Cloudspace

This month marks our two year anniversary loaning to small entrepreneurs worldwide through the Kiva “loans that change lives” program.  It’s been a great payoff seeing so many people succeed and pay us back so we can lend again.  We started with only four loans in December of 2008 and now have over 160 loans, totaling more than $4,000 lent.

For just $25 per loan, you can help an entrepreneur reach their goal too! It also makes a great holiday gift

Part of the Cloudspace Agile Process is to break large specifications down into feature tickets to assign to engineers. Breaking the specification down into feature tickets allows you to get a real feel for the depth of work involved in each step of the creating a web based product. Taking the time to break down a product into fine grained feature tickets is one of the most important things any product owner can do for their project. Each ticket should be focused and explicit, giving the developer every piece of information they need while remaining as brief as possible .

December 4th marked our third and most recent art show which, to no surprise, was a raging success! John “hex” Carter, Theresa and myself were hanging art for 4 days beforehand and our friendly neighborhood ninja, Aaron Yarhouse, jumped in at the last minute with an extra hammer and superior hammering skills to finish the job! With 50 individual attendees and an estimated 200 art pieces shown, it was by far our largest art endeavor yet. Special thanks to everyone who came out, an even specialer thanks to everyone (and there were tons!) who purchased something, double specialer thanks to artist J.P. Perez who remembered to take photos when the rest of us forgot, and the ultimate special thanks to all the other artists who made this possible! Hopefully I’ve included everyone, if someone slipped through the cracks let us know and the list will be updated to reflect the full extent of the awesome!

Great post from Bradford Cross over at Measuring Measures on questions that entrepreneurs should ask VCs and angels when looking for funding. I’ll reproduce the bullet points here, and let you jump to his blog for the expansion of ideas.

1. Are you aligned with [ insert company goal here ]?
2. What can you do for us?
3. How are you going to act during drawdowns and pivots?
4. How are you going to act when we are fielding inbound acquisition offers?
5. Do you focus more on people, or more on market?
6. Are you looking at us independently?
7. What are the terms?

Pitch on, entrepreneurs. Pitch on.

Instead of burying the instructions for your application deep in a FAQ somewhere, or trying to make them sit through a long tutorial during the signup process (“I just want to use the app!!1″), do what YouTube does:

Wait for them to take an action, then encourage them down the right path with more details. For infrequent and big/meaningful actions like becoming a contributor to YouTube (as opposed to most users who are viewers), an email is a great approach. For more common actions, in-app tips are better. The user has taken an action, and that’s a great time to teach them something new.

This post on training users has been brought to you by Cesar Millan (not true) and National Geographic (also false).