I just had an all-too common conversation with the founder of a startup who had spent more than a year working with a software development company who had produced a mess. The mess really comes from a developer who was willing to get started on a product that was not fully thought out. I always take a very different approach in early conversations. If I’m being asked to do startup software development, Some founders are taken aback. They are calling me to go build what they tell me to build.

Tags: hiring culture startonomics team developmen Recently, I was asked to present my philosophy and methodology toward building what I call A++ teams at the Startonomics conference. Below, you'll find the video recording of the presentation and the actual presentation itself.My apologies for the lack of posting to my blog -- I broke my arm snowboarding six weeks ago which makes it hard to write. :-)A Plus Teams

Tags: Design Development Interview User Experienc We keep seeing that people are drawn to elegant products and web sites, but HOW do you design elegance if you weren’t born with Steve Jobs’s design eye? I asked Matthew May to come to Mixergy and teach you the elements of elegance and give you a framework that will help you create with more elegance.

He essentially mentored me into becoming more than an engineer, becoming a product manager, and by the end of Tickle, I was not just a coder, I was managing a team of ten people including marketing, design, business development and engineering, and et cetera. Here's an easy way to vote for this interview on Hacker News. --Andrew Andrew

Quite often the goal is to get them into an excel spreadsheet in a form that allows people to easily play with them. Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp, Sept 2009) View more documents from Dave McClure . What Dave McClure's presentation does is point to some additional metrics that are useful to think about and consider: A : Acquisition - where / what channels do users come from? A : Activation - what % have a "happy" initial experience? R : Retention - do they come back & re-visit over time? R : Referral - do they like it enough to

Tags: hiring culture startonomics team developmen Recently, I was asked to present my philosophy and methodology toward building what I call A++ teams at the Startonomics conference. Below, you'll find the video recording of the presentation and the actual presentation itself.My apologies for the lack of posting to my blog -- I broke my arm snowboarding six weeks ago which makes it hard to write. :-)A Plus Teams

Los Angeles-based social networking site is looking to court developers with the launch of a development contest, the MySpace Developer Challenge , the firm said recently. Tags: myspace developer challenge contest prize social networking application softwar The site said the challenge will award $50,000 between winners submitting MySpace applications, which use the firm's Real-Time Stream API, Open Search API, Photo Upload API, or which integrate the service on the Apple iPhone. Judges on the contest include Mike Jones, COO of MySpace; angel investor Ron Conway; Google's

Once you have settled on a strong positioning statement, you can develop sound strategies for your marcom programs. When you develop a marcom strategy based on a sound strategic marketing view of your market your marcom program will be more effective -- and customers will have a better, more consistent brand experience. Developing a Sales Strategy Raising awareness of your product in your target market is where sales begin, and this is where marketing communications activities begin the selling process. With today's multiple channels for content to reach potential

Just saw a great post by Mark Geller - Developers wanted… in Los Angeles, U.S.A. (you can get to know Mark a bit more in my post Product Manager Entrepreneur Mark Geller ). Mark tells us: there is a lot of demand for developers right here in L.A. who would love to talk with you. There’s quite a bit of truth to what Mark is saying about startup software developers, but my guess is that If you have solid web skills and a few years experience, either with a commercial company or running your own legit projects, there are dozens of companies in L.A. reduced salary,

But it was not until the last couple years that I updated my skills and capabilities in web development. You can experiment with web development on your Mac. do not know much about PHP yet, but I am able to do everything mentioned in this post without basic PHP or MySQL knowledge, since most of the apps I run were developed by someone else. I first started messing around with HTML in DreamWeaver and Claris Home Page around 1999 to put up my own music website. I would like to share what I have learned.