Arthur Chang

Week Nine Ten Eleven

We've come a long way from the first days of FanPulse, starting from Joe and I building the foosball table.  Yes, the foosball table was the foundation of our entire company, setting the mood and proof of how fast and solid we could build something so that we could start playing with it ourselves.

I haven't blogged the last few weeks about our progress because it plainly drained me enough every day such that I had no motivation to just sit and blog, instead I sat and coded.  We have huge news, our iPhone application has launched to the public in the Apple App Store as of last Thursday.  See the blog post about it here.  That day was really exciting.  For the next couple days it was almost all building hype, which included spamming the crap out of our friends, borderline begging people to join us in watching the SuperBowl, and also presenting opportunities to sport bloggers to be featured as our news content provider for certain teams.

Building hype is important beyond anything you could possible do in a startup.  Not just in volume of hype, but the method of going about it.  At no time do you want to ever build the type of hype that creates expectations for exceeding your ability, but that doesn't mean even the simplest of applications can't have a lot of excitement surrounding it.  Play off of the fundamentals of your app, what already works and works great.  Talk about what these simple actions can do for the users.  Make users feel like they will become even more awesome after engaging in the 2 or 3 actions of your product.  Most importantly, don't promise anything that doesn't exist or hasn't been built yet.  Build hype about the present, be proud about what you have now.  The emphasis should be all about what's going on with your product today, and how it's currently making people's lives that much better.  Never make excuses for things your app might lack, or needs improvement on.  Make it sound like we purposely made everything the way it is (which should be true anyway).  Give people confidence in the product without making it sound like a scam.

It's huge to be confident in your own product.  That alone will increase the quality in the eyes of users.  If you're somewhat timid about making a fool of yourself, then that means you're truly not proud of the product and that's a bad sign.  If you're not proud, then you shouldn't have even released something.  Startups all understand that first revs, and every revision after is nowhere near the final goal of taking over the world, but knowing that goes a long way.  You see the qualities of what you have now, and it really shows when you pitch the idea to customers, investors, and beyond.

Avoiding criticism by making excuses is a huge turnoff.  Take criticism as suggestion and a learning experience, don't try to guess what people might hate or not like.  If you're stern enough, people will start seeing things your way, and the most passionate and well thought out suggestions will come up.  And of course, you'll get a bunch of random criticism that all stems from people trying to use your product in a different way than designed.  This probably means the messaging for what your app is really about was not clear enough.  There are exceptions where people are just looking for yet another hardcore "scoreboard" app for example, which we aren't.  If you read even a single paragraph of text, you'll understand this, but some will not and miss the point completely.  Hey, that's totally fine, but there's always room for improvement to make even the laziest users understand what's happening.  Once that's good, you can hook anybody.

Every release and big event for your product is a huge learning opportunity.  Build like a madman, hype it up like no other, piss people off, make people scream with joy, listen and learn, then do it all over again.

We were lucky in many ways, biggest being the SuperBowl event.  We saw a huge number of people check-in and shout about the game.  Once your friends are all on the app, it's actually really awesome while the game is going on.  The need for more cross platform solutions became even more apparent as a lot of our friends were sitting around not being able to join in.  We're pushing forward on our desktop and mobile web version of the application immediately.  We have a shell page for games already in the works: http://fanpul.se/games/133633  This will be good news for non-iPhone users, and people who just like playing with things on their laptops and desktop computers as well.  We'll get everyone's friends on this soon!

Time to get back to work!  More updates soon.

Week Eight

Today was an important day in the history of FanPulse!  We have officially submitted our product to the Apple App Store.  It's pretty amazing how much has been developed in such a short amount of time, much attributed to the awesome team we have.  Above is a photo I took of Joe and Vish as we prepare for the app submission on Saturday.

It's a good feeling to have to hit your deadlines, however aggressive.  Sometimes that extra pressure helps and makes everything just a bit more rewarding.  What this doesn't mean is that we're all taking vacation, it's quite the opposite.  We're diving head first into the next round of features and improvements we have been planning all along.

The difference between an iPhone app submission and a web app submission is that web submissions are up to you, and you can do them as many times as you want and as frequently as you want.  With the Apple App Store, you're at the mercy of their process.  What we released was a great minimum viable product, but there's still plenty of awesomeness to build.

