Knowing when to release a product is difficult. The maxim “release early, release often” certainly applies but that has to be balanced against making sure you have a minimum viable product and features that work well, with a minimum number of bugs. You also need to get feedback as early as possible to either completely change what you are going to do or introduce new feature you would never have thought of on your own.

As my company’s product, Investify, is now in a private beta, these tips gave me a lot to think about in structuring the remainder of the test period.

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

(via Daring Fireball)

Do you have a company with a great foundation, but it just didn’t work? Or do you have an idea that’s collecting dust? Don’t let your great ideas go to waste. We want to hear about them.

It looks like you can register and post your own story, but they’re also adding failed startup stories from across the web.

My Mac would sync with MobileMe and vice versa, but MobileMe would not push to my iPhone and no could new data was sent from my iPhone back to MobileMe.

Since I rarely connect my iPhone to my Mac (instead using wifi for everything), this was a big problem.

I searched everywhere and tried numerous suggestions on Apple’s support site as well as other places and nothing worked. I finally tried the following:

- turn off email sync with my MobileMe account (@me.com) and then turn on the sync with calendars, contacts, and bookmarks.

After this step, sync started almost immediately. I then tried to create a test event on the iPhone and within minutes my Mac was asking me to add it to iCal.

YMMV, but this is how I finally got it working. Since I don’t use the provided MobileMe email account (I instead use Gmail IMAP) turning off that email account wasn’t an issue, but this may still be a deal breaker for some.

If you’re having this issue, hopefully these steps help out.

If you had purchased $1,000 of AIG stock one year ago…you would have $42 left. Lehman Bros… $6.60 left… Fannie or Freddie… You would have less then $5 left. BUT, If you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have $214 left. Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. It’s called the 401-Keg plan.

I’m not sure of the source, but you have to admit it’s funny!

I’ve been using the Twitter Tools plugin for quite a while to post my most recent tweets to the blog sidebar. The newly released version of Twitter Tools had an option to create a weekly digest of Twitter posts so I decided to test it out.

As many of you saw this morning, there is obviously a bug in this feature. The author, Alex King, is aware of the issue but there is no time frame for fixing it so my experimentation is officially on hold!

Sorry for any inconvenice with the over posting.

The iPhone ships with many useful apps as well as those that can be downloaded from the iPhone App Store. These let me perform many tasks I previously could only do with my laptop. Being able to have this much computing power wherever I go was the major selling point.

Email via IMAP is seamless, Google Maps with GPS has been invaluable living in a new area, my todo items sync with Things, iCal and Address Book work pretty much as expected, and the games provide enjoyable entertainment especially on long flights when I get bored. Pretty much anything you can do on a laptop, you’ll be able to find similar functionality on the iPhone via third party apps. I’m even able to use SSH to access and administer my servers.

There are only two missing areas I’ve noticed so far on a non-jailbroken iPhone - streaming video capture and support for other programming languages (specifically I’d like to run Ruby). I have read that streaming video via Qik is coming soon though.

I’ve also had phones with integrated wifi before, but the iPhone switches automatically, and so seamlessly, that I’m amazed. I’ll be on Edge or 3G in my car and when I walk in the house, I’m already on our wifi network.

Everything just works and that’s the beauty of the iPhone. There’s little hackery needed to get going, but the ability to dig in and really get stuff done is there for those who want to. Just like Mac’s OSX.

Many of the reported iPhone negatives revolve around two areas - battery life and the onscreen keyboard. I’ll be writing more about the battery life in the future, but with normal usage I get over 4 hours and about 21 hours of standby time. Considering the iPhone functions as a tiny laptop for me, this is superb! Do you ever hear anyone complaining about getting 4+ hours out of their laptop?

The keyboard did take a little while to get used to, but I now find that typing on the iPhone’s onscreen keyboard is much easier and faster than my previous BlackBerry and Dash. It’s also as fast as my previous favorite, the SideKick. Typing works even better in iPhone applications that enable landscape mode. My only annoyance so far is that landscape mode typing is not yet available in the email application.

In addition to purchasing the new device, I also switched from T-Mobile to AT&T. The basic comparison is AT&T has much better coverage (both Edge and 3G), but offers more expensive plans. For the same price (both including unlimited data), I had a T-Mobile plan with 1500 anytime minutes while the AT&T plan has 450 minutes with 5000 night and weekend. At&T offers a rolling 12 months of rollover minutes, so it still works out for me based on past usage.

If you’re on the fence between a BlackBerry, a Google Android device, or the iPhone, I can wholeheartedly recommend the iPhone. The much publicized drawbacks are really non-issues, but you won’t realize this until you have some extended time with the iPhone.

In upcoming posts I’m going to look at some of these issues as well as the applications that are truly making the iPhone an exciting computing platform.

Priceline.com wants me to fill out a survey for a recent car rental I made through their site. Simple and innocent enough at first glance.

What really bothers me with this email is their reason why I should fill out the survey.

Usually, I hesitate to fill out any survey unless I have had a bad experience. If I’ve had a positive or neutral experience, I usually ignore these unless there is some offer, reward, or benefit for me (i.e. improved customer service in the future).

Priceline.com, on the other hand, says I’ll get “good karma” for filling out their survey. This is a ridiculous marketing message. I’ll give you, a for-profit business, more information to improve and generate more revenue. In return, I get “karma”. Are you kidding me?

Don’t insult me. If they had left this wording off, I might have actually clicked on that brief survey and provided some information. After reading that statement, I was turned off by the approach.

The sad part is that I actually had a great experience renting a car through Priceline and would definitely recommend them to anyone looking to save some money on a car rental.

I know many will read the email and wonder why I’m making an issue of this. It’s simple actually. Effective marketing is about providing benefit to the consumer and not the other way around. I don’t care about the business, I care about myself. Businesses need to remember to use this to their advantage.

There are numerous ways of doing this in Priceline’s case. Lower costs, more options going forward, better shopping experience, or improved customer service would all be relevant to their customers.

As a consumer why should I care whether I’m helping this business?

A more effective approach would have been to distill to a sentence or two why filling out this survey would benefit me and not the business.

His post is titled 7 ways I’ve almost killed FreshBooks and I can second every single point he makes. Luckily for FreshBooks, they’re still around and thriving.

I especially appreciated his first point - “Thinking we had to move faster than we did”

As entrepreneurs, we tend to immediately feel the pressure of getting our idea to market as quickly as possible. We have some paranoia (good perhaps?) and believe that another company will out-execute us and leave our company behind.

In the long run, it’s much more important to do things right as opposed to doing them as fast as possible. Obviously there’s a fine line here, but stepping back every once in a while to review before making that next move can be a good practice to follow.

A good idea is just that - an idea. It takes execution to build a great company and this is where many fail. Full execution of your strategy may take some time and there’s nothing wrong with that. Rushing forward as fast as possible is not always the best move.

With the new-found popularity of agile development and business processes (which I’ve been endorsing for many years now), I think some entrepreneurs are forgetting that an overall strategic plan is still important. You don’t necessarily need a full fledged, 200 page written business plan. But having a high level strategic plan will definitely enable you to stay on track and hopefully avoid some of the issues with feeling the need to take certain actions prematurely.