www.ryankuder.com

That’s what we did with Hi, I’m.

Jonathan and I came up with the idea for Hi, I’m during a brainstorm at Koombea’s Silicon Valley office one afternoon.  Jonathan had found the domain (which is a sweet domain, btw) and we were trying to figure out what to do with it.  We decided that it would be a great short URL for a personal page, but what to put on it?  We started looking at what links people used in their Twitter profiles.  Most people used their blog.  Robert Scoble used his FriendFeed page.  There was a smattering of YouTube or Vimeo channels for people who produced video content, some company homepages, and some Facebook pages.  A few people even got recursive and linked back to their Twitter account.  What if there was a page you could easily create that would grab all of the content from all of your networks and put them on one page?

We shared the idea with a few people to get their thoughts.  One common refrain was, “Doesn’t FriendFeed do that already?”  Well, sorta.  FriendFeed weights everything the same.  So if you spend a lot of time on an epic blog post (like this one) and then tweet 10 times about your cat, your magnum opus gets pushed off the bottom of the page.  We wanted to create a page about you that had all of your content and we wanted to give you the ability to highlight things that you thought were really important for people to see when they came to learn more about you.

So now we had the idea, but needed to figure out how to build it.  For our day job we run Koombea, a web development company that focuses on building initial products for early stage startups.  We needed to keep our focus on our client work so Hi, I’m was going to be a nights and weekends thing for us.  Then we heard about the Rails Rumble.  Rails Rumble is a competition where teams of four have 48 hours to build a new web app from scratch.  You can’t write any code or create any digital assets until the competition starts and then 48 hours later, you have to stop.  It was the perfect opportunity to build Hi, I’m.

We put together a team of four guys from Koombea and registered.  Since I don’t write code, I wasn’t part of the team.  But we spent a few days leading up to the competition planning our product and our process for building it.  We were going to focus on the profile page, the registration flow, adding a few key networks to your page, and that was it.  There wasn’t time to do anything else.

On Friday night, August 21 at 5pm PST, the gun went off.  Jonathan went to work on the servers, Max started designing, and Bebeto and Jose starting writing the code.  Max did a post-competition write up over on the Koombea blog if you want to know how it went.  The guys coded and designed and deployed for 48 hours straight and we made our last commit just a few minutes before the final deadline.

There were 161 apps completed in the 48 hour time frame.  From there, a panel of expert judges cut the list down to 22 finalists.  Those finalists were then voted on by the public.  After a few days, and some tense vote watching, Hi, I’m was named the winner.  Woo hoo!  Then…uh oh.

When you build an app in 48 hours, there’s a lot that doesnt’ get done.  And there are a lot of bugs.  Most startups spend weeks or months getting an initial product ready to be shared with the public, but we didn’t have that luxury.  And because of the rules for judging, we couldn’t deploy any features or bug fixes until the contest ended nearly two weeks later.

In that time, we saw traffic skyrocket.  There were blog posts on Mashable and Read/Write Web about the competition and the judging was also sending a ton of users our way.  People were creating their pages and sharing their links on Twitter which drove more traffic.  We were totally unprepared for the onslaught of users we had coming to us overnight.  And our hands were tied to fix the bugs people were reporting.

Since then, the initial burst from the competition traffic has died back down to normal levels.  And we’ve had some time to re-do some of the things we didn’t like as well as fix bugs and incorporate some of the user feedback.  We’ve rolled a few minor patches and a big redesign of the page where you add your networks.  All of these decisions were based on the feedback that we got during that first wave of new users.  It’s also great to see people using their Hi, I’m URL as the link they use for their Twitter profiles and their other profiles on the web (thanks Brett, Allan, Todd, Gustav, and everyone else!).  It’s exactly what we were hoping for.

So now what?  We still struggle to find the time to work on Hi, I’m that we’d like to.  Our clients still come first which means that Hi, I’m sometimes has to take a back seat.  But by being forced to launch in 48 hours, we learned some important lessons that have helped not only us, but the startups that we work with.

