Baydin quietly launched a new product today. We call it Boomerang, and it is a snooze button for your email.  It lets you take a message out of your inbox for a period of time, and then, when you are ready to follow up, it returns the message to your inbox and flags it and/or marks it unread. 

Check it out here:
http://www.baydin.com/boomerang

Why Boomerang?

Over the past few months, we spent a lot of time talking with people about how Baydin could make their interactions with email more satisfying.  We found that talking about improving email made us magnets for our customers’ general concerns about email – not just finding information. Over and over again, we heard frustrations about trying to manage an enormous amount of email, feeling overwhelmed, and losing track of information.

Boomerang is a response to that problem.  It’s incredibly easy to use.  Here’s how:

1. Right-click a message, and tell Boomerang when you want to see it again
2. Boomerang moves the message out of your inbox (into a special Boomerang folder it creates, so you can always access the message)
3. At the time you specified, Boomerang moves the message back into your inbox.

The funny thing is, while we thought it would be an interesting idea, we didn’t think we’d use it that much ourselves. But what we found was that Boomerang helped us stay on top of our own messages a lot more than we expected.

Last week, I got an email asking me to remind someone on the 22nd.  A couple clicks later, I didn’t have to worry about whether or not I’d remember to follow up.  I didn’t have to think about that message again until when it was time to deal with it.  My inbox (and my brain) were at peace. 

Try it now!

Sound interesting? Try it for free for two weeks, and if you like it, we’re taking 50% off the price for customers who purchase it during beta. Let us know what you think, and look for more great stuff from us soon!

What about Baydin (the automatic search product)?

It’s not going anywhere.  In fact, we’ll be releasing Alpha 6 sometime in the next two weeks.  Although now that Baydin Inc. makes more than one product we’re probably going to be renaming it. 

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When you’re writing managed add-ins for Office, it can be tough to figure out where Visual Studio is storing your settings file (*.dll.config) or any of the other files that it is generating when you Debug your program. 

I’ve solved this problem about 6 times, and I don’t ever want to have to solve it again.  So here’s the easiest way to find out where your plugin is ACTUALLY being run from:

MessageBox.Show(this.GetType().Assembly.Location.ToString());

And the actual config file is usually in:

C:\Users\UserNameGoesHere\AppData\Local\Microsoft_Corporation

This post was really more of a reminder to myself than anything else.  Sorry if it’s boring. 

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Image by Kansir via Flickr

As we continue to develop Baydin, I have been very surprised at how many people complain about “missing features” in Windows Search and the Outlook 2007 search bar, like the ability to search for messages from a specific person or to find only attachments. 

As it turns out, Windows Search and Outlook Search include those features (and a bunch more), but Microsoft borrowed a page from Google and hid them behind a plain-looking search bar.  Read through these tips, and in about five minutes, you’ll be an expert at finding even the most deeply-buried files. 

Just type these keywords into the Windows or Outlook search bar that you’re using now – it’s in the Start menu for Windows 7 and Vista, and it’s in the taskbar as a text box in Windows XP (if you don’t see it, right-click the taskbar and choose toolbars to turn it on.  If it’s not there, you can install it for free from Microsoft’s Windows search download page).  Just type them straight in, and you’ll be ready to go. 

1. The from: keyword

Want to find all the email addresses from your friend Jim?  Just pull out the from: keyword, and you’ll have them.  Just type from:jim (space or no space) into the search box, and you’ll only get communications from Jim. 

Of course, you might have six coworkers named Jim, so you can also use an email address.  Just type from:jim@gmail.com, and you’ll only get email messages from the right Jim. 

You can also use full names if you put them in quotes: from:”jim halpert” will make sure you only get messages from Jim Halpert. 

2. Find only attachments

If you’re running Outlook 2007, you can already search inside the text of any file sent to you as an attachment.  But sometimes you want to limit your search only to files you know someone sent you, or emails that included attachments.  In that case, you can use the has:attachment and is:attachment keywords. 

For example, to find all of the invoices you have received as attachments, just type invoice is:attachment into the search bar.  This is especially powerful when you combine it with #1.  For example from:”jim halpert” is:attachment wedding would find all the attachments, sent by Jim, that include the word wedding in their text.

