If you write software for a living and you’re located in Silicon Valley, you have your pick of employment options at an array of tech start-ups — yes, even in this economy. When a recruiter’s pitch is: “Wanna bro down and crush some code?” — like San Francisco-based Klout’s was — you get a sense of what that company is looking for. If you’re a woman, it’s not you.
That’s pretty sad, but it’s not all bad. As a woman and a software developer, crossing Klout off the list of places where I might work helps me narrow my options. I’d rather find out that an employer glorifies young dudes before I take a position than afterward.
Wanna bro down and crush some code?
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An Investment Perspective on SaaS Companies
Patrick Moran of New Relic had a great piece on TC the other day, talking about revenue in SaaS companies. The most interesting part to me was this:
Bad: Churn can kill you, or at least your market cap
If you are building a SaaS business, churn is your enemy. Most public SaaS companies report their monthly churn rate, either as a percentage of revenue or actual customers gained/lost. These rates depend on the type of business – 2% monthly churn is in the “tolerable range” according to many experts.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged APIs, competitive moat, SaaS, software as a service, strategery, Strategy
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For Business People: Chef and Vagrant explained
Carlos Sanchez has a good blog post over at DZone about Puppet and Chef. I’ve covered using Vagrant and the Opscode platform in a video tutorial, because I (and the rest of Cloudspace) prefer Chef over Puppet, but the important thing is that there’s some tool being used for this purpose — even if it’s just a Bash script.
The big thing that I think is missing from Carlos’s post is context. Techies tend to see the value quickly, but it’s good for business-types to know why a new tool is helpful to the business, instead of just a passing fad. Virtual machines (VMs) and automated configuration (Chef) are very useful, and like Voltron, they’re even more powerful when combined.</80s-reference>
Posted in agile development, best practices, Business, tech, testing
Tagged chef, opscode, Puppet, Virtual machine
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Early adopters, from a product person’s view
Today I got lunch with a friend who recently put his startup on hold. He’s remaining productive, as is good, and is continuing to educate himself, and refine his ideas. We talked briefly about why his startup hasn’t already become successful — why it didn’t connect with users in the way he wanted it to.
He described his product as being something that is at the intersection of technology and food, taking some of the more advanced ideas of how tech affects our daily lives, and making it available to people who are really into food.
So you’re doing User Testing
So you’ve decided to do some user testing of your product. Great job — very Lean of you!
I’m a huge advocate of doing user testing — even at the earliest level. One of my favorite stories on the subject is of a team that was working on a product that involved people recording data into a mobile app throughout the day. In order to do a bare-minimum proof-of-concept, they gave people small notebooks and a pen, and asked them to write down the data as it happened during the day. It cost them around $10 per person, and they were able to find out that people felt it was worth doing the activity (which is a requirement for everything else to work).
Cloudspace Has a Pretty Sweet QR Code
You’re probably saying to yourself “But everyone has a QR Code these days, what makes this QR Code ‘Pretty Sweet’”? Well Mr. Doubty McDoubterson, this QR Code has an awesome freakin’ rocket in it. Check it out, tell yo friends.
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Washington Post Names Sayfie Review and FlashReport as the Best Political Blogs in Their Respective States
For the past 6 years we have had the pleasure of working closely with both Justin Sayfie and Jon Flesichman. They are both kind, understanding and funny but above all else, they are hardworking. It’s because of that that we weren’t at all shocked yesterday when we saw that the Washington Post had put Sayfie Review and FlashReport on their list of Best State-Based Political Blogs for 2011. Although we would love to credit our work as the reason, we know that it’s all possible because of your tireless work (and maybe just a little bit of our tireless work). Congratulations you two! Make sure you take a moment to sit back, open some champagne, and toast to your success. I know we will. 
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Getting more information from users; designing the signup process
Getting users to sign up for a new site can be difficult. As a product designer, simpler is nearly always better, which has led to signup forms where users are only asked for an email (they get a randomly generated password emailed to them). Facebook Connect and OAuthing in via Twitter have also become viable options, but there are always uses for more information about users to personalize and improve the service.
The old way of collecting information is one that many sites still attempt: collecting all of this information up-front:
Registration forms like this often encourage users to give up during registration, meaning low user counts, low ad revenue, and no opportunity to upsell to other products later.
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How to get users to update their iOS apps
There are lots of reasons to want your users to update their phone apps. Anything from APIs changing, bug fixes, or driving users and profits through improved UX can be a good reason to get users to update ASAP. Updating apps is not something people regularly do (even Apple knows most iPhone users don’t even sync their phones at all), so here’s a technique to make it happen.
This tip is courtesy of Hotel Tonight, who sent me an email today demonstrating the technique, and inspiring the post.
Step 1
Send your users an email with a tantalizing subject line
More free money? Sure I’ll open this. I signed up for the product to save money on hotels, so linking the subject line directly to that core value is effective.
Posted in best practices, product
Tagged apps, hotel tonight, updating apps, user experience
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How to build a Lean product and UX (with examples)
I’m a big fan of the Lean philosophy for building things: businesses, products, user experiences, software, etc. This is one of the reasons I help organize the Lean Coffee meeting in SF (Tuesday mornings, come out and join!) Simple prototypes can be used to test things, rather than building a complete first version to validate an idea (which produces Waste, which Lean is designed to avoid).
This is why I’m so pleased to see my friends at Lumatic (the company formerly known as Omniar) taking advantage of this for their product and UX.
They built a static HTML version of the product that simulates many of the user interactions and the interface. At the end, they use a free survey from SurveyMonkey to collect feedback. Even better, they’re building a mobile app, and have still prototyped using HTML.
Posted in agile development, best practices, Business, testing
Tagged agile, lean, product development, testing, user experience, UX
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