Planet MiNDS

Nightmares

January 26, 2012 05:02 AM

Our goal with Intercom is to provide a product for every single web business to help them proactively build and manage relationships with their customers. We’ll help these businesses use great, personal, personalized customer service to turn their users into loyal, happy customers.

1,000,000 end-users tracked

Our journey towards meeting and exceeding this goal has only started. But already our Private Beta is helping 1,500 product managers and sales and support staff, in 500 growing web businesses, track and engage with over 1,000,000 users. And people love it.

“Intercom has fundamentally changed the way we communicate with our users.” — Jonathan Hoyt, GitHub

Opening the floodgates

The intense demand we’ve faced for access to our Beta led us to invite about ten times the number of people we had planned to! So we’re leaving behind our not-that-private Private Beta and launching our Public Beta today. Everyone can now get started with Intercom and watch us prepare Version 1 for launch this summer.

Seeking professional help

Our experience starting and growing (and then selling) Exceptional taught us a lot about the SaaS world. To help us in every other web business vertical, we’ve started bringing some amazing advisors on-board:

• Biz Stone (Obvious),
• Jonathan Siegel (RightVentures),
• Scott Rutherford (UserVoice), and
• Paul Adams (Facebook).

Funding the first step in a long adventure

We’re committed to building a Massively Viable Product (MVP?) that’s fun and rewarding for its users, and powerful and flexible enough so that every web business out there can easily and effectively stitch it into the way they like to work. This will take time and many smart minds. So we’ve raised $1M from strategic angel investors with a wealth of operational experience in web business:

• Jonathan Siegel,
• Eamon Leonard,
• David Coallier,
• Stuart Coulson,
• Conor Stanley,
• David Hauser,
• Biz Stone,
• Caelen King,
• Jonathan Strauss,
• Dan Martell,
• Bill McCabe,
• Andy McLoughlin,
• Roham Gharegozlou, and
• Paddy Holohan.

And from technology funds with a track record in backing successful teams:

• 500 Startups (investors in Simple, Rapportive, Slideshare, and Taskrabbit) and
• Digital Garage (investors in Twitter and Path).

On behalf of Des, Ciaran, David, Ben and myself, I’d like to sincerely thank you for your support so far.

January 25, 2012 07:36 PM

Hyperbole can be good for getting attention. While minister Sherlock's plans do not extend to the reach that the SOPA/PIPA bills had for America they are still a hot issue. Recently Stop SOPA Ireland has cropped up http://stopsopaireland.com. I would encourage everyone to browse their website and listen to what they have to say. Google the issue and learn more about the court case that led to this. Get involved, or who knows what may happen to [CENSORED]

January 24, 2012 04:04 PM

Angela's head jerked. The darkness faded, taking the dream with it.
"Visiting hours are over soon miss," The nurse smiled down at her sweetly. Behind her the ward lights flickered, their sterile light illuminating a row of beds. The nurse had such strange eyes. Heterochromia she supposed. The nurse moved onto the next bed. A monitor beeped. One of those strange machines they kept in hospitals, it had pinged every moment she had been here. How long had she been here? Angela wondered if the machine would keep going even unplugged. Blearily she followed its wires. They led into the patient seated before her.
The patient's thin voice jolted her fully awake. “Overdoing it again,”
“Mom?” Angela said.
“You dozed off on me. Have you been sleeping properly?” She was a thin woman, though perhaps that was what hospital food did to you.
“Mom I...” Angela puzzled over how to complete that sentence. Then her mouth gave up on her brain. “I'm fine mom,”
“Fine people do not nod off while visiting their parents in hospital. It'll be that Isley girl keeping you up all night,”
“I haven't seen Natalie in weeks, mom,” Not since Natalie had got a job, thought Angela privately.
“Hmm,” Lips were pursed and Angela was treated to a disapproving look. She always tried not to look guilty. She always failed.
Then her mother Rachael smiled. “It was good to see you dear,”
Angela bit her lip. “I'm glad you're doing well,”
Rachael sighed and the moment was gone. “Though I wish you'd talk to Uncle Vinny about that placement,”
“I'm planning to next week,” Angela lied. She rose from the chair. The ward was quiet. There were no other visitors and the patients were settling in for the night. One of them noticed her staring. He waved, his lined face lighting up in a grin. Angela gave a surreptitious wave back, feeling awkward.
“I should get going mom,” she said, returning to her mother's disapproving glare.
Rachael nodded. “I suppose,”
Angela embraced her in a hug. Her mother felt frail but also cold. She leaned back with concern.
“Are you alright?”
“I'll be fine, dear,” Rachael touched her daughter's cheek. Her hand was like ice.
“Holy- you're freezing,”
“I'm fine,” Rachael insisted
“Let me ask for another blanket,” without waiting for another stubborn reply Angela moved away in search of the nurse.

