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7 Things Your Startup SHOULD Copy From 37signals →
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Here are the things I think you should copy from 37signals:
1. Share your expertise. Whatever it is you are passionate about or an expert in — share your information. Contribute to the community. Help others learn. Blog, podcast, speak — whatever works for you. Jason and the 37signals team are phenomenally good at this. They blog, they speak, they wrote a fantastically practical book.
2. Be your own customer. Try (if you can) to eat your own cooking. A product works out much better when you use it yourself. Solve your own problems. Fix the things that annoy you the most. Beyond just 37signals, there are lots of examples where people built software that succeeded in part because they use it themselves. GMail comes to mind.
3. Minimize unused inventory. Don’t write a bunch of code that not a lot of people are going to care about and you don’t need today. We have a tendency to “design for the future” and add features or architectural elements with the expectation that they’ll be useful someday. Wait for that day. You might “overpay” if/when you do get around to needing it (because it’s more expensive to add things later), but on average, you’ll be better off not writing that code that you don’t need just yet. This is not an excuse for poorly designed software — it’s an argument for being selective as to where you design in future expansion.
4. Take a stand. Have an opinion and take a stand. 37signals does a great job with their “less is more” stance. They have a passionate position and are willing to defend and debate it. You don’t have to take extreme positions on everything, but there should be something you feel passionately about that you don’t just pick a happy, non-controversial middle-ground. Ideally, it’s this particular idea that your startup is centered around.
5. Charge early, charge often. There is no shame in putting a price on your product. Doesn’t matter how early it is. Just give customers an easy way out. Let them decide whether your product is worth paying for. If not, keep cranking. Too many startups feel like they need to have the “perfect” product before they can begin charging for it. That’s almost always a mistake. Charge early. Once you start charging money, all sorts of good things start to happen (for example, customer feedback starts to happen, because you actually have customers). Then, try to charge as often as possible. Instead of “big chunks” of money changing hands, try to move to smaller, recurring chunks. Many SaaS businesses function this way (with some sort of subscription or “pay by the drink” model). It works.
6. Contribute Some Bits Back: As you know, David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37signals is responsible for the phenomenally successful Ruby on Rails. This benefits them more than the “positive karmic loop” thing. By contributing to the open source community, they’re able to leverage the power of that community and make the platform they use for their own stuff much better. But, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting you should go out and try to build some platform/framework. In fact, please don’t try and go do that (99.9% of us should not be obsessing over building platforms/frameworks — particularly folks like you and me). Just find ways to contribute back — even if they’re small ways. It’ll help in at least two ways: You’ll develop better stuff and you’ll attract better people.
7. Build A Community: Software companies these days are about more than just the product — they’re about the people around the product. This includes both those that built the product’s users. Invest the time and energy to foster a vibrant community that connects the people that care about you, the company and the products. Allow customers to engage with each other. This is useful not just from a “more value in the software” perspective — but it also helps with respect to competition. If a big, 900–pound competitor comes after you some day, it might be easy for them to build some of your product features, but it will be much harder for them to steal your community.
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Attention loss feared as high-tech rewires brain →
“It’s a challenge for many kids just to sit silently for a few minutes without moving around, looking for some kind of stimulation,” he said. “We need that ability to center ourselves.”
Meditation anyone?
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Cool….but it should be automatically updated.
The new WikiReader is a $99 portable device from the Openmoko group that stuffs every Wikipedia article into a pocket-friendly traveling companion.
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Remembering Names and What to Do When You Forget →
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1. Confess
“What’s your name again?” would not be appropriate. Try something like, “I am so sorry, I have completely blanked on your name.” This said, with sincerity, is appropriate and speaks volumes about you while also demonstrating your genuine interest in knowing who she is and remembering her. As always, it is not what you say, but how you say it.
2. Ask ’What is your full name?’
The person will respond saying his first and last name. At which point you might say, “Yes, I knew it was ‘Bill,’ but ‘Bill Flynn’”; now you have both.
3. Go to a respected third party
Ask, “What is the name of the woman in the blue dress?” You may then approach her, greet her by name and be a hero, suggesting you remembered her name.
4. Ask for a business card or calling card.
Take this opportunity to make yet another visual association.
5. Ask him to spell his name.
Be careful here. He could say, “J-O-N-E-S. In other words, exactly the way it sounds.” This can happen from time to time. It’s OK. Others understand and appreciate your effort in trying to know their name.
6. Introduce yourself.
Approach the other person and say your name, first and last. In business, we should all be conditioned so that when we hear another person say her name, we respond by saying our name, slowly and clearly, so it can be understood and remembered.
7. The ’setup’
Sending over a trusted friend, colleague or spouse to introduce himself so the individual in question will respond by saying his name is frequently done and is effective. The person who designed this “setup” is then free to confidently approach the person, calling him by name.
Finally, knowing that most of us are challenged remembering names, it is everyone’s responsibility to be aware of this situation. Recognize the opportunity to help others when it comes to remembering names and using them for introductions and in conversation, which makes others feel valued and special. Everyone’s help and participation in making the name game seamless is not only appropriate, but required in order to be an active participant at any event. It will go a long way in terms of being noticed and appreciated.
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Courage (word of the day) →
The root of the word courage is cour the French word for “heart.” The idea that our emotions originate in our hearts goes back at least 2500 years and one of the earliest books to make this connection was something called On The Sacred Disease about epilepsy written by followers of Hippocrates.
At first in English the word courage had meanings extending to all sorts of feelings one might attribute to one’s heart: thoughts, feelings desires and passions; gentle, sexual, and violent. It was in the 1300s that courage began to make it into print as an English word and it did so with those many different senses of emotion. Over the centuries all those other meanings fell away.
Before French, courage came from Latin and before that the cour part points back to an Indo-European kerd meaning “heart.” There is still enough similarity between this Indo-European kerden and the Old English heorte that you can see that the Indo-European root actually did percolate up into both Latin and Germanic languages.
Quote reblogged from One Bite at a Time
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.
Photo reblogged from proust73 with 200 notes
This barrel-shaped desk clock designed by Charlotte van der Waals has 12 sides, each with the name of two major cities. Altogether, the 24 cities represent the 24 Global Time Zones. To find the local time in another time zone, simply roll the clock so the city representing that time zone is on top. I love this!
☺ Paws: Kewlness!
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The “lone inventor” is in fact an invention. Apparently, the independent genius is always someone who has a deep understanding of existing technologies and has the inspiration to combine them in new ways.
El “inventor solitario” es, de hecho una invencion. Al parecer, el genio independiente siempre es alguien que tiene un profundo conocimiento de las tecnologias existentes y tiene la inspiración para combinarlas en nuevas formas.
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I like this part
So ultimately all of these obvious changes happen only on the basis of momentary change. If momentarily not changing then obvious big changes cannot take place.
It is so simple but so powerful.
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Coding Simplicity: How to Avoid Feature Creep in Your Life →
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Think about how life was like only 20 years ago — no one was using the Internet (basically), we didn’t have IM or email or Twitter or blogs or any of the other complications we have today. And 50 years ago, no one had personal computers, caller ID, cable TV, fax machines, washing machines, CD players. Go back 100 years, a thousand, and then ten thousand, and you’ll see how many features have been added into our lives.
Think about when you started out as an adult: you might have had basically nothing, including no debt (until you got that first student credit card, car loan and perhaps student loan), no furniture, no house full of stuff, no long to-do list. Now, this might not be the ideal life (you also might have had no means to do anything, or a solid career, or skills) … but you had a fresh slate. No features was a negative, but there was also no bloat.
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