Every now and then I’ll run into a prospective client who wants to build the next newsvine, digg, flickr or Amazon. The thought being
“We’ll build it, throw it up there and see how it does.
If it doesn’t work we’ll move on.”
Whenever I hear talk like this, I flinch.
Why?
Because its not the way to build an enduring web application, start up or business.
You see, your ‘quit threshold’ in a situation like this is low. If something goes wrong or if the startup doesn’t meet your expectations early, you exit stage left.
That isn’t how the diggs, flickrs, and googles, pandoras were built. Those were labors of love, built by people who were very passionate about getting their idea to market. They pushed through many an obstacle to their ideas before ‘making it’ (and some continue to do so).
It is with this in mind that I heartily recommend reading this Seth Godin post about passion in creation
One difference between creating something you believe in and creating something that’s popular is that popularity seekers follow established steps. Do this, do that, do the other thing… lots of traffic. Do this, do that, do the other thing, a quick boost in Google. DT, DT DTOT and get a standing ovation…
The problem with this, that and the other thing is that you end up with a career filled with it. Instead of creating long-lasting art, ideas that matter and things that spread organically, you end up with a bunch of calculated mini-hits.
So build something you really care about. That way you’ll end up with something more akin to this and this, than some flavor-of-the-month-web-app clone.
You’ll be original. People will care.
And that is what you’re after.
July 22nd, 2008
scalability is not your problem, getting people to give a shit is
– Ted Dziuba
from Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog
July 22nd, 2008
I was just chatting with some SEO/SEM guru buddies of mine about how yearly contracts in the SEO industry make potential clients nervous, but are still the industry standard.
They’d stopped requiring yearly contracts for their services, charging from month to month instead (with a deposit up front) . Their clients seemed more comfortable with that arrangement and they were a lot happier with it too.
That set me thinking about why businesses ever require contracts to service their clients.
Then I stumbled over this little nugget that crystallized it all in my head.
And here’s a great quote from Nelson on why the company eschews the industry’s standard practices (which favor one-time contracts over long-term affiliation).
“Contracts allow you to be irresponsible as a company. You don’t need to worry about keeping people happy and fulfilled. What we have created here — an incredible workspace, opportunities to learn and grow, and, most of all, great co-workers — is better than any contract.”
Basically, contracts open the door to taking your client for granted. As a business owner, you need to be aware of that.
If you’re signing contracts with clients, evaluate why you’re doing it and whether it is serving you or the client better. You should be focusing on helping your clients make money.
If you’re thinking more about how to get money out of them, then you have a problem.
July 21st, 2008
This one drove me nuts.
I was compiling various versions of PHP4 on Mac OS X and even though the phpinfo() was saying that it was loading the php.ini at /usr/local/php/php.ini it really wasnt (still haven’t figured out what it was loading).
But after trawling about for a while, I found this excellent forum post that told me how to get my compiled PHP to load the right php.ini
The solution?
compile PHP with these flags
–sysconfdir=/etc –with-config-file-path=/etc –with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php.d
substituting the correct folder paths for each of the flags
July 2nd, 2008
