Apps

For 5.1 you need 4.3 and for that you need 10.7…

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Apps
WTH? I recently upgraded my iPhone to IOS5.1. I thought that was great until I tried to install my app built with Xcode 4.2 on my phone. Xcode 4.2 doesn’t work with IOS5.1…only 5.0 and below! Well, my Mac OS was 10.6.8 so I couldn’t use Xcode 4.3. I needed Mac OS 10.7. Rather than try to get my iPhone back to IOS 5.0, which is very complicated, I decided to get to Mac OS 10.7. So, I needed 10.7 to get 4.3 so I can use 5.1.  Are you following this?

I went up to a tech to get Mac OS 10.7 and I said, “I need 10.7 so I can use 4.3 in order to work with 5.1. Right now, I have 10.6.8 and 4.2 so I can’t use 5.1 because 4.2 only works with 5.0.” Holy smokes! the guy knew exactly what I was talking about and got me 10.7.

Now, I’m doing the 4.3, but it won’t work unless I have 10.7.3. Now, I’m getting that. What’s up with those Apple people and their version numbers? Jeez Louise.

Calling 1099 Contractors!

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in 1099, Apps, Business, Personal Finance, Product Management
Are you a 1099 Contractor? I mean when you get paid do you get a check with a single amount with no taxes taken out? Do you track reimbursable expenses or really want to? Or, do you have trouble getting all your income and expenses together for tax time?

If so, I need and want to talk to you. In return I can tell you about what other 1099 contractors are doing to make their lives easier. I can also get you a nice employee discount on QuickBooks if you are interested. Please connect with me on LinkedIn here. 

Alchemist Customer Development Series

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Apps, Business, Lean Startup, Product Management, Success
My wife told me about a course on Customer Development and Metrics from the Alchemist Series with the Citrix Accelerator that starts on March 13th. I realized Steve Blank will be teaching, so I signed up in a heart beat! It’s a very special course because it is a small group of students learning from top-notch Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and VC’s. This particular course is being prepared as a lecture series for the top 30 universities, so we get to ask lots of questions from the best and be a part of some stellar new curriculum. It’s not full.  If you want in, visit the link above and get your butt there.

Last night’s session was with Alan Chiu, principle with X/Seed Capital Management. It was a super interesting session. For the business I am working on inside of Intuit, I got solid advice for scrappy/crafty ways of finding customers to interview, knowing when to experiment for design vs. price, knowing when to build, etc. More posts coming on those later. One of my big takeaways was that my previous main two questions are now three.

  1. What question are you trying to answer?
  2. What’s the fastest way to answer it?
  3. What’s the cheapest way to get it answered?
I’ll use these questions the rest of my working life.

Lean Startup Crash Course

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Apps, Business, Product Management
Those of you who know me know that I am a fitness experimenter and product manager that works at Intuit (also a father of twins and a husband!). Well, I have to give a prominent shout out to Intuit, and Scott Cook specifically, for embracing the Lean Startup methodology and for putting innovation in front of everyone who works on products.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in an Intuit-wide Lean Startup competition where teams were selected to come to San Diego and pitch ideas to Eric Ries, get guidance from Brant Cooper, and get judged by a combined panel of innovators at Intuit. The competition started on Friday and ended Monday which meant working over the weekend.  Competitors were judged by how many times they passed through the customer feedback loop.  This means conducting experiments with customers in a time-compressed schedule multiple times.

I had heard about the lean startup methodology before and was familiar with many of the terms like “pivot” or “persevere”. However, I didn’t really know the Lean Startup method until it was “game on” time. I can tell you that going through this competition was fantastic!  Why?  Because my teammate and I made many mistakes and learned fast.

Here’s a quick run down of how it went (leaving the idea specifics out at the moment):

  1. We pitched our idea to Eric. Eric said do something else.
  2. We tested the problem space with real customers, and it was ho-hum.
  3. We ran a survey on Facebook, bought some ads, and didn’t get anywhere.
  4. We ran a survey on Ask Your Target Market and got fantastic results that told us how 50 customers rated the problem, solution, and if they would buy. 
  5. We had a new view of the problem and a rating of what customers wanted and that they would buy it if it existed. We were so excited we decided to build a prototype.
  6. The prototype got finished “enough” but took forever. Worse, it didn’t directly help us answer the question we needed it to answer. 
  7. We had to switch to a landing page mockup and test the problem, solution, and buy question there.
  8. We used up our ad money and found out how ad bids really worked. We wished we would have saved money earlier on the Facebook survey. 
  9. We got the ads dialed in and kicked off a parallel effort. 
  10. We only had a few hours left and ended up running around with our half-built prototype and our landing page printed out canvassing potential customers to see if the would buy it.
We ended up winning the competition, which was great, but what was much better was the experience of really nailing down the questions we needed to answer so we could decide how to move forward.  On top of that there was another huge learning…when you know the right question, you then have to ask the second most important question.  How fast can you answer the question you need to answer?  We really had a lot of barriers about even going to that question, but being time-pressed, the barrier broke. 
I can’t say enough about how crucial it is to ask that second question. Instead of running off into a corner building something we don’t know if customers want, we now have a very good picture of what customers want.  We did it with 4 days and about 200 bucks. Given what we know now, I think we could trim it to 2 days and 100 bucks next time.