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 to manage contacts,  and with all the cloud based contact managers available, business cards are still the standard when it comes to sharing contact details in a conference environment.

Out side of a conference environment, I’ve found business cards aren’t neccisarry.  There isn’t as much pressure to move things along quickly so you can bust out the next wunderapp to share contact details in some novel way.

In the end I walked away from the event with a stack of cards,  I didn’t hand over a card, instead having to switch the lame option of having the contact manually enter your details in their phone or scribbling something down on a piece of paper.  Not exactly professional.  Full disclosure – I still managed to make contact with all the leads I could of hoped for.

So as much as I would love to ditch business cards, the reality is, there is no one quick, easy way to share contacts.  Sure, there are some great tools out there that are tackling this exact problem.  But they aren’t exactly The Standard.  The Standard is still the business card.  And yes it’s a rubbish standard.

To avoid being caught out at the next big conference, I’ve caved in and got some of these bad boys printed up.  Maybe in a year or two, I won’t need to reorder.

Theres not a lot to say about the app – its just one text area and two buttons, but for quickly jotting down some notes, its extremely useful.

Enjoy.

P.S – developers, want to play with Pen.io API?  It not only allows you to post and retrieve Pen.io pages, you can also use it as a simple key store.  Think Amazon’s SimpleDB but fast, fun, and most importantly free!  Send me an email to get early access to the Pen.io API Beta

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 daily users.

Then I attended the Launch Conference.  I was chosen to present on stage, and the app was exposed to a whole new group of press, bloggers,  and early adopters.  The traffic once again spiked and then settled nicely above where it previously was and continued to grow.

Now on the graph above, things look flat during the period between the Launch Conference and March 12th.  But thats only because of the “insane” amount of traffic the app has been getting in the past few days.    So what’s driving this craziness – its not the press.  Its the users.

Much of the traffic is coming from Facebook, Google, Reddit and Hacker News, but even more exciting is the traffic being generated offline.    In the past couple of days, there has been a surge of pages in the education sector – whole classes of students are using the app to publish their work online.  Each of these pages is being read by parents and other students and the odd piece is getting picked up and shared virally.    And this in turn results in a bunch of new pages being created.

Another noticeable trend is the number of event pages being created has dramatically increased – pen.io seems to be the perfect place for quick and easy event invitations.  And these event pages have the same viral effect.

So although Techcrunch got the site off to an amazing start, its the users who are pushing the chart through the roof.  I would like to say that I knew this would happen – but I just created the tool, put it out there for the world to see, and the users did the rest and in doing so surprised the hell out of me.

Some Pen.io Pages that Rocked my World

Until I finish building a tag based discovery mechanism on Pen.io (coming real soon),   I’m the only one who gets to see the popular pages being shared on Pen.io.  Here are some of the pages that made me smile this past week:

What Else Can I Say (poetry) – Before Pen.io I never read any poetry, but now I find myself coming across creative pieces everyday on Pen.io and I must admit that I’m kind of hooked.  This is one great example.

Winning an Unfair Game – A Googler /Youtuber  posted this problem online.   One day I’ll get around to figuring it out.

Twittergate – So Twitter apparently removed their groups post on 3rd Party Clients.  Someone mirrored it here.

The Art of Intelligent Trolling – A great read.  Slightly ironic that its almost impossible to troll on Pen.io due to the current lack of social features.

I Have No Idea – I have no idea what this page from Japan is about.  All I do know is that there is what looks like a picture of some meat with animals and people living on it with a giraffe in the background.  I’m sure someone will eventually explain it to me and it will all make sense.

Japan’s Nuclear Situation – The debate on the internet about the nuclear situation spilled over onto many Pen.io pages.  Here was one.  (i have no idea if the info is correct, im just happy people are debating it).

Bristol Cake Sale of Japan – An example of an event page.

How to Survive an Apocalypse on $20 – This page was created right after the Tsunami in Japan with San Francisco in mind.   It was widely shared and as a result updated with some user suggestions.

Seaworld – A great example of one of the many random, funny, snippets of text posted online.

Most pages are created in languages other than English.  Pen.io is big in Germany, Japan, Portugal and Mexico.   And even with Google Translate, most page get lost in translation.

(cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.snapfoc.us

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 you’ve got a startup in the works, I highly recommend Launch as the place to launch your app.

My Favorite Startups at Launch

There were many amazing startups at Launch.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see that many in person (due to being stuck at my launch pad table).  Here are some of my favorites:

Disconnect is a really useful extension for privacy, and due to current world events is even more important.

Cabana has a beautifully designed site (props for the blueprint background).

Top10.co has the potential to be extremely viral as well as being the goto source for “whats most popular” type questions.

It was great meeting the BrandYourself team.  They’ve got a great product.

Mougg is a interesting product.  I created DragTune a little while back which is a similar idea (but much less advanced and I have stop developing it).

Greengoose obviously blew away the judges and was funded on stage.    I’m thinking this tech will be huge in about 4-8 years.    Its good to get in early.

Pen.io Won Best Design

After getting chosen to present Pen.io on stage (a terrifying yet surprisingly fun experience), Pen.io took out the Best Design award for Launch Pad companies.

