Digging In

Fred has a good post to open the discussion over at AVC today on sales traction vs product-market fit. Go read that. Here's my two cents: I'm generally optimistic about the possibilities of a product given the right team and plan. When I started Mission Research (GiftWorks) with my co-founders, I felt we should take our time, map things out, develop the framework, etc. But my impatience exceed that feeling, and I pushed for an early release, which led to a total of 2 customers (more or less) in the first month. The product wasn't right. There were bugs. There were features the customer base thought should be standard that weren't in there. Some of our usability assumptions were wrong. It was a slog for the first year. But it was an invaluable year: by the next release, we had a much better product-market fit. We listened. We spent time on site with customers, documenting how crappy their experience with GiftWorks was. We refined it and made it a lot better. An

I've had multiple monitor setups for a long time, mostly for my recording studio (which is now just a bedroom in my apartment). But as a Macbook Air owner I'm down to one 23", with a 24" on my studio PC. Recently I've craved more monitor space for dev purposes. I'm working on a few things, each of which requires a lot of testing, monitoring console outputs, multiple browser windows, and of course a few windows of code (someone tell me I'm doing it wrong). After spending a few hours looking for another 23" monitor--and finding an HP refurb for $89 if I could just make it to Best Buy in Fargo to pick it up--I stumbled across some software that makes it relatively simple. Avatron (and a bunch of others) makes a simple app that works over wifi to display a mac screen on a PC screen. For $20, I'm now using that 24" PC monitor for displaying 4 console screens--extending the Mac screen rather than simply replicating it. It's exactly wha

I haven't been blogging regularly. As one of my six readers you might have noticed. I'm not sure exactly why, but I needed a break. Maybe it's gotten stale. Maybe it's that I'd rather be coding than writing, and if I write I want to write about code. I'm working on a side project: autosave for Meetup, blogs, and Disqus. It's a pain in the ass to lose a post, so I've built a plugin that saves my stuff to the browser, and just for fun saves it to Ye Olde Cloud. It's not a business, it's scratching an itch. In October --when I first started this and put it down when it basically worked --I lost a long email to one of my meetups I manage. Meetup doesn't offer a basic autosave like, say, Blogger does, or Drive. Even Disqus has a basic autosave. The problem, though, is that it's very easy to trip over the keyboard and navigate to a previous site. Or for this to happen--which it JUST did as I'm writing this post in Blogger: Th

Rambling Preamble How you see the world just might inform whether you make it or not. I don't know what it is about me, but I tend to react to news based on my sense of justice--personal justice, social justice, economic justice--whatever the category, I have this bias toward what I perceive to be just. Or rather, I tend to see the injustices. At least I did in the past. When I feel that reaction now, I make an adjustment to a more objective point of view, and ask questions and reserve judgment for later. When I wake up and forget to appreciate the fact of waking up, my day is not quite as clear or positive. When I'm grateful for the day ahead and look forward to what I get to do because of the privileges I have--earned and unearned--I tend to have more of an edge. Sometimes an unhelpful arrogance (a little arrogance can be helpful, but I'm not known to be sparing with my embrace). Give Me a Fix This little rambling is to preface some thoughts following last wee