They read too many startup advice blog posts.
it’s friday and Mutek Igloofest on Saturday !!
We need data for @matchFWD.
A lot.
We need data to help us suggest the best talent matches for an open job opportunity to our connectors.
We’re only 2 developers, and I spend too much time not coding so we need help.
There’s currently 2 API that buzzed trying to evaluate influence, reach, reputation and authority of Twitter users : Klout and PeerIndex.
I am not really interested by most metrics right now, but I want to know what topics a user tweet about. Lucky for me both API have such a method so I ran a small manual test on Twitter users I know and follow well enough to judge the results
Here are the results…
Seb Provencher (sebprovencher)
Klout seems to limit the number of topics to three and is much more generic. If I had to classify my users in large bucket, that could be interesting but it wouldn’t make it easier to identify specifically everyone in my twitter feed.
PeerIndex results are much more precise and diverse. The downside, I would guess without testing, is that they are probably much more volatile. The topics you rank for this week, won’t be next week topics… So how do you deal with this… You weight all tags you attach to your users ?
What am I going to use ? Most probably both. Now let’s it Stackoverflow API and GitHub API to find great developers…
Do you use these ? How ?
It’s now been way over a month since I left the corporate world to jump on this new adventure. Might seems short, but time is when you know your runway length, how fast the market is heating up and you see your arbitrary deadlines coming up. It’s enough to learn a few lessons that I’ll share here.
When you launch a project that aims at disturbing a market, there’s probably an infinite number of things to do to get there and only limited time and resources. Don’t waste time debating. If you are unable to settle a point under 20 minutes, pick a side and move on. You might be right or wrong, but by the time it will make a real difference, chances are good that you’ll have figured out the right answer. And nothing was paralyzed by unproved arguments.
You’ve read it and heard it before on a few 1000s blogs, but it’s so easy to get crazy right at the start. You like the idea so much, you feel the pressure of tens of startup looking in the same direction and you want to launch asap to get some feedback, so you start working crazy hours. Don’t. Not yet.
If you get to the launch with your tongue hanging out of your mouth, the day a real spike of traffic hit your servers and things start cracking (cause they will), I assume you better be well rested so you can stay up all night a few times fixing unexpected production bug your full-fledged QA team (lol) hadn’t found. It’s not yet about to happen to us but at least we won’t be mentally and physically exhausted the day we get there.
Our lead developer and his little family are probably helping me keeping it real on that end. Thanks Julien.
The day you started your project, you probably already had read your share of “Ten Startup Lessons Learned” and other blog posts like the one you are reading now. Cut it out. You don’t need more lessons, you don’t need more advice, you’ll figure it out. If you are anywhere like me, the time you’ll save there might make a tremendous difference over a full week. And if you fail, it probably won’t be because of an unread blog post.
Same goes for business books. (I didn’t read the post … 
You have an angle, it’s different. Looking at what your competitors do inevitably lead you to consider adding some of their features into your product. Of course, you’re too focused and smart to do it, but they’re smart too and they do have good ideas, so the temptation is there.
It’s obviously important to map your competition when you start, maybe start a little keyword and brand monitoring plan, but don’t look at it more than once a week. You do need to stay focus and that can’t be good when you feel you also need their new shiny feature.
It’s too easy to start stressing about how important is it for you to succeed, how fast you need to go, all the things that need to be done, and all the tests that are not yet implemented, and your marketing strategy that’s still undefined, so how can it be fun ? Well it needs to be. It’s a simple question of survival. if you don’t have fun doing it, don’t. People around you will feel it, they’ll start to drag their feet to work and you’ll be on the death march before you even launch.
The lesson I am now trying to learn is to get to bed earlier. But I am not quite there yet.
I also have no idea if I can keep up with writing on this blog, but for now it feels like a nice place to dump my brain.
I just read Fred Wilson post on Talent and Bandwidth where he states the obvious need for NYC startups to be recruiting students for internships and great jobs. He mentions a very interesting program called HackNY whose goal is to
Establish a sustainable, repeatable summer program matching computationally and quantitatively expert NYC students with NYC startups
which sounds a lot like the goal of an event I organized twice last year : Bridgecamp. (@bridgecamp). But HackNY goes one step further by establishing a real program, not just a networking event.
I kinda drop the ball of organizing a second round in September for lack of time and a team, but it seems to be time to bring it back. I honestly don’t care about the name or any politic, I just want to get it going again. Daniel Haran also commented about it on the Startup Founder group.
