Found+READ: Comments on stories by Daniel Gibbons

Jeff Atlee — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 06:46:30 GMT

great article..

I am in the final financing run of a start-up here in usualy sunny South Africa.

I have close relationships with developers but since my businesses are rarely based on software tweaks I tend to be feature averse. For me the best applications are rich with simplicity. That’s why i tend to cut down on wishlists rather than build them up.

In case anyone needs to be re-inspired may i humbly recommend “Going postal” by Terry Pratchett. Although the business story is more of a turnaround, it is fantastically inspirational and has given rise to my favourite concept – “Move fast, you never nkw who is catching you up”

Later
Jeff

Rhett Murphy — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:42:21 GMT

I am sharing this with my partners right now! Well done. Thank you.

Brandon Mullins — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:42:10 GMT

Daniel,

Extremely valuable article and one of which I am sure touches the reality of the many software and app. entrepreneurs in existence.

I am co-founder/CEO of an exciting new start-up social media tool company, and me having a marketing mindset from birth (and from a college degree), I connect 100% with your comments on the process of building a product from scratch from the perspective of such marketing types. I am constantly reminding myself that our dev. team needs to finish ‘Attribute #1’ before I eagerly bombard them with the ‘Attribute #5’ idea that would be nice to incorporate, two years from now.

The concluding paragraph of your piece states it all: perfectionism and success are not necessarly mutually exclusive. In this high-growth game of internet start-ups, time-to-market is many times of equal importance to a newly launched product with a zillion features.

Igor Asselbergs — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:44:18 GMT

I’m familiar with the problem. Our solution is good planning.
When embarking upon a new project, the chief engineer first breaks the project into chunks of 4 to 32 working hours. These chunks are then entered into a project management application such as eTask. This will show you the right order and the overall time involved.
Now the trick is to incorporate every delay and every change into the eTask file every few days. eTask will then calculate the new overall time consumption and time for launch. the process doesn’t take much time or effort, but does wonders to keep things under control. Things always change during the process. But you will notice immediately when you plan to go over budget or deadline. You will then be able to take measures, for instance by dropping non-essential features, hiring more people or having a chat with your financiers/clients.
This way I’ve been able to keep almost all my projects within budget and planned time to launch.

Rob Smith — Sat, 19 May 2007 03:50:42 GMT

This is really important I can see already. We are in the process of founding a start up and this is something (I especially) will need to bear in mind.

Like the look of gaboogie too – nice simple pricing structure.

Marc Bedford — Sat, 19 May 2007 03:50:30 GMT

Every entrepreneur can learn a valuable lesson from this piece. Btw, gaboogie looks like a useful tool – well done.