Hello from David & Sheri Burns!

In our blog/lesson today we'll take a look at the following:
1. An update on Studio Bee LIVE! Going online this Saturday.
a. We'd love to have sponsors.
b. We'd like to answer some of your email questions or call inquestion for our first show.
2. A personal note about our family. Get to know us!
3. Lesson 42 on Protective Clothing
STUDIO BEE LIVE coming online this Saturday. I love to listen to beekeeping audio files when I'm traveling or working, but there just isn't that much available. That's why we decided to start Studio Bee Live, to be a place where you can listen, be entertained and learn more and more about keeping bees. We will have these broadcast available to listen to online or you can download them in MP3 format to enjoy in your MP3 player or as podcasts.
Each day we will produce a one hour broadcast on beekeeping, Monday through Friday. Each broadcast will have one main segment as the main topic of the day along with six daily smaller segments: Honey & Honey Receipts, Equipment, Bee Trivia, Bees In The News, A Look Back At Beekeepers and a Question & Answer segment.
We need your help. We are looking for sponsors or advertisers who want to underwrite these six smaller segments. "An now for today's Bee Trivia, brought to you by Clue's Cheverolet..." Each of these spots are available for $20 and does not have to be bee related. In addition, your company or business will be posted for that day on our web site with a link to your business as well. Call us if you'd like to be an underwriter in our first show this Saturday! 217-427-2678
You can even underwrite a segment in memory or in honor of someone special. Maybe Grandpa used to be a beekeeper and you want to dedicate a segment in memory of him. Give us a call. 217-427-2678. We are allowing our answering machine to pick up today to receive questions, but we'll call you back if you leave your name and number
We also need your voice in our shows. We need you to send in your beekeeping questions via E-mail or call in your questions. Just give us a call today and our answering machine will record your question and then we'll play it with our answer on our show. For example, "Hi this is Chad from Ohio and I have a hive that did good this year, but I'm wondering if they have enough honey for the winter. How I can be sure and is it too late to open them up and look and see?" Questions like that.
We will play your question and answer your question on the show. When you call in with your question, our answer will not only help you but so many others who were wondering the same thing. So call in today, Friday, day or night 217-427-2678. And, if you just want to call in and say, "Hi David & Sheri, love your website and good luck on your new bee program", that will be fun too! You can email us your question, but it would be so much better to have your voice on our show. But if you would rather email your question than call, out email is: david@honeybeesonline.com
A Personal Note:
We operated Long Lane Honey Bee Farms from our home in Central Illinois. Here's what we do: We keep bees, sell honey, sell bees (both packages & nucs), raise and sell queens, make and sell hive wooden ware, sell all kinds of beekeeping equipment and accessories, give beekeeping courses from our farm. Bees have become our business, our family business. Today let me fill you in on protective beekeeping gear. But before I do, I want to give you a personal note about our family (after all this is a blog you know)

Sheri is my high school sweet heart. I met her when I was 16 and she was 14. On that day in 1976 I knew that Sheri was the girl for me! Her dad was very protective of his only daughter, and though I don't remember the exact details of a rule that he had, it was something like if I went to church on Sunday, then I was able to spend a little time with his daughter.

Needless to say I became a Christian about a year later, not to win the pretty girl, but to repent and trust in Jesus. But then I did get the pretty girl. God is kinda like that. Sheri and I dated four years before we were married on August 3, 1980. Over the next 28 years we would both receive our college degrees from Lincoln Christian College, and find time to have 6 children (and now we have 4 grandchildren and another one on the way).
I began pastoring my first church, and living in the parsonage when I was 21. We already had our oldest daughter, Jennifer then and had Jill 16 months later. Then we had our first son, David in 1985, our third daughter, Karee in 1991, Seth in 1993 and our newest edition to our family, Christian in 2007. We had our last two sons at home. Over the last 28 years of our marriage I have pastored churches in Illinois, Missouri, Ohio and for the last 13 years, back in Illinois.
I have preached the gospel in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, India, Africa and on 5 teaching trips to Israel. The church I have pastored for the last 13 years now meets each Sunday on our honey bee farm, in our honey store. We are a home church that simply goes by the Bible. I preach each Sunday from our honey bee farm, and you are welcome to join us any Sunday at 10:30am Central Time.
I share all of that with you so that you can get to know us a bit more, but also to let you know that it is a good feeling to have traveled the world and yet find the greatest joy in working on our family farm with honey bees. I guess you might say we are just good ole, down home country folks. Right now, Karee, Seth and Christian are our only Children living at home with us, and they are a huge help with our honey bee business.
Seth started building frames in our business back in 2005 at just twelve years old. Now he's 15 and along with me builds every component in the hives we make. He exclusively builds all of the bottom boards, inner covers, top covers and frames. Seth holds the farm record for the fastest to build frames. He holds the record at assembling a frame (8 staples) in 16 seconds. In a pinch, Karee steps in and builds inner covers, frames and top covers. Last spring, during our busy season Karee really put in some long hours. Now, we have found a way to free up Karee so that she can continue to work only in the queen rearing operation on our farm. She knows the inside of a hive better than anyone! She can find young nurse bees to be used as a queen attendants quicker than anyone! Almost every day this summer she was out in hives picking out queens and young nurse bees and loading them up in their little shipping containers. She rarely was stung and a few times I fussed at her for not wearing a hat and veil. She is great!
Sheri, my high school sweet heart, does it all, but mostly the paper work, online orders, phone calls, and usually single-handedly is the shipping department. Most days she is the one packing the boxes and labeling them too. When it is really busy, we all stop and become the shipping department around 3 p.m. and work feverishly to try and beat the arrival of the UPS truck around 4 p.m. Sheri also feeds my kids, feeds me, my dogs, my helpers and she feeds my bees when they need it. She's a wonderful cook!
Dustin, my son-in-law, (Jennifer's husband) now helps us with our web site and data entry. The poor guy...I sorta dump a bunch on him at once, kinda like numbering books in a full library. But we are trying to get our data base updated so when you call, we can easily look you up. Finally, there's Callie and April, our two hound dogs. They are our long lane alarm system. As soon as anyone turns into our 1/4 mile drive, they bark and let us know we have a customer. They are respectful of all the hives on our property. That's us...On now to protective clothing.
PROTECTIVE CLOTHING
No one likes to get stung. It hurts. By the way, the odds of dying from a bee sting are almost equal to dying from a lightning strike, according to the US National Safety Council:

Odds Of Dying From lightning 81,949/1
Odds Of Dying From A Bee/Wasp sting 72,494/1

Even though bee stings aren't as deadly as some think, it still hurts and you'll turn red, itch and swell up. This happens to almost everyone. Wearing protective gear can prevent most stings. The first defense against being stung is to always use a smoker! Blowing cool smoke into a hive and onto the bees prior to working them is your best protection. I can work bees without any protective clothing if I smoke them first, but not if I do not.

The second defense against being stung is to keep gentle bees. There is no reason to keep a hive that is aggressive. Re-queen a hive that is mean with a more gentle queen and in 30 days the eggs that she lays will emerge to be gentle too! Near the end of this year's bee season, I had requeened all of my hives and because we raise our own queens, I was working my bees with limited protection and no aggressive tendencies from my bees.

But let's say you don't want to worry about requeening and you just want to wear some protective gear to keep from being stung.

Sometimes, especially when removing hives from homes, more protection is necessary.

We always recommend you wear a hat and veil. A hat and veil together will run you between 30-40 bucks. But, it is a very wise investment. No one wants to get stung on the face or head. Most beekeepers use the cheap plastic pith helmet with a veil. The helmets are pretty common but the veils can be different. Some have square screens in the front, as in this picture, while others don't. Some veils only come down just to the neck, while others come all the way down to the chest. The style that you choose for the hat and veil is up to you.

The next level of protection is a jacket with the hat and veil built in. These are nice, and are often referred to as an inspector's jacket. They look kinda like a parka jacket. You can unzip your veil and the hat/veil drops behind you and stays attached, as in the picture. I've unzipped the hat and veil and have laid them back out of the way.

