brettcvz

Okay I think we’re saying pretty similar things then!

The “top two” technique works particularly well for addressing “performance” type features for products already in market. Most customer requests, and most of the things that my stakeholders come to me with, are around ways the current product could better address the existing problem it’s trying to solve, rather than finding whole new customer pain points.

“customers get features deemed most valuable by product folk” - perhaps I am misreading the intent here, but this seems like a license for product people to ignore really getting to know the customer problem. Contrary to popular SV wisdom, I believe that most customers really do know what they want, at least most of the time and in broad brushstrokes. Many of the best products I’ve worked on have come from asking customers what they want! See http://brettcvz.com/posts/49-finding-product-ideas-in-new-cu... for a more detailed write up.

I hear you - instead of “what did you say no to”, I prefer “would you say <new thing> is a higher priority than <previous thing you said was #1 or #2>?” - it’s much easier for people to evaluate “A or B” tradeoffs than “A or not A” tradeoffs

I haven’t found this to be the case. If needed, you can always surface the constraint of “look, I have N other teams who are giving me their top two requests, in addition to trying to move goals X, Y, Z. I want to support you and move the ball forward on these issues, but I can’t do everything immediately”

Makes sense! For the eventual blog post, I'd be particularly interested in hearing how you decide which small bets to make (e.g. did Corporate Cards start from an employee saying "I want to go work on this"? An internal new-products strategy team? An executive?), and what structures you have in place for deciding when to invest more heavily in a bet.

We are trying to figure out how to do this at Clever, and I know others like Segment (https://segment.com/blog/finding-product-market-fit-again/) are thinking about this as well, so hopefully we can start putting together some advice on how to create an "engine" for layering new products onto an established platform.

It’s impressive to see the velocity of new products that Stripe is putting out. I’d be really interested to see a blog post or similar on how they decide which initiatives to invest in, how they structure those teams and set milestones, etc

Clever has a slightly unique business model (we sell to edtech companies, not to consumers or schools), but we do have a healthy, growing, sustainable business.

Source: I work at Clever

I have a strong suspicion that this is a spurious conclusion, for the same reason that the "moderate drinking improves health" correlation was debunked: http://theconversation.com/maybe-moderate-drinking-isnt-so-g...

The study doesn't appear to control for differences in wealth. I would suspect that the population of people who bike to work skews wealthier (higher rents close to work centers, less likely to have to go from job to job).

I'm curious how many of these types of longitudinal studies are at their core just confirming the correlation between wealth and health.

I would say it's safe to assume many, many apps do this. For anyone looking to tailor ads/recommendations to their users, the opportunity to peek at all the apps you have installed is too tempting to resist.

Interestingly, with a bit of people skills and a bit of restraint, honey badger developers can make rather good PMs because of their often relentless and no-barrier-too-high drive to make things happen.

Are there any companies who are using this currently? Can anyone speak to how it's working for them?

We're exploring some new ways to communicate this, would you be interested in providing feedback? Let me know at brettcvz at IFTTT dot com

Requisite comment on these sorts of posts - we are hiring for positions across the board: https://ifttt.com/jobs

It's a fun place with cool stuff going on.

New startup idea: "A single-tap, zero character way to control your life"

Edit: The above should be seen as a bit tongue-in-cheek.

As the original founder and CEO, I can provide a bit of clarity. As with many startups, ours was a thrilling but ultimately tumultuous journey. At the end of the day, we ended up with a nice profitable lifestyle business (filepicker.io) and a big ambitious change-the-world product that we were not able to get traction with (Ink).

The team decided that the right thing to do was to sell to someone that would: 1. Value and support existing customers 2. Return as much money as possible to investors, and 3. Allow the team to move on to new opportunities. (In priority order)

I have a tremendous amount of respect for the new team, and actually think they will do a better job with filepicker.io, because they are committed to its success as a company and a business rather than some distant vision.

For those who were fans of what we were trying to do at Ink (helping connect the apps and services that people use), I'm still committed to the dream and seeing if we can do it in a slightly different way at IFTTT.

At some point I may do a more full post-mortem, for now if you have any questions hit me up at <my username>@gmail.com

I'm so excited for this. First idea: a mode where I can toss the camera in the air, have it take pictures and combine the information with accelerometer data, and stitch together a full 360 reconstruction of the scene.

I was going to mention the same thing, Drew wasn't quite a first time founder when he started Dropbox, just as Mark Zuckerberg was not a first time founder when he started Facebook

Hey - was just poking around new and saw this. We're pushing on a number of open-source iOS apps, because the number of OSS is disappointingly low for such a popular platform.

Announcement & links: http://blog.inkmobility.com/post/59687500040/open-source-and...

Feel free to shoot me an email as well

The bevel bothers me as well, especially dark bevel on white background.

The primary difference is that Ink allows for applications to register new actions across applications, and to launch content directly into other applications as well. Think of Ink as a cross-application version of UIActivity that's open to anyone registering handlers, as opposed to only being able to use the UIActivity's of your own app or the system provided ones.

The current release candidate (v0.4.0 - https://github.com/Ink/InkiOSFramework) does not do end-to-end encryption between apps, so we would want to work with them to add in AES256 at a minimum before I'd recommend sending over passwords.

It's both technologically possible to make this secure enough and on our roadmap for the next major release.

Re. how it works behind the scenes, we do a streaming protocol over UIPasteboard, with actions being cached locally and periodically updated from the servers when connection is available. At least for now - we will continue to iterate on the underlying tech to make it faster/more reliable/more secure.

Re. iOS7, it required being a bit more clever, but Ink works with iOS7.

Give it a try, let us know what you think.

Not particularly. In a sense larger, established companies are always looking at startups for market verification; the startups that succeed are the ones that can out-pace the established companies.

In addition, there are market dynamics that preclude any of the larger players truly building a platform for interoperability. See for example the recent Google/Microsoft turf wars, that Mailbox only supports attachments from Dropbox, iOS native composer only works with Mail and not gmail, etc.

We've been working with apple since WWDC, they know what we're doing and are fine with it.

Our announcement at http://blog.inkmobility.com/post/58338915828/announcing-the-...

Intents has done a great job on android - I have some minor quibbles with it, but it's light years ahead of what iOS had pre-Ink

Edit since I can't reply to milesokeefe: As an avid android user (Galaxy Nexus), some things about intents that I feel are poorly designed: - No support for bidirectionality. There's no sense of "I'm done with this action, take the results and send it back" - No sense of intelligence in terms of what actions are shown. As far as I can tell, it seems to be filtered by content type, sorted by Most Recently Used. - Unclear actions - iOS suffers the same issue, where it's not really clear what it means to open in another application.

We do the data transfer locally on the device. We had an early prototype that did things over the web, but it was too slow and was frustrating to use on 3G.

Edit for clarification: the transfer occurs locally and works while offline.

I'll comment here as well, the other one seemed to have gotten bumped

Not to draw comparisons, but there's another rather large YC company that drew the same early critique

Yes and no. First off, people have been clamoring this for a while, and so far Apple hasn't moved. So we said enough waiting, let's make this happen.

Second, people use products that are made by a variety of companies, not just apple. Being able to send content between apps and between devices requires an independent, multi-platform approach.