alabut

Me too, but you need to get funded by them to participate :)

One important improvement is that it looks like they go the full product release cycle and incorporate the feedback into something testable with real users, so they go from idea generation to actually testing products or features by the end of the week.

The one on managing a remote team is still my personal favorite, 6 months later:

https://zapier.com/blog/how-manage-remote-team/

It's a great primer on workflow in general, not just remote teams. I must've referred to it a dozen times at my previous gig and kept trying to model our process after theirs when I decided to just join the real thing instead.

Slow rolling a launch reminds me of how the Facebook mafia tends to roll out their companies in measured and targeted ways, rather than trying to go viral all at once.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/13/inside-the-dna-of-the-faceb...

(scroll down to "controlled pacing")

Interesting idea for a service. Not sure if it would've solved my problems when I freelanced though, since the biggest time sink wasn't finding leads, it was all the communication before even starting a project to determine what they really needed in the first place, breaking it down by scope, priority, timing, etc.

Thanks for the writeup! I've done a couple of Startup Weekends and never thought about doing a subscription service, especially not for something I only ever eat on road trips.

Since you plan to keep the subscriptions going, I'm curious about how you plan to follow up with this project:

* do you plan on returning profits to the team?

* if so, is it evenly divided, or are individual sales tracked to the person that closed them? The latter could be the beginning of an affiliate system.

* also, would each team member get the full profit of each sale, or would you take a cut of their sales? The margins might be thin but could be interesting for the work-at-home types.

* have you learned more about sales or products during this time? i.e. did this fire you up to do sales for other existing products, or did it give you ideas for different subscription-based businesses? I can see product ideas for this - e.g. a "healthy pack" kind of offering, where you choose from jerky, nuts, dried fruit, and other Paleo-friendly road trip food, which you upsell to existing customers and hopefully make the offering more enticing to new ones - but don't see how the sales lessons scale if you tap out your friend network within a single weekend, unless you do the Amway kind of thing and just keep finding new sales people that sell to their friends.

* what's your long term plan? Do you plan on putting in more work into this?

I can think of several scenarios for the last point: to do no work and just let it ride as free money while you work on other projects; to do occasional weekend sprints of work with a team; to do little bits of work by yourself every day, like 30 minutes each morning.

I'd personally be interested in trying to learn other aspects of business that could make it grow, especially content marketing. I.e. would a blog about jerky be worth it in terms of sales? What kind of writing could you come up with that felt authentic? What kind of a time sink is it? Would it build a returning audience or be linkbait for Google? Would random people from adwords convert at all? Could you convert office managers that stock the office kitchen, or do they all use other services like Amazon? Etc.

Except it's free.

Good post. It's a developer-specific flavor of Imposter Syndrome that I've struggled with too. Must learn all the frameworks! Now! And my designer side wants to master ever style I see on Dribbble until Photoshop stands up and starts clapping.

A book that helped me overcome it is called Mindset, written by the psychology researcher Carol Dweck. I can't recommend it highly enough. Apparently the problem gets worse as you gain skills, not better, if you don't consciously take steps to counter it.

I was just chatting with a friend this weekend that I also recommended the book to because he identified Imposter Syndrone as his major obstacle in life, even though he's highly accomplished and his blog is constantly on HN. Talking to him made me realize that it not only affects more people than I realize but that it probably also affects generalists more than specialists, since being T-shaped means by definition that you can only pick a few areas to go deep.

Yeah, I miss that game. It ran for a couple of years before everyone moved on but a couple of us are thinking of putting it back together. Ping me at my HN username at gmail and I'll let you know.

This happened to me too.

My cofounder quit the day we got our email to interview and wouldn't budge no matter how much I tried to reason, cajole, or beg him to change his mind. At the time I played a weekly poker game hosted by a bunch of YC founders and I still remember walking in with two bottles of champagne in my hand that I bought before I got the breakup text and announcing "guys, I've good news and bad news and reason to drink either way".

I don't blame him at all. We had built up a ton of great chemistry working together for 6+ months but it was on a startup that flamed out with a firesale acquisition and he wanted more stability, especially with his wife grueling away at a residency to pay for their mortgage.

I still think it was a mistake though and not just on his part. He was my Woz and I would've gone to greater lengths to get him to stay if I truly had the Jobs zeal.

There's similar findings that a hungry stomach can make you more awake and even cure jet lag. It goes back to the 80's - Ronald Reagan used the technique to look fresh when landing across the globe.

http://blogs.hbr.org/2009/05/a-fast-solution-to-jet-lag/

When I learned about it last year, I figured it might also work as a technique to pull off all-nighters and tried it out whenever we had a press embargo for some feature we hadn't even created yet. It seemed to help a lot, especially for someone like me that usually needs an absurd amount of sleep to function.

Have you worked on an entire team that worked remote? Or been a remote worker on an otherwise co-located team?

Just from personal experience, I've found a huge difference between the two.

There's an entire book about why you're right and the OP's approach is generally the wrong one, called So Good They Can't Ignore You. The OP is exhibiting the classic "passion mindset" - you search your soul for your passions and if you plumb deep enough, you'll magically unlock some cheat code in the world and people will start paying you.

The book is a light intro into the field of Self-Determination Theory and it's filled with examples of people following their passion for 6 months before flaming out because no one will pay them for the thing they like to do.

Another way to put it is that making money takes practice just like playing the piano does. You're probably not going to wake up one day and realize that an empty calendar is exactly what you need to learn how people will pay you for something that nobody told you to build.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1985-making-money-takes-pract...

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110301/making-money-small-busi...

The millennial thing might be a distraction from the main point about the benefits of remote work. Some of the biggest taskmaster startup CEOs I've worked for were twenty somethings, whereas I have other friends in their 30's that have been working remotely for years. YMMV.

