What Domino's Could Learn From Sean Ellis

Dear Dominos,

Thanks for reiterating the critical feedback you received from customers in a $75mm ad campaign and subsequently not making the necessary changes to satisfy your customers taste buds. It's a great example of how not to go about finding product market fit.

When I first saw Domino's video ad (no, not the one from a few months ago where employees blew snot rockets on some very unlucky customers' food) I gave immediate props for taking on their “harshest critics” and was interested (and hungry) enough to place an order for delivery. Result 1: Domino’s counts a $16 incremental sale, directly attributable to the campaign. The delivery smell quickly brought me back to my late-night, freshman fifteen and I was as excited as ever to try the new recipe. A few bites later, and the verdict: slightly spicier sauce, maybe less-greasy cheese and the same tasteless, cardboard crust. Domino's ad campaign had tricked me into believing they had actually made a good pizza, but upon taste instead lived up to being a “sad excuse for real pizza.” Just about everyone I’ve asked has voiced similar sentiments. Result 2: Let down customer.

Where does this seem to leave Domino’s? In the short run their execs may clap for any incremental sales (Result 1). But in the long run some of those incremental sales may turn out to be forever lost customers, like me (Result 2). And as for measuring how viral the campaign was… well, let’s just say customers liking the product seems to have been an overlooked but critical element.

The campaign shines a nice spotlight on one of my favorite learnings from Sean Ellis and core to what we’re focusing on here at Pinyadda: the importance of the customer in achieving product/market fit. If customers were more involved and engaged in creating and taste testing with the chefs to create the new Domino’s recipe, I bet we’d see different results – like brand enthusiasts (“hey I helped create the new recipe!") and a product that lives up to the new branding (“wow this is yummy enough that I want my friends to try!”).

And so ensues Pinyadda’s 2010 focus – the customer.

After months of ramping up features and then stripping them down to minimum viable product, Pinyadda is focusing on achieving product/market fit. We want to test our hypotheses of what the product is, what problem it solves, and who is using it. So our focus is iterating on who exactly our customer is and how we can build the product to best meet this customer’s needs.

As part of this effort we were recently brainstorming homepage language across a spectrum of market segments (we’ll then move to A/B testing these). We ended up with 5 sets of taglines, each set emphasizing different Pinyadda value propositions. Check them out below:

Set 1: RSS readers aren’t meeting the needs of their most prolific users.

• Better than your RSS reader.
  
• The smarter, social RSS reader.
  

Set 2: Popular information sharing platforms contain non-threaded conversations, suffer from information overload, are too hard to organize/filter, and have character limits.

• The easiest way to find and share articles and blog posts.
  
• The news you want from people you trust.

Set 3: It’s getting more and more difficult to find the news and information that’s most interesting to me personally on the web.

• Your personalized information assistant: articles and blog posts delivered just for you.
  
• Spend less time finding news, and more time reading news.

Set 4: News is meant to be discussed, but emailing links to people clutters inboxes and takes too much effort.

• A better way to send and receive links.
  
• A separate inbox for discussing links.
  

Set 5: I wish there were one place to see and discuss what’s happening in my industry instead of subscribing to loads of newsletters, trade publications and large portals.

• Free, real-time news on your industry.
• Recommended industry news from peers and colleagues you trust.

Did we miss anything? How do you use Pinyadda?

(As we strive for product/market fit over the next several months you can be assured we are listening intimately. We will be building the product – from taglines to new features – in tandem.)

A Response, New Features, and the Vision Arriving

Last week, Andrew Davis of Tipping Point Labs wrote a post called "Start Up Overexposed: Too Early, Too Far, Too Fast" that used Pinyadda as its primary example. I encourage everyone to go and read the original post, but in lieu of that commitment, here is Andrew's main point:

"...something I noticed early in my interaction on the new platform highlights one of the major concerns I have with early-phase new media channels: the integration of features that increase reach too fast, too early."

