Today we launch a product. In a lot of ways, it's no different from the dozens of products we've launched for clients to date. They all start with a small but powerful idea that, with the right amount of love, could create an order of magnitude difference in the lives of many.
Our idea is called Rocketr. It’s for teams that like to keep notebooks for their own small, but powerful ideas.
Whenever you can, strive for the simplest solution possible. Not only does it save development time (and inevitably costs), but there's a certain appeal to users when they're faced with a clean, straight-forward and elegant solution.
Take Twitter for Mac‘s solution to reply-all. They could have gone the most natural route: design a new icon, add it to the row of icons on each tweet, code a separate function that grabs all the usernames in a tweet, add a new keyboard shortcut, blah, blah, blah.
A couple months ago I wrote a post titled, How To Find A Technical Co-Founder. It seemed to strike a chord with a lot of folks.
Recently I was asked to articulate my thoughts on what a “business” co-founder ought to be responsible for, so that technical co-founders could decide on the merits of working with “these people”.
I tried out Simplenote on my iPhone for the first time the other day and was pleasantly surprised by the speed and, well, simplicity of the app over the slightly more bloated Evernote.
The UI in particular was pretty light and did a good job of staying out of your way. While on a note-taking binge, I also came across this little goodie.
Rocketr Log: Day 37 - Rocketr's Minimum Viable Product is now 20% of it's original spec. How the hell did we end up here?
Everyone’s talking about Minimum Viable Products these days… including me. At least I thought I was, until the Rocketr team ran it’s first group of usability tests at the end of November. Suffice it to say that my perspective has changed.
To date, we have called out every assumption we’ve made with each feature choice and product decision. Now we’re witnessing an entirely new level of assumptions emerging from the foundations of the application – decisions we had not expected would require questioning.
