Are you convinced you are chasing THE RIGHT IDEA? Make up your mind and get going.
April 3 & 4 we organized http://2008.thenextweb.org/ conference. Last year, after quite a search, we ended up with a mediocre social network. Non of the standard available solutions for a b2b network especially suited for an offline event where suited our needs. In the end one of our sponsors build a simple network on a tiny budget.
For this years’ event we decided to build our own solution. For the past 8 months we’ve working on a nice beta.
By building it for your own event, you know what you want.
By testing it in the field you get a feeling on what works or not.
By talking to your potential clients you get a feeling of the market and the demand.
By the feeling of your guts you “know” that you have to push forward.
So stop working for your clients and think of something that might make you more successful.
Goal-Directed Design
If we design and construct products in such a way that the people who use them achieve their goals, these people will be satisfied, effective,and happy and will gladly pay for the products and recommend that others do the same. Assuming that this can be achieved in a cost-effective manner, it will translate into business success.
One of my all time favorite books. I definitely need to read it again the upcoming months. There is no other book that changed the way I perceive the world more than this one. For those who read the book and take the advice by heart know how much it will change the you.
A lot has been written about user interfaces in software and online services. About face 1, 2 & 3 are probably the best books in the field. These books give you some insight in the psychological effect good and bad interfaces have on users. But most info is about common mistakes, best practices and technical aspects of the interface. So lets forget all this.
Lets go back to the basics of the interface. Its soul purpose is to communicate. What would an interface of an online service look like and how would it behave if you model it around the best practices found in How to win friend and influence people.
Help, i’m over budget, over time, i have no idea how long it will take till launch and my guess is that is probably won’t work the way i want it to. To make it even worse, the only things the junior project manager of your contractor is nagging about, are your out-off-scope-features. The vision and the mindset you have don’t line up a slightest bit with the responsibility the project manager has. You want a kick ass service that will rule the world, he only has to make sure the company he works for doesn’t spend to much time on your project.
There is a not so simple solution though: your own in-house tech team. Two weeks of pizza and beer before the launch, will guarantee you they will do the over time. Give them a percentage of your company as an extra incentive to create a rock solid service. Do some partnering with other start-ups. They have the same mindset as you. They’ll give you some excellent feedback and although you might not fully understand their service, you can do the same for them.
We call it tough love. Instead of asking; ‘What do you think about my service?’. You should ask, ‘Is there something that you would change?’, or ‘What don’t you like about it?’
The main skill we look for in a developer is they way helps us think the service through with the available technology as a basis. Is it easy to create, might there be a better way? Is this a nice solution or is it the best solution? Even simple features can have a big impact and will force you to make some tough decisions. In the end you should have a package without loose ends and can’t be gamed or fraud with.
This should also be the role of the project manager of the contractor, (together with the interaction designer), but his role will change dramatically at the end of the project. He will push to the take no as an answer, just to protect his boss’ money.
Did you ever successfully motivate a person, to pick up a task, that might have a benefit 3 months from now? Most people don’t even think about the next month, except for some holiday or a birthday.
Wikipedia has a nice theoretical write up about motivation.
Do you do some thing that might benefit you after putting years of energy in it, without being obligated to do so? That feels great right? You’re doing stuff only for enjoyment, praise and money, but you don’t have to do it.
One of the biggest steps i’ve made to put obligation aside is not doing any client work any more.
Try not to do client work for a month. Only do stuff you enjoy and praises you and you might find your passion.
The start-up variant of meetings. Time consuming, cola draining and breath taking fun.
Every day we have at least 3 storms. With 12 people on 50 square meters it is ofter quite tumultuous. Since a few weeks all our sessions are moved to the hall way. Besides the obvious advantage that you don’t bother your office mates with your nonsense, it also has a positive effect on the efficiency of the session. The thing is, there are no chairs in the hallway. When you stand during a conversation or a brainstorm session, you talk less, switch topics and move forward faster. Stelios Haji-Ioannou, former chairman of easyJet, is well know for his stand up meetings. Sometimes we take is a step further with “the elevator decision strategy”. With only 8 floors up and down and maybe 3 stops/ timeouts, you force yourself to go even faster.
Today i had lunch with Mathijs van Abbe. We discussed the possibilities of mobypicture. We want to transform it into a modern mobile online service and make it fit our communication strategy for the upcoming year. With moby you can share the photo’s you take with you mobile phone across several online platforms with a single action. It will be a great addition for our open European platform. We’ll be showing more of the platform in the upcoming months.
During the discussion about all the different platforms we can connect moby to we both came to the same conclusion. We mis a specific type of online social community that would actually help you do business and maintain contacts. Where is the online social network with CRM capabilities?
Today is a great day. A new long awaited version of cakephp is released. A counterpart of ruby on rails implemented in PHP.
Cake is now up and running for about two years. At the office we do all our projects in php and now after some mild pressure we do all our project in cake. I love it. It takes you probably twice as long to set up your initial project, but after a while you really feel the strength of this elegant framework. Fleck.com V3.0 is also baked in cake, a few weeks ago Sander started at one of our new projects from scratch in cake, he never touched it before. Without any effort we took some components from the new fleck.com, plugged it in and it worked like a charm.
Keep up the great work guys.