Naked Startup

Startup Fridge: An Appeal for Stickers

Tue, 24 May 2011 21:55:10 -0700

We’re a small team with a little investment and a big plan. And a small fridge.

This is a global appeal for adhesive love.

Everyone likes stickers, right? We want to cover our tiny fridge with them. We’ll document the process here!

We’ve started well, thanks to running reddotrubyconf we have some github stickers. Thanks to ordering t-shirts we have threadless stickers. We need more, an unstickered fridge is an unloved fridge.

Send your stickers to:

Anideo Pte Ltd
63 Circular Road, #03-01
Singapore 049417

While you’re here thinking about sending us stickers, why not checkout fotobook our latest iPhone app.

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Hey Singtel. Can you fix Facebook Connect?

Tue, 03 May 2011 21:22:00 -0700

So our new app is out. And we'd love to start getting some 'in person' user feedback, but we can't.

Facebook Connect (and touch.facebook.com) is broken across all applications and browsers if you are connected using Singtel over 3G or broadband.

To replicate this problem, this is simplest way on any device connected to Singtel's network:

Using your web browser, sign out of Facebook (the website)
Connect to touch.facebook.com
Sign in using your correct username and password
Get redirected to the login form again with no error message
Look puzzled

This is showing up as a symptom on new downloads of all iPhone apps. Including ours. We believe this is due to the iOS-facebook SDK utilising touch.facebook.com under the hood to run it's authentication, so if you're just browsing facebook and you're logged into the main site and then you go to touch.facebook.com it works in the browser. This however is not a work around for Facebook Connect.

The reason there isn't much user screaming is that if your app uses facebook connect and is already authorized the app doesn't need to log you into facebook. Also the facebook app itself works.

We've called the call centre, but they assure us it's not a problem. But it is. And we've confirmed the problem with some other iOS friends who cannot finish the app they're building for the red giant, (which uses facebook connect!), until this problem is fixed! Hopefully that will help focus some minds.

Now we realise this is only a local issue and that we have the whole world to aim at, so we're likely going to have to remove the app from the Singapore store until the problem is fixed.

It's just a bit embarrassing that a Singapore-based company can't launch their apps in their own country. So come on Singtel, sort it.

If you want to do something and you have 5 minutes, call customer support on 1688 (mention the touch.facebook.com problem - Annika opened the ticket) and let them know about the problem. You'll be helping us, local developers, the larger startup ecosystem and I suppose yourselves if you value cool applications! Call now.

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What We Are Doing

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 18:36:00 -0700

This post has been gestating in various forms over the past few weeks, so I feel its best just to post what we have. Short version: the last month and a bit has been a great experience.

We've left an over-expensive office, signed up for our own (much cheaper) space and meanwhile been squatting on the good graces (and in the windowless basement) of the Entrepreneurship Institute of SMU. Simply "four dudes and a desk", as Kent put it. Perhaps we should get tattoos.

We've spoken to quite a few people about our company and what we're hoping to achieve, and it's finally coalescing into something we can share. Our plan is less a traditional startup and more a philosophy; but less pompous than that sounds.

In simple terms we're going to take our pretty damn awesome small team and ship something new every 6-8 weeks: an incubator for ourselves. We're primarily working in mobile and web for consumers, but we certainly wouldn't rule out a business-to-business enterprise.

We're putting trust in ourselves to ship a variety of high quality, focussed products each with an ability to make money and turn into a business of it's own. We're not wedded to any business model and will derive cash from each product on it's own merits, some likely advertising-based, some licensing and some with direct payment (yay!) from users. What we're not doing, is looking at growth for any of our products with no revenue plan.

Now obviously this sounds like we're a bit flighty; how can we be 'focussed' on multiple products, shouldn't we pick one thing to focus on and 'pivot' (ugh) until we find our market. We don't disagree that this might be a valid plan for some but not for us, we really are 'investing in the team' to borrow another phrase often heard in startup circles. Plus we're human and humans can multi-task. Sometimes giving a product some breathing room in it's early stages, and putting it in the passive thinking part of your brain, can be a good thing.

A longer truth (not always told amongst the 'science' of startups) is that no-one really knows what will be successful and we're brave enough to admit that up front. We can guess, but it's more honest to say you don't know what features or products will chime with users. What's the magic ingredient of Instagram that led them to their incredible growth? I would venture that however much you analyze the it amongst many iPhone photo apps it might simply be timing, some luck and a simple and solid enough product. Who knows?

What we're looking for is to have a measurable impact on the world, be it from large numbers of users or recurring revenue, by driving our success from high-quality stuff that people want. We don't have a huge amount of money, but thanks to our investor, we do have some runway to allow ourselves to concentrate fully on building our own things without having to worry about food or a roof over our heads, meaning a requirement for consulting gigs. A luxury Arun & I did not have last year.

An interesting side-note to our approach is the news that this sort of thing seems to be coming into style...

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So um, we have some news

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 05:36:00 -0800

It all started out with a harmless enough meeting with a certain Andrew Solimine on a wet November evening at the Toucan on Duxton Hill. Both Andy and I had met AJ a few times at various SRB meetups but this was the first time we were going to catch up face-to-face over beers. We started out talking about our different products - about Gameplan, Today's News as well as AJ's exploits with Anideo. A few beers later, the conversation slowly shifted to ideas about a partnership between Anideo and Deepcalm.

While we had never entertained thoughts of joining forces with other companies (with the exception of doing consulting work), AJ's infectious enthusiasm coupled with the fact that the three of us hit it off really well (6 hours of drinking during our first meeting is probably a good sign) led us to believe that a partnership might have some significant value. One huge advantage is that our philosophies are aligned while our specializations are complimentary. While we're all product guys-- AJ will focus on user acquisition and consumer feedback, Andy on user experience, and I will be mastering our technical infrastructure with the help of uber developer Kent Nguyen.

We met again the following week, this time with Eduardo Saverin (who is lead investor in Anideo), and after that meeting we were pretty much convinced that the three of us could really kick ass. After informally agreeing that it will be interesting for us to join forces, we dispersed for the holidays.

After some discussions over the technicalities of how we would work together, we finally agreed that the cleanest solution would be for Andy and I to join as partners at Anideo with AJ and all of Deepcalm's products will be brought under the Anideo umbrella. We signed the contracts last week we're all set to start rolling on the first of March. In the meantime, we're tying up all the loose ends - including consolidating code, domains, Heroku accounts, analytics accounts, financials and all of the other nitty-gritty stuff, so that come March 1st, we can start on a clean slate.

Some other unanswered questions:

1. Is NakedStartup going to continue?

- Yes of course. NakedStartup has been a success ever since we launched it, and it will continue and AJ will join on board as a contributor.

2. What happens to Gameplan and Today's News?

- Gameplan hasn't been as successful as we hoped it would, so it will probably be on sabbatical for a while, and maybe it might morph into something else in the future. Today's News will still continue to be available on the App Store, thought we might it move over to the Anideo iTunes account.

3. What are you guys going to work on next?

- We've been meeting once every week for the last month or so to bounce off ideas and we've discussed some pretty interesting ideas. We have some preliminary ideas about a conversation engine, which we're moulding into something more concrete, but we've agreed that we should be executing at light speed and be making sure that we don't waste time dallying around.

4. Where are you guys going to work next?

- Anideo's current office is on Orchard Road, though in all likelihood we will be moving. Tanjong Pagar and Bugis are two options - a lot of exciting companies in Singapore seem to be gravitating towards these areas.

We're very excited by this opportunity and we think this year is going to be epic, so wish us luck on our new adventure!

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Looking Back, Looking Forward

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:52:06 -0800

So, only a few days into the new year and I'm already late writing this.

2010 was frankly a brilliant year for Arun & myself. We launched stuff, and we saw that it was good. Looking back at our heady 9 week sprint to take Gameplan from nothing to product was super productive. Now it may not have been the soaraway success we had hoped for, but it does what it says it does and technically is probably the proudest I've ever been of anything.

The future of Gameplan lies in a 'pivot' (ugh, dreadful startup cliche ahoy!) we need to work out a better way of attracting users, in short we built something useful for people who don't know they need it.

We also built our first (and Arun's second) iOS app, Today's News a Guardian iPhone App. We subsequently launched a major improvement, a version for iPhone as well as iPad and implementing Apple's iAds. Today's News is as much an experiment as it is a money making venture (just as well given the performance of banner ads!) but we have thousands of users every day who find the app as useful as I personally do. So that's awesome.

