There comes a day in every non-technical entrepreneurs life when they ask their technical co-founder (or any software developer) for a time estimate.

The technical co-founder (or software developer) will ruminate for a few seconds, and then give an estimate that is more than a few hours.

The technical co-founder won’t go away and spent an half-hour thinking through all of the ramifications and how complex the yak will be to shave.

And it is at this point that you can safely ignore the estimate.

There’s no point pressing for a better estimate, or asking them to go away and think about the problem.

Your technical co-founder or software developer believes they are correct.

And that’s okay, because you need to learn to read estimates as much as your developer needs to learn how to give them.

You should always approach your discount policies in a systematic and data-driven way.

Anything less means you are just leaving money on the table.

Chat interfaces combined with IoT will bring a whole new level of anthropomorphization to objects and items in our lives that we have never seen before.

This isn’t just another talking teddy bear that keeps your kids company.

It’s not a simple, brain dead thermostat that can adjust the temperature when you ask it to.

It is a real conversation that lets you ask deep, meaningful questions about the environment that the IoT device is aware of.

Your technical co-founder will take time to implement that seemingly simple feature because they insist on handling all of the error cases as they proceed.

And that’s okay, because you need to understand that within even a simple feature there is nuance and error conditions that must be handled.

I’m not really an entrepreneur, I just play one on the internet.

You know what Enterprise software needs?

The iPhone experience.

Enterprise software needs an Apple-esque user experience.

Mobile apps have become an international phenomenon and localization doesn’t just mean localizing text into whatever language is used in a particular geographic region.

If your app, or the back-end service that powers the app, needs to address the customer in any way, you need to diligently localize that too.

This is especially true for non-English speaking countries where it is reasonable to assume they have different naming conventions and styles of address, e.g. Japan or Germany.

You also need to ensure you don’t run afoul of courtesy titles or honourifics, e.g. “Mr” in a country where only credentialed professionals may use such a prefix.

If your intent is to lock up your users’ content by demanding that someone else download your smartphone app after the creator of the content shares a link to their creation, then you are intentionally fragmenting the open web, and that is not the web that we all have come to know and love.

At some point your technical co-founder will think you’re the biggest asshole on this planet.

All strong relationships are built on disagreements and compromises.

How can you differentiate between unconstrained, destructive trolling and insightful, constructive criticism?

If you pay attention to all feedback, nothing happens because you’re too busy responding or pulled in too many directions at once until you please nobody.

If you ignore all feedback you create in a vacuum, and learn nothing at all from how to improve your product or what your audience wants.

The valuable skill we have to learn, if we build products for anybody but ourselves, is filtering – figuring out what voices and opinions to listen to, and which to ignore.

It’s okay to gather all opinions and feedback, but like medical patients in an emergency room; triaging the important stuff from the not so important stuff.

In the world of apps, our smartphone’s home screen is the new San Francisco – space is at a premium.

Oh, and just like San Francisco you cannot hire a developer to build it for you because they are busy working on their own start-up.

What happens when your message isn’t congruent with your actions?

I just got around to installing Windows 7 (an absolutely terrible operating system if you do anything more than email and web browsing) on one of the workstations at the office and I needed to read through a PDF document but didn’t yet have Adobe Reader installed.

I know Adobe Reader is a slow piece of bloated, bug-ridden nonsense and thought it might be time to look for alternatives.

Googling around I find out about Foxit and have heard good things from a few people so thought I would give it a quick whirl.

And I got slimed.

Installing the software just feels like a nasty, slimy experience as you click through all of the “No, I don’t want a new toolbar. No, I don’t need you to re-write my homepage bookmark. No, I don’t need eBay stuck on my browser either.”

By the time I hit the “would you like us to stick bookmarks to trusted websites you already have in your browser?” I was done and it was time to stop the install process.

The wording of each option is very forked tongue.

I had flashbacks to the 1990’s with the beginnings of the Internet and my first encounters with “behind your back, let me fuck your machine up” software installations.

AOL strangely comes to mind.

The phrasing of each option is done in such a way that you either aren’t sure if you need the toolbar for the software to work, whether you’re turning it off, turning it on, or are just asking to be bent over and taken without any kind of lube.

Okay, let’s stop this installation.

But there’s no “Cancel” button.

And No “Back” button.

Another incongruity.

”We’re so convinced you’ll love our software and all of the bloat that we bundle with it that we don’t need to provide you with the option to cancel.”

I quickly decide to bring up Task Manager and just kill the install process before this goes any further.

Here’s someone else who had the same issues with the software installer I did. http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2009/05/why-i-flushed-foxit.html

The marketing message states one thing, the actions of the software, and the company behind the software, are clearly something else.

So what other products does the company behind Foxit produce and sell?

I don’t know.

I don’t care.

I will never find out because through a single experience of dealing with a slimy piece of software that left a bad taste.

I won’t ever consider using any of their software in the future.

This is what happens when you have an incongruent message, you switch off your potential customers.

You destroy a future relationship.

How much money are you making by bundling distasteful practices in to your free software, to make a quick buck?

You louse up potential future sales because the user is no longer interested enough to look at what other products you create.

At least with Adobe Reader I know how to turn off what I don’t want and the registry patches you need to apply are clearly documented on various websites.

Before partnering up with a cofounder its worth finding out what their negotiation style is like.

Is it adversarial?

Is it manipulative?

Is it logical?

Is it strategic?

