, but I feel like I should get the money part figured out first.

leommoore 7y ago

Thanks Michael, I appreciate your post. So much of being an entrepreneur is a series of small uncertain steps that keep you moving in the right direction

davnicwil 7y ago

Great post, as usual from Michael! One kind of broad lesson I get from it is that, though it's tough to resist the urge to just build stuff because that's the comfortable and seemingly most obvious way to make progress on an idea, it really always pays off better to figure out what people want first. The metal shop example was a surprising and good one - so some businesses actually don't really want you to solve their problem in the best way, they want you to solve their problem adequately but it's more important to give them flexibility and options for the future.

mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading David! I've been enjoying your blog posts as well.

gyvastis 7y ago

Love the One-Line summary. I wish more people would do that. Helps to decide whether or not to invest my time or not.

peteforde 7y ago

I found your discussion of the sheet metal concept really interesting because as you found out the hard way, there's an awful lot of behavioural science in play. The line about Word having too many features is that everyone uses 10% of the features... the problem is that everyone uses a slightly different 10% of the features. One thing you should try hard not to do is look at the competition and write it off as crap. It's highly unlikely that your antecedents set out to make a shit product. It's likely that when they were starting out, they wanted to create something efficient and streamlined, but then years of paying customer feedback took things to where they are today. The folks at 37signals always used to remind us that it's much easier to add a feature than it is to remove one. I wonder how much of the shopkeepers reactions were fighting change vs just not trusting someone who didn't come from where they came from. There's real class anxiety around the blue collars vs the 20-something software millionaire set (which is likely how they saw you, as the other, even if you're actually their neighbour). I wonder what would happened differently if it was the owner of the first shop leading the pitch. I often advise founders that they shouldn't get into any business where one of the founders doesn't have deep industry experience and connections. If nobody on your team has ever managed a hotel, it's highly likely that you will fail to disrupt hotel management. Anyhow, it's unclear from your writing but seems like your first customer guy was just that - a customer. In other words, he found someone to spend a month doing free fan service for an idea that if he was truly that excited about it, he would have hired you or at least proposed a partnership and been much more aggressively involved in doing the initial customer development conversations with you. I'm intrigued by the notion that they have no problem installing their own servers. This pretty much lines up with a certain segment of blue collar and [what I'd describe as Meyers-Briggs 'S'-type professions]... heck, I've seen those computers. They are always covered in a slick of oil and dust particulate. I wonder if they would have been comfortable with an on-site solution that is also connected to a central service, like Github Enterprise. In this way, they have working infrastructure even if you decide to ditch software for comedy, and you can both push new updates and offer remote backup (which is good for risk mitigation) as a paid extra service. Do sheet metal shops have a trade magazine? Is there an annual sheet metal trade show in Vegas? You might still find it interesting to attend. Note that of course you're not passionate about sheet metal. The entire premise is ridiculous because even the sheet metal people see it as a job. The whole point of doing something unsexy is that in some ways it's hard because not everyone is willing to do it. I would change and do some things differently, like getting that first customer to put a lot more time and money on the line to explore the concept in a partnership capacity, but if you want to follow the FreshBooks trajectory you have to start with a fractional subset of functionality targeting a micro-demographic and THEN grow into the Intuit competitor over the next decade or so. There was never going to be an overnight success and you'll probably need someone to put in some adventure capital so that you don't burn out after a single month of customer development. While it's true that you failed to come to the table with a solution to a hair-on-fire problem the other sheet metal shops were having, try to remember that they have good reason for conservative skepticism about something that could turn their business upside down. A lot of this stuff is just an expression of the lowest levels of Maslow's Hierarchy. Everyone wants to be the hero of their tribe, but nobody wants to be humiliated in front of their tribe. The only way to sell into those shops would be for your first customer to make the leap, and then have someone else that already agrees with that customer make the leap and show everyone else that it's safe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V74AxCqOTvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V74AxCqOTvg It's not the first customer that is the most important. It's the second one! Also: flying doesn't kill you, landing does. In the end, his comments about how someday they might need the extra features is probably most telling. Deep down, people are scared of the future and they make a lot of irrational decisions based on things they've already done but also on things that they imagine they will do in a perfect future. People will double down on purchases that they've already made so they don't have to confront the quality of their first decision. And people will buy books on Amazon that they don't have time to read because in an imaginary aspirational future, they have an opportunity to real all of the books, and that person will be so smart and awesome compared to themselves today. A huge amount of purchasing in North America is aspirational. Kitchen appliances much? Onto the comedy app! Bandsintown/Songkick for Comedy is a really great concept. I agree that scraping is a fools errand. However, it's also really important that you replace scraping not with your time but with someone you hire from the internet. Not only is your time way too valuable, it's not a realistic test of what will be necessary to scale it even a little bit. I definitely think that you should find some comics willing to pay even a token amount to use your service to host a reasonably nice homepage for them. You might find it useful to watch this presentation by the founder of Bandcamp at #XOXO. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaUkS-lr-ZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaUkS-lr-ZM I do have a small beef: you say that you were making an MVP. What could possibly justify using Vue or any SPA to build something this simple? When did it become the default to start an MVP using tools that are designed to solve Facebook scale problems? I know that it's not just you and I'm probably farting in the wind, but this topic gets under my skin because the day absolutely will come where people look back on the SPAs-for-everything fad and profess that "not everyone was doing it, just the people who didn't realize they were conforming to the pack and reinventing simpler tech that already worked better than it ever had in the past". Your filtering needs were pre-solved by Isotope, for example. https://isotope.metafizzy.co/ https://isotope.metafizzy.co/

gbersac 7y ago

If you are into customer interview, I highly recommend this book which is about design process, and have a huge focus on cutomer interview : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32493686-when-coffee-kale-compete?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=QPwthiTs7f&rank=1 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32493686-when-coffee-kal...

RickJWagner 7y ago

Thanks for sharing all this, author. I've been a corporate coder all my career, but sometimes wonder what it must be like to run my own show. Your writings are highly interesting.

mtlynch 7y ago
Thanks for reading! I'm glad you're enjoying the posts.

mtlynch 7y ago

Author here. Thanks for reading, everyone! It's a surprise to see this on here because I mainly write the retrospectives as an exercise for myself and don't expect others to find them very interesting. I'm glad there were lessons I learned in this one that people found useful or fun. I'm running around today, but I'll be back on later tonight to respond to comments.

wazoox 7y ago

I don't see anything on this page but a couple of headings and some pictures, with large swaths of whitespace, bullets without any item, etc. Neither in Firefox nor Chromium. I had to switch to reader mode in Firefox to get any text? The same behaviour occurs on all the website... What gives? Here's a capture for anyone interested: https://demo.intellique.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/xM6QCQXReFSHzee https://demo.intellique.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/xM6QCQXReF...

taysix 7y ago
That is strange. I have nothing to share except that I don't have this issue. MacOS, Firefox 72.