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photo credit: vonguard

My wife has been a Venture Capitalist (VC) for some sixteen years. She’s spent a goodly amount of that time in the Chicago area. In that time, the startup scene has changed tremendously. Back in the 90′s most of the IT activity was around Fortune 500 companies, of which there are quite a few in the Chicagoland area.

The few startups that did percolate back then were facing dual handicaps — there was a dearth of startup talent in the Midwest and most VC’s held the opinion that to be successful, startups had to move to the coasts (preferably the west coast and within easy traveling distance of the VC’s office). Even the VC’s located in Chicago had to travel to the coasts to find interesting startups.

Fast forward 15 years and the scene has dramatically changed. There’s both a deeper talent pool of technical and other skills that have startup experience. Partly
that’s because there have been enough startups and small entrepreneurial companies in the Chicago area over the intervening years to build an experienced cadre of people who relish the startup environment and aren’t afraid of flying free of the stultifying stability of the corporate paycheck.

But beyond that I’ve been impressed by the overall entrepreneurial culture I see in the IT community in Chicago. Everyone is working after hours on their business idea. It reminds me of the industrial revolution, in some ways, as expressed in the following quote.

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.
– Alfred North Whitehead

In much the same way the greatest innovation in the Midwest is a culture and spirit of innovation. Witness that Pathfinder Development is working on products for seven(!), countem, seven startups at the moment. Exciting times.

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photo credit: kevinzhengli

An interesting investment concept that ended in 2007. From the fund description:

The UX Fund is an investment experiment inspired by Jeneanne Rae and the Design Council. We believe that companies that deliver a great user experience will see it reflected in their stock price.

The fund is comprised of 10 companies that we feel do great user experience. We invested $50,000 USD (about $5,000 in each company) on November 1, 2006. Shares must be held for 1 year.

Did the fund make money? You can find the results here.

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photo credit: TheNickster

Since Pathfinder Development focuses on software based product development I get 40-50 inquiries a month from people who are looking for design and development help. This ranges from people who just have an “idea” to people with detailed requirements and screen mockups. Though most applicable to startups, regardless of the stage there are a couple of things we look for first:

1. What problem is your application solving?
2. How does your product solve the problem?
3. Why and how will people beat a path to your door for your solution?
4. What are your market differentiators (and are they sustainable)?
5. What is the market size?
6. What is your revenue model – how will you get paid and how will revenue scale over time – this needs to be specific, even if a guess – how many users or licenses and what is your revenue per user or license.
7. What will it cost to design, build, operate (legal, accounting), support, market/sell – support should include both providing customer service and continually enhancing the product to keep it ahead of the competition.

Forget how cool you think the application is. Think about who’s going to buy it and what they are willing to pay.

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I recently read a copy of The Design of Design by Frederick Brooks, author of the classic title The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks offers, in a series of short essays, perspectives and principles of design that will be as relevant and thought-provoking tomorrow as they are today.

I particularly liked his insight that design involves optimizing resources other than money. For example:

• Ounces in a spacecraft
• Hours in a conference program
• Heat in a high-performance chip
• Seconds or frames in a film

In team design, Brooks offers the advice of naming scarce resources so everyone is aware of them and how they can change. For example, if getting to market quickly becomes the top priority, time will take precedence over cost or extended function as the premium resource. It’s important that everyone be kept on the same page.

Brooks offers that a key motivation for studying design is the fact that many designs are done by designers who are not the actual users of the product. Add to the mix the complexity of new technologies and geographical distribution of teams and methodology becomes relevant to outcome. Brooks challenges entrenched approaches that no longer work and offers a myriad of perspectives to improve one’s approach to designing complex systems.

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photo credit: | El Caganer

There’s a lot of best practices we’ve learned over the years developing products for our clients. One of the important lessons is that developing a brand new product for a startup is very different from developing a second or third generation product for a more established company.

I’d like to focus on some of the pitfalls that can happen with an existing product’s user base. But before I can tell you what’s wrong, I have to show you how it can work when everything is right.

The Magic of the User

When developing a product, you have to involve your users early and often. If you substitute your own judgement for theirs, you will likely end up designing a system with the wrong or useless functionality that won’t be appealing to your target user. Involving the user thus saves both time and money, as you won’t have to build all of that useless stuff.

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Having using Acl9 for some time, it was refreshing to see RailsCast’s Ryan Bate’s take on authorization: CanCan.  Ryan put together a webcast for CanCan that you can checkout here.  There have been some nice additons since this initial release so do checkout the latest documentation on GitHub.  I won’t go into what I dislike about Acl9.  It’s a good system, with a nice DSL for defining permissions.  I’ll just talk about some of the things I’ve enjoyed about CanCan.  If you haven’t explored the library, you should.

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Note: this is an OSX tutorial.

About every application with customers needs to send customers email. Some are newsletters, others are invoices, sometimes the application needs to send an alert. One thing is certain though – testing is a pain. I’m talking cross-client testing. Sure, it’s easy to look at a webpage in IE7-8, Firefox, and Chrome – but it isn’t as much of a no-brainer when it comes to looking at html emails in Yahoo, Aol, and Gmail. This post should help you do that.

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One of the things we’ve found out over the years in working with startups is that they struggle with figuring out exactly what their customers really need, what features should be in their product, how to price it, how to sell it, and how to incorporate that learning into an agile development process.

As a digital product development firm, we need them to be good at this, because that, just as much as our product development, will determine if they’re successful.

Luckily, there’s a whole body of knowledge around the Lean Startup and Customer Development that addresses this exact problem set.

Take a look at the following slideshow for a quick introduction to lean startup thinking and the customer development process:

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Adam Rifkin has an insighful article on  Why Google Can’t Build Social Applications.

My favorite part:

2010′s leadership of Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter struggled for YEARS learning from FriendFeed, Dodgeball, and Odeo, respectively. The main mythical man month mega mantra—”build one to throw away“—isn’t just a clever way to gracefully fail on the first iteration; it’s the way we learn. I believe those collective experiences have given them the humility to know that most things don’t work; the confidence to know that simplicity is more important than features; and the stamina to see their visions through the good, the bad, and the ugly that accompany startups.

Worth a read in full, and good advice for software startups of any kind.

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I had a problem with line numbering portion of my Flash Builder 4 (Eclipse) including setting breakpoints, error tracking and line numbers not updating. At first I just said that I can live with this Eclipse voodoo problem since it’s not the first one but with time it hampered my work.

I found commiserators here, as well what the problem really is:

If you’re running SnowLeopard and keeping your Eclipse on a secondary monitor this weird problem will happen – line numbers won’t scroll and  anything that resides on line number portion of the interface will go nuts (show erroneously without any noticeable pattern).

Solution is easy enough – move the Eclipse or Flash Builder to your primary monitor and the problem instantly goes away. Good. But wait a second! I use the secondary 23′ monitor so all the Eclipse elements of the interface can fit. 15′ feels like having one hand tied behind my back.

Adobe posted a patch that actually works! Don’t forget to read Rick Winscot’s post about the details. You can use the pre-patched files from Adobe’s bug page.

This little episode was another reminder not to take things for granted. Makes me think who wrote the first line numbering code to begin with?

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