Squeejee Blog - Latest Comments

Re: Sipping on Some Moonshine For Rails Deployments

pengwynn — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:49:15 -0000

Very cool stuff. Had no idea about the WordPress recipe. Will have to give that a whirl.

Re: Charging from Day 1: Genius or Deathknell?

bradleyjoyce — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:06:32 -0000

Marshall, thank for the book recommendation. MVP is a term that's been coming up a lot lately and I 100% agree.

I think we did a pretty good job of finding the mvp for TweetSaver... we have a decent backlog of features we'd *like* to implement... but they aren't necessary and customers seem to be happy with what we have.

I also really enjoyed Dave McClure's Startup Metrics presentation where he talks about killing features instead of adding features.

Re: Charging from Day 1: Genius or Deathknell?

twitter-14412699 — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:00:26 -0000

This reminds me of the Customer Development Process, as espoused by Steve Blank

http://steveblank.com/category/customer-develop...

If you haven't read his book, check out the 4 Steps to Epiphany, which I consider to be a must read for internet entrepreneurs. Blank has a great framework that you can use to structure your marketing efforts, and line them up neatly with an iterative software development process. Seriously great stuff.

Blank's term for what you are describing is the Minimum Viable Product, or the product with just the necessary features to get money and feedback from early adopters.

Re: Being Successful as a Distributed Team

mully — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:42:11 -0000

Thanks for the comment, Chris. The funny thing is that both you and Bradley seem to be more productive working internationally than working in the States! ;-)

But seriously, that is the beauty of the age we live in today. As long as you have access to a decent internet connection, you can literally work anywhere in the world and not lose a step. It is a beautiful thing.

Re: TweetSaver vs BackUpMyTweets vs TweetBackup

jonasl — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:36:07 -0000

Thanks for writing about TweetBackup! TweetBackup will support DM etc within a few weeks

Re: Being Successful as a Distributed Team

cglee — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:40:21 -0000

Great write up Brad! I worked from China during the Olympics while working for Squeejee and it's been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

I think the two main ingredients break down to communication and trust.

We have many tools to facilitate communication (as Brad mentioned), but the trust was built up over time. It was built up from many face to face meetings and debugging sessions. To further make the experience as seamless as possible to my coworkers and clients, I worked on US time, which meant working from 9pm-5am Beijing time.

I also had to deal with the limitations of international travel, especially to a country like China. For example, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Feedburner, Wikipedia, etc would be randomly banned and unbanned. If something was down, you never knew if it was the Great Firewall of China or if the site was really down. And who could forget working from Starbucks for a week while my internet was being set up.

There were many many hiccups, but I mention these things just to point out that even if you use all the tools, it still comes down to an accommodating employer who is willing to put up with those hiccups. If you're fortunate enough to be in that type of environment, you can make it work.

Re: Being Successful as a Distributed Team

davidshoemaker — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:09:54 -0000

We had pretty much exactly the same experience at my last startup. That's why a few of us are building ShopTalk now (http://shoptalkapp.com/). It's specifically designed to keep distributed teams in touch. Check it out, and thanks for the great post.

Re: Being Successful as a Distributed Team

bradleyjoyce — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:03:55 -0000

hey Marshall... I have some pics posted on my everlater page at http://everlater.com/bradleyjoyce and then a few more on my flickr account http://www.flickr.com/photos/29213832@N03/

Re: Being Successful as a Distributed Team

bradleyjoyce — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:02:33 -0000

Thanks for the comments everyone... papy posted the correct links and I've updated the post with them as well.

Re: Being Successful as a Distributed Team

mebigfatguy — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:01:56 -0000

http://www.getharvest.com/blog/2009/04/use-co-o...

maybe

Re: Being Successful as a Distributed Team

papyromancer — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:56:35 -0000

I was just wondering the same, and here it is:

http://coopapp.com/ Scrum?
http://www.getharvest.com/ Time Tracking

Re: Being Successful as a Distributed Team

Doug — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:46:33 -0000

I'd love a link to Co-Op as well, please. Great article. Thanks!

Re: Being Successful as a Distributed Team

J. David Lowe — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:45:24 -0000

Great advice. I'm also on a distributed team. I want to add a plug for reviewboard (http://code.google.com/p/reviewboard/). It's a very nice tool for sharing/reviewing/annotating diffs.

Re: Being Successful as a Distributed Team

twitter-14412699 — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:29:49 -0000

Bradley,

Great post! I live in Dallas but work for a consulting company based in San Francisco. We wrestle with many of the same challenges every day.

What is Co-op? Can you supply a link? "Co-op" is a common phrase which resists my GoogleFu.

And congratulations on your trip to Peru! Do you have any pics posted online?

