Category Archives: Business

Product Manager School

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Charlie O’Donnell from First Round Capital is offering a series of free Product Management classes at the NYU/Poly Incubator in downtown NY.  Each session will go over the skills necessary for a Product Manager.  I think these are great classes for a entrepreneur to take.  Typically when you start off, you’re the product manager in addition to whatever else you’re doing.  Sadly, I already missed the RSVP for the first session, but if I find some notes online i’ll repost it here.

Here’s the breakdown of the sessions:

Location:  NYU/Poly Incubator 160 Varick St., NY, NY

Session 1: Overview – 3/24

Talk 1: Understanding the responsibilities and limitations of a product manager: What are you supposed to own?
Tark 2: Good product management vs bad product management, and customer centric vs. market centric

Session 2: New Product Development – 4/7

Talk 1: Roadmapping: Scoping out requirements and priorities, minimum viable product. Limiting what you’re building and when to fill in the gaps.
Talk 2: Wireframes, specs, project management and brainstorming tools

Session 3: In mid-stride – 4/21

Talk 1: Building a product focused culture: Taking over PM for existing products and being a PM when there wasn’t one before
Talk 2: New features vs better features: how to balance improving what you have versus adding more

Session 4: Analytics – 5/5

Talk 1: Collecting data from users – interviewing, listening labs, customer development
Talk 2: Stats, funnels, graphs, A/B tests: What numbers should I pay attention to and how?

Session 5: Ups and downs – 5/19

Talk 1:  How to figure out when things aren’t working and how to pivot
Talk 2:  Product management when driving revenue is the goal: turning users into dollars

Your idea sucks, now go do it

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Someone on Newtech posted this interesting blog post from 2008 (an oldie but a goodie) – Odds are, your idea probably sucks, so hurry up and go do it.  From what I understand, VC’s and Angels expect about 20% of their investments to be home runs, 30% to get their money back, and 50% to outright fail… and these are the experts!  Given that I don’t see as many ideas as VC’s and angels do, I give myself a 20% chance of succeeding.  What this means is I need to keep throwing stuff out there till something sticks! I need to keep failing in order to figure out what the hell works, or what I’m doing wrong.

This is definitely easier said than done.  It’s so painful …  I’m in the middle of it.  It’s a lot of self exploration,  a lot of feeling inadequate and lots of ‘What the hell am I going to do with my life if this doesn’t work?’.    I feel your pain.  One mental trick that I use on myself to keep me in the game is thinking that the closer I get to 8 failures, the likelihood of success becomes higher :) .  So I keep trying things… I keep failing… toward the hope that just one will succeed.

If anyone else has thoughts on increasing their success %, I’d love to hear it!

Explanation of the different types of hosting options

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‘What type of hosting should I get?’  I’ve had this question asked of me several times by other entrepreneurs, I thought I’d cover the Pros and Cons of each of the different types that you can get.  Hopefully it will help you decide what the best approach is for your startup.

dedicated server – this is what you traditionally expect with hosting.  a service provider allocates you physical hardware in their data center that is dedicated to your website, and your website alone.  Pros:  You can do whatever you want on that machine, because you are leasing it.  Cons:  If you get a sudden burst of traffic because you got on the Digg homepage, you’ll most likely crash the server.  Also, you need to have someone highly technical to administer the machine.

a cloud server – a cloud server is a virtual server that runs on a shared massive computing infrastructure – such as the Amazon EC2 setup, or the Rackspace Cloud Server setup.  Pros:  They are in essence, dedicated servers, so you can do whatever you want on each of the virtual servers.  If you know what you’re doing, you can typically startup new machines to handle unexpected load/traffic.  Cons:  You’ll need an even more technical person to understand how to create virtual machines and administer them.

shared hosting – shared hosting is a setup where you and several other clients of the hosting company share a dedicated/cloud server.  Pros:  All administration should be handled by the service provider, including email setup, security, and website setup (but not maintenance).  Cons:  You don’t have admin access and you can’t install anything you may need on the server itself.  Sometimes you may not even have access to the machine, except through FTP.

shared cloud hosting - shared cloud hosting is similar to shared hosting, except that everything is stored on an administered cloud infrastructure.  Examples of this type of service are: Rackspace cloud sites, Microsoft Azure, and Google Apps.  Pros:  All administration is handled by the service provider.  Generally if your site gets slammed with traffic, the shared cloud site can handle all the additional traffic.  Cons:  No control of the environment that you’re in.  If you have a highly customized server that requires add-ons that aren’t in a standard package, then you probably need to go with a cloud server or dedicated server.

Ok, hope this helps.  If you have any questions of thoughts shoot me an email.

Startup Digest – go make your own luck

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There’s a great article on venture hacks about going out to the StartupDigest events and making your own luck.  I have to be honest, I’m not really an out going person and making that stretch to actually talk to people is a difficult thing for me.  No excuses, but I think its a byproduct of my Asian up-bringing where my parents always told me not to make a scene and to not cause a stir.  But I’m learning that part of being an entrepreneur is at some level starting a stir and putting yourself out there. So I’m making it a goal this year to put myself out there. I know it’s going to be difficult and at times painful, but I hope it will make me a better entrepreneur.

Also, if anyone suffers social anxiety like I do, email me, and we can start a non-stressful dialogue, and head to one of these things together.

Open Angel Forum in NYC

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Looks like Open Angel Forum is coming to NYC.  Not sure what the deadline is for the applications, but the event is on April 8th.

For a little background, Jason Calcanis learned that certain groups of angels were charging entrepreneurs to present.  He made a huge stink about it on his show This Week In Startups and even got some of the groups to stop charging.  In addition, in opposition to the idea of charging (and to the people), he started Open Angel Forum to show that he didn’t have to charge entrepreneurs to give them a chance to present to angels.

Apply here.