
Building a Startup: 12 Priceless Tools for Launching Your MVP - tansey
http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/05/31/building-a-startup-12-priceless-tools-for-launching-your-mvp/
======
phugoid
Something he left out was CRM, and I would love some suggestions.

My marketing involves contacting individuals at various companies. I need to
capture all the information I know about them, track email conversations, and
record meeting minutes. I also need to keep lots of comments about the
strategy for each customer.

So far, I don't know of any easy way to access this data in one place without
lots of steps and clicks. I've been using the file system; one directory per
company, and one text file per person. I paste emails and type meeting minutes
into each file.

I dream of a simple time-line based view of all the interactions with a given
customer. Inside that dream, I also dream of Gmail and Skype integration.
Suggestions, please?

~~~
roel_v
ZohoCRM is free for a single user, and you can upgrade later. It's not pretty
but it works quite well for me. For Skype 'integration', I use the Skype
Firefox plugin so I can click phone numbers to call people. It's not really
'integration' since you still need to manually enter a 'phone call' for your
contact but you can do that while the phone is ringing, it works well for me.

I haven't found any other (free) CRM systems that worked for me. I tried
vTiger installed locally but it's not very stable nor moving fast - not
something I'd want to base business on.

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troyk
not sure why so many people pimp 99designs. It's on the author's "priceless"
list, but it's the only tip he spends 6 bullet points instructing how to
overcome 99design crap. I tried them once, spent a lot of time collaborating
with designers and was not impressed with any of the results. I had to file a
chargeback with my credit card company because 99designs refused to refund my
money outside their 60 day policy (I was unaware I had 60 days, you have to
hover over their money back guarantee to find that out). I could be spoiled,
as I've worked with a good designer in the past (<http://rohdesign.com/>) --
the benefit being more focused attention to your project, albeit for a few
more $$, but not really when you factor in the value of your time.

~~~
Neputys
There's no such thing as fast cheap good quality. 99designs is a place for
people who don't know that or think they will somehow win the lottery...

~~~
moe
Not sure what's up with all the 99designs bashing. I used them twice so far
and you get what you pay for. Sometimes you're lucky and get a lot more.

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mtogo
| This almost goes without saying these days, but Git is the clear winner in
the battle of the source control versioning systems.

It is? How so, exactly? It has a small lead over other systems as far as
number of users goes, but i'd hardly call it a "clear winner".

~~~
rawsyntax
why is there a winner in source control at all? Is it a contest?

~~~
tansey
Admittedly, I'm not a source control or git expert by any means. However, in a
lot of work environments, it is a contest. Your company decides at the outset
that they will commit to use a set of technologies for the next project and
that's that.

I am personally looking at it from the outskirts as a guy trying to build a
startup. When I look around for a library or plug-in I need, I end up on
Github. When I look at cloud hosting providers like Heroku and AppHarbor (even
though they've since added support for other source control tools), I see
support for git.

I'm a machine learning guy, so my goal is to find the tools that minimize my
time developing software and maximize my time discovering new AI algorithms.
From that perspective, it is a competition: I do not have time nor care to
tinker with all the different source control methods. I just want what works,
and what works is git.

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pspeter3
I feel like any of these compilation articles are just meant to generate
discussion because people will disagree. Start up founders need to focus on
making a good product with the tools they have available to them

~~~
tptacek
This seems like the super-productive kind of disagreement to have on HN: "I
tried this and it didn't work and here's what did work for me".

Which version control system you use, yeah. But cheap ways to get a decent-
looking web app up quick? That seems relevant.

~~~
pspeter3
I'll agree with you on the relevance for getting a cheap decent looking web
app. I feel that the version control system and text editor recommendations
are just begging for flame wars because it's a subjective choice.

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plasma
For anyone else wanting to know what MVP stood for (besides the MVC
alternative!)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product>

~~~
samtp
I thought they were talking about this at first:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_view_controller>

~~~
hboon
The MVC alternative is <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-presenter>.

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marcymarcy
Not the tools I'd pin down, but in particular I am majorly against prefab
themes like themeforest, and crowdsourced work like 99designs or crowdspring.
You get what you pay for, and it's crap. I think both are a major insult to
originality and craft that comes with quality design work - the exploitation
of the latter, crowdsourced design work, just makes me flat out nauseous.

that said, WordPress, from that list, is indeed the best!

~~~
tptacek
Could not possibly disagree more strongly about Themeforest.

Take the top 20 admin themes from Themeforest and compare them to the UI/UX of
20 randomly selected YC companies. Not the front page; the actual UI.

Reasonable people will disagree which one wins.

But what's crazy about that is that the Themeforest stuff costs _twelve
dollars_ †, and is available _instantly_.

Desktop software developers don't have inferiority complexes about how samey
their apps look. In fact, refined sameyness is a point of pride among Cocoa
devs! But for some reason, every web app needs to be designed by Shepard
Fairey _and_ Khoi Vinh to launch.

By all means, contract Fairey and Vinh. But do it _after_ you launch the
product and start making money. Your initial users _do not give a fuck_ about
this issue. If you are not a natural, fluent designer, you will lose tens of
thousands of dollars of your time (and, worse, money) just so you don't look
like someone else's CMS skin... which _none of your real customers will
notice_.

† _Admittedly more if you need an all-purpose license, but still 1/10th what a
designer costs._

~~~
danielcrenna
Great call on Themeforest. The added benefit of using a prefab admin skin is
that you can actually build your entire concept before you need to think about
paying a designer. Many of the themes have a built-in grid system (if they
aren't using 966 outright) so that you can build UI workflows after creating
mockups. I have made this mistake in the past but would now never hire
designer if I hadn't already built a working prototype of every screen, and
for that I use ThemeForest HTML5 skins.

~~~
tptacek
As multiple designers will attest, I am more than happy to pay for design work
(nothing we have up publicly came from Themeforest or 99designs). But unless
your concept absolutely depends on graphical experience --- and look how
shitty Pitchfork's site was for years and years and years in the trendiest
most superficial demographic imaginable --- graphic designers are a terrible
thing to block your project on.

Rather than wrack my brain and carefully come up with a scoping document
laying out all the pages and functionality in my next application --- a
document that will be out of date exactly one customer meeting after I write
it --- I'm just going to point my next designer at a $12 Themeforest theme and
say "do this, but way better".

I don't mind that it costs $5-10,000 to get "better than Themeforest", but I
do mind losing weeks of release time sweating whether it's time to pull the
trigger on a designer and what exactly to have them do.

99designs is a different story. I don't have the designer's moral problem with
spec!work but the misgivings people have about quality and IP infringements
are based on real issues. I still think it's a good tool, but I can see why
some would avoid it.

Avoiding Themeforest though seems crazy.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
The designers' aversion to spec work seems more like an attempt at collective
bargaining than a true moral stance to me. I'm not saying that collective
bargaining is necessarily a bad thing, but the success of 99designs and the
like makes me think that they won't succeed in this age of globalization.

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hxf148
Good article I can attest that we have done most of the points on the list in
growing our startup (<http://infostripe.com>) we were not aware of 99designs
and might check them out.

I would also suggest submissions. Look for indexes, review sites and bloggers
in your area and submit your MVP.

Also don't give up on the first try when contacting busy people. Don't slip
through the cracks.