Perfect for Pam! 

3. Easy-to-remember Date filtering

In general, I’m way too lazy to filter information by date, especially in one of those awful boxes where you need to enter a start date and an end date and time.  But Windows Search has a couple incredibly easy to remember commands for finding just the files you recently changed. 

If you type in date:thisweek into the search box, you will find all the files and emails you updated this week.  date:thismonth will find all the files and emails you updated this month. 

The only downside is that all the emails or attachments you received today will show up too.  So on to #4, where you can fix that!

4. Filter by Document Type

It’s easy to restrict your search to only specified documents or only local files.  The kind and store keywords are the way to do this.  Typing store:file into the search box will pull up only your local files, whereas store:outlook will only look through messages, meeting invitations, and other Outlook items. 

The kind keyword complements it very well.  Typing nepal kind:docs will limit your search to documents that talk about Nepal, whereas nepal kind:pics will limit it to pictures with Nepal in the filename or in the metadata.  

5. And, or, not

If you just chain a bunch of keywords into a string, the default behavior is to combine them with and.  So kind:pics from:john will only find you pictures sent from John.  On the other hand, if you type kind:pics OR from:john you can find all the pictures and all the emails and attachments from John. 

Not is equally helpful; if Pam wants to find all the emails talking about her wedding sent from people OTHER than Jim, that’s an easy command: wedding kind:email NOT from:”jim halpert” will pull them right up. 

Search even better.

There are a whole lot more commands and keywords described on Microsoft’s Advanced Query Syntax page.

Of course, the best way to search for documents and files is to not have to search at all.  That’s where Baydin comes in: it analyzes your email, and proactively discovers the files you need to know about. 

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Techstars opened up applications for their 2010 classes a couple weeks back.  If you’re thinking about quitting your job to start a company, or you’re already working on a company but haven’t got all the kinks worked out yet, you should apply. (Full Disclosure: Baydin is a TechStars alum from Boston’s 2009 program)

I’ll be putting up a couple additional posts over the next couple of weeks (then a couple more to follow on in a couple months) about my experience in TechStars, what to do while applying to the program and before it starts, and a few thoughts on how to make the most of it for the teams who are getting started in the program. 

For now, I want to shill a little bit about how valuable and helpful and exciting the program was.  There are three reasons a startup should seriously think about TechStars – all more valuable, in my mind, than the ramen-level-funding and the investor access. 

Mentorship

TechStars is mentorship-driven.  As soon as you arrive at the office, you’ll start connecting with 60+ mentors, most of whom have been in the trenches at least once, and understand how the sausage gets made.  They’re eager to help, excited to teach, and even more excited to learn. 

Both Boston and Boulder have amazing entrepreneurial ecosystems.  There’s a really strong culture of “giving back” to the entrepreneurial community after running a successful startup (or funding a few).  And the recent buildup of “valley envy” in Boston means that the community here has closed ranks and is serious about helping first-timers. 

That means you’ll get tons of help figuring out novel business strategies, tons of folks who will give you product feedback, and a lot of help avoiding common pitfalls, like not knowing who the CEO is or building your product until it’s finished inside a vacuum, with no feedback from customers. 

Eran Egozy, one of the founders of Harmonix (the folks who made Guitar Hero and Rock Band) told us our product was too slow and hooked us up with an ex-Microsofter at Harmonix who shared some tricks for optimizing it.  Warren Katz, founder of VT MAK, taught us about SBIR grants, a nondilutive grant program for commercial technology research run by NASA, the Department of Defense, and a few other agencies.  David Skok from Matrix Partners came in to teach us how to build a sales and marketing pipeline on the web – and what to measure to find out if it’s working.  And that’s just the beginning – Richard Dale met with us almost every week to keep us on the straight and narrow. When nobody else would even think about installing our 3-week old protoype crap software inside MS Outlook, Will Herman ran it every day.  He also helped talk me through some of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. 

When things are going smoothly and everything is working right, mentorship is a nice-to-have.  When the crap hits the fan (and it pretty much always hits the fan at least a few times for a tech startup) that mentorship is the difference between a company in the Deadpool and a company that is still fighting.  You want these folks on your side. 

