Steve Blank teaches entrepreneurship at the Haas Business School in Berkeley, but has a pretty serious pedigree as a tech entrepreneur himself. I’m ashamed to admit that I still haven’t read The 4 Steps to the Epiphany, but I’ve read most of what he’s posted online.

Eric Ries is a protege of Steve Blank’s, applies and develops many of the same ‘lean’ ideas, and focuses specifically on web startups.

See the links for both Steve Blank and Eric Ries here.

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Paul Graham

He’s a tour de force and a hero of mine. One of the early proponents of ‘release early, iterate often’.

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

http://www.foxbusiness.com/search-results/m/25897600/funding-tech-start-ups.htm

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Joel Spolsky

These are my favorite as they relate to HR:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html

http://www.daisydiskapp.com/

I have a theory that inability to manage one’s finances and one’s hard disk space have the same psychological factors at their root.

P.S. It’s free, but you can pay $20 to get it to stop nagging you.

I’m not surprised. When you click the UserVoice ‘Feedback’ button, it brings up a list of the top few existing ideas to vote on, plus a vague invitation to ‘go to our feedback forum’.

If the problem you’re having is on that list, then you’re in great shape. But if you have a particular suggestion to make, there is nowhere to do so. In this respect, the ‘submit an idea’ heading is misleading since this box doesn’t really let you do that.

My guess is that not many people really notice the link at the bottom of the box to the feedback forum. This is a shame, because the forum itself is well-designed. It has a nice big box to add a new suggestion. It does a good job of minimizing duplicates by pointing out ideas that have already been submitted as you type. And the idea of giving users 10 votes to spend is enticing, and a rich source of information.

But despite that, we’re scrapping the UserVoice Feedback button and disbanding the forum. Here’s why:

- For the reasons described above, only a vanishingly small proportion of people who have something to say end up submitting/voting/commenting on an idea through UserVoice.

- We’re trying to be thrifty, and our userbase is small. So we don’t want to pay for the much more expensive plans – this cheaper plan doesn’t allow us to transfer our users’ login status from Memrise to UserVoice. As a result, many ideas get submitted anonymously, which makes it harder for us to engage in a conversation with a user [1]. Of course, people can create an account on UserVoice, but that’s a huge pain.

- By emphasising the top ideas, there’s a rich-get-richer effect. People vote most often on the ideas presented at the top of the list, and don’t notice potentially more interesting ideas just below. UserVoice should hide how many votes each idea has already accrued until you’ve already voted – otherwise an idea’s future popularity will be largely determined by its existing popularity.

So what did we do instead?

- We wanted to bring the barrier to entry down to zero. So we just dropped in a plain textbox, asking plainly what we can do to improve things. [2]

- The red Feedback button was ubiquitous, but I bet that made it effectively invisible. Our feedback box gets presented opportunely and prominently at the end of every learning session, at a moment when people will be most likely to have something they want to tell us.

- We get an email every time someone drops in a suggestion, with the user’s email address, so we can respond quickly to them individually. We very much want to follow up with people that have made the effort to give us feedback.

I’d say we’re getting at least 5 times as many suggestions as we were.

On the downside, we don’t have a nice communal forum any more that allows people to vote or comment on one another’s ideas – we might do something about that in the future.

Here’s what I wish UserVoice would do:

- Make it much easier for people to suggest new ideas. Even if it were to bring down the overall quality, I think an increased volume of raw responses would be of greater value.

- Charge straightforwardly based on the number of new suggestions. This would set up the right incentives for UserVoice to make it really easy for users to make new suggestions. N.B. I don’t have a problem with paying – I just don’t want to be forced to start out with a $100/mo plan when we have a tiny userbase in order to get features that I consider essential to the user experience.

- Corollary: Don’t withhold important features like single sign-on and white labeling the design for the exorbitant options.

[1] We compared UserVoice and GetSatisfaction pretty closely, and they both hike the prices if you want to be able to transfer login status across. In fact, GetSatisfaction didn’t (at least at the time) allow anonymous suggestions, which felt like a huge barrier to entry to new submissions – this was what convinced me to try UserVoice in the first place.

[2] Hmm – perhaps this should be a command, e.g. ‘Tell us what we can do to improve things’?

Two friends have just released iPhone apps in time for Christmas:

• Jenga, by Natural Motion. This is the official Jenga iPhone app – there’s a fiendishly realistic physics model of the world behind the scenes, and it’s a thing of beauty.
• Storyville by Fatty Apps – I love the idea of receiving a short story each week, beamed straight to my outboard brain.

Buy. Them.

P.S. I’d be happy to put you in touch with Torsten or Atul if you have any direct feedback you’d like to give them.

