We've built a great product. Now what?

Previously, I had a post about Google Plus, the great party everyone showed up to, and a minute later went home.
After talking to some entrepreneurs recently, It seems like getting the crowd to take a look at your product is one challenge, and then getting them engaged over a period of time is even more challenging.
So after identifying what the world needs, and how to give the world exactly what it needs, got some feedback from friends, all that's left is bringing people in.
A few tips on doing that without spending on ads and promotion:

(I'll use a flower shop analogy).

- Try to think of one great benefit your potential user (Customer) receives from your product. Formulate that into a strong message. ("We promote flower shops" -> "The best way to promote your flower shop").
- Look for where your potential user hangs out (Online flower shop owners online forum). Stalk it, see how you can begin promoting yourself there.
- Even better - Find out your 'dealer' there (A power user...). Do what you can to lure him: Promise him to be featured for free. Make him get the customers to you.
- Now find 10 of these...

Marketing used to be based on ads, impressions, clicks.
Reliable, engaging marketing is based on opinion makers.

Or, you can do like these guys.

A small rant about Apple

If you have an app or a book published for both Google Play store and the Apple iTunes store, you must know that one as well:
The second you login into the Google Developer console, you see a neat little dashboard, presenting your apps statistics.
With the iTunes connect portal, you need to press two annoying links before you need to wait a couple of seconds and then, hopefully, you get your daily download graph and stats for your app.

This is annoying.

It's amazing how Apple, which stand for design for most people, offer such poor usability for its developers. And don't get me started about XCode.

The X of Y

People which have a hard time defining what their start up does, find it easy to use another start up as a metaphor for what they do:

- "The Groupon of vacations"
- "Like Twitter, but with Video"
- "Like Tumblr, but cooler"

This is something you wouldn't do on your website, right? So why would you introduce yourself like that in person?

Try to come up with what that company does (Go to the "about" in that company's site), and replace that with the company name:

- "Daily deal on the best vacations" (Vacations Groupon)
- "A social video information stream" (Video Twitter)
- "The coolest way to share everything" (Cooler Tumblr)

Still simple, much better.

Moonshooting.

Well, looks like there's a new buzzword in town: The moonshot.

The basic term means that instead of thinking how to solve a problem incrementally (Improve by 10%), you try to think how to solve it 'exponentially' (Improve 10 times instead).

Though there are already 'exponential thinking' courses taken at universities, Wired had a special issue about 'thinking big', and a nice website with all sorts of neat videos from top scientists and CEOs about how the world's problems are going to be solved in the coming years.

The way I see it, in today's world, this type of thinking is essential in today's scale factors. If you work in the b2c business, and solve a problem with data, you already need to think by millions and millions of transactions - That's exactly the 'big data' thinking.

So the next time you think about a redesigning your system for performance, try to think how it would handle 10 times more users. or 1000. or 1000000. The world has gotten big, it's time to scale our thinking as well :)

School yourself!

The tech world is all about tech fashion. Buzzwords come and go, new OSs, frameworks and stacks come and go, but sometimes, instead of learning the 'framework of the moment', you would want to learn some completely new fields and skills.

Luckily, this is really easy to do these days.

Udacity, founded by the head of Google X (Google's futuristic project lab), offers plenty of courses, all of them free. From web development to parallel computing, it's all there, neatly packed, with tests, certificates and all.

General Assembly offers video courses, some free and some paid, and focus more on design and entrepreneurship.

10gen, creators of MongoDB, have 3 great courses on database, from programming to scaling and maintenance (Of course by using mongo...)

There are plenty of other resources online - Just pick what you want to learn, and go there.

Spending 2 hours a week expanding your horizons and skills - It's worth it, even if just for the fun and challenge.

Is 7" the new 10"?

7" devices are a rage.
After the success of the first 'wave' of 7" devices (1st Gen. Kindle Fire, Nexus 7), and the iPad Mini cannibalizing both iPad AND iPod sales for Apple, the 7" (to 8") tablet category seems to be taking over the tablet market.

After playing with 7" devices for a while (Both nexus and iPad mini), I can definitely understand why. The form factor is simply more successful than 10" tablets. Easy to hold with one hand (iPad Mini feels as light as a kindle), good enough to work with (Thumb type is possible) - Seems like this is the spot for tablets.

So, while 10" tablets are getting more and more laptop-like (Windows 8 convertibles, for example), 7" devices will get retina-quality screens, and probably become the new form factor size for tablets.

The untapped computing power

Now that cloud computing has taken over the web, it's time to think what would be the next step. Considering that the cloud providers are making money out of renting CPUs and storage. But there's already a lot of CPU power and storage connected to the web, and not being used most of the day.

This thought kind of takes me back to a '97 project called seti@home. That project used home PCs to parallel process radio signals from space. And though users didn't gain much from this project except for a thank you mail, times have changed since.

My wife, who has a day job, has a PC connected to the internet, operating all of the day. Imagine you can rent your computer for processing power or storage. Such network infrastructure already exists, and it would be pretty simple to install a client which receives jobs or lends storage for a cloud based network. As most search/ image processing/ big data analysis engines use map reduce and distributed storage nodes, such a network could provide a reliable, viable alternative to current cloud providers.

Been doing a lot of thinking about this lately. Who wants to join me and implement such a network?