The best part about working remote is that it requires good teamwork because nothing will get done without solid communication, whereas colocated teams often skimp on process because they assume they'll make it up via adhoc meetings instead.

It absolutely is. I took a California Government class in college that blew my mind about how much of bipartisan political scheming is about water, to this day, because there's so much money in it.

His oft repeated quote was "when politicians agree on something and it stays out of the news, it's usually not in the public interest".

People like to make fun of Las Vegas as a city that wouldn't exist without imported water but most of So Cal wouldn't either. The bad guy in the film Chinatown is loosely based on William Mulholland, the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars

+1 for Difficult Men. Very in-depth and well written.

A head's up though: even though it was published recently, it was written just before the ascendancy of good internet TV (House Of Cards and Seinfeld's web series were nominated for Emmy's only just this year) so it mainly chronicles the rise of HBO and then Showtime, AMC, etc from a decade ago. However the parallels between premium cable and the internet are pretty clear.

It's not exactly spec work - there isn't an explicit understanding that they'll use somebody's work if its good enough; it's not commissioning a one-off project with vague promises of future work - but it's also definitely not standard practice, at least for design gigs, since it's so easy to get a feel for their work by flipping through a portfolio.

If the concern is whether they can strike the same tone and style, hiring people on a temp contract is usually a better way to go, plus then you also test if they're fast, present their work with a strong rationale, play nicely with others, etc.

Can't you just edit the file directly on Github? It's what I did recently with a one word typo I noticed while I was out of town and only had my phone.

TLDR: we often rush to building an initial version of a product when we can jump straight to manually creating value for a customer and testing demand by charging for it, then crystalize that learning into a product later.

I believe there's a corollary to this: you can jump straight to building an MVP when you're building for yourself and are confident there are others like you. I remember PG describing it (in a video that I can't find the link to) as a design pattern where the broadcast signal and receiver all within the same brain.

Even better is when the thing you build solves a real problem at a business you're running and it makes you more money. My favorite YC example is Ilya from Mixrank. He was working as an SEO consultant when he realized some of his process was abstractable as scripts, wrote some to help him do his job better, then emailed it around to other SEO colleagues to see if it helped them as well, and all of that validated learning helped him attract his technical cofounder and then build Mixrank as a product. I believe they may have even been profitable before starting YC?

Very cool. The page to sign up is here:

http://dribbble.com/teams/soon

That's how I've been using Tagg, a competing (and much uglier) device. It lets me know when the walker takes my dogs out, how much exercise they got and where they went. Plus I get the peace of mind that I can trigger a Lost My Phone kind of feature if they ever got lost.

And Krista!

Point #1 is a recent lesson learned for me. I remember seeing Robert De Niro on Inside The Actor's Studio saying essentially the same thing. He can't tell anymore while filming a movie how good it will be based on how the shoot is going, since he's been on well-run productions that flopped and chaotic stressful ones that came out great. Now he just concentrates on giving a great performance no matter what and doing a lot of work.

Also: http://dcurt.is/what-a-stupid-idea

You just described pre-Google Blogger and everything I loved about it back in the day.

I was a huge fan early on in my career of using Blogger for both work and play. It was a really flexible generator of markup files - it didn't have to be HTML, so I'd use to make RSS/XML that would get piped into XSLT to make contact directories or into a Flash site for art projects, all while keeping an easy admin interface for various people to contribute their content.

I really wanted Blogger to succeed on its own. I took an Adaptive Path workshop with Ev when it was just him and Jason running things and begged him to take my money for a premium account. He said creating a Blogger Pro was a popular request and they were working on it, but then shortly after they got acquired by Google and it wasn't long before it went downhill, especially when it stopped being a static file generator and became a bad Wordpress clone (no plugins, for example).

That's what I love about Jekyll. What's old is new again and I'm pretty much trying to recreate that great setup from 5-10 years ago for my current projects. Content-centric sites want to be in HTML, not rendered on the fly by app/centric frameworks.

I love how crazy fast your site is on my slow browser (chrome on iOS seems to drag when you've got 100+ tabs). I'm starting a blog network as a side project and setting it up as Jekyll for exactly this kind of performance.

Also love the honest assessment that in your repo's description that your setup is "far more neckbeard and far more work" :)

First the trailer for Gravity comes out and then this happens. It's almost as if real life decided space needed a marketing stunt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufsrgE0BYf0

That sounds awesome too. One thing you might want to experiment with is the opposite of Rewards - randomly timing perks so that they're unassociated with performance. This approach is shown to work on everything from mice to casino gamblers, otherwise a predictable pattern of wins just become the new normal.

This is very cool and a problem worth solving. Rypple is first the startup I heard of that focused on making employees feel good rather than simply tracking them but it only handed out compliments. This seems like the next logical step - to give perks that are tailored towards each person.

It's the same design principle - design each screen first, then abstract out templates as needed - that makes me love Jekyll, since a static website is already a valid Jekyll site and it's up to you how much you want to use Jekyll’s post, metadata, and templating functionality, if at all.

Not that you'd use Jekyll for an app like Draft, I'm just saying.

Funny to see two different S12 teams tackling Kickstarter fulfillment in complimentary ways - the other is Backerkit:

https://www.backerkit.com

Reminds me of the Malcolm Gladwell anecdote about how orchestra auditions are usually biased unless they hide the musicians behind a screen, so that the music is judged free from distraction.

You can see the same principle at work on a new TV show called The Taste, where contestants cook up and serve a single bite of food that the judges eat without knowing who the contestants are. So far the home cooks have been not only holding their own but beating out the pro chefs.