I’m moving my blog to http://startup-technology.herokuapp.com. Wordpress.com has too much control that it feels like overhead, Svbtle has too little control so that I can’t get at information I want, and its makers are unresponsive when I try to contact them.
Self-hosting seems like the best solution right now.
See you at http://writing.londonstartuptech.com/ !
I made a widget for adding a rainbow to your profile pictures, so you can show your support of LBGTQ people during the Sochi Winter Olympics. This post is why I did it, how I did it and what I learned.
LGBTQ people have a hard time of it in Russia. In the run-up to the Winter Olympics 2014 in Sochi (a city in West Russia), Russian president and Dobby the house-elf-lookalike Vladmir Putin said that gay people would be welcome but they had to leave children in peace. Anti-gay sentiments like this have led to gang violence against gay people.
During the Sochi opening ceremony, Rebecca Front a British comic actress, popped up on my Twitter feed with this:
I’ve no idea by what magic he did it, but @RupertMyers is adding rainbowness to avatars for a bit of LGBT solidarity. Plus it looks nice
— Rebecca Front (@RebeccaFront) February 7, 2014
Rupert Myers was adding Rainbow...
This is the last in a four-part series about starting a company. The previous posts have been about taking a project and making it into a business, learning to understand your customer and developing a product.
This last post is all about ramping up. Here, I’ll tell you how to take the business you’ve started and grow it.
If you’ve been following this whole series then you should already have a pretty strong understanding of who your customer is and what problem you’re solving. You should have a strong idea of why your solution works for your customers. Most importantly, you are absolutely certain that your solution will make you money.
The next step is to grow your strong understanding of the customer and the solution they need into a profitable business.
If there’s one message about growing your business that you should repeat in the mirror each morning, set...
The previous post in this series was a method for understanding your customers. This post is about developing a product. The next and final post will be about ramping up your business.
Product is a pretty vague word. Let’s start by trying to define it. Open up a text editor, or grab some paper and a pen, and write down a definition of what a product is. Take as long as you need, I’ll still be here whenever you’re finished.
I’m serious, do it!
Done it yet?
I’m going to assume you’ve either written it down now, or that you’re not going to bother. If you haven’t written it, then at least spend a second getting an idea in your head.
Done?
OK, so let’s think about some things you might have written down. Did you say something like “a product is a tangible item that people will pay money for”? This is MBA-speak for a product, used to distinguish products from...
The previous post in this series was about changing your thinking from a project mindset of making something that people like, to a business mindset of making a sustainable product with paying customers.
This post is about understanding who your customer is, and what they want.
Businesses sell things. You need to have a product to sell but, as I said in the last post, you don’t know what to build until you know who you’re building it for. Without customers, this looks like a vicious cycle. Where do you begin when the customers are needed before you can make the product, and the product is needed in order to draw in customers?
The answer is to start with a hypothesis for both, a best guess of who your customer is and what the product they need looks like. (The next post in this series is about developing products.)
Once you have a hypothesis about the...
This is the first in a four-part series on starting a company. Today’s post is about how you turn a project into a business. The next article in this series is about working out who your customer is.
The main difference between a project and a business is that a business’s aim is to make money and a project’s aim is anything else.
This has a profound impact on the idea of perfection. Perfection in a project normally means satisfying your own opinions but perfection in a business means the qualities that make your product valuable to customers, which might be totally different.
Businesses must always be trying to sell to customers in order to understand what is valuable to them, so they know what kind of perfection they should be striving for.
I remember talking to a friend of a friend about startup companies at a social occasion last year. This was an...
Ruby on Rails is the most mature web framework that most new companies use for making their web-apps. While Rails decides a lot for you, there’s often a choice of which library or plugin to use to accomplish any given goal. After doing several varied Rails projects, these are the libraries I always use to make my life easier.
Use Carrierwave. You’ll see some people advocating for Paperclip or Attachment-Fu but I’ve tried all three and Carrierwave is easier to use. It works very well with storing on Amazon and makes it easy to do things like caching uploads on forms, generating expiring URLs and pre-processing uploaded images.
Use Devise. It’s very flexible, makes OpenID and automated emailing super-simple. It’ll also auto-generate views for you, so you don’t need to bother writing your own from scratch. I’ve never even thought to look for anything else, it’s...
Why your new business should get lots of users right now; some creative ways of getting them.
There are three types of people you need to consider when trying to sell your product: the User, the Customer and the Buyer.
In the case of a person who goes into a shop, decides they want a Twirl then buys it and eats it, these are all the same person. In the case of a big corporation that buys something new for their employees to use, these are probably three totally different people.
As an early-stage business, you should...
A collection of technology pitfalls I’ve seen non-technical startup founders make, and how to avoid them.
This is an easy one. If you want to start a company where users all sign up to use Service X but the technology for Service X isn’t going to be ready for 1 month, you shouldn’t just spend that month sitting around and playing on Twitter.
You should go out and get the users anyway. Getting users is hard for pretty much every startup in its early days, so don’t delay doing it. Keep a spreadsheet of email addresses, write down phone numbers of everyone you meet who expresses an interest in what you’re doing, post about what you’re doing in forums and get contact details from everyone who replies.
When your technology is ready to go, you’ll have hundreds of accounts from day one, and you can avoid that empty-desert feel new sites sometimes have.
Git is better than what we had before but it’s not great. Download my pdf cheatsheet for free if you want a clear guide to git that thinks the way you do.
Git is a modern, distributed version control system, replacing older, centralized systems like Subversion. It has emerged as the de facto answer to storing historical information about changes to files, at least among software developers.
Git is powerful and it’s a lot better than Subversion. But it’s not great. I think that statement is objectively true for three important usability reasons.
Good software helps the user to feel in control. Git doesn’t. Let’s look at a relatively simple command:
git add <files>
This is the command you use to tell git that you want to include certain files in the next batch of work you commit. Let’s look at the help-text description:
This command updates the index using...