tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64005362024-03-19T20:39:41.497+08:00/home/siddhiSoftware, management and photographySiddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.comBlogger493125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-995125710091241092015-01-01T14:44:00.000+08:002015-01-01T18:32:40.858+08:00Completion list for 2014<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It's the end of the year, which means it's time for the completion lists for the year.<br />
<br />
<b>Books</b><br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-project">The Phoenix Project</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21326.Fables_Vol_1">Fable Vol #1</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2217176.A_Whack_on_the_Side_of_the_Head">A whack on the side of the head</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/387190.Test_Driven_Development">TDD: By Example</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/914211.Influencer">Influencer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452796-drive">Drive</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18482790-the-pomodoro-technique">The Pomodoro Technique</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16115622-land-of-the-seven-rivers">Land of the Seven Rivers</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/893511.Street_Angel">Street Angel</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9306087-scenes-from-an-impending-marriage">Scenes from an impending marriage</a></li>
</ul>
<div>
I only managed to complete 10 books this year. I was shooting for 12, so fell a couple short.<br />
<br />
<b>Games</b></div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/3ds/mario-luigi-dream-team">Mario & Luigi: Dream Team</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/3ds/gunman-clive">Gunman Clive</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/3ds/luigis-mansion-dark-moon">Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon</a></li>
<li>Rayman Fiesta Run</li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/art-of-balance-touch">Art of Balance Touch</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/nintendo-ds/advance-wars-dual-strike">Advance Wars: Dual Strike</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/chronicles-of-shakespeare-a-midsummer-nights-dream">A Midsummer Night's Dream</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/bittrip-beat">Bit.Trip Beat</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/3ds/pokmon-y">Pokemon Y</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/70202">Mario Golf: World Tour</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/3ds/donkey-kong-country-returns-3d">Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/wii-u/mario-kart-8">Mario Kart 8</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/wii-u/nintendo-land">Nintendoland</a></li>
<li>Bayonetta 2</li>
<li>Phoenix Wright: Dual Destiny</li>
</ul>
<div>
Platform-wise breakup</div>
</div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Nintendo 3DS - 8</li>
<li>Nintendo Wii U - 3</li>
<li>PC - 2</li>
<li>Nintendo DS - 1</li>
<li>Windows Phone - 1</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
Obviously Nintendo was the platform of choice this year, especially the 3DS. It is just more comfortable for me to play handheld. The Wii U's gamepad has generally been criticised, but I <u>love</u> the off-TV play feature. Most of the time was playing on the gamepad like a handheld, while others used the TV. This is an awesome, awesome feature.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Board Games</b></div>
<div>
<b><br /></b></div>
<div>
Crossed 10+ Plays this year</div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28720/brass">Brass</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/54043/jaipur">Jaipur</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/129622/love-letter">Love Letter</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/128882/resistance-avalon">The Resistance: Avalon</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/102652/sentinels-multiverse">Sentinels of the Multiverse</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/103886/star-wars-card-game">Star Wars LCG</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/70919/takenoko">Takenoko</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/120677/terra-mystica">Terra Mystica</a></li>
</ul>
<div>
Crossed 5+ Plays this year</div>
</div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/98778/hanabi">Hanabi</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/104162/descent-journeys-dark-second-edition">Descent 2nd Ed</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/63628/manhattan-project">The Manhattan Project</a></li>
</ul>
<div>
This was the year that I got into board games. Since I have a wide variety of genre interests, I selected one game of each type. Here is why I picked each of these games:</div>
</div>
<div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Dungeon Crawl - Descent 2nd ed</li>
<li>Filler - Love Letter, Hanabi</li>
<li>2 Player - Jaipur</li>
<li>Party Game - Resistance: Avalon</li>
<li>Cooperative - Sentinels of the Multiverse</li>
<li>LCG / Deck Building - Star Wars LCG</li>
<li>Family / Gateway - Takenoko</li>
<li>Heavy Euro - Brass, Terra Mystica</li>
<li>Worker Placement - The Manhattan Project</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-52202627785674496422013-10-29T12:11:00.001+08:002013-10-29T12:11:33.831+08:00Lavender field near Aurel<div margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"> <a rel="lightbox" href="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/75/203998492_61f2e0f4ed.jpg" title="Lavender field near Aurel"><img src="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/75/203998492_61f2e0f4ed_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a> <br /> <span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddhi/203998492/">Lavender field near Aurel</a> <br /> Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddhi/">Siddhi</a> </span></div><br />Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-27238063751906766232013-06-03T02:19:00.001+08:002013-06-03T02:19:31.728+08:00Game Review: Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://pics.mobygames.com/images/covers/large/1235422507-00.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="149" src="http://pics.mobygames.com/images/covers/large/1235422507-00.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.mousechief.com/dhsg/">Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble</a>. With a title like that, how can you not play this game? And more so when it has got an <a href="http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/dangerous-high-school-girls-in-trouble">81% average rating on MetaCritic</a> and was nominated for <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/01/13/writers-guild-videogame-award-nominees/">Best Writing on the Writer's Guild of America awards in 2009</a> (the game was released in 2008) So my curiosity piqued, I decided to spend a couple of weekends seeing what the fuss was about.<br />
<br />
<b>Gameplay</b><br />
<br />
You pick a girl to play as, and in the introduction<span class="st"><span class="f"> – which doubles as a tutorial</span></span><span class="st"><span class="f"> – you start by recruiting three more girls into your gang. After that it all about talking to other people and progressing the plot. Progressing the plot involves winning minigames: Taunt, Expose, Fib and Gambit (introduced later in the game). </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="st"><span class="f">Taunt is an insult-retort game similar to insult swordfighting in Monkey Island. You win if you say an insult that the other person doesn't know the retort to, or if you correctly choose a retort for their insult. The catch is that you only learn new taunts and the correct retort when they are used against you for the first time. So a part of the strategy is losing a few games by learning new taunts and retorts on side quests, so that you are better equipped on the main quest.</span></span><br />
<span class="st"><span class="f"><br /></span></span>
<span class="st"><span class="f">Expose is a word game where you are given the thoughts of the person you are talking to, but every word is covered. You can uncover a certain number of words. After that you have to guess the remaining words from the context by selecting from six choices for each word.</span></span><br />
<span class="st"><span class="f"><br /></span></span>