Before responding to this comment I'd like to thank Andrew for his honest critique of our product. One of the best features of new media and the social web movement is the ability to post honest reviews and the ability of small firms like ours to respond. Andrew's keen eye and expertise in the field is something that can only make our company better, and it's feedback like his that is the single most valuable metric of user engagement and satisfaction we have.

Andrew's main critique stemmed from our (now-obselete) set-up guide that asked him to import his contacts before becoming acquainted with the site. If I understand his points correctly, he argues that this sort of 'exposure' has the potential to taint the experience of the initial core user base by extending the product's reach ahead of its development - the internet equivalent of letting too many people taste the secret recipe before it's been perfected.

It's a great point and one that we've wrestled with for a while now as we decide when to push the product, what features are ready for implementation, and what the consequences of each of these actions may be. On one hand, it's very important not to poison the well, so to speak, by inviting people to an experience that's not fully formed. On the other hand, there is simply no substitute for having outside users tell you what works and what doesn't. In our business, particularly from a product standpoint, the work is never done. There will always be cleanups and feature enhancements and new functionality to experiment with, and there is at least as much art as science in the timing of these releases and updates. It is, as Andrew points out, a delicate balance "between inviting constant and sustainable new user adoption without risking too great an exposure to an audience that is not ready to adopt your new concept."

It's something we think about every day, and I'm happy to announce a couple of new features and other product improvements that we think greatly enhance the user experience on Pinyadda and will allow us to open our doors to more people. For the record, we've been in closed Alpha phase for several months now, and access to Pinyadda has been restricted to those we've manually approved on a user-by-user basis. While Andrew's point are well-taken, we have been pretty diligent to avoid over-exposure in this early phase of the product. Andrew was personally invited because we value his expertise in the field and knew that he would provide constructive feedback.

The set-up process is something I've written about before on this blog, and was where Andrew found his main rub with the user experience. I'm happy to say that we've completely overhauled the process, including a repositioning of the invite/import process he talks about. Coupled with a new landing page, the design focuses on providing simpler calls to action, giving users more information about the actions they're performing, and presenting the value of the product to the user, not the other way around.

We've also introduced a universal search function that allows users to find what they're looking for quickly and intuitively, whether they're looking for content, people, sites, or tags. It's the beginning of a series of changes designed to make navigating the system simpler and faster. Also new are several email integration features including the ability to send links and comments via email using a simple "@" operator, and the option to be notified when someone responds to a comment you've made. Both of these features have already begun to influence the way users are behaving by increasing engagement around high-quality content. Discussions are becoming more robust, comments more insightful, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

This kind of interaction is the real beauty of the Pinyadda product - the ability to engage in real discussion around content that makes people think. Seeing people begin to use the product to facilitate these discussions is an incredible experience, and one that makes the vision stronger and the will to execute that much more intense.

Once again, thank you to Andrew and all of our other testers who continue to help us make this product and this company a positive influence in the world and in their lives. Information is the currency of the knowledge economy, and we're thrilled to be playing a role in that economy that helps people stay informed, express their opinions, and enrich their world view.

If you've got any critiques or comments you'd like to share, or if you'd like to be a test user, please let us know in the comments! We've also enable Disqus commenting on this blog so that you can sign in with one of your existing accounts and track your comments from across the web.

Welcome to IA

Hello World. I’d like to introduce myself before getting into the inaugural Information Architecture blog post. My name is Greg and I am in charge of Ops and IA here at Pinyadda. I will be writing a weekly post (Friday mornings with Sliggity) with the goal of keeping you up to date on all things content. Phew, let’s get into it.

We hit a big milestone this week by crossing the one million mark in items indexed. First million is always the hardest, right? We have been increasing our content at an alarming rate and adding many new sites a day. During these weekly posts I will be summarizing a few of the big sites in hopes that you will add them to your Pin and explore a new realm of content. I will also touch upon some of our challenges and highlight our indexing numbers as well as those of our competitors (big numbers guy, I hate text).