1. Figure out your Minimum Viable Product. For Hi, I’m, this was registration, adding your networks, and your profile page.  Focus on this, and nothing else and then ship it.  As soon as you can.
2. Your plans will change. What we thought we were going to do next wasn’t what we ended up doing next.  By getting the product out early, we were able to see what worked and what didn’t and get feedback about what our users really needed.
3. Do your Customer Development homework. By talking to users before we built anything, we were able to get a good idea for where to start.  Scoble was really helpful for us in thinking about this.  We identified him as an alpha user and he helped us think about what would be helpful for someone who is on the extreme side of creating and publishing personal content on the web.  We worked backwards from there.
4. Focus on what’s the immediate next thing you have to do. Sometimes, we see startups thinking three or four steps down the road.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to know where you’re going, but when you’ve got a time crunch, the most important thing to do is to know what you’re going to do today.  And then recalculate that for tomorrow.  And then again for the day after that.
5. Don’t worry too much about small bugs. They happen.  And the first people to use your product will help you find them and determine which ones are most important to fix and which ones you can save until later.
6. You’re never done. For startups, “done” is a concept that doesn’t exist.  There is always something to do next.  If you try to define a “done” state, you won’t get there.  Get just as far as you need to and then launch.  Figure out what’s next from there.
7. Grab the opportunity when you have it. This is one area I think we could have done better.  Because our ability to work on Hi, I’m was limited after we launched, things have been slower than we would have liked.  Ideally, we’d have been launching more features and fixing more things sooner and faster.  I think we could have better leveraged the post launch hype.
8. Be ready for the trough of despair. Typically, most of your hype comes when you launch.  You’ll get written about, see huge traffic spikes, people will talk about you on Twitter…but it goes away.  Your traffic will die down.  Do not worry about this.  It happens to everyone.  Expect this and embrace it because it will give you a chance to take what you’ve learned and get on your way to the light at the end of the tunnel.  We were actually glad once traffic started to dip back down because we could breathe again and reset our focus.
9. Learn. Everything you do gives you an opportunity to learn something new.  This could be about your internal process for building, about how users are really using your product, about what your customers need, or about yourself as an entrepreneur.  The key to success is taking every event in the launch of your startup, learning something from it, adjusting, and then using that do whatever comes next.

So now what?  We’ve got some great feedback on what people want from Hi, I’m.  We’ve got plans in place for how we’re going to make some money off of it.  We’ve got our next steps figured out in terms of what we think we should build for our users.  We’ve got some ideas for breaking into other markets.  As part of our prize for winning the Rails Rumble, we get to spend a week at Techstars in Boulder, CO meeting with entrepreneurs, VCs, CEOs, and startup mentors.  We’re going to use that time to focus on refining our plans and working on developing some new features.

For now though, we’re focusing on consistent iteration and improvement.  We’re trying to work on small tasks that add the most value and learning from each thing we do based on our users’ behavior and feedback.  Launching a product in 48 hours is a huge challenge and we learned a lot from it.  Hopefully these lessons learned will be helpful for other startups who are working on their initial launches.

And if you’re curious now, you can get your own Hi, I’m page here.  There are plenty of good names left, but they’re going fast  If you do, feel free to introduce yourself like this:  http://hi.im/ryan

You know you’ve got a hit on your hands when your customers are doing your customer development for you.

My friend Ryan Graves is a big Foursquare fan.  So much so that he’s taken on a little experiment.  He’s been going around to bars and restaurants and selling them Foursquare.  The kicker is that Ryan doesn’t work for Foursquare.

He’ll walk into a restaurant, try to find the right person to talk to and then tell them why they should be using the service to reach their customers.  Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t.  But he keeps going on to the next one and repeating the process.  For Ryan, he’s getting some good sales experience, but for Foursquare, they’ve got something really interesting going on.

Ryan’s been blogging his experiences selling Foursquare.  In a post about a week ago, he writes about what would Foursquare be learning if they had sales reps.  And not just if they had sales reps, but if they had the feedback loops in place to collect the information the sales reps were funneling back and analyze it.  He lays out some of the reactions from businesses that could help Foursquare target their products to their customers better.  In a post yesterday, Ryan takes some of that feedback and translates it into some ideas for Foursquare.  If Ryan worked for Foursquare, he’d be providing some really good information back to the team to make decisions based on facts.

In Eric Ries’s post linked above, he points out that the most important part of customer development is getting out of the building.  The father of customer development, Steve Blank, says, “In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.”  But when you have a team of three, it’s hard to get out of the building.  Foursquare has a random guy in Chicago doing this work for them!