Let’s say you want to buy example.com, and set it up as a series of static informational pages about Example Business Inc, along with @example.com email addresses. There are (at least) 3 ways you can go:

1) the standard method

- Grab the domain from GoDaddy (or any other domain name registrar – they all do basically the same thing). It’ll cost you $10-20 for a year or two

- Then you need to find a place to host your site (e.g. Rackspace, Dreamhost). You’d spend c. $10/month to rent space on a server, point your new domain name to the server’s IP address, write and upload some html and images, and away you go.

- You then need to set up email addresses. If it’s GoDaddy, I think you’ll be able to set it up to forward your email to an existing account without too much trouble.

- This is what i had to do with Memrise because I wanted control over everything. Honestly, it was much much more complicated than i had anticipated to figure it all out.

option 2) use Google

- Use Google to register your domain name

- I think that’ll automatically set you up with Google Apps (custom Gmail, Calendar, Sites, Blogger, Docs etc.) for free.

- Then you can set up the design and content of the pages of your website with Google Sites.

- So then you’d all use a custom Gmail interface to check your @example.com address, and have access to blog.example.com, calendar.example.com etc. I’m a big fan of Google Apps.

option 3) Weebly (or some equivalent competitor)

- Besides Google, there are a variety of companies that help build a site. I’ve heard good things about Weebly, but haven’t closely investigated it for myself.

- Much like Google Sites, it looks like they’ll do most of what you’d want: help with design templates, deal with the hosting, potentially help with domain names, and a bunch of other stuff. Nice!

Conclusions:

- As long as your needs are simple, I would consider the Google/Weebly approach, since I think it’ll be the most straightforward.

- Down the line, if you decide that you want to build something more complicated and interactive, you can always hire a programmer and switch from Google/Weebly to your own hosting set up.

- If you have someone to help who enjoys techie stuff or has set up their own site before, then setting things up with GoDaddy and your own hosting will probably go smoothly. But otherwise, a company like Google or Weebly that’ll do 90% of the work for you, so you can focus on building a great site

In my case, they were unstoppered by a day in London. I pinballed from train platforms to coffee shops, oblivious bustle all around me, far away from the furrowed-browed finger-pecking at Memrise HQ. That context-shift provided a firebreak from the quotidian, and I was finally in the mood to mentally roll up my sleeves and rub my hands together.

Writing’s like peeing – once you break the seal, the words just spill forth all evening.

I was able to decant a dozen half-thoughts that I queued up like toy soldiers, to be birthed one by one over the following week. It’s now rather fun to receive a blog post from my previous self every day.

In retrospect, I think a lot about Jeff Bezos’ advice: don’t be proud of your talents – be proud of the things you really worked hard to achieve. For this reason, I’m more proud of (and glad about) my PhD than anything else I’ve yet done.

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It’s hard for me to summarize my thoughts on grad school, perhaps because it varied so much in so many ways. Grad school was wonderful when I was excited about it – for the first few years, there was literally nothing I wanted to do more than talk and think and write and program lab stuff. Every week was filled with new ideas, a sense of progress and discovery, and I bounded into the lab every morning.

I don’t know what changed exactly, but at some point, I started to really lose enthusiasm. I’m perenially stymied by an inability to understand the source of my own motivations, and to make sense of my own emotions. So I don’t really feel like I understand why the joy started to fade. Perhaps because I worked for years on ambitious experiments that didn’t work out. Because I’d been in one place for years. Because I’m a little flighty. Because I thrive in a more competitive or fast-moving jobs. Because really I love AI and computers a little more than brains. Because I wanted to be my own boss. Because I lost confidence. Because I need to feel part of a team working towards a common goal. Because I needed more inter-personal contact with a range of different people. Because I’m not temperamentally suited to be a scientist. Because I need to be in a city. Because I felt obliged to finish it, after investing so much into it, long after I would have left a normal job. Because the specialization necessary can come to seem like a straitjacket. Because I got obsessed with new ideas. I don’t know.

It seems to me that a PhD is the right move if one loves what one’s doing, and one wants to be an academic. Of course, you can’t know for sure in advance that both of those are true. But if you think they might be, then go for it! While I think we have some things in common, I don’t expect the idiosyncracies of my experiences to apply closely to anyone else, so don’t look too closely for parallels to yourself in my issues above.

Right now, starting a company feels like the job I’ve been looking for my whole life, but I wouldn’t have the wherewithal to do it unless I’d been through the last few years.

I don’t know where your path will lead. Like me, I think you get excited about a lot of things, and could happily set off in many different directions, including becoming a great and happy scientist.

This email doesn’t really answer any of your questions. I’m sorry about that – I just don’t want to give advice one way or the other, because I think you’ll make the right choices without my advice, and because you’ll make whatever choices you make into the right ones. You are a lucky guy, in this (technical) sense – http://gregdetre.blogspot.com/2009/10/i-dont-believe-in-luck.html

Keep me posted.