As we expand rapidly one of the major challenges we embark on is the organization of our content. We do not want to simply index like Google and throw a firehose of information at you. Every item that comes in is carefully classified in real time by our taxonomy, which is constantly evolving as trending topics are surfaced throughout the web (and no, we don't use Twitter). This will ensure that you will find exactly what you are looking for in exactly the place you thought it would be. We're constantly adding more content based on our extremely complex standards, also known as a set of algorithms I came up with while studying at Babson, locked in the Cutler Center for days with only a keyboard and the classifieds section of a newspaper. Just kidding. We rely on a few simple metrics, our brains and your suggestions to discover and deliver the most valuable and trusted sites on the web to you.

New Sites, Week of 10/19/09 – 10/22/09:

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Raleigh News & Observer, Hartford Courant, Austin-American Statesman, Investor's Business Daily, Tennessean, Fresno Bee, The Palm Beach Post, The Press-Enterprise, Democrat & Chronicle, Birmingham News, Illinois Daily Herald, Des Moines Register, The Honolulu Advertiser, Los Angeles Daily News, Asbury Park Press, Florida Times-Union, Providence Journal, The Salt-Lake Tribune

(Free Pinata to anyone who can spot the trend in this week’s new sites)

As I’m sure you have many other interesting pieces of content to get into this morning, I am going to wrap this up. Please post comments or send me an email greg at pinyadda dot com, I’d love to hear new site suggestions and your views on IA.

Cheers,

Sligs

Usability vs. Ease of Use

In a Web 2.0 world, we want everything to be customized. We want our web applications to know who we are, where we are, what we like, even what we're doing right now. There are a few techniques that designers and engineers can use to get this information without asking us - IP targeting, for instance - but they remain rather blunt instruments, and often leave us feeling violated, as if an evil internet spy was lurking just beyond our gaze.

The solution is to put the customization in the hands of users, allowing them complete control of what information they share, giving them oodles of preferences and settings, and making sure they can change everything at a moment's notice. Seems simple enough, right?

The problem is that most users won't ever find all those switches and dials, let alone know what to do with them or what mix of this setting and that toggle will result in Goldilocks-style contentment ("a this privacy setting is just right..."). There are a few us who enjoy this kind of masochistic settings torture, but we're not average (or stable). For everyone else, there's the dreaded user set-up guide, a ubiquitous necessity that's found its way into every website you've ever signed up for.

At Pinyadda, we're all about customization. It's our bread and butter. But we're also committed first and foremost to making our user experience completely painless. The place where these two goals conflict most intensely is in the set-up process, and it's where almost all of our product attention has been directed lately.

The most difficult part of designing any component is finding the ability to put yourself in other users' shoes, to imagine what it's like to be anyone but yourself. This is multiplied almost tenfold in the setup process, and the consequences of getting it wrong are similarly heightened. If you can't set it up, you can't use it. Imagine how much business Ikea would lose if they made you put the furniture together before you bought it. That's the kind of thing we're dealing with.

So how do we bridge this gap between usefulness and ease of use? Between customization and speed of adoption? It's a tough nut to crack, and something that probably takes a few failures to get right. A few basic principles we've learned (sometimes the hard way):

- Make as few assumptions about the user as possible. When you work on something every day, it can be hard to make yourself think like a brand new user. It can almost never hurt to make things twice as simple. Then make them twice as simple again.

- There's no substitute for user feedback. It's tempting to stay inside the bubble and iterate on your own designs, but the only real metric you have for usability is users. Seems so simple, but it's always harder than you think to put your designs out there for critique. Try to remember the adage to "have strong opinions, that are weakly held."

- Speed is good, but quality is better. Brevity is important in a setup guide, but quality of user experience shouldn't be sacrificed to achieve it. Would you rather get to mediocre experience fast, or get to a great experience a little slower?

