February 2010
1 post
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...
January 2010
1 post
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...
October 2009
1 post
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...