Yes, don't you just hate it when people make a living creating software? </sarcasm>
179 karma · joined January 16, 2009
I get clear answers, all of our lawyers are up-front about their billable hours, and most importantly, understand that we ultimately decide, they're hired to provide expertise and to help us understand what kind of risks we're taking and what our options are.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I think the real problem is that many startup founders consider dealing with lawyers and legal stuff in general a chore and a hassle. Something to get out of the way as quickly as possible.
If however, you find the right person for the job – ask around for references – and take an interest in the work you do with them, it doesn't have to be that way. A new kind of law firm, as you call it, or simply a good law firm, as I call it, already exists. In my experience there are actually quite a few out there, you just have to take an effort to find and evaluate them.
I couldn't find anything about a license or copyright on your project's github page.
http://jacobian.org/writing/great-documentation/
He subdivides documentation as a whole into more or less the following three sections:
- Tutorials
- Topical Guides
- Reference
Screencasts can work for Tutorials, and they can be used for marketing purposes, in which they're closer to topical guides but probably won't provide as much depth as a textual guide could.
Imho. a screencast can be great as a marketing tool, but not so much as a learning tool.
- People who have the patience to court a jury with a business plan, perfecting their pitch, etc. at such an early stage – while they could be working on their product – don't make the best entrepeneurs.
- The judges are teachers who've been entrenched in the academic world for too long to pass valuable judgement on a startup's viability; Their judgement is either counterindicative of success overall, or they may simply weigh factors that are only important for a more mature business too heavily for the judgement to have anything to do with startup success.
- Most startups fail, including those that come forth from these competitions, there's no measurable correlation.
Take your pick ;)
Any judgement of a startup's possible success that's based upon business plans rather than founders' personalities misses its goal because it does not account for the amount of change to the plans that is required for success, but which will only happen if the founders have sufficiently flexible minds.
A final point then: Does hearing a respected jury tell you your plans are the bee's knees make you more hesistant to change them or throw them overboard when things aren't taking off?
Nice counter-example: Finland just made broadband internet access into a legal right: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/finland.internet.righ...
Our first app was built using 'unsanctioned' technology, PyObjC (before PyObjC shipped with 10.5); the app would have never seen the light of day on the iPhone, but then again, we would never have built it in PyObjC for the iPhone to begin with. Everyone we've ever met at Apple has been supportive from day one, and we owe a lot to many of those people.
We have not shipped any iPhone apps, so I can't say how I'd like that, but as a Mac app developer I love working with Apple.
There is no impending robotic revolution, there is a gradual shift in what kind of work people do as there has been since the dawn of the industrial age.
Since "near this city" is filter 1 and price range is nr. 2, people are going to pick their city to shorten their options from several hundreds to a couple dozen to make it easier to choose.
Not too big of a deal right now, but once there are 10x as many designers on there, this is going to be one of those straws clients will grasp on to, even when geography really isn't that relevant to them.
"No turning back" sounds like a poor excuse to keep dragging a startup along, trading 25% and a boatload of your time through some investment TV show for just 90k sounds like you've given up on actually working your ass of to develop the product/business, or for that matter, actually being sort of in charge of it if it somehow does manage to survive.
The low valuation is not the problem, but twenty-five percent at that valuation? Better do some consulting to scrape that cash together. It might make sense in some situations, just sounds like a bad deal to me if you also have to be on some TV show to actually have a chance at getting it.
The article is rather light on details and – as others have already pointed out – on math that makes sense, so I might be getting the sitation completely wrong, but this just strikes me as a really poor way to run a startup.
I certainly hope I never stop feeling like there's a lot more to learn. Once you start feeling that way, the challenges and the pleasure in overcoming them will most certainly end, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how much there's really left to learn.
Now, the above mentions one or more third parties. Having redundant providers significantly reduces the risk of being cut off like that, but while having a known single point of failure may seem stupid, it's not as if only businesses that don't have any are real.
Whether or not something constitutes a 'real' business does not hinge on that business' dependencies or any other risk factors. Whether you'd want to be a stakeholder in it is an entirely different matter.