- Structure makes people comfortable. Telling users where they are and giving them a clear understanding of what's next is important. Showing the steps up front and giving clear feedback when each one is completed goes a long way toward helping people feel comfortable and relaxed instead of anxious and annoyed.

There are probably a lot more, but we'll stop there. What do you think? Can you think of a great setup guide and why you liked it? Do you have any pet peeves when it comes to setting up a new service, or any tips for how to make it great? Leave your ideas in the comments.

What's New for DEMOfall09

Finally. After a summer filled with long hours, two complete user interface overhauls, plenty of backend headaches, and a lot of soul-searching about how best to explain what we are and what we do - we're ready.

This post comes to you from sunny San Diego as we prepare for DEMOfall09. We couldn't be more excited to meet some of the best new companies in the world and see what they're doing. But we'd be lying if we said the most exciting part of all this is having a product that works and telling everyone we can find about it.

While this is certainly not anywhere near the end of our development, it does mark a big milestone for the company and gives us a great base from which to figure out where we fit in the market, how we can best serve our customers, and where we need to focus our efforts going forward. Whether people love us or hate us, we know that all of the feedback we'll get over the next couple days is invaluable. Whether you're going to the conference or not, we'd love to hear what you think. Send us an email, tweet us, or leave a comment here.

Here's a few of the notable changes we've made:

1) New user interface.
We stripped it, toned it down, and stripped it again. Pinyadda is about providing quality web content to our users, not about giving them a visual feast every time they log in, and this new look give the content you want without any distractions.

2)New homepage.
The new homepage features a module that allows anyone to get a glimpse at the content that's being shared on Pinyadda without logging in. This is the first step in a number of changes we'll be rolling out that opens up the content experience to everyone.

3)Real-time indexing.
We were close before, but now we're there. Content is coming in hot, and we like it that way.

Yesterday was the first chance we all had to really play with the finished product as end users, and I have to say the experience was great (Finished, of course, is a relative term...). Lots of great content, easy navigation, and conversations flowing. We're a little partial, but it's truly amazing to see how far the site has come over the last couple of months. Anyone who saw the original prototype can attest to that.

We flew out yesterday, went for a swim in the Pacific, and grabbed a room at the nicest HoJo we've ever seen to get our internet on and grill each other on the pitch. Today we're headed to the Longboard Bar & Grill to watch the Patriots game (at least one of us will have a close eye on the race at Louden, too) and then it's back to the laptops for all the last minute tweaking and de-bugging we can handle. We'll be posting at the end of each day of the conference to talk about our favorite presenters and give general updates.

A big thanks to all of our team members, advisers, friends, parents, and users. We couldn't have come this far without you. You can follow the conference on twitter using the hastag #demo09. If you're going to be in attendance, you can find us at booth 65.

Defining Quality Content

As the media landscape continues to change and we move away from traditional forms of content like daily newspapers and monthly magazines, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish quality content from the barrage of information that's available everyday.

At Pinyadda, we've made a commitment to present our users with content that's "high-quality" - but like many others, we continue to find it incredibly difficult to define a set of standards for internet content. Before we try to answer that question, let's go back to the beginning:

Used to be there were newspapers - big newspapers. At least one in every city. What they printed was considered fact; it could be reasonably asserted that leads had been followed, investigations had been performed, sources checked, editors consulted. With relatively few exceptions, these papers represented the definitive source of information for businesspeople, laymen, and housewives alike. They print it, you read it. Simple game.

Over time we saw the reach of radio and television extend, but the mechanics remained the same. It took lots of money and smarts to run a station or a channel, and the barriers to entry remained high: formal training, infrastructure, and approval from the media cohort. One could still reasonably assume that these sources met at least some minimum standards of professionalism and journalistic integrity - otherwise they wouldn't be on the air.

Yet once the internet gave everyone the ability to become a publisher, these assurances vanished altogether. Certain old media stalwarts (and some new ones, ProPublica and Politico come to mind) have successfully established brands that serve the purpose of validating the quality of their content. So create a powerful brand, problem solved. Instant legitimacy.

