Companies We Love
@GrasshopperLabs- Three Keys To Creating A Great User Experience For Your Product http://tcrn.ch/cjubwA
- Is Your Startup in a Good Neighborhood? http://bit.ly/aLYx12
- Frothy Times for Web Angel Investing http://bit.ly/b4Ifdf
Labs Blog
Breakthrough Applications Built for Entrepreneurs. Here you can find out what the Labs Team is working on, hear perspectives on emerging technology, and explore how to harness it for the benefit of entrepreneurs and their startups.
More Productivity with the Pomodoro Technique
Good programmers are always in search of tools to make them even more productive. Be it those text processors, application launchers, IDEs, we are never a hundred percent satisfied with our toolbox. Maybe this is an extension of our day-to-day behavior, one of constantly looking to improve the execution of a task or simpler – not to say minimalist – manners to solve a problem.
Besides that, another similar problem is faced by members of our class: the neverending search for time, focus or task management methodologies. It was during one of those searches that I found a tool that soon became one of my favorites: the Pomodoro Technique.
Created by Italian Francesco Cirillo in the late eighties, the Pomodoro Technique is a very simple time management methodology. You work within short time periods of 25 minutes by using a timer. During those periods, you should focus exclusively on a single task, doing your best to ignore interruptions.
Each 25-minute work cycle is called a pomodoro (Italian for tomato) and is followed by a short pause, three to five minutes long.
The idea behind this method is the perception that calculated pauses increase mental agility and allow you maximum dedication during a specific period.
Permission to Behave Like a Child
I just watched Temple Grandin’s talk at TED about the kinds of minds the world needs. She describes how the world is full of different kinds of thinkers – visual thinkers, abstract thinkers, and verbal thinkers. She goes on to emphasize how the world seems to be one that favors abstract thinkers more than any other.
Before continuing – spend some time learning about Temple Grandin and her life. This is an amazing woman who has taken what many might see as a disadvantage, her autism, and turned it into an advantage that we’ve all benefited from.
One of the things that came to my visual/verbal thinking mind while she spoke was how, despite the different kinds of “thinkers”, kids seem to share one thing in common: their drive towards getting hands on experience with the world around them is nearly unstoppable.
Consider this scene: a block of clay sitting on a table surrounded by 5 year olds. How many of those kids will sit around that table discussing what might be created with this clay? How many would whiteboard the pros and cons of certain structures over others? How many would write a functional spec? I’m pretty sure we’re all correct when we say none.
Labs Crew in Austin for SXSW 2010
The Grasshopper Labs crew has landed in Austin for SXSW 2010! They will be in the city until the 16th, so if you want to grab a coffee just give them a shout. They’ve got all sorts of Chargify SWAG to give out and have a big surprise planned for Monday night.
There may or may not be a giant green bull running around with them as well. Purely hearsay at this point. If you’re interested in talking shop with any of the Labs guys, just shoot them a DM on Twitter – David Hauser (@dh), Michael Buffington (@go), or Jon Kay (@grasshopperbuzz).
Enjoy the show!
FOWA Miami 2010 (Semi-)Live Blog
I’m going to be semi-live blogging today from Carsonified’s Future of Web Apps Conference in Miami. As each session draws to a close, I’ll enter some quick notes about the highlights and main takeaways. Enjoy!
Update (10:00am): There is a FOWA live stream on Ustream, but I don’t have the URL right now.
Update (10:30am): Just found out I got locked out of Twitter for 60 minutes because I changed my password yesterday and Tweetie has relentlessly been trying to log me in with my old password. Ugh.
The 10 Golden Prinicples for Successful Web Apps – Fred Wilson
9:05-9:35
1. Speed
- Speed is the most important feature
- Pertains more to mainstream users than power users. Mainstream users leave or get frustrated when something is slow
- Have all portfolio services on pingdom and monitor those results
2. Instant Utility
- Must be useful right out of the box
- There are tricks you can use (i.e. pre-populate content from sources you don’t intend to use long-term, like scraping the web)
- Compared Google Video’s “come back later” after uploading a video to You Tube’ instant availability
Of Mutual Benefit
As part of our recently started book club we’ve been reading Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained. Though some of us have read the book and applied a lot of the ideas to our day to day work, we all thought it’d be great to read and talk about it as a team.
In a mind-bending, recursive, meta sort of way, what I read this morning has inspired me to take our book club up a step.
