Please one, delight many
Big exits, and thousands of paying customers are delusions when your startup has yet to find it’s first customer. Even more valuable to an early stage startup is the answer to the question: “how the hell do we make something that at least ONE person will pay us money for? “
Stop being a whore attempting to please the entire Market.
Your first customer isn’t ‘The Market.’ , so stop trying to figure out what it wants, it has no bloody idea. The market is a collection of single customers. These single entities typically have a pretty good idea what will and won’t work for them. Think about the ideal customer for your business. Give them names and personas so they sound like real people. What does your product look like to them? Would they pay money for such a thing ?
Why I still like programming books
I have a secret , I still pay money for and read paper programming books.
When I’m reading a book, I’m the mood to learn something. Distractions must be eliminated. Electronic books exist on the computer, which is pretty much a massive sucking vortex of distraction.
Books dont have hyperlinks. There’s only one thing to do with a book, read it. (and maybe throw it at a raccoon. but that’s different.)
It’s impossible to cut/paste code from a paper book straight into an editor. (An urge that is sometimes hard to suppress with electronic books.) Typing in the code myself improves muscle memory and really makes the memory ‘sticky.’
Books are also fun to lend out. And if you get a bunch of them on your bookshelf, people will think you’re smart* ;)
Javascript + gymnastics
A JS protip from twitter:
If you’re trying to do
if(x == true){ x= 1;}
else{ x=0;}
Shorten it with : x=+!x;
Thought that was kinda neat! But why does it work? In JS a variable can be “cast” as a different variable type through the unary ‘+’ operator.
If you’re feeling limber, try these out in the console:
true + 3.33
false+false+true+true
’ ‘+false+true
Checkout Javascript Garden for other examples of casting with unary ‘+’
http://bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden/
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