Jul
17
Had a funny and honest conversation with Tristan the other day. We talked about the stress we were feeling, what were the plans for the next few days, and how we were going to handle some investment questions.
Over the course of the conversation, we came to an interesting epiphany. No one else we know gets this. No one has any understanding of how freaking hard this stuff is. Sure we’ve now met a variety of entrepreneurs who can understand, but most of them are on their 4th or 5th venture, and have a hard time remembering just how difficult the first go was.
At any given moment of any given day, I’m worried about the progress of our product, whether we can meet client expectations, if we’ll make rent and payroll this month, what was that email I was supposed to respond to?, how many promises can I make and how many do I have to keep?, should we hire another person?, can we hire another person?, what do I know about sales?, what do I know about being CEO?, is this still a good idea?, is this now a bad idea?, can I do this?, can my team do this?, how did it already become 11pm? You know what they say, you can only keep seven individual thoughts in your head at any given time. What does that mean? It means I lose my keys and wallet a lot.
And if you think that isn’t tough enough, remember that you have to put on a great face for everyone, and I mean everyone. Investors, potential investors, friends, family, employees, advisors, and everyone else. This is why having a co-founder is so important. This is the only person in the world who understands your problems and feels your pain. They’re like your mom, your best friend, and your psychiatrist all rolled into one.
Someday this little business of ours will be chugging along running itself as they say. Until then we’re responsible for all of it.
One last thought to leave you with because you’re probably wondering why anyone would do this: while the lows are tough and often long, the highs are absolutely incredible. Absolutely incredible.
Jul
11
Amazing talk on leadership by the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. When I clicked on the video, I never imagined I’d watch the whole thing. Probably the best 20 minutes I’ve spent all day. Phenomenal topic and incredible execution. Worth the watch.
Benjamin Zander: Classical Music with Shining Eyes
Jul
11
I don’t consider myself much of a salesman
Filed Under sales | Leave a Comment
But then again with only three other people in the company (who all have real actual roles and responsibilities), the job basically falls on my shoulders.
Hrmm…
- No sales experience (Unless you count that lemonade stand back in the day)
- Selling into large, slow moving, corporate organizations at a senior level (VP and above)
- I’m still only 26
- The hopes and dreams of a company and its investors placed squarely on my shoulders
Nothing like jumping into the deep end to find out if you can swim! We’ll probably paddle poorly for a while and stay afloat. Hopefully this will give us enough time to figure out some of the techniques that make good sales teams successful. Supplement that with a boatload of research and a “do it or drown” attitude and I think we might just be able to pull this off.
I’ve got two potential customers interested so far. They’re excited about the product and the opportunities we can provide them, and we’re excited about how they view their online real estate. We’ll be sure to keep everyone updated on our progress. Look for some exciting news in the next month or two…
Jul
8
Customer Feedback is King
Filed Under public relations | Leave a Comment
Just a heads up for those of you who have been posting in the forums and playing with our Alpha test - we’ll be moving to a more robust customer satisfaction platform shortly. It should facilitate better communication between you and us.
Why the change? Simple, you shouldn’t have to keep checking the forums to see if we’ve responded to your comments. So our new solution will automatically reply to you when we’re responding to your thoughts. This means that you can easily find out when we’re working on your issue.
In addition you’ll be able to see what other users have asked and how we answered their questions. Should make it easy to figure out if we already know about a bug.
Love the thoughts, keep them coming.
Jul
7
What’s all this jazz about standards compliant browsers?
Filed Under alpha, product design | 1 Comment
Why can’t I view Event Seek in Internet Explorer? What do you mean I have to download Firefox or Safari? Why don’t you just make it work in IE?
Such a simple question with a slightly more complicated answer.
A brief history of the web to explain what I’m talking about. When the web was created, only a few groups were using it and everyone had to agree on how the computers would talk to one another. They created a set of standards for the communication so data could be passed seamlessly. This simple conversation eventually began one of the most powerful and interesting groups around today - the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The W3C “develops interoperable technologies to lead the Web to its full potential. W3C is a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding.” If you take out all the fancy words, these guys basically create the standards that continue to make the web possible. One of the biggest tasks of the W3C is continuously updating the standards that make websites possible. These guys are responsible for HTML, XHTML, CSS and a host of other technologies that our browsers use to display webpages.