Camaraderie

TechStars called the relationships that form between the companies during the summer “cooper-tition” in one of the handouts to the mentors.  For a kind of cute phrase, it’s amazing how accurately it describes the way we interacted during the summer. 

We all helped each other out and we were all there for each other pretty much anytime.  If you need some help figuring out where to find good interns, one of the companies will know.  If you are trying to figure out how to reach an elusive blogger, someone at one of the other companies will have been there.  If you need to know which version control system makes the most sense, someone from one of the companies will be able to get you started.  Because we were all in the same boat, we all understood, and we all had valuable information to share. 

And if things are going crappily (which they will), you just waxed an important blogger’s data, or you can’t get any customers, or one of your most promising potential investors just said no, there’s someone right there who’s been there too. 

At the same time, when you’re seeing the LangoLab folks still working until 4 in the morning and the TempMine guys in the office before the crack of dawn, and one of the TechStars community interns crashing in one of the “conference rooms” after an all-night marketing blitz session… it inspires you to work harder too.

Plus ping pong, a medium-well stocked beer fridge, lots of free food, and a handful of pretty awesome gatherings. 

Validation

Paul Graham said in one of his essays that in many cases, the most valuable thing companies get from Y Combinator is the kick in the ribs to abandon a stable job with a salary and take a chance on really making the startup idea work. 

TechStars validating our idea and our team was critical to starting Baydin.  Without that kick in the ribs, it probably would have remained a weekend project and never really gotten off the ground.  It’s totally different working on a startup full time.  And you’ll find out, a lot faster, whether or not it’s the right product and the right company if you go full time. 

If you get into TechStars, or even become a finalist, you’ll get feedback on where the strengths and holes in your business idea fall.  You’ll know whether this is the right startup to take a chance and commit with, or if you’re better off figuring something else out, or if you’re best off bootstrapping this idea on nights and weekends. 

Either way, you’ll get that feedback just for applying.  Plus, the application process will force you to crystallize your idea and make it stronger. 

So go get started!

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As I mentioned during my talk at Defrag 2009, the best corpus of sample email data we have is the email data dump that the federal government released after Enron’s collapse.  The corpus includes over 400,000 real email messages from Enron employees, and it’s ripe for analysis.

The data is available on the web in a ton of different formats, but none of them are especially conducive to just picking them up and starting analysis, especially in Windows – the original data actually is posted in a format that has filenames ending in periods, so they’re completely invisible to the 93% of us who are in Windows.  It took me about 2 days of solid work to get something running before I could actually work on analyzing the data.

I’ve created a VirtualBox image that includes the Enron data, the tools to gather a large sample of Twitter data, and some sample Python scripts that take almost all of the work out of accessing the data for analyzing the email or Twitter data.  I think this is by far the easiest way to start analyzing the Enron email corpus, and a pretty darned easy way to get started collecting and analyzing Twitter data.

It should take you less than half an hour of hands-on time (plus a little time for zip files to extract) to go from nothing to running the sample scripts and generating histograms of message length.  Good luck, enjoy, and feel free to email me or leave a comment with questions.

Getting Started

1. Download and install Sun’s VirtualBox.
2. Download my VirtualBox Image file, which runs Xubuntu (a streamlined Ubuntu installation optimized for slower hardware – perfect for a virtual machine!)
3. Extract the VirtualBox Image file into a directory you can remember.
4. Run VirtualBox and create a new Image.  Name it whatever you like; the OS is Linux and the version is Ubuntu
5. Set the memory to at least 512 MB (if you have 3+ GB, I recommend 1.5 GB so that you can load the entire enron messages table into memory).
6. Leave Boot Hard Disk checked and choose Use an Existing Hard Disk. Click the folder icon next to the dropdown, click Add, and navigate to the EnronTwitter.vdi file extracted from the download link above.
7. Highlight the EnronTwitter.vdi file and click Select.
8. Click Finish.  Select the new VM and click Start.  Wait for the image to boot.

Everything you need to get started is in your home directory in the data folder.  Double click the Home icon on the desktop, and double click the data folder inside that directory.  To edit the files: Right-click and choose Open With Mousepad or use a text editor of your choice.

