Saturday, March 27, 2010

Business of Software Conference 2008 (Part 2)

Excerpts from lecture by Dharmesh Shah, OnStartups.com
  • At startup, your idea may "suck"... get started!
  • Say "NO" to venture capital
  • Target liquidity
  • You don’t have to go out there and market (broadcast) to get people interested!
  • Real EV of raising venture capital is high (add difficulty in getting one)
  • Nobody reads Business plans... rather write a blog!
  • All startups should be embarrassed about their product when it goes out into the market... If you are not embarrassed, you have waited too long!!
  • Don't depend on advertising to sell your product
  • You are not gonna be able to get the "pricing" right anyway... so just pick one
  • Starting as early as possible and "charge" as often as possible
  • SAAS - You are now the customer
  • COCA - Cost of customer acquisition
    • = Money spent to get a new customer onboard
    • = (Total cost of sales + marketing/Number of new customers) - lifetime value of the customer (LTV)
    • Therefore, one of the biggest success factors - lower attrition rate
  • CHI - Customer Happiness Index - Probability of customer that he will stay next month
    • Above can be correlated with (and hence should be monitored closely)
      • Did the customer use the software, usage patterns (e.g. customers who use "a" feature are 4 times more likely to stay than who don’t
      • Track usage data - by feature... who recommend it + which customers used it and how many left + who approved it
  • Don’t do "partnerships"
  • Go to the market even before you have written the first line of code
  • Manage Risks - technology risks, market risks
  • Try and reduce market risk as early as possible
  • "Pay per click" is a morphine drip

Business of Software Conference 2008

Excerpts from lecture by Jason Fried, 37 Signals (the Back Pack guy)
  • Maintain "momentum"... do small projects
  • Build the "real" thing (UI)... avoid abstraction (unwanted documentation)
  • Do what works now! Optimize for now... No decision is permanent
  • Avoid words like - Need, Can't, Easy, Everyone, Nobody
  • Have Uninterrupted stretch of time for productive work
  • Focus on what is NOT going to change - Speed, Simplicity, Clarity, Ease of use, Reliability, Uptime
  • Keep questioning... always and all sorts
  • Focus on "easy" ones "first"

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Sharing Agile experiences of a Scrummer

Jean Tabaka has recently compiled a list of tips and tricks to scrum better. I thought it is worthwhile to share it. We may know already know most of them, but penning them down into a list makes it interesting! And, alomg the way, it has some great links too.

Here is the article.