What I find interesting about this is not the conclusions that Ryan draws, but the fact that he’s doing this at all.  He explains that he doesn’t work for them, but is a huge fan of what they do.  The experiment is something he’s doing entirely on his own.

If I was Foursquare, I’d find Ryan and talk to him and I’d ask him three things…

1. Why are you doing this?
2. What are our customers saying to you?
3. What would you do based on that feedback?

If your product has fans that are doing your customer development work for you, how can you find those fans and how can you learn from them?  The first step is to listen.  Read the blogs that people write about you.  Read the tweets.  Find the reviews on places like Wakoopa or Oneforty.  Then reach out and start asking questions.

The case of Ryan doing actually legwork, for free, for a product he really loves is probably exceptional.  But it happens every day for every product.  Find these people, listen to them, and most importantly, encourage them.  If I was Foursquare, there’d be a t-shirt and a thank you note in the mail already.  Plus maybe a plane ticket and an invitation to interview for a job.

One of my favorite blogs is Photoshop Disasters.  It’s a blog full of egregious Photoshop goofs like this one where somehow the Victoria Secret model lost a leg and and is about to fall over.

The other day, they ran this picture of a Ralph Lauren Polo (heretofore referred to affectionately as “Ralph”) ad.  Whoa, that girl needs a sammich!

Not long after, Boing Boing posted

about the Photoshop Disaster.  Needless to say, Ralph wasn’t too happy about getting called out for their awful photo manipulation (well, let’s hope it was a manipulation!).  So they did what any smart company would do and sent DMCA take down notices to both blogs to have the pictures removed.

Big mistake.

Photoshop Disaster’s ISP automatically takes down any image they get a DMCA notice for.  Boing Boing’s doesn’t.  Both blogs immediately blogged about the take down notices, Boing Boing even re-ran the image.  Both blogs mocked Ralph Lauren Polo for the notices and Boing Boing even offered to feed their models if they ever happen to drop in for a visit.

Now RLP isn’t dealing with month old posts that were probably buried and forgotten–they’re dealing with new posts that are re-running the image.  I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to get into the specifics of whether RLP has a case in the notices, but the damage done isn’t legal.

What happened next is that the new posts garnered all kinds of attention, not because of the model in the picture, but because of the take down notices.

And it gets worse for Ralph.   Last night, the kerfuffle was the top story on the Yahoo! front page (sadly I didn’t get a screen shot).  The Yahoo! front page is one of the most visited pages on the internet with over 400 MILLION people per month dropping by.  Certainly more action than PsD and Boing Boing get.

So now, instead of PsD readers and Boing Boing readers seeing what was pretty much a throw away post for both blogs, the entire world is getting treated to the gloriously skinny model.

There’s actually a name for this phenomenon: The Streisand Effect.  In 2003, Babs sued a photographer for $50MM for invasion of privacy over a photo he published of her bluff top Malibu mansion as part of an aerial photography series on coastal erosion. The photo garnered more attention as a result of her lawsuit than it ever would have on it’s own.  Now Babs has a phenomenon named after her.

Had Ralph just let it go, nobody would have known.  But now, everyone knows.

Nice work, Ralph.

Lesson Learned: Sometimes it’s best to just do nothing.  And here’s the other thing:  You need to think two steps ahead and know who you’re dealing with.  If Ralph had known anything about Boing Boing, they’d know that there was a good possibility that their notice would be blogged and published for the world.  They could have seen this coming.  But they didn’t.  So not only are people seeing the digital emaciation of a model that Ralph wanted to cover up, but they’re also getting mocked mercilessly across the Internet.

My wife was nine months pregnant. Our due date was September 11, 2001. We had gone to bed the night before wondering if tomorrow would be the day our first daughter would be born.

We woke up the next morning with no labor pains and no baby. As was our custom, I started getting ready for work while my wife Mandy spent a few extra minutes in bed. While I was in the shower, I heard the phone ring. Mandy answered. “Hello?” And then a pause. “Oh my God.” It was her mom calling. She told us New York had been bombed and the United States was under attack.

We turned on the TV news and stood silent at the foot of the bed watching the events of the morning unfold. Neither of us spoke. We watched the towers burn and the chaos envelop New York. We stood there for a half hour just watching. Not knowing what was happening. Not knowing what to do.