For all the new, casual, and expert sports fans out there, this is just a taste of what's to becoming the coolest thing you'll ever see =)  I'll be posting on the FanPulse official blog (http://fanpulse.posterous.com) soon with details, and once we hit the app stores you'll see plenty of updates and buzz.

You should follow us on Twitter for the latest updates here.

What startups are looking for in services they use

Are you an entrepreneur or a company that wants to make some success in providing some service for startups?  Get started by understanding what startups need.

Startups want to concentrate on their core features, any paperwork or supporting services they have to deal with, build themselves, and maintain is incredibly gross to anyone.  This is a huge problem for a lot of startups: minimizing overhead busy work.  Why would a company have to go through the mundane and standard processes of accounting, legal paperwork, and even technical features that are common everywhere?  Either it be a technical feature that supports the core product or a completely unrelated element of maintaining a startup company, it needs to be something that can run in cruise control.

Be a company that creates a service that solves the problem of abstracting perviously unavoidable tasks by basically creating the notion of: "set and forget."  The way I measure the value of a service provided for startups is how little people think about the service.  If things just work, and frees up time for core product development, then that is a good service.

A prime example is something like Superfeedr.  Julien of Superfeedr came to Dogpatch Labs to meetup with me, walked me through a lot of features I didn't understand, and really took his time to understand my problem.  He assured me his service would be the answer.  It took me a few days to setup, and months later, I haven't had to think about Superfeedr ever again.  It just works.  It's a feature that works so well I have had to dedicate no time into maintaining or tweaking it.  Time and peace of mind is the greatest gift any company could give me.

It's a good sign when people ask me how well the product is working, and have a lot of questions on how I'm solving problems of my supporting features, and I have no clue.  All I do know is that it works amazingly well, exceeded expectations, and never caused me to need to go into details of understanding why it works.

I'm also not advocating not doing your research and keeping an eye out for updates, better solutions, and so on, but there are plenty of times when it's of more value to be able to depend on a service that works well, might not be exactly the newest and cutting edge, but frees you up to really develop the aspects of your product that will get you users, get you rich.  There's always time later to optimize, and if you chose the right products to go with, those guys are going to optimize for you.

So that brings me to another point, gaining the trust of startup companies to just set and forget.  How do you portray that your service is going to be dependable to us?  Ideally in the long run, the product is going to be tried by many companies and have a really good reputation.  I have no problem seeing the all star products all currently using and advocating the use of some product and just committing to it. I trust everyone else did their research and have had good experience.  But getting to that point is difficult.

The factors that are important to getting to the point of being trustworthy is to be human.  Put a face and a team behi nd the product.  Be completely transparent so we know that you're not hiding your problems or success.  Be honest, you are making money too, and we want to know how and why.  Don't try to seem like a completely altruistic group of people, because that just seems way too suspicious.  I don't have any problem with a company making money off of me, as long as I'm getting tons of value and the prices are reasonable enough for me to continue on with business.

The initial partnerships or customers you have are really important.  Choose companies that are popular, blog and talk a lot about cool supporting companies around them.  The best I've seen go out in person to meetup, chat, and talk about their product.  Personalized service and real face to face assurance really helps validate any product.  It's hard to do, but worthwhile if you're talking to people that are heavily influential.

And when you are answering questions, don't position yourself as someone who knows more about the product and the features than the company you're trying to persuade to use your product.  Don't be stubborn or egotistic.  Listen to their feedback, their needs, and give in once in awhile.  Let them know you've definitely been aware of any issues or features they want but are not yet built, and acknowledge that the fact that they are giving you the feedback substantiates the priority of those products.  Constant and dynamic evolution of products are a good sign that it won't be left in the dust in today's pace of technological advancements.  Also making any startup feel like they have played a hand as an early adopter in helping shape the cool supporting product will help further the startup's advocation and evangelization of your product.  Asking for advice and feedback is one of the most valuable ways to keep networked with a lot of startups.

I have no doubt the majority of the companies out there have great products for startup companies, but the steps to actually getting into the hands of these startups as a viable product really hinges on the basic concepts of making life easier and enforcing constant trust is incredibly important.