<span class="st"><span class="f">Fib is a mostly luck based game, a cross between poker and bluff. You win if you either have a better hand, or you successfully bluff and call on the opponents bluff.</span></span><br />
<span class="st"><span class="f"><br /></span></span>
<span class="st"><span class="f">Gambit is a slightly complex variation on rock-paper-scissors.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="st"><span class="f">Gameplay basically involves playing the minigames against people you meet in order to get information needed to progress the plot. At first it is quite repetitive as the story starts slow and you tend to lose a lot of the games, but as you go on the games generally get easier and story gets more involved. So even though you're basically playing the same minigames over and over again, it is not as annoying as it is while starting out.</span></span><br />
<br />
<b><span class="st"><span class="f">Story</span></span></b><br />
<br />
<span class="st"><span class="f">That brings us to the story, which is really the main part of the game. The story in this game is top notch, and I can see why it got a Writer's Guild of America nomination for writing. There is a *lot* of dialog, but it is well written, so even those who don't like reading much might enjoy the game. You start out slowly, investigating a series of small accidents in the high school, but before long you're exploring justice, society, marriage, power and corruption. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="st"><span class="f">The overall theme is based on feminist movements in 1920s America, with your gang of girls rebelling against a male dominated and conformist society. The characters are all interesting, and have reasons for behaving the way they do. As you learn more your views on each of the characters also change. Sometimes the person you thought was the villain turns out to be the victim, or vice versa. In the end, every person has their own reasons and none of the characters are black and white. </span></span><br />
<span class="st"><span class="f"><br /></span></span>
<span class="st"><span class="f">Although the themes are serious, the story itself is light hearted for the most part, until the end when it gets quite weird and dark. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="st"><span class="f">If you like a good story-driven game, then you should give DHSGiT a try.</span></span><br />
<span class="st"><span class="f"><br /></span></span></div>
Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-73918971017331434572013-04-17T17:21:00.001+08:002013-04-17T17:21:57.558+08:00Grey Pelican<div margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"> <a rel="lightbox" href="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5218/5441178776_313fd8b3cc.jpg" title="Grey Pelican"><img src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5218/5441178776_313fd8b3cc_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a> <br /> <span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddhi/5441178776/">Grey Pelican</a> <br /> Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddhi/">Siddhi</a> </span></div><br />Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-40459515417938146692013-01-20T23:43:00.001+08:002013-01-20T23:43:39.177+08:00Bharatanatyam<div margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"> <a rel="lightbox" href="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7233/7249072256_d8ea15410e.jpg" title="Bharatanatyam"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7233/7249072256_d8ea15410e_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a> <br /> <span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddhi/7249072256/">Bharatanatyam</a> <br /> Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddhi/">Siddhi</a> </span></div><br />Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-34411566184114957872012-12-25T03:42:00.000+08:002013-01-01T01:09:48.073+08:002012 Completion List<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The last couple of years I've been keeping track of the videogames that I complete. This year I completed the following games:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/nintendo-ds/trauma-center-under-the-knife">Trauma Center: Under the knife</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/gameboy-advance/legend-of-zelda-a-link-to-the-pastfour-swords">Legend of Zelda: A link to the past</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/nintendo-ds/world-ends-with-you">The world ends with you</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/blackwell-legacy">Blackwell Legacy</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/blackwell-unbound">Blackwell Unbound</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/blackwell-convergence">Blackwell Convergence</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/wii/metroid-prime-3-corruption">Metroid Prime 3: Corruption</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/womens-murder-club-death-in-scarlet">Womens Murder Club: Death in scarlet</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/botanicula">Botanicula</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/gemini-rue">Gemini Rue</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/nancy-drew-danger-on-deception-island">Nancy Drew: Danger on deception island</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/wii/swords-soldiers">Swords & Soldiers</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/dear-esther">Dear Esther</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/ares-extinction-agenda">A.R.E.S Extinction Agenda</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/torchlight-ii">Torchlight 2</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/sam-max-season-two">Sam & Max Season 2</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/blackwell-deception">Blackwell deception</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/endless-space">Endless space</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/jolly-rover">Jolly Rover</a></li>
</ul>
<a href="http://siddhi.blogspot.in/2011/12/2011-games-in-review.html">Here is the list from last year</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>Update:</b> Managed to finish <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/kaptain-brawe-a-brawe-new-world">Kaptain Brawe</a> with an hour to go in the year! :)<br />
<br />
I also tracked the non-technical books that I finished this year. Here is that list: <br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7613.Animal_Farm">Animal Farm</a> - George Orwell (2nd time)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6021272-hen-s-teeth-and-horse-s-toes">Hen's teeth and Horse's toes: Reflections in natural history</a> - Stephen Jay Gould</li>
<li><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40798.Turtles_Termites_and_Traffic_Jams">Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams</a> - Mitchell Resnick</li>
<li><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7869529-night-flight">Night Flight</a> - Antoine de Saint Exupery</li>
<li><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161744.Common_Sense">Common Sense</a> - Thomas Paine</li>
<li><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8765784-reading-between-the-wines">Reading between the wines</a> - Terry Thiese</li>
<li><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/884288.Interesting_Times">Discworld #17: Interesting Times</a> - Terry Pratchett</li>
<li><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37614.Chasing_The_Monsoon">Chasing the Monsoon</a> - Alexander Frater</li>
<li><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14653803-the-war-of-art">The War of Art</a> - Steven Pressfield</li>
<li><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1101290.Dealers_of_Lightning">Dealers of lightning: Xerox PARC and the dawn of the computer age</a> - Michael Hiltzik</li>
<li><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63689.The_Great_Railway_Bazaar">The Great Railway Bazaar</a> - Paul Theroux</li>
</ul>
I wanted to read twelve books this year, and managed to complete eleven. I'm pretty satisfied with that.</div>
Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-26155927414103056962012-11-11T11:57:00.002+08:002012-11-11T11:59:07.237+08:00Why you need to validate your assumptions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This week, our team had to submit the second assignment for the Stanford <a href="http://www.venture-lab.org/venture">Technology Entrepreneurship</a> online course. The assignment was to make a list of hypothesis to validate and then to go out and conduct interviews and surveys to validate them.<br />