We finished the year taking on a contracting role at ViKi, working alongside the development team there and a micro-army of Pivots. It's been good to broaden our pairing partners and simply by working with a talented group of people on the rewrite of a high traffic site has been enlightening. We also launched with little to no problem and after ironing out some minor bugs (only to be expected!) over the first two weeks we have an average response time of under 150ms and that's not even including pages served from the high-speed cache.

If I'm allowed I may write in more detail about what we're using at ViKi, if not I can probably just write a bit more generically about the tools we've used in the process, without incurring the wrath of any NDAs!

The next year holds many excitements. We have a few more weeks at ViKi, I'm doing some interesting consulting work with Paul G and we may have a big announcement in the next few weeks about our future plans. Oh plus there's going to be a Ruby Conference in April in Singapore with top international speakers, you'll want to come.

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So What Now?

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:38:49 -0800

It's been a while.

I think we can safely say that in its current incarnation Gameplan will not make us millionaires. Or frankly pay our salaries. However, this does not mean we are giving up.

Today's News seems to be a fantastic product and we have a hard core of several thousand readers using our app every day. Plus we have an iPhone version in the works, which should increase our users count several-fold. Arun even thinks it might be his preferred version.

But our (meagre) salaries have to be paid. So in an effort to do some interesting work and make some cash we met with several people over the last month or so to attempt to secure some paid work so we can fund ourselves as an entity for the forthcoming year.

After meeting with several potential clients we finally agreed to work with ViiKii on an extended consulting job that'll see us well into 2011.

What made us take the assignment? We're working on something that's an interesting project, with a decent shot at success, working with a talented team of staff and Pivots. Hardly a bad way to spend your life for a couple of months.

What should be noted at this stage is that we're not giving up on our 'startup', we're just going about it another way. We're both talented developers and don't need to spend other people's money on a workforce to build our ideas. We can help other people with their ideas, get involved, learn and at the same time fund ourselves for another run at Gameplan (or maybe something else) next year.

As is often said, investors are often backing a team rather than an idea, per se. We're doing the same. Investing in a team, but we're just funding it a different way; through our own skills. We back ourselves to do something amazing but by taking on interesting consulting work, for a little while, we don't need it to be right this minute.

Also the benefits of working with other people on interesting projects can only help us to avoid pitfalls and spark interesting new directions for us as a team. Plus it's nice to get out and about in a coding sense once in a while!

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Our Attempt to become the Pull-To-Refresh of iPad News Apps

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 05:31:01 -0700

When we launched version 1.0 of Today's News - we were quite aware that it's navigation UI was flawed and needed quite a bit of work. The first thing I do when I read any newspaper is to scan the cover page and then jump straight to the sports section, and then work my way through the rest of the paper. The first version of Today's News didn't let the user do that easily. But we launched anyway, because apparently real artists ship.

As we were rolling out version 1.0 and waiting for the App Store gods to approve our work, we were hard at work at making changes to the navigation UI. Very early on, Andy had sketched a version of what he thought it should look like, but said - "this is definitely version 1.1, let's get this version out the door quickly". As is evident from the sketch below, it had a heads-up display which would let the user scrub between stories, but it would also graphically denote to the user the length of each section in the paper, which upholds the Today's News ethos of not ever showing counts of stories, but yet subtly managing to tell the user what he needs to know about the day's paper. The coolest thing (and my favorite bit) of the new UI is the ability to tap in a section, which would then bring you to the first story of that section. So for example, if you tapped anywhere in the Sports Section, it would bring you to the first sports story.

I spent a couple of days working on a rough implementation of Andy's sketch and after a few days of our combined polishing, we've gotten to a stage where this UI is something we're really proud of (and as an aside, I personally couldn't stand to look at version 1.0 when a much improved version 1.1 was waiting in the wings). To make things obvious, you can even skip between sections using the conventional method which is to tap left and right arrows. We've also made the HUD on-demand, so you tap once to bring up the navigation HUD and tap again to make it disappear. The pleasant side-effect of this is that you get more room for the content of the article, leading to a much more pleasant reading experience and that's the whole point really. Here's a brief peek at what it looks like.

Please excuse the less-than-professional video quality. This was done with an iPhone4 and a flaky Internet connection in India. You can watch it in full HD glory here.

We believe this is a nifty piece of innovation and we're (not-so-)secretly hoping this will became the "pull-to-refresh" of iPad news apps ;)

Another important piece of feedback that we've received from plenty of people is that the ads spoil the elegance of the app. While we'd love to provide an in-app purchase to remove ads from the app, we're unfortunately limited by the terms and conditions of Guardian's Open Platform. We have to live with the fact that despite the elegance and beauty of our product, we're still sharecroppers on the Guardian's wonderful farm.

Version 1.1 of Today's News is now live on the App Store and is ready for download.

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Today's News - A young iPad app's journey from an Idea to App Store

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:28:29 -0700

First of all, apologies for the obtuse Seinfeld reference.

So Uncle Steve was kind enough to approve Today's News this morning. It is interesting to see how little time is spent in the actual review, just an hour, compared to how long you wait for a reviewer, 9 days. We've spent the last month working on Today's News - a different kind of news iPad app - and it is available for free on the iTunes App Store, starting today.

The Beginning A few months ago Andy showed me a site he stumbled upon called Today's Guardian, created by the very talented Phil Gyford. It was a very interesting take on how news must be presented on the web. The biggest feature of the site was 'finishability': you get the feeling that you are done with the day's paper without having to worry about unread counts, todo's or percentage complete bars. As a big fan of the Guardian (or more specifically it's weekly football podcast) myself, I was very impressed by the app as well.

A few weeks later we both got our iPads, and from day one we were completely blown away by the awesomeness of the media-consumption experience on the iPad. This may sound like fanboy talk, but websites genuinely look and feel better, and like Scott Forstall likes to say, it really did feel like holding the internet in your hands. It was at this point that Andy said "I would so love to have Today's Guardian on the iPad as a native app" and we made a mental note to ourselves that this would be an interesting project to do at some point in the future.

A few short weeks after this, we were done with Gameplan's paid-pricing plans launch and we decided that we could do with a little break from thinking about it, and thus began our efforts to start work on Today's News.

The Technical Details Today's News is powered by the Guardian's excellent Open Platform which gives us full access to their entire content, with the only condition being that we run their ads as part of our app. The iPad app however does not query the Open Platform directly, and instead queries a Rails-powered web-service that I wrote in a few hours, which periodically gets the "day's" news from the Guardian Open Platform and stores it in a relational database.

While Andy was in the UK, I did a rough-and-dirty prototype which basically used a bunch of UIWebViews (in simple terms slightly-underpowered MobileSafari instances) to display each story. It was functional, supported sideways scrolling and the scrubber, but had very little else. This was when Andy's input was crucial as we polished the app into a fairly useable and pretty app in about 2-3 weeks. After he got back, we went into over-polish mode and after a couple of days, we decided that using UIWebView wasn't going to cut it.

The Move To Core Text It was at this point that we discovered Core Text and realised that some of the premier apps on the iPad, such as iBooks (and possibly Flipboard) use Core Text to display attractive text in a fast and efficient way. The move to Core Text was more challenging than we expected, but the results in terms of look and performance are excellent. Today's News turned from the lovable, bumbling Mini Cooper of the sixties to the BMW-powered Mini Cooper of the noughties.

The rest of the pre-launch timeframe was spent fixing niggling crashes which enabled me to learn about memory management in a much more detailed way!

Andy also conjured up a brilliant logo and this is probably one of my favourite parts of the app. John Gruber recently opined that the quality of the icon is a proxy for the quality of the app, and so I hope the quality of the app lives up to the quality of the icon.

Marketing Details and our conversations with The Guardian Once we had a prototype I setup a simple website, wired it up with Campaign Monitor and used the excellent 140proof.com service to run a few Twitter ads targeting keywords such as "Guardian", "iPhone", "iPad", etc. and this got us some attention and some signups. We also also submitted our "MVP" to techstartu.ps and news.yc.

We were always convinced that we wanted to charge for Today's News - seeing how successful the Guardian's official app is and we also think good software needs to be rewarded! It was at this point that the Guardian got in touch with us, and clarified that we would be violating their Terms & Conditions if we charged for Today's News. We had some good-natured back-and-forth resulting in an agreement to keep Today's News free and deploy our Mobclix ads in the app to help cover our costs.

