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Week #374

Fri, 25 May 2012 15:56:00 +0100

Friday again… week is over. This week has been really hard but we are quite happy with what we have accomplished.

Stage: In the past few days we’ve had a lot of activity in Stage. Our biggest event to date, The Offf festival (4000+ attendees) took place and other events with a high demand, like New York’s GORUCO, started to sell their tickets. That means a bit more of support tasks than usual, but as we have said a lot of times, supporting your users and customers is as important as rewarding.
Bazaar: Project bazaar has achieve it’s first milestone and the first intranet features are already in production. That means that we have found some flaws and poitns that need to be changed and improved. But everyone involve in this projects seems to be happy with what we have delivered.
Verkami: On tuesday we released Verkami’s new product: Verkami+, a tool for marketing specific crowdfunding campaigns. The first project using this new tool is Fermin Muguruza’s Zuloak documentary film. Don’t forget to take a look at the live map.
Qstion: Yes, you have read it right, qstion is still alive. We had to make a decision about its future, since it has been stalled for one year. And we finally made it. We have sold it. A couple of months ago a potential competitor came to us asking for it’s situation and after a few weeks of negotiation we sold him the product. Since we really love the idea behind this product, we are supporting its new owner, both technically and commercially.
Minor tasks: We have also added a new feature to Steel Stock Exchange and started the development of another project (codename: plankio), but nothing remarkable.

Not bad for just five days, right?.

My recommendation lecture for the weekends is Des Traynor’s post The fallacy of funnels. Maybe you don’t agree with everything, but I think it’s a good read specially if you have a SAAS product.

Have a nice weekend.

Week #373

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:13:00 +0100

Tired, exhausted and still working. The final launch of one of the projects we have been working in for the last 2 months is getting rough and it’s taking its toll. We keep fighting back… as usual.

Without time for writing a better summary but wanting to share something, I’m going to reuse a link to one of the most fascinating projects I’ve heard in the last years: Kumaré - The True Story of A False Prophet.

While might seem a simple satire at first, it raised on me a lot of questions about what is true and what is not, what makes us believe in others… or in ourselves.

Have a great weekend.

Week #372

Fri, 11 May 2012 19:54:00 +0100

Friday again, Linking Paths week #372 comes to an end.

We have continued working on our projects and we’re one step closer to the first production-ready version of Bazaar and Verkami’s sideproject. As usual, we have been working with Stage’s customer to make their life easier and finishing a new feature for Eingang, Stage’s check-in app. Starting next week, our customers will be able to create eingang-only users.

The Europa League’s final match we talked about 2 weeks ago was played, and Bilbao’s team was painfully defeated by Atletico de Madrid. Well, we’ll have better luck next time!

My lecture recommendation for this weekend is Tom Howard’s Reality check: part 1. It’s pretty long for blog’s standards, so be sure you reserve more than five minutes to read it completely. Even if all the VC-related stuff doesn’t apply to you, like it doesn’t to us, I think it’s a really interesting lecture since I can identify myself in many parts of the story. We have also go through all the fears, doubts and uncertainty for the past 3-4 years. In fact, we are still there, you are always there while trying to build something by your own.

Have a nice weekend.

Week #371 Week 3³+7³+1³ brought more sunny days here in Iceland...

Fri, 04 May 2012 21:10:00 +0100

Week #371

Week 3³+7³+1³ brought more sunny days here in Iceland and mixed feelings. We’ve reached first design milestone in Bazaar and coded a few new features. Verkami’s sideproject has proved more difficult that we expected initially but we’re making progress anyway and additionally we advanced some steps in small projects. However, there are so many things in our plates these days that we don’t have time for celebrations (a bad thing in the long term). Keep fighting.

On the sunny side of the street, a few weeks ago I applied to CIID Summer School 2012. For a long time this institution, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, has been recognized as one of the best places in Europe to learn interaction design and in a very surprising movement someone thought it would be nice to have me in its Summer School this year. I fell in love with Denmark many years ago after my first visit to the -now discontinued- Reboot conference. It’s a small and beautiful country, that even with its small flaws, shares the high quality-of-life standards common in the nordic countries. Copenhagen is a superb city too, specially in the summer, and I’m very excited with the idea of attending the School.

Finally, my link for this week: Made in the USA. The documentary shows the current state of the manufacturing industries in USA. Core message is that although the number of jobs decreased constantly in the last decades -partially at least due to technological unemployment- USA is manufacturing more and better than ever. Of course it’s an optimistic approach to the issue but at least it’s an approach.

I think that Spain -and Europe in general- have given up on many manufacturing industries. Making shoes? No way, you can buy a crappy pair made in China for 5€. A solid good-for-decades wood table? Too difficult, let’s go to IKEA. Yes, Spain is still creating some products but the general trend is appalling (and I’m 100% sure the curve is far worse if you include more years and the 2010-2011 data):

Graph by Linking Paths, based on public data by INE, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

So I find very refreshing that there are countries reflecting on how can they improve their industries and get back in the manufacturing markets after decades of cheap outsourcing. Even if it’s in other continents.

Have a nice weekend.

Week #370

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:05:00 +0100

Another busy week comes to an end. So busy -again- in fact this week I’ll write a quick and small report before going to the swimming pool with my son.

