What you should know as a founder of a software company
1–10 of 113 posts
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#2One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web apps and web pages is easy to remove, and people will love you for it.
I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold.
That said, I think the leap from 100 to 10,000 users is very hard, and I don't know of any advice about how to cross that gap.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#3Really, the key is solving something important that people absolutely need, and will overlook all these weaknesses for. Then something like a good UX is a can you can kick down the road for a long time.
If instead you're doing Yet Another Pinterest, then good luck, you're playing a very different game.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#4> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player.
This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making that tradeoff correctly.
In all likelihood, most startups would benefit from focusing less on UX concerns and more on selling, selling, selling.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#5> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…
Box is a good demonstration of what you describe.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#6> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…
As a front end dev / designer I used to agree with the author, but now I think it depends.
Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched.
If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#7> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…
Agreed. The mantra needs to be selling, selling and more selling. For a CEO everything else should be second.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#8Really, the key is solving something important that people absolutely need, and will overlook all these weaknesses for. Then something like a good UX is a can you can kick down the road for a long time. If instead you're doing Yet Another Pinterest, then good luck, you're playing a very different game.
> that people absolutely need
A tough one. Asking myself what I absolutely need, I come up with air+water+meat+housing. And I'm a coder! =) but even for softer interpretations of "absolutely", haven't ran into any such non-niches (we're talking "people", not obscure-exotic-niche-use-case-prospects) in a long time lately.
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#9One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web apps and web pages is easy to remove, and people will love you for it. I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold. That said, I think the leap…
How did you determine that speed was what gave the site its first toehold? Did you collect some kind of data that supported your internal push to make that a priority?
Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company
#10> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…
Yes and no. The UX -is- part of the sell. You can sell the implementers on features, but to sell to a business (especially a traditional risk averse enterprise), you have to wow non-technical people. To do that, having an amazing UX for the features the non-technical people care about goes hand in hand with a sales pitch ("Look at how beautiful those charts and graphs are. You can really visualize the data to make better decisions!")