Archive for the ‘ Product Development ’ Category

Growing Pains? Try Retooling.

Growth is fun and exciting in a startup, but it can also be just a little painful and scary. Its scary because people can’t anticipate problems that arise from growth such as having customers, supporting them, answering their requests, and fixing the issues they experience with your product.  Or adding employees, training them, educating them on [ READ MORE ]

Whats Does a User Experience Specialist Do?

Despite being a code loving femgineer I secretly harbor a prediliction for design and focus on user experience, which is why I read books like John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity, Donald Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, design infographics (What its like to be a Yoga Instructor  in the US?, What does it cost to [ READ MORE ]

Culture of Constraints

In 4 days it will be the 1 year anniversary of launching BizeeBee my second startup. When I started BizeeBee I was determined to put in place engineering principles that I hadn’t been able to at previous companies.  I also wanted to avoid a lot of bad practices that I had experienced throughout my [ READ MORE ]

Challenges of Getting Early Adopters, Acquiring Customers & Monetizing

I’ve gotten some requests recently to write a post on how we’ve gotten early adopters at my startup BizeeBee and how we got them at Mint.  I hate to burst everyone’s tech bubble but there is no secret for getting early adopters.  I also want to address two concepts in this posts getting early adopters vs. methods for customer [ READ MORE ]

Getting Your Startup Team to Understand Your Customer

Its been 8 months since we launched our first product at BizeeBee.  When we launched we had 3 customers (yoga studios), they saw the value in what we were building, so much that one studio owner  worked very closely with me for almost year.  Since launching my desire to please customers hasn’t stopped.  The buzz bee [ READ MORE ]

Post-Launch Prep II

After launching BizeeBee I realized that my initial post on what to do after you launch your startup wasn’t enough to cover all the work that the BizeeBee team has done after launching and thought I’d share some of our efforts.  We launched BizeeBee about three weeks ago with a few yoga studios across the nation.  The [ READ MORE ]

An Outsider’s Outlook: Bringing People in to Brainstorm for your Startup

Today I woke up to find this email in my inbox: I just wanted to thank you for your time on Friday.  It really was a perfect time for us to be hearing your advice.  Some of the questions you asked about marketing touched off some incredibly productive conversations this weekend… not only about our marketing [ READ MORE ]

Major bug or vocal minority?

My recent blog post for Seattle 2.0: Major bug or vocal minority?  How to Use Feedback from Product Users.  The post covers how to think and evaluate bugs and features in the context of  pleasing users.  I’ll also be speaking at Deploy 2010, hosted by Seattle 2.0. [ READ MORE ]