thesash

I'd like to suggest that all the lessons learned here are precisely what Lean Startup teaches-- with techniques that are meant to prevent you from spending two years in a death spiral.

Segue to edit of my standard rant on this subject: (originally posted on: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3429906)

MVP != half assed, cheap, shitty product. It is exactly what it says: a minimum viable product, key word being viable. An MVP for a mission critical application or a cutting edge piece of research isn't going to be cheap or easy, because it needs to be viable.

Because of the name, many people make the assumption that doing a Lean Startup means not taking the time or money necessary to execute properly, this is not the case. Lean means conserving capital by focusing on iteration until you each product market fit, and only then ramping up sales or marketing, but again, if you're cracking a new market, untested technology, or going up against mature competition, even that phase of conserving capital and focusing in product may require a lot of capital.

Your product, when released to customers, needs to be usable, and needs to scratch an itch for them, otherwise it is inherently not viable. That's why customer development is so essential, it prevents you from making the worst mistake possible-- building a robust product no one wants. Even if you have the best product idea in the world, the only way to know if the features you add are having a positive impact is to measure the behavior of real, live, human users.

That being said, it's still your responsibility to stay relentlessly focused in your core value proposition. You can't build every feature you're customers ask for, only the ones that make sense for your product.

What we're seeing now is the lean startup backlash where people use the terms but don't really take the time to understand what they mean,.

The Lean startup movement is a powerful set of lessons that can empower entrepreneurs and save us from wasting our time and effort building the wrong things and chasing the wrong metrics, but I guess some of the lessons just have to be learned painfully through experience (it was certainly true for me).

It depends. Are you looking for fulltime or freelance? Do you have a budget to pay a competitive rate, or are you looking to cut corners?

If you have the budget to pay a competitive rate:

Fulltime

- http://www.angel.co - A great platform for startup hiring. you can find founder level talent here.

Freelance

- http://www.dribbble.com - Cream of the crop. For a reasonable fee you can search by location and availability - http://www.behance.net - another great collection of portfolios

If you're not prepared to pay a competitive rate:

Fulltime

- http://www.craigslist.org - I've hired great designers via craigslist who were just starting out, but didn't have much of a portfolio put together.

- Local art schools or universities with design programs - same theory, you'll save by hiring designers at the beginning of their careers

Freelance

- http://www.elance.com

- http://www.odesk.com

- http://www.99designs.com

Not the best, but definitely the cheapest.

Good luck!

I think we're at the tipping point for a new era of long-form content that's designed natively for the web, and I, for one, am very, very excited about it. There's a whole crop of sites and apps (Svbtle, Medium, Quartz, The Magazine) that were born on the web and are dedicated to long form content, but now with initiatives like this we're seeing the old guard finally come around to the fact that the web is not print made digital, it's a whole new medium with a whole new set of possibilities.

I think there is plenty of appetite for real journalism, thoughtful opinion, and gasp long form content subscriptions, but the implementations have lagged behind the technology, while opportunistic content farms like HuffPo and short form (but tech savvy) sites like Buzzfeed have moved more quickly to capitalize on the true potential of the web. Hopefully projects like this can turn the tide and prove that content on great content can be a great business on the web.

Fab.com built their initial user base almost exclusively through Facebook ads and Facebook shares. They are still one of facebook's biggest advertisers, and even use demographic and interest data from their Facebook users to determine when and where to run tv ads.

One of the things we like to think about in ux design is how we can design at the intersection of user goals and business goals. In this case the business model is to drive a high volume of impressions to a broad audience. Therefore this is a viable ux, since the business goal is to drive volume, not engagement. A site like qz is going to have to command a much higher cpm and as a result will need to focus on retaining high value users as opposed to just driving high volume impressions.

A great analogue to this is in eCommerce sites. Compare the number of products presented on an amazon product page to the number presented on Barney's New York or net a porter. Amazon moves higher volume of product, and generates more revenue, but does that mean they present the best ux for shopping? Certainly not, but that's not their focus, nor is it Forbes's priority to provide the best possible ux for readers.

Tradesy is hiring developers and designers for web and mobile, full-time and interns, in Santa Monica or remote.

We're building a peer to peer online marketplace that facilitates sticking points in the transaction that prevent people from buying and selling online, from suggesting pricing, to providing shipping kits and handling returns on behalf of sellers, to ranking items in the storefront.

Since launching in October we've gotten a lot of great press:

http://tradesy.com/press

and more importantly, we've gained significant traction right out of the gate, as well as an overwhelmingly positive response from our customers.

We're a small team, you'll be the fourth engineer, and while we develop on a LAMP stack with Redis and Solr on top, we value strong engineering talent with a background in Java and/or C++. PHP experience is a perk but not required.

For mobile, we're working on iOS first since 75% of our mobile traffic is iOS based, but if you develop for Android we'd still love to talk to you.