The next level of protection is a complete bee suit. Generally it is like the jacket but includes the pants. Bee suits are not totally sting proof. Though it is very rare, it is possible to be stung through a bee suit. Again, it is almost impossible, but can happen and did happen to my son once when we were removing a hive from a house.
So whether you wear a hat and veil, a jacket or a suit, you'll probably change what you wear after you work your bees a few weeks.
Suits and jackets are very hot in mid summer, so do keep that in mind. It is best to choose a fabric blend such as cotton/polyester blend that is cool. You may want to get one size larger than you normally wear because suits and jackets go over your regular clothes. In this picture, you can see that among a group of beekeepers, there are many different configurations.
A low budget idea is to buy a real inexpensive painter's suit from Menards or Lowes. These are made of material that does not last for every, but probably at least one bee season. I've used them. They can tear easily, but they are white, very thin painter's suits. They do not have a hat or veil, and a bee could sting through it, but they are white and bees just do not like to land on white. I always wear a very light colored shirt and bees stay off. Bees have an instinct to attack black.
To make sure queens are gentle, breeders wave a black cloth over the top of a hive and then counts the stingers on that cloth. The hive with the fewest stings are the more gentle hive. Bees are "wired" to defend their hive against black bears so wearing a white painter's suit can be a low budget solution.
If you are afraid of being stung on your hands, there are many different types of bee gloves with longer sleeves to tuck beneath your suit. Most are sting resistant, meaning a bee might be able to sting through the glove, and others are sting proof which means a stinger cannot penetrate your gloves. But, as you would imagine, the gloves that are sting proof are not the easiest gloves to work a hive with. They are big and clumsy and you look like a Haz-Mat worker. When gloves this awkward, you accidently smash more bees and that makes them more aggressive. When I have to wear gloves I wear a pair of leather work gloves and duct tape the space between my gloves and my suit. I've never taken a sting through a leather work glove.
We sell hats, veils, jackets, suits and gloves so feel free to give us a call.

It was nice to be with you today, and thank you for checking in.
Bee-have yourselves!
David & Sheri Burns
217-427-2678
www.honeybeesonline.com
EMAIL: david@honeybeesonline.com

Our hosts for October were Rayrena of Happy Cows and Belita of Culinary Adventures. (The pictures through out this post are from Rayrena of Happy Cows, Liz of Bits 'N Bites and Maybelle's Mom of Feeding Maybelle.) Here is Rayrena's post.

Since this is my birthday month, I figured what better gift than being able to choose the recipe for our October challenge

Almost two years ago I listened to a podcast on The Splendid Table that featured James Oseland, who is now the Editor in Chief of Saveur magazine. The recipe he described and shared with them was for Beef Rendang. I've been haunted by this dish and was excited to give it a try.

I received permission from the author to reprint this recipe and an accompanying pickle recipe. I am also posting a vegetarian/vegan option just to this forum but we do not have his permission to post it publicly. I am looking forward to trying the vegetarian option since it sounds delicious!

If you are interested, you can listen to the author's interview at The Splendid Table and view the recipe there as well.

Excerpted from Cradle of Flavor: Home Cooking from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore by James Oseland (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006) Copyright 2006 by James Oseland.

Beef Rendang (Rendang Daging Sapi)
Makes 4 to 6 servings

This extravagantly rich, dry-braised beef curry is a signature dish of the Minangkabau highlands of West Sumatra, Indonesia. It's a triumph of flavor, with lime leaves, nutmeg, and cloves. The dish is cooked by a process that inverts normal braising. The beef is slowly simmered in a spiced coconut-milk broth until the broth evaporates and the meat is left to sauté in the intensely flavored rendered coconut and beef oils left in the pot.

This recipe comes from Rohati, my cooking guru in Padang, West Sumatra. She offered me a few sage words of advice when she gave it to me. First, she said, allow plenty of time to make it. Rendang has its own lethargic cooking rhythm, so that the more you try to rush it, the longer it seems to take. I know what she means. I've often underestimated how long it takes to cook and have left hungry dinner guests waiting while it continued slowly to simmer away. Second, she said, use a shallow, wide pan, such as a skillet, rather than a deep soup pot. The less enclosed the cooking space, the easier it will be for the liquid to evaporate—in other words, the opposite of how you want to cook a curry. And third, Rohati advised me always to use the best-quality beef I can get. In America this means avoiding precut stewing beef, which is of inconsistent quality. Instead, choose boneless chuck or bottom round laced through with bright white fat and cut it into cubes yourself.

"Rendang is sacred food in West Sumatra," Rohati said. "If you skimp on ingredients, you risk upsetting Allah."

If you decide to use the maximum number of chiles this recipe calls for, you may need to use a standard-sized food processor, rather than a small one. An excellent garnish for this dish is a tablespoon of very finely sliced fresh or thawed, frozen kaffir lime leaves. Be sure to remove the center stem of each leaf before slicing it.

For the Flavoring Paste:

* 1 whole nutmeg, cracked open with a nutcracker or a heavy, blunt object such as the bottom of a glass measuring cup
* 5 whole cloves
* 6 shallots (about 5 ounces), coarsely chopped
* 3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
* 5 to 20 fresh red Holland chiles or other fresh long, red chiles such as Fresno or cayenne, stemmed and coarsely chopped
* 1 piece fresh or thawed, frozen turmeric, 2 inches long, peeled and coarsely chopped (about 2 teaspoons), or 1 1/2 teaspoons ground turmeric
* 1 piece fresh ginger, 2 inches long, peeled and thinly sliced against the grain (about 2 tablespoons)
* 1 piece fresh or thawed, frozen galangal, 2 inches long, peeled and thinly sliced against the grain (about 2 tablespoons; optional)
* 5 candlenuts or unsalted macadamia nuts

For the remainder of the dish:

* 2 pounds well-marbled boneless beef chuck or bottom round, cut into 2- to 2 1/2-inch cubes
* 2 1/2 cups unsweetened coconut milk
* 3 thick stalks fresh lemongrass, each tied into a knot
* 1 piece cinnamon stick, 4 inches long
* 7 whole fresh or thawed, frozen kaffir lime leaves
* 5 whole daun salam leaves (optional)
* 1 teaspoon kosher salt
* 1 tablespoon very finely shredded fresh or thawed, frozen kaffir lime leaves (optional)

1. To make the flavoring paste, place the nutmeg and cloves in a small food processor and pulse until ground to a dusty powder, about 2 minutes.

2. Add the shallots, garlic, chiles, turmeric, ginger, galangal (if using), and candlenuts to the ground spices. Pulse until you have a chunky-smooth paste the consistency of cooked oatmeal.

3. In a 12-inch skillet (nonstick works best), mix the beef and the flavoring paste until well combined. Add the coconut milk, lemongrass, cinnamon, whole lime leaves, daun salam leaves (if using), and salt. Stir well to combine and bring to a gentle boil over medium heat. Immediately reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer uncovered at a slow, steady bubble, stirring every 10 to 20 minutes with a spatula to prevent the meat and coconut milk from sticking and scorching. You'll probably need to adjust the heat periodically to maintain an even simmer.

4. The meat, coconut milk, and flavoring paste will now go on a fascinating journey. At first, the broth will be thin and gorgeously bright orange. As it cooks, the coconut milk will reduce, its fats (as well as the fat the meat renders) separating from the solids. It will become progressively thicker and darker, eventually turning brown. Continue to simmer gently until the liquid has reduced by about 95 percent, stirring every 15 minutes or so to prevent sticking. Only the meat, oils, and a bit of very thick sauce will remain in the pot. This will take anywhere from 2 to 3 hours, depending on the skillet that you use, how hot the fire is, and the richness of the coconut milk. Test the meat; it should be tender enough to poke easily with a fork. Taste some of the liquid for salt, and add a pinch more if needed.

