John Bullard » Entrepreneurship

RE: Email

John — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:32:27 +0000

We use (and misuse) email for just about everything. Google’s answer to this archaic messaging service is Wave. I’ve been using the app for a few months now and I’m thoroughly impressed. That said, I’m not sure how wide spread adoption will fair. Despite all the hype, there still isn’t an easy answer to “What is Google Wave”. I think Wave, like other revolutionary products like One Note, will suffer because of this.

In the meantime, soft changes can significantly cleanse our Inboxes:

The real solution here is to move people beyond email silos wherever and whenever possible.

Broad kudos? Post it on a feedback forum or your blog.

Need an urgent, immediate answer? Pick up the phone and call.

Got something that needs a lot of touchy feely discussion? Set up a face to face meeting.

Discussing a particular topic or product? Post it on a public message board.

Is this more of a friendly, social thing? Try using a social network like Twitter or Facebook.

Coding Horror

StudyBob

John — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:59:33 +0000

I’ve been putting a lot of time and effort into StudyBob. I’d say its 60% complete, not bad for a month’s work. I’d like to launch just before school starts back up (August 25th). Barring any unforeseen issues, I don’t see this as overly ambitious.

I’m working diligently to follow the ideas laid out in 37signals : Getting Real . A lot of it I knew from the beginning (Ch 2: “Build Software for yourself” or “Your passion or lack-there-of will shine through”). They did a great job organizing all of these thoughts into a development mindset. It’s really a must-read.

I’ve been devouring every internet entrepreneurship story I can find. Mark Levchin (paypal), Jawed Karim (paypal + youtube), Evan Williams (twitter), just to name a few. There’s definitely some common trends, most notably passion.
(If you find internet entrepreneurship interesting iinovate is a stellar source. GigaOm and TechCrunch are also daily reads.)

I’ve definitely learned the value of ‘outsourcing’. I spent hours installing a mail server, creating accounts, adding a gui, re-doublechecking security… only to stumble upon the glorious Google Apps. Done. Shoot me an email: john studybob.com . I should have learned my lesson, but instead I uploaded a wordpress directory and began hosting studybob blog. This put stress on my meager server, created more databases, etc… So I scrapped the entire install and started a free wordpress.com hosted blog and threw on the first cool skin I found. Done. Check it out: studybob.wordpress.com. The lesson: time is finite, do cool things with it… leave the mundane to everyone else.

Levchin

John — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:11:48 +0000

Mark Levchin, founder PayPal / Slide:

I actually think that a successful startup is 5 percent good idea and 95 percent execution.

It’s really – it’s just one of these things where can you strike the fear of God into your competitors by releasing every two weeks the features that it takes them three months to write. And by the time they’re done copying the features that you built last week, you’ve got three more months on them. And this is really all about execution.

The devil’s in the details.