Learning From Failure: One Startup’s Story of What Went Wrong
Devver , maker of developer coding tools and TechStars 2008 graduate, announced last Monday that it would be shutting down after being active for nearly two years. News of a startup closing up shop is never a fun thing to hear about, but fortunately many lessons can be gleaned from the experiences of the entrepreneurs. Today, co-founder Ben Brinckerhoff provided just such lessons with an insightful blog on the Devver journey and why he and co-founder Dan Mayer are choosing to move on. Sponsor An unfortunate truth about startup culture is that a lot of the most valuable lessons are learned when entrepreneurs fail to heed them. Some notice their mistakes early on and can pivot their products and business toward a more successful future, but sometimes they don’t realize their mistakes until its too late and there is nothing that can be done. This was the case with Brinckerhoff, Mayer and their startup, Devver, which they say failed to focus enough on one of the most important parts of building a startup: customer development. As Brinckerhoff points out in Monday’s blog post, the company assumed they had found their minimum viable product (MVP), and as a result focused more on product development than listening to customers’ needs. “You can teach a hacker business, but you can’t make him or her get excited about it, which means it may not get the time or attention it deserves.” – Ben Brinckerhoff “Our mistake at that point was to go ‘heads down’ and focus on building the accelerator while minimizing our contact with users and customers (after all, we knew how great it was and time spent talking to customers was time we could be hacking!),” writes Brinckerhoff. “We should have [been] asking, ‘Is there an even simpler version of this product that we can deliver sooner to learn more about pricing, market size, and technical challenges?’.” Both Brinckerhoff and his co-founder are “technical founders,” which means their specialities are on the development side, not the business side. The only other person the pair hired to help out, a fellow software developer, also fits into the technical side of the startup. Brinckerhoff says this may have been one of the hurdles that led to the downfall of the company. “Looking back, it would have been to our advantage to have a third founder who really loved the business aspect of running a startup,” writes Brinckerhoff. “Having solely technical founders is non-optimal. You can teach a hacker business, but you can’t make him or her get excited about it, which means it may not get the time or attention it deserves.” Brinckerhoff also adds that having a split team located in different states contributed to the company’s struggles, but it seems to me it was more of a hassle than a reason for failure. Split teams are actually growing in popularity and probability for success, as we discussed earlier in the year with companies like Blank Label and chocri . Devver undoubtedly had issues with its split setup, but its likely that it didn’t contribute toward its closing as significantly as the other errors. Regardless of this issue, its clear that the Devver team learned and shared some valuable lessons about the importance of customer development. As Steve Blank noted during his presentation at last week’s Startup Lessons Learned conference, startups shouldn’t be too eager to product management before customer development. Devver may have jumped the gun a bit in terms of over developing their product, so learn from their mistake and remember to develop your customers before throwing the kitchen sink at them. Discuss
Android Ported to iPhone
Hacker Planetbeing has apparently ported the Android to the iPhone. The Android OS is, in this video, apparently running successfully on the Apple phone. Planetbeing has offered the Android-to-iPhone ” pre-built images and sources ” as a torrent download For the time being, it looks like the porting only works on first-generation iPhones. Sponsor “It should be pretty simple to port forward to the iPhone 3G,” says Planetbeing. “The 3GS will take more work. Hopefully with all this groundwork laid out, we can make Android a real alternative or supplement for iPhone users.” As Alexander Vaughn points out on AppAdvice , “Just like you can do Bootcamp on your Mac to access PC apps, you’ll be able to go on Android to try all these apps that don’t exist, or were not allowed on the iPhone.” Discuss
Developer Trends: Ruby in the Cloud with Enterprise Class SLAs
Heroku is a platform that offers an effective join of the best parts of scaling cloud infrastructure with simple but great tools for immediately provisioning Ruby applications. Last week, at the Under the Radar event, where Heroku is a alumni, the company announced that they are nearly at 60,000 applications – marking a growth rate of over 1,000 new applications hosted weekly. In this quick analysis, we’ll review Heroku and New Relic as two pieces of cloud infrastructure that helps web sites perform to service level agreements even the developer can love. Sponsor $ sudo gem install heroku – or – Getting Started is Easy Feel like impressing the boss? Tell ‘em you can transform that whiteboard sketch into an working web application in two weeks. That is what some inspired Ruby developers are doing. Some significant enterprises are giving it a shot. We found this list of enterprises that are known to have a Ruby application in production. So, the boss says ” do it ” What do you do next? If the answer needs to be “now”, Heroku can fit in nicely as a place to launch your application without having to bring new technology or skills into the organization. Heroku’s ruby platform lives on top of Amazon Web Services. The company sells a unit of computing called a Dyno, and bundles packages like the Ronin that are comprised of compute plus storage packages. All of Heroku’s offerings come with infrastructure curation build ton top of EC2, S3 and a host of Amazon Web Services. Shown here is a snapshot of the Heroku Add-ons , partners the company offers to developers. It offers simplicity to the developer in the way the platform is