Aitor has continued working on the design of Verkami’s first side project and in project Bazaar. And for me, I’ve been working on Bazaar’s codebase but also had to do some maintenance work in two old projects and had to restart a frozen project we signed 8 months ago! (codename: blueprint). Luckily this project is small and shouldn’t affect other tasks.

This week I’ll recommend you to read Why Is Business Writing So Awful? from Jason Fried. The article is pretty old in internet time (May 2010) but still relevant. Of course your customers moderate your tone, but don’t forget that you choose your customers!.

One last thing. As you may know, Linking Paths’s roots are in Bilbao. It’s also public that we are not big football fans, but still I’m very happy that Athletic Club, will be playing Europa League’s final on May 9th. It really means a lot for a small city like Bilbao and its very special team.

Have a nice weekend!.

Week #369 Summer. Work. Sunny days. Hard work. Not usually good...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 23:58:00 +0100

Week #369

Summer. Work. Sunny days. Hard work. Not usually good combinations.

This has been one of those weeks when you bust your ass… and the results are just ok. I keep working in Bazaar and Verkami’s new sideproject design and Alberto has been working on Bazaar’s client API. A small victory: a few days ago we sent the first emails to people interested in Stage’s new payment platform beta process. We’re tentatively using May 1st as start date for the beta.

And that is all. No big insights this week aside from the fact that in many cases effort and progress are not so directly related.

Before wishing you a great weekend… my link. For the one I offering you this week you’ll need a whole day: http://videos.liftconference.com/. Lift 2012 videos has been published and all the talks are amazing, but if you want a recommendation, I’d start with my beloved James Bridle’s: We fell in love in a coded space.

Have a great weekend.

Week #368

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:00:00 +0100

Week is almost finished. Back to routine after Easter Season. Well, I should say “routine”, since I’ve had one meeting every day of the week. Too much for me.

Aitor has been mainly designing for Bazaar and a new sub-product for Verkami. In the time left after all those meetings, I’ve lived one of the most ridiculous situations in my career. I’m not a system administrator. And problably I’m not a devop either, even when I’ve installed and managed an interesting amount of servers and applications. But trying to fix the Ruby stack of a Red Hat 5 server using gTalk… Yes, just gTalk, that’s all. I have no idea about the other services or apps the server hosts, neither do the guy on the other side of gTalk. Pretty funny.

Regarding our products, this week we have migrated Stage to a new host following a bigger upgrade in our provider. It was pretty easy, the folks at Slicehost did a great job helping the affected customers with the migration, so in around one hour all our systems were up and working properly again.

The bad news come from Payout. The legal framework is really a nightmare. We always suspected that the entry barriers were the cause of the lack of competition in the baking & payments sector. And we were right. We have reduced our choices to two alternatives, but both of them force us to be part of the banking sector’s spider network. It’s not the we hate banks, but becoming one or partnering with one of them is not one of our dreams. Let’s see how it evolves.

And finally, my weekly recommendation. This week has been a lot of buzz about Instagram, but I want to recommend you a different reading: How will the new law on cookies affect internet browsing? from The Guardian. As many of you know, the grace period the EU gave member states to transpose the e-Privacy directive -also known as “the cookie law”- finishes next month. Most members states have left their homework for the very the last minute, including Spain and the UK.This article is very informative. But to be fair, I don’t see many sites using cookiesdirective.js in the coming weeks.

Note: Don’t forget to click the ‘Click to discover how the Guardian uses cookies’ button below the image on The Guardian’s article.

Have a nice weekend!.

"YouPorn hosts “over 100TB of porn”, and serves “over 100 million” page views per day. All told, this..."

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:50:05 +0100

“

YouPorn hosts “over 100TB of porn”, and serves “over 100 million” page views per day. All told, this equates to an average of 950 terabytes of data transfer per day, almost all of which is streaming video. This is around 28 petabytes per month, which means our 29PB estimate for Xvideos is on the low side; it probably serves 35 to 40PB per month.

It gets better! At peak time, YouPorn serves 4000 pages per second, equating to burst traffic in the region of 100 gigabytes per second, or 800Gbps. This is equivalent to transferring more than 10 dual-layer DVDs every second.

”

- It’s an old adagio in Linking Paths’ campfire: ‘If you want to see bleeding edge tech, talk with a porn company’. They really know how to scale: Just how big are porn sites?

Week #367 367 is finishing… happy number, happy week....

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 20:21:00 +0100

Week #367

367 is finishing… happy number, happy week. Easter is here -foggy and rainy in Iceland as you can see in the picture, slightly better in Burgos- but work at Linking Paths continue. This week we did a bunch of work:

Starting with our semi-secret Bazaar project, Alberto made a rather big number of commits to the repo, while I kept working hard on its design. Hard to feel the progress when the project is so massive but we’re slowly recovering from the delay.
Verkami is doing better than ever and we’re working hard with them creating two amazing mini-projects that can have a big impact in the crowdsourcing community, not only in the local context but globally. Exciting opportunities ahead!
For our own products this was a maintenance week. We only did support work but apparently it was not bad at all (thanks Thomas for your nice words):

Seriously impressed by stagehq.com ‘s customer service. It took them about exactly 5 minutes to fix the problem I had.
— Thomas Fuchs (@thomasfuchs) April 5, 2012

As we mentioned last week Steel Stock Exchange was launched publicly in one of the best steel related events: Tube.de. The feedback that the founders have shared with about its reception has been über-positive. There is a lot of commercial work to do in the near future but market looks prepared for SSE. If you want to understand in just 2 minutes what is the app about, watch this beautiful intro video made by Transistoria.
We finished a proposal (after many rewritings) for an interesting project related to Open Data & ODA. Even in 2012, many industries are still managing heaps of data manually and NGOs world is not different. Usually the best tool they can provide to allow people to browse & understand this data -and why this data important- is a huge PDF. Maybe we’ll be able to help them to improve this soon.
As some of you maybe read in twitter a few days ago our old blog was hacked by some bastards exploiting a bug in Wordpress and/or its plugins. They were using our blog to setup a phishing site. We received a notification on what was going from our hosting the day after the hack was made and fixed the problem quickly.The attacked served was used only for a few static sites and none of them was affected, but since we don’t want to put more effort maintaining a blog engine than using it, we’ve moved to a new platform.