Re: Questions for OneForty.com - Squeejee

oneforty — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:10:16 -0000

Hi folks,

We're doing our best to hear and respond to developer feedback and better serve the community.

Our approach to the developer contract was wrong. We're working to make it right. Here's how:

Revised Publisher Registration Contract
* Effective immediately, the old Reseller Agreement is replaced with a Publisher Registration Contract. (View it here: http://oneforty.com/terms/publisher_contract)
* This lets you register as a developer and claim your apps.
* We're still working on needed improvements to this contract to create productive terms of service that cover registration, claiming and optional donations

Two separate agreements:
* Publisher Registration Contract (applies if you wish to register for developer privileges to claim and edit your app)
* Reseller Agreement (future: will only apply if you wish to offer items for sale at oneforty.com when that functionality is rolled out). This contract will be developed as part of our ecommerce pilot program. Interested in being part of the pilot testing? Ping us at developers@oneforty.com.

Donations
* To revise the contract today, we had to temporarily disable the donation service.
* We have refunded all donations that were made under the terms of the old contract.
* We're revising the Publisher Registration Contract to allow us to turn donations back on for those who opt-in.

Reseller Agreement
* As part of our ecommerce pilot, we'll create a second contract for developers who wish to sell products on our site.
* Its terms will be more developer friendly and created together with your feedback.

Thank you for bearing with us while we work out these early kinks. We value your feedback, and we're anxious to make the Twitter community an even better place. As always, you can reach us at developers@oneforty.com.

Warmly,
the oneforty team

Laura, Mike, Michael and Robby

***NOTE: You do not have to claim your apps to get credit as the developer. Prefer no contract at all? We can add your name as the developer on a listing without you having to agree to anything beyond the site's general TOS.***

Re: Questions for OneForty.com - Squeejee

jgiven — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:42:17 -0000

I think it's great that you guys are so upfront and transparent about this. Thanks!

Re: Questions for OneForty.com - Squeejee

bradleyjoyce — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:22:55 -0000

Thanks so much for the reply and getting involved in the discussion so quickly. It speaks a lot to your intent and purpose to be open about mistakes and where you're heading going forward.

In my mind, the store aspect of OneForty really complicates the life of a twitter app developer. There is just so much more to take into consideration. With regards to customer contact, this is going to be a touchy issue.

For us, if you are using one of our apps then you've agreed to allow us to contact you via email for such purposes as informing you of updates to the application, info regarding your account/subscription and general marketing. Of course, we hate spam just as much as the next person so not only do we rarely send out emails (just so we're not perceived as annoying), but when we do we use a professional service (MailChimp) which then allows people to unsubscribe should they not want to receive anything from us. Since we pride ourselves on our level of customer service and support to our customers, giving up this right to freely communicate is not really an option for us. The way you have it worded now is like we're automatically assumed to be inconsiderate and we're going to spam the heck out of the people who are paying to use our products. This sounds like the lawyers talking. It's a much stronger deterrent to know that an upset customer can leave a bad, public review about any misbehavior.

At the end of the day, by choosing to be the middleman, you've got to assume a lot of the risk for what you allow in to the store. It's unrealistic (and borderline offensive) to ask people for their apps, and then (through this contract) do as much as you can to keep the risk on the developer (this was the way I initally perceived things after reading the contract). Do your diligence upfront to only let upstanding developers/apps into the store and then let the community moderate. After all, you have the final ability to remove any app from the store. If you get a lot of complaints about someone, it wouldn't be hard to stop it pretty fast.

The other thing I don't really understand is this notion of stuff distributed by oneforty.... the percentage of apps that could be distributed by oneforty is extremely small (basically just desktop apps right? most twitter apps are web based and phone apps are going to be distributed through their respective app stores). A lot of the language in the contract just doesn't make sense for web-based apps which will be the majority of apps listed in OneForty. All of Squeejee's twitter apps are web based. How would we sell these through OneForty? I don't see how that makes any sense. Of course we'd be happy to have OneForty participate in any of our affiliate programs so if you send us a new customer who ends up subscribing, we'll throw a little love back your way. Any other arrangement I think would be over complicated for the amount of money we're charging people.

Again, I've been really pleased with your openness and responsiveness to developer concerns over the contract. Hopefully the community can continue to discuss (civilly, what is is with some people and their negativity?!) and improve things to make OneForty a success for all involved.

Re: Questions for OneForty.com - Squeejee

Duane Roelands — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:30:38 -0000

It's not that you -can't- remove my site from your directory. You -can-. You are -refusing to-. I'm not inclined to believe that you have the freedom to waive the developer contract on the spot but are somehow legally hamstrung with regard to the no-removal policy.

It's not as though I asked you to take down a link to my application that someone else added. >>I<< submitted my application to the directory; it's ludicrous that I shouldn't have the ability to un-publish my own work.