<br />
When we did our survey, it threw up a few surprises.<br />
<br />
Here is what we learnt:<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="356" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" scrolling="no" src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/15077358" style="border-width: 1px 1px 0; border: 1px solid #CCC; margin-bottom: 5px;" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="427"> </iframe> <br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 5px;">
<b> <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/Siddhi/venture-lab-tech-entrepreneurship-market-survey" target="_blank" title="Venture lab tech entrepreneurship market survey">Venture lab tech entrepreneurship market survey</a> </b> from <b><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/Siddhi" target="_blank">Siddhi</a></b> </div>
</div>
Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-74273046698259161282012-11-07T01:09:00.003+08:002014-03-22T03:23:40.812+08:00Startups: How do you promote your company without being annoying<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Most engineer founders are reluctant to actively promote their startup. We always think, "what if they find us obnoxious" or "will they just send our email into the spam" or "will we get a hostile response". So this answer on Quora is a valuable lesson to all of us engineer founders:</div>
<span class="quora-content-embed" data-name="Startups/How-do-you-promote-your-startup-without-being-annoying/answer/Russell-Wallace/quote/112163">Read <a class="quora-content-link" data-embed="HtEGJB4" data-height="374" data-id="112163" data-key="7d3b85ff574c0358ba8e09e72b3065a2" data-type="quote" data-width="575" href="http://www.quora.com/Startups/How-do-you-promote-your-startup-without-being-annoying/answer/Russell-Wallace/quote/112163">Quote of Russell Wallace's answer to Startups: How do you promote your startup without being annoying?</a> on <a href="http://www.quora.com/">Quora</a><script src="http://www.quora.com/widgets/content" type="text/javascript"></script></span><br />
<br />
<i>This post is a part of the <a href="http://siddhi.blogspot.com/2000/01/selected-archive.html">selected archive</a>.</i></div>
Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-30104913395700197462012-11-03T17:40:00.000+08:002012-11-03T17:40:12.430+08:00Why you should attend the Unconference sessions at Nasscom Product Conclave<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>Unconference? What is that? And why should you attend?</b><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Everyone knows what a conference session is:</span><br />
<ul style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<li style="margin-left: 15px;">A conference session has a pre-decided agenda, with pre-decided speakers</li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;">Sessions are typically one-to-many between the speaker and the audience</li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;">Interaction is only for a few minutes of Q&A at the end</li>
</ul>
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Often times, an interesting session can leave you with more questions regarding the execution of the concepts. For example, the speaker might talk about key concepts in marketing for a venture funded US startup. But if you are a bootstrapped Indian startup, then what modifications should you do to apply these ideas in your company? And what are other companies like yours doing?</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">That is where an unconference session comes in. In an unconference session:</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;" /><ul style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<li style="margin-left: 15px;">YOU choose the topics. The attendees vote on topics that they are interested in, and we select the top voted topics</li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;">Sessions are discussion oriented. Everyone participates and there are no silent observers</li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;">Sessions are based on peer-to-peer learning. You learn from the other attendees, who are all product companies like you</li>
</ul>
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
The Product Conclave will have four unconference sessions, and YOU can shape the agenda.</div>
<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">What would you like to discuss at these sessions?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;" /><b>This is the process by which you can participate:</b><br />
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
1. Take a look at all the questions posed in this Google Moderator - <a href="http://www.google.com/moderator/#15/e=1ff83d&t=1ff83d.40" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www.google.com/<wbr></wbr>moderator/#15/e=1ff83d&t=<wbr></wbr>1ff83d.40</a></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
2. Please look through over 20 questions. If you find a topic you like, please vote for it. </div>
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
3. If you do not see a topic you like, you are free to create one and describe it a bit so that others can understand it. </div>
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
4. We will allow people to vote till 6th of Nov (one day before the Product Conclave starts)</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
5. On 7th morning, we will pick the top 3 (most voted topics) and assign one session for each</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
6. If your topic comes up, be prepared to be co-moderator. Your job is not that complex. You ask some seed questions to get the discussion started and share what you know.</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
7. Typically we expect 20-25 people for each discussion. Every one should get a chance to speak and ask questions. There will be no formal presentations. Just a brief introduction. </div>
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
We really look forward to seeing you in these sessions. Learning from peers in your industry is a lot of fun and if you have not done this before, you are sure to enjoy it. </div>
</div>
Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-14447536192577260052012-10-21T22:40:00.000+08:002014-03-22T03:24:18.402+08:00Is there such a thing as a bad idea?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I'm doing the <a href="https://www.venture-lab.org/venture/">online Technology Entrepreneurship course</a> offered by Stanford this semester. For the first assignment, all participants are grouped with random team members into teams of 10. The assignment asks the teams to brainstorm 5 good startup ideas and 5 bad (eg: selling ice cubes in Alaska) ideas and create business models for both the good and the bad ideas. The second assignment asks the team to choose a bad idea created by another team, and make a compelling commercial for it.<br />
<br />
The second assignment description says: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In entrepreneurship, it is very difficult to tell a bad idea from a
potentially very good idea. The differences are quite subtle or even
non-existent and it's often much more about the team and what they do
with the idea. A creative, hardworking team can turn a bad idea into
something with a lot of potential. Some go so far as to say that there
are no bad ideas. Creativity is a constant resource that your team has
that can be applied during the startup process to improve on business
models and generate new even better ideas.</blockquote>
<br />
In fact, when browsing through some of the bad ideas, I was struck by how many actually have potential. Here are some ideas submitted in the "bad ideas" category that I came across which may turn out to be good ideas:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><b>Selling umbrellas in summer season</b>: The person who submitted this idea is from Europe, and I can imagine how he thought obviously what a dumb idea this was. But come to India or other equatorial countries and see how many people use umbrellas to protect from the summer heat. </li>
<li><b>Disposable paper T-shirts</b>: Not exactly paper, but <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyocell">Lyocell</a> is a fabric derived from wood pulp, just like paper is. And there is demand for cheap, disposable, single-use fabrics in the medical industry (<a href="http://www.ahlstrom.com/en/investors/reportsAndPresentations/Documents/2009/Nonwovens%20in%20medical%20industry.pdf">See slide #30 here</a> [PDF]).</li>