In a daze, I finished getting dressed and got in my car to go to work. As I drove up the 680 I wondered, should I even be going to work? Oh my god, I had friends who worked at the World Trade Center. Was San Francisco in danger? What was happening next?

I got to work, but not much was getting done. Everyone was following the events of the day online. They sent us home a few hours later.

Emails started flying around amongst my Georgetown friends trying to find people we knew. My friend Ned was in New York on business. My friend Jason worked in the World Trade Center. My friend Julie worked there too. I had gone to school in Washington DC and had friends who worked at the Pentagon. Where were they? Were they OK? I was so far away and felt so helpless.

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Ned was fine. He couldn’t get out of New York so he and a friend rented a car to drive back to San Francisco. Julie had been in the towers when the planes hit and had managed to get down the stairs to safety. Everyone I knew at the Pentagon was fine. My friend Jason died on the 94th floor of Tower 2.

Jason had been best friends with one of my roommates, Peter. They were a year behind me at Georgetown. Jason would come and hang out at our apartment visiting with Peter and we’d have some beers. Or we’d hang out at the Tombs. We once got dragged by Peter out to Gettysburg College because he knew some girls out there who needed dates for a sorority dance. Jason’s date that night, Sarah, would later become his fiance but they would never have the chance to get married. Our friend Julie, who had been at the WTC that day, wrote a memorial for Jason here.

We learned later on that another classmate of mine, Joey Eacobacci had died on the 105th floor of the north tower.

The next few days passed in a haze as we learned who was OK and watched the story unfold.  I can’t pretend to understand the emotions and the grief of the families who lost people that day. I can’t pretend that I lost my best friend or a brother or a sister. But every one of us lost something that day whether we knew personally one of the victims of 9/11 or not.  Every one of us has something to remember.

Seven days later our daughter Ashley was born and from the chaos of death and destruction she brought us peace, love, hope, and life. голова болит секс голова болит секс The Tommyknockers movies

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This is a long, but excellent presentation by Joshua Porter on how to design applications for social traction. It’ll take a few minutes, but it’s well worth your time. Hat tip to Guy Kawasaki for the link.

In October, I will be running in the Royal Victoria Marathon with Team In Training to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and I need your help.  I’m raising $5000 to help support research and try to find a cure for cancer.  I’d really appreciate if you could take a moment and donate what you can to help this cause.

When I started running a few years back, I did it because I felt out of shape and unmotivated.  Since then, I’ve run a half marathon and three full marathons.  This one will be my fourth.  At the time, I was very lucky that I didn’t have a connection to cancer, but over the years, I’ve gotten to know many brave survivors and they are who I’m running for.  I wanted to introduce you to three of them that I’m running in honor of this year.

Carlos Hernandez was an 8th grader when he was diagnosed with cancer a few years back.  He was a little guy who loved playing tennis.  His chemo treatments put a screeching halt to that.  He lost his hair.  He lost weight.  But he fought.  I got to know Carlos while I was training for my first marathon.  Along the way, his family took a trip to Europe to try to see a World Cup game, but they didn’t have tickets.  Through the generosity of our Team and World Cup sponsor Yahoo, we were able to hook him up with tickets to see Germany play while they were there.  He brought me back a hat, said thank you, and gave me a hug.  Carlos is going to be a senior in high school now and I’m pleased to report that he’s cancer free.

Ellen Cirigliano was running with our Team in 2006 while I was a team captain.  On a 20 mile run in Monterey, my job was to run last and help anyone out who was having a hard time finishing.  I caught up with Ellen at around mile 16 while she was puking in some iceplant.  Puking on a long run isn’t all that uncommon, but she went to the doctor the following week anyways.  She was diagnosed that week with a brain tumor.  Since then, Ellen has been a volunteer with Livestrong, a Team In Training Honoree, and has run several marathons herself including last years NYC marathon.  Her cancer is in remission.

Drew Olanoff is a guy I know from the Silicon Valley tech scene.  He’s active in social media and startups and we’d only met once at a conference, but we hit it off.  The week I started training this year, Drew posted on his blog that he had been diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma.  Since then, Drew has teamed up with Livestrong and started blamedrewscancer.com to raise money and awareness.  Drew has 12 chemo treatments scheduled for this summer which he has approached with courage and an attitude that is inspiring.  He’s not out of the woods, but we’re hoping they’re able to get rid of it.

