Product People

On the show today is one of the best bootstrappers in the business: Paul Farnell of Litmus.com joins me and shares some great stories.

Highlights

• “My parents didn’t want me to have a games console; they wanted something that I could create things on. My first computer was an Amiga.”
• “I was inspired by my dad. I started publishing a magazine myself, and distributing it in my middle-school. We even sold annual subscriptions! (mostly to teachers, because they had more money)”
• “When I was 12-13 years old, I started building different software products. The first was “Instant Theme Creator”. It sold for $19 (although it was always advertised for $29). It was listed on Download.com”
• “I’ve always liked the validation of someone finding enough value in something that I built they were willing to pay for it. I didn’t want to just make a magazine that people would read, I wanted to make”
• “There are so many hacks that we technical people do every day. We don’t always think that if we could create systems for other people; make these hacks into products” – Justin Jackson
• [Did you enjoy business school?] “No. I didn’t enjoy the courses (or find it applicable). But it was time well spent: because I had the freedom to build Litmus.”
• “I was so impressed with the design, usability of 37signals.”
• “I built the first version of Litmus in a weekend. It was initially called SiteVista.com. It was running a couple of old desktop machines in my dorm, on the college’s internet.”
• “It was incredibly exciting to see people using the product. You would literally see customers using the product, because they were testing web pages on the screens underneath my desk.”
• “It did cause some trouble: my girlfriend would get woken up by the machines under my desk.”
• “We programmed the original app in VB script.”
• “We launched with under 100 people.”

Show notes

• Paul on Twitter
• Paul’s blog posts on Litmus
• Peanut Software archived page
• Paul’s presentation at FOWD

Sponsors

• Our premium sponsor is Sprint.ly. Sprint.ly is agile project management software with one goal: to help you ship more stuff. You can try them out for free at  www.sprint.ly. You can also thank them on Twitter:  @sprintly

Shout outs

• Shout-out #1: Kyle Fox’s blog post on product management. I’d like to give a shout-out to Kyle Fox who’s written a great blog post called “ Multi-tasking is the heart of product management” Go to kylefox.ca to see that!
• Shout-out #2: Product People newsletter
• Shout-out #3: Save 10% on domains at Hover.com
• Shout-out #4: Get $25 off at Ting

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Jason Evanish has made a name for himself as a customer-focused entrepreneur. He caught the eye of  Hiten Shah, the founder of  KISSmetrics. Hiten asked Jason to leave Boston, and move to the Valley to become KISSmetric’s Product Manager.

Since then, he’s become known as a generous teacher; especially when it comes to customer development, pattern matching, and product development.

Show notes

• KISSmetrics
• Jason on Twitter
• Jason on About.me
• FogPHP blog post on launching

Sponsors

• Our premium sponsor is Sprint.ly. Sprint.ly is agile project management software with one goal: to help you ship more stuff. You can try them out for free at  www.sprint.ly. You can also thank them on Twitter: @sprintly

Shout outs

• Shout out #1: ThinkMojo and Startup-videos.com showcases the best startup videos around helping you find inspiration & resources for your product demo video.

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While in Boston, Jason Evanish made a name for himself as a customer-focused entrepreneur. He caught the eye of  Hiten Shah, the founder of KISSmetrics. Hiten asked Jason to leave Boston, and move to the Valley to become KISSmetric’s Product Manager.

Since then, he’s become known as a generous teacher; especially when it comes to customer development, pattern matching, and product development.

In this candid interview, Jason shares what he’s learned so far leading product at KISSmetrics.

Highlights

• “Your assumptions are not necessarily true.”
• “Customer development is a series of tactics to get to the core of what a customer really is. You find out what there problem is, and create a solution that can really delight them. The challenge is that customers won’t flat out tell you what they need. You need a process to draw it out of them.”
• “If you want to get the politics out of your organization, become a data-driven company. Now you have numbers and data.”
• “A lot of people think customer development is highly subjective. The key is you need to trust the interpreter. If you were having someone translate from Chinese to English, you would need to trust the person doing the interpretation.”
• “What kind of data should you track? Look at feature adoption rates: what do people actually use?”

Sponsors

• Our premium sponsor is Sprint.ly. Sprint.ly is agile project management software with one goal: to help you ship more stuff. You can try them out for free at  www.sprint.ly. You can also thank them on Twitter:  @sprintly

Shout outs

• Shout out #1:  Sam Baumgarten – learn about creating web apps. Check out Sam Baumgarten’s blog to learn about creating web apps and get updates on his projects such as Nathan Barry’s ConvertKit.  sambaumgarten.me

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Nathan Barry has released two really successful ebooks, and a new web app called  ConvertKit. If you’ve ever wanted to write your own ebook, but couldn’t get started, this interview is sure to inspire you to create and launch your own stuff.