The old man winked at her as she passed. “Lass,” he called out but she merely smiled back, walking on.
The other patients did not look up. One was deep in conversation with a doctor who, for reasons beyond Angela's understanding, wore sunglasses. Some people. Angela passed blacked out windows, fighting an odd pang to see outside. The nurse busied herself at the final bed in the ward. It was set a little apart from the others though the curtains were not drawn. The final patient was not like the others. He was laid out like a cadaver, shrouded utterly in a body cast. Signatures were scrawled on one of the arms. There was a window left in the plaster, so he could look out. Angela peeked but his eyes were squeezed shut. A faint murmuring could be heard.
“Excuse me,” Angela said.
The nurse left down the chart, hanging from the end of the bed “Yes?”
Angela could only make out the number on it. Patient #667. “It's my mother. Could she get an extra blanket?”
“Why of course,” the nurse moved toward a cabinet. “It can get chilly these winter nights,”
Angela followed, lowering her voice. “What happened to him?”
When the nurse looked nonplussed she indicated the plastered patient. The nurse sighed.
“Oh,” she pulled out a blanket, turning it over as checked it. Then she led the way back down the ward. Angela chased after her.
“You don't want to know,” said the nurse suddenly. The doctor looked up as they passed. He gave the nurse a nod. She returned it.
“You know when you say that it makes me want to know even more,” Angela said.
The nurse smiled “Nothing wrong with asking questions, I suppose,” Then she let Angela draw closer “He played with fire,” She whispered conspiratorially.

Continue reading "Chapter 6: Passion"

January 22, 2012 10:13 PM

“Grandma’s rule” has a common meaning across countries & cultures. At a simple level it’s usually understood as “eat your carrots, then you can have dessert“. At a more abstract level it’s about priorities. Get the important stuff done first, the cool fun stuff can follow. It applies in all disciplines. Let’s see some examples.

Seasoning comes later

Gordon Ramsay is a man of strong opinions. Simplicity in cooking is something he strives for. In an episode of Kitchen Nightmares he points to a spice rack in a kitchen while screaming at a chef “I use these to make good food taste better. You use them to hide the fact that you can’t even cook yet.” True to his word, Ramsay refuses to let chefs in training use any spices or flavourings until they can get the basics right. Despite being a Michelin star chef, Ramsay has an eternal focus on the basics. Few recipes sum this up better than his broccoli soup. Ingreidents: Broccoli.

The basics always work

At Carrington training ground, Sir Alex Ferguson’s 73 year old voice booms across the field. “Get off the pitch. Don’t come back until you can hit a decent pass“. The 16 year old teenager runs to the dressing room, worried he has blown his big chance with Manchester United. His crime: a Rabona pass, a difficult way to strike the ball by wrapping your kicking leg across the back of your standing leg. Footballing greats such as Messi, Cristian Ronaldo, Ronaldinho (shown above) can all be seen doing them when they make sense. The important thing here is that they’re all masters of basic passing too. If you can’t do the basics, steer clear of the fancy stuff. Otherwise you end up a YouTube sensation for tripping yourself up.

Zoom with your legs

Photography teachers greet students on day one and confiscate all their lenses and fancy gear straight away. Zooming in to make your shot is a bad habit to form on day one of your education. If you can’t get in the right place to take your photo, all the lenses in the world won’t help. You could make a similar argument for iPhone filters.

Sometimes design is premature optimization

This happens when the complexity of building out the design is greater than the certainty that it’s the right design. For example, if it takes 2 hours to style up a component but only 3 minutes to work out that it’s the wrong element, then you’re making shitty trade-offs. Frameworks like Bootstrap are great for quickly building out a UI so you can start assessing it. This lets you quickly get a feel for what’s right, what’s consistent, and what’s most efficient for the user. Photoshop doesn’t do that, nor does writing hundreds of lines of CSS to style a button Just Right™.

Sometimes the design is the product

The lean startup movement advocates as little work as possible before validating your business model. Lean is one of those words, like Agile, that are chosen deliberately because they set-up a false dichotomy. No one wants to say they’re a Fat Startup. Or that they do Clumsy Development. So everyone is now adopting the Lean Startup® Methodology.

Lean is often misinterpreted as “don’t waste time on polish“. Sometimes the polish is all that counts. You can’t judge the market for a five star hotel by building a seedy motel and seeing how well it performs. In some cases the quality of product is more important than the type. When the interface is the killer feature, it’s tricky to go “lean”. If your belief is that people will appreciate a fully polished beautiful to-do list, you can’t show them a scrappy UI to test the market.

In conclusion

You have to get the basics right before adding any high degree of polish. All your shadows, gradients, and transitions won’t save you if you’ve built a sexy but overly complicated interface. In addition, you’re wasting development time polishing things that you don’t yet understand. But in the march towards being as lean as possible, don’t confuse the high-end with the low-end.

At the end of the day, you can make a pizza so cheaply and quickly that no one would dare eat it. That doesn’t prove there’s no market for pizza, only that there’s no market for shit pizza. Which are you making?

January 19, 2012 05:15 PM