Hacking Away On The Bleeding Edge

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We are doing some very interesting development work lately, although none of it is in releasable form yet. We decided with our most recent project that instead of just starting from the beginning and building one big project, we would build a series of small projects that did distinct tasks. This means we can easily test a single concept or idea long before we have to make sure it plays nice with other code.

Sometimes these projects are a one-day event. For instance, we will create a completely separate project just to make sure an animation works the way we want. In other cases the project is long-term. For the new app, we spent well over a year and a half just playing with the engine to make sure it reacts the way we want, for instance.

The latest component we are working on is something we have been playing with for a month or two now, off and on. In this case we started it as a separate project because the code uses concepts that are right on the bleeding edge of technology. This technology takes a web page and turns it into a rich text editor, a la Word or Pages.

As I mentioned, though, this stuff is bleeding edge and lots of things have not been thought through well in this world. For instance, it is painful to get the cursor position and figure out where it is relative to the screen. Why do I care? Because when typing into this kind of view I want the cursor to be on screen and for some reason no one thought to do that automatically. After spending an entire day playing around with the code and pulling out what is left of my hair, after spending a week researching the topic, I finally came up with an elegant hack that will do the job perfectly.

When this is all said and done, we should be able to take all these sample projects, move them into the primary one, clean a few things up and be ready to go.

That’s the theory anyway.

Businesses, Like Babies, Take Time To Develop

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Mark Suster wrote a great post about a year and a half ago that has been sitting in my box waiting to be added to the blog. His post, 9 Women Can’t Make A Baby In A Month, highlights the argument for time in building a business:

Markets develop for a complex set of factors that are often beyond all of our control. It is often the fortuitous mixture of new technologies, customer awareness and then acceptance of the technology and then the slow adoption into our daily lives that leads to markets exploding.

Nascent startup markets are like fine wine, they take time to develop.

But that’s not the only important point in his post, although he doesn’t directly assess this one: constraints are critical. The early stages of company development are all about constraints. Small team, small budget, limited time, tight product description, limited marketing reach, tiny sales staff. Feature creep is dangerous. Every decision must be carefully considered.

True innovation occurs through constraints, and having a small team is just one way to force constraints into the system.

The Next 1000 Customers

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Seth Godin wrote a thought-provoking article last week on how markets are overstimulated. Too many products chasing too many people trying to be all things to all people. And of course the press loves these kinds of apps and talks about them a lot. The best quote:

If you’re entering a market filled with loudness, it’s harder to be noticed, even if the incremental benefit you offer seems large to you. If you’re trying to delight existing customers, the more delighted they already are, the more new delight you need to offer to turn heads.

I’m guilty of forgetting this. In the pursuit of making a living wage it seems we have been constantly trying to attract more customers to powerOne. Of course this is what the App Store does to productivity apps because the opportunities for recurring income (whether upgrades or subscriptions or whatnot) is so limited. So we are constantly looking for the next 1000 customers to pay us $4.99.

This isn’t sustainable. We need to move to a model that supports us so we can focus on our core set of customers that care deeply about our products, use them every day, and need them to work effectively. I want to make our products better for those that care and are willing to pay for them, not worry about attracting more and more customers who really aren’t discerning about the true benefits of our software.

Buying Developers Or A Cut Of The Profits?

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If you aren’t familiar, app.net is a paid service for those who are tired of Twitter treating us like product and selling us to the highest bidder. For the record, 1) I understood this when I signed up for the Twitter service and knew they had no business plan; and 2) I do have an app.net account. Developers, in particular, have been screwed by Twitter. Long story that I won’t go into if you are not familiar — I’m sure you can google “Twitter screws developers” and uncover 50 million posts — but let’s just say here that Twitter built itself on the backs of third-party clients and is now screwing them over by cutting them off.

app.net charges $50 per year to be apart of its Twitter-like service and is looking for ways to reward developers who write apps for app.net. With that, app.net is offering a portion of its monthly income to these developers. I don’t agree with the method for determining the split but I think it is a brilliant idea.

Why? First, it is hard for developers to make a living $2 or $3 per copy. Giving developers a cut of the revenues gives them an on-going incentive to keep improving the app and adding new app.net features. Second, if the platform is successful then app.net is recognizing right up front that developers have contributed to that success and aren’t just paying it lip service. They are actually paying out hard cold cash to their best contributors.

This is a valuable model, akin to Amazon offering reference referrals [1]. Yes, the app.net model is more complicated since it can’t directly give each developer 10% of the purchase price (or whatever the Amazon referral model pays), but a few thousand dollars on top of the revenue generated from selling their apps could be huge for many developers and is an interesting supplemental model to consider when trying to build a company.

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[1] I’ve read mixed reactions to the model, partly because it smacks of paying developers to write apps for your platform, which may indicate doom for a platform. I don’t know if I agree with that but that’s the thread circulating these days. Except I see what app.net doing as very different. This isn’t paying developers to write apps; this is a thank you to app developers for contributing to the platform. As I mentioned above, this is much close to Amazon.com’s referral program, not RIM and Microsoft buying apps.

Honda, Lane Assist and Blind Spot Cameras

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Who says car companies aren’t innovating? Honda is introducing a very cool feature into the 2013 Accord: Lane Assist. At its core this technology monitors your position in the road and beeps at you if you start drifting into another lane. If you turn on the turn signal, it won’t beep. Here’s a concept video from Honda posted to YouTube:

A reporter from the Portland newspaper, The Oregonian, took the new car for a test ride and noticed something else interesting. When you turn on the right blinker, the map changes to a camera view, which shows the scene from a small camera embedded in the right rear view mirror. This is perfect for seeing into your blind spot before moving to the right. Check out the video at oregonlive.com.