8 ms·

We Built It, And They Didn't Come

68 points by kiteloop 13y ago

aaronbrethorst 13y ago
Regarding the slide about Kathy Sierra, find a spare hour and watch this video: http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-the-minimum-badass-user-business-of-software-a-masterclass-in-thinking-about-software-product-development/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-... Her talk alone justified every penny I spent going to BoS last year.
- welder 13y ago
  Also, I found this Founder's Wiki by the OP to be a good reference: http://founderswiki.com/wiki/Main_Page http://founderswiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
- babuskov 13y ago
  I just started and couldn't stop until I've see it all. Great stuff. Thanks. Any other BoS talks you recommend?
  - aaronbrethorst 13y ago
    They're all good, but Gail Goodman's talk was—I think—also a cut above the rest: http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...
  - nedwin 13y ago
    This is my personal favourite: Gail Goodman on the SaaS long slow ramp of death. http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...
- stan_rogers 13y ago
  Just a bit of warning for anyone on a data-limited mobile plan: that's one spare hour and the better part of a GB (for the not-so-HD version of the video). You may want to watch this one wired.
losethos 13y ago
The wedding feast to the father gather bums outside and got pissed they did not dress well, then threw out and there was nashing of teeth. "We know you." "Go away." God says... C:\TAD\Text\2CITIES.TXT d a half, that I hope the topic on which I am about to touch may not--" He was stayed by the Doctor's putting out his hand to stop him. When he had kept it so a little while, he said, drawing it back: "Is Lucie the topic?" "She is." "It is hard for me to speak of her at any time. It is very hard for me to hear her spoken of in that tone of yours, Charles Darnay." "It is a tone of fervent admiration, true homage, and deep love, Doctor Manette!" he said deferentially. There was another
programminggeek 13y ago
You know, I'm a builder. I like to build things. But a business isn't about building things, it's about selling things. You can build a real business with a terrible to mediocre product if you are great at selling it. You can't build a real business if you can't sell your product, no matter how good your product is. The thing that will determine your success is sales and marketing, especially early in the business life.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  This is why my self-driving RC-car platform is withering on the vine - I can't get funding because I'm an engineer, not a salesman.
  - ZoF 13y ago
    Need a site? I'll build it out for free within reason. Need someone to physically pitch your product to investors? I can't do that.
  - agibsonccc 13y ago
    Half of the battle is picking up the phone. I think the main problem is coming up with a problem you're both passionate about and that provides value to customers. You can learn sales as you go. The best salesman are the ones who don't know how to say no. I think the self defeatist mentality of "I'm not a salesman" is the core problem. You're a salesman if you call yourself one. The main reason being: You're the first person who said yes. Your next job is to do what every other sales person has to do: stomach a no answer, learn from your mistakes, and iterate on your idea within reason of making sales. Validation is apart of the sales process as well.
  - TimothyE 13y ago
    I had the same experience when I graduated and worked as an engineer. Ended up deciding that I'd learn the business side myself and do an MBA. Now I see the other side of the page, lots of business students who want to start something up but can't make a product. If you want to commercialize go find someone who's as passionate about business as you are about the engineering and you'll have a much better chance
sixQuarks 13y ago
Whenever I see these slideshare links, I never get anything out of them. Without hearing the actual audio or text that goes along with the slides, they're not really useful to me. Anyone else have this issue?
- marincounty 13y ago
  Yea--me too.
- quaffapint 13y ago
  I'll save you 70+ slides - It's all about marketing and sales, not design and development.
- simonw 13y ago
  Not really. Even this deck (which is clearly one that suffers from not having the full material) I still found it easy to get the general gist of the presentation in just a few minutes from clicking through the slides. Obviously I'd be able to get a lot more out of them if they were annotated with the full content, but I still found them useful on their own.
curiousdannii 13y ago
"Ideating"? Really? Yes I know it's not a new word, but really?
- adamnemecek 13y ago
  How else would you synergize the vertical?
- fotbr 13y ago
  After the IBM commercial, "Ideating" became code for "I'm going to take a nap" where I worked at the time.
