Showing posts with label startup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label startup. Show all posts

Sunday, November 2, 2008

If you gonna set up a web startup ...

Wanna be the next Google? Do I hear a "Yes" elsewhere ? I have loads of thoughts on this since I love doing web startup. So let's do this checklist to realize...

1. Do you know absolutely everything about your business? Do you eat your own dog food? Those "Well, I will use my product later when it is fully developed/established" or "Ehr, I will use my service later, got things to do now..." will definitely fail, more here

2. Are you ambitious/motivated enough? Doing startup is not doing your everday work, if you work only 8 hours a day and spend the rest of the day relaxing then you better quit it. Most IT staff work 8 hours per day under excellent management and what will make your company the next Google since there is no difference between you and other normal IT staff.

3. Do you have a successful team? From Taneli
Startup teams should be about things like attitude, values, goals, objectives, motivation, trust, learning, courage, energy, intensity, competence, superior judgement and good communication (emphasis on feedback).

They should not be about: micro-management, processes, business plans, formal matters, profit and loss statements, reports, politics, non-action, vague visions and missions, long hours and exhausted managers, strict roles and responsibilities.

Success Teams are often full of leaders. There isn't just one central person responsible of leadership: everybody leads, and they lead to every possible direction: their own teams, colleagues, their bosses, partners etc.

And in the end, let's discuss a quote from Kristoffer Lawson:
New startups are fantastic because they still think it's easy so they'll go for it and only later realise the deep hole they got themselves into :-)

Now you decide: do you give up or go forwards with the lessons learnt. If you decide to continue, chances are you'll have now learnt stuff the hard way and will be much better tomorrow. You need to be hammered to eventually become world-beaters!

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Things learned from Muxlim

The purpose of this entry is not to disparage the muxlim website but to remind myself that those things may happen to young startup and show the lesson of avoiding them.
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  1. Try your best not to show the users errors, instead inform them something more friendly like "Oops, something weird happened".

  2. Why does Muxlim use the Agavi framework? Is it supposed to be the next generation one? I have never heard of it before I met the error. But the real question is that isn't it too risky to use a early-staged framework due to the lack of documentation and support? But I believe that the folks at Muxlim has made a right choice.

  3. Team MahShelf has something to learn from this error: let's release frequently and constantly. Look at the latest date that Muxlim released the next version of their website :2008-07-09. Let's move our asses to make the next release faster :D

  4. Doctrine is a good ORM in my opinion, so I need more time to think how to migrate from Propel to Doctrine and it will be a severe pain in my head. Oh well, it is still fine, I have made several "180-degree" decisions like that since I was in charged of MahShelf project :D


PS: For those who still do not understand this entry is about, Muxlim.com is a social network found in Finland and this entry was inspired by its error shown during its down time.