Show notes

• https://twitter.com/nathanbarry
•  http://nathanbarry.com
•  http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook/
•  http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/
• Scrivener
•  iBooks Author
•  https://convertkit.com
•  http://nathanbarry.com/competitive-advantage/
•  http://thinktraffic.net/most-common-pricing-mistake

Sponsors

• Our premium sponsor is Sprint.ly. Sprint.ly is agile project management software with one goal: to help you ship more stuff. You can try them out for free at www.sprint.ly. You can also thank them on Twitter: @sprintly

Shout outs

• Shout out #1: Working with Unix Processes by Jesse Storimer. Our friend Jesse has written a great book: Working with Unix Processes. More than 2000 Ruby programmers have discovered the fundamentals of system programming with my ebook. Go check it out and spawn some daemons.   workingwithunixprocesses.com
• Shout out #2: Beathound by Creature Creative. Beathound is a service for staying on top of new releases from the artists you love. If you’ve ever missed an album from your favorite band, you need to try Beathound. They’ve just added a cool feature for anyone following SXSW – visit beathound.com/sxsw to follow new releases from all of SXSW’s showcasing artists this year.
• Shout out #3: Save Business Time with Espree. Our listener Espree has built savebusinesstime.com: a marketplace for the world’s best web apps for business. These are apps that help people get their work done faster. If you have a B2B app that you’d like to promote, you can submit it at: www.savebusinesstime.com/submit-your-tool/
• Shout out #4: Copywriting for Geeks by  Marc-André Cournoyer. Next up: fellow Canadian Marc-André Cournoyer has a great book Copywriting for Geeks. Learn how a developer quit his job and started a product business that became profitable from day one. Visit copywritingforgeeks.com

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Nathan Barry is an amazing individual: when you spend time with him you can’t help but be inspired to create and launch your own stuff. As a young man he’s had tremendous success is releasing his own products: an iPad app called One Voice, two really successful ebooks, and a new web app called ConvertKit.

Show notes

• https://twitter.com/nathanbarry
•  http://nathanbarry.com
•  http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook/
•  http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/
•  http://nathanbarry.com/2012-year-quitting-job/
•  http://unicornfree.com/2013/difficulties-for-nathan-barrys-app-experiment
•  https://convertkit.com
•  http://nathanbarry.com/competitive-advantage/
•  http://thinktraffic.net/most-common-pricing-mistake

Sponsors

• This episode by Sprint.ly!
• At our day jobs we’ve switch to Sprint.ly, and it has really simplified our development process. Now, everyone on the team has a simple view of our company’s development: on one screen, we can see what’s in the backlog, what people are currently working on, and what’s been completed and is ready for testing.
• I’d like you to try Sprint.ly out for free: you can sign-up for a 30 day trial at www.sprint.ly

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

This week we have Jason Fried of 37signals on the program. We discuss how he made thousands of dollars in high school, why he chose DHH as a partner, what it’s like to be “internet famous”, and the thinking behind the new Basecamp,  Basecamp Breeze and Basecamp Personal.

A quick note about the audio quality of this show: Jason had a bad WiFi connection that caused Skype to drop out at numerous times in the interview. We felt like the content was good, and so we released the show (even though the audio is not up to our standard). In order to serve you the listener, we paid to have a transcript made so you can read the interview. You can see this at: productpeople.tv/jasonfried

Shout outs

Here’s something new: it’s called Shout Outs, and it’s an inexpensive way for YOU to sponsor a show. Starting as low as $39 per episode, you can promote anything you want: It could be your bootstrapped startup, a job opening, or a side-project. We’ll read these “shout outs” at the end of each episode. You can get started at productpeople.tv/shoutout

Show notes

• Jason Fried
• David Heinemeier Hansson
• Their new book: Remote
• New Basecamp
• Basecamp Breeze
• Basecamp Personal
• Sponsor: Sprint.ly

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Kyle Fox is back for another episode: this time he talks with Justin about the power of design, how big their launch mailing list was, and why it’s important to track your metrics from the beginning.

How should you run your beta program? Should you give beta testers free access for life?

Besides co-hosting this podcast, and working as a Product Manager at  Granify, Kyle runs his own SaaS app on the side:  FotoJournal. FotoJournal allows photographers to create a professional looking photo blog.

Show notes

• FotoJournal
• Buffer
• Jon Smelquist
• Techvibes write-up on FotoJournal
• Petapixel write-up
• FotoJournal launch party
• Mixpanel

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!

Kyle Fox is a real Renaissance man. Besides co-hosting this podcast, and working as a Product Manager at Granify, he also runs his own SaaS app on the side: FotoJournal. FotoJournal allows photographers to create a professional looking photo blog.

If you’ve asked these questions, you can learn from Kyle’s experience: what should I build? Should we incorporate? Should I get the .com?

Kyle talks about why he decided NOT to launch a competitor to Freshbooks, why perfectionism is his enemy, and how he had people sign-up and become paying customers when he launched.

Show notes

• FotoJournal
•  Lift Interactive
•  Parade
•  Jon Smelquist
•  Techvibes write-up on FotoJournal
•  Petapixel write-up
•  FotoJournal launch party
• They incorporated online at Staples.ca
• Mixpanel

🎙️ Podcast hosting is provided by Transistor.fm.
📺 Learn how to start your own podcast!