Worse, is is sulky, sullen and angry (a form of manipulation) until you acquiesce?

A lot of your cofounder’s negotiation style will stem from their home life, so it is worth looking there as much as asking questions.

In the near future we will talk about the wars that came before.

The wars between the behemoths of the technology industry as they fought for dominance.

The wars where they fought to deliver  physical products directly to your door as quickly as possible.

You will meet developers who will do it for less than the other developer.

There is a valuable lesson in hiring inexpensive amateurs to fuck everything up for you.

Your developer will want recognition.

And your job is to give it to them.

Every day.

I’ve yet to see any business fail because the founders were persistent.

Too often they fail due to distraction and lack of consistency.

If you are only building your product to match with current uses cases of how users work, then you are already falling behind your competition.

Perhaps I am just being overly sensitive to this.

I have noticed that there is a prevalence of late for website sign-up forms to ask for not only the usual information such as a user name, but the ever ubiquitous and completely useless date of birth and now, this week, your gender!

And it isn’t just optional either, it is mandatory.

You will have a gender, damn it!

Yahoo! Mail, Google, Skype, SightSpeed, Windows Live, and at least two popular social bookmarking sites and a Firefox plug-in all have a mandatory “gender” field.

Why do you need to know my gender?

For marketing purposes?

I don’t want to be marketed to.

For sales analysis by your staff?

That benefits you, not me.

So you can uniquely identify me?

Choose something else.

My personal details are my own to reveal not yours to own.

I find being forced to reveal gender, sexual orientation, date of birth, or most other details about me, involuntarily, is an annoyance and offensive.

And I am not the only one I am sure.

The information I divulge is entirely up to me, not you.

Requiring name, date of birth, or gender does only two things: it annoys your customers off, ensuring they won’t be giving you their business, and if they do go to all the trouble of informing you of this information, you now have a polluted database because they just signed up with completely false details showing that they are a female Doctor/Baroness/Sir born on January 1st 1901 who loves the movie “Go fuck yourself!”* whose first pet was called “And your dog!”

I love telling people in customer support at my bank that one when they ask for my secret pass phrase so that they can “verify my identity.”

Customer Support: “And to whom am I talking to right now?”

Me: “Justin Lloyd. The account holder.”

Customer Support: “You’re a man.”

Me: “You are very observant.”

Customer Support: “Can you verify your date of birth for me?”

Me: “Yes, January 1st, 1901.” (or whatever earliest date that their dumb computer system will take)

Customer Support: “And can you answer the question, What is your favourite movie?”

Me: “Go fuck yourself!”

*pregnant pause*

Customer Support: “And how may I help you today Baroness Justin Lloyd?”

The moral of the story is, if you are in business and in the habit of collecting data to benefit you, you’re an idiot and your data is worthless.

* Actually I use an equally interesting, equally childish but completely different “favourite movie” now.

Phone designs, like fashion, move fast.

And they mostly move in herds.

Incremental changes to design are quickly emulated.

Technological tweaks are rapidly assimilated in the next generation of a competitor’s handset.

Are you tweaking? Or are you innovating?

Change is slow.

And change is hard.

And change comes at a cost.

And change must be paid for.

And change can have an uncertain outcome.

And yes, change can be painful but it needn’t be.

But change, change is what drives us, as entrepreneurs, forward into a tomorrow that is different than today.

I’ll take change over the status quo every day.

Your next developer will think your previous developer was an idiot.

If developers all agreed on how to solve a problem, technology wouldn’t move forward.

What I want to be able to do is take a picture of the IO ports on my TV, stereo, laptop, phone, computer monitor, printer, and so on, directly with my iPhone, then have the phone tell me which cables I need to hook up the two devices.

If you create products (or a service) for any length of time, you’ve dealt with the product feedback troll.

The person who needs to voice their opinion about your product (or service) in a non-actionable way, or in a way that is not useful to improving your product.

The art of dealing with a product troll is to practice feedback triage regularly, determining which opinions are valuable and which opinions are just noise.

The biggest issue I have with apps on iPhone OS is not the apps themselves, but discoverability of the apps.

This is going to become a huge problem in the near future, e.g. 3 to 5 years.

And whilst there are ways you can increase your ability to acquire users, the biggest issue will always be how do users find out about your app in the store?

Product market fit isn’t some mythical thing that happens to other people by random chance because they found the end of the rainbow.

Product market fit is something that every start-up is capable of achieving, but the process is Sam and Frodo crawling semi-naked over razor sharp rocks in an inhospitable landscape until they reach the fiery end.

You will insist that your technical co-founder installs the kitchen so you can show off the luxury of the fixtures to potential investors before the roof is on the house and before any other room in the house is finished.

And that’s okay, because we all need to learn the proper order of things and how much we can fudge before it fails.

Someone (probably Amazon) will attempt to deliver packages to your door by flying drone in the very near future.

Doesn’t matter if the drone automated or not.

Direct to your door.

By drone.

In under an hour.

Click.

Pay.

Delivered.

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the software developer can only advise his client to redesign the UI.

Paraphrasing Frank Lloyd Wright.

I keep getting offered SEO copywriting services by people who I swear have English as a second language.

Sorry to say it, but I wouldn’t trust these people to replace the dead lightbulb, lamp, bulb, light, globe Earth, planet, flower, flash, lights, floodlights, lanterns, stars, torches, tapers in my office, den, work, workshop, shop, store, grocery, groceries, laundry detergent, soap.