How many of us in the software world would actually have a real business within this definition of dependencies if you consider how quickly we'd all go in the red if google somehow ends up blacklisting us? With a somewhat grown-up business, you don't need 100% of your sales to evaporate to be in serious trouble..
Many now popular constructs in contemporary language have come forth from – at their time – seemingly illogical mutations. By banning all seemingly illogical new ways of saying things, or in other words: only letting new constructs that make more sense pass unopposed, we effectively kill a language. A language that allows for only the most logical and most effective of ways to express ideas has no room for creativity. (I'm referring to creativity with the language, as in playing with the language, e.g. stand up comedy or creative writing; it is perfectly possible to be creative using a dead language, or to write beautiful – syntactically correct – code.)
Considering how evolution seems to work, such a 'pure' language is inevitably where we'll end up if we kill off all seemingly illogical new constructs.
To bring my point back to where I started: There are not two groups, one that cares about precision of speech and one that doesn't. I understand you deliberately simplified your explanation, there are never 'two groups', but I think there's another, more interesting, way to view this difference beyond just stating that there obviously must be a continuum between two extremes. I pose that we all have a certain tolerance level for how incorrect a construct may be with regard to how we value its addition to the language (is it merely a lame bastardization, like "I could care less", or does it have actual merit, like "to upvote") for us to accept or reject that construct.
If we shoot down "I could care less" only because it's unsound – or if you prefer, incorrect or imprecise – we may be smug, but we are definitely being reckless and are doing the language a big disfavor. If, instead, we point at this wart in someone's copy because its (1) unsound and (2) lacks any merit over the correct version, I don't think that's smug, let alone asinine, at all.
If you touch it, the screen is now locked in the current orientation. To see the button again, simply rotate your iPhone to another 90° angle range and it'll fade in again briefly.
Works really well, maybe not so great for the small plane scenario where orientation changes all the time making the continuous fading in/out a bit annoying, but great for statically holding your iPhone at an off angle.
This worked out great, within a very short timespan we had thousands of beta users, who apparently agreed with us that our product was useful. With all the email we received from these people we were able to assess what kind of features people wanted added to our product (and which bugs really needed to be fixed right away) to be 'good enough' in their opinions. We mixed in the feedback with the improvements we had in mind already to release 8 more betas to incrementally get the product to a 'good enough' sweet spot that was being redefined/refined with every release.
Finally, we released a 1.0 (for pay) version of the product 5 monhts later.
Our application now has a large, very loyal and mostly happy group of customers and it won an Apple Design Award last month. I'd say our ideas about how we took it from beta to 1.0 worked out pretty well.
So, I'll echo what others have said here: Make something useful, release that, then work your ass off to turn it from something that's just useful (which is already a hard criterion to achieve) into something great.
If you just need 'testing': Hire someone to be a tester, or employ some friends to play with a private beta and give you feedback. We did this too before taking the beta public, and thereby prevented a lot of annoyances for our users and a ton of nearly identical emails in our support inbox for issues we really ahould've fixed before we released.
Even with this precaution in place, we still received multiple hundreds of emails a day just after the public beta release about other issues that we could have fixed before shipping but didn't yet know about. Releasing prematurely can not only turn away your earliest users, but it can also overwhelm you with a support burden you don't want to deal with when what you really should be doing is continuing development towards a solid 1.0.
If you're still in startup mode, the following two questions should help you make the decision:
- do I need it right now?
- can I spare the money right now, if not: can I make a deal with my IP attorneys where they agree to bill me later? (just think about the money you need to spend the coming couple of months, the total estimated cost over 20 years is completely irrelevant at this point)
If both questions are answered with a 'yes', do it. Because if you need it right now, it doesn't matter how inconvenient the distraction from working on your product is right now, as a founder you'll just have to deal with it. And if you don't need it, don't do it, because I'm sure you can find some other thing you need to do 'right now'.
Don't let the idea that you already spent money on the provisional patent cloud your judgement about whether you should put more money into this. If you can't come to a rational decision, and the prior expense is what pulls you over the fence emotionally, it's probably better to cut your losses.
Good luck, these kinds of decisions are hard, especially deciding whether you 'need' something. That's something only you can assess, it could help to get a second opinion from another IP attorney, preferably one that doesn't have a financial incentive to sell you on going for it.
- Dirk