My list of links-to-share-with-you this week is pretty big (maybe we should copy another initiative of our beloved Berg and start a “Saturday Links” series) but I would like you to focus in this one: An Essay on the New Aesthetic.

The New Aesthetic concerns itself with “an eruption of the digital into the physical.” That eruption was inevitable. It’s been going on for a generation. It should be much better acculturated than it is. There are ways to make that stark, lava-covered ground artistically fertile and productive. Lush, humanistic, exotic crops will grow from that smoking, ashy techno-rubble of ours, someday. I live to think so. I’m all for that prospect. It’s exhilarating to see such things attempted, especially in a small auditorium before the straights catch on.

Bruce Sterling does a good job describing all this New Aesthetic “movement” that has been going on for a while and that is one my current obsessions. I just can’t stop thinking about how future’s leakings are all around us. As someone creating software this is probably the most exciting moment in History.

Have a good weekend and a better Easter!

Week #366

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 20:04:00 +0100

Week is over. This is a special week since we’ll celebrate our 7th birthday on Sunday. 2555 days of Linking Paths. I had no idea in 2005 that we will last 7 years. I didn’t thought about it by the time. Now I really want us to stay at least 7 years more in business.

Unfortunately this time there is no list of things we have learned during this time like we did 2 years ago. But if you want to read a bit about our goals and ideas you can take a look at the interview that Ana Martinez from masquenegocio did us and published on Tuesday.

Anyway, thanks to all of you -family, customers, enemies, friends- for being there supporting us along all these years. We really appreciate it.

Aitor is back in Iceland. A last minute problem prevented me from attending codemotion but according to some reviews (spanish links, sorry) Aitor delivered a great talk. That’s not a surprise for me.

Steel Stock Exchange, one of the projects we have being working on with our friends of La Personnalite, went public on Monday after a closed beta. This is one of those projects that puts you in front of reality. We usually think that internet is only made of social networks, newspapers, gadgets and our email inbox, but that’s far from true. Reality, even internet’s reality, is much bigger than our small context.

We have also continue the work in Bazaar. Aitor continued working on its design and I focused on API and systems integration, since ours is only a part of customer’s enterprise systems. We are still behind schedule but since next week is one of those special weeks where everybody seems to be on holidays, I hope we can fix it.

Next week I’ll be working from Valle de Montija, a small village where my parents live now, which population is even smaller that my already small -our building has only 3 floors!- neighborhood in Madrid. In the remote case anyone reading this spends his Easter holidays in the area, I’ll very happy to have a couple of beers.

And now my recommended reading for the weekend. This time is not a single item, it’s a whole site. I would like you to check Hiut Denim:

This is a great story from a city in Wales which used to make jeans. I don’t want to reproduce the whole site, so, please, check their story but also take a look at their blog. Really inspiring, specially in this week of General Strike in Spain.

I wish them all the best.

Entrevista para masquenegocio.com

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:29:00 +0100

Hace un par de semanas Ana Martinez de masquenegocio.com nos entrevistó para esa página web. Ahora se acaba de publicar la entrevista. A continuación podeis leer el texto integro, sin editar, de nuestras respuestas.

1. Entrar en vuestra web da alegría, sobre todo cuando uno pincha en la sección para conocer el equipo. ¿Tanto optimismo y alegría se respira en una tarea tan difícil como la de montar un negocio?

Gracias, nunca nos habían dicho que nuestra web transmitía optimismo y alegría. Aunque lo cierto es que empleamos un tercio de nuestra vida trabajando; y sería muy ingenuo suponer que un periodo de tiempo tan grande contenga únicamente momentos felices.

El hecho de que el balance de todos estos años deba ser positivo -y debe serlo- para tener un vida feliz, no debería evitar que aceptemos que es imposible que todo sea fantástico, siempre, en cada momento y en cada situación.

Respecto a lo difícil que es montar un negocio. Creemos que empezar un negocio es fácil. Extremadamente fácil para la mayor parte de sectores y personas. Puedes montarlo en la mayor parte de comunidades autónomas en pocos días, con poco dinero.

¿Es cómodo? No, tienes que patear oficinas y registrar papeleo. ¿Es agradable? No siempre, hay funcionarios fantásticos y auténticos capullos malintencionados. ¿Es emocionante? No, lo último que quiere alguien que esta creando una empresa es que la primera experiencia haciéndolo sea rellenar formularios con información que las administraciones ya tienen.

Pero… ¿barreras difíciles de vencer para crear una empresa? Pocas. Y reduciéndose cada vez más allá donde mires. Creemos que el Estado es torpe, ineficaz y paleto promocionando la creación de empresas pero no compartimos todos esos comentarios de los “emprendedores” sobre lo difícil que es “empezar” una empresa en España.

