Startup Mullings

A Week in the Startup Life (Week 10)

Note: The content here is from May but I’m trying to catch up soon. The introductions are retrospective but the daily notes are kept in the present tense. Hopefully it’s not too confusing.

The first lesson this week was that using Open Source libraries may start off being very helpful but as your product gets more complicated you will most likely have to customize it to do what you want or create your own replacement. We used an Infinite Scroll library that we had to modify and we’ve also had to modify the an image gallery plugin to do what we want. It’s definitely a good way to get started and there’s no point in reinventing the wheel but be aware that as your product grows the tools and libraries you use will need to be updated. The second lesson was that it’s amazingly useful having a coding cofounder and not because two can write more code than one. It’s great having a second perspective on the technical details as well as someone to call me out for being lazy and taking shortcuts. It’s also difficult to QA your own code so having someone else look at it is helpful. In general, it’s great to have overlapping set of skills between the cofounders and a goal for me is to improve my UX skills.

Here’s week ten:

• 5/21 - Added more events to be tracked in MixPanel and cleaned up the timezone issues for the various social networks we were pulling from. Had a chat with MaxPanel about the best way to track different events and got some useful feedback.
• 5/22 - Gave users ability to delete their own moments. Started caching commonly used templates and HTML.
• 5/23 - Spent some time working on financials around the stock options I was granted in the prior job. The goal was to discover how much I’d need to pay to exercise them as well estimate the tax liability.
• 5/24 - We create our own plugin to have Facebook albums load in Galleria rather than rely on the one provided by Galleria. We need to rewrite this one of these days.
• 5/25 - Fixed some bugs that Sandy discovered around liking/reposting of moments and Facebook albums. Implemented cascading of likes/reposts as well as dealing with the privacy issues that arose from reposting of moments.
• 5/26 and 5/27 - Took the weekend off

Eating Yourself: Innovation through Cannibalization

I was rereading the HBR paper on Strategies for Two Sided Markets and came across a passage describing Apple’s mistake of trying to monetize both sides of their market, the consumers and the developers, rather than focusing on one like Microsoft did by giving away the SDK for free.

It got me thinking about Apple’s recovery. Many people credit the iPod with revitalizing Apple but I think there’s more than that. I suspect the bigger reason was the decline of desktop software and the ability to be productive on the web. Suddenly the network effects that existed by having software that only worked on Windows no longer existed. Software started migrating to the web and people were more willing to try new operating systems out. In 2006, I switched to Linux without too much trouble. It was also simple to find help online to deal with the various issues I ran into which made the transition easier. In some ways, Google helped Apple recover by speeding up the move to the web with a more accurate search and a good set of productivity apps.

In general, it’s damn difficult to overcome network effects. Google will not be replaced by a search engine. Facebook will not be replaced by a social network. These network effects will be broken by a behavioral change. Instagram rode this wave of behavioral change of the move to mobile and it was a savvy move for Facebook to make the acquisition. It makes you wonder what Instagram could have become had it stayed independent.

Innovation is cannibalization. By pushing the envelope of technology, pioneering companies cause behavioral changes that will give rise to companies that may end up replacing them. As Clay Christensen notes, it’s rare for a mature company to put resources behind a disruptive technology that will cannibalize itself but it’s the only way to stay relevant. Only 13% of the companies in 1955’s Fortune 500 made the list in 2011. It’s amazing to see how quickly things change and the pace is only getting quicker.

In Defense of Yahoo

Reading recent tech coverage makes you think that each newly startup is more valuable than Yahoo. Yahoo is the 4th most visited site in the world with over 300 million users on Yahoo mail. This is a problem every startup should hope to have.

User acquisition is the most difficult task for a consumer startup. User attrition is an easier problem to solve than user acquisition. Yahoo doesn’t need to build a product that’s 10 times better than the competition, they just need to simplify and improve what they already have. Yahoo also has massive usage among the mass market with millions of people having Yahoo as their home page. These are not the same people that sign up for every startup featured on TechCrunch. Yahoo has challenges but worrying about user acquisition is not one of them. Yahoo will need to develop a vision and relentlessly pursue it. The culture will need to change and vested interests will need to be broken.

It’s easy to criticize Yahoo for ignoring Google and Facebook but impossible to say what Yahoo should be doing now. I look forward to seeing what happens to Yahoo with Marissa Mayer at the helm.

The Startup Advantage: Details, Details, Details

A frustration I’ve been experiencing more and more is having to reload a webpage in order to change the date range in the options. If a company expects me to keep a site open for more than a day they should make it easy for me to update the options. The big example is Google Analytics - I open up a page, choose a date range, and get to see my charts. If I keep the tab open and want to want to run the same analysis the next day, I’m forced to reload the page to even be able to include today in the date range. It’s an unnecessary action for the user and it would be easy to correct this behavior with some simple Javascript.