We finally submitted to the App Store last week and Andy put the icing on the cake with a kick-ass microsite as well as a screencast which goes does a pretty good tour of the app.

I personally had an absolute ball working on Today's News and I think both Andy and I are quite proud of our version 1. We already have a version 1.1 in the works that makes the released version look a bit clunky which will hopefully be on the App Store pretty soon!

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Seedcamp Singapore 2010 Retrospective and Distilling Reality

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 07:41:48 -0700

So Andy and I were accepted into a mini-Seedcamp in Singapore last week. We were apprehensive that it might turn out to be an echo chamber of familiar faces and generic advice, but Seedcamp turned out to be an excellent exercise in questioning our assumptions and challenging the direction of our product as well as our business model.

The Pitch The day began with all companies pitching their ideas to a roomful of fellow Seedcampers as well as mentors. Andy gave a very good pitch and many of the mentors later commented that the Gameplan pitch was quite memorable and that they were intrigued by the idea and wanted to speak to us about the product as well as our business model.

You can watch the entire presentation here.

The Mentorship Sessions The pitching session was then followed by mentorship sessions which can be best described as 'speed-dating-meets-advisors'. We were paired with BitDin and shared 15-20 minutes of time with multiple sets of mentors over the course of the day. Reshma and Philipp explained that this is to maximize the number of ideas that you can absorb, the number of introductions or connections that you can get, and most of all - exercise your brain and think outside the box. Here are a few highlights:

Daniel Heaf (BBC Worldwide) and Yeo Yaw Shin (Infocomm Investments Pte Ltd) Our first session set the tone for the rest of the day. Both Dan and Yaw asked pointed questions about Gameplan - what it does, what our target market is, how do we plan to market it, etc. and it gave us the chance to clarify our pitch and our message and ensure that we made sense while speaking to veterans of the Internet industry.

There was discussion about engaging schools as users of Gameplan but Dan pointed out that schools are tough to involve as early adopters (he was speaking from experience). Dan also sowed the first seeds of the Gameplan pivot, when he said that for a consumer Internet company, it is easier to go with a bottom-up approach rather than our top-down approach.

In other words, if we are targeting leagues, then the initial set of users that we need to get on board are not the league managers but the players. Given our struggles with marketing and early adoption we also asked Dan about how we figure out when to 'pivot'. Moral of the story: give it a bash, get critical mass, but if you don't have measurable traction - think of changing course.

We also got to demo Today's News and if we weren't mistaken, there was some definite excitement over what we're about to launch.

Adrian Blunt and Chieh Suang (Nusantara Ventures) Our next session was with Adrian Blunt and Chieh Suang from Nusantara Ventures - an early stage venture capital firm focusing on investments in Indonesia. Adrian also used to be the program manager for FIFA Online, and as enthusiastic FIFA players, it was a mini-thrill for both of us to meet him.

They both recommended various avenues to persue for exposure - from advertising on sports/news sites or blogs, to running our own leagues to spread awareness (we came pretty close to the second suggestion with our sponsorship of The Startup Cup).

Philippe Cazaubon (Data Robotics, Inc. - makers of the incredible Drobo) My favourite takeaway from this session was how Philippe, as soon as he sat down, asked us this question: "How do you make money and who do you make money for?" I personally think it's a brilliant question and one every startup should attempt to answer before it sets out to do business. This led to another engaging session about getting traction, speaking to various kinds of people who would generate leads for us as well as more introductions in the bag.

Remember: "How do you make money and who do you make money for?"

Christian Geissendoerfer (Yoose.com) and Edvarcl Heng (Mediacom and SocialHero.me) This was by far the most eye-opening session for us. We've never really spoken to a 'pure' marketing person regarding Gameplan prior to this, so Edvarcl really had us thinking when his first words were: "Make it free". He went on to provide us with a fairly convincing alternative course, focussing on the players and then our business model primarily becomes lead-generation for major sports brands such as Adidas, Nike, Puma et al. He cited examples of DailyMile, Endomondo and Runkeeper of how they kept their primary app free but became a vast resource for huge sports brands to tap into.

In the six months we've started, we'd become somewhat wedded to the idea of a pay business focused on revenues and profits - so to listen to this perspective was fascinating (as well as a little scary).

Christian also offered to introduce us to a German sports league he knows of - the number of introductions and leads we got from Seedcamp is outstanding.

Aarti Gumaledar (Yahoo) and Philipp Moehring (Seedcamp) Aarti and Philipp took up where we left off and further strengthened the case for a product that is free at the point of use. Aarti also brought up the angle (very Yahoo-esque I might add) of how Gameplan could become an excellent source of hyper-local sports data if we made it free and focused on a bottoms-up approach. Philipp further shook us up when he asked us "Who our target market is?" and dismissed our generic answer and poked us to come up with a much sleeker, cleaner message.

At the end of the day, though very tired, Andy and I felt very good about our decision to apply for Seedcamp. Even though some of the mentors had very little knowledge of how sport works (or sometimes even of how consumer Internet companies work!). Not to forget, our hearty congratulations to the winners and we hope you guys have a great time at Seedcamp London.

It was incredibly valuable to remain sponges for the entire day, ask questions, be questioned and most of all have a lot of fun. But as a friend of ours Dinesh mentioned later in the week, it's important not to get carried away by new ideas and thinking different. What's important for success is for us to distill our own reality from the advice and not accept or implement ideas wholesale.

We've spent a fair amount of time discussing the future path of Gameplan between us (and with anyone who'll listen!) whilst also polishing Today's News and starting a few little freelance jobs. In the next couple of weeks we'll get back into Gameplan proper with what will probably be a new direction, but we're letting the Seedcamp-sparked ideas seep through our subconscious until then.

For those on the fence about applying to Seedcamp, we wholeheartedly recommend it!

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SingTel Accelerate 2010 – Day Two

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 10:51:31 -0700

I perceived about a 50% drop off in attendance for the second day. It's often a problem with conferences, I really think a focussed single day is often a better event. People have real work to do or other commitments so turning up to two full days can be a bit of an ask and I think the extended 'adverts' at the beginning of the first day weakened some resolve for the second.

This is my write up of day two's presentations at the SingTel Accelerate 2010 conference. There is also an overview and the first day's content.

Mitchell Baker

blog.lizardwrangler.com @mitchellbaker

Chair of Mozilla Foundation This was perhaps a little dry, but then in that unforgiving hanger it was very hard to build any rapport with the audience, I get the sense she even prefers presenting in a more collaborative environment! Mitchell talked through how Mozilla had used it's open and chaotic nature to compete and improve the open web.

Things feel like they're speeding up even compared to a year ago. How do we build value in this setting? Mozilla use openness, participatory, decentralization, flexibility, and tries to make it easy to try things out and to develop structures that promote these attributes.

Internet, blogosphere is all distributed, using these models. Mozilla is focussed right on the extreme of these models, due to it's civic, nonprofit status. Open source for the public benefit, over 400m users. Mozilla invests in the web as a platform for technology innovation. They don't see the improvements to IE as a problem, the improvements to to web, in general, are the goal. The competition in the browser market is a great thing for improving what we can do with the web.

Mozilla need to be open to compete, as their competition is much bigger. The ground underneath them is changing and they can't keep track, so need to be open. In 2004 they were 15 people and are now 300 but still over 50% of patches are from volunteers.

Make it easy to try. It's important to realise that secrets feel safe, but are not cost free, sometimes outside eyes can help. Policy is also important, how much negotiation do you have to do before you can do something?

Open innovation, not one size fits all. Certainly requires commitment as the hardships is that it's tough to fail in public. However it gives great flexibility and you can benefit from others innovation.

An open world is part order and part chaos, the key is to balance the two.

Rob Goldberg

VP of Business Operations at Zynga People are spending huge amounts of time on social networks. Combined with the app economy & virtual goods there is a gaming industry revolution going on. Social gaming is a $15b industry. Online games grew 7% in the last few years but Facebook/social gaming grew 300%.

Taps into human needs. Social communication through shared experiences, the network is the substrate beneath the game.

A social game is a fun and easy to play, three minute, guilty pleasure. Not WoW, MW2 or other online gaming. The basic gameplay is free, to get broad adoption. Between half and three percent of users buy virtual goods, to enhance the gameplay.

The key is that they are universally themed and played with real friends. Generates authentic social interactions creating real social communications. Everybody wins.