What’s Next

I’m currently working on a very cool directory feature for Pen.io – It will index pages automatically and make it dead easy to find and create pages on hot topics.

I’m also actively looking to raise capital for Pen.io so I can take the app from being a “project” to a business.

Looks like Jason is also putting on a Hackathon for developers - definitely something I would want to be a part of.

Other site builders, blogging platforms and even html, forces the user to concentrate more on design, layout and formatting.  I liked one of the emails I got from a Teacher who came across Pen:

Pen is really plain, but that’s a good thing.  Students will worry less about formatting and more about content.

But don’t be fooled into thinking Pen only supports plain text.  The beauty of Pen, is at its very basic form, a user only needs to enter plain text to create a page.  But as they get used to the app, they can experiment and expand using HTML and the specially designed PenUp Markup language.  Furthermore, special features like drag and drop image uploads are hidden away and only become visible when the user actually needs them.

Why Publish on Pen?

A lot of the content that’s currently being published to Pen is poems and short stories.    But why put a short story, ebook, manifesto or poem on Pen?

When you publish to Pen, you’re giving that piece of content its very own home.  Its not a shared home.  That one piece of content, be it a poem or any other piece of text, has its own site.   That site is free from distractions – no navigation menu for users to click out to, no flashy banner ads to draw away attention.    There is also no date to devalue your content if its months or years old.  There’s little design for the visitor to critique.  Basically, when a visitor hits your content on Pen.io, its just them and your creation.

Pen isn’t designed to replace blogs, but rather create a permanent home for special pieces of text.

PenUp Markup Language

PenUp is a markup language that I’ve been designing for a little while.  Its designed specially for Pen.  Users who want to add videos, images, headings and more can make use of a very simple and logical set of tags.  Unlike other Markup languages, PenUp is designed to make use of third party services such as YouTube and Google Maps.  Its not just a txt to html language.  Think of it as a really simple way to make use of third party API’s.

For example, to embed a YouTube video, simply write:

:video http://youtubeURLGoesHere

PenUp also helps with formatting.  For example, to add a new page, a user just adds the page tag when they want a page break:

:page

Currently Pen only supports a few tags (:page, :image, :video, :h1,2,3) but more tags will be released when I finish the spec for PenUp.

If you want to discover some of the amazing things people are doing with Pen, make sure you follow the Twitter account where I showcase some of the best creations.

p.s – Special thanks to the Hacker News community.  Not only did the momentum behind Pen begin there, I also received some valuable (and essential) feedback.

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 maybe some slight differences in how you implement.

Amazon is obviously a popular choice with devs.  Amazon Web Services powers many of the web apps we use everyday.  So its not going to be an uphill battle for them to attract customers.

Furthermore, the Amazon Simple Email Service includes a free plan for EC2 users which offers 2000 emails a day.  For many apps, that will be more than enough.   Free can be tough to beat

This is a problem for all service providers and platforms.  You’re always at risk of having the big boys copy your product or release something similar.

Is Sendgrid dead?  No, of course not.  I’m not jumping over to Amazon and either will the other Sendgrid customers.  But it will be interesting as an observer to see how the small guys (Sendgrid) innovate (if possible) over the coming months.  We’re in for a good lesson in competition and product development.  Stay tuned.

My question to the startup community – how do you deal with this type of competition?  Tweet me up with your thoughts.

By the way: If you would like to try out Sendgrid,  new customers get a 25% discount using this special link.

Why Learn Git?

Before you learn a new skill, its always important to ask, why?  Knowing why you want to learn something makes the entire process more enjoyable, as you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. For me, I was sick of screwing up Subsversion repositories.  I somehow managed, at the great annoyance of the devs, to break various subversion repositories.  Don’t ask me how (I don’t know), and don’t email me with a lecture on the virtues of Subversion and what I was doing wrong. But why use version control at all?  Running numerous web apps (I think I currently have 7 live apps) with not just one person working on them, means there is a huge opportunity for things to go wrong.  Files are being changed almost 24 hours a day.  Basically, without version control, I would have no hope of making progress. But Git also helps me with smaller projects too.  For example, now that I’m Git aware, I use it with all my design work to keep track of the various edits and changes I make.   Now I can skip back through various designs with ease. I have even put all my personal blog files into a Git repository so that the next time I feel the urge to screw around on a server, I won’t (hopefully) break anything that can’t be reversed.

How I learnt Git

It all started with RailsTutorial.  Although its a book on RoR, its also the perfect introductory to Git.  Even if you have never used version control before, you’ll understand whats going on with the step by step practical approach. The RailsTutorial book will give you the basics.  But you’ll probably need to further expand on this, with some deeper understanding of the entire process. I found that Getting Good with Git, was a good companion to RailsTutorial.    Finally check out ProGit.  Its Free, and goes into a lot of depth.  I’m using it to learn more about the internals of Git.

