Building & engineering around startup uncertainty - Mike Krieger

Building & engineering around startup uncertainty - Mike Krieger
[Slides]

Confusion sinks startups, so we need to fight it. First thing that needs to be handled is the product itself, and what needs to be built. The second part is the technical challenges that happen with building said product.

Instagram came out of a project called burbn. It was an HTML5 app that did social/mobile/location stuff. The most asked question was “what are you guys?” You have to actually focus on something. And it took them three months to get less confused.

They did this by doing four things:

ideate
validate
build
send out & iterate
Ideation is about creating your original ideas. They don’t code until they sketch out a UI. And they’ve built and thrown away entire features on paper. This is an example of ‘making wrong less painful.’

Validation is about getting feedback from users, to confirm that your thoughts are true. Every social app should go through ‘the bar exam.’ If you can’t explain it to someone at a bar, then you need to simplify it.

Building is pretty obvious, but there are still some tricks. You still have to be able to learn while you build stuff. You can do this with a tight feedback loop, iterating on one week cycles.

You need to be ‘proud but embarassed’ about your first launch. Do a few features, and do them really well, to build your ‘minimalist viable product.’

“One day out in the real world is worth one month of guessing.”

“Use your friends and make some new ones” (for your beta)

All of this is about product uncertainty. As for technical uncertainty, the main question is “Are we building it the right way?”

Focus, and keep your team small. Ask yourself what your company is actually about. Your framework is not going to be the most important bottleneck. Stand on the source code of giants. Experiment with quick projects. The anti-pattern is “Let’s re-write our entire site.” An interesting way to think about features is “Could we rip this out in 20 minutes if it’s bad?”

From: http://thechangelog.com/post/4507882708/codeconf-sunday-summary

Web product guidelines

- simple
- public over private
- personal vanity
- internet is global
- permalinks
- one important item per page
- don't break the browser
- don't wanker in technology
- a medium is not a grande
- break convention for your users
- no useless widgets
- nobody changes the defaults
- level up
- invaluable tool
- use it yourself