Why does it matter?

Consumer

321m installs, people you know are playing!
Real communications are happening, families playing together to make connections. The game provides a mechanism to grease the wheels of communication and add a little fun.
Provides self expression. Could it be the new email, chat room or IM?

Mobile Operator

Social Gaming is the leading application use on mobile.
Consumers find apps through carriers and they prefer to pay through the carrier for convenience and security.
Drive data plan adoption, smart phone adoption and there is a revenue share.

Consumer website or business

Time spent is huge, can be an hour a day.
Games drive engagement, don't think about producing a game for my brand. How does the game crossover with your brand? Would you make a movie or newspaper for your brand? Games are the same.
Ads, branded virtual goods, in game integration.

Hong Qu

@hqu

Designer at YouTube YouTube would try and work out who their users were and created personas to guide their engineering. They stayed close to the customers, listen to support emails. Everyone got a weekly email of site stats (the second appearance for this at the conference). Also a sense of ownership amongst the staff, no QA - everyone tested, everyone fixed.

Think like a game designer. Formulate strategy at a systemic level, work out how users interact, work out their motivations and patterns of behavior. Throw engineers at the stuff users are actually using! Don't get bogged down in develping non-performing features. Simplify. Release minor fixes every week, major features every month and full redesign once a year.

Why do user research? The later you collect it the cost of change is higher. Tough to change paths once a direction is set. Like google with google video.

You have to be careful with A/B testing, it can turn into an arms race between competing goals. Know what you're trying to achieve. Causality is better, work out why people are doing things. Multivariate testing is even better.

Localization was important for the continued growth once YouTube was bought by Google. Marketing message for local markets was prospect of global success not just local.

Michael Galpert

michaelgalpert.com @msg

Founder of Aviary Michael's speech had a lot of 'cool shit' in his presentation, but there seemed very little to link it all together other than it was 'cool shit'. And once again the massive room did it's damage.

He made some interesting points about incentivizing innovation, like the X Prize or the Netflix prize. He also discussed allowing people freedom to try things, citing Google's infamous 20% time that produced GMail.

Richard Kelly

on ideo.com

Associate Partner at Ideo Shanghai Once again a talk full of interesting stuff that didn't seem to fully hang together for me, but I think that was more to do with the videos (that didn't quite gel) than the content, which did have more of a message.

He posited that design is everywhere: having design as just cool or pretty is missing the point. Designers solve problems in different ways. He contrasted the difference between choosing (analytical thinking) and creating (design thinking).

Designers diverge to create choices, and IDEO allows and encourages that. You have to focus on people. You can't start with business models or technology. You have to understand your customers unique point of view.

A useful technique at IDEO is prototyping. Build to think. Don't come to a meeting without one. Make things really simple, what can we build to answer the questions we have? Prototypes enable a better conversation.

The second message of the talk was that IDEO is clearly a super-awesome place to work. :-)

Noah Kagan

okdork.com @noahkagan

Founder of AppSumo Probably the most entertaining talk of the day and although he'd struggled (MC'ing) in the big room like all the speakers, in a more intimate setting he was able to work his charm on the crowd.

Deliberately provocative in content there were many little vignettes of 'stuff' that encouraged the crowd to do something a bit unusual.

The structure was loosely his career journey from (literally) sleeping on the job at Intel, through getting fired at Facebook, marketing success at mint.com and then his current project AppSumo.

Consider alternative ways of pricing. Freemium, deep discount, virtual goods, service pricing.

Outsourcing is the norm, Noah uses a virtual freelancer in Bulgaria and he earns more than his parents. It works, but it's not so much about the money, it's about the value of your own time. Reconsider how you spend both.

But then look at how you spend time in your business. On AppSumo support is actually a high ROI activity, because he learns what his customers are looking for.

Marketing has changed. People can complain in public which is both cool and shit at the same time. Social recommendation is better than a link.

Lean startups are just common sense. You don't have to spend the two years to get to validation! 9 months before the launch of mint.com and they knew it was going to be a success when they launched due to the marketing activities they were doing before the site launched.

Chaos is your friend. Try lots of stuff. Explore new things.

Do four things tomorrow...

1. Call your customer. 2. Cancel a meeting. 5-10 minutes every morning seems to be effective 3. Find a thing taking too long and improve it. 4. Go for a walk, focus on the best use of your time.

And try to get fired! It's extremely humbling.

Two great things to try and live your life by: Jeff Bezos' Regret Minimization Framework (4 mins) and Steve Jobs' Harvard commencement speech (15 mins). NB: Only twenty minutes of video and I would really recommend them if you haven't seen them

Panel - Investments in South East Asia

Joi Ito @joi,
Andy Zain @andyzain,
Prof Wong Poh Kam @pohkam,
Edgar Hardless.
Moderator: Darius Cheung @rius

NB: I have paraphrased people's comments here, get in touch if you'd like me to correct anything that you feel is a misrepresentation. Probably the most interesting panel, given the excellent moderation by Darius, of McAfee (nee Tencube). He wasn't afraid to ask searching questions of the panelists and put them on the spot. Plus Joi is always very quotable!

Straight out of the gate Darius quizzed Joi about comments in his BBC World Service interview that seemed to indicate that his passions lay in Dubai (where he lives) and Tokyo (where many of his business interests are) and that Singapore was a handy stop off on his preferred airline!

He responded that he'd 'tried' Singapore 12-13 years ago, but at that time it was hard to make progress. He admitted that investments in Singapore were not something he looked for and they did make him a nice offer but the government make it very easy for the private sector to get involved if its something they see as needed for the country.

Why Singapore? Singapore could be anywhere, but isn't. You do not need to be in Silicon Valley, you can create a hub for this sort of innovation with a friendly government and a decent Internet connection. However it needs critical mass, which is why he's making a lot of noise, need to get to a tipping point. Didn't notice from outside how nice it is!

He also made it clear that on his investments in Singapore, he can take a lot more risk because of the government help. The 'swings of the bat' are even cheaper for him. Outside Singapore he'd have to know the entrepreneur, be the first investor and for them to have a product and already have scalable distribution plan. In his more typical investments you can't pitch ideas, with just slides, without a working product, but in Singapore he's more willing and able to try early.

As an investor you have to add enough value that they would want to hire you.

The top level of government in SG is very agile compared to governments elsewhere but the average SG student wants to simply know the answer to the test. Entrepreneurs have to question authority.

Difficult to give general advice to entrepreneurs. What attracted Joi back was a group of civil service people that were allowed to be unique inside the bureaucracy.

Are there any common qualities in entreprenuers in which he's invested? Not really, they are all very different characters. You have to spend a lot of time with these guys and like them more. Good intuition. Some VCs invest in assholes, some VCs are assholes, but I have a no asshole rule. Humble but confident. Give advice but they have the final choice. Co investors are more often the people who screwed him!

There seems to be a high quality of entrepreneurs in Singapore, but Joi can't tell if Neoteny Labs have met them all yet! Investors in Asia often are less savvy than the entrepreneurs which is tricky as they have to provide more advice when the money is smaller.

Ed Hardless (also interviewed by e27) was also on the panel and gave a much better account of the Innov8 fund than had been provided in the midst of the first day's messages from the sponsor.

Innovation is important to Asian companies, more recognition. Next five years an exciting time. Singtel think they can help with going to market.

What would make them invest? A focus on mobile: the next 1 billion users will be accessing the Internet on mobile.

Singtel know the pain points in the telecoms industry in SE Asia - sourced information from their group companies. Taking that information and identifying companies who can identify and help those pain points. If they invest in a company the company can be sure that someone in the Singtel group will be a market for them!

They are not looking for control from day one. Influencing companies for preferred terms is not really in the interests of the fund.

There were also some good 'Why Indonesia?' points made by Andy Zain.

The four large Asian markets are somewhat closed for governmental or other regions. Indonesia has a latin alphabet and a large enough single country market to be a good big stepping stone to other larger markets like the Philippines. It does have unique infrastructure problems but that provides opportunities. For example the telcos can be tricky to deal with and take a big cut. Mig33 managed to get around this by having their own merchant system.

Well if you've made it through all this you've done well, there's also my overview and my take on day one. Don't forget to checkout our products, Gameplan and Today's News.