Such small details don’t matter individually but together they reflect a lack of empathy for the user that impacts a company culture. We should always be striving to make a user’s experience better and doubly so whenever it’s actually an easy fix. Other easily fixable examples I’ve seen are clearing entire forms when there’s an error with one field and not highlighting the field that’s giving the error.

I suspect the reason these aren’t fixed is a managerial problem. The application works and there’s no reason to go back when there are all sorts of new shiny things that can be built. No one wants to do a cost vs value analysis for these minor fixes so they stay the way they are. I suppose you need to either build things the right way immediately, fix it without letting anyone know, or resign to leaving it alone.

There’s a reason startups tend to have better products. They don’t go through analyses to determine whether to make minor changes, all it takes is for someone to decide that something needs to be fixed and the next deployment, probably within a few hours, will have it solved. Combined with the massive sense of ownership that comes with working at a startup, that’s a lot of improvements that would be done at a startup but not a larger company.

Need for Speed - A Week in the Startup Life (Week 9)

Note: The content here is from ~2 months ago but I’m hoping to catch up soon. I’m going to start writing the introductions retrospectively but keep the daily notes in the present tense. Hopefully it’s not too confusing but let me know if is.

This was another productive week getting our new profile page ready. Our goal was to make Glossi’s profile pages look better by adding a larger image and an improved layout. We also wanted to increase the speed as much as we could. An approach we ended up implementing is to first load the user’s profile information and then load the user’s social media content asynchronously. This way the top of the page loads immediately and the content appears when it’s ready. Because the page is broken into various components it also became easier to cache certain fragments and further improve the site speed. One issue with this approach is that the Google bot doesn’t crawl the asynchronous content so we’re working on a fix.

Here’s week nine:

• 5/14 - Made a ton of improvements to Glossi’s infinite scroll to prepare for the new profile page. I’m much more comfortable with Javascript now so I made some changes to the library and submitted a fork request on github. Our goal was to make the infinite scroll library load from a different url based on user actions on the page which the existing library didn’t support.
• 5/15 - Finally got multiple queues working using Celery and RabbitMQ. This allows us to have high priority and regular tasks treated differently. This also leads to site speed improvement since we can do certain things asynchronously that we weren’t comfortable with doing before since we weren’t confident that they would get done in time. The reason I didn’t do this earlier was because I made code changes in quite a few places and I wasn’t confident in being able to test it properly. After developing a testing approach I became more comfortable with getting it ready for deployment.
• 5/16 - Spent the day working on the new Glossi profile layout which should launch in a few weeks. In the evening, I caught up with a friend who’s working on a startup. We had a pretty interesting discussion about focusing while having a grand vision and how to choose an initial market to target.
• 5/17 - Made some performance improvements to the newly improved infinite scroll by tracking prior calls and only calling when there’s a chance that something will be retrieved. Met up with an old college friend of mine who’s working on a few startup ideas. Contrasting with his first startup (that was successfully sold), he’s focused on building a company that can generate revenue from day one. I wonder if this is a trend
• 5/18 - Fixed up minor bugs with the infinite scroll, multiple queues, and went through server logs and fixed a few issues uncovered by the Google crawler having to do with old cached pages.
• 5/19 - My wife and I held a Miss Representation screening and had a good discussion about women’s portrayal in the media. Watching it also gave me the idea to scrape some data from IMDB and look at the trend of actor vs actress ages in movies. A light Glossi day.
• 5/20 - Started incorporating Mixpanel into Glossi - amazingly well designed product that’s simple to implement and fun to use. I still have a few questions about tracking certain events but I’ll try to figure them out over the next few days.

Achieving Browser Autocomplete

Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about habits. How do they form? How do they change? And the selfish one - how can you build a product that is habit forming? My cofunder sent me a great Nir & Far blog post that goes into detail about generating desire which is a great read to anyone building a consumer product.

Along these lines, I decided to be a bit introspective and see which products and sites are a part of my habit. A simple way was to type each letter of the alphabet into the Google Chrome address bar and see what site autocompletes. Here goes:

• analytics.google.com
• bankofamerica.com
• cad-comic.com/cad
• docs.google.com
• eventbrite.com
• facebook.com
• glos.si
• heroku.com
• instapaper.com
• joinblended.com
• klout.com
• linkedin.com
• maps.google.com
• news.ycombinator.com
• optimum.com
• plus.google.com
• questionablecontent.net
• reader.google.com
• startupmullings.com
• twitter.com
• udacity.com
• voice.google.com
• wixlounge.com
• xkcd.com
• youtube.com
• zerply.com

After excluding my sites (glos.si and startupmullings.com), we can organize them into the following categories:

• Entertainment (the comic sites - xkcd, QC, CAD; Youtube; Google Reader)
• Social Networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Twitter)
• Utilities (Google analytics/docs/voice, Bank of America, Instapaper, Eventbrite, Optimum, Heroku)
• The rare letters (Zerply, Udacity, Wix Lounge). I’d like to include Klout on this list rather than admit to browsing it but I don’t know if that will be believable.