To get to a Terminal: Double-Click the Terminal icon on the Desktop or click Applications at the top left, click Accessories, click Terminal.  You will need to type cd data to get into the directory with all the sample scripts.

Linux login info: enron/enr0n
MySQL login info: root/enr0n

Enron Data

There are two sample scripts in the directory – enron.py and enronrecpients.py.  The enron.py script generates a histogram of the message lengths of all of the emails in the corpus.  enronrecpients.py counts how many emails from the corpus are multi-recipient.

One caveat – these scripts load the entire database into memory before they run.  For that reason, enron.py is currently set up to run on only the first 200k messages.  If you chose to provide more than 1GB of memory, you should be OK to load the full set of messages, so just remove the LIMIT 200000 from the SQL command.

To run the script, open a terminal, cd into the data directory, then type
python enron.py

You can modify these scripts to analyze additional message data.  The comments describe what does what as well as providing instructions on how to figure out what else is inside the Enron data using the MySQL client.

Twitter Data

The relevant Python data analysis script is twitter.py and the relevant data collection script is datacollector.php.  The twitter script uses simplejson to access the fields in the Twitter JSON stream and counts the number of multi-reply (@ to multiple people) as well as multi-retweet (multiple RT in one tweet) messages in the sample data.

To run the Python analysis script, open a terminal, cd into the data directory, and type:
python twitter.py

There’s only a tiny amount of Twitter data in the image as-is.  You’ll need to run the datacollector.php script to pull data from a Twitter streaming API called the “Gardenhose” –a medium-volume feed that provides a pretty good way to get a bunch of data fast.  The script pulls from what is called the “spritzer” stream, which is just a random, undirected sample.  I got this script from this streaming api tutorial.   You’ll get about 25,000 Tweets per hour.

To run it, you will need to open datacollector.php and replace twitterusername with your Twitter account’s user name and twitterpassword with your Twitter password.

Then open a terminal, cd into the data directory and type:
php datacollector.php

After you’ve run the script long enough to get all the data you want, I recommend that you cat the files together into a single file so the Python script can digest it in one pass.  Do this by typing
cat 20*.txt > tweetcorpus.txt

There’s a lot more information about customizing the stream coming out of the Twitter streaming API, including using search on the front end to restrict the stream at Twitter’s Streaming API Documentation page.

Getting Data out of the Virtual Machine (into Windows)

VirtualBox helpfully provides the ability to share a folder between the guest OS (the Xubuntu image) and the host OS (whatever you’re running, in my case Windows).  To do that as of 11/23/09, click the Devices menu entry at the top of the VirtualBox window, and select Shared Folders.  Click the Add button on the right, click the dropdown under Folder Path and choose Other. Select the folder you want to share, and give it a name (I shared my Desktop, so i just called it Desktop).  Click OK on both dialog boxes.

Now you need to mount the shared folder, so you can access it in the guest OS.  Open a Terminal and type the following (replacing Desktop with the name you chose for the folder you shared):

> sudo mount.vboxsf Desktop /media/windows-share

Now, double-click the File System icon on the Desktop in the VirtualBox image, and double-click the media folder.  The shared folder you selected will appear there as windows-share, and you can exchange data with your computer’s regular file system using that folder.

Helpful Links

I already set up the VirtualBox image with all the scripts and data you should need to get started, but here are some links in case you need to repl
icate some of these steps or if you need to find the original Enron source data.

• My Slides from the Defrag 2009 Conference (Slide 15 links to a bunch of great papers)
• How to load a MySQL dump into a database
• VirtualBox Shared Folder information
• Accessing MySQL from Python (annoying 4-page format, but great tutorial)
• Original Enron Source Data (don’t even bother if you’re running Windows; the folks who put this data up ended all the filenames with a period, so you won’t be able to open any of them)
• Enron Data as a MySQL dump (this is what I loaded into the image)
• Enron Data as an Outlook .PST file (thanks to Pete Warden, founder of Mailana, one of Baydin’s fellow TechStars companies that is also focused on email)
• A bunch of other Enron Data links

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I presented the following slides at Defrag 2009 last week in Denver.