Empezar algo -una empresa o cualquier cosa- únicamente requiere de un momento súbito de decisión, un chispazo de determinación, un instante en el que la persona y su deseo están en el mismo sitio, al mismo tiempo. Cualquiera que realmente quiera hacerlo -detalle importante- puede hacerlo.

Lo verdaderamente difícil, lo que raramente se cuela entre las pomposas lineas de las “políticas de creación de empleo”, de la “creación de tejido empresarial” es cómo mantener viva esa determinación. No durante un año, ni durante dos, sino duramente 25, 50 o 100. Es tan difícil que los casos en el mundo de empresas que sobreviven a sus fundadores son la excepción y no lo normal.

Construir algo que sea positivo y significativo para muchas otras personas (clientes, proveedores, trabajadores) y que perdure en el tiempo teniendo la suficiente longevidad para crear un efecto a largo plazo. Eso es difícil. Muy difícil.

2. Por cierto, ¿cómo se os ocurrió escribir esos 17 puntos?

Cuando celebramos nuestro 5 aniversario como empresa, empezamos a pensar sobre lo que habíamos aprendido en este tiempo, lo que habíamos hecho mal, lo que habíamos hecho bien, lo que no habíamos hecho… Creímos que algunas de las conclusiones a las que llegamos eran lo suficientemente genéricas como para que fueran útiles para otras personas.

Las sintetizamos en puntos y las publicamos. Nada del otro mundo… creemos que todas las empresas deberían hacer una declaración pública de sus ideas y valores.

3. Y contadme ¿qué es Linking Camp? ¿Cómo se os ocurrió montar este negocio y por qué?

(Nota: Imagino que hablamos de Linking Paths -la empresa- y no Linking Camp -nuestro chat interno) Linking Paths es una empresa de desarrollo software. Creamos servicios web que pretenden mejorar la vida de nuestros usuarios.

Alberto y yo nos conocimos años antes de crear Linking Paths. Ambos somos desarrolladores y compartimos opiniones sobre cómo, por qué y para qué crear software. Tras algunos años hablando sobre ello llegó el momento de poder participar juntos de ese enfoque y lo hicimos.

Creemos que en muchos casos la creación de una empresa es el resultado natural de disfrutar haciendo algo, de querer dedicar a ello el mayor tiempo posible y de compartir ese tiempo con personas con las que compartes visión. Lo menos importante es el punto que nos llevó hace ya siete años a crear la empresa.

4. ¿Sois vosotros dos los socios? ¿Contáis con más trabajadores?

Contábamos con ellos hasta hace unos meses. Razones económicas, la falta de carga de trabajo y el querer ir dejando la consultoría nos obligaron a tener que despedirlos. Otras de las cosas realmente difíciles de montar una empresa es tener que despedir a un amigo con el has compartido esfuerzo, penas y alegrías durante años. No hay palabras para describir como te sientes en ese momento.

Mucha gente encuentra en esa difícil situación/posibilidad el argumento perfecto para la famosa separación vida/trabajo. Pero esa barrera no existe. No en nuestra sociedad. Menos aun en la sociedad del futuro. Puedes compartir tu vida con gente que la enriquece a todos los niveles -y que salga mal- o auto-imponerte un aislamiento de 30 años por lo que pueda pasar en el futuro. Si ésta ultima no es la definición de tenerle miedo a la vida no sabemos lo que es.

5. Y hasta ahora, ¿qué tal os ha ido?

Llevando siete años sólo podemos decir que la evaluación es muy positiva pero es difícil generalizar en este punto. Por una parte trabajar en Linking Paths es fantástico: hacemos lo que me gusta hacer todos los días, gozamos de flexibilidad para trabajar dónde, cuándo y cómo queremos, podemos aplicar nuestra visión de las cosas en un producto y ver como es usado por miles de personas… Definir tu empresa, lo que defiende y representa y poder vivir de ello es un privilegio que no todos tienen y me siento afortunado de que sea así.

Por otra parte es duro. Muy duro. Asumir las decisiones y los valores sobre los que hemos montado Linking Paths conlleva una cantidad de esfuerzo enorme y a veces es fácil caer en el desaliento. Pierdes de vista el objetivo de lo que quieres hacer y el detalle más insignificante del día a día se hace insalvable. Creo que estos momentos -y no el impuesto de sociedades- es el verdadero precio que paga un empresario para crear su visión.

6. ¿Qué os llevó a emprender?

Primero: creemos que se debería prender fuego al verbo emprender. Ha sido manoseado, prostituido y abusado de tal modo que ya casi ni lo reconoces. Emprender significa comenzar un negocio. Tan sencillo como eso. Sin embargo hay un grupo grande de gente empeñada en hacernos creer que emprender es a) un objetivo en si mismo que b) está reservado a un perfil casi místico de gente ‘innovadora’. No lo es. En España hay casi 2 millones de empresas que son personas físicas y aún así se habla de falta de emprendedores.

Segundo: como decíamos antes, montar una empresa es una salida lógica si encuentras algo que te gusta hacer y que es útil para otros hasta el punto que te paguen por ello. Cualquier persona que se encuentre en esa situación puede crear una empresa.

7. A quien se le diga que hoy día es posible crear una empresa rentable (punto 1), no se lo cree. ¿Algo que decir a esos escépticos?