Below is my plug for the companies that have made FanPulse progress so quick and has helped maintain such high quality throughout our development process.  If I missed you, that's probably a good sign, but let me know anyway and I'll add you to the list:

• Superfeedr - Pushes feeds to our webhooks.  No need to manage feed pulling processes ever.
• Heroku - Keeps our backend up and running all the time.  Provides awesome addon features that just work and need no monitoring on our part.  Also allows us to scale up in an instant, deploy new code, and more.
• Evri - Deals with our initial sports related Natural Language Processing.  Works all the time, it's awesome.
• Chatterous - Helps the founders communicate easily, even maintaining history when we need to go back.
• Github - Repository to store code, place to find and track plugins and addons to help development, provides a pretty slick bug tracker as well that we don't have to maintain.
• Amazon AWS (s3, ec2) - Helps us scale, do backups, and more, with little worry or effort.

(first photo taken last week on a walk with my family through Lands End in San Francisco, CA)

Week Six

Here's week six in my series of documenting the early stages of my new startup.  The purpose is to document our progress, our maturity, and what we learn and experience every week.

This past week has really shown me a few key things.  

Lots of startups are trying to launch right around Christmas, either to tag onto the shopping spree of the economy, or to get things finished so they can go relax for the holidays.  There's quite a buzz in the startup community about now, and you learn a lot from them.  There's also a high level of stress, especially the balance between work and holiday festivities, which include shopping, family and friend events, traveling, and more.  Best thing to do?  Stay out of it.  Depending on Christmas for your app to launch successfully shouldn't be your strategy, though I won't deny the boost it could give.  Either way, the ultimate success of your product won't hinge on it being ready for Christmas, if it does, you have other problems to worry about.  Other stresses include the Apple App Store closing down to any changes or submissions you might have during and around the Christmas day, long lines to get approved, and other elements of your product that are totally out of your control.

Another cool characteristic about this time of the year is that you're more likely to be around friends and family.  Holidays are a great time to practice the elevator pitch.  I've learned a lot about my product by talking to a lot of people, strangers and friends alike, that I probably couldn't have in the same amount of time with my co-founders or buried in code.  I left my echo chambers last weekend to go on a photoshoot with a seriously eclectic group of people.  There were new faces, familiar faces, and old faces at the shoot.  The photo posted above is from the event at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco.  I met a few developers in enterprises, a few from Google, a few from startups, and then also a bunch of other people in various trades and fields.  All of which had at least some interest in sports.  If not before we talked, definitely after =)

At the event, I was able to take a breather and walk at least 7 - 8 miles, enjoying the outdoors and the holiday decorations.  I also talked to a lot of different people, about the new company, about my new product, and about what they thought about it.  Sure I wasn't the only one talking the whole time, but I did get a lot of reactions and feedback.  By the end of the night, my pitch had matured dramatically from when the day started.

I am a developer most of the day, coding, but that doesn't mean that's all I need to concentrate on.  Founder status requires the responsibility of keeping your head above the clouds, out of the echo chamber, and putting on many hats.  Gathering data from feedback and analytics through the product is one thing, but also just trying to describe and basically convince people that your product is awesome gives you an idea of what people want before even seeing the product.  In essence, I was trying to sell vapor.  I get a little credibility for the vapor since I'm actually building it.  This weird "Matrix" type stuff I do on the backend seems to add just enough mystery for people to give me a little more cred than I would have otherwise =)

What I've done in this exercise is further gain another set of feedback from a totally different group.  I've also further improved the pitch.  I've substantiated more of the product's focus, and have more ideas on how to market the main features.  Sure it's not the final or only set of data go off of, but getting out and doing something completely different with a totally different group of people has definitely helped me as an individual become better in experience and knowledge to continue development of the product.  It also helped me step back a bit in my thoughts of my product, to reorganize what I have been doing for a few weeks, and describing it in it's most primitive of forms.  It really helps to be able to get out of the huge hole you've dug in your product, so you can remind yourself what fresh minds really think about a potential product of yours.

This further substantiates my belief that being a successful entrepreneur and developer is strongly aided by your ability to take part in other activities outside of your daily work.  I'm not saying go out to random venues to try to push your products, nor take time away from development or from the product in order to try to gain more feedback.  But go out and enjoy the world from a different perspective completely, keep your own self achievements a little more diverse, and you'll be amazed at how people think outside of the world's startup bubble.