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SingTel Accelerate 2010 – Day One

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 10:50:31 -0700

I'm only going to cover a few takeaways for the speeches I saw and with four tracks I was only able see a small part of what was going on. I'm not a massive fan of these huge multi-track conferences, for me it's better to have much more focussed events that are less spread out and allow plenty of time for meeting people.

This is my write up of day one's presentations at the SingTel Accelerate 2010 conference. There is also an overview and the second day's content.

Joi Ito

joi.ito.com @joi

General Partner of Neoteny Labs I've seen the presentation before, but its always good to see an excellent speaker at work. Given his warmup act it was a triumph and at last we were into the content proper.

Rob Mee

CEO of Pivotal Labs Now I know the Singapore Pivotal guys and am pretty on board with how they do things programming-wise so Rob's talk on 'turning software development on its head' already had me in the metaphorical choir.

His use of various biological, chemical and physical processes as metaphor for the way Pivotal work may not have been entirely scientifically accurate but was an interesting way of presenting their philosophy and process.

However when it comes down to it, the strongest argument for pairing, testing etc is the experience of trying it and seeing how well it works. Until you do that you'll be doomed to suffer the mythology of the wizard / cowboy / lone wolf programmer.

He also put up a 'No innovation required' slide, which had him chased from the venue by SingTel representatives. (Not actually true).

The questions threw up some interesting details about the Pivotal process: they do 8 weeks in person before attempting any virtual pairing and the pivotal office is a fully open space, raucous but focussed!

Bill Scott

Sales & Business Development at Getjar Boasting of one billion non-apple app downloads, and a interesting look at the apps-on-mobile space this was a level-headed assessment of the state of the mobile arena for developers.

He clarified that we're now in an age of touch not type. Apple changed the game. The Internet browser is analogous to the early DOS days. Touch devices are replacing the 'typing' style with touching icons like the point and click days. All this means that apps are big business... likely over 30 billion in 5 years, that's an industry of 200,000 people.

Selling apps is not the best model. Selling 99c apps is not a billion dollar business. Freemium services are a good choice as are supplemental purchases.

He also gave a quick personal overview of the various platforms:

Android: Per user minimization is climbing. Carriers are driving android into lower end phones, which should increase the market hugely. iPhone: Good today, but will not scale like Android as Apple are not interested in the mass market. Windows: Not sure they can make the closed store work but has good game strength due to Xbox experience. Blackberry: Have to do something dramatic to get out of their niche. Symbian: Declining. Meego could work, but wont happen without a US presence in the handset market. WebOS: Best technology and a limited interest in a closed app strategy. Not sure what HP have planned for mobile. Java: Not gonna happen. Oracle might try, but they seem uninterested.

He also suggested an excellent multi-platform development pattern: don't forget the web. Start with one platform, then create a web version before building out native formats. Obviously a little plug for GetJar, but it's a good suggestion!

Amit Ranjan

amitranjan.com @amitranjan

Co-founder & COO at Slideshare Slideshare is 3 founders, 30 staff and Indian flavored! Most of their development is with Amit in India, their head office is in the US. He shared some findings from his years at Slideshare.

The organization matters more than idea, market, competition. Products is the art of visualizing the invisible. It's about the people and the attitude. He made the anaology with Darwin's Theory of Evolution: the organism that is the most able to change is the most successful.

Speed now, scale later. Make the product and let scalability be a new problem if you get lucky. Use your small size to retain agility. First width, then depth. Make your user base as wide and quickly as possible. Mould your virality into the product.

Data and metrics are the lifeblood of the organization. These are hard but not sexy: track your funnels, where you customers come from. Trends are important, more so than absolute numbers. A key takeaway is to abandon 'sexy dashboards' send email reports, it works wonders.

East vs west.

It's key to understand the differences in culture and use them, he illustrated with these illustrations from Yang Liu.

Outsource your non-core competency. A lot of technical complexity is outsourced at Slideshare. When you take aim, think bullseye and nothing else - no distractions. That is what allows you to compete with the big boys. Focus on your users and not your competition. It forces you to think and you avoid playing catchup.

James Chan

motochan.com @motochan

Invetment Manager at Neoteny Labs Good talk, slides available on his blog. As I commented on his post, James leapt straight into the 'meat' of the presentation and pulled out a few 'gotchas' to be aware of but an even simpler explanation would have helped ground the presentation for those who did not understand the lingo!

Neoteny's profile is small teams, at an early stage. Money raising can be tough, and it's difficult to balance product and company and VC. You are often raising money when you need it most, but have the least experience.

When pitching it helps to think big. 'Engineer honesty' isn't useful, the dream is! This is an investor's philosophy, you're not overselling. The trust between investor and entrepreneur is paramount - it's about economics and control.

A term sheet is not a binding agreement, so wordsmiths are not welcome but the essence is important. Price per share is the most important thing. Worrying about pre- or post- valuations is not the point.

Good lawyers are hard to find. If you find one keep them close! Manage them well or they can manage you.

The most important thing about taking investment is that it is not about selling half the pie, its about using the investor's money to massively increase the size of the pie for all investors.

There's also my overview and my take on day two. Don't forget to checkout our products, Gameplan and Today's News.

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SingTel Accelerate 2010 – Overview

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 10:49:25 -0700

This is the first of three articles about the recent Accelerate 2010 conference. We got some last minute tickets from James Chan [@motochan] of Neoteny Labs, one of the sponsors (who incidentally have a new website courtesy of my own fair hand).

My first contact was an SMS thanking me for going to i.lluminate, SingTel's more typical 'business' conference from the previous day. I was a little worried that this might be a sign of haplessness to come. In fact infrastructure was not something that faltered at all and the numbers of employed personnel/cameramen left it clear that this was not an exercise in frugality.

First impressions? Holy crap. A massive room, that felt empty despite a couple of thousand people, you had to feel for Noah Kagan [@noahkagan] who was MC'ing, an early morning Singapore crowd isn't participatory at the best of times, but given how sparsely populated the aircraft hanger was they'd have had to have laced the coffee with hallucinogenics.

Then a slightly incongruous drumming band, who were pretty good but the accompanying video animation seemed to fire app missiles from all over Asia into Singapore causing an explosion! I think it was a good explosion though. :-)

The Ads

I'm not going to dwell on the hour and a half that followed and seemed to stretch into infinity. The SingTel CEO had the unfortunate moment where he told the crowd that "Einstein tried a thousand times before he invented the lightbulb", which he'd have had to have emerged from the womb holding in 1879 when it was invented and he was born.

We were then told often by several members of SingTel senior management how innovation and creativity were important and that SingTel had them in spades before doing a interminable demo of their new (terrible) TV product that was so awful that it probably deserves it's own article.

The classic 'scared of being a dumb pipe' message of every telco in the world rang out through all of SingTel's speeches. Thankfully it appears they are willing to buy their way out of their 'predicament'! The SingTel Innov8 investment fund was launched last week and we were told that as entrepreneurs it was "another area which you can deal with SingTel, simply".

Again I'm pleased that there is this money available for startups in the South East Asian market, but I can't help but feel that it's more a case that SingTel can use it's huge reach to scale later in a startup's lifecycle rather than help foster the initial push to product.

I'll leave my gripes with SingTel as an article for another time, but it's safe to say SingTel's spoken view of itself and the actual experience of dealing with them in the real world are entirely different.

We also heard from Ronnie Tay, the CEO of iDA. Clearly a very bright chap although suffering from a bad case of buzzword-itis. As I put it on twitter... "Drinking game for #accel2010. Everytime a speaker says innovation, cloud or creativity drink a shot. Hammered in 5 minutes."

There was some good news in the government's understanding that fast network access acts as an enabler to innovative businesses. (Wireless@SG for it's faults is better than everywhere else) And that they want the engineering workforce to have relevant skills. Once again I just wish my experience on the ground trying to get involved with the universities was more fruitful.

There's also my take on day one's presentations and also day two. Don't forget to checkout our products, Gameplan and Today's News.

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Week 26 - Accelerated?

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 14:15:03 -0700

So last week was taken up with polish on our iPad app, including a transition from WebViews to CoreText. And for those of you who are familiar with iOS programming this involved a huge boost in speed. We also met up with the talented souls at COMA, who agreed to give us a little feedback on the app during a 'lets meet and see if we can work together in the future' chat.

The middle of the week was taken up with Accelerate 2010, I've got some extensive notes that should be up later in the week.