Marketplaces pose a lot of interesting technical challenges like working with large and rapidly growing sets of user submitted items, processing large volume transactions, working with image processing and manipulation, developing algorithmic solutions for curation, spam, and fraud, and automating chunks of the logistical backend that runs behind the scenes.

As a company we value transparency, sustainability, and customer service. We're relentlessly focused on developing a product people love, and to that end we focus on quantitatively measuring impact of the changes we make to the product, as well as getting constant feedback from our customers.

You can reach us through angel list, or contact me direct at sash@tradesy.com

https://angel.co/tradesy#recruiting

Or that google isn't an auto manufacturer...

My stock comment on the subject originally posted on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3429906

1) MVP != half assed, cheap, shitty product. It is exactly what it says: a minimum viable product, key word being viable. An MVP for a mission critical application or a cutting edge piece of research isn't going to be cheap or easy, because it needs to be viable.

2) The cycle of expectations that your product needs to be as feature rich as your competition on day one leads to what Eric Ries calls the large batch death spiral where it always seems like a good idea to add that one last feature (I've been there, it's painful, and really difficult to pull out of).

3) RE: fear of ruining your reputation if your MVP isn't shiny enough-- good news: no one knows who you are when you launch, so you have nothing to lose. Don't launch your MVP in the press, court early adopters, listen to your customers, and focus on building value until your product kicks the competition's ass. If you hide from customers out of fear you take the biggest risk of all: building something no one wants. Even if you have the best product idea in the world, the only way to know if the features you add are having a positive impact is to measure the behavior of real, live, human users.

Unfortunately I think what we're seeing is the lean startup backlash where people use the terms but don't really take the time to understand what they mean. The Lean startup movement is a powerful set of lessons that can empower entrepreneurs and save us from wasting our time and effort building the wrong things and chasing the wrong metrics, but maybe some of the lessons just have to be learned painfully through experience.

The invisible UI is such a wonderful and logical pattern, especially when constrained by a mobile platform. As touch interfaces reach maturity and users are more comfortable with the general paradigm, I think we'll be seeing a lot more applications forgo chrome in favor of an experience that relies on touch but is largely invisible to the user.

I just tried 2 searches. My current address, and my current city. Both failed. Google maps handles them no problem. They could have the best data and nicest maps, but if their search sucks, what's the point?

If the market opportunity here is defragmentation of social networking, then Yahoo should acquire Buffer[1], and get themselves a dead simple product that "just works." IFTTT and Yahoo Pipes are awesome for technically savvy folks, but it's a non-solution for the vast majority of the market.

[1] http://bufferapp.com

Obligatory reference to Betteridge's Law of Headlines[1]

    Any headline which ends in a question mark can be  
    answered by the word 'no'

AirBnB & Twitter each had three founders. VMWare had five founders[2], and they've done alright.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

[2] http://www.quora.com/Startups/Can-a-startup-be-successful-wi...

Data or it didn't happen. There is 0 data to back up any of these points. If you're basing your design decisions on generalizations in 2012, you're doing it wrong.

Ansolutely! I used to carry a Thomas Brothers guide to San Diego in my car. When I got lost it would take me 5 minutes just to figure out where the hell I was. The first time I drove to LA for my college orientation I had a map of California but not one of LA, and I got lost driving back from Westwood to UCLA and ended up in the middle of bel air. Today, it's hard to even remember that frustration.

The other day I was stumbling my way through configuring a server and thinking to myself: "how the hell did anyone ever accomplish anything before Google?".

Everyday I face problems that I've never solved before. I can query a nearly complete repository of human knowledge and find solutions nearly instantly.[1]

When I'm exploring a new city I have satellite maps of the entire world tied to a searchable index of millions of places, all on a device that fits in my pocket and is more powerful than as a supercomputer was 25 years ago[2].

There's an electric c on the market that rivals gas powered vehicles from Mercedes, BMW, and Porsche in luxury, power, and price. [3]

I'm plugged into a network that can notify me in advance of an earthquake that's going to reach me.[4]

Cars that drive themselves have been approved as street legal vehicles in several states.[5]

[1] http://bit.ly/Qs14ZG

[2] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/mark-hurd-is-still-...

[3] http://www.teslamotors.com/models

[4] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earthquake-twitter-use...

[5] http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/09/06/self-driv...

This is utter bullshit. Warren Ellis's excelent "How to see the future"[1], addresses why we're perpetually bored by the times we live in, and are always nostalgic about some bygone golden age:

    ...We look at the present day through a rear-view mirror. 
    This is something Marshall McLuhan said back in the 
    Sixties, when the world was in the grip of authentic-
    seeming future narratives. He said, “We look at the 
    present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards 
    into the future.”

    He went on to say this, in 1969, the year of the crewed 
    Moon landing: “Because of the invisibility of any 
    environment during the period of its innovation, man is 
    only consciously aware of the environment that has 
    preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully
    visible only when it has been superseded by a new 
    environment; thus we are always one step behind in our 
    view of the world. The present is always invisible because 
    it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of 
    attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an 
    earlier day.”