<li><b>Spicy ice cream</b>: This was one of the bad ideas selected by my team. But, it turns out that spicy ice cream is a <a href="http://www.sassyradish.com/2009/08/black-pepper-ice-cream/">popular flavour</a> with <a href="http://www.thekitchn.com/-best-lick-2008-ice-cream-cont-11-61069">many recipes online</a>.</li>
</ul>
So what do you think? Do we throw away many "bad" ideas which could be great ideas with a little creativity?<br />
<br />
<i>This post is a part of the <a href="http://siddhi.blogspot.com/2000/01/selected-archive.html">selected archive</a>.</i></div>
Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-3398428373442500432012-08-11T05:15:00.001+08:002012-08-11T11:48:48.156+08:00Why are so many entrepreneurs embarrassed to want to make money?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I don't get it.<br />
<br />
Many people who attend Chennai Open Coffee Club want to start on an idea or a business. But when it comes to figuring out how to make money, so many people get embarrassed and say "I dont want to run a business to make money, I just want to [insert noble cause here]<insert cause="cause" here="here" noble="noble">", where noble cause may be something like "help the poor", "assist the farmers", "improve the quality of education" etc. Or they say that they want to become a "social entrepreneur", whatever that means.</insert><br />
<br />
Why are we so conscious about wanting to make money? Why do so few people say, "there is huge problem X, users with problem X are willing to spend money, and we want to solve that problem X and collect all these pots of money". Somehow a lot of people feel insecure about phrasing things like this. It makes them feel like unethical money grabbers. <br />
<br />
Listen, there is nothing unethical about it. You aren't getting money for free. You are getting it for solving problem X. <br />
<br />
And even if you have some noble scheme in mind, remember that without money coming in, you'll soon close down, and your noble scheme will die with it. And if you are thinking "I'll start an NGO" then remember that the same economics are in play for NGOs as well: End of donations equals end of vision. Which is why many NGOs actually spend more time and money on fundraising than their actual activities.<br />
<br />
So, don't be embarrassed about making money. Search for an idea that will make you rich. Then work back from there.</div>Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-25314965339765985652012-07-23T04:43:00.002+08:002012-07-23T16:50:52.530+08:00Sequence - Start acting on user insights<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This weekend was <a href="http://in50hrs.com/">in50hrs</a> Chennai edition, and <a href="http://kausikram.in/">Kausik</a> and I decided to make a small app for SaaS developers called Sequence [until we come up with a better name]. For those unaware, in50hrs is an idea-to-prototype event where you have to code a product from scratch over a weekend. (Somewhat like <a href="http://startupweekend.org/">Startup Weekend</a>)<br />
<br />
Sequence allows you to create rules that match against user activity in your app and take appropriate action.<br />
<br />
<b>Examples</b><br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li>If a user signed in, and was then inactive for 2 days, send a notification to the sales guy to call the user and follow up [Simple follow up action]</li>
<li>If a user has not used the product for 30 days, send them an email with a discount code [Simple re-engagement]</li>
<li>If a user has signed up from facebook referrer, then show them facebook integration features. If they signed up from a twitter link, show them twitter integration features. [Simple segmentation]</li>
<li>If a user is highly engaged, send an email explaining the benefits of upgrading [A mistake the many web apps do is to send this message based on <i>time</i>. For instance, a week before the trial expires. That is the wrong time, you want to send it when the user is at the peak of usage. If they are highly engaged on day 7 of the trial, then send this email on day 7]</li>
<li>If a user has started using the app a little, and has not yet liked the facebook page, send them an email asking them to like the facebook page to get 100 free credits [Timing the message when they are starting to get engaged and are most likely to perform this action to get free credits.]</li>
<li>After the user has done the basic activities, send them an email highlighting an advanced feature [Holding off emailing about the advanced feature until they are somewhat comfortable with the basic feature]. <b>Bonus</b>: Integrate with <a href="http://tourmyapp.com/">Tour My App</a> to show a tour of this advanced feature.</li>
</ol>
It's pretty straightforward really<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="383" scrolling="no" src="http://toolsforagile.wufoo.com/embed/x7x2x3/" style="border: none; width: 100%;">&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://toolsforagile.wufoo.com/forms/x7x2x3/"&amp;amp;amp;gt;Fill out my Wufoo form!&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt</iframe><b>So, how does Sequence work? </b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<b>1. Integrate with Analytics</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0P8cZdeoadBGeM6XdCf7dGovv_UuJT-h-T4QkMiFD7yWJbamPhOjV7ZTCw8YXXbkfplKPAcOdP9_rq5oW6NOyf8tnPSEkvEbegdLBrFsZg_h8RBX-LHu_RDEgxtnBKUKigkbY6A/s1600/mixpanel.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0P8cZdeoadBGeM6XdCf7dGovv_UuJT-h-T4QkMiFD7yWJbamPhOjV7ZTCw8YXXbkfplKPAcOdP9_rq5oW6NOyf8tnPSEkvEbegdLBrFsZg_h8RBX-LHu_RDEgxtnBKUKigkbY6A/s1600/mixpanel.png" /></a></div>
<br />
Most apps already have user activity data with one of the popular analytics tool - <a href="http://www.mixpanel.com/">Mixpanel</a>, <a href="http://www.kissmetrics.com/">KissMetrics</a>, <a href="http://www.totango.com/">Totango</a> etc. Sequence integrates with their export API to pull in daily (could be hourly too) raw data, process it and store it. We simply reuse the data you have for analytics instead of building a clickstream data repository ourselves. The advantage of this is that your don't have to do any integration on your page - no Javascript, no backend calls etc. Just hook Sequence up with your analytics account. <br />
<br />
For in50Hrs we integrated with Mixpanel, since that is what we use in our other products.<br />
<br />
<b>2. Create rules </b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4kfsn4DJXAmNE4cSb3v479kP6PgLQob_ewbqsn9hSj00xkcmIg3NfAUoWv-Y6oyRyruZgzu-h06v-PHA_AzrtY8pAjtuEgMOXvrSpmVmEaqW9ARC0SHrD9iyJmfuMJTL3AqabmQ/s1600/rules.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4kfsn4DJXAmNE4cSb3v479kP6PgLQob_ewbqsn9hSj00xkcmIg3NfAUoWv-Y6oyRyruZgzu-h06v-PHA_AzrtY8pAjtuEgMOXvrSpmVmEaqW9ARC0SHrD9iyJmfuMJTL3AqabmQ/s1600/rules.png" /></a></div>
<br />
Once you have your data processed and stored in Sequence, it will match it against a series of rules that you can create, like in the picture above. Variables start with $ and special functions start with #. Variables are application specific and can be custom defined as per your application needs.<br />
<br />
<b>3. Link rules to actions</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF8Umlo_NU6NPKx3td4l3VVha7BqAejd76hYOSQ4ivx4ypCHJgzCKbv6ej0sPe0xWCXAB2O3OZ5ghTAdHdGIvORK5ACEPKIQpjCBTFZG3jP5W0rw0oRhWNa71zAS6bIn1ItgAhaQ/s1600/sequence.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF8Umlo_NU6NPKx3td4l3VVha7BqAejd76hYOSQ4ivx4ypCHJgzCKbv6ej0sPe0xWCXAB2O3OZ5ghTAdHdGIvORK5ACEPKIQpjCBTFZG3jP5W0rw0oRhWNa71zAS6bIn1ItgAhaQ/s1600/sequence.png" /></a></div>
<br />
Once you have the rules in place, you can link them to actions. Actions can be anything - displaying them on a dashboard, sending a particular email to the user, sending a notification to the sales team etc. For the minimum viable product that we demoed at in50hrs, we displayed them on a dashboard.<br />
<br />
<b>That is it</b><br />
<br />
That is all there is to Sequence. Link your analytics, create rules, automatically let the system take appropriate action whenever a user's activity matches the rules.<br />
<br />
<b>Interested?</b><br />
<br />
If you would like to become an early customer of Sequence, then fill up the form below. Note that this product is exactly 6 hours old, so its raw. Be prepared to rough it out.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
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Fill out my <a href="http://toolsforagile.wufoo.com/forms/x7x2x3">online form</a>.