  - curiousdannii 13y ago
    Which commercial?
    - fotbr 13y ago
      This one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziOG_GHNVq0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziOG_GHNVq0
- ibisum 13y ago
  He's young, and needs the money.
- vdaniuk 13y ago
  Coursera mooc on innovation specifically talks about various aspects of ideation as a process so yeah, it a legit word.
- lfittl 13y ago
  (author here) Yeah - I'm not 100% happy with it either. Initially I had Exploration, which is really what I mean (you open up the floodgates and look quickly at a lot of different ideas, before zooming in on one). But that sounded kind of quirky/confusing when used for comparing it with Execution, as in Execution vs Exploration. And after all, Ideation is also a valid word to use in this context.
yeukhon 13y ago
Here is my take after reading the slides from a student perspective. If we put more resource on marketing would it mean at some point we will oversell our service? In other words, we can only handle 100 users but now 120 users because of the good marketing? Then we have to hire more people (but that takes time too) to make the system more robust (from both deops and software engineering). That's a problem, isn't it? Would it be okay to say a startup should have a good estimate of how many users they can handle at each cycle?
- foxylad 13y ago
  Fear of overselling could kill your company - it puts a brake on everything you do. Even worse, it gives you the perfect excuse not to market your product to the max, and human nature means you'll actually market it close to the minimum. My philosophy is to ask "will it scale?" for every part of your business. EVERY step - including sales, support and things like invoicing too. This adds surprisingly little overhead, but if Jon Stewart mentions your product on The Daily Show, you'll be popping champagne corks instead of blood vessels. On the platform side, services like Appengine make this easy. But you need to have plans in place to scale support, sales and everything else.
  - simonw 13y ago
    Rather than asking "will it scale?", I suggest asking "could it scale?". There's no point in doing up-front work to make something scalable if you don't know if it will be needed, but it's also important not to design features that absolutely could not scale under any circumstances. If you can think to yourself "if I need to scale this, I've got a rough idea of how I would do it" you'll probably be fine. And if not... once again, not being able to scale fast enough is a great problem to have (telling an investor "I don't have time to talk to you, our server's can't keep up with all of our new signups" is a great pitch).
- sfall 13y ago
  I believe that his point is getting the users is the first choke point to make or break your company.
- 13y ago
serverhorror 13y ago
(This is not a flame or anything just my subjective impression. I know the people who built this (well 2 of them) personally. So forgive me guys) I was asking a few times how things were going and that I could need something that sounds like what they were building -- granted on a very informal level but still I asked and expressed my interested. Problem was: They never came back to me and told me: Hey here's the stuff! Wanna try? I can make up reasons why, maybe because I moved to another country to take a job, or after all they don't like me or whatever. To me it boils down to: I (as in "the potential customer") was asking how far the product was and never got a real answer. My team has about 2000 Boxes to "operate"[1] and I manage only a single team. Totaling to about 100K servers with different DCs spread over the world. I'd think anybody who gets this kind of offer should try to get a foot in the door. Even if the deal doesn't close people have heard about the stuff. So the essence is to me: This one little slide where you see that sales/marketing was way under represented in the team. Hell guys I know! you can build stuff, but don't expect me (the customer) to keep asking and asking and asking for wether or not it suits you to send me something I can work with... [1]: I currently live in an enterprise environment where DevOps or agile is still something new and not to be trusted!
- lfittl 13y ago
  Author here - thanks for the comment (and please don't worry about sharing stories, its true after all!) This was a big problem/mistake we made back then (and which isn't obvious from the slides) - we just didn't let people try the product, since we didn't want to be a hosting company ourselves. We did show demos to people and did pilots in a few cases, but it would have benefited us a lot to have a public installation where people could have tried out the product. I'm sorry we didn't get to work together then - there was certainly a lot of interest that we managed (and filtered through) poorly. Luckily I've learned from that (I hope!) :)