But what about the other 10,000 sites that are producing quality content on a daily basis? The small-to-medium blogs with a couple of writers who focus on local and niche issues, and probably do it better than the big brands - what about them? Here's where it gets tricky.

From our standpoint, there's a very fine line between providing readers with the information they want and maintaining high standards of quality. So we have to establish some benchmarks - a job much easier said than done. There are a few basic metrics:

Traffic:
Unique visitors over time.
Pros: Gives an accurate approximation of how many people read and/or trust a given web property.
Cons: Quantity doesn't necessarily denote quality.

Staff:
Does the source have professional (paid) content staff?
Pros: Professional staff indicates a seriousness of purpose that definitely increases the likelihood of quality content.
Cons: Tough benchmark for many sites to meet.

Frequency of Publication:
How often does the source publish?
Pros: Acknowledges and recognizes obligation to an audience (or perceived audience).
Cons: Publishing poor content every day doesn't make it good content.


None of these are decisive metrics, and none can be used in isolation. Furthermore, each of them ignores the most subjective aspect of the debate: quality is, in many ways, in the eyes of the beholder. Who's to say that the NYTimes is of any higher quality than TMZ? Both have lots of readers, both publish oodles of content, both have full-time staff. And for some readers, TMZ's content might be far more interesting.

We tend to say something along these lines: "Nonsense. The NYTimes is a much higher quality source than TMZ. It's all fact-checked and very serious. TMZ is nothing but unfounded gossip." But is it really true? What about the Op-Ed section? The blogs? Suddenly the two sites seem closer than we thought. The example is a bit of a stretch, but the concept holds.

And what about a well-reasoned, thoughtfully-prepared, and oft-published blog that has little traffic? It might well be the most "quality" source available on a given niche topic, but if no one reads it, who cares? It a blog post falls in the internet forest, does it make a sound? More importantly, should it?

These are hard questions, and ones that have vast implications for the future of media on the internet. Without a way to define legitimacy, the big boys will continue to feel the air sucked out of their advertising revenues, as more and more traffic defects to the little guys. But it's our hope that finding a way to create a set of standards for quality content will raise the bar a little for everyone, creating a media ecosystem where everyone is encouraged to do more with less, not more of less. In other words, finding a way to grant legitimacy to sources who deserve it can both improve margins for those that meet expectations, and encourage others who might be capable of high quality content production to step up to the plate a little sooner.

Building a Better Plane: Why RSS and the Social Web Don't Mix

TechCrunch released an article today with the headline "Bloglines On Life Support". And last week, NewsGator made the decision to shelve their web-based reader and allowed users to sync their feeds with Google Reader, which now moves into an uncontested leadership role in the RSS reader market. Can we sound the final bell on the era of RSS?

Probably not just yet. But soon - very soon. The beauty of RSS is its ability to get content from lots of sources in one place. But not a lot of people ever really got it. Many different services, from browsers to email clients to desktop applications, incorporated RSS into their feature sets. But how many Outlook users took the time to customize the RSS section of the app? How many Safari/Firefox users ever touched the built-in RSS feed readers? How many people ever downloaded a desktop reader like NetNewsWire? When compared to the general internet user base, these numbers are small. And not because RSS is nerdy or geeky - in fact, it's one of the simplest technologies to understand. The failures of RSS hinge on two key problems: infrastructure and time.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure can mean many things. Here I'm referring to it as the pipes through which RSS feeds travel and the pages or applications used to view those feeds. No one quite got it right. Even as Google Reader grows in popularity, it remains a technology of the few and not the many, for one key reason: you have to understand how it works to use it. You have to understand how feeds work, you have to know what you want to add, and you have to have some basic knowledge of how to organize the content your read online. This has been the case with almost all implementations of RSS - the "it's useful, it's kind of interesting, but I don't really get it and it's hard to set up" argument. It's a good argument - and even an expert RSS user will readily admit that it's not great, and there's probably a better way to do this stuff.