He goes on to cite some examples of stuff that seems banal and boring because we're just so used to it:

    There are six people living in space right now. There are
    people printing prototypes of human organs, and people 
    printing nanowire tissue that will bond with human flesh
    and the human electrical system.

    We’ve photographed the shadow of a single atom. We’ve got
    robot legs controlled by brainwaves. Explorers have just
    stood in the deepest unsubmerged place in the world, a
    cave more than two kilometres under Abkhazia. NASA are
    getting ready to launch three satellites the size of
    coffee mugs, that will be controllable by mobile phone
    apps.

    Here’s another angle on vintage space: Voyager 1 is more
    than 11 billion miles away, and it’s run off 64K of
    computing power and an eight-track tape deck.

    In the last ten years, we’ve discovered two previously
    unknown species of human. We can film eruptions on the
    surface of the sun, landings on Mars and even landings on
    Titan. Is all of this very boring to you? Because all this
    is happening right now, in this moment. Check the time on
    your phone, because this is the present time and these
    things are happening. The most basic mobile phone is in
    fact a communications devices that shames all of science
    fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators.
    Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it
    couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice
    Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile
    phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass
    windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things
    happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn
    wizards.

    That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said     
    that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic. 
    And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but 
    magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all 
    now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning 
    it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room 
    with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science 
    Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across 
    the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.

[1] http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14314&utm_source=buffer...

Thats my point though-- it seems like there are too many unknown unknowns here to make any sort of predictions. We're still several massive leaps removed from where we would need to be in order to really get started.

My thoughts exactly-- if we don't understand how organic consciousness works, how can we hope to replicate it artificially?

Exactly, 2x people != 2x productivity, it simply doesn't work that way.

That might be true if computer programs were subject to the survival of the fittest, which, in my experience, they are not.

My point isn't about throwing manpower at a problem, it's about diminishing returns. The notion that if you put two people on a problem they will be able to solve it twice as fast is a logical fallacy. That's a fact, not a platitude. That being said, if you put 100 people on the problem, you may be able to solve it quickly, but even then you will eventually reach a point where adding more people does not add any more benefit. That's what I wish more non-technical folks understood.

Every time I hear about the inevitability of the singularity, all I can think about is what a precariously balanced collection of hacks actual computer programs are at their core, and how far off that is from true intelligence. Am I just pessimistic or are we a complete paradigm shift or two away of even getting close to true AI?

Add the mythical man month to the list. SO many non-technical folks fall victim to the idea that by putting more people on a job you can get it done faster, when in reality as we all know, efficiency drops sharply after a point. It takes a woman 9 months to carry a pregnancy, 9 women can't do same the job in one month, and the same is true for solving any complex problem.

Also, they're spending close to half of what Microsoft is spending, but they have a fraction of the products, and they don't advertise to nearly as many audiences.

Running the marathon is the easy part, it's the training that'll get you. The vast majority of runs when I'm training for a marathon are not tranquil, peaceful, or enjoyable. In fact, the runs that matter, the ones that make the difference between a PR and a disappointing race, are the ones that suck the most. Forcing yourself to run when you're tired, burned out, have other things you want to be doing, that is what it means to be a runner. I love to run, but it would still be a hell of a lot easier to go home tonight and veg out in the couch instead of getting out and putting rubber to pavement, and that's a temptation tat hasn't gone away, even after 10 years of running.

Perhaps the lesson isn't "Find what you love", but rather, "Decide what's worth loving and force yourself to grind your teeth and power through no matter what". Summoning the grit to power through and do what you love even when it sucks is what separates the marathoner from the runner that never steps up to the start line.

Direct link to registration website: https://rtv.sos.ca.gov/elections/register-to-vote/

It works surprisingly well. Crazy that this is new.

I think the analogue would be design, as opposed to code, see Apple v. Samsung case

What's true for magic is true for tech: "Invention is all fuzzy, sloppy stuff"

That's one hell of a story of hustle. What you've discovered, I think, is (paraphrasing Steve Jobs [1]) that the world around you was built by people just like you. You've seen behind the curtain, and there's no wizard, only some dude who's no smarter than you are figuring it out as he goes along. Kudos to you for discovering this at such a young age, I didn't get it 'till my twenties.

My advice to you: put the last section of your article out of your mind. You've achieved some pretty amazing things, focus on that, and keep shipping. Comparing yourself to others is a path to insanity, there will always be someone who has accomplished more, done it faster, made it look easier, etc. And one more thing-- you're never too young to do anything, but keep in mind that with age comes experience. There are people out there (like the ones you mentioned), who have been where you are before, have faced similar challenges, and overcome them. No matter how early you start, you'll always have more experience the older you get, so continue to seek out the advice and mentorship of those who have walked the path before you.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=U...