Practicing your pitch also gets you organized, fresh, and thinking.  It keeps you from putting yourself into dead ends, or too far down the wrong road.

Also partaking in some holiday fun will help you rejuvinate some of that spirit and excitement that is constantly being sucked away by memory leak issues, internet explorer compatibility issues, and dealing with battling third party services (apple, facebook, etc) that you depend on.

Happy holidays everyone!

Week Five

Week five has been really exciting, and here is a little recap of it as part of my series of documenting the early stages of my new startup.  The purpose is to document our progress, our maturity, and what we learn and experience every week.

It's been a pretty exciting week.  Along with our great beta testers, being part of the target audience really helps as we can visualize and understand the app with first hand experience.  I couldn't imagine building something without having any interest in using it when it was done.  Building something that you will eagerly use is as exciting as it is motivating.

Week five was awesome, everything we did had a substantiated direction.  Instead of waiting around and trying to justify what we've built, we've proven a few theories, and totally eliminated others.  All the polishing we did made the app better, and what makes the app better?  By improving that core feature / functionality that everyone understands and uses.  We didn't spend time working on a page that only 2% of our users saw, and nobody really cared for.  We didn't spend any time adding in features that had nothing to do with our core functionality.  Everything we did helped people do what they naturally came to the app to do.

One big question we talk a lot about is, what's the pitch?  One thing to realize is that if your product doesn't dictate a clear enough pitch, it's definitely not focused or clear enough itself.  If we were making a machine that materializes a hamburger, and that's all it did, our pitch would be quite clear: "Our product makes hamburgers out of thin air."  I wish that's what we were making, but the reality is, few things are that simple to start out with.  It could have started with an idea to make food from air, an entire meal, multiple meals, for an arbitrary amount of people, possibly creating liquids to drink too, and with kosher and vegetarian modes, and what have you.  All of that is what a lot of different people want, but why promise so much when you could simplify to start with just making a hamburger and doing that really well to prove what you're capable of.

Once everyone knows exactly that one core feature that's where the excitement starts.  You no longer have as many lingering questions, nor too many tasks to tackle.  You don't have to hire tons of people to take care of each category of what your product has, but instead the core team that you like a lot working on the same core elements.  Simplifying will also help you release early and often, without ever needing to explain exactly what all the new things will help you do.  You'll know that you're going to get a better hamburger, and because of that you're excited right away.  You don't need to read into the bulleted list of features to know that.

Simplifying is the best decision to make, but it can also be the hardest one because you're letting go of all these features you were really excited about.  The best way to think about it is that nobody else is thinking as much into it as you, you're down a path way further in maturity than your product is, and that each of these features probably has a place and time in your product, but that time is later.  Wait until the audience understands and loves your core features, and then be the good guy who gives these people all the little features that they start to need.  The demand is what wil l keep your product alive after launch, the demand is what is going to help investors decide to invest, and the demand will show you the possibilities of generating revenue.  Launch with something that is awesome, just one thing.  You'll be surprised!

Anyway, the photo at the top is a picture of one of the natural bridges near Davenport, California.  I went down there a few times that day, trying to find the perfect lighting and weather.  It was raining pretty bad, and I was hoping for some breaking fluffy clouds, but settled for a dark semi-long exposure to capture a minimal look on these cool structures.  More on my Flickr stream: http://flic.kr/photos/kinetic

Week Four

Wow, I've almost lost count of how many weeks it has been since we started building our app (photo unrelated... mostly).  It literally started from scratch 4 weeks ago, and tomorrow we are already ready for our second beta release.  This isn't a pure web app, mind you, it's an iPhone app.  We got backend, frontend, api's, stat servers, natural language processing processes, and more, all playing nicely in 3 weeks, and now 4 weeks ready for another release.  On top of all of that, we have all the nitty gritty business details: seed funding, design work, branding work, marketing strategies, PR relationship building, shmoozing, twittering, and blogging.  It all really gets complicated, and it's amazing how we're getting everything in line and organized.

This week was dedicated to improving our first release, w hich I'd like to call our alpha.  After using the app ourselves along with 20 or so beta testers, we've really gotten to know how our idea works in real life.  An idea and a finished product are basically two completely different things.  What you think your product will be, is actually not how it will ever feel once materialized.  Focuses shift, things are stripped out, and the core features are redefined and polished.  Every release is going to throw curveballs at you, you just have to be ready for it.  All the features and ideas you thought were table stakes might just be superfluous things that really don't make your app cool.

