All Posts Tagged ‘Design’

Austin Gardner-Smith

How Gannet’s Paywall is Sucking the Life Out of Its Content (And It’s Not About the Money)

Austin Gardner-Smith | July 6th, 2010

I’ve written about paywalls before, and I think they’re a terrible for everyone. And it’s not because I’m an information hippie who thinks that all content should be free. It’s because they reflect a fundamental misunderstanding about how to capture the value of great content, and because the user experience sucks. Really bad.

Gannet just rolled out paywalls at three of their regional papers. I found out because I follow paidContent.org on Pinyadda, which, ironically, is a free publication. After I got through the painful period of disgust/anger/befuddlement/hilarity that ensues when I hear about new paywalls being erected, I went to visit the Tallahassee Democrat, one of the sites sporting the shiny new system. It didn’t go very well.

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Austin Gardner-Smith

Notes from a Lean Startup Case Study

Austin Gardner-Smith | March 30th, 2010

Last week Cheryl and I did a quick case study about Pinyadda’s application of the lean startup mentality as part of the lean startup Boston meetup group. There’s a link to the video of the full presentation at the bottom of this post, but I thought I’d run through a couple of the key points  I tried to stress in talking about our experience that I think is worth saying again. But let me also be clear that these are my opinions and not necessarily part of the formal (or informal, for that matter) lean approach.

– Being lean is about doing things that make sense and about being efficient, not necessarily about following every step of the ‘methodology’ to a T.

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Austin Gardner-Smith

Pirates Are Super Awesome, Metrics Are Kinda Cool, but Pirates+Metrics = Super Awesome Cool

Austin Gardner-Smith | March 22nd, 2010

I like pirates. A lot. I’m from a place where people spend a lot of time on boats and we played Coasties and Pirates instead of Cowboys and Indians. So when I first heard about this dude named Dave McClure who was spreading something called  ”Startup Metrics for Pirates” I was pumped.

Turns out this stuff is useful for people who are pirate-neutral, maybe even those with an aversion to pirates (I don’t understand you). I could sum it up  but you’re much better off checking out the presentation or watching a video of Dave giving the basic talk. But the gist is pretty simple: measure the stuff that matters, don’t measure the stuff that doesn’t. This might seem like an easy thing to do, but in reality it can be pretty easy to confuse getting a lot numbers with getting the right numbers.

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Austin Gardner-Smith

Opening Up – Announcing the Public Beta

Austin Gardner-Smith | January 27th, 2010

Last Wednesday, amid a sea of reporters and a blinding array of flash bulbs, we opened Pinyadda registration to the public. OK, so that’s not exactly how it went down. We did quietly open up registration last week and so far the results have been great. Thanks to everyone who’s signed up; we look forward to hearing from you in the coming weeks about your experience with Pinyadda and how we can make it better. (more…)

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