Prior to the conference I was up late putting the finishing touches to the Neoteny Labs website, which has launched and they seem pretty happy with. They wanted crisp, clear and to focus primarily on the companies in which they've invested rather than themselves, which is bizarrely the opposite way that most other funds do it!

In terms of Gameplan, our frankly appalling Google Analytics tell us the story that we know... Gameplan is not a product for the early adopter tech crowd. And that the direct emailing is not working. We need to do a better job of marketing, so with that in mind I have been collecting phone numbers to ring actual people (gasp) and go and meet them and explain the benefits in person and get their feedback.

Given that it seems at this stage that we're not going to be an overnight success I'm also having discussions about doing some fixed-term contract Rails work and other projects (perhaps iOS-based) in order to increase our 'runway' as a products firm. It looks like we're likely to be a half products and half consulting firm for a little while.

So a week of realisation and preparation. It is amazing/terrifying how the weeks can fill up with non-programming activities.

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Week 25 - Field of Dreams

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:28:24 -0700

I've returned from the UK (and wedding season) to Singapore. Gameplan now sits at the precipice of success, we know the product is good, we know it is better than the alternatives, we know what we'd like to do with it in the future. But now we must perform that most arcane of arts (to the developer): marketing.

Our particular struggle is with our marketplace, in the whole it doesn't know that it needs our product. We're not competing against a bloated incumbent, we're competing against wasted hours on spreadsheets. We're not selling to early adopting techies who scour Hacker News for the latest iPhone hotness. We're selling to normal people in love with their sport enough to try the Herculean task of organising sport.

In short to paraphrase Kevin Costner in 'Field of Dreams', if we build it they might not come. So we're experimenting with reaching out to them. I've been cold-emailing various sports leagues, who's details I've been collecting over the last couple of weeks. I've broadly used a template from Peldi's post on marketing. I'm trying to send out over 15 emails every day alongside the 'regular' work I'm doing.

We're also going to hook up with our local startup colleagues myADengine to help us try out some online ads and see if we can drive some traffic that way. We're keen to hear any other ideas or advice anyone might have. Although ideally on a budget, TV ads are a bit beyond our cost!

Our side-project Today's News is close to releasable, we just need to iron out some details with the lovely people at guardian.co.uk and polish the edges. It's looking like our original plans for the app have slightly changed but more on that when we launch. We also know exactly what improvements we're going to make for the next version.

In other news we caught up with Jon from buUuk and traded tales of the Singapore startup scene and got (and hopefully gave) some good advice as well as a good old fashioned gossip.

Next week we're heading to Accelerate 2010, which seems frankly huge and unwieldy as a conference compared to the entrancingly bijou Schnitzelconf. If you're going come find us, we're not exhibiting, but we'll be happily dishing out business cards and opinions and we'll happily demo for anyone! :-)

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Schnitzelconf: Presentations

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:44:40 -0700

This one is a bit of an epic, but then so was the amount of useful content from the day. I think I've covered pretty much all of the individual talks, I can make no guarantees as to completeness and obviously will link up any slides if they become available. If you're one of the speakers and you think I've got something wrong or misrepresented you, drop me an email and I'll sort it.

As a sidenote this should be proof that you can indeed type longform articles into an iPad. In cafes and airports.

Paul Campbell

pabcas.com @paulca

Founder of Ketchup, organizer of Funconf "We live in the best of all possible worlds, a world in which the nice guys are winning" Paul opened with an atypical but rousing presidential-style oratory. Rather than try and give a perspective on his product, in its nascent stages, he instead chose to illustrate the hopes, dreams and fears of the new entrprener. I thought the approach was unique and a great start to the day, his optimism at the future was infective.

Update: He's posted a full transcript.

Garrett Dimon

garrentdimon.com @garrettdimon

Founder of Sifter "Bugs are less of a problem, it's a lack of a specific 'required' feature that make support emails mean" Garrett is the solo founder of his startup (with a silent 'money' partner) but as he put it, he was the only one in the trenches when the servers went down. Sifter launched as a side project from his consulting work which ran in parallel for eighteen months until Garrett finally went full time, but he did squeeze in a house move, wedding and honeymoon into that time. Proof that life doesn't have to come second even to your own business!

The (effectively) solo founding has clearly put Garrett through the mill, and his talk had a survivalist edge; emphasizing the support of his family and the need as a solo founder to remain flexible and relaxed in the face of seemingly permanent chaos! As much as you can.

Some interesting points raised:

Listen to your family, they can normally tell better than you when you need a break
Try and learn the difference between urgent and important tasks, there is a difference
Get mobile i.e. Get a laptop and if you can automate tasks so you can do them with a phone
Set customer expectations, Garrett now explains on his support page that it's just him, and customers seem happy to give him greater slack
Support is customer feedback, use it
And most importantly... don't worry, there will be bad days (but not every day) and conversely don't forget to celebrate the good ones!

Goeffrey Grosenbach

blog.peepcode.com @topfunky

Founder (Senior Visionary) of Peep Code "People pay for that?" I'd like to reiterate what was said in Geoff's introduction, it was extremely strange to see Geoff's voice coming out of a human as opposed to a screen, such a huge part of my learning of the last few years has been based on his screencasts.

He opened by explaining that as Peepcode had been asked to sponsor several conferences but this was the first time he'd been asked to speak: leading to his assumption that organizers must have thought he was "rich but dumb". He prefixed his advice by pointing out that business gurus of all sorts proffering advice do not give you all the answers and that his advice was more the sum of many thousands of small decisions. He boiled his approach down to a few small things...

Craftsmanship and Trust

Trust is the asset you bring to your customers, it's what makes economies work. At Peepcode the dedication to quality is what he believes keeps customers coming back.

Find value where others don't see it

Geoff often hears "people pay money for that" when he explains what he does, turns out they do. Often his screencasts may not initially sell very well, like his Intro to git release, but then six months later github launches and it's his best seller ever. He's also recently released an add-on for the Mac text editor Textmate, turns out there's a market for small, very focussed software.

Experimenting with pricing

Geoff offers single unit pricing and packs of 5 & 10 credits at a discount, but over half of his monthly revenue comes from his all-you-can-eat annual subscription. The message here is to find different ways to sell your products.

Solo founder issues

He's still not sure of the answer to the question to "How many employees do you have?" There doesn't seem to be an answer that means 'success' so best not to worry! Being a solo founder does lead to issues, switching between creative and business thinking can be tricky. Best to try to subcontract whatever you can, your time is super valuable.

Creative marketing

Best month ever was a result of a simple email pointing out what was new. He drives traffic through his 'editorially designed' blog, which no other developers have. Sponsoring conferences hasn't been a thing, but giving away product can also work as that costs nothing.

Exercise is important

Often leaving the computer and doing something physical can help the subconscious sift through problems.

Adii Pienaar

adiirockstar.com @adii

Founder of WooThemes "Life happens while people are fixing bugs" Adii came across as more humble (but still very driven) in the flesh than his online 'rockstar' persona might have suggested. Top bloke. He focussed on what he believes makes WooThemes unique: its front to back focus on design.

A lot of his presentation dealt specifically with the balanced 'wide view' you need when operating a design-focussed business. The issues of ego, taste, community critique and the challenge of producing content that is both broad and niche enough to sell to their audience. The difficulty of customizability versus a supportable product.

Another clear message was Adii's attention to detail, WooThemes aim for 'out of the box' awesomeness so their themes work without the user needing to hack at them.

He also touched on the culture of WooThemes, they have several founders and so share the shit work around and are very open with the whole company about what products are working and which ones are not. It's also import to realize you're creating a culture with how you behave, because at some point you have to step away from every decision.

Tom Preston-Warner2>

tom.preston-werner.com @mojombo

Founder of Github and Gravatar (sold to wordpress) "Hire the best people and treat them like kings" "Execution is where ideas die or flourish" Tom opened by declaring that time is our most precious resource, its the one thing we cannot get back.

If you're working at another company you're working on someone else's dream. Don't be fooled by equity as even an early employee, unless you can spot a Google or Facebook (and you can't) the eventual payout will be too small to matter. When you work for yourself you can do 'cool shit' like buy your customers beer or stupid entertaining projects and pick the people you want to work with.

But how? Before you needed money and connections, but now all you need is a MacBook.

The biggest factor in your success is to charge money. To get 100k peer year you only need to make 8,333 per month which is 700 users paying you 12 dollars, suddenly doesn't seem like much right?