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Recently <a href="http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-07-17/news/32714378_1_average-seed-funding-sameer-guglani-indian-startups">Y Combinator selected TapToLearn and Plivio into their program</a>. This is after they selected <a href="http://www.interviewstreet.com/">Interview Street</a> in an earlier batch.<br />
<br />
I don't know TopToLearn and Plivio personally, but Vivek from Interview Street was pretty active in the Chennai startup scene for a long time before moving to Bangalore and finally into YC. <br />
<br />
He bootstrapped for many years while pivoting on several themes. Apart from <a href="http://themorpheus.com/">Morpheus</a>, who bought into his idea, why didn't any other Indian investor buy into it? <br />
<br />
I'm sure a lot of VCs and angel networks would be kicking themselves now. They had a chance to invest early into a global startup that is now going places, and they missed the chance. Instead they will invest millions into the next shaky e-commerce, travel or deal site. <br />
<br />
It's embarrassing when they have these companies growing right under their noses, and it takes YC to recognise them. </div>Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-69462729689072853292012-03-24T11:42:00.001+08:002012-03-24T11:42:24.476+08:00Sharon Lee<div margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"> <a rel="lightbox" href="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/2/1436870_db7aef9c39.jpg" title="Sharon Lee"><img src="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/2/1436870_db7aef9c39_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a> <br /> <span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddhi/1436870/">Sharon Lee</a> <br /> Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddhi/">Siddhi</a> </span></div>Model shoot. The dress is a modern version of the cheongsam.<br />Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-89324148610327969342012-01-30T14:33:00.001+08:002012-01-30T14:33:57.858+08:00Bathing Pool<div margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"> <a rel="lightbox" href="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/15/18915165_1508541d98.jpg" title="Bathing Pool"><img src="http://farm1.staticflickr.com/15/18915165_1508541d98_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a> <br /> <span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddhi/18915165/">Bathing Pool</a> <br /> Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddhi/">Siddhi</a> </span></div>This is an image of the Roman bathhouse at Bath. It was built around 50 AD by the Romans and has been preserved until now. The water is an unusual green colour because of algae growing in it.<br />Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-61474305508539858632012-01-09T01:47:00.001+08:002012-01-09T01:47:36.526+08:00Minimum Viable Product & the Tour My App roadmap<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Recently there has been a lot of noise made about minimum viable products (MVP). MVP was the topic at this month's Chennai Open Coffee Club. Unfortunately I couldn't make it at the last minute, so there are my thoughts on MVP and our approach to building Tour My App.<br />
<br />
We recently launched a new product called <a href="http://tourmyapp.com/">Tour My App</a>. This is a product through which you can create "tours" to guide users step by step through the actions required to complete tasks in your web application. In this post I'll explain how we are applying the MVP concept in Tour My App. <br />
<br />
First some history.<br />
<br />
We've always wanted a tour functionality in our other product - <a href="http://toolsforagile.com/">Tools For Agile</a>. We searched for various solutions, but didn't find anything that fit our needs. In the meantime, <a href="http://www.thestartupcentre.com/">The Startup Center</a> had an event called In 50 Hours. The premise of the event is simple - build a product from scratch in 50 hours. <a href="http://kausikram.in/">Kausikram</a> went ahead and built an initial prototype of Tour My App over the weekend. The idea was to later on incorporate that into our product. However, during the demo at In 50 Hours, many people expressed interest in having that functionality in their products as well. We then decided to split this functionality into a separate product. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://tourmyapp.com/">Tour My App</a> was born.<br />
<br />
Having decided to build it out into a separate product, we now needed to figure out our release plan. Here is where the MVP concept enters the picture. MVP is a principle to build just enough of the product to validate your assumptions. They may be assumptions on user adoption, pricing model, sales model, technology... anything relating to the product. We have some idea about all these factors when we start, but they are all assumptions. How do we validate it? What we do not want to do is to build a big product and then learn that many of our assumptions are wrong. So, our goal was to build the product piece by piece in order to answer the most important questions up front. <br />
<br />
Out of all the questions, the top questions right now were<br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li>Is Tour My App solving a real problem?</li>
<li>Will people pay to have this problem solved? </li>
</ol>
The idea for Tour My App comes directly from a problem we faced ourselves. We badly wanted this functionality in Tools For Agile. Our analytics showed that many users signed up for Tools For Agile but would leave before they performed a single action. If we could get users started easily, then we could make our users much more productive - and increase the chance they would become heavy users.We were ready to spend money to get this solved, but we couldn't find any other product that we could use. We were desperate to get a solution. That is why after a few months of looking, Kausik decided to just write it himself.<br />
<br />
But this is just one data point. Were there other companies like this? And would they pay to have it solved?<br />
<br />
These were the questions we wanted to answer.<br />
<br />
So we did something unconventional - we charged for the beta. <br />
<br />
Generally beta testers get the product free. So why did we charge for it? In usual terminology, beta testers are <i>testers</i>. This means that they are given a buggy product and are expected to report bugs. In exchange for this service, they get the product free. In our case, the product is not buggy. We even have a <a href="http://demo.tourmyapp.com/">demo page showing it in action</a>. We want people, not to test the product, but to solve their problems.<br />
<br />
The initial beta pool is a set of companies who really have a serious problem, are willing to pay to get the problem solved and the problem is serious enough that they want to explore solutions right now, rather than wait for the application to go live later.<br />
<br />
In other words, we want to filter out the people who signed up for beta expecting a free toy to play with, and focus on those who <i>need</i> Tour My App.<br />
<br />
So what does all this have to do with MVP? And if the product is production quality, then why are we in beta? Simple, the <i>quality </i>is at production level, but the product isn't finished.<br />
<br />
You see we only built the bare minimum functionality to run a tour. There is still no UI, no sign up page, no login page. In order to save a tour, we have to go into the database and create user accounts and store the data manually.<br />
<br />
Why did we do this? Because building those features now doesn't help us answer the questions we want answered at this point. The MVP is the <i>minimum</i> you need to build to get answers to your questions. So we cut out these features for now. We'll build it later.<br />
<br />
We are sitting down with the beta companies, and together figuring out what different kinds of tours they need. Based on that we will add the data to run the tour into the database and the tour can then be deployed live into the app.<br />
<br />
The discussions will also highlight whether we need to add more functionality into Tour My App or not. We have thousands of potential features in our minds. We are not going to implement any of them until we come across a beta customer that needs it. Then we will build it. So we are not building features based on assumptions, or coolness, but only when see a need in front of our face.<br />
<br />
In this phase we want to answer the question: Can we build the kinds of tours that customers need?<br />
<br />
Once we figure out the answer to that question, and are satisfied that we are doing a good job of solving beta customer problems, <i>only then </i>will we build out the frontend, the website, the signup page, login page and all that. All that is simple - there is no unknown risk there.<br />
<br />
Then we will open to the public with the live application.<br />
<br />
PS: Do you think you are losing customers (and therefore, lots of revenue) because some proportion of users cannot figure out the steps required to complete tasks in your web application? Is the problem so bad that you want a solution right now and are willing to pay to have it solved? <a href="http://tourmyapp.com/">Then give us your email and we'll bring you into the beta program.</a></div>Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-22718353380321441482011-12-18T00:06:00.000+08:002011-12-18T00:11:20.156+08:00Review: The Cat and The Coup<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://coup.peterbrinson.com/catc_screenShot2.jpg"><img border="0" height="247" src="http://coup.peterbrinson.com/catc_screenShot2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
The Cat and The Coup is a free to play documentary game about the life of Iranian Prime Minister Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh. The story mostly centers around the 1953 coup. This is a very short game, and wont take more than an hour to complete. You play as the cat of Dr. Mossadegh through scenes that chronicle his life, starting from his death and going backwards. Each scene has a small puzzle that you must solve as the cat in order to progress to the next scene. The art is done in a very distinctive style and transitions between scenes are very nicely done. If you like history, and you like games, then go and download this game right away. You can get it here - <a href="http://coup.peterbrinson.com/">http://coup.peterbrinson.com/</a></div>Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-24184652707999677292011-12-15T12:55:00.001+08:002011-12-17T23:22:49.114+08:002011 Games in Review<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Unlike the past few years, I actually managed to complete quite a few games this year. Here is the list of games completed in 2011.<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/beat-hazard">Beat Hazard</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/chime">Chime</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/tropico">Tropico</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/kings-bounty-the-legend">Kings Bounty: The Legend</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/emerald-city-confidential">Emerald City Confidential</a></li>
<li><a href="http://coup.peterbrinson.com/">The Cat and the Coup</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/tales-of-monkey-island">Tales of Monkey Island</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/drawn-the-painted-tower">Drawn: The Painted Tower</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/drawn-dark-flight">Drawn: Dark Flight</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/broken-sword-shadow-of-the-templars-the-directors-cut">Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/broken-sword-ii-the-smoking-mirror-remastered">Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/broken-sword-the-sleeping-dragon">Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/runaway-a-road-adventure">Runaway: A Road Adventure </a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/puzzle-bots">Puzzle Bots</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/lume">Lume</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/tex-murphy-overseer">Tex Murphy: Overseer</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/nimbus">Nimbus</a></li>
</ul>
In addition, quite a bit of time was spent on <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/left-4-dead-2">Left 4 Dead 2</a> and <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/team-fortress-2">Team Fortress 2</a><br />
<br />
Update 17 Dec: Add <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/out-of-this-world">Another World: 15th Anniversary Edition</a> and <a href="http://www.mobygames.com/game/limbo">Limbo</a> to the list!<br />
<br />
Reviews will follow shortly.</div>Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-60067760419486413102011-09-02T13:11:00.002+08:002011-09-02T13:16:48.177+08:00pip re-installing wrong version of a packageI recently ran into a pip gotcha that left me scratching my head for hours.
