Run It Back

Tax your meetings

Meetings are bad.  The inputs are wasted mental effort pitching, arguing, and defending vague ideas.  The output is a likely garbage plan.  The best actions aren’t birthed in meetings, they’re suggested by data.

Small startups are nimble and can do tricks larger companies only dream of.  Like writing and launching a major feature in an afternoon.  Or having an all-hands product design meeting every day.

I was horrified when I realized we were doing that last one.  Every day over lunch Sascha and I would have a wide-ranging discussion about Ninite and end up leaving with 3 new half ideas to maybe implement someday.  My brain was slowly filling up with garbage.

Nimbleness in startups is a double-edged blade.  It’s great for positive activities.  However, for things that have negative externalities, make sure to impose an extra cost.  Now we force ourselves to formally schedule a meeting if we want to speculate on new features or changes.  Meetings are way down and lunch is fun again.

Side Effects of Simple

Doing something simple is a pretty well-worn piece of startup advice.  I won’t repeat stuff better said elsewhere, but here are two unexpected side effects we ran into by keeping Ninite simple.

The first is that you can go international almost by mistake.  This happens when you make something so simple that users don’t have to know how to read (like IKEA’s instructions).  We don’t even do a great job installing apps in other languages right now (this is our next big improvement to Ninite) but people outside the US still use Ninite a lot:

The second is unforeseen uses.  Shortly after launching we got an email from a blind user describing how much easier it was to set up a computer with Ninite.  I hadn’t considered Ninite as an accessibility tool.  Complicated products often do one thing, simple ones are versatile.

1 note

How we got 18,000 beta users in 4 weeks

We got 18,000 users in our 4-week private beta by emailing relevant bloggers demo codes for their readers.  In a Hacker News thread about getting users there were some recommendations to start your own blog and build an audience.  That sounds hard.  It’s much easier to just borrow other peoples’ audiences when you need them.

Find small blogs (10k-50k subscribers) relevant to your market and offer them 100-1000 signups with a custom-branded demo code.  The blogger likes getting an exclusive for her readers, and the readers like getting insider access to a hot new tool.  Contact a bunch of them at once, we felt lucky to have a roughly 20% hit rate.

To find these blogs you can try looking for stuff via Google blog search, although it frequently returns a lot of spam sites.  We found searching delicious tags was a better way since it’s got more of a human filter around it.

The best way to find blogs is to give personal demo codes to people who missed out on a blog code in exchange for a list of blogs they read.  This demo code application form can also get you a wealth of other market information if you ask more questions.  It was on a form like this that our users told us what our premium/pay features should be.

Keep track of the contacts at the blogs that post your demo codes.  When you launch, email them again and they’ll cover you once more.  This also results in a burst of coverage around launch so you seem to be everywhere.

130 notes