5. When all the liquid has evaporated, reduce the heat to low (the meat and the remaining sauce are prone to burning) and allow the beef to brown slowly in the rendered fat. (The fat may be foamy at this point, but it will settle down when the cooking stops.) Stir every 5 minutes or so to prevent sticking and scorching, being careful not to break the beef apart. Continue sautéing the beef until it's the color of roasted coffee beans, 5 to 10 minutes longer. The surface of the beef should be barely moist and have an appetizing oily sheen. (If there is too much oil in the pan for your liking, skim some of it off with a spoon and set aside for later use; it's wonderful for sautéing potatoes.)

6. Remove and discard the cinnamon, lemongrass, lime leaves, and daun salam leaves (if used), and then transfer the beef to a serving dish. (Alternatively, serve this dish with all the aromatics, for a more rustic presentation.) Garnish with the shredded lime leaves, if using. Allow the beef to rest for at least 30 minutes before serving. Slightly warm room temperature will best show off its intensely aromatic flavors. This dish will taste even better the next day.


My testing notes:

1) For the nutmeg and cloves, I pounded in a small mortar. The threw the remaining paste ingredients in a food blender. I used some of the coconut milk to get it all moving, then poured it all over the meat before cooking.
2) For the lemongrass, remove the first couple outer leaves, trim away the dry tips and pound the stalk with the handle of your knife or a meat mallet, then tie into a knot.
3) The first time I used dried turmeric, didn't use the galangal or lime leaves and it was very good.
4) One time I used 8 cayenne chiles and it was fairly spicy, the next time I used 6 Fresno chiles and there wasn't much heat.
5) Both times I had a hard time getting the meat tender. Both times I ended up adding a can of chicken stock towards the last 1/2 hour and cooking until tender, then cranking up the heat until it evaporated.
6) Definitely use a nonstick pan. And be watchful towards the end, the resulting paste can brown quickly!

Following is the recipe for the accompanying pickle dish:

Javanese Cucumber and Carrot Pickle (Acar Timun)
Makes 4 servings.

* 3 small Kirby (pickling) cucumbers (about 10 ounces), unpeeled, stemmed, cut into matchsticks about 2" long and 1/4" wide
* 1 large carrot (about 5 ounces), peeled and cut into matchsticks about 2" long and 1/4" wide
* 3 shallots (about 2 1/2 ounces), thinly sliced lengthwise
* 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
* 2 cups boiling water
* 2 heaping tablespoons sugar
* 2 tablespoonspalm, cider, or rice vinegar
* 2 fresh green Thai chiles, stemmed and cut on the diagonal into slices 1/4" thick

1. Combine the cucumbers, carrots, shallots, and salt in a heatproof, nonreactive bowl. Pour the boiling water over the vegetables and stir well. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or aluminum foil and let the vegetables rest for 15 minutes.

2. Drain the vegetables in a colander, gently squeezing out excess water with your hands. They should be fairly dry, but they need not be bone-dry.

3. Transfer the vegetables to a nonreactive bowl. Add the sugar, vinegar, and chiles and stir well to combine. Taste a cucumber. It should have a balance of saltiness, sourness, and sweetness. Keep in mind that it is a condiment and should be fairly strongly flavored. Adjust the seasonings, including the salt, accordingly.

4. Allow the dish to rest at least 15 minutes, to give the flavors time to settle. Serve the pickle at room temperature, never cold, which would mute the flavor. This pickle should be eaten within hours of making it. If left longer, it will lose its perkiness and robustly sweet-tart flavor.

My testing notes:

1) I just used a plate to cover the bowl while the pickle and hot water mixture.
2) I forgot to add the Thai chiles and it was still good.
3) Play with it, I preferred a more sour pickle so added more vinegar.

Quotes From the Forum:

I made it for dinner tomorrow but had a few bites tonight. delicious. and the smell was heavenly. Maybelle's Mom of Feeding Maybelle

The pickles were really nice. Such an easy recipe too. I can't wait to try it next summer with vegetables from my garden Liz of Bits 'N Bites

I made it today Rayrena. We loved it. The flavor was amazing. As I was adding all the spices I was thinking oh my will this be good all together. Lori of Lori's Lipsmacking Goodness

I just saw video of John Doerr's talk yesterday at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” roundtable event. The tips are based on advice JD solicited from great KPCB entrepreneurs. I was impressed enough to transcribe (and paraphrase) the list. You can see the whole video at the end of this post.

1. Act now, act with speed.
2. Protect the vital core of the business.Use a scalpel to make strategic cuts.
   
3. Get 18 months or more of cash (runway) in the business against a conservative forecast.
4. Defer all facilities expansions, capital expenditures. Use Google Apps. Reprioritize & rerationalize all R&D. Defer.
5. Negotiate. Everything is negotiable in this climate.
6. Everybody should be selling. Selling is an honorable profession. Everyone from the receptionist to engineers is selling. Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue.
7. Offer equity instead of cash. Voluntary salary reduction program.
8. Pay attention to where your cash is. All cash in most secure possible instruments.
9. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it.
10. Over-communicate with employees, investors, customers. Don't sugar coat.

What I find remarkable about this list is how many of them apply to lean startups in good times and in bad. For example, on the "leading indicators" front, I think companies should use a funnel analysis to drive decisions and get rapid feedback on how they are progressing. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. I've also used the voluntary salary reduction tool - it's particularly useful as a way to get passionate employees who don't have a lot of personal expenses to buy into the mission of the company at a deep level. And even for those employees who can't afford to take much reduction, it's sobering to go through the exercise of deciding if they believe in the company enough to put their own money into it. At IMVU we strongly believed that everyone in the company had to be involved in selling. There's no better way to learn what customers want (or hate!). And it's hard to know if you're truly succeeding without a focus on revenue.

I hope the startups who are struggling with the current downturn will use it as a motivator to make cuts that actually increase their tempo and speed. A crisis can clarify what's important, and getting clear about what's important is the criticial first step to seeing waste clearly (see Lean Thinking). And once you can see waste, you can start to get it out of the way of your execution, and become a truly lean company.



The Entire Video of John Doerr Giving 10 Tips for Start-ups to Avoid the Econalypse

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• Ten ways to save your company by John Doerr
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• Ten ways to save your company by John Doerr
• John Doerr: 10 ways for companies to stay afloat in rough times (MG Siegler/VentureBeat)

The article addresses the issue of development cost from the developer's perspective, but can also be read in reverse to understand cost from the buyer's perspective:How much should you charge for a web site?From the article:Tom said he was a university student and has been building websites for people lately. He says that he does it on his own time so it doesn’t cost him anything, so he has no

"Kurt Cobain can definitely teach us things about starting our own business, whether big or small":The Kurt Cobain Guide to Startup Success

Every company will need to pitch itself from time to time. Usually we think of pitches in the context of raising money, but that is only one of many pitch situations. We pitch to potential partners, vendors, publishers, conferences, employees, and even lawyers. It's different from selling a product, because it is not part of our regular business practice, is not something that relates to our core competence, and tends not to happen in a repeatable and scalable way. (I'll exclude those non-lean startups who basically exist for the purpose of raising bigger and bigger sums of money. You're not one of those are you?)

Most of the times I have seen pitches fail, it is not because they are poorly written, or that the entrepreneur lacks passion. It is because they don't answer the right question. My favorite example of all time comes from students in an entrepreneurship class. Their idea was to build a next-generation autonomous robot, that could be used by defense and security agencies around the world. The whole pitch was about how valuable robots could be in the future. They even included a slide with The Transformers on it. Now there was nothing wrong with their analysis: anyone who invents a technology as sophisticated as The Transformers is definitely going to make a lot of money. But these students completely failed to address the one and only question on their audience's mind: can you three guys really build the robots of the future? (Turns out, they were incredibly well-credentialed graduate students who had, in fact, developed some interesting new robotics technology. But you wouldn't have known that from their pitch.)