You claim that if the terms of your contract preclude serving the developer community, then you're not doing your jobs. Not allowing a developer to remove an application that he himself submitted is not "serving the developer community".

Re: Questions for OneForty.com - Squeejee

oneforty — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:57:11 -0000

sorry for the confusion over the opt-out interface. i just checked both apps to see if i could help switch that off for you, but i think you're set? FWIW, yes the contract opt-in has been there in the developer registration flow since alpha testing launched. thanks for taking time to help us understand all this better. please let us know any other thoughts, anytime.

Re: Questions for OneForty.com - Squeejee

oneforty — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:51:23 -0000

@bradleyjoyce and @patrick good call. we're going to separate the agreement that lets you claim and promote your apps from the reseller program agreement. we need something at the claiming stage to establish the terms of service for letting you edit your app, but the heavier reseller stuff can and should wait for later.

Re: Questions for OneForty.com - Squeejee

oneforty — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:16:51 -0000

this is laura, and i am personally and sincerely quite sorry i can't change simply waive the no removal policy on the spot even though you very politely requested us to. we ARE actively examining the policy. that's the best i can do tonight.

Re: Questions for OneForty.com - Squeejee

oneforty — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:22:45 -0000

Hey everyone, thank you for taking the time to help us better understand and better serve the developer community.

We read this and shared it with our investors, advisors and even our @oneforty and @pistachio Twitter readers. We're glad this conversation about the contract is happening. We've been trying to gather feedback via our developer alpha this summer and the Twitter API developers list. We're listening earnestly. We especially want to get this contract right before we start pilot tests that will let developers sell directly on oneforty.

There's also a bunch of things you didn't raise (others have) that we're changing. just a few of them:
-We already killed the "we get a share of offsite sales" clause
-We are seriously reexamining how to improve the minimum payments threshold and time delay before payments get sent out
-We're changing the cancellation terms

These -- and quite a few other -- things are being actively reevaluated. We know it's lame to hear "we're working on it" as our main answer to you right now, but that's the plain truth. Quick specifics on what you raised:

2.1 Needs to be more clearly expressed what this even means. This unclear language confused at least one developer into thinking our model is royalty based (it's not) and that all payments would be made to developers as "donations/gifts" instead of regular income (they're not going to be)
2.2 Trial versions should only apply to trial versions distributed through us. Not ANY trial version you ever share.
3.2 We're not trying to force you to provide phone support, so we need to rewrite that
4.0 FEES - we agree we need much more explanation and support around how we imagine all of this working
5.2 We need to work out fair terms under which the customer relationship gets shared. What's in the contract now ain't it yet.

We'd particularly love to hear your concerns about sharing the relationship with the customer fairly. (ie, the part about not contacting them in any way except to provide support.) That's a tough one to figure out. Whatever we end up with needs to protect developers, oneforty and honor oneforty community privacy expectations.

We feel strongly that the marketplace needs to grow as a partnership between oneforty and the communities it serves.

More on why we feel this way, from our FAQ http://oneforty.com/pages/faq#developers

What if I disagree with the terms of the developer contract?
Tell us. We're here to cultivate and serve a community in which everybody thrives. If our terms preclude that, we're not doing our jobs, and we want to know it. We rely heavily on feedback from the developer community

Thanks for opening up this dialog and we look forward to more of it.

Warmly,
Laura, Mike, Michael & Robby (@oneforty)

Laura Fitton (@pistachio)
Mike Champion (@graysky)
Michael Macasek (@macasek)
Robby Grossman (@freerobby)

Re: Questions for OneForty.com - Squeejee

Duane Roelands — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:18:10 -0000

Hm. Two members of the OneForty team just refused to pull my applications out of their directory. That's annoying. Guess I'll have to rename it to "OneForty Developer Contract Is Unethical"

Re: Questions for OneForty.com - Squeejee

Duane Roelands — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:38:44 -0000

My application is free and open-source and will always be so, so this affect me all that much.

That being said, I find the terms of this agreement to be noxious and parasitic. I'll be removing my application from oneforty until such a time as this goes away.

Re: Questions for OneForty.com - Squeejee

Brian Deterling — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:31:54 -0000

When I claimed my app I started and stopped about three times due to the contract. Finally, I decided that since my app (http://tweepdiff.com) was a website with no payment plan and nothing for the user to purchase, most of the terms that looked scary weren't going to affect me. But I did message Lynn at the time about making it more clear, especially for external websites. I agree that you should be able to claim your app without signing an agreement. There should be a plain English description of what you are agreeing to and why, sort of like a term sheet. That way, if you decide you want to enter into a full-fledged agreement, it's just a matter of making sure the contract matches the plain English version.

Brian Deterling
@bdeter