La rentabilidad no debería ser un fin en si mismo, sino un efecto del impacto positivo de la empresas. Cuando dejamos de verlo así perdemos el equilibro y la visión: la ética y los principios de la empresa saltan por la ventana. Solo hay que ver las razones que nos han llevado a la situación de crisis actual.

Creemos que es posible tener una empresa rentable porque existen personas dispuestas a pagar un precio digno por un servicio que mejore su vida en mayor o menor grado. Y creemos que ese es un principio universal muy cercano a cualquier humano independientemente del momento de la Historia.

Obviamente, posible no es lo mismo que fácil. Quizás esos escépticos debieran empezar por preguntarse si están haciendo algo por lo que ellos mismos pagarían.

8. ¿Qué pasos debe dar un emprendedor para montar una empresa rentable? Y más cuando hoy día solo escuchamos que se están cerrando empresas…

Esta es otra pregunta sobre la que es muy difícil generalizar. Los rudimentos para hacer una empresa rentable son sencillos: haces algo que la gente quiere, lo das a conocer y lo vendes por un precio superior a tus costes. Hay un montón de gente empeñada en hacerlo más complejo de lo que es, pero básicamente se reduce a esto.

La mayor parte de la gente no tiene problema para calcular sus costes o incluso darlo a conocer, incluso suele acertar al ponerle precio. El problema suele ser el primer punto: encontrar algo que la gente quiere y por lo que está dispuesto a pagar. El consejo más fiable que tenemos en este sentido es hablar con el consumidor que mejor conoces: tú mismo.

Piensa en esos problemas que tienes que te gustaría que alguien resolviese y en cuanto pagarías por ello. Generar un producto/servicio para ti mismo ayuda a eliminar interrogantes. Si existe un grupo de personas suficientemente grande que comparta tus problemas tienes un mercado y con ello la posibilidad de un negocio.

9. ¿Y qué pasa con la financiación? ¿Se puede encontrar o es imposible montar tu negocio si no cuentas con inversores?

Obviamente esto depende directamente del volumen de la inversión y esto a su vez habitualmente del sector. ¿Se puede montar una naviera sin inversión? ¿Un restaurante? ¿un empresa de calzado? ¿un servicio web? Cada sector tiene unos costes y una barrera de entrada diferente, y por lo tanto la necesidad de inversión varía de la misma manera.

Además las fuentes de inversión pueden ser muy variadas. Dentro del mundo tecnológico en el que nos movemos nosotros, muchos suspiran al ver la actividad de Venture Capital que se mueve en Estados Unidos. Como en España -de hecho en Europa- es prácticamente inexistente o mucho más reducida, suman dos más dos y ya tiene la cabeza de turco de la falta de compañias tecnológicas. Precisamente en el sector en el que la barrera de entrada es más baja, muchos suspiran por tener inversores… un sinsentido.

Al mismo tiempo cuando empresarios americanos descubren que en Europa puedes utilizar la prestación por desempleo para montar una empresa alucinan. Eso también es inversión, pero parece que solo estamos dispuestos a gastar el dinero de los demás (algo que obviamente siempre es más fácil).

10. Lo peor y lo mejor de emprender.

Lo mejor de ser empresario es la capacidad para crear bajo tus propias reglas y vivir de ello. Lo peor es el peso de la responsabilidad que implica.

11. Aún así, ¿merece la pena?

Obviamente la pregunta no podría acarrear una respuesta más subjetiva pero sería raro responder otra cosa tras siete años. En nuestro caso como en otros tantos, sí, merece la pena. Si preguntas en la calle encontrarás posiblemente el mismo número de personas que te digan que no.

Quizás es más interesante el concepto de fracaso. Si haces todo lo que esta en tu mano nadie te asegura que no acabarás perdiendo, pero solo un estúpido o un hipócrita te dirá que has fracasado.

12. ¿Crees que estamos rodeados de demasiado pesimismo o se pueden hacer cosas? ¿Por qué?

Nuestro cerebro es muy curioso. Habitualmente favorecemos una recompensa inmediata en lugar de una a largo plazo. En el corto plazo las malas experiencias suelen tener un peso desproporcionado sobre las positivas. Sin embargo, en el largo plazo solemos tender a ver el vaso lleno y solo recordamos lo positivo. Somos contradicción.

Bueno, eso y que las buenas noticias no venden periódicos. Aunque bien mirado, ya nada vende periódicos…

PS: Muchas gracias a Ana Martinez y al resto de equipo de masquenegocio.com por entrevistarnos.

Week #365

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:00:00 +0000

4 flights, 1 five-hour train travel, 1 four-hour car trip… more than 14.000km in total. This week -not finished yet- has been a travelling week. As noted last in our last weeknote, a talk and a few meetings brought me back to Spain for a week.

I arrived to Madrid on monday’s evening. We had a quite productive meeting on Tuesday morning for the Bazaar project. In the evening I came to Basque Country and spent another 2 days there (talk in Webdevbilbao included) while Alberto was in Madrid fixing stuff in a few projects. We met again this morning in Bilbao and right now we’re driving back to Madrid. Tomorrow I’ll be giving another talk in Codemotion 2012. A Sunday morning work brunch with Verkami will close the week and I’ll be back in Reykjavík at night. Tired but happy (and sad).