I have come to believe that there is a hierarchy of pitches, and that understanding where your pitch falls on this spectrum can assist in making decisions about what information to highlight. Pitches higher in the hierarchy tend to be more successful, and so if you can fit your company into one of those categories, you can get better results or better terms. Now, just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you should - and there are plenty of other great resources out there that can help you think through whether and when to raise money (or do other kinds of deals).

With that disclaimer out of the way, here's how I order the hierarchy of pitches:

Printing money
Key questions: are those numbers real? how big is the market? can your team execute the growth plan?
Most important slide: valuation

Promising results
Key questions: can you monetize that traffic? (or drive traffic to that profitable destination?) do you know why you've achieved those results?
Most important slide: hockey stick

Micro-scale results
Key questions: who is the customer, and how do you know? what is the potential market size? what are the business economics?
Most important slide: lessons learned

Working product
Key questions: what does the product do? what's the launch plan? who's on the marketing team?
Most important slide: live demo

Prototype product
Key questions: what will it take to ship a working product? how do you know anyone would want it? who's on the engineering team?
Most important slide: demo (if the product solves an obvious problem), engineering resumes (if the product is nearly impossible to build), "day in the life of a customer" (if neither of the above)

Breakthrough technology
Key questions: who owns the patents? can we make a product out of this technology? are there any good substitutes?
Most important slide: barriers to entry

All-star team
Key questions: has the team made money for their investors in the past? are they domain experts? are they committed to an idea in their domain of expertise?
Most important slide: problem we are trying to solve

Good product idea
Key questions: what kinds of risk does this company need to mitigate (technology risk, market risk, team risk, funding risk)? is it a revolutionary and novel idea? is this team the one to back? can the team bring the product to market? who is the customer? who is the competition? will they fail fast?
Most important slide: about the founders


In a pitch meeting, try to spend as much time as possible talking about the key questions for your pitch. If you find yourself getting asked non-key questions, try to use your answers to steer the conversation back to the key questions. But here's the most important part: if you keep getting non-key questions over and over again, something is wrong with your pitch. Either you misunderstand where your pitch fits into the hierarchy, or you are not using the early part of your pitch to establish it. Don't keep banging your head against the wall - if you can't convince your potential partners that your startup is printing money, try to figure out why. Experiment with different narratives. If you still can't do it, move one level down the hierarchy and see if you can make that story stick.

One last piece of advice: don't forget that potential partners are evaluating the strength of your pitch, not you. It's not true that companies with pitches further up the hierarchy are better, in some absolute sense, than companies further down. It's just that they have an easier time closing these kinds of deals. If you can't close the deal, maybe your company is at the wrong stage of its development, and it's time to try a different tack.

6 reasons why my VC funded startup did failFrom the article:We’ve got quite some money as a seed investment from a VC and were quite happy and successfully developing our application. We did show it to many users and received very favorable feedback from big companies. Why did the startup fail and I’m no millionaire?

One year ago on Splashes and Splurges, this is what I wrote about.

I think it's my favorite post.

It begs an equally happy update.

It's coming.

Chuck's Code & Learning: Learning to write tests that matter

Don't write tests for scenarios just because you can. Write tests that support a specific business need.

Amen.

Why to Start a Startup in a Bad EconomyFrom the article:The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.When Microsoft and Apple were founded.As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either. The truth is more boring: the state of

Venture Hacks has a great article today on lean startups. They quote extensively from two of our most important thinkers: Taiichi Ohno, creator of the Toyota Production System, and Kent Beck, creator of extreme programming. If you're not familiar with their work, and how it relates to startups, this is a great place to start. Go read it.

I want to take up one of the questions posed in the Hacker News discussion of the article:

The question in my mind against most of these efficiency driven programs is simple. If you're always looking to eliminate waste and become super efficient, you're not spending any time being creative or chasing radical ideas that may or may not be worth the effort spent on executing them.

Innovation sometimes requires a lot of wasteful experimentation and it looks like that is completely anti-thetical to the whole efficiency argument.

This is a common sentiment that derails many efficiency programs. But I do think it is a misconception of what lean startups are all about. Part of the problem is the distinction (that I owe to Steve Blank) between lean startups and lean companies. In a typical lean company, waste is defined as "every activity that does not create value for the customer." And this is 100% correct. By driving this kind of waste out of your company, you actually boost creativity by eliminating beaurocracy, busy work, unnecessary hierarchy, and, of course, excess inventory.

But statups require a special kind of creativity: disruptive innovation. And, as the commenter rightly points out, this is not really a matter of efficiency. By the standard of "customer value," most innovation-seeking experiments are waste. Lean startups operate by a different standard. I suggest they define waste as "every activity that does not contribute to learning about customers." (aka "how you get to product/market fit.") This is why I find the concept of the Ideas-Code-Data feedback loop so helpful. Any activity that actively promotes us getting through each iteration (including the learning phase) faster, is value-creating. Everything else (including a lot of traditional "agile" or "lean" tactics) is waste.

Of course, lean startups and lean companies both follow the same underlying principles. It's just the implementation that changes, as focus shifts from learning to execution. And, as many commenters noted, there are great companies that successfully incorporate innovation into their execution discipline (Toyota first among them). I would say that the true standard of waste is "anything that does not carry out the company's mission." But I think that is too abstract to be really useful for most startups, since it's hard to realize that the mission changes as the company goes through the natural phase changes of growth.

I was inspired to write The product manager's lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. When a process is not working, there's usually somebody who feels the pain most acutely, and in that company it was the product manager. Last week, I found myself in a similar situation, but this time talking to the engineering manager. I thought I'd share a little bit about his story.

This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced. He has a good team, and they've shipped a working product to many customers. He's working harder than ever, and so is his team. Yet, they feel like they are falling further and further behind with every release. The more features they ship, the more things that can go wrong. Systems seem to randomly fail, and as soon as they are fixed, a new one falls over.

Even worse, when it comes time to "fix it right" the team gets pushback from the business leaders, who want more features. If engineers want more time to spend making their old code more pretty, they are invited to do so on the weekends.

Unfortunately, the weekends are already taken, because features that used to ship on a friday now routinely cause collateral damage somewhere else on the platform, and so the team is having to work nights and weekends cleaning up after each launch.

Every few months, the situation comes to a head, where the engineers finally scream "enough!" and force the whole company to accept a rewrite of some key system. The idea is that once we move to the new system (or coding standard, or API, or ...) then all the problems will be solved. The current code is spaghetti, but the new code will be elegant. Sometimes the engineers win the argument, and sometimes they are overruled. But it doesn't seem to matter. The rewrite seldom works, and even when it does, a few months later they are back in the same dilemna, finding their now-old code falling apart. It's become "legacy code" and part of the problem.

It's tempting to blame the business leaders ("MBA-types") for this mess. And in a mess this big, there is certainly blame to go around. But they are pushing for the things that matter to customers - features. And they are cognizant that their funding is limited, and if they don't find out which features are absolutely critical for their customers soon, they won't be able to survive. So they are legitimately suspicious when, instead of working on adding monetization to their product, some engineer wants to take a few weeks off to go polish code that is supposed to be already done.

What's wrong with this picture? And why is the engineering manager suffering so badly? I can relate to his experience all too well. When I was working my first programming jobs, I was introduced to the following maxim: "time, quality, money - pick two." That was the watchword of our profession, and I was taught to treat with disdain those "suits" who were constantly asking for all three. We treated them like they had some kind of brain defect. If they wanted a high-quality product done fast, why didn't they want to pay for it? And if money was so tight, why were they surprised when we cut corners to get the product out fast? Or went past the deadline to get it done right?

I really believed this mantra, for a time. But it started to smell bad. In one company, we had a QA team as large as our engineering team, dozens of people who worked all day every day to find and report bugs in our prodcut. And this was a huge product, which took years to develop. It was constantly slipping, because we had a hard time adding new features while trying to fix all the bugs that the QA team kept finding. And yet, it was incredibly expensive to have all these QA testers on staff, too. I couldn't see that we were managing to pick even one. Other, more veteran programmers told me they had seen this in many companies too. They just assumed it was the way software companies worked.