Basically this group gets together, creates a standard for how browsers should read the information underlying webpages and then advocates their changes to anyone who will listen. Browser builders like Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple then integrate the newest changes into their browsers. All the cool things that webpages can do now that they couldn’t do three years ago are all thanks to these guys.
Firefox and Safari are excellent about taking the standards suggestions from the W3C and implementing them into their browsers. This means that when you sit down to create a web page, as long as you follow the guidelines set forth by the W3C it will look and act beautifully in Firefox and Safari. Should make developing easy right? It does - once you know the language, you can make a browser do just about anything.
ENTER MICROSOFT.
Surprise, surprise, Internet Explorer does not play well with others. Microsoft chooses to follow the guidelines sometimes. And sometimes they choose not to. What does that mean? It means you have two languages - one for Firefox and Safari and a host of other browsers, and one for IE. Shouldn’t be too bad except that you only get to have one webpage. Try talking to a German and an Italian at the same time with the same words and having them both understand you and you’ll know what it is like making webpages on the Internet today!
Developers have resorted to creating what are called “IE hacks” that are little tricks that they use to make IE able to understand the language everyone else uses. While these can be useful, they are inconsistent and can generate problems for other browsers. Think of it like whispering to the Italian and hoping the German doesn’t hear and get confused.
If Microsoft’s browser is such a pain, why does everyone still use it? Why wouldn’t web users just complain and force Microsoft to switch?
It’s amazing how much dominance you can have when you pre-load your browser on 93% of the world’s computers (and people are lazy). Remember a few years ago when an anti-trust lawsuit was filed against Microsoft? Yep it was about this issue exactly. It’s amazing how much dominance you can have when you provide the operating system for 93% of the world’s computers…
So, what does all of this mean? It means you have to hire very talented programmers, who are well versed in the challenges created by this issue. Give them enough time and they’ll figure out a way to communicate with Germans and Italians at the same time. It’s pretty amazing to watch, but it does take some time. Tomorrow we’ll be releasing Event Seek so that it works in Internet Explorer 7 and will spend the next few weeks working on IE 6. At the end of the day, we cater to you and will converse with you in your natural language - that is our responsibility. It’s just going to take us a bit of time.
At the urging of our development team, I’d like to say: If you’re using Firefox or Safari or some other standards-compliant browser, thank you! If you’re using IE 7, we don’t mind you too much. You’re at least easy enough to talk to. If you’re still using IE 6, please for the love of all things that are good, upgrade to IE 7!
Seriously though, continue to enjoy Event Seek, I’ll make sure you can enjoy it in any browser you like, although it make take a few years off the development teams’ collective lives…
Jul
7
“Why stand when you can sit?” - Winston Churchill
Filed Under alpha, product design | Leave a Comment
Greetings! In honor of America’s birthday, let me quote from one of Britain’s greatest leaders - Winston Churchill. The stuttering, Prime Minister once profoundly posed the question, “Why stand, when you can sit?” This question is one that I take to heart both in my personal life and professional life. Make things easy on people; make things easy on yourself. When the opportunity arises to facilitate efficiency and ease, take the opportunity to do so. In honor of this mantra, I present to you Event Seek updates designed to make our user’s experience a touch easier.
- Autocomplete is here! Don’t waste time inputting new venues into our system, chances are that we already have them. Adding events is enough of a bear without having to fully describe the locale. So, as you enter your event into our system and get to the venue portion, simply start typing the name of the venue your event is being held at and should we already have it. Simply click on it and your venue is automatically loaded. You will also notice the implementation of this feature when you are trying to send messages to friends or invite them to events.
- We are now IE 7 compatible and starting to make our way through IE 6. Soon, you’ll should have the option of discovering events on whatever non-WC3-standards-compliant browser you want!
- Lastly, and in my opinion, most importantly, we are now implementing feeds from our ticket affiliate partners. We are currently up and running with Stub Hub with many more feeds to come in the following weeks. This means that our little “Event Seek Bot” can finally take a much deserved vacation and our users can have access to the most complete event data around.
