Found a cool way to track what people might be saying about your website. Check out Google’s Blog Search. You can search by your company’s name and then click the RSS link on the left hand side to follow it through your RSS reader. I’ve been following Carbonmade for a while now and it allows me to respond and interact with our community.
You may have heard of Startup School, it’s an event run by the Y Combinator people. It’s a free yearly conference run out of Stanford. And this year they’re sharing the videos on the Web. I’ve seen three so far and they’ve all been great: Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com, David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals, and Greg McAdoo, Partner at Sequoia Capital. It’s really worth your time if you’re interested in startup stuff. A full list of the talks can be found here.
WOW, getting something out feels so good. We released our first update to Carbonmade in well over a year. It was just a little something, but we all feel great that we got something new out to the world. We added PayPal support (a lot of our customers are overseas), overhauled our entire billing system, re-designed several forms (sign in screen, billing screen, and a few others), updated our Privacy Policy, and a few other things.
Most of the credit goes to Jason for learning the PayPal API from scratch and coding things: a big shoutout to the self-proclaimed eater of oranges! The majority of the changes were behind-the-scenes coding changes as mentioned above, but Dave and I contributed a lot too. What a huge sigh of relief to get something out. I really can’t put it in words how good it feels.
I’m such a huge advocate of rapid iteration for web applications, so this long tenure was killing me. You need to release early and release often to be competitive in this business. Dave often uses the idea of putting something in an “incubator” to allow it to grow and for us to study it. We can see how it’s being used and change things through customer feedback. To be able to do this, though, you need to be constantly iterating. Releasing often also gives you that sense of accomplishment that helps keep you sane. I think we were all going a little batty without a recent release. There’s certainly a lot more we can do, but even something as boring as an overhauled billing system feels satisfying.
I never want to have to go so long without an update again and I don’t think we will. We all agree that we’re going to focus on smaller chunks of work from here on out. Don’t try and perfect your website out of the gate, but let it grow through an incubation process. Find a feature or area you can improve on, spec it out, design it, code it, and release it. As Nike’s famous slogan says: Just do it!
I finally folded and joined LinkedIn. I just had enough inquiries by people if I had a LinkedIn account that I just gave in and signed up today. I’m not really sure what I’m going to use it for — or if I’ll use it at all — but now I can at least answer “yes” when people ask me. I also heard that it had a nice, clean UI and so I wanted to check that out too. So far, I’m impressed.
I’m feeling a bit constrained with the blog posts I’ve been making. I’m going to switch it up a bit and just post with my gut. I want to use this blog as a stress reliever, so I don’t want to feel compelled to have to write on interesting entrepreneurial topics all the time. That being said, I’m going to take a much more casual approach to things overall, but still try to mix in serious topics every now and again. Off to meet up with some friends for a late dinner and some drinking afterward. Enjoy your evening!
I filed an extension yesterday to give me extra time to wrap up a few things. I’m coming off a year where I sold my last company in early 2007, so it’s a bit more complicated than normal years. I’ve learned a few things in the process of gathering my taxes for this year that I should have known before. The first thing is to stay organized throughout the year. I made a mistake of not staying on top of things and it’s made the last few weeks a lot more hectic than they should have been. Second thing is to contact your accountant well in advance of April 15th. I dropped the ball here as well and waited until about one month ago when almost everything was booked up. So for this next year, I’m staying a lot more on top of things by generating monthly reports and keeping my accountant in the loop with quarterly updates. By keeping better organized, you won’t see me having to file an extension for 2008 and I’ll probably spend 1/10th the amount of time trying to locate things as I did this year.
I’m not speaking of great entrepreneurs here, but rather the Masters golf tournament. I’ve been following it quite closely this year — as I do every year — as Tiger Woods is someone I look up to and watching him is a treat. His determination, dedication, and focus are unmatched. If you’ve been watching this weekend you’ve seen all three things at work for him. He’s likely going to lose to Trevor Immelman, who is having a superb Sunday, but this doesn’t take away from how Tiger is handling his game today. Tiger has had no luck at all, but fights through it with amazing grit. He’ll likely lose this tournament, but he certainly isn’t giving up. All entrepreneurs should look to Tiger Woods as an inspiration especially when the going gets tough.
