I was caught off guard at the last conference I attended.  I had just built Pen.io, and at the last minute was invited out to the U.S. In this day and age of smart phones, I wrongly assumed that I could easily go without having any business cards.   Yet, with all apps being built [...]

I’m a huge fan of Zenware.  Pen.io in itself is pretty minimal, but I thought I would have a go at getting even more zen.  The result is Pen Zen.  Although this project came about simple to test out the new Pen.io API (still in private beta), Pen Zen ended up getting featured on Lifehacker [...]

When Pen.io first launched, it was covered by Techcrunch, TheNextWeb and a bunch of other blogs. Predictably traffic at the time was very good  and I thought this was an “insane” amount of traffic.  It sent through a burst of users (aka a spike)  and then started to settle down into a nice number of [...]

I’m back in Australia after what was a crazy week spent in San Francisco at the Launch Conference. The conference was amazing – it provided the perfect platform to show off Pen.io, network with other startup folk and gain some great exposure.    Hopefully this will be the first of many Launch conferences.   If [...]

This post is a bit late.  Pen.io launched a few days ago but I’ve only just managed to get around to writing this due to the usual post launch tweaks, emails, questions, press etc that needed to be done. Pen is the fastest way to publish content online.  It takes just seconds to setup a [...]

I’m a fan of SendGrid, the transactional email service provider.  I use them, and I know they’re a popular choice with other startups. But I just saw the news that Amazon was releasing the Simple Email Service.  This will compete directly with Sendgrid.  From what I can tell their products are pretty much identical, with [...]

After learning the basics of Git, I had one of those moments.  One those moments where I couldn’t imagine how I ever managed before. In what now seems like a past life, I used Subversion.  I only started using subversion because thats what the devs were using. It was only until I started learning Ruby [...]

As an entrepreneur there are numerous ways to challenge and improve your self.  Education is a popular way to add challenge to a lifestyle.   But its also handy to have a little trick up your sleeve to really push your limits.  And for me, it’s all about making the conscience effort to do one thing [...]

Who Do You Use? I get asked all the time what services I use for Task.fm and my other apps – such as hosting and sms provider.  I’m always more than happy to answer.   This is why I’ve started my latest project: WhoDoYouUse. WhoDoYouUse was inspired by one of my favorite reads, The Setup.  But [...]

Stop Adding Features Seriously stop it.  I had read all the books about launching and running lean startups.  But somehow, I still managed to constantly add new features to Task.fm.  So whats wrong with new features?  With each new feature, you add an extra layer of completxity.  This is an extra layer that your customers [...]