With FanPulse, we've found that, sure, there's about a hundred different things people would love in the app, but does that make them more likely to open up the app again?  Nope.  What do they like the most, what do they use the app for?  That's what we need to focus on.  If there's an outrageous amount of demand for a feature that's outside the scope of our core, even more so than what the awesome feature the app is centered around, maybe it's time to look at another product that has been unearthed by your previous idea.  Yes that could happen, but don't force it.

Tomorrow we're releasing a set of features that is a continuation of our efforts to polish and make our core functionality work even better.  I still regard the next release as an alpha, as it's still testing out our earliest ideas.  I'm not against saying that it's not perfect or ready for the public yet, because it will be soon, and releasing small and often will pay off big time.

If you're not in our releases yet, and want to get in on this next beta, send an email to beta@wethefan.com with your name and email.  If you have an iPhone and know how to get your UDID, send that too!  We'll get you in for tomorrow.

And if you're all wondering what the heck the picture is above, it is of a Porcelain Crab.  The Neopetrolisthes ohshimai is not actually a true crab, but a squat lobster evolved into what is more or less a crab looking thing.  I think this evolution is called carcinisation.  Basically shows how crabs might have evolved from lobsters due to environmental factors (hiding under rocks for example).

Anyways, these guys are cool!  They use their claws to fend off predators or in my case a few harmless snails and fish, but use what's called setae to catch food.  Setae are basically a pair of arms that stretch out from underneath them that have "nets" in them.  They catch particles (planktonic food) and shove them into their mouths:

I currently have a mated pair in my tank, they sort of just hang out together and grab stuff out of the water column.  I doubt I'd be able to keep any of their offspring successfully, but it's fun having them as a pair nevertheless.

The Importance of Good Admin Pages

A good administration dashboard is key.  The whole reason behind an admin panel is to allow for human heuristic fine tuning of an app.  We need these either constantly or often, in order to maintain some aspect that just cannot be solved with computer magic (though many will argue that there is always a way, but the tradeoffs in some cases are not worth it).  Because of this, an aesthetically beautiful and equally easy to use admin interface is as important, if not more, than a user facing interface.  For computers, you want them to crank through really gross algorithms that would otherwise be impossible to maintain in your own brain.  For administrators, you want to make the experience of administering a site as pleasant and easy as humanly possible.

The big reason why people neglect and cut corners on admin facing pages is because "nobody ever sees it except us."  But isn't that the most important thing?  If you as employees only see the shittiest parts of your app all the time, or subject poor interns and new hires to this awful task, it just shows how little attention to detail you give to making your app hum like a well oiled engine.  When you develop any part of your code, always ask yourself if this is quality you are proud of, internal and external to your own company.  At some point horrible admin panels will just pile up, and there's no turning back.

If you start with a slick looking admin panel that works great and is easy to maintain when things change, then you will always have an awesomely tuned app with consistently great admin controls.  If you start with quite a grotesque arrangement of links and badly styled form fields, anything slicker than that just makes what you've built already look even uglier.  It's a bad snowball to be in.

It's easy to choose admin pages to cut corners on, because there's never an imminent need for them.  The time it saves is clearly good initially, but leads to plenty of cursing and swearing later on.  So what's the solution?  In some frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, there are nice little things like Active Scaffold.  Unfortunately DHH and the rails maintainers aren't the world's best designers.  The usability, looks, and consistency are all pretty bad using the built in utilities.  At FanPulse, our current admin looks good, works great, is easy to maintain, and is even easier to expand on.  What we did is we used the somewhat popular web app theme utility for our rails based app called, "web-app-theme" by Pilu.  I guess it's not that clever of a name, but it works like it reads.

The tool is actually a ruby script that can be used with the script/generate command.  It basically sweetens up an existing active scaffold, or any model based controller.  It even creates all the files from scratch to you.  It comes prepackaged with a dozen nice themes that are super clean and easy to use.  It took me less than a day to create an expansive admin panel that can help us keep track of, modify, and add new teams, players, leagues, divisions, conferences, sports, beta users... you name it!  This will save us hundreds and hundreds of hours of work, and make administering the app just a tad less tedious.  Of course, if your app requires tons of administrative work constantly, there's some other decision that has gone wrong.  In our case, we need to do some fine tuning once to make sure all our data is totally perfect.  It's also great for adding new beta users and all that jazz.