Time

RSS isn't real time. Probably because what we think of as "real-time" didn't exist when RSS was created. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no FriendFeed. The difference between 5 seconds and 5 minutes wasn't that great. Things have changed, and people demand almost instant information. RSS has responded, and services and protocols like Pubsubhubub are making it faster, indeed getting it much closer to real time. But it's the equivalent of strapping a jet engine to a glider instead of building a better plane. RSS isn't meant to handle real time information. It was intended for people who read a relatively static list of sources, looking for relatively specific types of information. It wasn't designed as a platform for people to run their whole world through, and it's not equipped to handle the influx of content from 100 sites, track the updates of 5,000 followers, or monitor the stream of 500 friends. It's simply too much content, too fast, and RSS inherently limits our ability to parse, sort, and rank this content. Services like my6sense are trying to solve this, but it's unclear if anyone has a good way to do this. I'm not convinced.

At Pinyadda, we have our own thoughts about the future of information. RSS was created to serve a specific information seeking need, before the social web was built. But now it's built and we want to use it for getting information - not just social updates and birthday reminders but also articles about politics and sports scores and song recommendations and product deals. And we want it all in real time. And RSS can't do it, even with ten jet engines strapped on. What we need is a better plane - a whole new way of thinking about information that uses the a social infrastructure to connect content across silos in real time. That's what we're trying to build for our users, and if we do it right they won't have to know a thing about how it works, they'll just know that it does work.

On that note, we'd also like to use this post to announce that we've been selected to participate in the AlphaPitch portion of the DEMOfall'09 conference in San Diego, September 21-23. If you're going to be there, please leave us a note, send us an email, or hit us up on Twitter (@Pinyadda). We can't wait to show the world what we've been building.

The State of Information Architecture

A large part of what we're doing at Pinyadda revolves around information architecture - the way content is organized on any given website. In many ways, the internet resembles the largest library ever created, harboring a collection of books, articles, photos, songs and videos in unfathomable quantity. Yet unlike the modern library, where every item is classified and sorted in a universal manner, the internet library is made up of millions of walled repositories, each with its own unique method of classifying content.

Classification is one of the most important parts of granting identity to any person or object - if I don't know what you are, it's nearly impossible for me to determine who you are. We classify things in our everyday life in a subconscious manner; it's how we make sense of the world around us. But if you've ever tried unsuccessfully to find a certain article on a certain webpage, you've experienced firsthand the limitations of the way things are classified on the internet. Was that article in the Culture section, or the Arts section? Maybe it was Entertainment? Or was it Local?

We have a few solutions to this problem, the first and most obvious being search, and most of the time it does the trick. You know what you're looking for, you type it in the box, and viola, up pops the article. Sometimes. Other times it's there, but it's buried 30 items deep in the results, and still other times it's not there at all. And most importantly, search requires that you knew what you were looking for in the first place.

What we're moving towards is a system of tags, like the ones at the bottom of this post, that allow us to label items instead of classifying them. This approach gives us a far more flexible way to categorize information while allowing it to remain organized and findable. By creating semantic relationships between tags, we can begin to infer implicit hierarchy instead of explicitly stating it. If all items tagged with "internet" are also tagged with "technology," but not all items tagged "technology" are also tagged "internet," we can begin to infer that the internet is commonly thought of as a subcategory of the Technology. But unlike defining a strict hierarchy that asserts Internet to be a subcategory of Technology and nothing else, inferring this relationship allows us to make reasonable assumptions without ruling anything out. Tags let us keep our options open.

But there's a catch. In order to infer useful relationships between tags, we need to place certain limits on their scope. A thousand tags loosely related to each other is far less useful than ten tags strongly related to one or two others. In the same way, a few tags used many times is far more useful than many tags used a few times. In order for us to identify patterns that make it easier for us to find information, we need to define the scope of our available tags. In short, too few tags limit different users' ability to find information, but too many render the system nearly useless . It's a balancing act, and a delicate one.

