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Hacker News | Balsamiq hits $100,000 in revenue
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The “build a great product and they will come” myth is bullshit 99% of the time (unless you have a built in marketing engine– SEO or viral). Balsamiq won the same reason that 37s did (and JoelonSoftware for that matter)… They had a great story, told it well, and the story happened to resonate/be interesting to their exact target market (web geeks / entrepreneurs).
Bravo!
But try to build great software for supply chain management, or managing a beauty parlor and let me know how “everything else will follow” there. There’s a reason that SalesForce.com (which, arguably, has/had a great product) has spent 60-70% of their topline on sales and marketing.
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Personally, I feel that we worry way too much about keeping our source code top-secret. One reason people think source code is valuable is because “the resulting product is valuable, so therefore the source code is even more valuable, right?” … well, no. The product is valuable because of the thousands of small decisions you made as you were developing the product. The source code is just the manifestation of those decisions. In other words, the product is valuable because of its design, not because of the source code that describes that design. Just because someone has access to a product’s source code doesn’t mean they can make valuable decisions about it. And if they can’t do that, then they can’t “steal” your hard work by building on top of it and selling it. They just don’t have the domain experience to do that. Plus, they would always be slightly behind you in terms of development, because you’re constantly adding new features and fixing bugs.
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Hit $100,000 in revenue, time to start looking up | The Balsamiq Blog
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I just recently surpassed $100,000 of revenue. Balsamiq has been in business for less than 5 months, so as you can imagine this level of success goes beyond my wildest dreams.
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geek.teacher » Blog Archive » One way I use Diigo
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A few months back, after checking out the options available, I switched over to using Diigo. It offers more options, and has some nice grouping features. Also, I primarily use it because it can send links to delicious every time I make a new bookmark, and would import from delicious when I started, but delicious doesn’t offer the same options. This way I have a backup of my bookmarks, as well as access to tools that interact with delicious. This way, too, if I’ ever someplace that blocks one but not the other, I won’t find myself lost in the middle of a lake without a paddle.
Like most of the social networking tools, I more or less exclusively use it as a professional resource. I do the personal posting thing in Twitter to some degree because everybody does, and it’s what makes the community a way of getting to know people, but I’m really there for interacting with other educators. This blog primarily, but not always, deals with education. Any nings I belong to are education-related, and of the major social networking sites, the only one I’m on is LinkedIn, a professional resource. Diigo is the same for me. It’s all about things tangentially related to education.
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Five whys: The startup immune system, Part 1 – Venture Hacks
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Summary: Whenever you find a defect, ask why five times to discover the root cause of the problem. Then make corrections at every level of the analysis. By applying five whys whenever you find a defect, you will (1) uncover the human problems beneath technical problems and (2) build an immune system for your startup.
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When something goes wrong, we tend to see it as a crisis and seek to blame. A better way is to see it as a learning opportunity. Not in the existential sense of general self-improvement. Instead, we can use the technique of asking why five times to get to the root cause of the problem and make corrections.
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- Why was the website down? The CPU utilization on all our front-end servers went to 100%.
- Why did the CPU usage spike? A new bit of code contained an infinite loop!
- Why did that code get written? So-and-so made a mistake.
- Why did his mistake get checked in? He didn’t write a unit test for the feature.
- Why didn’t he write a unit test? He’s a new employee, and he was not properly trained in Test Driven Development (TDD).
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- Bring the site back up.
- Remove the bad code.
- Help so-and-so understand why his code doesn’t work as written.
- Train so-and-so in the principles of TDD.
- Change the new engineer orientation to include TDD.
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Making corrections builds your startup immune system.
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5 whys uncovers the human problems beneath technology problems.
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Make your corrections proportional to the cost of the defect.
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