Archive for 2015

If you envision yourself as an entrepreneur, but you need validation from other people, I guarantee that you you’ll never make your start-up successful.

People don’t validate other people until after they are a success.

Your technical co-founder will become frustrated because you ask for a feature you cannot explain why you need.

And that’s okay, because you need to rationally think and be able to describe every single feature you want.

Otherwise, you’re just wasting everyone’s time.

Especially your end users’ time.

Before you adopt the strategy of building a product without any kind of user interface, realise that you have made how to use your product completely opaque.

We have spent the last 30+ years educating users on how to interact with computers through easily discoverable user interfaces.

I see a lot of start-ups now proposing we get rid of that paradigm.

I applaud you for trying new things, but “no user interface” is still a “user interface.”

And user interfaces are like jokes. If you have to explain it, it’s probably not very good.

You ain’t shit if you can’t ship.

You will be dazzled by someone with an opinion on the best way to implement this.

We need to be exposed to lots of snake oil salesmen to be on guard for the next salesman selling a shiny bullet.

A business that’s building a web application needs to realise it requires two separate websites.

There’s the website for the app, and then there’s the website for the marketing.

Keep them separated and you won’t go crazy.

Combine them, and you’ll make your customers crazy.

This is why I don’t like software that auto-updates by default and cannot be easily disabled.

Today I had to explain to a client why the product launch is going to be delayed from today until tomorrow.

The development environment on the software developers’ computers updated at 2AM last night and everybody is dead in the water until we figure out what the breaking changes were.

If you make decisions about what you want from life based purely on money or what other people think of you, you won’t ever achieve anything and you won’t ever be happy.

This is applicable to you personally.

To your start-up.

To the products you develop.

To the funding you raise.

To ultimately, how you exit.