Suffice to say, I no longer believe this.

In teams that follow the "pick two" agenda, which two has to be resolved via a power play. In companies with a strong engineering culture, the engineers pick quality. It's their professional pride on the line, after all. So they insist on having the final say on when a feature is "done" enough to show to customers. Business people may want to speed things up by spending more money, but enough people have read the Mythical Man-Month to know that doesn't work.

In teams that have a business culture, the MBA's pick time. After all, our startup is on a fixed budget. They set deadlines, schedules, and launch plans, and expect the engineering team to do what it takes to hit them. If quality suffers, that's just the way it is. Or, if they care a lot about quality, they will replace anyone who ships without quality. Unfortunately, threats work a lot better at incentivizing people to CYA than getting them to write quality software.


A situation where one faction "wins" at another's expense is seldom conducive to business success. As I evolved my thinking, I started to frame the problem this way: How can we devise a product development process that allows the business leaders to take responsibility for the outcome by making conscious trade-offs?

When I first encountered agile software techniques, in the form of extreme programming, I thought I had found the answer. I explained it to people this way: agile lets you make the trade-offs visible to whole company, so that they can make informed choices. How? By shipping software early, you give them continuous feedback about how it well it's working. They can use the software themselves, since every iteration produces working (if incomplete) code. And if they want to invest in higher quality, they can. But, if they want to invest in more experiments (features), they can do that too. But in neither case should they be surprised by the result. Sound good?

It didn't work. The business leaders I've run this system with ran into the same traps as I had in previous jobs. I had just passed the burden on to them. But of course they didn't feel reponsible for the outcome - that was my job. So I wound up with the worst of both worlds: handing the steering wheel over to someone else, but then still being blamed for the bad results.

Even worse, agile wasn't really helping me ship higher quality software. We were using it to get features to market faster, and that was working well. But we were cutting corners in the development methodology as well as in the code, in the name of increased speed. But because we had to spend more and more time fixing things, we started slowing down, even as we tried to speed up. That's the same pain the engineering manager I met with was experiencing. As the situation deteriorates, he's got to work harder and harder just to keep the product from regressing.

It was my own failure to ship quality software in the early days of IMVU that really got me thinking about this problem in a new way. I now believe that the "pick two" concept is fundamentally flawed, and that lean startups can achieve all three simultaneously: quickly bring high-quality software to market at low cost. Here's why.

First of all, it's a myth that cutting corners saves time. When we ship software with defects, we wind up having to waste time later dealing with those defects. If each new feature contains a few recurring problems, then over time we'll become swamped with the overhead of fixing and won't be able to ship any new features.

So far, that sounds like just another argument for "doing things right" the first time, no matter how long they take. But that's problematic too. The biggest form of waste is building software nobody wants. The second biggest form of waste is fixing bugs in software nobody wants. If we defer fixing bugs in order to bring a product to market sooner, and this allows us to find out if we're on the right track or not, then it was worthwhile to ship with those bugs.

Here's how I've resolved the paradox in my own thinking. There are two kinds of bugs:

• One kind are what I call defects: situations where the software doesn't behave in a predictable way. Examples: intermittently failing code, obfuscated code that's hard to use properly, code that's not under test coverage (and so you don't know what it does), bad failure handling, etc.
  
  
• The second kind of bugs are the type your traditional QA tester will find: situations where the software doesn't do what the customer expects. For example, you click on a button labeled "Quit" and in response the software erases your hard drive. That's a bug. But if the software reliably erases your hard drive every time, that's not a defect.

The resolution to the paradox is to realize that only defects cause you future headaches, and cannot be deferred. That's why we need continuous integration and test-driven development. Whenever we add a feature or fix a bug, we need to make sure that code never goes bad, never mysteriously stops working. Those are the kinds of indefinite costs that make our team grind to a halt over time. Traditional bugs don't - you can choose to fix them or not, depending on what your team is trying to accomplish.

Defects are what make refactoring difficult. When you improve code, you always test it at least a little bit. If what you see is what will ultimately make it into production, it's pretty easy to make sure you did a good job. But code that is riddled with defects is a cameleon - one moment it works, the next it doesn't anymore. That leads to fear of refactoring, which leads to spaghetti code.

By shipping code without defects, the team actually speeds up over time. Why? Because we never have to revisit old code to see why it stopped working. We can add new team members, and they can get started right away (as an aside, new engineers at IMVU were always required to ship something to customers on their first or second day). And the whole team is gettng smarter and learning, so our effectiveness increases. Plus, we get the benefit of code reuse, and all the great libraries and tools we've built. Every iteration, we get a little more done.

So how can I help the engineering manager in pain? Here's my diagnosis of his problem:

• He has some automated tests, but his team doesn't have a continuous integration server or practice TDD. Hence, the tests tend to go stale, or are themselves intermittent.
• No amount of fixing is making any difference, because the fixes aren't pinned in place by tests, so they get dwarfed by the new defects being introduced with new features. It's a treadmill situation - they have to run faster and faster just to stay at the level of quality/features they're at today.
• The team can't get permission from the business leaders to get "extra time" for fixing. This is because the are constantly telling them that features are done as soon as they can see them in the product. Because there are no tests for new features (or operational alerts for the production code), the code that supports those new features could go bad at any moment. If the business leaders were told "this feature is done, but only for an indeterminate amount of time, after which it may stop working suddenly" they would not be so eager to move on to the next new feature.

Here's what I've counseled him to try:

• Get started with continuous integration. Start with just one test, a good one that runs reliably, and make sure it gets run on every checkin.
• Tie the continuous integration server in with source control, so that nobody can check in while the tests are failing.
• Practice five why's to get to the root cause of future problems. Use those opportunities to add tests or alerts that would have prevented that problem. Make the investment proportional to the problem caused, so that everyone (even the business leaders) feels good about it.
  

My prediction is that these three practices will quickly change the feeling around the office, because the most important code will wind up under test quite soon (after all, it's the code that people care the most about, and so when it fails, the team notices and fixes it right away). With the most important code under test, the level of panic when something goes wrong will start to decrease (because it will tend to be in less important parts of the product). And has the tension goes down, it will be easier to get the whole team (including the MBA's) to embrace TDD and other good practices as further refinements.

Good luck, engineering manager. May your team, one day soon, refactor with pride.

Sheri and I greet you from our honey bee farm, Long Lane Honey Bee Farms in Central Illinois. Thank you for checking out our blog and beekeeping lessons. Please tell others about what you have found here! There are links at the bottom to "send to a friend" and we would appreciate it if you pass this on to friends that are beekeepers or folks you'd think might be interested.

I've been watching a new product for honey bees called Honey-B-Healthy. I've read some outstanding testimonies and reviews. But what really sold me on this product was inspecting some hives of a couple in our local association. She uses this product in her hives and I have never seen such a healthy hive. Her hive matched the testimonies I have been reading about Honey-B-Healthy. So, I called and spoke with the creator of this product, Robert Noel. He graciously took my call and gave me the details as to why this feeding stimulant works so well. So I tried it, and I was even more impressed! Wow, do my bees love it!Of course, I can only give you my opinion and how this product has help my hives, but let me tell you I am in love with it and so are my bees. I've read testimonies of hives that were almost entirely destroyed from pesticide sprays but Honey-B-Healthy brought them back to full strength again.

We pretty much are off of the medication treadmill, but we do not consider this a medication. It is essential oils, largely spearmint oil, and lemongrass oil. Fall is a great time to feed Honey-B-Healthy to your bees. Many people use it in a spray bottle instead of a smoker to calm the bees. This is commonly referred to as a spritz spray. It is also used on new plastic foundation to help encourage the bees to draw comb on plastic frames. A small 16 ounce bottle goes a long way. You simply add 1 teaspoon to one quart of 1:1 sugar water. As a spray, use 4 teaspoons per quart.

