All Posts Tagged ‘Product’

Austin Gardner-Smith

Updates, New Badges, and the Summer of Yadda

Austin Gardner-Smith | June 2nd, 2010

Things are moving fast at Pinyadda HQ and we wanted to make sure to keep everyone in the loop about what we’ve been up to. Yaddapalooza was a huge success, with hundreds of people coming out to celebrate our progress and cheer for the future, and we’re super pumped to turn on the gas and really take Pinyadda to the next level. Here’s a quick rundown of the cool stuff we’ve shipped in the last few weeks:

The Newsstand

Our users needed a better way to find new people, sites, and topics to follow that allowed them to do three main things: find a known quantity (e.g. a person or site whose name they were sure of), find unknown quantities with a known criteria (e.g. sites that have content about cars), and browse content by category in a way that was intuitive and fun. We’re pretty happy with the way it came out and we’re eager to hear your feedback about how to make it even better.

New Badges

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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

KISSmetrics vs. Google Analytics

Austin Gardner-Smith | February 8th, 2010

Like most other startups using the lean startup methodology, we’ve become pretty obsessed with tracking data. We track all kinds of stuff, from internal product metrics to external referrals to conversions via the various funnels we’ve set up. We rely on these numbers to help us make key product decisions, to tell us where we should focus our marketing efforts, and generally to find out what’s working and what’s not. For a company still wiggling our way into product/market fit, these numbers are our currency, and it’s important that we get them right.

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