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Justin and Jason discuss Pluggio’s numbers and the results of a Pluggio product-market fit survey, Jason’s recent trip to Scandinavia, how Justin is upscaling his outsourcing, making Appignite command-line accessible, why AnyFu is worth pursuing and the summer show schedule.
One thing I wanted to mention after listening to today’s podcast, is that I’ve had bad experiences outsourcing cheap, and I’ve had bad expriences outsourcing expensive. I had someone who built an app from scratch quote me 20 hours @ $50/hour to make a change, and found someone who had never seen the app make the change in 8 hours @ $10/hour – from Eastern Europe. Found her on oDesk and I continue to send her work.
So while Justin’s outsourcing experiment didn’t work out, I have not found that more expensive is better. I’m glad you found the listener who’s willing to cut you a deal – I actually think that’s a great arrangement. But I’ve found ridiculously awesome coders in 4 programming languages (.NET, PHP, ColdFusion, Perl) way too many times to know that I can find someone in the $10-$25/hour range who can meet or beat anyone I’ve found locally in the $50-$90 range.
But I am bummed to hear things didn’t work out. It sucks to waste time going down a rabbit hole like that.
I was laughing so hard in my car during this episode.
Jason: Ya so people totally recognize me across the world!
Justin: WTF my cat just dropped a shard of poo on my desk…
And then Jason describes the whole 5-delay plane and food poisoning ordeal and I was just imagining Justin thinking like ‘damn, I thought I had it bad with cat poop on my hand…’
Then the Swedish Ralph Lauren part just made me lose it. If making someone laugh means you are friends, then you guys are officially my friends now
@Justin, regarding the whole ‘make customers smile with an email’ bit – you should take a look at the AppSumo emails that Noah Kagan puts out. I know there was some controversy because they can seem kind of spammy, I think the intent is similar to Derek Sivers style.
@Jason, has Guyon ever been on the show? I think it’s only fair that he gets to tell his side of the story at some point!
@Justin — If you have that many customers coming in from referrals you should create incentives for people to refer you customers. Something for people who don’t really care to be affiliates, but could send you a couple more customers. This is a common strategy and it dovetails with the idea from MicroConf (and the book Switch by Chip & Dan Heath) where you double down on the things that work. Find the bright spots, understand why they work, and capitalize on those instead of chasing the problems.
Very funny show indeed. Being French but having traveled a lot all around Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden and especially Norway) and Finland I found Jason’s observations quite entertaining. I can’t recommend visiting Norway enough btw.
I agree with @Matt S, it would be great to have Guyon on the show.
Well done on managing to make me laugh out loud on a fairly busy street during this show. Donated off the back of it!
Maybe you guys should drop appignite and pluggio in favour of a Justin’s Cat Poo Problems venture. Not sure how exactly you would make money but I also can’t see how it couldn’t!
@Toby – Glad you enjoyed it and thanks so much for the donation!
@Jason – Yeah, I know it’s long….
Thanks for responding (where are your comment permalinks?) to my post at http://techzinglive.com/page/762/135-tz-discussion-%E2%80%93-fear-and-coding-in-las-vegas-part-2/comment-page-1#comment-4643 where I expressed concern about anyfu being a distraction to AppIgnite, which you’ve expressed frustration about being able to put in the time you need. You responded saying that anyfu would be a relatively quick path to profit which should allow you more time to work on AI.
After listening to #135 I want to reiterate my comments more strongly than before.
1. Regarding the prioritization of a logo and design - You spend a looooooooooooot of time on it in the podcast which I think demonstrates the proportion of mind share and thinking time it represents. The logo and design are *not* things that should be any distraction from the development of the biz model, the building of the site and the gathering of your initial customers. People coming to the site thinking it’s a karate supply shop is a real stretch of a concern, it’s just not an issue. Design – who cares now, make it look shitty. Look, AI has almost no UI “design” (not a criticism) and do any of the early adopters care? Why is it different with anyfu. As Justin said, the initial audience will come from the listener base so what does it matter? People won’t arrive and say whoa I’m confused these guys were tech and now they sell nunchucks. I think you said that you want a quick path to revenue and as a result the logo and design are very important to have up front. I think you are kidding yourself by thinking you can accelerate the adoption of a new service with those design elements in place, let alone at all – there is no such thing as rush to revenue. I love your continued optimism but I think its idealism and this is a case of it.
I rarely agree with Justin but in this case he nailed it. He unfortunately succombed to you which is frequent.
2. Regarding the logo being quick and cheap to do -You said you can save time by giving the designer a real focused well-though out sense of what you want, so you’ll save time on iterations. Isn’t this what everyone things when they hire a designer or anyone else? No one goes into these things saying they won’t be focused or won’t think it out. Regardless of how long or short it takes it’s a distraction that per Justin and my first paragraph isn’t important at this phase. Plus, take a look back at the shows. How many times have you said such and such is quick and you’ll knock it out right away and then the next show you said you had no time, kids, consulting, and so on. If you try to look at yourself from the outside don’t you see the pattern again and again? The result isn’t likely to be different this time.
3. Minimum viable product as related to all this – You’ve been a proponent of releasing MVP from the beginning. But every time it applies to you you redefine your MVP to be higher and higher. This is a problem with developers or product managers defining their MVP by themselves – you simply can’t tell what’s minimally viable to the customer if you are the one building the product. The customer input is needed. There are a bunch of features* you felt had to be in MVP (and the list kept growing at each “almost ready” point) which Justin called you on. I recommend you talk with customers (and Justin, because in this case I think he’s right) about MVP because I see you’re already going on the tangents which will derail you from achieving the near term goal you want.
If you don’t agree with this, why not just put out something and if you discover it’s not yet minimally viable, then you iterate. I think your barrier isn’t fact-based but psychological since you’re close to it.
* Feature requests from early adopters do not necessarily represent features required for an MVP. My sense with AI is that you conflated the two, e.g. John Early-Adopter said he needs a way to send an email so you spent time on implementing email. That’s a feature request, not a critical path item for MVP.
harps on mvp but then always changes his definition of it to be more more more. justin was on track about disagreeing on this one