Honey-B-Healthy is great when introducing a new queen too.These essential oils have long been used by beekeepers and found to be very good for bees. Many claim that these essential oils seem to stimulate the immune system of the honey bee.

We are selling the 16 ounce bottle for $28. The 16 ounce bottle is enough for 24 one gallon feedings of sugar syrup. Call us today and we'll send your bottle right out: 217-427-2678. We seldom endorse these types of products, but I sincerely believe this is a great benefit to keeping healthy bees, drawing comb and introducing queens. Give it a try. Use it now to prepare your bees for winter and to have some on hand for late winter and early spring feeding. You can also order online with a credit card. Log on to our beekeeping store at http://www.honeybeesonline.com/ and order this product from our main page.

Now, let me highlight the need for you to provide ventilation in your hive during the winter. Wrapping your hive can actually cause more internal moisture due to condensation. We've worked for a couple of years to modify our inner cover to accomplish several things. We've listened to beekeepers, and have made some changes based on our own beekeeping operation as well.

First, many larger beekeeping companies make their inner covers out of a very thin piece of Masonite. Beekeepers complain that when they place a large jar of sugar water over the inner cover whole during cold months, the thin Masonite will not support the weight. So we make our inner covers from 1/2 inch plywood which will not sag when a large jar of sugar water is placed on top. And get this! We also make a special inner cover that has the regular mouth jar whole already in the inner cover. All you have to do is drop your jar in the hole. And to keep it sealed when you are not feeding, just leave the lid in without the jar. Or for extra ventilation during the winter or during a nectar flow when the bees need the ventilation to cure the nectar into honey, leave both holes open. Take a look at this new inner cover design. Larger side rails with ventilation notches on all four sides. Just in time for a rough winter, why not give your hive another advantage for late fall feeding and better ventilation. And, we have added a special riser that can is attached to the inner cover and can be placed down so the top cover sits flat or raised up to provide maximum ventilation. No more looking around for a rock or a stick to raise the top cover.


Answers to abbreviations and questions above:
DCA - Drone Congregation Area
SHB - Small Hive Beetle
AFB - American Foul Brood
DWV - Deformed Wing Virus
SBB - Solid Bottom Board
AHB - Africanized Honey Bees
What is festooning? It is when the bees hold on to each other's legs, linking themselves together usually when building comb.
What is the age of a nurse bee? A nurse bee describes a bee between the ages of 2-10 days old caring for brood.
That's all for now. Next time we'll take a detailed look at various protective clothing, hats and gloves.
Be sure and check out:Studio-B-Live
Purchase Honey-B-Healthy
Purchase An Inner Cover

See you next time, and remember to Bee-Have yourself!
David & Sheri BurnsLong Lane Honey Bee Farms14556 N. 1020 East RoadFairmount, Il 61841217-427-2678


EMAIL: david@honeybeesonline.com
Website: http://www.honeybeesonline.com/

Ava's finishing up lunch, twirling her sippy cup around and around in her high chair.

Ava: Mommy, I want Santa to bring me a pink guitar.

Me: Well, we need to write him a letter. What's the first song you'll play on your pink guitar if he brings you one?

Silence. I start cleaning up. A minute or two passes. I forget I asked a question.

Ava: I love you

Me: (Heart melting) Oh, I love you too, peanut.

Ava: No mommy. I Love You, that's the first song I'll play.

::

A fall splurge

I had a $5 gift card to Target. I really wanted to buy a new clock with it, but it still would've been too much money. So I bought this wooden leaf instead. It needed to feel more "leafy" around here, you know, fall-like. So I hung it on the front door but found it hanging in the garage the next day. Today I'm moving into the house. Bring it on, hubs.

Selling your business to GoogleFrom the article:It's every small business owners dream to be bought by Google. The good news is that they are buyers and they have plenty cash.We are all familiar with the high profile large deals like its acquisition of Youtube for $1.65 billion but there are plenty of small, low profile purchases too.There are 7 criteria you need to consider...

I was invited to the Virtual Goods Summit yesterday, and got to see quite a few interesting speakers and panels. It got me thinking about what decisions are essential when building a virtual goods product.

I'm really proud of the virtual goods system we built at IMVU, and a whole day of presentations left me feeling very confident in IMVU's durable competitive advantage. Most of the breakthroughs we had at IMVU were made possible because we had really good people grappling with really difficult problems. Those problems were the necessary consequences of some decisions we made early on. I'd love to take credit for the good work that came later, but that's not really fair. The credit is due to much smarter people than me, and to the incredible power of necessity, that mother of invention.

Here's what I mean. I believe there are only a few key decisions to make about virtual goods. These decisions cause problems that will challenge you for years, if you are lucky enough to be successful with your product. If you know what you're getting into, you really don't need to solve those problems in advance. As the size of your community and economy grows, you'll be able to solve them as they arise, as long as you know what to look for.

What makes a particular decision key? Those that require extreme focus and which are hard to reverse later. Of course, no choices in the real world are completely binary. At IMVU, where we are known for our incredible user-generated content, we also have some first-party content, that was important in seeding our catalog. But the work we've done to enable UGC dwarfs the effort we've put into first-party content, so much so that I think it has rightfully consumed almost all of our focus. Hence, this caveat. I recommend that you focus on one answer to each of these questions, even if you dabble in the other possibility.

User-generated content (UGC) or first-party content?
Some products, like Habbo Hotel or World of Warcraft, employ professional artists and designers to create compelling virtual goods that players want to buy. Others, like IMVU or Second Life, rely almost exclusively on third-party developers to create goods.

If you go the UGC route, be prepared to learn an awful lot about copyright and trademark law. Be prepared to deal with excruciating judgements about what kind of content is appropriate for your audience. Your challenge will be incentivizing your developers to create, and managing the volume of their output. How do you help customers find the best of the best? And what do you do with the rest? You may have to staff up a large customer service department to review and approve all of the items. And you may find yourself at the whim of some pretty unstable people. Yes, I have had to deal with developers on strike. Are you ready for that?

If you go the first-party route, you can try a different set of problems. You do get the beneift of total control of your content, so you can guarantee your customers a quality experience. However, virtual goods is a hits-driven business, which means you must constantly figure out what kind of content your customers want. Sales depend on being right (whereas in UGC we can pretty much try anything, and promote the winners). Your platform may require you to staff up a large production department to crank out enough content to satisfy your customers. You may have to take template-based shortcuts ("500 colors of the same basic shirt"). You may also struggle to keep up with changes in your audience. If your early adopters are interested in one kind of thing, but your mainstream audience has a different set of tastes, you may find yourself with a lot of rework on your hands. Can your platform really accomodate emo and anime? Princess and goth?

One last note on UGC vs first-party content, especially for you who are thinking of going the first-party route. Be careful not to get yourself accidentally into the UGC business. Humans are incredibly resourceful, and they really like to express themselves. Beware the trap that Google Lively fell into. They thought they had UGC under control, because they prohibited any user-generated 3D content or animations. They did allow people to create chat rooms and set the topic to whatever they wanted. Guess what they wanted to talk about. Lively's launch was marred by zillions of sex chat rooms, with people spending hours and hours trying to figure out how to use Lively's stock animations to make their avatars do things that looked kinky.

Subscription or a la carte payments?
I notice that people sometimes forget that one of the most profitable virtual goods businesses in the world is Blizzard's World of Warcraft, even though they don't allow customers to trade their hard-earned cash for virtual goods directly. Instead, they charge a flat-rate subscription, and then manage goods using a combination of gameplay, an internal currency and various trading systems. Most systems that come out of the video game world use subscriptions, as do products targeted primarily at kids. Why? Subscriptions help keep gameplay balanced between those with lots of money and those with less, which is key for products focused on fun. Subscriptions also constrain payment-method choices. In the US, it generally means getting parents involved, which is great for kid-focused products (that need parents anyway) but not necessarily great for products targeted at teenagers. On the other hand, they have a huge advantage when it comes to chargebacks, because regular subscribers provide a huge base of "safe" transactions that form a stable denominator for chargeback ratios.

