Podrover Graduation Day
It has been a rollercoaster. Sometimes I thought I was done. Sometimes I thought this day would never come. I made it. Podrover is out of beta. I am proud of what I achieved so far. There’s still a lot to do, but I am very happy with this milestone. Podrover and AppVersion are two products that I fully produced. Design, development, marketing, everything. I am very happy with my life these days.
Your business is about them
I am an avid listener of the Hack the Entrepreneur podcast hosted by Jon Nastor. A few weeks ago he interviewed Derek Sivers. There’s a quote still stuck in my head. The success of your business has nothing to do with you and what you want, your personal passions and preferences ... this isn't about you, your business is about them and their needs. Derek Sivers source Passion can be a driver, no doubt.
Writing code in entrepreneur mode
Here is it, innocent Ruby code: t1 = "2015-08-27T11:53:00-07:00" t2 = "2015-09-16T12:33:36-07:00" t1 < t2 #true Some of the DB queries in Podrover involve time. For example: “get all the reviews since yesterday”. During the prototyping phase I always worked with strings and when I came to build that query I still used strings. As long as the format (and the time zone) is the same it should work. If you have a case in which it doesn’t work let me know and I’ll update this post.
The Unsustainability Pattern
New shiny service announced. “How much does it cost? Nothing? I am in!” We have seen this many times. The fact that you don’t pay doesn’t mean that there’s no cost. Somebody is paying, maybe you’ll never know who, but believe me somebody is taking money out of his pocket to put it in someone else’s wallet. It may look free to you, but somebody is paying for servers, electricity and bandwidth.
Copy and paste mentality
Raise your hand if you remember which was the most difficult obstacle when you started programming. I do. It was the difference between ‘=’ and ‘==’. To me they were the same. I remember that to complete a homework I needed a function and it was like one that my mentor already shared with me. So I took his code and, on purpose, exchanged all the occurrences of ‘=’ with ‘==’ and then submitted.
Putting Marco's numbers in perspective
Marco Arment has published the sales numbers of Overcast, the podcast application that he released six months ago. We need more posts like this. They help a lot other entrepreneurs to explore opportunities and put things in perspective. Before you jump to the “he made it so I can make it too” conclusion let’s put those numbers besides other facts/numbers: Marco runs a very famous blog. I don’t know if Alexa is still the goto tool for measuring websites but his blog has a 45,162 global rank.
On Numbers and Happiness
With fewer numbers there would probably be way fewer discussions. At the moment I feel to say that “people tend to exploit numbers to be sensationalist”. That especially happens when I read some post exploiting the who-has-a-longer-penis “template”. The keyword in this case is “longer”: when you compare integral dimensions you can say which is greater. That’s ok, but you can assign meaning to numbers, as we do when we code.
Kids are Entrepreneurs
.. but they don’t know yet. I have a kid and he is 16 month old. Now that I have more free time I really enjoy spending the days with him. You might think that way I am not working or learning something about my job. WRONG! He recently started walking, and that was a relief for my backbone! But there is more. In spite of the fact that we constantly say: “Slow down” or “Don’t run”, he walks fast and sometimes he falls.
On Your value
Where I reflect on my value as an entrepreneur. You know that a freelancer is an entrepreneur, right? A few weeks ago Matt Gemmell touched my heart. He is not a cardiologist, so I mean it figuratively. He was the keynote speaker at mdevcon. Before his presentation I was already very happy because the conference has been great: my presentation was a success, the room was packed and many people approached me offline.