68 points by kiteloop 13y ago

Regarding the slide about Kathy Sierra, find a spare hour and watch this video: http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-the-minimum-badass-user-business-of-software-a-masterclass-in-thinking-about-software-product-development/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-... Her talk alone justified every penny I spent going to BoS last year.

welder 13y ago
Also, I found this Founder's Wiki by the OP to be a good reference: http://founderswiki.com/wiki/Main_Page http://founderswiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
babuskov 13y ago
I just started and couldn't stop until I've see it all. Great stuff. Thanks. Any other BoS talks you recommend?
- aaronbrethorst 13y ago
  They're all good, but Gail Goodman's talk was—I think—also a cut above the rest: http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...
- nedwin 13y ago
  This is my personal favourite: Gail Goodman on the SaaS long slow ramp of death. http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...
stan_rogers 13y ago
Just a bit of warning for anyone on a data-limited mobile plan: that's one spare hour and the better part of a GB (for the not-so-HD version of the video). You may want to watch this one wired.

losethos 13y ago

The wedding feast to the father gather bums outside and got pissed they did not dress well, then threw out and there was nashing of teeth. "We know you." "Go away." God says... C:\TAD\Text\2CITIES.TXT d a half, that I hope the topic on which I am about to touch may not--" He was stayed by the Doctor's putting out his hand to stop him. When he had kept it so a little while, he said, drawing it back: "Is Lucie the topic?" "She is." "It is hard for me to speak of her at any time. It is very hard for me to hear her spoken of in that tone of yours, Charles Darnay." "It is a tone of fervent admiration, true homage, and deep love, Doctor Manette!" he said deferentially. There was another

programminggeek 13y ago

You know, I'm a builder. I like to build things. But a business isn't about building things, it's about selling things. You can build a real business with a terrible to mediocre product if you are great at selling it. You can't build a real business if you can't sell your product, no matter how good your product is. The thing that will determine your success is sales and marketing, especially early in the business life.

stephengillie 13y ago
This is why my self-driving RC-car platform is withering on the vine - I can't get funding because I'm an engineer, not a salesman.
- ZoF 13y ago
  Need a site? I'll build it out for free within reason. Need someone to physically pitch your product to investors? I can't do that.
- agibsonccc 13y ago
  Half of the battle is picking up the phone. I think the main problem is coming up with a problem you're both passionate about and that provides value to customers. You can learn sales as you go. The best salesman are the ones who don't know how to say no. I think the self defeatist mentality of "I'm not a salesman" is the core problem. You're a salesman if you call yourself one. The main reason being: You're the first person who said yes. Your next job is to do what every other sales person has to do: stomach a no answer, learn from your mistakes, and iterate on your idea within reason of making sales. Validation is apart of the sales process as well.
- TimothyE 13y ago
  I had the same experience when I graduated and worked as an engineer. Ended up deciding that I'd learn the business side myself and do an MBA. Now I see the other side of the page, lots of business students who want to start something up but can't make a product. If you want to commercialize go find someone who's as passionate about business as you are about the engineering and you'll have a much better chance

sixQuarks 13y ago

Whenever I see these slideshare links, I never get anything out of them. Without hearing the actual audio or text that goes along with the slides, they're not really useful to me. Anyone else have this issue?

marincounty 13y ago
Yea--me too.
quaffapint 13y ago
I'll save you 70+ slides - It's all about marketing and sales, not design and development.
simonw 13y ago
Not really. Even this deck (which is clearly one that suffers from not having the full material) I still found it easy to get the general gist of the presentation in just a few minutes from clicking through the slides. Obviously I'd be able to get a lot more out of them if they were annotated with the full content, but I still found them useful on their own.

curiousdannii 13y ago

"Ideating"? Really? Yes I know it's not a new word, but really?