Jul
7
Designing for the Future
Filed Under alpha, design | Leave a Comment
Designing a web application takes a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of patience. Two of those three are qualities I find myself lacking (care to make a guess?). But that’s not to say that the product will be lacking. In it’s present state, Event Seek meets all the standards we’ve set for our alpha product. Things are organized in an orderly fashion and everything connects in a more-or-less seamless and usable way. But while the present offering meets our expectations and functions properly in *most* (crappy windows browsers coming soon!) browsers, could it be so much better? Absolutely.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. I think most startups can agree. On most nights and, yes, sometimes weekends, Tristan, Connor and I are all feverishly pouring over the product, the feedback, and the blueprint for beta. While beta is a long time off, the considerations for it are here and now. What more, we’ve got to plan further than that. We need to anticipate. I think one of the hardest parts about delivering a product as exciting as Event Seek is delegating good ideas for the future. Aside from all of our great ideas for features, we have to focus on our primary objective: we have to deliver a product that is functional, adaptable, and modular.
With so much of the future features being put off, one would think that the design of the product could very well be decided before a single line of Event Seek code has been written. Well, as things turn out, that assumption couldn’t be farther from the truth. For example, we reorganized the messaging system in a mere 10 minutes a couple of weeks ago. What does that mean for the front-end designer of Event Seek? You have to be on your toes. Your style sheets will need to constantly adapt and your markup should be robust enough (and semantic enough!) to handle the strain.
With that in mind, I am constantly looking at ways of setting down practices: a sort-of design document if you will. But Event Seek is still evolving rapidly. We want to be a comprehensive event solution. That word, comprehensive, and the front-end engineer’s battle –namely, to be concise– are diametrically opposed. Take for example a very likely situation: you’re a partner of ours and you want Event Seek powering your event offering. You will probably want something that looks and feels like your existing site. Further still, you may want a “widget” or some other kind functionality that works outside of the existing application. How does one style these widgets? Do you want a partner having to link to your stylesheets? Do you want to conjure up unique stylesheets for each client? These are questions I have to ask myself on a day-to-day basis.
So, if you are a front-end developer and you organize your stylesheets like I do, you’ll probably have a stylesheet that holds most of your “static” designs: elements on the page that don’t really change depending on the ID of the page or the nature of the session. Then you’ll probably have a stylesheet that holds the “modular” parts of your design: elements that come and go in a fluid fashion, and elements that need to adapt to the layout they are placed in. The problem comes when you need to have both the “static” parts of your site, and the “modular” parts of your site changing at the same time. No two clients will ever want the same design, so you need to design for the future.
In making the trasition from a completely web-standards design to one that is fueled in part by IE hacks, this is a serious point of contention for me. Designing your site to be robust enough for the future but stable enough to be cohesive and have a sense of brand unity is a very perplexing problem. It’s one of those unique challenges that makes my job more fun. In addition to our own discussions about the subject, we’ve got a great user base that has given us fantastic insight and feedback about the product. We couldn’t ask for more. Well, maybe except having that user base discuss their ideas on the forum. Everyone here at Digital Lodestone Group is proud of Event Seek alpha. We all have a part in evolving the product, anticipating our customers’ requests and exceeding everyone’s expectations.
Jul
2
Coming soon…
Filed Under production | Leave a Comment
* This message has been brought to you by the Event Seek Production Team*
Greetings everyone! I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your excellent feedback to date. Please know that all of your suggestions are being weighed and prioritized each and every day, so please keep them coming and I will make sure to let you know when you can start to see your ideas in motion.
Just a couple of updates on what you can expect to see in the coming weeks. My first priority is getting Event Seek compatible with Internet Explorer (versions 6 and 7). While our front-end programmer spends his evenings developing nefarious plans to facilitate the downfall of Microsoft, both Connor and I realize that accomodating 60% of the browsing market is substantially more than a “nice-to-have”.
Also, look out for Version 2 of Searching and Sorting in the coming weeks. I have a little secret for you all, good recommendations start with a good search engine. Once we fine tune our search methodology, our recommendation algorithm will have the room and flexibility it needs to grow and develop over time.
Keep the suggestions coming! I will let everyone know when new features get pushed to our Alpha site.