February 2012
5 posts
What does it take?
The full stack for a web application can be rather overwhelming, but it’s not quite as bad as you might think. If you look at this list knowing only a small portion of the items, it can be incredibly intimidating. Really, though, it’s an incremental learning process. You learn a little something new every day, and before you know it, you’re having fascinating conversations with...
Improving Code Quality →
Adam provides a peek behind the curtain at one of the changes we’ve made to our process to improve the overall quality of Sifter underneath the hood. The more we quantify quality, the easier it is to constantly work to improve it.
Why we shut down Newsberry →
Whenever a business shuts down, it seems there are many that are quick to ask, “Why not sell it or open source it?” It’s never that easy, and this explanation from Wildbit does a great job explaining why selling is easier said than done as well as why open sourcing it isn’t always practical.
All I Ever Wanted
It used to be a job, a responsibility, and a livelihood. The moment we launched, shit got serious. I stopped dreaming and started responding. To customer feedback. Feature requests. Complaints. Cancellations. It stopped being a dream come true and started just being a job. Granted, it was still the most emotional connection that I had ever felt with a job, but it wasn’t what I envisioned.
...
3 tags
Exhausted and Anxious
A few weeks ago, we released a significant update to Sifter. (Rails 3, Ruby 1.9, and a bevy of associated gems and other components in case you’re curious about such things.) Since then, there have only been a few fleeting moments of peace and quiet. My Pavlovian response to the email alerts has gotten a bit out of hand.
The first couple of weeks after the release I felt physically ill due...
January 2012
1 post
2 tags
Ready
We spent the last 6 months doing hard work that isn’t fun or directly visible to customers. It just had to be done. It sucked. Building this foundation has been the hardest, most involved work with which I’ve ever been involved, and nothing has ever pushed me so far outside of my comfort zone. Conveniently enough, my daughter is 6 months old as well. Put the two together, and well, you...
December 2011
2 posts
Automation, Self-service, and Administration
Just a random thought. As a solo founder, my time is our scarcest commodity. Making sure that I have free time and minimal interruptions has become one of my highest priorities, and it’s paying off. Some of the best investments I’ve made in Sifter are the things that keep me free to focus on the product. It seems obvious to me now, but the following guidelines have all evolved...
Tenacity
Lately, I’ve been reading biographies and stories by athletes, business people, and politicians. The one attribute common to all of them is tenacity on a level that most of us can’t even imagine. The problem is that on the surface, we only see the success. We don’t see the work that went into achieving the success. We see the culmination rather than the 10 or even 20 years that...
October 2011
4 posts
Tradeoffs →
A great example of how perceived “improvements” aren’t always that. Larger screens for mobile devices certainly have their benefits, but as with anything, there are tradeoffs.
“Great design helps because it makes life a little less complex. When you are...”
– Drawar
September 2011
4 posts
Speaker Deck is Live →
Speaker Deck is brand new clutter-free way to share your slides from presentations. I suggest that you use it.
Thoughts on Business Models
After the recent presentation, I was surprised how many questions I heard about our choice of business model or application. There also seems to be no shortage of people debating between native mobile and web applications. For me, there are a variety of reasons that I chose a hosted web application and why I’d make the same choice today.
Why hosted and subscription-based?
Income...
Bootstrapping a Software Product →
The slides from a presentation that I gave at Refresh Dallas last night. It goes over the lessons learned through both the good and bad decisions that we feel we’ve made while bootstrapping Sifter.
Make Things →
So, to hell with all that noise. It’s just a big mass of envy, chatter and FOMO. Let’s get excited and make things.
Yes. Let’s.
August 2011
5 posts
The Incessant Reality Check
My biggest frustration with our little boot-strapped startup is that the bootstrapping part causes us to always grounded in reality. We’re incredibly careful to remain profitable as we grow the business. That’s a good thing for the long-term, but it can be incredibly frustrating when the gap between your vision and execution is huge.
There’s the Sifter that I see in my head and...
2 tags
Prioritizing Features →
A great post about prioritizing features by focusing on both how many people use a given feature and how often they use it.
3 tags
The Early Days of Founding Sifter
Keith Jacobs and I had known each other and worked together fairly closely for about 5 years when he wrote a check for $16,000 so I could quit my job and start Sifter. What’s more interesting is that after writing the check, he didn’t look at the results of his investment until Sifter launched. Imagine writing a check for $16,000 and not looking at the results for 11 months. That kind...
Prioritization
2.3%
That’s the percentage of time that people interact with Sifter via Beanstalk or email integration. Certainly there are dozens of factors at play here, but I can guarantee you that number is completely disproportionate to the amount of time and effort hat we’ve invested in those features.
I do believe that they are important features that will definitely play a key role in our...
Will it last?
With the proliferation of subscription-based hosted businesses, my first thought with each new one is to wonder if they’ll be around in a year. Are they funded? Are they profitable? How long have they been around? When trusting a company with your data or any important piece of your business, I would think that this would be more important to people. Apparently it’s not.
Let’s...
July 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Mind Your MeTweets →
To each their own. Some will disagree, but I can’t agree enough with Mike on this one. Glad to see someone address it.
1 tag
Sifter Marketing Site Reloaded →
I finally managed to finish updating the Sifter marketing site. An overhaul for the API documentation, a new blog and changelog (both powered by Harmony), and a handful of other updates to bring the site up to date with the application.
Of course, it’s responsive as well if you’re into that sort of thing.
2 tags
Driven off the Road by M.B.A.s →
A solid article about the effect of companies being run by M.B.A.s vs. engineers or product people.