Other sites, like IMVU, Mob Wars and many others allow customers to buy items a la carte, one at a time (or in bundles) as an upsell to the standard experience. This is especially important for teenagers, because it allows them to participate in products without having to go through the complex negotiation with their parents that a subscription usually requires. If you support mobile or prepaid cards for billing, they can even do it on their own, without approval, just using their discretionary income. If you go this route, be prepared to make money a dollar at a time, and to work with lots and lots of payment vendors. You're also going to have to deal with a lot more fraud and chargeback issues, because you'll have to work harder to forge the kind of long-term billing relationship subscription businesses enjoy. On the other hand, you can service customers that are hard to reach: the unbanked, international customers without credit cards, and teenagers everywhere.

Merchandising or gameplay?
In a game like World of Warcraft, Kart Racer, or Mob Wars, customers don't struggle to discover new items. It's obvious what they want to buy, because the objects confer direct benefits that are rooted in the gameplay mechanics. The challenge is to balance the benefits that paying customers get with the benefits that customers get by investing three other attributes: passion, time and skill. An unbalanced game can lose all of its customers (paying or otherwise) rapidly.

For other products, customers are generally shopping for virtual goods in some kind of catalog. If you go this route, be prepared to make a long-term investment in the skill of merchandising. If you have a non-trivial amount of goods for people to buy, they are going to have to find ways to sort through them to find the ones they want. You'll need bundles, promotions, category and segment managers, and algorithms for upsell, cross-sell, and conversion optimization. In other words, a marketing department.


You can use these three questions to analyze existing businesses. For example, IMVU is a user-generated, a la carte, merchandising product. Habbo is first-party, a la carte, merchandising. Mob Wars is first-party, a la carte, gameplay. WoW is first-party, subscription, gameplay. I hope it also proves useful to people thinking about creating a new virtual goods product. My belief is that many of the decisions you make later will flow from these early ones.

Here's how we thought about it in the early days of IMVU. We first tackled the issue of UGC vs first-party content. This one was easy for us, because our values committed us to try to make freedom of expression core to our product. It was part of our mission statement. Of course, it didn't hurt that we only had a small team and not a lot of money, and third-parties gave us a lot of leverage. As for subscriptions, we wanted to have them from the beginning, but decided against them. Here was our reasoning. Fundamentally, we wanted our third-party developers to make money from their time invested in IMVU. So we did this thought experiment: we imagined a customer who was willing to buy a virtual shirt from one of our developers, but couldn't afford to pay us the subscription fee. Would we really turn them away? We decided the answer was no - our developers interests had to come first. So we chose a la carte. Last, we tackled the gameplay question. We knew IMVU would be a socializing platform, and so we decided that we would let our customers interact using their own rules for assigning status, like we do in the physical world. The government doesn't assign each clothing brand its own level of benefit. The companies that own those brands work hard to differentiate their offering so that people who wear their clothes will be perceived in a certain way. We wanted to let our developers do the same thing, so we opted not to go the gameplay route.

That's how we formed our initial IMVU hypothesis. Very few of the decisions we made in those early days wound up, years later, affecting the outcome of the product. But these three did. I hope sharing them will help others who are thinking of working with virtual goods. If that's you, share your experience in a comment. Did you find these questions helpful? And for those of you already experienced with virtual goods, what do you think is missing?

Here's the truth: I am way better at reading, writing, and talking about organizing than I am about doing organizing.

But I'm changing my ways.

You heard me. I'm disassembling my avoidance disorder bit by bit by bit.

And in celebration of favorite season fall, first on the list is clutter.

The word itself invokes chaos: clutter=where to start?

In the past? Nowhere.

In the present? With purpose.

Here's how we're doing it:

• With a pad and a pen. We've observed every room (which isn't many in our townhouse) and asked this question: How do we want to use this room?

Here's how we answered:

Living/TV Room: Relaxing and Reading
Kitchen/Great Room: Creating
Bedroom: Dressing and Sleeping
Bathroom: Showering and Grooming

• In chunks. It's a work in progress, but we're listing the items that don't meet the purpose and doing one of three things:

a. eliminating them (trash, giveaway, charity)
b. moving them (e.g. books from bedroom to living room, arts & crafts from all over to kitchen/great room)
c. leaving them put

• In phases (I'm a big fan). Once the rooms are perfectly purposed, we'll do one more thing:

Revisit each room, and do one more "do we really need this" exercise. Mostly this goes for my books and magazines (I plan to do the article extraction thing--cut out keeper articles and notebook them). I already tackled the clothes (word of advice: it hurts but don't look back). I'm putting off the books. I really might need them someday. Right!?

I'm going to do this. If I do, I've told myself, I get to splurge a bit at Christmastime and make this home a cozy winter wonderland.

::

Note: this is a grandparent/aunt/love Ava update

We took Ava for her flu shot this afternoon. Since I just had mine and still have the bruise and the swelling to prove it, I was really, really, really dreading it for her.

We spent some time with her doctor kit beforehand, giving her "baby" a shot and talking about how it would just pinch for a minute. While she wasn't exactly thrilled to be getting one, she didn't protest much (the extra goldfish at snack time might have helped).

Her daddy and I held her tight while the nurse prepared the shot. She squealed and worse-than- winced in the less-than-a-second it took, but that little darling didn't shed one tear. In fact, before the nurse had put the needle away, little Ava, in the sweetest little voice, looked at her and said, "Thank you."

Pitter Patter Pitter Patter.

::

Splurge-potential

No splurge to report. I'm making an apple cake for a meeting on Friday. If all goes well, I'll pass the recipe along.

How to get rich by Mark Cuban

I wrote earlier about the issue of distribution advantage on the iPhone. As the gold rush drives thousands of apps onto the platform, it's getting harder and harder for new entrants to get oxygen. Take a look at The App Store after the gold rush - FierceDeveloper:

According to a recent BusinessWeek feature, the flood of new games, productivity tools and related iPhone software is making it difficult for the vast majority of apps to crack the consumer consciousness. A number of developers are slashing their prices to remain competitive, but it appears that the gold rush that followed on the heels of the App Store's July 10 grand opening is already over, and the get-rich-quick stories of developers like Steve Demeter--who reportedly raked in $250,000 in just two months for his iPhone game Trism--have already passed into coder lore.

The App Store is a channel for customer acquisition. As the channel gets more and more crowded, just launching an app in the store is getting worse and worse as a strategy for each new entrant. This is completely analogous to the situation elsewhere on the internet, where launching a new website, product, or service with PR is getting harder and harder. Customers and prospects are overwhelmed by the number of media and companies clamoring for their attention. If your launch is not immediately successful, you quickly fall into oblivion. On the App Store, the same dynamic is in play. If your app doesn't immediately make it into the Top 25 page, it's pretty hard to have any kind of durable growth.

So what can you do? I think it's helpful to think about two kinds of competition for distribution: acquisition competition and retention competition.

Acqusition competition is how new apps get new customers. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral. On the iPhone, it seems that two are driving most of the installs: the "newest apps" RSS feed (which may be combined with PR) and a primitive form of SEO, when people search the App Store for a specific kind of app. Over time, we should get more channels that service the long tail of apps for which the current channels are not working. For example, if any of the mobile ad networks gets major traction, they may become a dominant way that people discover new apps.

Retention competition is how you get people to come back to your app. The primary place this competition is visible is on the home screen of the iPhone itself. But the real battle is in the mind of the people who have installed your application. What causes them to come back to your app, instead of spending their time doing something else? Are they turning on their phone specifically to get your app? Do they browse around looking for an app to pass time? Does your app solve a specific problem that they have? Do you have a way to notify them by SMS or email when something notable happens?

