Gavin Terrill's Blog

Of Interest - 12/2014

Wow, tabs full already and we've only just begun the new year! Here's what I'm looking at now:

• Frida - It's a desktop application that let's you inject Javascript into native processes (Win, Mac, Linux). Looks useful if you want to reverse engineer stuff or maybe extend Apps with integration functionality (looking at you AppConnector). Is JS the new LUA?
• I'm getting into testing my Shopify Apps and have come across some really useful posts:
• Writing maintainable Rails tests
• TDD and ActiveRecord in Rails
• BookThatApp needs an API. Grape is the crowd fave, and looks Ok, but I went to #rorosyd the other night and listened to a talk about Roar (and Katy Perry). Spoiled for choice!
• Speaking of BTA, it also needs a UX review & facelift. I'm thinking Bootstrap 3 with all the mobile first responsive goodness for the reskin.  There are a couple of themes I like from WrapBootstrap:
• Canvas
• Unicorn
• The Thoughtbot playbook is awesome! Highly recommended reading for anyone running a  professional services operation. There are some nice tidbits if you are doing SAAS apps as well.

    

Entrepreneurial "overnight" success

Stratify is an "eDiscovery" product that was just picked up by Iron Mountain for a cool $158 MM. Bill Burnham, one of the early stage investors, tells the story of how the company endured numerous rounds of fundings, restructurings and business model changes:

The reality was that they had a fantastic product in what was effectively a very small market.  Everyone put their heads together to try and figure out how to build the business faster, but in many ways the company was stuck.  And then something totally unexpected and very fortuitous happened:  I got sued.

Fascinating read. Reminds me of what Marc Andreessen says about product/market fit.

48 hours to launch a startup

This looks like some serious fun: http://startupweekend.com/

What a great idea! Get a bunch of interesting folks in the room, come up with an idea and build it over a weekend. The idea they came up with sounds really cool - a widget based polling service. I can definitely think of use cases where that would be very useful.

An interesting aspect for me as I follow along are the choices being made on the dev side. EC2 for compute power - no brainer. S3 for backup - yup. Facebook is the obvious choice for the first extension. Spring and Flex though? I would of thought they would of gone with RoR for sure.

The revenue model will be ad based, by the looks of the latest (Sat. night) mockups at least.

eBay eCommerce

I recently researched the options for creating an e-commerce website for my friend's flower shop. Bottom line is that the market seems pretty poorly served right now.

One thing that just occurred to me is why don't e-bay offer a branded hosted e-commerce offering? They have already figured out the payment mechanisms, how to deal with taxes, maintaining a product catalog and so forth, so it would seem like a pretty simple product offering. This would be ideal for the many small to mid-size businesses already selling their stuff on e-bay.

Carpe Diem

In the end, it's mostly about people: Small Ideas