I was wondering why nobody had mentioned Chargebee here yet. If you're building a subscription business, I'd say this is the way to go. Unless you want to worry about managing recurring billings, maintaining legacy pricing tiers everytime you change your plans, one-off discounts, etc.
Just make sure you have a recurring billing system in place right from the start instead of hacking it on top of your gateway yourself. You should be able to focus on your product right now - not the billing, and the tech debt if you choose to move when the wheels are spinning is just not worth it.
[Source: Hacked a system in my last org and burnt fingers, before happily moving to Chargebee]
I understand the feeling when a competitor pretty much photocopies what you did and tries to claim credit... But aren't we taking the whole ripping off thing a bit more personal than we should?
After all, most businesses are copies with just a minor differentiator - that ends up making all the difference.
I've had to struggle with procrastination since highschool (now 10+ yrs in the workforce). A couple of things I've noticed about myself and the teams I've worked with:
- We always find time to do things we love doing. So the trick is to simply fill your bucket with things you genuinely enjoy.
- Always have a backlog. It might be a note or a sheet on Excel - but always have a list of things that need to get done. Keep adding the new stuff into this as they come, and spend a couple of hours once a week running through this.
- Get in the flow. Plan your backlog so you have a mix of high, medium and low complexity stuff on your plate.
- Figure out your "in-the-zone" time. For me, I've noticed that I'm most charged up for creative work later in the evening. Make sure you don't have any meetings or distractions lined up during and at least an hour before your zone time.
- Get your temple. Everybody needs a place where they can go, zone in and get work done.
- Have a daily standup where you discuss what you planned to do yesterday, what you did, and what you plan to do today. Do this EVERY SINGLE DAY.
I've noticed most organized/ disciplined folks just do this automatically. For us procrastinators, it's like starting a workout routine after your BMI has hit the ceiling - you need a system, and you need a system that you'd actually enjoy if you want to stick to it!
I'd have to agree. To add to your points though, I like to think of Ideas and Execution lying in a spectrum between Genius and Obvious.
You can take an obvious idea (a social network to connect friends circa 2004), add genius execution to it in terms of adoption and growth, and win.
You can take a genius idea (crunch every page in the web and spit out search results in seconds), keep the execution in terms of UI and experience really obvious and win.
You can even take an obvious idea, apply an obvious execution strategy to it, and steadily grow (or at least play a strong catch up).
The scary part is when you mix a genius idea with genius execution - and risk getting having brilliant app fly over the head.
IMHO bad things start to happen when we start falling blindly in love with our own intellect.
I've been using tenreads on the web for almost 6 months now - great way to get my morning news fix. Only complaint is sometimes the articles don't pick up the best cover image... Hope it's fixed with the iOS update.
I think PH as a community has grown - with more users, visibility and products added every day. And that means the only way to keep the community clean is by putting up some walls.
When you throw a few hundred great products, their makers, and thousands of tech enthusiasts into one place, it's not easy to strike a balance between "content policing" and "random garbage". Somebody IS going to be hurt...
Our product was submitted by a user and won well over 100 votes last year (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/germio) - when it was still way too early for us to even dream of that kind of spotlight. ProductHunt was a great source of feedback and traffic then - as it is now, and I think this is one of the most beautiful tech communities alive today.
Your definition of "good" and "bad" is probably off tangent. As a manager, you take up a new role of being the "coach". It's your job to help your team play at the best performance they possibly can.
Letting go of someone is the simplest thing anyone can do... but if you look back at your own career, chances are you'll find more than a couple of instances when your peers put up, tolerated, and coached you to where you are today - just don't close the doors you walked through.
That's what we're building with our startup germ.io [http://germ.io] - as a product to help you log your ideas, evolve them with more detailed sub-ideas, and move them through incubation to execution.
Why? I think the key is exactly what you've said - to think linearly. Ideas often mushroom to end us up in a place drastically different from where we started, so the end result is not really linear. But we need to think about the next step in an idea linearly if we ever want to get something done. That is where mind maps (non-linear all the way) and traditional task-based tools (too linear) fall short.
Check out what we have at germ.io, signup and if you'd like in on what we're building right now just ding me a message.
We first spoke to prospective users about germ.io and everyone "felt" the problem (managing ideas and building on them till they get to execution) - but they thought it was too big a problem to be solved through software. But at that point we were only looking to see if the problem we were trying to solve was real - not fit our solution in.
Once you know you're solving a problem that exists, you can't figure out fit by just talking to people - you need to throw out a (crappy) version and let real people play. We don't have the time/ $$s to spend months and THEN know we don't have a fit. So decided to roll out an MDP in pre-beta cycles called "Omega's" (story: blog.germ.io/wtfs-an-omega/). In the last week, we've had over 800 signups and 200 users we've opened access to, so I guess the challenge is to build -> ship -> iterate.
The family and friends you talk to before you have a prototype are the people who'd tell you they think your stuff is cool, but would never take their wallets out if they weren't doing you a personal favor. Their word and opinion isn't really worth much.
depends... if you want to raise capital that's one less rockstar to look for. if you're kicking up the next big disruptive startup that's one more guy you should look out for..
You don't choose your inspiration moment. Rather, it chooses you (ref: http://blog.germ.io/how-to-get-from-ideas-to-execution/).
Our man had to get out of his problem and think about something totally different to get inspired by an elevator. Think he hasn't seen a missed elevator before? I bet he has. But he had to distract himself from the problem to let the hidden machines in his head get to work.. It's the same reason Archimedes "decided" to go to a bath when his life was on the line. I don't think he was looking for just soapy relaxation there..
Deep down, we all have our little temples.
"If Archimedes went looking for a towel first, you'd have never had a submarine" - qvikr
It's painful that every GTD tool starts with what's probably the last step in getting something done - the task item. When it should be starting with the big idea in the beginning.
The problem though is visualizing a DAG with even 20 nodes becomes super confusing. So you'll end up with a mess and have no idea why those edges are running in every direction. It's not like mindmaps need something new to get more confusing than they already are...
Brilliant. The press loves a typical "love at first sight" story, and over time all we remember is the survivors. Psychologists call this the survivorship bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias). I think in tech startups someone ought to name this habit the "Techcrunch Bias".
I guess the reason for that is because even the smartest of people, at best, have only tried to do things in x ways... So if your thoughts don't align with the "tried and tested" methodologies in x, at least according to this smart person, you will probably fail.
Just make sure you have a recurring billing system in place right from the start instead of hacking it on top of your gateway yourself. You should be able to focus on your product right now - not the billing, and the tech debt if you choose to move when the wheels are spinning is just not worth it.
[Source: Hacked a system in my last org and burnt fingers, before happily moving to Chargebee]