<br />
<br />When you install a package for the first time using pip, it will download the package into a build directory, unzip it there and install from there. Even if you uninstall it, the copy in the build directory remains intact. The next time you reinstall, pip checks if there is already a version in the build. If its there, then it directly installs that without downloading it again.
<br />
<br />This is usually fine, unless you uninstalled in order to install a different version. In that case you might be mystified as to why the same old version is installed again.<pre class="source">pip install pycrypto==2.3
<br />pip uninstall pycrypto
<br />pip install pycrypto==2.0.1 # still installs pycrypto 2.3!!</pre>The solution to this is to simply delete the package copy from the build directory.
<br />
<br />If you are using virtualenv, then the build directory will be a top-level folder inside the virtualenv.Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-50227508020600792612011-09-01T01:03:00.002+08:002011-09-01T01:26:59.240+08:00Installing Python Imaging Library on Ubuntu<a href="http://siddhi.blogspot.com/2011/08/setting-up-postgres-on-ubuntu-1004.html">Continuing on setting up the VPS</a>, its now time to install the Python Imaging Library. This is another major pain in the neck.
<br />
<br />On Windows, PIL comes nicely bundled with everything. On Linux, it gets compiled, and the stupid part is that different bits of support get compiled in depending on what you have installed. PIL will silently skip components and say that the compile was successful. It's only when you run the application do you find out that some parts of PIL are not installed. Big, big, pain. If you are doing automated provisioning of machines, <span style="font-style:italic;">then you have to be careful that you have the right packages in place before you <a href="http://www.pip-installer.org/">pip install</a> PIL</span>.
<br />
<br />The two components that I am interested are PNG support and Truetype font support, because thats what we use for our app.
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">PNG Support</span>
<br />
<br />If you want PNG support, you need to have the zlib library installed. <pre class="source">sudo apt-get install zlib1g
<br />sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev</pre><span style="font-weight:bold;">JPEG Support</span>
<br />
<br />JPEG requires libjpeg62<pre class="source">sudo apt-get install libjpeg62
<br />sudo apt-get install libjpeg62-dev</pre><span style="font-weight:bold;">TrueType Support</span>
<br />
<br />You'll need the libfreetype6 package installed<pre class="source">sudo apt-get install libfreetype6
<br />sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev</pre>Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-21758461671115270572011-08-31T23:29:00.003+08:002011-09-01T00:32:24.687+08:00Setting up Postgres on Ubuntu 10.04We've just migrated our Django build server to a new box, and I'm currently installing all the necessary dependencies. Even though I've done this many times, I still keep forgetting the steps to do it properly, so this blog post will document the steps for future reference.
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">PostgreSQL</span>
<br />
<br />Installing postgres is a major pain, because there are so many annoying small things to do to get it working properly.
<br />
<br />First, before you do anything you want to ensure that <a href="http://blog.lnx.cx/2009/08/13/fixing-my-missing-locales/">you set up your locale</a> to UTF-8.<pre class="source">locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
<br />update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8</pre>If you forget to do this and its not setup by default, then postgres will use ASCII which is probably not what you want. If you sill forget this (yes, I forgot), and you haven't put in any data yet, then you can <a href="http://jacobian.org/writing/pg-encoding-ubuntu/">drop and recreate your postgres cluster</a>.<pre class="source">pg_dropcluster --stop 8.4 main
<br />pg_createcluster --start -e UTF-8 8.4 main</pre>Okay, with that out of the way..
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Installing Postgres</span>
<br />
<br />The latest version of Postgres on Ubuntu 10.04 is Postgres 8.4<pre class="source">sudo apt-get install postgresql-8.4</pre>You'll also need the dev package to compile psycopg2 later<pre class="source">sudo apt-get install libpq-dev</pre>And don't forget the python dev packages to compile psycopg2<pre class="source">sudo apt-get install python-dev</pre><span style="font-weight: bold;">Setting up Postgres</span>
<br />
<br />By default postgres is configured to use your system users for authentication. If you want to use a specific user/password combination, you'll need to change this.
<br />
<br />Open up /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/ph_hba.conf and change<pre class="source">local all all ident</pre>to<pre class="source">local all all md5</pre>Then restart postgres.