Rinse and Repeat

The most important thing with Git, is to screw around.  Try experimenting and don’t worry if you get errors – just Google them and find out why.  Its the best way to learn. Also, don’t cheat by using a GUI for Git.  I think a GUI is probably harder to understand than actually using the command line so you probably won’t be cheating. You can easily learn Git in a weekend, but I found it took a couple of weeks of using Git to become really at ease with all the concepts.  And with like anything, there is always room to improve – as far as I see it, I’m still a noob.

But before I explain the “how”, let me explain the “why”.

It’s easy to feel the world is against you.  You look at other entrepreneurs and think they have it easy.  It seems they can launch just about anything and with it comes a ton of success.  And here you are, sitting, wondering why nobody is visiting your app.  Now its easy to fall into the trap of believing there is nothing you can really do about this and all that’s required is hard work and eventually something will happen.  I used to think like this.

But then I started pushing my limits, putting myself out there and suddenly the doors started opening.

For me, asking others for things can be scary.  Or used to be scary.  There was a time where I was afraid to pick up the phone and talk to a journalist, thinking, “how could they possibly care about my product”.  Yet, after doing it every day for a week, suddenly it didn’t seem so scary anymore.  I moved onto to doing something else that scared me.

But whats more incredible about this is the change in attitude it has brought about.   I’m starting to see through the irrational fears that I have (and everyone else does too) and doors are starting to get opened left and right.

I’ll take the high I get from succeeding while doing something that scares me, over sitting around, being “just comfortable”, any day.

By the way, credit for this of course goes to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Tracking Your Progress with Current.im

I want to give you guys heads up on an app I’ve been working on – Current.im.  I wanted a simple way to keep track of what I did each day.  Current.im is a daily journal which limits you to just 140 characters.   Its a very fast and efficient way to record your days. Its currently in MVP (minimum viable product) form at the moment, but will be getting a boost of functionality over of the coming weeks.  It’s of course free and I would love for you to try it out.  Let me know if you come across any bugs.

More importantly, this app is all about ease of use and being able to update your journal anywhere.  Therefore, I’ll be using the great services of Tropo to add SMS functionality.  If you would like a local phone number in your country to update your journal via sms.  Tweet me here

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 rather than focusing on the hardware and gadgets, WhoDoYouUse is all about the cloud services that entrepreneurs and their startups are using.  Its a great read if you’re interested in how other entrepreneurs run their businesses.

I’ve already got about 20 interviews lined up they’ll be going live every couple of days.

And I’m looking for more people to interview.  So drop me a line if you’re interested.  Also, if there are requests for people you’d like to see on the site, let me know with a tweet. ]]> http://feint.me/articles/who-do-you-use/feed 0 http://feint.me/articles/5-important-things-i-learned-about-building-apps http://feint.me/articles/5-important-things-i-learned-about-building-apps#comments Sat, 08 Jan 2011 12:07:26 +0000 Anthony http://feint.me/?p=2061 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 need to figure out how to use.  An extra level that needs customer support.  An extra layer that adds to server load.

Basically, if you’re not careful you’ll end up with a big mess.  I’m still recovering from this myself – and yes I’ve learnt my lesson.   And this leads to my next point…

Don’t Promise What You Can’t Deliver

Start running a web app, and sooner or later you’ll start receiving emails asking for various features to be added.  Its tempting to say “cool idea.  Yes, we’ll look at building that in the future”.  or “yes thats on our todo list”.   But, you’ll soon discover, as I did, that in between announcing you’ll build a feature and the time it actually takes to ship it, a lot can happen.

Thats why I’ve sort of fallen out of favour with GetSatisfaction.  It allows users to post and vote on feature requests.  But remember, your users don’t understand the complexity of a new feature and how it will effect their user experience. I’ve shipped features that had received a lot of requests.  But after a couple of days of using the feature, the “thats cool” effect had worn off and they stopped using it.    So when an email starts with “wouldn’t it be cool if”, just reply with a generic “Thanks for the suggestion” type email.

Communicate

Another mistake I made was not providing the proper level of communication when an app went down.  Cloud based software will always have downtime.  Its inevitable and often may be out of your hands.  Don’t be tempted to bury your head in the sand and hope it will just go away.

Communicate on Twitter, your blog, via email – however you can.  Make sure your users know whats going on.

Charge More

If you think you have a better product, don’t be tempted to cut the price to match your competitors.  If your product is premium, charge a premium for it.    Remember, your app, unless its a straight clone, can never really be compared to any other product.  It can always have unique selling points that you can justify charging more for them.  Your users will know this to.  Its often amazing what people will pay for – you think a customer is paying for your cool features, but have you ever considered they chose your product over a competitors because they like your sites colour scheme more?

Ignore the Critics

Sometimes people will write bad things about you or your product.  Its often the hardest thing in the world to not respond, but at the end of the day, its the best thing to do.    I’m not saying block everything out, just don’t feel the need to go out on a PR frenzy and respond to every comment thats made about you.  Take Digg.com for example and their latest product flop.  If they stopped feeding the big blogs with constant “we screwed up” lines, the blogs would have stopped writing negative posts and moved on.  You don’t need to justify every decision you make.  Sometimes you’re allowed to say “we think this is better”.

There are my 5.  Tweet me up with some of yours.