Here’s a copy of my comment there as it’s a closed group :
I organized two Bridgecamp events about a year ago aimed at inspiring students to join startups after they graduate or for an internship.One in McGill where Fred Lalonde gave a great presentation about what is it to be working in a startup and why they should to. Results were mixed as we failed to get the right audience : more MBA/business type than engineering type.Second was in Laval University where Samuel Bouchard, DuProprio.com CTO told his story and how he’s now launching his own robotic startup. Only engineering students this time.Only thing is that doing it by myself is a bit too much, even if they are very low-key events. All we need is the proper contact to the engineering departement, a list of startup opportunities in Montreal, a few dollars for pizza and drinks and a great pitch.After reading about HackNY I thought I had to go back to it. I know the Startupifier guys (Riku and Max) and Sylvain want to help.Would be great to throw at least two : maybe one in McGill and one at ETS. I was thinking mid-March as I am farily busy until and we want a few good weeks to get a good room of peeps.Anyone willing to help can email me at thebridgecamp@gmail.com. web : http://bridgecamp.pbworks.com/Follow us on Twitter : @bridgecamp
You get an email from your dad asking about your well-being as you haven’t posted anything on Facebook for 48h…
Est-ce que ça va bien?
Tu n’as pas écrit sur facebook depuis
dimanche 10.35 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
True Story
Product Manager is one of those jobs that you often learn about when you realize what you’re doing actually has a name. There is multiples paths to become a product manager, all with their advantages and inconvenients, which makes for a profession with a somewhat uneven level of practitioners. But if there’s one thing common to all great product managers is that they’re passionate about building product. Well enough to accept a Sunday morning invitation to an all day event when Montreal weather start dropping exponentially.Barry Paquet and I were probably looking at the same blog posts 8 months ago when we separately had the idea of organizing a Product Camp in Montreal. Or maybe it was the the years of self-taught knowledge and experiences telling us that there has to be a better path to get there. With the help of a few web-based drills, sponsors and devoted team, the first ProductCamp was held on Nov 21st at Concordia University, courtesy of the SIFE chapter of the university.
Around 100 persons showed up to a day full of “workshops” and presentations around the subjects of Product Management and Product Marketing. Alistair Croll opened the day with an excellent keynote from someone who has been through it all and can teach most of us a few lessons. Talks went about launch best practices, the differences between product management in big corporations versus startups, customer development and a few others.
It was a learning experience for participants as well as organizers and we now know more about the audience. It was great to see a few faces not linked to the Montreal startup scene as well and we have hope that this event will help gather Product Managers for differents industries, not just web and mobile. The products and technology might be different, but the challenges remain.
We’ve taken good note of the participants feedback and we’ll hopefully be back soon with a second edition of this event.
Vous avez reçu un avis et une facture par la poste vous informant de l’expiration prochaine de votre nom de domaine? Prenez garde!
Le truc est simple : En tant que propriétaire de noms de domaine, je reçois une lettre de Domain Registry of Canada. Avec la petite feuille d’érable et les couleurs blanche et rouge, on jurerait une lettre d’une agence gouvernementale. Il m’annonce que mon nom de domaine expire bientôt et me suggère de transférer le domaine sous leur service.
Ça peut sembler semblable à beaucoup de campagne marketing, mais avec un branding gouvernemental et un texte qui joue sur la peur de voir son domaine expiré et tout perdre, c’est un peu limite comme tactique. Surtout que leur prix sont exhorbitants : facilement 3 fois plus cher que la compétition.
Comme les noms de domaine sont souvent enregistrés par les companies elle-mêmes et non par “le gars qui a fait le site web”, Domain Registry of Canada fait sûrement de bons revenus.
Ce que je trouve bien, c’est qu’en recevant une Xème lettre du genre aujourd’hui, je suis allé voir dans Google qui en parlait. Je trouve ça beau de voir les posts de Mitch Joel de Twist Image et Gabriel de iXmédia sortir en tête des résultats de recherche.
Rien de nouveau pour les geeks, mais si vous avez une PME, que vous recevez une lettre du genre, faîtes attention
- Yah, but how should I take this Phil ?- Take is as you want. Do whatever you want to do with it. Twist it, turn it, enhance it. Don’t go for stupid. There’s good, great and awesome. And awesome is pretty cool.
picture by superdeathsquid on flickr
Just received this pic
in a very nice email from a pal telling me my recent career move inspired him
to keep pushing for the dream
and reminded him
that I need to check my head every now and again as to where I am at.
Perfect way to end the week and prepare for the new start on monday, thxs.