At Pinyadda, we feel strongly about creating a system that makes as few assumptions about individual users as possible. Everyone is different, and everyone's information consumption preferences are different. It's our job to make sure that we do as much to help you find the stuff you're looking for without getting in the way. The current state of information architecture on the web inhibits everyone's ability to get the most out of it, and it's a shame. The content you want is out there, somewhere. We hope we can bring a little method to the madness of finding it.

A New Perspective

After a great meeting last night and an even better whiteboard session this morning, we've made a couple significant changes in the way we're going to be positioned going forward, and I think all of them are great decisions that were made for the right reasons.

The product itself and our development roadmap has changed very little, but we realized that we had a different animal on our hands than we initially thought. The good news is that this characterization solves a more palpable problem, creates more value for both users and publishers, gets us to revenue and profitability faster, and is a much more sustainable business plan. All very good things.

In the meantime, it allows us to work smarter while we work harder by focusing on more specific tasks, and helps us get a product in users' hands a lot sooner. With a clearer vision of what our product is and does, we're even more determined to go all out for the next couple of sprints and push this thing out the door.

We've reorganized our information architecture, made the site much easier for users to navigate and build their Pin, and changed our attitude about content to focus more on quality and organization and less on flat out quantity. Our new mission is simple, intuitive, and clear: to connect people in meaningful ways around the world's most valuable content. We hope that Pinyadda can become the way content and consumers connect in the age of the social web.

Execution and the Thrill of Self-Reliance

When you have a great idea on your hands, it's really easy to keep pushing the boundaries of what might be possible. In a startup, it's one of the most important things you can do - more than a few companies have gotten their big break because they kept pushing forward, innovating, thinking up crazy schemes about how to their product could take over this or that market, be tweaked to fit this or that need. And often those other implementations turned out to be the real gold - PayPal and Twitter are the first examples that pop into my head. Pie in the sky sometimes works out great.

But what makes the entrepreneur different from all the other crazies with great ideas is one simple thing: execution. In business, just like in sports, execution is the simple key to success. You've to have a good gameplan, a good team, and be well prepared, but in the end it comes down to how well you play when all the marbles are on the line.

For us, it's time to take a little break from dreamworld and get right down to it. Now that we have a working product with almost all of our core functionality intact, we're concentrating on making it work exactly the way we want it to, with no exceptions. Until now, we've been able to get away with saying "of course, we'll obviously fix that before release." Not anymore.

And to a certain extent, that's a really gratifying feeling, because we're all invested in the product and want to make it great. Unlike a hulking corporation, we can see a problem and fix it with our own two hands. There is a direct correlation between how hard we work and what kind of results we see, and it has nothing at all to do with financial compensation. It's about taking pride in your workmanship and owning the success or failure that comes along with it. That's the real point of addiction in startups, and it's why successful entrepreneurs go back and do it again even after they've struck it rich. It's the thrill of self-reliance and the unqualified gratification of knowing you've built something wicked cool that actually works.

And on that note, it's time to get back to work.

Walking the (Bottom) Line

Yesterday's Alpha release coincides with a big week of business for us when we return from Saturday's festivities, and it got me thinking about the need to balance the internal and external aspects of our company. One of the hardest things we have to do as a small team is find the right balance between product and production, by which I mean spending the right amount of time on product design and development and the right amount on networking, marketing, positioning, and pitching. It's a tough line to walk but one that I think we're doing pretty well with.

As a team, we're in agreement that we should spend as much of our time and energy developing the best product we can. Without that focus, we're nothing more than words on a page. But the need to raise capital isn't going away, and as a group we understand the importance of keeping our eyes wide open when it comes to the market opportunity and the way we position our business. Yes, we think Pinyadda is the coolest thing in the world, but it's first and foremost a business venture that demands our constant scrutiny and focus.