This morning I read about one of the principles of Extreme Programming (XP): mutual benefit. I, like most middle children, am already an expert in the realm of all things mutually beneficial. Middle children are always at risk of having their plans for fun being thwarted by their older and younger siblings and as such become mutual benefit samurais at an early age.
Mutual benefit, in XP, means that every activity should benefit all concerned. As a kid, if I wanted a cookie, the only way I was going to be able to have that cookie was if I could distract my siblings. Either they’d also needed a cookie, or they needed to be distracted long enough for me to obtain and consume a cookie without threat.
Welcome to the Bullring – Chargify Launches Blog
For the past two months you have read posts about the first Grasshopper Labs product, Chargify. If you haven’t, well here is a summary:
Chargify is a recurring billing application developed by Grasshopper Labs, a team of entrepreneurs, developers, and marketers who strive to create breakthrough web apps. Chargify is designed to make billing easy and with affordable freemium pricing, no long term contract and no transaction fees, it is perfect for growing web 2.0 and SaaS applications.
That being said, the Labs team has been working extremely hard over the past few months to ensure the success of Chargify, and today we’d like to announce the launch of the The Bullring, Chargify’s new blog. We’re hoping to share the knowledge we’ve built over the past six years and make it easy for young SaaS applications to implement a recurring billing system.
Find great information on recurring billing, billing best practices, recurring billing case studies, metrics, SaaS, Rails and more! The Bullring is meant to serve as a hub for entrepreneurs and developers running subscription based businesses. Check it out at http://chargify.com/blog.
Chargify API Libraries Emerge
We sent out a survey recently to those on our Beta waiting list (thanks for all your responses!) and one thing that I noticed from the comments was that not everyone is aware of the API libraries/wrappers that have emerged so far for the Chargify API. The Chargifiy team has published one for Ruby/Rails, and I’m aware of another one for Ruby and one for Python.
The full list is always our support site, but here’s a quick run through.
ActiveResource Chargify API Gem
This is the “official” ruby gem from the Chargify team. It leverages ActiveResource (which is built in to Rails) for an easy implementation and ActiveRecord-like method interface. Its hosted on github, with gem hosting by the cool new Gemcutter.
The source repository is here: http://github.com/grasshopperlabs/chargify_api_ares
Pull requests are welcome!
The State of Chargify – November 19th
Its been a while since the last blog update on Chargify, so allow me to fill you in. Things have been progressing rapidly and we’ve gotten great feedback from our beta testers. A big thanks to all of you!
Not a beta tester yet, but want to be? We hear you! If you’re not already signed up, head on over to http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup/ and click the big “Sign Up for the Beta” button.
If you ARE on the list, hang tight. We’re moving as fast as we can to allow everyone to Chargify their customers. (Yes, I just used Chargify as a verb… but I’m not the first to do that!)
Chargify Update: What’s Happening?
Development and the private beta of Chargify is proceeding rapidly and we’re getting great feedback from lots of our beta testers.
Recently, we’ve released a few major updates and we plan to release another major update by the end of the week. This update includes, among other things, access to all of your product information via our API which has been one of our most requested features.
A big thanks goes out of the beta users we currently have, because we’ve been getting some super great feedback that we’ve turned directly into new features.
A bunch of you have asked to look at our API documentation before being accepted into the private beta. All of our documentation is freely available on our support site. Our documentation is a combination of “Cucumber features” and written documentation we’ve generated over the last few weeks. We are looking at exposing more of our Cucumber features in a more useful way for developers.
If you haven’t been accepted into the private beta yet, fret not. Once we push out our next update, we’ll be letting a whole gaggle more users in (in a first come first served order). We expect to fully open up the beta for everyone in the next 30-45 days.
Launching Chargify in the TechCrunch DemoPit: Lessons Learned
Monday was a wild one for the Chargify team – we launched our product in the DemoPit at the TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. We did not win the “Audience Choice” vote (votes are cast through poker chips placed in to DemoPit presenters’ jars), but the day was full of affirmation nonetheless.
Most people simply “got it” when we explained what we are doing. We particularly resonated with developers who have tried to integrate a billing system, and investors/stakeholders who have seen their developers flounder when it comes to smoothly accepting recurring payments.
A particularly great moment for us came when Mr. Michael Arrington himself rode up on his Segway, chatted with our CTO and co-founder David Hauser for a few moments, then dropped his chip in our jar and rode off. I can only guess that someone else tipped him off to what we’re doing, so many thanks to that person. Read more »
