Think Vitamin

As a professional of the tech field for the better of the last 7 years, I've had the opportunity to work with countless of these marketing, pr, bd people and to be frank, that "Greatness", I've only heard of, never actually witnessed it.

I am aware that the services are needed and can bring some tremendous results when well executed, but at this point I've settled to learn some of this stuff on my own, rather than investing too much time in finding someone to trust with the responsibilities.

Don't get me wrong, it would be absolutely awesome to find the rare pearl that the article mentions. But it's choosing between either continuously peruse for some Master of her domain, or rather investing all that energy into learning to do things myself.

Obviously, some things are more sensitive than others and I still gladly defer to the experts (I won't touch the legal stuff without consult). For others however, I've noted that there have been times when I sat with someone who was supposed to advise me on marketing or BD, and they ended up learning more about these than I did by the end of our meeting.

The whole thing reminds me of this post http://thinkvitamin.com/user-science/user-experience/ux-professional-isnt-a-real-job/ where the author claimed that "UX Professional" isn't a job title. Ensues a torrent of comments with basically the same arguments that the present article emphasizes it's because you haven't seen a great one yet.

I guess the question is then, how to find…

Ryan I am impressed with all of your achievements including http://thinkvitamin.com/ but I am not sure your advice is as sound as your business. Your team has built a great brand globally over many years with the conference business, and in my opinion you have done a nice job leveraging that brand equity for your new startup.

I do agree that if you are building a revenue focused company, you don't have to go to San Francisco.

But it's hard to argue against how easy it is to raise money or get acquired in the valley vs anywhere else in the world. Look at how easy it was for Path and Instagram to raise money and to get cheap money at that. In other markets many VCs want to see revenue not just traction and that revenue can work against you and lower your valuation - making the money more expensive.

For reference to Instagram, see this Chris Dixon interview with Kevin Systrom

"He also talks about how the serendipity of Silicon Valley contributed to the formation Instagram, remembering a party that Dixon once threw in San Francisco where Systrom ended up meeting his key angel investors."

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/founder-stories-instagram-launch/

The author's point might have been better if there weren't a bunch of CSS libraries which have already solved this (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/ and http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/ to pick two).

You wouldn't rewrite cstdlib why would you rewrite your CSS framework for every project?

More over I think a lot of people neglect the real issue which is the high touch point of the Web, it's the multiple clients. You try to write cross-OS GUIs in Java and Swing and find out how easy that is (it isn't, obviously).

The reason people advocate CSS is that it presents some real tangible benefits. CSS was specifically designed to present the semantics of layout rather than HTML tables. The author doesn't even talk about CSS tables (http://thinkvitamin.com/design/css/tables-the-next-evolution-in-css-layout/).

Again I wish people would talk about technologies they were familiar with and had even made spent time with. You don't see me critiquing the algorithmic design of search engines because I didn't choose to follow CS down that route of expertise.

I have personal experience using a number of solutions for startups. I find the Recurly.JS solution to be one of the absolute easiest to get up and running without any actual programming. It's great for MVPs. http://js.recurly.com

* Chargify

* Recurly

* CheddarGetter

* Authorize.NET (and subsequently CyberSource)

In addition to what I've mentioned from personal experience, there's a couple of previous posts on this subject worth checking out:

* Poll: How do you bill recurring payments? - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2201363

* Ask HN: Recurring Billing Solutions - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438929

* Recurring Billing For Web Apps - http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/reoccurring-billing-for-web-apps/

> It does not have, as its primary goal, the delight of random web users.

But it could. And that's really the point of this exercise: showing one way that it could additionally delight users, on top of providing the critical functionality it already does.

Delighting users is one step up[1] from what Wikipedia does right now. Yes, they're doing something of fundamental importance to the human race. But does that mean that the software needs to be bleak, emotionless, and, let's face it, not very enjoyable to work with?

[1] See Aarron Walter's Emotional Interface Design as described here: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/emotional-interface-design-the-gateway-to-passionate-users/ for a great explanation

Thank you. You're very right -- it's so easy to get discouraged at the apparent lack of activity in any early product, no matter how jazzed you might be about it. It's also easy to get caught up in the "if you build it they will come" mindset. Sadly, this seems to be rarely the case, even for the best of products. (Though as adamtmca notes, it's certainly possible!)

The first few 100 users of Forrst were all my friends and colleagues, and theirs as well. I invited folks I trusted would give me raw, honest feedback, and I trusted them to invite similarly-minded people. The next ~1,500 users came from this post: http://thinkvitamin.com/design/forrst-finds-designers-who-code-developers-who-design/