Dick Costello has a new blog

Its very cool...  Check it out here

Here is a comment I left

Great post as usual. 

An issue that comes to my mind is that in starting a business it is often not clear what the actual technology will be to achieve the desired outcome.  Feeds are clearly feeds, a discrete technology with a pretty straightforward set of components (processing, syndicating, analytics, etc).  On the other hand when we started Triggit all we knew was that we were going to get into the online advertising business and focus on monetizing the long tail.  Early on we rolled out three different solutions to this problem that were clearly not the right approach.  Each time we took what we learned and went back to the drawing board.  Effectively we scrapped each previous “launch”.  If each of those had taken 3-6 months Triggit would be dead by now.  What we learned in that process got us to where we are now, which is a good place. 

I completely agree that once the product is figured out it makes a ton of sense to plan for the iterations, flexibility and the general assumption that the market will force you in other directions.  But that first important step of getting a really good handle on what the product will be cannot be over emphasized.  To play on your analogy my question is are you going to make shakes or hamburgers? 

This seems like the age-old business, engineer split.  The business guy starts with the business questions and asks what technology do I need to solve this problem and the engineer starts with the technology and asks what business problem they can solve with it.

My 2 cents

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