bundled into Ruby. It has simple documentation that almost makes it fun to flip through architecture diagrams. And, it uses a model for add-ons that both promote the partner and make it easy to on-board. For example, when buying the popular Ruby application performance tool, New Relic for use in Heroku, the billing comes directly through Heroku’s console and process. Recently, Heroku teamed up with NorthScale to introduce a memcache implementation to Heroku customers. Now, memcache is a command away, provisioned in your Amazon infrastructure cloud, all tuned and orchestrated by Heroku. All of the sudden, the cloud looks even smarter for developers scaling Ruby. New Relic Saves the SLA So, your app is ready, it looks exactly like your team wants it to. Is it ready for production launch? This can be an important time, and more and more often, developers are turning to tools like New Relic to test for application bottlenecks as part of the acceptance process. Sometimes, however, something is missed, and an application starts getting reports of “slowness”, perceived or real. New Relic is ready to offer help, where you can tune your application, or do a quick two-minute install and troubleshoot. Here is a demonstration application company hosts with a sample application. New Relic has become a dominant application performance management tool. Its services provide a way to tune Ruby (and now Java) applications and report on a number of factors such as application performance satisfaction. The company has chosen to guide users towards simplifying the way SLAs are defined by implementing Apdex (Application Performance Index) which buckets application SLAs into three buckets, “satisfying” “tolerable”, and “frustrating”. By taking this approach to judging performance, the company moves users to the true experience of the web application instead of the raw metrics. What this boils down to is business owners being able to pinpoint where they need to be satisfied with the overall application performance. Ruby hosting in the cloud is catching on. With cloud offerings for real-time performance tuning and scaling up in the cloud a whole new door for growth with the language and adoption for the enterprise. Platforms like Heroku and tools like New Relic are bending the time-honored boundaries of Information Technology. The old joke “quality, time, cost – pick any two” is about meeting reality face-to-face. Yet, we wonder if Ruby in the cloud will offer the opportunity to break the rules of reality and let developers have it all. With commands such as “heroku scale memcache” directly near our fingertips, it may be time to claim a future where quality, time, and cost are joined as one. Discuss
What Twitter Annotations Mean
I love to sit on the beach. One of the coolest things about the beach is the number of layers of visual depth. Look at the sand and it’s beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you’ll see a whole layer of life running around on the sand that you didn’t see before. Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and light dancing between them. Look closer still and you see that each grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture. If your eyes are strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more layers by looking closer still. That’s what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter Annotations this Summer. It’s a beautiful vision, with huge potential, but there’s another way to look at this analogy: you don’t build on the beach sand because it shifts too much. Will Annotations live up to its incredible promise? Sponsor What Annotations Are Last week Twitter announced a forthcoming feature called Twitter Annotations: it’s a system for almost any metadata to be connected to any Twitter message when it’s published. Inside every Tweet is now a space where you could put or find anything, including links out to further instructions or larger bodies of information. That’s always been the case with the 140 characters of content – but now we’re talking about systematic metadata intended for machines, to augment the content. The idea is dripping with potential, but also some risk. Isn’t much of life’s meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? Twitter has been considering adding Annotations for at least two years, according to Platform Team member Raffi Krikorian. That’s a relatively large portion of the company’s young life. Every time a new bit of metadata was added to Tweets, like geolocation information was last Fall, the company would ask itself “should we be doing this, or should we just open up the platform for and and all metadata?” Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content. What might this look like? We could see Annotations fields like: Link to a media file, like podcast enclosures, photos linked to, etc. Context about the Tweet like where was the author when it was published, maybe what the weather was like there at the time. Your Twitter publishing interface could offer you a special option to write reviews of movies, books, or links you’re sharing. The ISBN of the book, a link to a preview of the movie and the number of stars in your rating could be included in the Tweet Annotations. Any way you can classify, describe, append or otherwise enrich a Tweet with words or numbers can be included in Annotations. You Tweet, you (or more likely your Twitter app) attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and more will make it easy for users to add these annotations. Yes, this is meaningful in large part because of the 140 character limit on Twitter messages themselves, but isn’t much of life’s meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? From Annotations Come Analysis Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it’s when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that things get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter – that’s when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate. Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier. Tweetmeme’s Nick Halstead believes that Annotations will be used most extensively to communicate webhooks, links to instructions for a Twitter client to follow. He thinks it will enable game play and help Twitter start acquiring more users again. “Because of the size of the data you can put in the annotations, I think people will come up with links to offsite resources. Seesmic is building their own platform for Windows to support plug-ins, but this reaches much further, but this lets Twitter clients augment a tweet with other services. Sf you were Stocktweets, you could attach a link in the namespace that’s in stocktweets, Seesmic could follow that link back to Stocktweets and ask it how to render it. So you could put a chart and any other associated information. It’s like FBML [Facebook Markup Language], the ability to embed applications inside the Twitter clients. Maybe threaded conversations. A game of Scrabble where the link points at a currently rendered scrabble board, so other people could look at the board and join in playing it. Annotations and webhooks would allow gaming to start happening on Twitter.” Halstead believes an Alpha version of Annotations could be made available to developers in a month. How about showing me all the Tweets from anyone that are referencing the President of the United States (subject: POTUS?), analyze the sentiment in the messages, show me where those Twitter users were located and tell me how those local sentiments change over time. Send me an alert when one of those starts to shift radically. Show me all the Tweets by people in their 20′s and in their 50′s (imagine an author age tag in Annotations, why not?), living near the site of a disastrous event. How do those discussions differ? There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be tackled when the developer world’s imagination runs wild on the terms of description applied to our messages. Of course it will be tempting to draw all kinds of conclusions from this rich data. We’ll surely be able to draw a whole lot of value from it. “You can learn something from almost anything,” Big Data cruncher and 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar says. “Just give me enough data, I’ll figure out something.” But let’s keep in mind the words of social network scientist danah boyd, who wrote the following on her blog this morning: Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic…Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer. Tweet Power Politics Twitter’s Krikorian says the site will probably list “trending annotations” just like it lists trending topics today. There will probably be a wiki where anyone can find out what namespaces are being used for what purposes. Really though, the classification system is going to be determined by the market. That’s something that worries a lot of people. “People who believe in building standards are conerned about our blase attitude about how we want to run annotations,” Krikorian says. He believes that the developer community will work things out for itself, just as it has in the past. “There has been a lot of emergent behavior around how to relate to tweets anyway, without our imposing much structure around it. The Twitter platform is continuously evolving – the developers will figure it out. Twitter developers iterate in public.” That’s likely to be cold comfort for people focused on the power of structured data standards. Many people are calling for Twitter to embrace the well-built efforts of the Semantic Web community. Krikorian says that 90% of Twitter developers don’t know what the Semantic Web is but that there’s certainly room for standards lovers to work within the Annotations scheme. It’s not just about standards, either. “We need serious consideration from folks who know their stuff before we create a convention,” says Teresa Boze , who suggested the American Society of Indexers in particular. It’s hard to think that creating a giant living library without consulting some librarians is a good idea. The absence of standard terminology could really be a problem. Annotations can’t be changed retroactively, either. Krikorian says that major players will dominate the obvious use cases for Annotations and the company will monitor and highlight really innovative Annotations developed by people on the margins. We’ll see how well that will work. Imagination will make the sky the limit for this publishing platform used easily by more than 100 million people around the world. But a shortage of forethought, planning and agreed-upon standards may bring that platform’s aspirations back down to earth quickly in the future. Time will tell. Discuss
Cartoon: What’s a Time-out in 2010?
As a parent (now there’s a phrase you don’t see here that often), I’m dazzled by the range of entertainment options my kids and I have. From the educational (I swear!) shows we have loaded up on PVR, to the educational (really!) kids’ apps on my iPhone to the not-even-a-little-educational clips we watch on YouTube, we could easily while away every hour in a digital haze. But there’s this whole other world out there of face-to-face interaction, fresh air, exercise and – loath though our children’s parents are to admit it – sleep. And when the time comes to power down the Wii and say goodbye to MySims Agents for another day, tantrums sometimes ensue… and the almighty power of parental discipline has to come into play. Sponsor Sometimes just counting sternly to five will do the job. Sometimes something more stringent is called for – like shelving a game for a few days. And sometimes, well, sometimes we’re groping for solutions, like generations of parents before us. At least for the next few years, Alex and I are in the enviable position of knowing the tech better than our kids do. (We’re reasonably sure than when our then-two-year-old son locked Alex out of her iPhone, and created a ghost partition on our home server, it was random button-pressing at work.) Ask me in another decade, and you may hear a much different story. With that, let me wish a very happy first birthday to my favourite budding little pair-coding team in the world, and to their parents who could single-handedly make geeky look cool (to me, anyway) all over again. More Noise to Signal. Discuss