On Sunday, October 11, I’m running 26.2 miles to help find a cure.  I’ll be running in honor of Drew, Ellen, Carlos, and the other friends I’ve made who’ve fought or are fighting cancer.  Your help really means a lot to me.  

You can donate online here.  Every little bit helps.  Thanks in advance for supporting my marathon and our fight against cancer.  

Thanks,
Ryan

Seems like once a day I have one of those “Aha!” moments when I have some idea that I think would make a great blog post.  And once a day, I don’t write that post.  I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’m not a good blogger.  Good bloggers have the ideas and then…wait for it…ACTUALLY WRITE THE POSTS!  So in the spirit of not writing blog posts, here are three blog posts I’m not writing.  Feel free to vote in the comments for any you like and I may get around to it someday.  Or not.

1.  Fractals and New Product Development

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Fractals are geometric patterns where each iteration is a smaller version of the one before it.  When we think of product development, we can use fractals as a model for figuring out how to build features and how to prioritize that development based on customer development principles.

2.  Why San Diego Has the Best Tech Social Scene

I live in Silicon Valley.  Most of the events and parties that I end up at (which aren’t many) are somehow tech related.  Tweetups, Meetups, Happy Hours…you know the drill.  But there’s something about the scene in San Diego that I love.  We just got back from a trip down there and had the good fortune to meet up with some San Diego tech people at the Del Mar Racetrack.  Good time had by all.  It could be the people, could be the weather, could be the events, or it could just be the vibe.  In any case, San Diego’s tech scene is great. 

3.  What Is Influence?

When you work with startups like we do, one of the keys for getting your product to market is who your early adopters are and the level of influence that they have in their communities.  But what makes a person influential?  It’s not just the number of Twitter followers they have.  There’s something inherent about influential people that allows them to share what they know and

get others to act on that.

So there are three ideas.  I’ve got lots of thoughts on them and may get around to writing them up.  Any that you’re interested in?  I’m taking suggestions.

I’ve always wondered who stops by to read this blog.  Those of you with MyBlogLog accounts show up over there on the left.  There’s the really general information that I get from Google Analytics that tells me where you come from.  I get comments from a few of you now and then.  But I don’t really have any clue who you ARE.  

What do you do?  What are you interested in?  Why’d you come?  I’d love to meet you.  Leave me a comment introducing yourself.  Give me a link.  Let me know your Twitter name.  Tell me something interesting about you.  Anything you want.

And nice to meet you!

I just saw a few tweets float by from friends of mine advertising a link to a site called Earning-Profits3 (link intentionally omitted).  It’s a guy telling you how to make $1000s per month posting links to Google.  But none of the friends who I saw posted the link seemed like the kind of people who would get into that kind of thing.

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A quick search on Twitter Living Hell download shows that there are 1000s of tweets coming out right now, all from different people, with the same link.

Could it be related to the TwitViewer Supercross movie download phishing scam that popped up this week?  Regardless of where it’s coming from, it appears Twitter’s got another security problem.

As both of my loyal readers may know (hi Mom!), I’m currently training for the Royal Victoria Marathon in October to raise money for cancer research.  I’m running for my friends Drew, Ellen, Todd, and our team’s honorees who have beat or are currently fighting cancer.

Today, I’m excited to let you know that I’ve got some help in that mission.  John Frenette of Hellasound is donating 50% of all sales of his awesome running music to the cause.  Hellasound produces custom running tracks that match your cadence.  Each track is a half hour long and is customized to your stride.  If the shuffle mix on your iPod were a weekend jogger, Hellasound is Kenyan.  It’s that awesome.  I get faster just listening to it at my desk.  But seriously, having music that matches your cadence keeps your pace up and drags you along when you feel like slowing down.  Each track is $5 bucks and $2.50 of that is going to help people who are fighting cancer.  

So if you’re a runner, you can do something good for yourself and do something good for others too.  To get your customized running track, just go to Hellasound.com and use the coupon code TNTRYAN when you check out.  John, thanks for your support!

If you don’t happen to be a runner, you can still help.  It’s super easy to donate online.  Just click here and give till hurts.  Because no matter how much it hurts, it’s not worse than chemo.