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Justin and Jason discuss Justin’s progress with TweetMiner, the pros
and cons of radical transparency, Jason’s still secret side project,
bootstrapping vs raising funds, how the seed round is the new series
A, doing a startup with a partner versus going solo, Justin’s medical
mystery and why Jason believes that ground breaking innovation often
require breaking the Not-Invented-Here directive.
Congrats for the podcast Justin and Jason. Love Tweetminer! I perfectly understand your fears of getting Tweeetminer out in the daylight to avoid being copied. One strategy is to continue improving in beta as you do – then release when you hit some 10 000 users (with your affiliate strategy). The learning curve to copy TM would be quite high at that point – but you would need to really push marketing at that point to benefit form the first-mover advantage and getso many users that copying you would not really make sense. In advertisement there is a saying: copying the first-mover brand that becomes known for a specif feature will benefits the first-mover – because those that copy will always be compared to the first-mover. You would need to stay ahead of the competition at that point (leap-frogging strategy: while competition is catching up and adds a feature, you would already be thinking about the step after that) etc… good luck, its worth it!
Great podcast guys. Informative and entertaining. Tweetminer looks great out of the gate. It is inspiring example of how one person can release a product with a viable business model in place from day one, and without funding. It is indeed a great time to be a business minded developer. I would say your openness experiment is a success. I agree you should open it up even more. Keep providing insight and direction to those thinking about doing the same. Great job!
Thanks for the podcast guys, very interesting as always. Justin, I heard about your celiac disease and wanted to say “I feel you”. I am gluten free for 2 years now. It was very hard in the beginning because that freaking gluten is everywhere. But it gets better. Your symptoms will go away, you’ll get more energy and become more productive. Before I went gluten free I couldn’t work productively for more than 4-5 hours a day and our business was suffering. It took me more than a year to get better but it’s like night and day. But I miss all the good stuff my wife used to bake so much! If you have any questions about gluten or anything else feel free to ask. I’m an expert now 🙂 Good luck!
@Michael Rakita
Thanks so much for this feedback. It’s really interesting to know it took a year for you to get better. Of course I was hoping for an overnight quick fix, but then after looking into the actual internal damage that’s created http://www.aafp.org/afp/20071215/afp20071215p1795-u3.jpg I realised it isn’t a quick fix – I need to be in it for the long haul. The real surprise is that it’s verrrry difficult to eat at restaurants 🙁
@Justin
Yes, that’s very true. We eat out much less now 🙁 You have to tell waiters about your gluten intolerance. Most chefs in good restaurants know about gluten and will accomodate you. Some restaurants are better with that than others and you will have to experiment. Of course each failed experiment will cost you but hopefully you can find a couple of places where you can go and don’t worry about gluten.