* have at least 10 customers willing to buy my service when it's done. During the time of development they would commit to spend time with me validating my product hypothesis.
* prepare spec for a _REAL_ mvp.
* clearly _describe_ problem that I'm trying to solve. (now I know that it takes multiple iterations to achieve this - most importantly discussing the problem with your future customers)
We are fixing this right now. First idea was to use Disqourse (we still have disqourse.com) because discourse.com was taken. Now we've seen that Google is changing all the queries from disqourse to discourse so we've changed our domain name to discoursehq.com :)
Google ChromeOS and Google Wave share some similarities in terms of marketing messaging behind those products. In both cases biggest value of both products is in business - they should never be marketed as a consumer products.
I agree with Paul that ChromeOS with its current market target will fail - just like Wave did.
But there is still hope for ChromeOS. Google should target bigger companies with it. Make it a hardware extension of their Google Apps offering. IT departments and CFOs will love them.
And you know what? I think that they are thinking about this already - that is why we've seen Citrix client there.
There was an interesting blog post about this problem few weeks ago on HN. In general you can defend your b) or c) or d) situation with on word "Timing".The only problem is that you must convince people in the audience that Timing is right and why it was hard/impossible before and right now is easier/possible.
What we are looking for here is something like an Instapaper for email. I often open an email - scan in and if I find something important I make this email "unread" again...
I think that this may be a good idea but should be implemented as a browser plugin.
I don't want to switch from Chrome to something based on Chrome that will not be updated as fast and often as the original.
Interesting article - but I think people should note that creating 10% better business and trying to compete with the incubants is a very risky and time consuming game. Much riskier and much more time consuming then anyone could anticipate... Of course - it all depends on the market segment you are trying to conquer.
People have no idea how hard it is to get first 10 paying customers (not to mention 200!!). It's one thing to get people to say "I love your product - will buy premium plan for sure!" and the completely other thing to actually receive a payment ("I'm sorry I was busy", "Will buy, just waiting for my customer to place an order" etc.).
Best of luck to everyone trying to persuade their customers to pay. I'm also one of you!
We are seeing very interesting pattern. A lot of people (including PG in recent interview http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632477 ) noted that YC founders communicate via Facebook not email. We take this observation to the business - customer world (b2b) and we have created real-time facebook-like communication platform that controls the context (sales business process). Each action fires up an email - but in this case email is just a notification - SMS-like service to let you know that something is going on in the project.
* have at least 10 customers willing to buy my service when it's done. During the time of development they would commit to spend time with me validating my product hypothesis.
* prepare spec for a _REAL_ mvp.
* clearly _describe_ problem that I'm trying to solve. (now I know that it takes multiple iterations to achieve this - most importantly discussing the problem with your future customers)