The reason I think it's important to think about retention competition when you are thinking about acquisition is that it strongly influences your acquisition options. If your app has incredibly strong retention, you will probably do very well with the current PR/new app system of acquisition. Why? Because you'll be able to leverage your strong retention to stay in the Top 25 list, which will lead to strong acquisition, in a nice positive feedback loop. If your app has strong word-of-mouth or viral components, your retention drives new acquisition, and it's not so important to have good placement in the store. If and when a good SEM solution shows up for iPhone, you may be able to use it to artificially drive your app into the Top 25, as a one-time event. Then, if your retention is good enough, you can stay there. Or if your lifetime value is high enough, you can just keep spending on SEM.

So if you have a new app that you are thinking of launching, what should you do? My advice: don't launch big. Don't do PR upfront, don't put out a press release. Figure out how to launch quietly, so you can find out what your retention and referral rates are going to be. If necessary, consider doing this under a different brand name than the one you are wedded to using. Having that data will let you pick an acquisition strategy that is appropriate for your app. It's like knowing the future.

There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development, low-cost (fast to market) platforms, and rapid-iteration customer development. When I have the opportunity to meet startups, they usually have one of these aspects down, and need help with one or two of the others. The most common need is becoming more customer-centric. They need to incorporate customer feedback into the product development and business planning process. I usually recommend two things: try to get the whole team to start talking to customers ("just go meet a few") and get them to use split-testing in their feature release process ("try it, you'll like it").

However, that can't be the end of the story. If all we do is mechanically embrace these tactics, we can wind up with a disaster. Here are two specific ways it can go horribly wrong. Both are related to a common brain defect we engineers and entrepreneurs seem to be especially prone to. I call it "if some is good, more is better" and it can cause us to swing wildly from one extreme of belief to another.

What's needed is a disciplined methodology for understanding the needs of customers and how they combine to form a viable business model. In this post, I'll discuss two particular examples, but for a full treatment, I recommend Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

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Let's start with the "do whatever customers say, no matter what" problem. I'll borrow this example from randomwalker's journal - Lessons from the failure of Livejournal: when NOT to listen to your users.

The opportunity was just mind-bogglingly huge. But none of that happened. The site hung on to its design philosophy of being an island cut off from the rest of the Web, and paid the price. ... The site is now a sad footnote in the history of Social Networking Services. How did they do it? By listening to their users.

randomwalker identifies four specific ways in which LJ's listening caused them problems, and they are all variations on a theme: listening to the wrong users. The early adopters of LiveJournal didn't want to see the site become mainstream, and the team didn't find a way to stand up for their business or vision.

I remember having this problem when I first got the "listening to customers" religion. I felt we should just talk to as many customers as possible, and do whatever they say. But that is a bad idea. It confuses the tactic, which is listening, with the strategy, which is learning. Talking to customers is important because it helps us deal in facts about the world as it is today. If we're going to build a product, we need to have a sense of who will use it. If we're going to change a features, we need to know how our existing customers will react. If we're working on positioning for our product, we need to know what is in the mind of our prospects today.

If your team is struggling with customer feedback, you may find this mantra helpful. Seek out a synthesis that incorporates both the feedback you are hearing plus your own vision. Any path that leaves out one aspect or the other is probably wrong. Have faith that this synthesis is greater than the sum of its parts. If you can't find a synthesis position that works for your customers and for your business, it either means you're not trying hard enough or your business is in trouble. Figure out which one it is, have a heart-to-heart with your team, and make some serious changes.

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Especially for us introverted engineering types, there is one major drawback to talking to customers: it's messy. Customers are living breathing complex people, with their own drama and issues. When they talk to you, it can be overwhelming to sort through all that irrelevant data to capture the nuggets of wisdom that are key to learning. In a perfect world, we'd all have the courage and stamina to perservere, and implement a complete Ideas-Code-Data rapid learning loop. But in reality, we sometimes fall back on inadequate shortcuts. One of those is an over-emphasis on split-testing.

Split-testing provides objective facts about our product and customers, and this has strong appeal to the science-oriented among us. But the thing to remember about split-testing is that it is always retrospective - it can only give you facts about the past. Split-testing is completely useless in telling you what to do next. Now, to make good decisions, it's helpful to have historical data about what has and hasn't worked in the past. If you take it too far, though, you can lose the creative spark that is also key to learning.

For example, I have often fallen into the trap of wanting to optimize the heck out of one single variable in our business. One time, I became completely enamored with Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (which is a great book, but that's for another post). I managed to convince myself that the solution to all of our company's problems were contained in that book, and that if we just faithfully executed a marketing campaign around the principles therein, we'd solve everything. I convinced a team to give this a try, and they did tried dozens of split-test experiments, each around a different principle or combination of principles. We tried and tried to boost our conversion numbers, each time analyzing what worked and what didn't, and iterating. We were excited by each new discovery, and each iteration we managed to move the conversion needle a little bit more. Here was the problem: the total impact we were having was miniscule. It turns out that we were not really addressing the core problem (which had nothing to do with persuasion). So although we felt we were making progress, and even though we were moving numbers on a spreadsheet, it was all for nothing. Only when someone hit me over the head and said "this isn't working, let's try a radically new direction" did I realize what had happened. We'd forgotten to use the all the tools in our toolbox, and lost sight of our overarching goal.

It's important to be open to hearing new ideas, especially when the ideas you're working on are split-testing poorly. That's not to say you should give up right away, but always take a moment to step back and ask yourself if your current path is making progress. It might be time to reshuffle the deck and try again.

Just don't forget to subject the radical new idea to split-testing too. It might be even worse than what you're doing right now.

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So, both split-testing and customer feedback have their drawbacks. What can you do about it? There are a few ideas I have found generally helpful:

• Identify where the "learning block" is. For example, think of the phases of the synthesis framework: collecting feedback, processing and understanding it, choosing a new course of action. If you're not getting the results you want, probably it's because one of those phases is blocked. For example, I've had the opportunity to work with a brilliant product person who had an incredible talent at rationalization. Once he got the "customer feedback" religion, I noticed this pattern: "Guys! I've just conducted three customer focus groups, and, incredibly, the customers really want us to build the feature I've been telling you about for a month." No matter what the input, he'd come around to the same conclusion as before.
  
  Or maybe you have someone on your team that's just not processing: "Customers say they want X, so that's what we're building." Each new customer that walks in the door wants a different X, so we keep changing direction.
  
  Or consider my favorite of all: the "we have no choice but to stay the course" pessimist. For this person, there's always some reason why what we're learning about customers can't help. We're doomed! For example, we simply cannot make the changes we need because we've already promised something to partners. Or the press. Or to some passionate customers. Or to our team. Whoever it is, we just can't go back on our promise, it'd be too painful. So we have to roll the dice with what we're working on now, even if we all agree it's not our best shot at success.
  
  Wherever the blockage is happening, by identifying it you can work on fixing it.
  
  
• Focus on "minimum feature set" whenever processing feedback. It's all too easy to put together a spec that contains every feature that every customer has ever asked for. That's not a challenge. The hard part is to figure out the fewest possible features that could possibly accomplish your company's goals. If you ever have the opportunity to remove a feature without impacting the customer experience or business metrics - do it. If you need help determining what features are truly essential, pay special attention to the Customer Validation phase of Customer Development.
  
  
• Consider whether the company is experiencing a phase-change that might make what's made you successful in the past obsolete. The most famous of these phase-change theories is Crossing the Chasm, which gives very clear guidance about what to do in a situation where you can't seem to make any more progress with the early-adopter customers you have. That's a good time to change course. One possibility: try segmenting your customers into a few archetypes, and see if any of those sounds more promising than another. Even if one archetype currently dominates your customer base, would it be more promising to pursue a different one?
  

As much as we try to incorporate scientific product development into our work, the fact remains that business is not a science. I think Drucker said it best. It's pretty easy to deliver results in the short term or the long term. It's pretty easy to optimize our business to serve one of employees, customers or shareholders. But it's incredibly hard to balance the needs of all three stakeholders over both the short and long-term time horizon. That's what business is designed to do. By learning to find a synthesis between our customers and our vision, we can make a meaningful contribution to that goal.