Dick Costolo’s post titled “Launch Late to Launch Often” contains (as always) some terrific ideas.
Extensible architectures generally provide more long-term business value than point solutions, although point solutions may monetize a specific market more quickly
- Software that hasn’t been released can be changed in ways that become less possible N customers after launch. As N grows, so does the difficulty in refactoring some percentage of infrastructure or functionality.
- Additionally, as more than 1 copy of the software is released into production, these difficulties multiply.
- You have no idea what capabilities the market will want from your software in one year
- Customers generally value functionality and speed of ROI over flexibility and extensibility, however in order to maximize your chances for long-term success, your business values flexibility and extensibility over specific functionality.
The bottom line being that you want to invest pre-launch such that you optimize for innovation post-launch.
This is right in line with Boyd’s law - Speed of Iteration is what matters but the challenge of planning for the future versus overthinking the present is always something to keep in mind.
The point that platforms generate more value than point solutions is something that resonates strongly with us. Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 had a post along these lines talking about Aggregators (platforms) vs. content sites (point solutions.) Another great post if you’re interested in online media.
Posted on March 19th, 2007 in Personal | Comments
Alison and I were in Vancouver for the weekend and Iva offered to dog-sit. Macy loves hanging out with Iva and I was confident Iva would take great care of the dog. I was wrong. I returned yesterday evening to discover this in my email.
Apparently, Macy was the toast of the neighborhood on St. Patrick’s Day. Nothing like a big black dog in a green t-shirt to get a crowd of drunken revelers happy.
For those of you who know me well, this is probably even funnier given my take on animal abuse dressing up pets in whacky costumes.
The last week has been a hectic one at Judy’s Book. We released an update to our deals site on Monday and most of the week has been spent in addressing the numerous issues that come up post release. Dave and the engineering team did a fantastic job identifying and then whittling down our bug list.
I’ve been busy defining and working with the rest of the management team to prioritize new features. The exercise of listing out features, assessing their value, estimating their implementation complexity, and then making tough choices about how to attack them is an incredibly valuable one. If done correctly, you end up with a shared understanding of what’s important, why it’s important and what needs to be done to achieve it.
It’s going to be a busy year which in startup-land, is exactly what you want.
My apologies, my site was down for 24 hours while my hosting provider f-ed around with “deploying some quick fixes” on their end. You get what you pay for when it comes to tech.
Good times.
For the past three days, my girlfriend has been stolen by Intel. This isn’t some nefarious corporate espionage plot. Rather, they have sucked her into a web-based flash game in which you are the manager of a corporate IT department. I know, I know…who could resist?
I’m not sure what happened, but I’m sure this is related to her deep feelings for her Intel-based mac. I’ll let you know more as I get to the bottom of this.
PS: I realize that this post makes it hard to pick who the bigger geek is. She’s the one who got sucked in and I’m the one blogging about it.
We’ve been heads down for a while working on getting local deals into Judy’s Book and we released the latest iteration of our site last night. Naturally, it’s not perfect, but I’m excited about what we have put together. The real proof will be in how our users react. One of the coolest things for me is typing in a search, seeing what deals are available online and then entering a location to see what’s on sale near me.
In truth, release is only the beginning. Now the real work begins.
UPDATE:
Over the past few days, I was working with our test engineer as he was putting an upcoming release through it’s paces. I was feeling pretty good overall but I also knew that we were bound to have a bunch of issues that needed to be addressed before we were in a position to contemplate pushing the update out to production.
As I was sitting at his desk, he suddenly let out this loud Dr. Evil-esque laugh and started adding another entry to his bug list. My internal reaction was a little defensive - “why the hell are you so happy we have bugs?” - but then it clicked - he was happy he found the bug, not happy that we had it. This is exactly what you want. He was trying to prevent us from shipping software that didn’t work.
You’re never going to build perfect software and a tester who loves finding bugs isn’t a sadist, he’s just great at his job. Here’s to sadistic testers - we need more of them.
If you’re not reading Dick Costolo’s Ask the Wizard regularly, you’re missing out. He has a great post up on how to attack a competitor with dominant market share and it’s insightful and to the point. Highly recommended.
I’ll instead talk about how I think you compete against companies with lots of hidden barriers to entry. It’s quite simple - you don’t attack them by trying to compete with them head on, you don’t meet force with force. You attack them by either changing the rules of the game that’s being played or even better, you pull out the Aikido bag of tricks and use your competitor’s strength against them.
Andy has a great post on his blog about negotiating term sheets. In it he also alludes to what I think is one of the most important things you can do in business - forming a network of people who want you to succeed.
…life is long and you don’t know whether this company is going to make it (in fact odds are against you)….so if you want to do another company, you want the group of people who want to support you to be as big as possible. Those people who support you when you’ve got nothing –who took a risk on the company not because of the company but because of you…those are the people you want to keep happy and close to you.
It’s all too easy to trade off the short term for the long term and it seems that people have a tendency to do that.
One of the most (only?) predictable aspects of product development is that release dates create stress. They create stress for developers who want to finish on time and also want to create quality product. It’s stressful for management because they are anxious to have a product out in the marketplace as soon as possible and it’s stressful for ops because they are going to have to test, deploy and support a new application. They are also stressful for product managers who are in the middle of all the activity.
Release dates are also critical. They drive clarity and they force you to make explicit all the tiny little decisions that you have made and glossed over. It’s equivalent to writing down an idea you’ve been thinking about for a while. All the leaps you’ve made in your mind to make your idea hang together are forced out into your mind and onto paper. It’s important to do, but it takes work.
In spite of the stress, it’s fun too. Especially if you feel good about what you’ve been working on. Getting through test, cleaning up bugs and moving to release is a great feeling. This is also tempered by the anxiety of wondering whether users will care and by the knowledge that you’re never done - you’ve got to measure user response, get ready to iterate and also to start working on what’s next.
It’s supposed to be hard work. Nothing valuable comes easily. Also, during release time, it’s important to remember we’re all on the same team.