The great thing about our team is that everyone clearly understands both sides of this equation. Each product innovation represents a new business opportunity, which in turn leads to more product improvements. When done right, the interaction between business strategy and product strategy creates a positive feedback loop that drives both innovation and ROI.

As much as preparing for meetings with investors may seem like a chore to some entrepreneurs, it's an amazingly useful exercise. Considering an outside perspective is crucial to avoiding the groupthink trap, and formulating our value proposition forces us to constantly evaluate our long-term vision and make sure our short-term actions are directly related to achieving those goals.

As entrepreneurs who are absurdly obsessed with our idea, our initial urge is to think of raising capital as a necessary evil that will allow us to get back to work on the product. But in reality raising capital is great a way to always be asking ourselves the question "is this idea worth the work we're putting into it?" As long as the answer remains a resounding yes, it's more likely that both users and investors will find value in our product. If not, it's a sign we're doing something wrong and need to re-evaluate the direction we're heading in.

At XSITE last week, Tilman Genross, the CEO of Adimab, kept hammering away at an idea that I think is often overlooked by startups. The first thing to do, he said, is to figure out exactly what the problem is, and then ask yourself if there is real value in finding the solution. The short answer is always "of course, why else would I be working on this?" But being honest with yourself and regularly holding your own feet to the fire is enormously important.

We happen to think that the disjointed and scattered nature of the huge amount of content on the internet is a real problem, and we see enormous value in creating a system for people to get that content in a manner that is relevant and entertaining. And we hope we can pass that value along to our users.

Alpha Rising

After months of product development and testing, our Alpha is being loaded to the live site right now, and it's really exciting. We've come a long way from that first spark of imagination, and we still have a long way to go. But it's the little pieces of gratification along the way that make the startup ride worth taking. And today is one of those days.

This update includes a whole host of stuff that is just plain cool. All the functionalities of our core product are here, along with a bunch bug fixes and UI updates that make using Pinyadda a truly enjoyable experience. The difference between this version and our prototype seems infinite, and the product is really starting to come into its own.

A new, way more intuitive Build page, better Pintax navigation, and host of back-end improvements are all up and in working order, and we're pumped. When we look at the big picture these seem like small changes, but when we put on our user hats and try it out we realize that these improvements make a big difference. It's an encouraging and exciting milestone, and as we start to refine the product, the tech, and the business model, the amount new opportunities and ideas seems to be multiplying almost daily.

With all this comes an ever-expanding to-do list which has required us to begin developing and implement some key workflows and processes that are already helping us to stay better organized and be more productive with our time. Scheduling our time better, setting and achieving measurable small goals, and using collaboration technologies have been a key focus over the last several weeks as we begin to think about growth phase. While we're still really small and everyone is definitely wearing multiple hats, we're very aware that streamlining our processes and workflows and documenting our systems will be a key component of how fast we can ramp things up and how much we can squeeze from each dollar of investment. Two of our key organizational philosophies are agility and resourcefulness, and making sure that we can get new people up to speed quickly and adapt to changing conditions are tasks that affect every aspect of the business.

As we ramp up this summer we're making it a point to share our experiences on this blog, and we're always interested in hearing what you have to say. Post a comment, drop us a note, tweet us, whatever. We're also going to schedule a couple of external work sessions where anyone can drop by and shoot the breeze about tech, Boston, Pinyadda, or pretty much anything else. We'll post those times and locations up here and tweet them as well. Hopefully we'll get to meet a bunch of new folks who are down with what we're doing and love the internet in the same freakish way we do.

Today's a great day for Pinyadda and for us, but we're already logging bugs, testing features, and thinking about ways to make it better. With every milestone reached comes a new starting point and a new opportunity for improvement, and we can't wait to get moving on the next round of stuff as we head toward Beta. It's part insanity, part geekiness, and whole lot of obsession with our product and our vision.