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Create a postgres user and database</span>
<br />
<br />These are the two commands for creating a user and database. If you intend to run the Django unit tests, then dont forget to give CREATEDB permission for the user.<pre class="source">CREATE USER username WITH PASSWORD 'password' CREATEDB;
<br />CREATE DATABASE db_name OWNER username ENCODING 'UTF-8';</pre><span style="font-weight: bold;">Compiling psycopg2</span>
<br />
<br />You should be able to <a href="http://www.pip-installer.org/">pip install</a> psycopg2. Note that it needs to be compiled, so you should have build-essential package installed beforehand.<pre class="source">sudo apt-get install build-essential
<br />pip install psycopg2</pre><span style="font-weight: bold;">There is a gotcha here:</span> <a href="https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/16250">psycopg2 version 2.4.2 is NOT compatible with Django 1.3</a>. Either use the trunk version of Django or use psycopg2 version 2.4.1.<pre class="source">pip install psycopg2==2.4.1</pre><span style="font-weight: bold;">Troubleshooting</span>
<br /><ol><li><span style="font-style: italic;">make or gcc is not found</span>: install the build-essential package</li><li><span style="font-style: italic;">postgres gives the error "ERROR: new encoding (UTF8) is incompatible with the encoding of the template database (SQL_ASCII)"</span>: You haven't set the locale properly before installing postgres. See the top of the post for setting the locale</li><li><span style="font-style: italic;">Django gives the error "Got an error creating the test database: permission denied to create database"</span>: If you want to run unit tests, the user must have the CREATEDB permission</li><li><span style="font-style: italic;">postgres gives the error FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "username"</span>: You need to edit the pg_hba.conf file to turn off ident authentication and set it to md5 instead</li><li><span style="font-style: italic;">psycopg2 gives the error 'PyType_GenericAlloc' undeclared (first use in this function)</span>: Install the python-dev package</li><li><span style="font-style: italic;">psycopg2 gives the error pg_config: command not found:</span> Install the libpg-dev package</li></ol>
<br />Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-49857317625715333412011-08-01T12:40:00.004+08:002011-08-01T17:11:27.318+08:00My Django Dash 2011 experience<strong>About Django Dash</strong><br /><br /><a href="http://djangodash.com/">Django Dash</a> is an online, weekend Django hackathon. You get 48 hours to develop a Django app of some sort, from scratch. <br /><br />Apart from being a lot of fun, its a great way to squeeze in a bunch of learning over a short period of time. <a href="http://kausikram.in">Kausik</a> and I set out to build a badge generation application.<br /><br />(View the site here - <a href="http://www.printmybadge.com">Make My Badge</a>)<br /><br /><strong>The idea</strong><br /><br />A lot of people probably know about the badge generation python script. This is a script that takes a list of people, a badge template and generates badges for all the attendees. The badges can be printed out and laminated beforehand for attendees to pick up at the event registration.<br /><br />The badge design itself is based on a simple principle (surprisingly violated by a huge number of events!) - keep the name large and easy to read from across the hall. We wanted to avoid badges where the name of the event is prominent but the name of the person is tiny. I'm also not a fan of handwritten badges. Not only do they look ugly, but the scribbling is rarely readable. <br /><br />We also wanted to auto-scale the font size based on the length of the name, and to split long names into two lines so that we could use larger font sizes. These badges have been used in a number of events in Chennai, and have always been popular, with some people even preserving them as souvenirs. (<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/protoin/2709843725/">See the badge in use</a>)<br /><br />One of the problems with the script is that you need some technical knowledge to generate the badge. This made it complicated for a people to generate badges for an event. It also made it difficult to generate and print badges on the fly at the registration desk for on the spot registrants. <br /><br />We decided to build a web app in 48 hours to do everything that the badge generator did, but as a Django site.<br /><br />Something that we wanted to do (apart from developing the site of course) was to get up to date on the current cutting edge technology in the Python/Django space. Sure we use a lot of cutting edge tools for <a href="http://toolsforagile.com">ToolsForAgile.com</a> but that application is now almost 3 years old. Although we do keep updating it, its a big application and updating platforms and infrastructure can take time. Plus we wanted to <a href="http://www.energizedwork.com/weblog/2006/01/spike.html">do a quick spike</a> of some of the technologies so that we could take the learning back to our product. Django Dash was the perfect opportunity for that.<br /><br />Here are some of the things we learned<br /><br /><strong>Django deployment scenarios</strong><br /><br />When we first developed our product, the only option for python and django deployments was to use <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/">Apache</a> with <a href="http://www.modpython.org/">mod_python</a>. Then the <a href="http://wsgi.org/wsgi/">WSGI</a> standard was finalised and <a href="http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/">mod_wsgi</a> came along. mod_python is now officially end-of-line with no more support available for it.<br /><br />Today one popular deployment configuration is to use an <a href="http://nginx.net/">nginx</a> frontend server to serve static files, with a reverse proxy to an Apache + mod_wsgi configuration to serve dynamic files. <br /><br />Apart from Apache, a lot of other backend servers are becoming popular, most notably <a href="http://gunicorn.org/">gunicorn</a>. <br /><br /><strong>Django hosting</strong><br /><br />There are now a gazillion hosting providers for Django. When we started out with <a href="http://toolsforagile.com">ToolsForAgile.com</a> the only option was to roll your own setup on a VPS or dedicated server. You still want to do that for complex deployment setups, but there are now any number of django specific hosts for the common scenarios - <a href="http://ep.io">ep.io</a>, <a href="http://gondor.io">gondor.io</a>, <a href="http://stable.io">Stable</a>, <a href="http://dotcloud.com">Dotcloud</a>, <a href="http://apphosted.com">AppHosted</a>, <a href="http://djangozoom.com">DjangoZoom</a>. Ken Cochrane has an excellent series of blog posts with <a href="http://kencochrane.net/blog/2011/06/django-hosting-roundup-who-wins/">a comparison of django hosting providers</a>. <br /><br />All these services allow you to simply deploy, while they handle setting up the deployment stack, load balancing and auto scaling for you.<br /><br />And of course, for the simpler use cases, there is always good old <a href="http://www.webfaction.com">Webfaction</a>. I've hosted various sites with them for four years, with not a single problem so far.<br /><br /><strong>ep.io</strong><br /><br />ep.io and gondor.io were sponsoring Django Dash, so apart from setting up a custom stack on a Linode VPS, participants also had the choice of deploying on one of these services. We decided to try out ep.io for our submission.<br /><br />Overall, I must say that I really liked ep.io. It was a bit complicated to get my head around first. It took a while to get file uploads, static files and celery set up. That was more to do with the fact that we were using ep.io for the first time. Once setup, deployment was a breeze. All we had to do was to upload the project using their command line client and ep.io would automatically provision the app with all the required services. They also have an interface where you can push your project directly via git or mercurial.<br /><br />I should note here that the ep.io client only works in linux as it requires ssh to execute remote commands. Since we were on windows, it took us a fair while to hack up the client and hook it up to do its work through Putty instead.<br /><br /><strong>pip</strong><br /><br />This is the first time we exclusively used <a href="http://www.pip-installer.org">pip</a> along with a requirements.txt file to sync up the python dependencies of all the local dev environment as well as the remote server setup. It worked really well. pip rocks!<br /><br /><strong>Celery</strong><br /><br /><a href="http://celeryproject.org/">Celery</a> is a distributed task queue. It's amazing how popular it has become in such a short span of time. For our submission, we decided to try out celery to generate the badge images asynchronously through the tasks queue. <br /><br />Celery can work on top of a number of transports. Popular configurations are to use it over an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Message_Queuing_Protocol">AMQP broker</a> like <a href="http://www.rabbitmq.com/">RabbitMQ</a> or over <a href="http://redis.io/">Redis</a>. We used it over RabbitMQ (which in turn requires <a href="http://www.erlang.org/">Erlang</a>), whereas ep.io supports celery over Redis. The nice thing is that we just had to tell ep.io that we wanted to use celery and it would set everything up, including launching the celery daemon, configuring it to use redis and what not.