Building Tastemaker

Darkest Hour

Since I’ve been working on Grand Opens for months now, the only true failure would be never launching in the App Store. Sure, plenty would have been learned along the way — but the project itself would be a failure.

Chapter 15: Behaviors

I’m a longtime Foursquare user. It’s been 6.5 years at this point. Despite me loving Foursquare (always and forever), the original use-case of the product is unnatural for me and doesn’t fit my behaviors at all. In addition to the game aspect of Foursquare/Swarm, the use-case was “Use this…

Chapter 14: $

Invariably, one of the first three questions someone asks about a new startup is: How are you going to make money?

When I hear that question I provide the monetization path I’m leaning towards at the time, and luckily sometimes people provide their own novel version of a…

Chapter 13: If The Tech-Giant Stars Align

In September I started thinking about a launch plan and distribution channels to target post-launch. There will be lots of tests and I’ll dust off Traction (which I highly recommend) for additional thoughts before then. But generally:

Chapter 12: Over-designing

Despite previous realizations that I was prioritizing the wrong thing, it can still happen. Poor prioritization happens not necessarily because I get tempted by trendy bullshit or that I’m a slow learner — sometimes it can happen due to good intentions.