Github has approximately 370k users and over a million repos. They got there by having a product that is viral and by building a community. Let your users share their stuff with their friends and let them become your sales team, then let them get involved with each other without your involvement. It's about helping your users kick ass .

Think about how your users can give you cash, for example think about a companies product, they will pay you forever. Think about add ons, like the github jobs board, that let you leverage your community (250 jobs x $300 is a lot of money for a three week project!)

Cofounders are the most important thing as they prevent dumb decisions and help you look at stuff with different eyes. Join user groups, then drink beer: camaraderie makes life better. Your team are your product, hire the best and treat them like kings, at github the developers get the same salary as the founders.

Github's approach to getting bigger is to continue to go through the process of innovating, executing and iterating.

Innovate

The very beginning of a feature, identify the interesting side trail

Execute

Where ideas go to flourish or die. Good execution results in an iPhone level of polish: you have to care. You're trying to get to a state where the the comments are "of course it looks like that"

Iterate

Keep doing it. You always get a second chance at a feature Make things real, Github have a ship it squirrel they use in their company campfire room.

If you do all these things you'll never 'work' again.

Tobi Lütke

blog.leetsoft.com @tobi

Founder of Shopify "Fuck the better mousetrap" "Your paycheck is society's scorecard" Tobi's Shopify is probably the biggest company of any of the speakers and has probably been going the longest as well. His talk focussed on the finances and metrics you need to track to understand the state of your business.

Firstly, charge real money (spotting a theme yet?) as freemium is bullshit. Turns out the ideas in Chris Anderson's Long Tail are pretty much nonsense, even Amazon have semi-debunked his theories. It doesn't work out, certainly in Tobi's experience.

Then raise your money until people complain, a good technique is simply to put an expiry date on your prices. You want to get to the level of 'expensive, but worth it'. A good example of that level of pricing is wine, a high-end wine merchant will know a lot more about pricing than any number of startup founders!

You also have to help your customers to think what you want them to think! A classic Steve Jobs move, create your own reality distortion field, create social proof. Simply by adding most popular to one of Shopify's plans on its pricing page made it into the most popular!

Build and know your funnel: Visitors -> Leads -> Prospects -> Customers. Optimize it at every stage. You need a sales team, even if it's just your website and adwords. Track the stats to improve your funnel.

He also covered the various simple metrics you should be measuring... I didn't scribble down the details, but the obvious source for the same formulae is Dave McClure's Startup Metrics for Pirates.

Peldi Guilizzoni

peldi.com @peldi @balsamiq

Founder of Balsamiq Mockups "It's my second child... but a monster that needs six people to look after it." "It's hard to make friends with Google Analytics" He talked through his experience of Balsamiq's success which still seems to slightly baffle him given the velocity his business has taken in the last two years. The presentation took the form of a flow chart and can be found at bit.ly/cotoletta I can't really add much that his slides don't say but I'll illuminate a couple of points.

He recommends actually taking the time to get good at something, do your 10,000 hours to become an expert and when you start hearing stuff like 'when you become rich and famous don't forget me', its a good sign! Also have a business plan, even if it turns out to be nonsense (his did) it'll help convince you to make the jump.

As you're going through the process try and remember why you're doing it, family are important and so is trying to do what you love. For Peldi life is a little sadder without coding, so he's trying to get to place where he can do tasks that take more than 10 minutes.

He also directed to his own startup marketing advice.

Michael Buffington

collusioni.st @go

Founder of Grasshopper Labs (behind Grasshopper, Chargify & Spreadable)

"You don't need to be a WalMart in the world" Michael's keynote at the end of the day was amusing and his crazy animated keynote slides are something to behold.

His argument was that as a world we need purpose-driven entrepreneurial behavior because the giant corporate behemoths aren't going to change things for the better. He also included a small rant about how the education system fails to create or reward entrepreneurial traits or even encourage the very thing society values, art, culture, writing etc.

Stay small. It can be a good life to be small.

Ignore VC - funding sucks - all that happens is you waste time pitching the lie, wasting time and losing control when you should be making something amazing.

Keep your job, it's not a safety net its a trampoline.

You need to ask yourself the questions: What are you doing this for? If it's for money you're probably going to be disappointed. What will keep you going? What would you do with infinite money? How long could you be idle? When would your toys and riches lose their appeal?

Find that thing and do it.

Both inspirational and challenging, a great finish. Time to get back to work on Gameplan and Today's News.

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Schnitzelconf: An Overview

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:39:32 -0700

I would normally throw something like this up on my personal blog, but the Schnitzelconf ethos is very much how Arun and I think about Gameplan.

I'm going to say it now, rather than save it for the end: Schnitzelconf was the best conference I have ever been to, bar none. The speakers were all terrific, the narrow focus of the conference and panels was a triumph and it all ended with eating chilli in the shadow of dinosaur skeletons (thanks to the amazing venue of the natural history museum).

So firstly congratulations to Amy, Thomas, Harald and Alex. Epic shit. I've got a couple of further articles to come on the individual talks and the panels so this is simply the 'around the conference' post rather than details of the individual sessions.

Firstly it was great that this was in Vienna with a European focus, apart from the embarrassment of my appalling German contrasted with the excellent English of every European I met. Most of the other conferences I'm aware of in the UK and Europe are about more narrow technical subjects (web design, Rails etc) so a more general 'small business with a web focus' conference with a strong build-a-fucking-product-and-charge-for-it message was more enlightening for me.

I'm not aware of any other conferences with such a strong opinionated message, I guess the only spiritual sibling might be lessconf in the US. So many web conferences are driven by a VC/be-the-next-Twitter vibe that to be reminded that outside money is a) not the only way and b) is most likely not even a good idea for most people, was intensely refreshing. This is particularly true when you consider the funding (and subsequent behavior) of startups that haven't even got half a product, let alone any income.

A couple of meta-observations of all the featured businesses:

High quality design and attention to detail were the hallmarks of the successful businesses of the speakers, reconfirming my belief that a beautiful/usable product is a must.

There was also a high focus on the exceptional treatment of customers and high levels of support, another hallmark of all of the speakers businesses.

Also rather obviously, CHARGE MONEY FOR YOUR PRODUCT.

One of the most interesting observations was in conversation with Alex Hillman who noted that for a web conference we hadn't heard the word 'startup' much, rather the word 'business' seemed a better fit.

The high quality (and accessibility) of the speakers, given the low ratio of speakers to attendees, was a tremendous boon. It's always great to be able to meet people you respect and realize that despite their success, they have come from a standing start as well.

So I return to the UK, and then sunny Singapore, reinvigorated and more convinced that the track we're on with Gameplan (and our other projects) is the right one. In fact I think a version of this conference for Singapore itself might be a good thing given the burgeoning web scene, to perhaps suggest another way than the Gahmen grant or Gahmen-backed finance routes.

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Returning & Avoiding Burnout

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:59:09 -0700

It's been a while since we've posted on the naked startup, and for that I apologize. Gameplan has been down to one full-time person, Arun, as I've been attending the weddings of some very good friends in the UK and Italy. I also took the opportunity to take a proper, no-Internet, break with my wife and a group of friends in Tuscany.

In my absence Arun has pushed the payment functionality and redesigned front end/homepage live, thus ending the free preview period. We'd done a great deal of the work before I disappeared but all credit to him for polishing off the rough edges and getting the site live.

I've also been working on the Neoteny Labs site (launching real soon now) and Arun has been working on an iOS side-project which should hopefully launch in the next month or so.

In our own way we've both been taking a break and letting our brains ease off on Gameplan before we begin marketing it in earnest. I obviously took a holiday (one which my wife has been reminding me I needed) and Arun has, although still working, completely changed his focus (I hope in his case a change is as good as a rest).

In addition, as I was in Europe I was able to attend Schnitzelconf, a conference aimed at bootstrapping entrepreneurs. I'll be following this 'apology post' with a few write ups of that inspirational event.

I personally feel immeasurably better, although I didn't even realize I needed the break, now refreshed and ready once again to blast into Gameplan-related activities and that includes keeping this blog up to date, so keep listening - I hope this is still useful.

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Software for Startups - FreeAgent

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:26:44 -0700

This is the first in a series of articles describing the support system of products we swear by at Gameplan. If a product is in this series, we can vouch for its awesomeness. I spent much of last year running a solo web-design firm, with some help and co-operation from another couple of local designers.