<br /><br />On our side, we used <a href="http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-celery">django-celery</a>, a Django integration of celery. With djcelery you can create a tasks.py file in your app with a bunch of task definitions which you can call asynchronously through a view. <br /><br />After some initial setup hiccups, it worked like a charm, allowing us to push out the badge image generation out to the workers. When badge generation was done, it would trigger another task to zip up all the images and allow the user to download a single zip with all the badges. Everything happening through Celery. It was pretty exciting to see the whole flow in action.<br /><br /><strong>Django 1.3</strong><br /><br />We used Django 1.3 for this submission. Our product is built on a version of django that is somewhere between 1.1 and 1.2.<br /><br />We got a chance to play with some of the new stuff in 1.3. We got a chance to try out class based generic views, the new logging setup, TemplateResponse, some improvements to the admin, and a bunch of other stuff.<br /><br />The admin interface itself is a huge section to explore. We briefly thought about doing the whole site through a custom admin interface, but we were running out of time so we shelved the idea for the time being.<br /><br />Django 1.3 also has a completely new way of dealing with static files. The old django-staticfiles app has been added as a contrib package and is now the official way to handle static files. The old way had a single static directory with all the static files in it. You now have to put your static files either under an app folder, or in a global static dir. You then call the collectstatic management command to pull in all the static files into a directory that the frontend server will serve. <br /><br />Similarly, there seems to have been a change in the way uploaded files are handled. Previously they used to go under the static folder. They now get a folder of their own.<br /><br /><strong>What got done in 48 hours</strong><br /><br />We eventually ran out of time on all the features that we wanted. Thats not surprising, with the amount of new stuff we were using for the first time. It took almost one and a half days to setup and get comfortable with ep.io, celery, django-celery and all the changes in Django 1.3, and getting them to work properly on the local dev environment and online on ep.io.<br /><br />However, since we built the whole app incrementally, we managed to get the important features in. If you go to <a href="http://www.printmybadge.com">Make My Badge</a> you'll be able to login, generate and download a sample set of badges. You can create events, though you need to go to the admin interface to add people to the event.<br /><br /><strong>What is left to do?</strong><br /><br />We ran out of time before we could integrate django-registration for new users to register. We've created a sample user through the admin interface for now. We also wanted to be able to upload a list of event attendees through a CSV upload form, but couldn't put that in. As a workaround, you need to add people through the admin interface.<br /><br />Apart from those two main features, there were lots of UI design work that we wanted to do which we couldn't finish.<br /><br /><strong>Where are we going from here?</strong><br /><br />Once the event judging is over, we have a bunch of enhancements to add. The CSV upload feature, for example, got done about 2 minutes past the deadline. We want to put that in. Integration with django-registration is also ready on the development environment. <br /><br />We want to eventually add integration with a payment system. Charge Rs.1 per badge generated or something like that. <br /><br /><strong>Overall Impressions</strong><br /><br />Django Dash was awesome fun. Although we couldn't complete everything we sure did learn a lot of new things that we can take back into other projects. And now that we know the tech, I'm pretty certain we can have a similar app complete in 48hrs.<br /><br />I was just going through some of the teams, and here are some submissions that I found. Remember, all these were done by scratch in 48 hours! - <a href="http://drawnby.jupo.org/">Drawn by</a>, <a href="http://familyfeed.vorushin.ru/">Family Feed</a>, <a href="http://proposalmatic.dwaiter.com/">ProposalMatic</a>, <a href="http://future-fi.com/">FutureFI</a>, <a href="http://www.goalrally.com/index">Goal Rally</a>, <a href="http://djangolint.trilandev.com/">Django Lint</a>, <a href="http://www.consolitweet.com/">ConsoliTweet</a>, <a href="http://www.courtside.me/">Courtside</a>, <a href="http://linky.ep.io/">Linky</a>, <a href="http://gitawesome.com/">Git Awesome</a>, <a href="http://stardust.andrewsmedina.com/">Stardust</a>, <a href="http://setwithme.ep.io/">Set With Me</a>, <a href="http://74.207.230.202/">Libman</a>, <a href="http://showofffr.com/">Show Offfr</a>, <a href="http://smartlinky.com/">SmartLinky</a>, <a href="http://staste.unfoldthat.com/">Staste</a>, <a href="http://djangodocs.com/#/1.3/search/">Django Docs</a>, <a href="http://playcodewar.com/">Code War</a>, <a href="https://github.com/superbobry/grepo">Grepo</a>, <a href="http://www.codrspace.com/">Codr Space</a>, <a href="http://myimg.at/">My Img</a>, <a href="http://96.126.125.5/">Gearoscope</a>Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-21728423326821823042011-03-17T23:09:00.003+08:002014-03-22T03:24:41.140+08:00Why your startup should not start with a Freemium biz model<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I'm reading Ash Maurya's book <a href="http://book.runningleanhq.com/">Running Lean</a> that I picked up from AppSumo's Lean Startup bundle [The bundle gives you $6000 worth of ebooks and web app subscriptions for only $99. Its a total bargain, but only 3 days to go before the offer expires, so get it soon - <a href="http://www.appsumo.com/?r=d3fI">use this link</a> and I'll get a $10 credit :)].<br />
<br />
There is a section on the freemium pricing model and why startups <strong>should not</strong> start with freemium. This part really resonated with me because we fell into many of these problems early on. The reasons against freemium are: <br />
<ul>
<li><em>Low or no conversions</em>: Startups often give away too much in the free plan, leaving users with no need to upgrade</li>
<li><em>Long validation cycle</em>: Conversion rates on upgrades are low, so its hard to validate the pricing model</li>
<li><em>Focusing on the wrong metric</em>: Causes a premature shift in focus from building the right product for paying customers to new user sign up</li>
<li><em>Low signal to noise ratio</em>: Free users may give feedback that paying users dont care about</li>
<li><em>Free user's aren't free</em>: It costs time and money to support free users</li>
</ul>
Do you think freemium works? What are your thoughts?<br />
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<i>This post is a part of the <a href="http://siddhi.blogspot.com/2000/01/selected-archive.html">selected archive</a>.</i></div>
Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-64467503165500671932011-01-18T17:32:00.004+08:002014-03-22T03:25:03.989+08:00Why New Ideas Can Be Bad<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This is a great post from Tim Kastelle: <a href="http://timkastelle.org/blog/2010/10/avoiding-the-deadly-trap-in-idea-management">Why New Ideas Can Be Bad</a> which ties in with my blog post from last year: <a href="http://siddhi.blogspot.com/2010/05/too-many-people-excited-by-ideating-not.html">Too many people are ideating, not enough are executing</a>.<br />
<br />
Tim references a talk by Scott Belsky at the <a href="http://the99percent.com/">99% conference</a>. Here is what Belsky says:<br />
<blockquote>
When ideas are new, we have lots of excitement and energy. However, once we settle into trying to make the idea real, the levels of both excitement and energy go down – it starts to feel more like work. How do we respond to this?<br />
<br />
According to Belsky, the natural response is to look for the excitement of a new idea again – and succumbing to this temptation is deadly.</blockquote>
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<a href="http://timkastelle.org/blog/2010/10/avoiding-the-deadly-trap-in-idea-management">Read the whole thing.</a><br />
<br />
<i>This post is a part of the <a href="http://siddhi.blogspot.com/2000/01/selected-archive.html">selected archive</a>.</i></div>
Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6400536.post-5871771406193252862011-01-17T20:10:00.001+08:002011-09-09T11:58:47.911+08:00Windmill<div margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"> <a rel="lightbox" href="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/58/204019670_f209d5dd89.jpg" title="Windmill"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/58/204019670_f209d5dd89_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a> <br /> <span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siddhi/204019670/">Windmill</a> <br /> Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/siddhi/">Siddhi</a> </span></div>Sunset at Fontville<br />Siddhihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16893177345726416004noreply@blogger.com0