The web-app-theme generator is geared towards being a good launch point for an entire web app, not just an admin panel.  I'm not that excited to take these designs and showing them to the world, but they look and feel great for administrative purposes.  So I've tapped into using it exclusively in an admin only side of our app.

They key to making it an admin only app, is to use elegant Rails Namespaces, which came about in the rails Changeset 6594.  This allows you to group controllers for specific models inside a namespace.  I chose the namespace called "admin".  This effectively gave me the ability to create a subdirectory in the app/controllers directory called "admin".  Then under there were all my individual controllers for individual models.  My routes.rb looked as so:

 

  map.namespace :admin do |admin|

    # The below resource mapping directs /admin/teams/* to Admin::TeamsController (app/controllers/admin/teams_controller.rb)

    admin.resources :teams

    admin.resources :players

    admin.resources :users

  end

 

The above snippet shows how I have a model controller for each model.  By doing this, you can maintain a super restful way to setup your controllers, using the usual index, show, edit, update, new, create, destroy actions with their respective get, put, and delete request methods.  Also maintains a great way to use named routes with: admin_teams_path to goto the index action of the teams controller under the admin namespace.  Another example is new_admin_team_path for going to the new controller.  One thing to note is for other mentions of controllers outside of this admin namespace, use a prepended slash to specify no namespace.  For example:

redirect_to :controller => '/session', :action => 'new'

The above takes you out of the admin namespace because of the prepended slash in front of session.  Otherwise it will try to hit you with admin/session controller, which probably doesn't exist.

Once you've installed the web-app-theme generator, and setup your routes, you can then create initial admin layout and styles:

$ ruby script/generate themed admin --theme="drastic-dark"

The generator is called "themed" and the parameter "admin" is what we want the layout to be named, in this case it will automatically create an "admin.html.erb" layout file for you.  The option "--theme" is where you designate what theme style you want to go with.  Pick from here: http://pilu.github.com/web-app-theme

Once that's done, create a view for your first model controller (controller can be created after):

$ ruby script/generate themed admin/teams --layout=admin --with_will_paginate

The above will generate all the views for you under app/views/admin/teams using the layout we generated before as well as scaffolding the views up with will_paginate automatically.  Good if you have more than like 50 entries.  Then create your controller using the usual ActiveScaffold, but give it a namespace as well as a "global" layout:

class Admin::TeamsController < ApplicationController

layout 'admin'

...

The controller should be created inside the app/controllers/admin directory.  Given your routes were setup with admin.resources :teams, it should all be setup.  Oh and one last thing, if you used the will_paginate option, make sure you change the controller finds to paginate.  And that's it!  Do the same for all the other models you want to administer.  If you want to do one offs from models, it's easy to just use the usual template to put whatever you want in there.  Takes minutes, looks consistent, and is much nicer to use and expand on.

Make your employees happy in your startup, make the interns feel like they are not doing really sad work in, but actually being part of a really polished startup company.  Having a solid admin in your app is a huge indication of how well you plan everything you work on, including planning, researching options, and finding the most elegant and robust solution available.  If you can learn to use these tools quickly, you will go far in the rest of your development, user facing or not.

NOTE: I didn't do any editing of this blog post, just wrote what was in my head (as I usually do), so please excuse my crap grammatical errors and horrible organization of it all.  I'm not here to publish a book, just write my thoughts down.

Week Three - Stay focused especially with a release

The Calcinus laevimanus (Zebra Dwarf Hermit crab) in my reef tank gets blown around quite a bit.  I have flow that amounts to about 7500 gallons per hour flow through the tank, so as soon as the hermits lose grip on a rock, they go flying.  This little guy tumbled quite far, but was able to get back up after a little rocking back and forth.  Determination and focus to survive is as simple as getting your house upright again.  Well, maybe simple for a hermit.