That’s all! Enjoy your weekend.4 flights, 1 five-hour train travel, 1 four-hour car trip… more than 14.000km in total. This week -not finished yet- has been a travelling week. As noted last in our last weeknote, a talk and a few meetings brought me back to Spain for a week.

That’s all! Enjoy your weekend.

Week #364

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:22:00 +0000

I’m really tired this week since I barely slept for a few days. Don’t ask me why -I’m at peace with myself- but the fact is that I didn’t sleep a wink in two days. I’m really looking forward to the weekend

Ok, weeknote #364. This week we have been working on customer projects full time. Our products activity has been reduced to the minimum: Stage’s support and trying to find the appropriate legal form for Payout. If you know me, you have probably heard a lot of times that making your customer’s life easier too often means making yours harder, but that was before entering the Bank sector trying to become a payment gateway. In this sector “harder” can very quickly become a horrible nightmare!. And yes, before David Bonilla writes a comment recalling my debts, I know I owe you a post on payment gateways.

Back to our week. Aitor finished Verkami’s support for multilingual projects. Starting yesterday, Verkami’s users can handle their projects’ content in multiple languages. Their user base continue to grow quickly in Spain and across Europe, so this move makes total sense. Because of our own experience we know internationalization of user’s content is one of the most difficult and misleading things to do on the web, so we’ll see how everything develops.

He has also found time to work on Bazaar’s design. I’ve also been working on it, trying to advance on integration and infrastructure and also fighting with LESS and Rails’ assets compilation. Despite our efforts we are now a bit behind schedule, so we have to push harder next week.

It’ll not be easy: Aitor is flying to Spain to give a talk in Codemotion and I’m leaving our current Madrid office, so I have to get my stuff out. I’m looking for a new place, so if you have any idea within 30 min walking distance from Goya let me know.

And… I’ve to go now!. Time for go swimming with my son. I can’t give you any recommended reading for this week. Next time I’ll give you two, I promise!.

Have a nice weekend.

PS: A late suggestion by Aitor. An awesome talk about mass incarceration and justice inequality in the US: “We need to talk about an injustice” by Bryan Stevenson (after this talk over $1 million was raised by attendees to fund a campaign run by Stevenson to end the practice of putting children in adult jails and prisons.)

Week #363

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 20:25:00 +0000

In the middle of huge snow storms here in Iceland we’ve reached our week #363. Curiously that is the exact number of miles the Erie Canal has.

Built in 1825, the Erie Canal was the engineering feat of the 19th century […] and the only such wonder ever built by the labor of free men, and not by slaves or by forced conscription. Paid eighty cents a day, aided by horses, the workers dug up and removed 11.4 million cubic yards of rock and earth—more than three times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. ¹.

It was not the kind of work everybody loves for sure, but it made possible the creation of thriving new companies and the settlement of thousands of inmigrant farmers in the West. Big dreams and hard work coming together for creating wealthness for many people. We like that.

We’ve been working hard too. Alberto took multitasking to new heights with lots of coding, meetings and emails, this last point originated by GMail wrongly marking as spam all the emails sent to our corporative email address in the last month.

I’ve working in new features for Verkami, a few support tickets for our Stage customers and the last details of the new Stage’s payments platform. I’d like to be able to do more but I keep trying.

This week I want to share with you a small business moment. A spanish company wrote us asking for a Stage demo. Although anyone can create an account in our product and check its features directly on the web, we agreed. We try very hard to sell & promote Stage as much as we can with our limited resources.

The meeting began as usually with a brief presentation of who is Linking Paths, and who was Ugly Fucking Bastards & Co (slightly fictional name). What they do, what we do, our products, our experience, etc. So far so good. It was time then for our Stage’s demo. Conversation then turned quite surrealist:

Linking Paths: To show you how easy is to create an event with our service, first we’re going to create a test account for you…
Ugly Fucking Bastards & Co: No, we don’t want to create an account for this demo.
LP: Umm… eee…, no problem, I can create one for myself.

[Alberto creates an account and starts creating a demo event]

UFBC: But all this is demo information. I want to see real bookings.

[Alberto show them bookings from our company account]

UFBC: No, these are tests. I want to see one of your real customers.
LP: We can’t show you the private information of our customers.
UFBC: If you say so because of the Data Protection Act, it’s no problem, everybody does it…
LP: Sorry but we don’t care what others do. We can’t do it.
UFBC: Well, if you don’t want to sell your product is up to you, but I don’t know why have you come then…
LP: We’ve come to show you our product, and we don’t need to show you our customers’ private data to do it. Would you like to have your data exposed to other people?
UFBC: Yes, I do not mind, and what I want to see is real data.

In this moment Alberto was really tempted to leave the conversation, but as the good salesman he is, he keep demo-ing Stage hoping to bring back the conversation to a logical point.

After that point they showed no interest in our product and after Alberto finished explaining the features, company’s representative opened the meeting room’s door and said “thank you very much and bye”.

As infuriating as it’s on itself this kind of behavior, what I think is unbelievable dangerous is to approach any aspect of your business with this stupid motto: “everybody does it”.

We’re confronted everyday with situations in our personal lifes that put us in front of the crossroad between what we’re expected to do and what we think must be done. This problem, difficult from the very beginning, become harder and harder as we grow up and become adults.

Despite this, I think people -at least the people worth fighting for- somehow find the courage to defend their views and values and do what they think is right. They are the anonymous heroes that make mankind worthwhile.

However, as soon as we enter enterprisey waters, our values, views, the whole Ethics concept, jump out the window. Every nasty policy, bad practice, horrible attitude or plain felony is justifiable because… you know… business is business… everybody does it.

Fuck that.

I don’t buy it. It’s bullshit. I think this kind of reasoning is the main source of the awful laboral context millions of people suffer everyday day. And you know what? I’d prefer to close our small company right fucking now than to keep it open no matter the price we have to pay.

Be true to yourself. It’s the only bulletproof way to keep your dignity. Have a great weekend.

PS: Except you UFBC’s representative. I wish you a horrible weekend: queueing for hours at IKEA, wrongly filling taxes paperwork on the Saturday’s night and suddenly discovering you’re an asshole on Sunday’s morning.

“American History Revisited”, Seymour Morris Jr.. ↩

Week #362

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:51:00 +0000

Again Friday, weeknote time. This is our 8th weeknote, my fourth. I must admit that I’m pretty happy to see we are keeping up with the challenge. Because at least for us, writing a post a week is a challenge. I’ve been told many times that it’s quite impressive the amount of things our tiny team can do at the same time. I don’t know if it’s impressive or not, but they are really a lot, so keeping the pace with this weeknotes as hard as positive for us. ¿?

Ok, let’s review our week. Our customer’s projects continue their progress. Not always as fast as we would like, but at least they keep moving. I almost came back to normality after last week’s chain of unfortunate events so I could meet our customers in Madrid and do some development. We are really becoming experts on international payment, sales and invoicing, since we are also facing this problems in our customer’s projects.

Regarding Linking Paths’ products, Aitor has been mainly working on Stage, refactoring the payment process to accommodate the new workflows. It’s taking longer than expected, but the results are worth the effort.

This week we’ve been also talking about Qstion. It’s really a pain to have 95% of a product and not being able to finish/put it online, so we have to choose what to do with it. A couple of weeks ago someone asked us about it and we’re considering different options for its future.

We’ve also new improvements in Payout’s legal form. We have been working with our friend and lawyer on Payout’s operational and legal framework. As you should expect, nothing it as easy as it should be if you try to work with the Bank Industry. The good news are that we continue to receive positive feedback so we keep pushing.

And this week I would like to recommend you to read about Chargify’s pricing updates: pricing is a key decision when you are creating a product as you will read in this post, since changing it could be very painful.

15 months ago they decided to raise their prices, but apparently the change was poorly executed. Customers and no-customers talked about it for weeks. Even Inc Magazine published an article about it 3 months later.
This week they’ve announced their upcoming pricing update. They have done it in a completely different way, with plenty of time and giving enough background to their customers. You should read this post because despite their pricing model details, it has a lot of good insights on your product’s costs, pricing and value. I completely agree with the two ideas exposed in the “Can’t we just wait it out?” part and many entrepreneurs should interiorize them.

Their experience has some other points to think about -for example being forced to raise their price twice in 15 months- but that’s outside the scope of this reading.

Week #361

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 23:00:00 +0000

It’s not only a member of the Mian–Chowla sequence… it’s the number of the horrible weeks too.

Last 5 days’ list of problems is endless:

Alberto -and all his family- was sick half of the week.
Flood at the office.
30 min. of downtime in Stage due to a wrong update in the systems.
Even a flat tire!

Life gives us lemons, we make lemonade (we tried to find someone else who life handed vodka for having a party but to no avail). Alberto almost finished the i18n of one our customers’ projects and we keep contacting more and more payment gateways for Stage and Payout.

Me? I keep managing most Stage’s support and I’ve been furiously refactoring, cleaning and paying big amounts of technical debt in different projects, specially in Stage. We try to make every single line of code and pixel of design perfect, but in order to actually ship your apps/project you’ve to be able to find the GoodEnoughPoint™ and stop there, at least for a while.

We believe in never ending polishing and therefore we keep going back to these areas where we’ve accumulated code o design debt to fix them. It’s not the sexiest work in Earth but it’s totally necessary if we want to keep our products and business sustainable.

As for our link of the week section, I want to bring your attention to a Bret Victor’s talk titled “Inventing on Principle”:

He is one of my tech heroes and the creator of the amazing concept of Explorable explanations that I personally think could transform education worldwide if applied to text books.

That’s all. A week of sweat, effort and hard work.

Have a great weekend.

Week #360

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:49:00 +0000

This has been one of those weeks when you do many things but still feel you have made very little progress.

On Wednesday evening I gave a talk on payment gateways in Zaragoza invited by the folks of Cachirulo Valley. This took most of my time this week but also a lot of Aitor’s time helping me out with the keynote. We tried to explain our experience building Stage’s own payment gateway as clear as possible, but as you probably know, “clear” and “banks” are words that hardly go well together. I’ll try to share the slides and write a post on this subject next week, but if you have been following this blog for more than a couple of months you probably know that this may take longer.

This talk was also important because it has been the first time we talked in front of a public audience about Payout, the spin-off of Stage’s payment gateway for supporting other European startups. It’s too soon to give any details yet, but this is something we’ve also been playing with for the past weeks. Both, in terms of code and paperwork. I must say that the acceptance of the idea in Zaragoza was pretty good and we already have a couple of companies that would like to give it a try.

And last but not least, this talk also gave me the oportunity of meeting Diego Mariño and Marta Sánchez outside twitter. It’s really cool what they are doing with Ducksboard and it’s always good to talk to people having similar problems than yours.

Despite this talk, time fly by as usual working on some projects and supporting Stage’s customers. Nothing really remarkable.

This week my recommended reading for the weekend is not a blog post but a video: Wilson Miner’s inspiring talk at last Build.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not about design being the most important thing on earth, it’s about the importance of what we do, the decisions we make, and how that shape us and our world.

Have a nice weekend.

Week #359

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:59:00 +0000

Another week. Yes, another prime number week and we’re done with half February. Shit… time is flying this year!

As usually this week we’re wearing lots of different hats. For Alberto that means sysadmin tasks, coding on Stage frontend and more paperwork with American Express, plus international money transfers from/to the States.

I spent long hours coding backend payment gateway integration and optimizing some operational tasks in Stage (faster deploys & a simple Clarity service). More feature design in Bazaar and coding in some in-progress features for Verkami filled the rest of my week.

At Linking Paths we’re used to do this craft-juggling all the time. We think that in modern companies working on/for the web there is no space for monolithic specialists; we need T-shaped players, or even better, ✳–shaped people that is proficient, interested and open to many fields. Technology is getting more and more hybridized at an increasingly faster speed, so do the teams that create it.

In fact, since quality is fractal, and we obsess with creating great quality products and services, we find natural to approach problems in a multidisciplinary way. A -initially simple- change on a form/table can often involve small UX, support, documentation and/or marketing considerations. It’s time consuming and we bust our asses doing it, but we think our customers deserve it.

That’s all folks! Have a great weekend and if you’re in Europe… enjoy the cold and go to the snow!

PS: Oh, a small tip for next week. If you are in Spain, Alberto will be speaking in Zaragoza (here specifically) next wednesday about different solutions to manage your payments online. Alberto will share the stage with Diego Mariño, founder of the great service for creating dashboards Ducksboard. Go if you’ve the opportunity!

Week #358

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:01:00 +0000

Again Friday. Time for the weeknote. This has been a week full of administrative paperwork, specially for Aitor. You can’t imagine how difficult and stressful can become something that should be really easy: to submit your tax declaration. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong, and the worst part is that nobody seemed to be very helpful. Fortunately we have the next three months free of this nightmare.

But again we have managed it and done a lot of stuff. A LOT.

The Bazaar project keeps moving on, despite the complications we are facing. Payment gateways limitations and working with no-stock make everything much more complicated. It shouldn’t, but they do. Nevertheless Aitor is going on with backend’s design and I’m almost finished handling a standard so open that it’s hard to call it “standard”. I really don’t want to imagine how most competitors are handling some of this common issues, it scares me.

On wednesday we received an email informing us that Apple was interested in receiving a demo version of ABCKit for using it potential marketing opportunities. Yes, we know it may mean nothing, but having this opportunity is still good. ABCKit doesn’t use any external service, what made building this demo version pretty easy. The app has also started to receive a lot of good reviews for its english version. We are really happy for the achievements this little app is getting.

Aitor has also find time to improve Verkami’s search engine and to send a proposal for the upcoming Codemotion with the intriguing title of “What is to be a developer?”. If you’ve never seen Aitor on stage take a look at Hack Politics and imagine the rest.

Regarding Stage we’ve improved our custom fields and integrated localizations for Portuguese and it’s Brazilian Dialect. But we have been mostly supporting our users. Users from all around the globe, from Australia to North and South America passing by Europe. Many people thinks on support as ‘fixing bugs’, but supporting users is much more than that. It’s about understanding your customers, their business and their needs. It’s more about listening than saying. It’s about making your customer’s life easier, and, man, that’s pretty cool. And we really love to do it.

And this brings me to my recommended reading from this week: Customer Experience v User Experience by Leisa Reichelt. Don’t forget to read the comments, full of supporting info and links to further reading.

But this week hasn’t ended yet. This weekend we’ll have a hard time moving the last apps we have in our oldest dedicated server to their new home at Linode. Cross your fingers.

Happy weekend.

Week #357

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:24:00 +0000

Another week is over and with this sphenic number (3 × 7 × 17 yeah!) the first month of the year is almost done too.

It has been a pretty cold, snowy week here Iceland, even the road connecting Keflavik, the international airport and Reykjavík was close for a few hours (that is a really rare event). Just take a look at my street last Thursday:

Ok, ok… another one:

Alberto, not happy with closing the banking nightmare last week that is going to allow us to provide Stage’s users with our own payment gateway is now working specifically with American Express to allow users to pay with this kind of credit cards.

American Express is a rara avis in the world of the credit card processing since it’s a sole company who manages the entity, opposed to Visa or Mastercard that are consortiums composed by thousands of members -banks- distributed globally.

We want 2012 to be great year for Stage and we’re working to improve the areas where we are not the best player -e.g. payment options- and strengthening those parts of our service that customers already love as our world-class support system. For that matter Alberto has been playing with different ways we can develop the use of Intercom in our product.

In my case, I’ve been mainly coding and integrating the development branches that contained the changes to allow credit cards charges in our payment gateway. We want it to be flexible and clean enough for further development so it’s taking its time but so far we are pretty happy with the results and excited that private beta launch is sooner than ever.

We keep making progress too in our retail-oriented customer project, Bazaar. More UI design for me, more development for Alberto, making small steps in this vast project. We look forward to share with you some sneak peeks in the next weeks.

So far so good.