7deeds » startups

Jason Fried of 37 Signals @ Big Omaha 2009

Petros — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:19:04 +0000

Jason Fried @ Big Omaha 2009 from Big Omaha on Vimeo.

Some points of interest from the video:

Charge for your products
Don’t use plans
Don’t work all together in open spaces where every one can interrupt each other
Share your knowledge and watch for things that can be extracted into products
Ideas are for ever, but inspiration for implementing them can expire

Auto Tuning on Vimeo

Petros — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:24:43 +0000

It’s hilarious…

via Auto Tuning on Vimeo.

BCS Hellenic Sector George Leon links reviewed

Petros — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:07:10 +0000

On 25 February 2009 in Athens, George Leon presented the following list of web sites in the BCS Hellenic Sector Event “What new & innovative Internet business ideas might be successful in Greece?”. During his presentation he mentioned several links that are listed here: Greek Business Ideas. I checked them out and I list here some of those links:

ScreenToaster
Online screen recorder. Capture screens instantly.

VisualCV
Get a better resume, online.

myGengo
Simple human translation.

MyFootballClub
The world’s first web community owned club.

Bambuser
Live from your mobile.

Webcast My Wedding
Webcast your wedding to family & friends worldwide over the Internet.

Hitchsters
Share, Save, Socialize. The best way to share a ride to and from the airport.

Offbeat Guides
Building your own personalized travel guide couldn’t be easier.

Floorplanner
Create floor plans, house plans and home plans online.

Logo Design
Affordable logo design with a rapid process.

Eatbite
Food pictures.

Disclaimer: These links are the ones I liked. There are more if you visit the aforementioned site.

Competing by enhancing customer experience

Petros — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 11:51:55 +0000

Recently I had a very bad experience with a VPS hosting provider. Although, I am so angry I could setup a domain with rants about that hosting provider and a universal poll with one button that would say “Press me if you thing X hosting provider sucks”, and then pay for that site until that hosting provider went bankrupt, I decided not to go that way.

Instead, I thought I should try to invert all these negative feelings by trying to provide some value through this blog post.

Sometimes a company may screw up. When a company screws up and as a result a customer is unhappy, most think game is over. This is not true though. A company can win that customer back immediately.

All it has to do is:

Explain to the customer all the details about the incident.
Tell the customer what steps you are going to take so this incident cannot happen again.
Sincerely apologize to the customer.
Be generous and give the customer something to compensate for their loss.
Try to help the customer get over the incident
Try to have one person supporting the customer until the whole thing is resolved, or if you can’t at least have a system that keeps every support technician up to date with the incident. That way, the customer will not have to explain what happened to each and every different person that contacts him.

If instead of all the above, you do exactly the oposite, there will come a day you are going out of business.

Developing for yourself first

Petros — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:09:47 +0000

As a professional programmer for over a decade, the applications I am proud for having developed can be counted on one hand. I always wondered why. As I was thinking about it, a pattern was revealed. All these applications were developed by me in order to solve a problem that I had.

What this really means, is that I was the first user for these applications. I knew exactly what the problem was, and I also knew what the best solution should be.

Developing other applications where I am not really a user, means I only have my accumulated knowledge over the years about the business domain, the knowledge of other people, my assumptions and my ability to continue writing code even if I am bored to death. I can tell you this is really difficult to handle. Developing in order to solve something you really don’t care about. Developing an application based on assumptions you make is a time bomb ready to explode.

Most successful and usually small companies, started out solving their own problem first and then offered their solution to the public. There are always people out there that want a solution to the same problem as yours.

I think this is a recipe for success even if you don’t have a lot of money to begin with.