#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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

In the last two and a half years I’ve launched a web application, moved twice, got engaged and married, went on a honeymoon, bought a house, and even got a dog. Today marks yet another milestone. I’ll be working on Sifter full-time from here on out….

It was a little over a year ago that I set out to try and turn a few mockups into a full-fledged revenue-generating piece of software. For the most part, it’s been a pretty smooth ride, but there have definitely been some lessons learned. In January of…

Like many, I hate to see mindless copying or stealing of visual designs. When it comes to interface elements though, I feel exactly the opposite. I want to see sites reusing bits and pieces of interfaces. It’s key to improving the usability of the web…

Having a clear vision and purpose for your application might seem like just a nice-to-have, but in reality, it’s that vision and purpose that determines decisions at every crossroad. Any lack of clarity and strength of purpose will show through in the…

If there’s anything I’ve learned about designing web applications in recent years, it’s the fact that things change over the course of a project. Learning to embrace that fact and direct it towards a productive evolutionary process has made a…

One of my favorite topics is the influence of business decisions on interface design. It’s an unfortunate truth that the underlying business structure and decisions will invariably affect the interface. It’s important to recognize this fact and work to…

One of the key requirements for creating any kind of issue tracker is making it easy to get data into the system. While the browser is the primary interface, I felt email also had to be a first class citizen for issue submission. The browser interface…

It’s not uncommon to spend so much time on the big picture that we overlook the details. While I’m far from a typographical expert, my growing interest in typography has really helped draw my attention into more subtle details that add up to make a…

We’ve taken a look at the concepts behind the issue life-cycle and workflow, and next we’re going to see how the dashboard is playing out so far. For me, the dashboard is about quickly assessing the state of projects, and diving right in to managing…

I’ve seen countless elaborate ways to link related or duplicate issues. While most of them get the job done, it’s generally way more confusing than it needs to be. I considered a lot of different solutions, but in the end, there was one that stood out….

Last time, I went into my vision of a simpler bug and issue tracking life-cycle. This time, I want to focus on one of the manifestations of a simpler process—the status bar. As I mentioned before, status and responsibility are the two most significant…