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.

Testing a low-fidelity prototype hurts, but it’s good!

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Lean Startup, Product Management

For the mobile app I am working on with my buddy Nirav, I recently tried out usertesting.com to get feedback on the app design. This company takes an URL/app, sends it to a panel of their users, and then provides a video of the tester’s use of the URL/app along with written summary from the user.
I have built a working jquery mobile prototype with Nirav that is very rough. Even though it was embarrassing to test something that is so low-fidelity, we thought the feedback would be valuable and decided to see how the process worked with usertesting.com.
The first learning was an “ops” learning to use a super easy URL for the testers.  Right now, we have a long and convoluted URL from Amazon’s ec2 service with characters that require keyboard toggling for mobile phone users. The first three testers had a heck of a time entering in that terrible URL on an iPhone keyboard.  I couldn’t believe that the usertesting folks didn’t get the urls to the user’s mobile devices for them.  When I saw that in the videos, I realized a URL shortener would be a simple mediator. The next test I ran was with a short URL from goo.gl. Users had no problem with that. Why wouldn’t usertesting.com just text or email their user the URL? Anyway…
The next learning, which I have heard from Lean Startup folks before, was that low-fidelity prototypes yield great feedback. I’ve done many usabilities in my 15+ years of working in Silicon Valley, but this prototype is rough with a capital “R”. While there were big problems like decimals to 4 places and only a back button to navigate the app (users got so lost even though there are only 4 screens!), I learned a crucial problem that we need to resolve so a user can grok the real benefit of the app. That was a huge learning that would have taken days longer to get if we had tried to make the prototype better.  It was seriously embarrassing to watch the videos.  It was hard, and I had to stop them and walk away seeing those glaring bugs.
I should call out that there were a number of emotional barriers I had around running a test like this. I thought it wasn’t good enough, and if it wasn’t good enough, then users would hate us. We’d be blacklisted in some way. I thought somehow we’d be tarnished by testing something so unpolished. None of that happened. Now, it seems so odd to have held up experiments like this in the past. The consequences were non-existent. The benefits are moving us forward.