Every consumer site should strive to get to browser autocomplete status for some users rather than being semi-popular to more users. Being useful to a few passionate users and growing with their help is a much better approach than trying to immediately appeal to the mass market.

And although this exercise may be embarrassing, I’d love to see what others have as their 26 sites.

A Week in the Startup Life (Week 7)

A pretty exciting week - very productive first half and then an awesome trip to Austin. It’s good to take a break every once in a while to relax a bit and get some new perspective. Travelling is a great way to get some new experiences which can help influence the decisions you make for your product. Just as it’s important to have diversity in the workplace to surface a wide range of ideas and perspectives, it’s important to also have variety in your experiences.

Here’s week seven:

• 4/30 - Some serious coding today. Improved our image extraction for RSS feeds and deeplinks. Improved performance of our album display code. Started working on some new Glossi social features that let you interact with other people’s moments better. Ended up meeting with the Glossi team in the morning to discuss our roadmap and met a bay-area entrepreneur who was in town for lunch.
• 5/1 - Had an interview with ERA in the morning about attending their program. We could have definitely done a better job explaining what we’re about and our goal but on the whole we did a pretty good job. Spent the day working with the cofounder and in the evening hosted the first NY Web Tech Scaling meetup. Now I need to find a presenter for the next meetup.
• 5/2 - Discussed the past week’s progress with a potential client and went over the launch plan - definitely a lot of small things that need to be taken care of before launch. Met up with the cofounder to code and ended up improving a variety of small things. I’ve definitely improved in the Javascript department and ended up simplifying a ton of code.
• 5/3 - 5/6 - A short trip to Austin for a wedding of a high school friend. We went with a large group of people and had a great time. I’ve never been to SXSW so this was a good introduction to Austin.

A Month in the Startup Life (Week 6)

So this week had some highs and lows. We were very productive with Glossi and got a lot done but my grandfather passed away after a battle with cancer. I’m going to miss his motivation and inability to remain idle. I remember him visiting our house for some sort of celebration and quickly start raking leaves - after which he’d yell at us kids to clean up the piles. I’m amazed by his work ethic and wish I can bring half as much to Glossi.

Here’s week six:

• 4/23 - A productive day of coding with very few distractions. Almost finished up albums and did a bunch of work improving the way we pull short content. Made some improvements to our Google+ integration by going through some debug logs and identifying some areas for improvement.
• 4/24 - Added thumbnails to the Glossi album displays and spent time with Git merging the various branches together. Did a bit of code refactoring. Finished up a blog post.
• 4/25 - Started discussing the release plan with the client as well as sharing the album display feature we’ve developed. Did a bit more work in the afternoon around refactoring our album display and started thinking about developing this type of display for Facebook albums.
• 4/26 - Started working on JS/CSS compression and cache invalidation. In the past we’ve run into issues with browsers caching our JS/CSS files instead of loading the new version causing a crappier user experience so we’re trying to make this a non-issue. This required us moving a bunch of JS code from our template into JS files.
• 4/27 - My grandfather passed away a few days ago and we had the funeral today. He had an amazing life - fought in World War II as a teenager and moved his entire family to the United States. I’ll miss him and his need to always be working.
• 4/28 - Pretty light coding day. We improved our deeplink code after looking at some examples of failures. We also removed a bunch of code and pages that were no longer used.
• 4/29 - Not a lot of coding today but set up some meetings for the following week to meet with other entrepreneurs working in a similar space. There are lots of companies with lots of different ideas trying to tackle this space.

Selling to the enterprise? Target the consumer

A trend I’ve been noticing more and more is enterprise sales being done bottoms up. The typical approach is to offer a free trials or have some sort of freemium product. Each sign up is then treated as an inbound lead that is assigned an account manager. Within two weeks of signing up for New Relic I was contacted by an account manager who helped answer my questions and helped me get New Relic set up for Glossi. Working with him, we were able to get a longer trial period and a discounted price for when we’re ready to upgrade. HubSpot found that inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound leads. If having a strong SEO and Social Media presence drops acquisition costs that much imagine the drop caused by having a usable product. Although we’re a small, scrappy startup that’s quick to try new products and services, I believe this approach will become the standard way of selling SAAS in the enterprise. It’s much easier to get a person to try something new and if you can turn him into a fan, you’re one step closer to getting the company signed up.

An extreme case of this would be to initially build a product that’s focused on the consumer and only building out enterprise features when there’s a clear demand for them. A great example would be Dropbox, they initially focused exclusively on making a kick-ass experience for the consumer and only after nailing that down did they release the “Dropbox for Teams” plans. I don’t recall the history of GitHub but they may have done something similar - initially focusing on public and private repositories and then growing into the more enterprise friendly plans. This is a great approach for a product driven startup since you can focus on building your product without getting stuck in the twisted path of custom client work. But when your product and team are more fleshed out, you can focus on the additional revenue opportunities created by going after the enterprise.