It’s interesting to note that the one area of the U.S. economy that’s adding jobs and increasing productivity and wealth is also the one that is the most relentlessly product- and consumer-focused: Silicon Valley. The company off Highway 101 that best illustrates this point is, of...
Tagline Cliches
Better to have no tagline at all than to use one of these worn out and meaningless phrases.
________________ done right.
________________ the way it should be.
________________ evolved.
________________ for the rest of us.
________________. Simplified.
Better ________________.
The easiest way to ________________.
The better way to ________________.
June 2011
1 post
3 tags
My Biggest Mistake
When I set out to build Sifter, I had a singular vision. Make a bug and issue tracker that non-technical team members would actively use. However, once it was out in the wild, things weren’t so clear. I failed to stay focused. I let myself get distracted by finances, logistics, uptime and support.
I got bogged down watching our bottom-line even though we’ve always been comfortably...
May 2011
3 posts
Who is Acorn for? →
This is all too familiar of a story.
Shine. An elegant and simple weather app for the... →
The copywriting is perfect.
Dew point. Visibility. Wind direction. Advanced Doppler radar. Who cares?
Is it hard to build, market and maintain a web app... →
I chimed in at Quora to a question about whether it’s hard to build a web app to make $1,000/mo. My answer was simple. It’s not hard, but unless you’re aiming significantly higher than $1,000/mo, running a web app that should be available 24x7 simply isn’t worth the time, stress, and added responsibility.
April 2011
3 posts
Version 2.0
I came across this quote via John Gruber today, and it might be the most perfect description of how I’ve felt lately about Sifter.
For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people...
3 tags
Betting on Design
I’ve designed and created software and web sites for a lot of different companies over the years. All of those companies have been focused on features or just getting something out the door. They were more concerned about next week’s trade show than next year’s vision. They would rather have one paying customer today than one passionate customer tomorrow. I always understood...
4 tags
Economies of Small →
This eloquently sums up my feelings on where we want to take Sifter. I’d much rather we craft a very special application with just enough customers to support a small team rather than grow to the point where our full-time job is scaling the application.
March 2011
1 post
1 tag
Chatted with Dan Benjamin about Sifter on The... →
I got a chance to chat with Dan about the ups and downs of Sifter, the journey to get this far, and where we’re going from here.
December 2010
5 posts
2 tags
Decisions
We’ve been contacted a couple of times with an opportunity to participate in promotions where we give away a few free Sifter accounts. We’ve always been curious and considered participating, but ultimately never pulled the trigger. Similarly, we’ve never even come close to considering a freemium model. Both are probably great at generating attention and new customers for apps...
Anonymous asked: What payment processor are you using and how did you go about setting it up? Was there a large learning curve in the implementation, or a big barrier to setting up an account with a bank?
One web →
An excellent summary by Jeremy Keith on the various ways that fragmentation is beginning to creep into the web.
1 tag
Worrying
The most challenging thing about running Sifter has been balancing the countless tasks that fall on the shoulders of a solo founder. (Yes, we have other people, but all of the day-to-day tasks are mine.) Over Thanksgiving, I took some time to sit down and re-prioritize all of the responsibilities that I was juggling, and it’s made a dramatic improvement.
I quickly recognized that the...
Handling Criticism
A while back, i wrote a short opinion piece for .net magazine. Issue 205, to be precise. It focuses on how to handle and respond to criticism. Since it’s not currently available online, I thought it would be nice to share it here.
Elbert Hubbard said, “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” That’s not encouraging for anyone who hopes to create anything meaningful....
November 2010
12 posts
2 tags
Work/Life Balance
Sometime around 2002, I attempted to start my own business, not as part of the grand plan, but rather as a fallback for lack of options. It didn’t do so hot. I was living at home and the highlight of each week was meeting up with friends at a bar on spinner night where you would spin to find out the price of your beers. (Anywhere from free to $1.) I digress.
That business lasted a couple...
I'm always disappointed when I see companies... →
If people make a personal choice to focus on work, that’s their decision, but I agree that it’s concerning the way the media glorifies those that work like machines.
1 tag
Starting is easier than sustaining.
I spent about a year planning and building Sifter. We launched, and I’ve now spent about two years running and supporting it. In my personal opinion, launching was easy. Things didn’t become truly challenging until Sifter was live. That’s not to say that launching is easy, but in my experience, sustaining the effort after launch is significantly more challenging. Fortunately,...
Pay someone else to organize your photoshop... →
Based on some of the comps I’ve received from people over the years, I’d say they aren’t charging enough.
Reasons to Work →
He makes a very good point.
2 tags
2 tags
“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than...”
– Seth Godin
Anonymous asked: Wich way do you get most new customers?
What is the most rewarding medium for promoting the business, other than your blog.
What is the most rewarding medium for promoting the business, other than your blog.
kyledaigle asked: Do you work on Sifter full-time? If so, how did you go about making the switch? If not, what are you supplementing your Sifter app with? Thanks!
European carriers are afraid of customers having... →
With the embedded SIM, customers could insist on shorter-term contracts, using the ability to easily switch between carriers as leverage.
A business model that emphasizes preventing customers from leaving instead of making them want to stay is a business model that doesn’t deserve to last. Carriers are quickly becoming commodities, and in that situation, their best bet is to focus on...
2 tags
Support
For me, support requests have been simultaneously one of the most rewarding and most challenging aspects of running Sifter. What I’ve found is that by making myself acutely aware of the value of those emails, it feels less like an interruption and more like an opportunity.
Currently, we get about 5-10 support requests per week that I spend anywhere from 15-45 minutes responding to and...