Week three of my startup company has been pretty exciting.  We met up with one of our board of advisors, who provided really good feedback and information.  It's always great to have people who really make the effort to share their knowledge and insight.  It's not like you rely on that for direction, but it's good to keep your head out of any echo chambers you might be in, and really listen to other experts out there to see how other people and groups think in the same industries.  That is one of the most important things to learn in a startup: how everyone else is thinking about the same problems.

The worst that could happen to a company is for all the founders to put their heads down, bury themselves in code and business details, talk amongst themselves, and in essence, persuade each other that what they are doing is exactly right.  Echo chamber.  Everything really comes down to the same way of thinking for startups: release fast, often.  This will get you the most feedback from real life people, and with what they say you can easily determine what to build next as a feature.  There's no need for you and your founders to be geniuses, knowing exactly how people will want the app to behave, knowing the perfect UI flows.  There's also no need for countless hours discussing how exactly the best way to present information is.  Just present it as best you see it, and let the people tell you.

And of course there's simplifying.  If you find yourself needing more resources and hires to build stuff, you are definitely NOT focused on the one goal.  If you need to branch out to maintain some completely separate product to give your core product some value, you have just created two startups.  Whenever you are faced with tons of features that aren't maintainable, you've probably gone too far.  Focusing on one strong goal, either it be 140 character status updates (or face it, 140 characters of bragging), or it be checking into sports games with your friends, will keep you from biting more than you can chew.

Our next release will not be a ton of more features that 1 to 5% of our users wanted to see, but it's going to be polishing up and making the core functionality that 100% of the users have used, even better.  Of course making it even better doesn't mean just making buttons shiny, or fixing a few bugs, but it can definitely include features that all go towards the same goal of making the core functionality that much more appealing.

It all comes down to a fine balance of not building non-core functionality features, and giving people enough things to be excited about for the next release.

This will be our next biggest challenge!  Utilizing user feedback to determine what's next on the list.  I'm not going to lie, we do already want to do about 100 different things, but we're going to try our best to keep it simple.

Thanks to all the feedback so far on FanPulse!  Those beta testing are really the ones behind exactly what this product will become.

FanPulse Beta Released!

I'm excited to announce that the FanPulse Beta has been released for the iPhone!  We (Joe, Vish, and I) have been working night and day (when not playing foosball or basketball) and the app has now landed in a handful of handpicked users' phones / touches.  This first phase of introducing sports fans to a socially centric sports application includes many novel yet simple concepts that naturally align with how people think and talk about sports today.  We've really tapped into how people interact with friends or even strangers about sports, making their sports knowledge more powerful in an effortless way (for us technically and for the sports fan!).

Instead of reinventing how sports fans should consume sports, we've simply provided a nice tool for sports fans to increase their casual to hardcore sports knowledge, as well as improve interaction socially with friends over a technology medium.

If you'd like to learn more and be part of our next release, you should follow FanPulse on Twitter here for updates on how to signup! 

Week Two

Week two has felt like an eternity, and surely the amount of productivity is close to that.  I've never expected to have put together something so quickly and with such high quality before in my life!  The requirements for the upmost quality of code and timeliness is as extreme as you could imagine, since the one I have to answer to here is simply: me.  You are your harshest critic.

Week two went really smoothly, as I started hitting my stride in feature development balanced with all the other planning, management, and what nots of the product.  There has been awesome feedback so far from our advisors, and just bouncing the idea off people is easier and easier, meaning the problem we're solving, and the solution, are understandable and clear.  It's not completely perfected yet, but everything's pointing in the right direction.  The minimum viable product is stripped down pretty far, and definitely scary to release since it's not exactly what our grand vision is (far from it really).  The human tendency to try to completely bedazzle the audience with the first splash upfront is difficult to ignore.  We must see the value in quick and lightweight releases of the product, as long as each release provides a solid, unique, and easy to understand message each time.

People don't need your product right away, if they do then it has to be perfect right away.  Without even having people try it, there's no way to know what they want.  Instead the approach the company is taking is to give people something that's different, that begins to solve the fundamentals of the problems they have.  Once they commit to that one single idea we've released, they're hooked! Now they NEED new features.  And that's what we build =)

Aside from code, I decided to get out and take some pictures again this weekend.  This time I was pleasantly accompanied by my #1, and we did some exploring around Moss Beach / Fitzgerald Marine Reserve.

See all pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kinetic/

Teasers below: