Sandeep Shetty's Blog

Fliptabify Design Principles

2012-01-27T18:55:00.000+05:30

Should just work.

You shouldn't need to repeat stuff you've already done on Shopify.
Should have good defaults settings to give a configuration-less experience.

Shouldn't have an admin section to force minimal configuration and simple features.

SCP excluding .git & other dot files/folders

2012-01-27T18:43:00.001+05:30

Quick command to scp your git repo to your server without copying .git & other dot files/folders:


scp -r [!.]* sandeep@server:/path/to/docroot

You can use this hack to store stuff in your repo (in dot files/folders) that you don't want to deploy to your production server.

Workflow vs. Tools

2012-01-27T18:36:00.000+05:30

Workflow is more important than tools.

- Getting Shit Done

Unitasking

2012-01-27T18:34:00.002+05:30

I noticed something interesting the day I was confined to just 13" of screen space. Even though I couldn't see everything I needed to operate and reference at once, I became more focused. Only seeing one window at a time enabled me to mentally hunker down on the task at hand. My actions felt purposeful; my decisions, deliberate. Surprisingly, my productivity didn't suffer. I did slow down, but also experienced a calm efficiency--similar to that which is required when fastening the innumerable rows of snaps on a screaming baby's pajamas. If you rush, you're going to mess up; if you miss snaps, it's going to take longer. And rushing makes you sweat. Never let the baby see you sweat.

- Unitasking

Pricing Parking

2012-01-03T02:33:00.000+05:30

When to collect?

On entry

Increases entry time resulting in longer entry queues.

Bad idea when customers are anxious to get in and might negatively affect repeat visit rates especially during peak hours/days.

On the way out

Decreases entry time resulting in smaller entry queues.
Longer exit queues

Might be better than long entry queues?

What to charge?

Fixed Price

Simplest model.
Can be collected at either entry or exit.

Based on time (e.g., by the hour)

Can only be collected at exit as it is variable.
Uncertainty of price

Can be mitigated by limiting the maximum price and marginally increasing price over just a few time intervals (2 interval example: $x for 0-3 hours, $x+y for 3-10 hours where y is marginal).

Might influence customer behaviour to a small degree

Might incentivise customers to leave early

A free for first x minutes policy might reinforce this.

Based on demand and supply (charge more when supply cannot keep up with demand)

Can be fixed or metered.
Can be collected at either entry or exit if it is fixed and at exit only if it is metered.
Might significantly influence customer behaviour

Disincentivises casual customers from coming during peek hours.

Related

On why charging for parking makes sense and dynamic pricing

More love from Shopify

2011-12-11T22:49:00.001+05:30

Turns out, apart from t-shirts, open source also pays stickers. The hand-written card is a nice personal touch. It's the little things like this, that go a long way in building a community. Good show Edward my man. Keep it up.

If your a Shopify customer, check out Fliptabify, the easiest way to showcase your products on Facebook and drive traffic to your Shopify store.

Open-source pays t-shirts

2011-12-09T00:35:00.001+05:30

Shopify sent me some swag for creating shopify.php, the open source lightweight PHP client for the Shopify API that I built to scratch my own itch. It replaced Shopify's own PHP adapter and is now the officially recommended PHP adapter to use for the Shopify API.

If your a Shopify customer, check out Fliptabify, the easiest way to showcase your products on Facebook and drive traffic to your Shopify store.

Worse is Better Design Rules

2011-11-13T02:01:00.001+05:30

The Worse is Better design rules:

Prefer Simplicity over everything else.
Sacrifice Correctness for Simplicity.
Sacrifice Completeness for Consistency.
Sacrifice Completeness for Simplicity.
Sacrifice Consistency for Completeness if Simplicity can be retained.

Invisible Design

2011-11-13T01:57:00.001+05:30

Ironically, invisible design in UX requires adding constraints while in programming it requires removing them to find abstractions.

Start. Finish. Repeat.

2011-11-07T04:23:00.001+05:30

If you haven't started, start. If you've started, finish. Repeat.

Finding the optimal path between start and finish is not important; finishing is. Take the shortest path.

A Nuanced World

2011-08-22T00:56:00.001+05:30

We live in a nuanced world. A world with multiple layers of detail and meaning. With connections that are sometimes impossible to uncover given our limited perception. So we choose to simplify, generalize and polarize, and lose out on the richness that is this life.

Bigfoot Says

2011-08-21T23:48:00.000+05:30

The best thing about not really existing is never having back troubles or eyesight issues, even though I have been around long enough to have been haunting gullible people’s imaginations for hundreds of years.

- None So Blind

P.S. The post where I found that comment is funny too:

I mean, seriously? Scientists?! What have they ever done for me?

Google+'s killer feature

2011-07-03T11:24:00.002+05:30

Hangouts is a killer feature! The possibility of "hanging out" with people you haven't met in person and making real connections is a game changer.

The Right Solution Test

2011-06-28T02:13:00.002+05:30

You know your on the right track when customers (with very little effort) totally get how your product solves their problems and take ownership of the process of moving to your solutions, regardless of the obstacles they need to overcome along the way.

The most important reason to do your own startup

2011-06-21T00:09:00.005+05:30

I'll write a detailed post soon about all aspects that I considered while deciding to do my own startup, but for now, I want to talk about the most important reason of them all: Personal Growth.

For the first time in a long time, I have the feeling that I am fulfilling my potential and it is amazing the growth I have seen in myself in these past few months.

Putting yourself outside your comfort zone, sharply brings into focus your values and forces you to think hard about them and make some tough choices. You will be pleasantly surprised to find yourself doing things you never thought you could. And there will be times when you will be upset at yourself for doing things you believed you never should. But in the process, you will learn a lot about yourself.

In the end, with all the uncertainties, if nothing else, I know at least one thing for sure: I will be a better person than I started out and that is worth more than anything else you might think is important.

Are you doing a startup? Why are you doing it? Are you on the fence? What is keeping you from starting up? I'd love to hear from you.

The Business Guy

2011-06-07T04:02:00.008+05:30

Update: For various reasons, we paused AceSeller and are not working on it currently.

Given the fact that ecommerce is just taking off in India and we did not have enough market knowledge, it was very clear from the beginning that considerable effort would have to be put into doing Customer Development, Vendor Partnerships, Sales and Marketing (the business side of the startup) for AceSeller.

And then there were three
A recent chance meet over coffee with Rakesh, who recently quit his job at Directi to pursue his own startup; heard about what we were working on and was interested in collaborating with us given his background working with large high-volume ecommerce websites (most recently at Cleartrip).

Doing what it takes
At this point I already had a scrappy prototype of AceSeller ready in PHP, but it was time to take a call. Now that we had Rakesh on board, who could take care of the tech, I could choose to stop focusing on developing the software and instead focus on the business side of things.

It was a tough choice to make, but in the end if you really want to make your startup work, you have to do what it takes. In our case it was clear that someone had to take care of the businessy stuff and that someone turned out to be me.

And that's how I became the business guy at AceSeller.

Stumbling upon a problem

2011-06-06T12:41:00.006+05:30

Update: For various reasons, we paused AceSeller and are not working on it currently.

While researching a startup idea of selling quality limited edition t-shirts online, I realized that selling online in India was not easy nor cheap and there weren't any options targeted specifically towards the Indian market and solving its problems.

Around the same time I also happened to meet a lot of fashion designers and artists (thanks to my wife) that were trying to connect with their customers online (blog, Twitter, Facebook) and over and over again I stumbled upon online conversations where their customers would ask how they could buy their products online and saw them being sent an email address instead!

It looked like I had stumbled upon an interesting problem to solve with a sizable market and it was time to validate it.

Synchronocity

Meanwhile, Jinesh was also looking at selling t-shirts online at around the same time and had experienced firsthand the obstacles to setting up an online store in India. We got talking and he was soon on board taking care of design.

And that's how the startup journey of AceSeller began...

CodeMirror vs. Ace

2011-05-31T03:23:00.009+05:30

Here's why I went with CodeMirror over Ace for Rewritepad:

Better support for textarea (good to have for scenarios where JavaScript is unavailable). Ace has a special build for it but it isn't compatible with the regular API yet.
Smaller in size (34k vs. ~185k) and comes with a very handy compression helper.
~~Much faster and deals with huge documents way better than Ace because it only puts the visible content in the DOM tree~~. As pointed out by Fabian Jakobs, the author of Ace, in a comment and by Marijn Haverbeke, the author of CodeMirror on Twitter, both CodeMirror and Ace use the same technique and in fact Ace actually pioneered it.
Better documentation compared to Ace.
Marijn Haverbeke.

Ask for what you want

2011-05-28T12:09:00.002+05:30

I've noticed that in most situations my assumption that what I want won't be feasible (for my employer, family and friends, service providers, business partners) is exaggerated and just plain wrong.

Have the clarity to know what you want and the courage to ask for it and more often than not you will get it.

Starting up

2011-05-28T05:07:00.003+05:30

Starting Jan 1, 2011, I switched to consulting part-time (3 days a week) at my regular gig Directi (which IMO, is one of the best companies to work for in India) to spend some quality time with my then pregnant wife and focus on building products that scratched my own itch.

So far, I've become a dad (it's a girl!), shipped Owe.to, shipped OboxApps, almost shipped Rewritepad and saw bombay evolve in the process.

Along the way I also stumbled upon what looks like an interesting problem to solve, with a sizable market that I'm very excited about.

Overall, its been a great year so far and I'm looking forward to the rest of it.

Business 101

2011-05-01T01:05:00.001+05:30

Find a pressing problem faced by enough (depending on how much money you want to make) customers* .
Come up with a solution to the problem and offer it to customers. The price is a part of the solution.
If enough customers are not willing to pay for your solution, then either the problem was not pressing enough (go to step 1) or faced by enough customers (go to step 1) or you don't have the right solution yet (go to step 2).
Rinse and repeat till you have enough paying customers.

* Customers are people with a problem that they are willing to pay to solve. Your users are not always your customers. For example, users of a site/product might just be people that your customers can advertise to.

Secure (transient) storage of passwords for external APIs that don't support OAuth

2011-04-25T05:29:00.004+05:30

My latest project, OboxApps.com, a mobile app suite for LogicBoxes (LB) and Resellerclub (RClub) users, has to deal with the the awkward situation of storing the users credentials to make API calls on their behalf.

Searching turned up some great answers by ircmaxell on how to deal with situations like this:

For increased security, I wanted the storage to be transient (duration of the session) and did not want to store the password on the server. So this is what I came up with:

I ask the user for the API credentials over HTTPS.
Verify that the creds works by making an API call.
Generate a 128 character random salt.
Encrypt the password using the random salt with the method used in the Encryption class from answer 1 above.
Store the random salt and API username in the session.
Send the encrypted password to the client in a secure (HTTPS), httponly cookie.

The API credentials and the encrypted password cookie are transmitted over HTTPS to protect against any kind of sniffing and the httponly property of the encrypted password cookie ensures that client side JavaScript cannot access it through XSS attacks (although it is not supported by all browsers).

Additionally (as suggested by ircmaxell in a private conversation), I could also look at implementing the Secure Cookie Protocol (pdf) for the encrypted password cookie and ensure the salt is sufficiently strong by using a derivation function such as KDF3 on the random salt to prevent or at least curb brute force attacks against the key generator, but I think this is good enough for now.

Owe.to Facebook Application

2011-03-08T21:36:00.000+05:30

I created the Owe.to Facebook Application over the weekend to skip the email address verification step (that was required to prevent others from pretending to be you). I can skip it in the Facebook application because Facebook has already verified your email address.

Go to App or check out the Application Profile Page.

You will be asked for the send me email permission when you access the app for the first time. Owe.to requires this permission to access your Facebook verified email address.

Would love to get feedback form you. Please leave a comment below or visit http://oweto.uservoice.com/

Owe.to Update: Group Reminders, Remember Email Verification Status and Sneak Peak of Android App

2011-02-25T13:13:00.003+05:30

Here is a quick update on Owe.to:

Group Reminders: You can now setup reminders for more than one person by simply filling in additional email addresses separated by commas. This is perfect for keeping track of shared expenses like parties and celebrations, going clubbing, group holidays or buying a gift for special events like a friend's birthday, wedding, housewarming or baby shower.
Remember Email Verification Status: If you are a regular user of Owe.to, then you won't have to verify your email address every time you want to setup a reminder. When you verify your email address by clicking on the link sent in the verification email, it will remember the verification status for your email address and won't ask you for verification for all subsequent requests in the same browser.

I've tried to implement these without sacrificing the immediacy and simplicity of Owe.to. Hope you like it. To give feedback to improve Owe.to visit: http://oweto.uservoice.com/

Coming soon: My friend Mital is working on an Android app for Owe.to.

Owe.to (my "little" app) featured in The Times of India's Mumbai Mirror

2011-02-11T11:48:00.002+05:30

I woke up on Feb 9, 2011, to see a lot of users on Owe.to. Ok, a lot is not really a lot, more like a few hundreds, but it was more than the usual, considering I hadn't announced it anywhere and only showed it to few friends.

Looking at the access logs, I stumbled upon a few requests coming in from the online version of The Times of India's Mumbai Mirror. Turns out that someone at Mumbai Mirror came across Owe.to and featured it on Page 24 (the sci-tech section).

The reason I hadn't announced it yet was because I was still wrapping up the finishing touches on it (lots of small things to do). This forced launch had me scrambling to finish off stuff, but it was also kind of liberating and exciting. Plus I now have a nice pitch for Owe.to thanks to the description in the paper:

Fed up of friends who borrow money and then conveniently forget? A website to send friendly automated email payment reminders to them.

Other places Owe.to has been spoted so far:

Jared Spool bookmarked my now dated post about Owe.to's design principles alongside Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design, Facebook Design Principles and LukeW's Developing Design Principles: http://www.delicious.com/jmspool/designprinciples
Stephen Anderson said "(Owe.to is a) Great example (of a conversational form), thought through in detail"
Owe.to was featured on a Dutch website in an article about conversational forms: http://www.webanalisten.nl/verbeteren/praktijk-cases/%E2%80%9Cverhaal-formulieren%E2%80%9D-ruim-25-meer-conversie.html