Startup founding trends in 2011

by edmarferreira on November 25, 2011 in Make with No comments

The technology world sometimes behaves like fashion and each year we see new trends arise and others fade.When a big startup hit like Facebook, Twitter and Groupon come we see a storm of clones and me-too products. In some cases these huge successes creates new categories of internet products. Think about “social networks”,”social games”,”micro blogging” and the list goes on and on. Thinking about this, one question comes to my mind:

Many startups are being founded this year and how can we visualize what are the most popular concepts people build startups around ?

First we need to choose a way to visualize this concepts. Tag clouds are a popular way to see the big picture about a blog or group of text. What if we can visualize the startups founded this year as a big tag cloud. This is not the more precise way, but it’s enough to give us a feeling about the core concepts.

Now we need some data. Crunchbase again is a sweet data source. They have tags for each company in the database. Using crunchbase API I compiled some data about companies and tags used to describe these companies. After some data cleaning and transformation I came up with this tag cloud :

The iPhone and Facebook are the most iconic success in tech world in the last years. This is not a surprise at all, we see new “mobile” apps and “social” stuff everyday. These are the most popular tags in our cloud and have a huge distance from any other tag.

The success of Groupon inspired a lot of entrepreneurs, “deals”, “daily-deals”, “group-buying” and other related tags have significant number of companies. Twitter related startups are also representative.

I was expecting a large number of startups with tags related to “cloud computing” and “cloud”, but these tags  do not appear in the top 20 results. The tag “cloud” appears in the position #25.

Location related tags are also not common in the dataset. There are no tags related to location in the top 50 results.

To visualize better the top results, look at this graph of the top 10 tags:

The 50 most common tags are listed in this table:

What about your company ? Are you surfing the actual trends or are swimming against the tide ?

How fit is your code base ?

by edmarferreira on November 17, 2011 in Think with No comments

As hackers we love make stuff. The idea of creating something from barely nothing attracts lot of people to programming. But it turns out that a lot of programming work is fighting bugs and making modifications in stuff that already exists.

Your work doesn’t stop after your product launch, it just starts. You need to maintain your application running and also make lots of modifications and additions. There are two main attributes of  your code base that needs constant attention.

Code Health

Code health is how “well” your  code works.To maintain your application healthy you need to fight bugs. This is the most common preoccupation in developers mind. Your users will complain if your application has a lot of bugs. You will be constantly fighting to fix all bugs.

Code Fitness

Not all developers pay attention to this one.  Code fitness is the capacity of your code to change. One person can be relative health and not fit. Your application can have very few bugs and still not be “fit”. You can make your application more fit by refactoring your code.  If your application code base is constantly beeingrefactored it will be more flexible over time.

Code Fitness Day

Balancing these needs is more difficult than it seems. In  the day to day activity you’ll be fighting infrastructure problems , bugs and keep developing more features to your product. You keep saying that when you have the time you will change that crappy login class or that other class has too much responsability. You will never find the time and your code base keeps getting out of shape.

One solution for this problem is to keep a reserved time to make your code more fit. I like to take one full day each 2 weeks only to do refactoring. This is 10% of total development time but it is enough to make a huge difference in the long run.  You can do one day per month or even one day each 2 months, but you need to start now.

Why one single hacker can still make the difference

by edmarferreira on November 10, 2011 in Think with No comments

Stories about lonely hackers creating big products and changing the world from their bedrooms are the core mythology of the startup community. When people think about startups they see the mythical garage where a bunch of kids are working on the next big thing. However the internet is huge now, companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft invests billions to dominate the online world. Can a lonely hacker still launch something that matters these days ? I think that its possible, totally possible. Why? lets analyse some interesting trends :

Open Source inside

OK. We are not seen linux and free software running in all desktops. Open source software lost the consumer battle in almost all fronts except maybe  browsing. However Open Source is much bigger than Linux and Firefox. Modern web development is all about open source. Linux is a slum dog in the desktop world, but in the server world it’s not even  an alpha dog , it’s a big wolf.  From databases to languages, everything that powers the web today is open source.

World Wide Hackers

A single hacker can use the huge power of the open source community and in a matter of hour compile a complet web application stack. The power of open source goes much further than this, we can sue gems, jars, plugins and other code written by developers around the world. You can build an application in some cases just gluing other peoples code. Some people can argue that this is bad for the developer and developers need to learn first how to make their own modules. I am not discussing the merit of the tools here, the fact is that a well trained hacker can easily be  standing on the shoulders of giants to see further.

Gods in the Clouds

We can launch tens of machines in an hour and then send then to oblivion in the next second.  Think about the power and flexibility that cloud computing gives the modern developer. A datacenter at your service with some commands in your terminal. You don’t need permission from your boss or some sysadmin in your company. You just need a credit card to start.

The gospel

I don’t like the TDD evangelists. I don’t like the agile Evangelists. I don’t like the Lean startup evangelists. But I love what they have done for our community. Experiences from uncountable people working to make great software products  are encoded in many forms and methodologies. The sum of these methods are the collective knowledge of our trade and its available to everybody.

You can whine about everything, but we are living in the best time ever to be a software developer. So, shut up and start making things that matter.

 

 

 

People don’t buy your product because it’s easy to use

by edmarferreira on November 1, 2011 in Think with 1 Comment

Startups are no place for the weak. As a startup founder, you will have hard and lonely hours of work. Despite this, the odds are that you will fail.
When you are building your product, there are many distractions caused by the noise of the startup community in your head. Here is a short list:

  •  Our design is ugly. We need to make it beautiful.
  •  Our infrastructure is slow. We need to make it fast.
  •  Our code has lots of bugs. We need to make it reliable.
  •  Our UX sucks. We need to make it easy to use.

We have the natural tendency to think that features will make people buy our product.
As a justification of this line of thinking, we hear people say:

  •   People buy Apple products because of their design
  •   People buy Apple products because they’re easy to use
  •   People use Google because it’s fast

The list goes on and on.

How many blog posts have been written explaining the success of (successful company) in terms of any of these features? What we all forget sometimes is that all these features are just ways to deliver value to our users; they are not the value itself.

Imagine that you have a beautifully designed, fast, reliable and easy-to-use product that sends bags of dog shit to your door every day. Do you think that anybody will want to use it?

Maybe people choose Apple products because of their design. However, they don’t buy smartphones because of design; they buy them because smartphones are valuable to them. Nobody needs to discuss the value of smartphones. A lot of people want smartphones.

This line of thinking works if what you are building already has proven value. Before you think of these issues, you have to prove the value of your product.
Your first job as a founder is to make something people want:

Products that help them accomplish something that they want.

Products that help them avoid something that they don’t want.

Products that make them feel better.

People want products that are useful or fun. Make sure that your product fits at least one of these two descriptions.

Hello World

by edmarferreira on October 26, 2011 in Think with No comments

 

I created this blog to share my thoughts about startups and document what I am learning from starting a technology company.

I will use this blog as a lab book to share with you some of my ideas and get your feedback about my projects.