One of the things that used to be a massive hassle was cashflow: estimating, invoicing and tracking what money was coming in and out. I started out manually creating and tracking sent invoices and estimates, but this was a massive 'extra headache' - who was I waiting on for approval or payment and what was I spending?

As a side note I even hand created templates thinking that a designer should have 'nice looking invoices', which was a big waste of time - don't do this, put your logo on a simple invoice and send it out. Invoices are for getting paid not proving how talented you are, save your creative effort for the project at hand!

I dabbled with a couple of 'on laptop' systems but was concerned about the single point of failure, plus the various solutions didn't seem to capture the 'what am I spending' part of my financial story.

Enter FreeAgent.

FreeAgent literally saved hours of time and headaches. It deals with the invoicing and estimating process and time recording in a straightforward way. In addition you also get useful graphs and charting of your business incomings and outgoings.

The most useful thing was tracking my outstanding invoices when running multiple concurrent projects, When you import your bank statements the invoices and payments are all automatically synced and marked as paid. This year they even added automatic reminders so the system can remind clients for you. Brilliant.

Being UK-based they interface well with the downloadable formats from the UK banks, but I emailed them a sample of DBS's awful CSV download and they added compatibility. That's what I call service! And they've done it again for another Singapore person. And when you import your CSVs it remembers payees, so the more you use it the better it gets.

While the last few months has mainly seen money leaving the business (a trend we hope to reverse soon!) I've still used FreeAgent to track our spending and do a couple of estimates for consulting work. When we kick in with receiving payment via PayPal, FreeAgent will link up with that too and track our incoming funds - super-awesome.

For me FreeAgent is better than the competitors because it treads the line between too complex and too simple and ends up hitting the sweet spot of doing everything we need and then getting out of the way.

I've since eulogized FreeAgent to a couple of people and everyone I've referred has been extraordinarily happy with it. Plus they seem like a bloody good gang of people solving a problem, hopefully like we are, so supporting them makes me feel good.

Why not give FreeAgent a try? If you use any of the links in this article you'll get 10% off (and so do I) and there's a 30-day trial... so double win right?

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Weeks 19 and 20 - Of Payments, UI Polish and Remote Working

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 06:32:50 -0700

First of all, apologies for the absence of last week's weekly update. We've been neck deep in knocking out bugs and payments and polishing our product and one thing led to another and it was already Friday, so we decided to roll out a combined report this week.

Payments We've made some stellar progress with integrating payments into Gameplan. What we're especially proud of is that we've made paying a very unobtrusive part of the entire Gameplan experience. A user can essentially sign up on Gameplan, create an entire league and decide to pay us once he sees how much time Gameplan has saved him. Paying us is not a pre-requisite for a user to use Gameplan (whatever the size of the league/tournament) and we think that will encourage a lot more people to give it a spin. Integrating with Paypal has been a bitter-sweet experience. Since we aren't doing recurring payments and thanks to the excellent Railscasts, we have a tested (with Cucumber and Shoulda) payments system built into Gameplan, but running tests on Paypal's Sandbox is still a nightmare-ish scenario. If ever there was a service ripe for creative destruction, it is Paypal. But I digress.

User Interface Polish and Tweaks Andy and I have also been hard at work ironing out irritants and glitches in the user interface to make it as seamless as possible. We've been heavily influenced by the Blank Slate Design Pattern - thus making sure that users are not lost when they sign up. Funnily enough, while we were in the process of making these changes we bumped into a friendly Gameplan user at the Web.Sg meetup and he mentioned to us that once he signed up, he wasn't sure what the difference between a league and a cup was - and this really re-affirmed our decision to spend time improving our message and making it as less confusing as possible.

Andy's also making some massive improvements to our homepage, so watch that space!

Remote Working Andy's away in the UK for a month so we're working remotely this month. Luckily most of the hard engineering problems have been solved and so working remote looks like it will work out since most of the tasks that we have to do are related to marketing and responding to bugs and user feedback. While this will be the longest period the Gameplan founders will be split up since the first of April, it will be an interesting experiment to see how we work during this month. We've also launched an internal project codenamed S10K which both of us will be working on - more details on that soon!

Weeks 19 and 20 Combined Stats: 11 issues closed. 5 new features adding up to a current total of 99. 5,134 lines of code and 12,317 lines of test code with a code-to-test ratio of 1:2.4.

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Week 18 - The Startup Cup, Founders Meetup and Payments

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 05:58:21 -0700

So last week we launched Cups and Tournaments, released the second edition of our newsletter and started work on our biggest challenge of 'em all (yet) - payments.

We've received some great feedback on the tournaments feature - some praise and some great feedback on what we can do to improve it - some of which already have been rolled into our product. This reinforces the notion we have which is do not build in vacuum - get the Minimum Viable Product out and iterate rapidly. Some of the best lessons we've learnt so far have come from things pointed out by our users and it does make the both of us focused on fixing the right problems.

Andy's also rolled in some optimizations to the frontend as well as some fixes to rendering issues on the iPad, with more on the way.

The Startup Cup We also latched on to an interesting marketing opportunity - we reached out to the organisers of the inaugural Startup Cup (through Hacker News) being held in San Francisco on the 15th of August this year. They're supporting a charity called 'charity: water' and if you'd like to donate you can too. Some of the hottest startups that we know and love such as Slide, Disqus, Revision3, Xobni, Yammer, WePay, Weebly and many more are taking part. What's great is that the organisers of The Startup Cup are using Gameplan to organise the tournament and we can't be happier to help out. Do watch out for the final results of what promises to be an exciting tournament.

More Hustling We also took the opportunity to speak to a few of the Halls of Residence at the National University of Singapore. While the academic year hasn't begun and the people I met were still busy with orientation - it was great to touch base with my alma mater and let the various sports committees know of our existence and help make their lives easier when it comes to organising sport on-campus.

The Founders Meetup Wednesday was also the inaugural Founders Meetup organised by e27 and it was great to catch up with old friends as well as meet some new ones. I do believe we are at the cusp of something of a mini-revolution in Singapore in terms of startups breaking the stranglehold of banks and other financial institutions as a career option for younger folk, and both Andy and I are proud to be part of a great ecosystem which is definitely on the ascendancy.

Payments Andy and I have battling for the rest of the week with our payment system and we're making steady progress with it. We are aiming to get it sorted out as soon as we can, and begin hardcore testing, before we roll out paid-plans in the very near future.

Can't Wait.

Stats 4 issues closed on GitHub, no new features added (but a lot of 'em are in our staging environment and not merged to master yet). 4,814 lines of code and 11,299 lines of test code with a code-to-test ratio of 1:2.3 (again - plenty of code is waiting to be merged into master).

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Naked Startup

Startup Fridge: An Appeal for Stickers

Hey Singtel. Can you fix Facebook Connect?

What We Are Doing

So um, we have some news

Looking Back, Looking Forward

So What Now?

Our Attempt to become the Pull-To-Refresh of iPad News Apps

Today's News - A young iPad app's journey from an Idea to App Store

Seedcamp Singapore 2010 Retrospective and Distilling Reality

SingTel Accelerate 2010 – Day Two

Mitchell Baker

Rob Goldberg

Hong Qu

Michael Galpert

Richard Kelly

Noah Kagan

Panel - Investments in South East Asia

Joi Ito @joi, Andy Zain @andyzain, Prof Wong Poh Kam @pohkam, Edgar Hardless. Moderator: Darius Cheung @rius

SingTel Accelerate 2010 – Day One

Joi Ito

Rob Mee

Bill Scott

Amit Ranjan

James Chan

SingTel Accelerate 2010 – Overview

The Ads

Week 26 - Accelerated?

Week 25 - Field of Dreams

Schnitzelconf: Presentations

Paul Campbell

Garrett Dimon

Goeffrey Grosenbach

Craftsmanship and Trust

Find value where others don't see it

Experimenting with pricing

Solo founder issues

Creative marketing

Exercise is important

Adii Pienaar

Tom Preston-Warner2>

Innovate

Execute

Iterate

Tobi Lütke

Peldi Guilizzoni

Michael Buffington

Schnitzelconf: An Overview

Returning & Avoiding Burnout

Software for Startups - FreeAgent

Weeks 19 and 20 - Of Payments, UI Polish and Remote Working

Week 18 - The Startup Cup, Founders Meetup and Payments

Joi Ito @joi,
Andy Zain @andyzain,
Prof Wong Poh Kam @pohkam,
Edgar Hardless.
Moderator: Darius Cheung @rius