As you can see from my workspace post, I work from home. nterface has an office in Chicago, but at this stage of our company’s development it’s not as essential that all three of us work out of the same space (Campfire takes care of that). As soon as we add a fourth or fifth employee, it’ll be a lot more important.
It’s often difficult to stay focused when working from home. There are just so many distractions (TV, Wii, roommate(s), DVDs, music, etc.). So lately, I’ve been working on ways to increase my productivity. The biggest boost to my productivity has been moving my workspace from my bedroom to my living room. This change probably doubled my productivity. Your bedroom is just too much of a relaxing environment: your bed is there.
Another thing I’ve done is to separate my two computers. On one computer (the one in my bedroom) I have the play stuff: my music, my videos, etc., and on my other computer (my work computer), I keep my work files and everything is geared towards work. So when I get on my work computer, it’s all work and no play. My work computer forces me to do work, because there’s nothing else to do on it, but Word, Excel, and a web browser (FireFox 3, of course).
The last thing I’ve done is to start going to my local coffee shop 2-3 times a week. I never really did this in college, even though a lot of people swore by it — I use to go to the library — but now working from my apartment, I’ve found that it’s essential to have a second thinking space. Changing spaces definitely triggers different ideas and thoughts for me.
I’ll add more productivity increasing things I’ve done in a later post.
You’ve probably seen Hugh MacLeod’s post “Why I Deleted My Twitter Account” earlier today (his cartoon is here). It’s been all over Techmeme, Twitter, and just about everywhere else on the Web. He explains that he found it “too easy” and that he’d rather focus on his books and cartoons. Admirable. But I find myself more focused with a Twitter account than without one. Let me explain why.
Twitter has changed my life in the few weeks I’ve been using it. I’ve been so passionate about it that I’ve recommended it to countless friends and a few have even taken me up on the suggestion (NeilVaidya, abullock, and vonhunne). I feel a hundred times more connected to the online community and my online friends with Twitter rather than through blogs.
The main reason I use it, though, is that I find myself being more productive — not less — using Twitter. Why? As odd as this may sound, I look forward to making posts on Twitter, but try to limit my tweets to significant events. Therefore, I find myself being more productive for the anticipation of being able to post about it on Twitter. Twitter is like a reward to doing something good for me. Strange, huh?
Why do you use Twitter? Or why don’t you?
This is somewhat of a continuation of my last post about PayPal (What is PayPal Thinking?), but branches out more generally. As far as I know, none of the original PayPal founders are still with the company: many have gone on to start new and exciting startups. Max Levchin, the most well known of the founders, is mainly credited for coming up with the idea of easily being able to pass money over the Internet. On the one hand he wanted it to be a painless process, but on the other hand he wanted it to be safe and devoid of scammers. Max is generally credited with solving PayPal’s early fraud problems through advanced mathematics.
However, I can imagine that Max certainly did not envision his fraud detection hindering legitimate users. Max goes on to say as much in the book Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. Well, just last night I went to open up a new PayPal account after being instructed to delete mine by a PayPal Representative to free up my Social Security # for my business account. The process began OK until I got to the “Add Bank Account to Verify” process. I got an error message: “Your bank account has previously been linked with another account. You must add a new one.” or something to that affect.
Now, this is clearly some sort of security measure. “OK,” I said to myself, “I’ll just contact PayPal over the phone and explain the situation. They’ll surely understand that it was they who told me to close my personal account in the first place and they’ll override this.” It turned out that not only would they not override it (~90 minutes later), but that their system was hard-coded to not even allow them be able to override it if they wanted to. What a crock. I know that if Max and the other founders of PayPal were still with PayPal and if the company still had any resemblance to its founders’ vision than this would never have happened. It’s just another example of where a startup outperforms a big company: customer service and their users’ interests in mind. So now I’m left to either never use a personal account with PayPal again or to get a new bank account. (A great post was made on a very similar subject earlier today by Fred Wilson.)
