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Justin and Jason discuss TweetMiner’s stats, the pros and cons of compensation transparency, how generating revenue eases the capital raising process, the costs and potential benefits of being cloned, dividing time between product development and marketing, losing revenue due to poor feature segmentation, the importance of actually doing something, one hit wonders and how to maintain product development momentum.
Hi guys,
Regarding transparency, you might want to read/listen to “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely. A really great book on Behavioral economics. In one of the chapter, the author suggests that the spectacular raise in CEO wages these past years is linked to the legal obligation large companies have to disclose the salary of their top earners. Every CEO can now complain about how much more the other guy is doing for similar performances, which leads to a nice (and irrational) inflationary spiral.
I love the idea of transparency but humans being human, I’m afraid this might sometimes cause more harm than good. At least in big companies, probably less so in startups though.
Thanks for the show, I’m proud to have been a listener since episode 1 🙂
@bcurdy
Thanks very much for this, I’ll check it out. And thanks for the kind words about the show. Happy Thanks Giving! 🙂
Thank you for another episode of the TweetMiner show 🙂 Jason, we can’t wait to see what you’re working on, come on, release it already 🙂 I don’t remember who said that, but if you’re not embarrassed by your software you waited way too long to release it.
I can tell you what happens with companies that seem to be doing nothing for the last couple of years after releasing great products. They are building the next small thing for their big thing. My rule of thumb is that you spend 10% of time doing big visible things like releasing a new product or doing major UI updates and 90% of time doing small things visible only to some of your users or things invisible at all. And the ratio of small things to big things grows very fast when your product and your userbase grows. You have to do more and more small things that users want, like the scheduling update Justin talked about on the show. I’m sure 37signals guys work on new features even though their response to all feature requests is “no”. Plus don’t forget that most startups are very small, so people who could write code have to do tech support, bizdev, marketing and everything else.
Anyway, just wanted to explain why my tagline on LinkedIn is “Building The Next Small Thing” 🙂
@Michael,
You’re absolutely right about me needing to release it already. That thought races through my head many times every day. Like I mentioned on the podcast, my goal is to get it into private beta by the end of the year. Oh, and believe me, I WILL be embarrassed by it! 😉
@bcurdy,
I’m with you completely. I think Justin is way too optimistic about human nature. He should probably go start a commune or something and find out the hard way. 😉
Also, thanks so much for the positive feedback. Sometimes when listening to an episode I think how much I suck at this, but when I hear from listeners who actually enjoy the show it makes me think we should keep working at it. 😉
Great show guys.
I was that Tweetminer user who said about Bit.ly not registering the URLs as mine, and you were right it was a problem Bit.ly’s end (which is sorted now).
I think that since Justin has done pretty much everything Jason has suggested, that Jason should listen to Justin (too many J’s!!) and release something in 4 weeks. You could even give out a URL for the podcast listeners to sign up and give early feedback after your private beta but before any serious public beta.
@Toby
Yea Jason get your act together!!!!
Here’s some interesting stats about the TweetMiner time line….
1st Line of code – August 10th
1st Signup – September 13th (took 34 days to go live)
1st Sale – September 17th (took 38 days to get first sale)
1st $1000 – November 17th (took 67 days to get $1000)
If someone told me I had to come up with $1000 in 2 months I would never think writing a web app from scratch would be the way to do it.
Very inspirational!
What happened about the ‘Swedish Partners’ that you spoke to ? You didn’t mention in the follow up podcast.
Still in discussion… nothing to report just yet! 🙂