adamnemecek 13y ago
How else would you synergize the vertical?
fotbr 13y ago
After the IBM commercial, "Ideating" became code for "I'm going to take a nap" where I worked at the time.
- curiousdannii 13y ago
  Which commercial?
  - fotbr 13y ago
    This one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziOG_GHNVq0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziOG_GHNVq0
ibisum 13y ago
He's young, and needs the money.
vdaniuk 13y ago
Coursera mooc on innovation specifically talks about various aspects of ideation as a process so yeah, it a legit word.
lfittl 13y ago
(author here) Yeah - I'm not 100% happy with it either. Initially I had Exploration, which is really what I mean (you open up the floodgates and look quickly at a lot of different ideas, before zooming in on one). But that sounded kind of quirky/confusing when used for comparing it with Execution, as in Execution vs Exploration. And after all, Ideation is also a valid word to use in this context.

yeukhon 13y ago

Here is my take after reading the slides from a student perspective. If we put more resource on marketing would it mean at some point we will oversell our service? In other words, we can only handle 100 users but now 120 users because of the good marketing? Then we have to hire more people (but that takes time too) to make the system more robust (from both deops and software engineering). That's a problem, isn't it? Would it be okay to say a startup should have a good estimate of how many users they can handle at each cycle?

foxylad 13y ago
Fear of overselling could kill your company - it puts a brake on everything you do. Even worse, it gives you the perfect excuse not to market your product to the max, and human nature means you'll actually market it close to the minimum. My philosophy is to ask "will it scale?" for every part of your business. EVERY step - including sales, support and things like invoicing too. This adds surprisingly little overhead, but if Jon Stewart mentions your product on The Daily Show, you'll be popping champagne corks instead of blood vessels. On the platform side, services like Appengine make this easy. But you need to have plans in place to scale support, sales and everything else.
- simonw 13y ago
  Rather than asking "will it scale?", I suggest asking "could it scale?". There's no point in doing up-front work to make something scalable if you don't know if it will be needed, but it's also important not to design features that absolutely could not scale under any circumstances. If you can think to yourself "if I need to scale this, I've got a rough idea of how I would do it" you'll probably be fine. And if not... once again, not being able to scale fast enough is a great problem to have (telling an investor "I don't have time to talk to you, our server's can't keep up with all of our new signups" is a great pitch).
sfall 13y ago
I believe that his point is getting the users is the first choke point to make or break your company.
13y ago

serverhorror 13y ago

(This is not a flame or anything just my subjective impression. I know the people who built this (well 2 of them) personally. So forgive me guys) I was asking a few times how things were going and that I could need something that sounds like what they were building -- granted on a very informal level but still I asked and expressed my interested. Problem was: They never came back to me and told me: Hey here's the stuff! Wanna try? I can make up reasons why, maybe because I moved to another country to take a job, or after all they don't like me or whatever. To me it boils down to: I (as in "the potential customer") was asking how far the product was and never got a real answer. My team has about 2000 Boxes to "operate"[1] and I manage only a single team. Totaling to about 100K servers with different DCs spread over the world. I'd think anybody who gets this kind of offer should try to get a foot in the door. Even if the deal doesn't close people have heard about the stuff. So the essence is to me: This one little slide where you see that sales/marketing was way under represented in the team. Hell guys I know! you can build stuff, but don't expect me (the customer) to keep asking and asking and asking for wether or not it suits you to send me something I can work with... [1]: I currently live in an enterprise environment where DevOps or agile is still something new and not to be trusted!

lfittl 13y ago
Author here - thanks for the comment (and please don't worry about sharing stories, its true after all!) This was a big problem/mistake we made back then (and which isn't obvious from the slides) - we just didn't let people try the product, since we didn't want to be a hosting company ourselves. We did show demos to people and did pilots in a few cases, but it would have benefited us a lot to have a public installation where people could have tried out the product. I'm sorry we didn't get to work together then - there was certainly a lot of interest that we managed (and filtered through) poorly. Luckily I've learned from that (I hope!) :)