I wanted to take a quick look at the different use cases for email vs. microblogging and make some predictions about how the email experience will be changing over the next handful of years.  To do this, I performed some analysis on the Enron email corpus and a half-a-million-message Twitter corpus to illustrate the differences in the way people use these services.  I used that information and some trends about Twitter’s growth to make a few educated guesses about which Web 2.0 features we’ll watch make their way into email clients and servers.

There are a ton of useful links and papers on Slide 15.

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Defrag is *awesome* so far – so much to learn! I’ll be posting the virtual machine image with the Enron/Twitter data I used, plus information about how to process it, right here this weekend. Check back Monday, and if you’re at Defrag, say hi!

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Sunday’s New York Times included a column under their Ping business technology section that made a pretty convincing argument that the web and mobile technology are stamping out serendipity.  Instead, they argued, the opportunity to discover new things are being replaced with the opportunity to engage in groupthink – to discover only the new things that a carefully selected group of people (Facebook friends, Twitter followees, or an algorithm tuned to your tastes) find interesting. 

Fred Wilson responded (via Twitter) with a link to a 2006 blog post from Stephen Berlin Johnson claiming exactly the opposite.  According to Johnson, the web is the world’s greatest serendipity engine, and he discovered WAY more cool, surprising things from aggregators on the web and from going off on tangential searches than he ever discovered as a graduate student.  After learning about German operas because of an avatar someone had that looked like Julio Lugo, I see Johnson’s point. 

I think what the web’s effect on serendipity has a lot in common with Tyler Cowen’s thinking about globalization’s effect on food.  In short, Tyler thinks the local diversity of food options is increasing, but the global diversity of food options is decreasing.  I can now get Thai food, Malaysian food, Indian food, Southern American food, French food, or Ethiopian food all within a few blocks of our office in Cambridge.  So as globalization increases, my access to different types of cuisine is increasing.  On the other hand, the world’s busiest Pizza Hut is in Hong Kong.  And Thai food, Malaysian food, Indian food, Southern American food, French food, and Ethiopian food are all available in Hong Kong as well.  So the total diversity of food available in Hong Kong starts to look a lot like the total diversity of food available in Boston.  The quality of food in any one place is higher than it has ever been before, but at the same time, something is being lost. 

The web is doing something similar to the diversity of content that I see on the web.  While nobody will argue that the total amount of diversity of information on the web is going anywhere but up, the diversity of content I actually get exposed to is not.  What’s being lost is the stuff that doesn’t fit into my own interests and doesn’t go viral enough for everyone to see it. 

One of the major implications of viral content is that the web has made the huge winner even bigger.  See Susan Boyle, United Breaks Guitars, Autotune the News, and other viral videos.  These are the real winners in Serendipity 2.0, because before the Internet existed, only British folks would have ever seen Susan Boyle, and nobody anywhere would have ever seen United Breaks Guitars.  Short, digestable, and non-offensive pieces of content are what the new serendipity delivers. 

The other type of content that I see is stuff that I already know I will be interested in.  I read Dare Obasanjo’s Tweets because I am interested in his previous stuff.  I subscribe to Paul Krugman’s blog in Google Reader because I liked what he wrote before.  If Paul Krugman or a friend who shares interesting stuff links to something, it’s probably something I know I will be interested in. 

The total knowledge I’m exposed to in some degree of depth is a lot more diverse than it would have been prior to the web.  I don’t think I’d know nearly as much about economics or cooking Thai food without the Internet.  I’d almost certainly not be starting a company.  On the other hand, though, the frequency with which I spent the time to really read something I wasn’t initially interested in is a lot lower than it used to be when I only had whatever magazine I had in front of me. 

I think, in general, having easy access to knowledgeable experts in areas that interest us is hard to see as a bad thing.  Being able to discover content that has a higher-than-average chance of interesting us is a plus too. 

My worry is that we’ll lose the exposure we need to find out if we really like something that is a bit of an acquired taste.  Have you ever heard a song that you really didn’t care for the first time it got played, but then after a few more listens, came to love?  For me, that happened with the Marshall Tucker Band, now some of my favorite music.  Or have you ever read a book that started slowly, but then ended up phenomenal?

What is getting lost in Serendipity 2.0 is the time we need to acquire that taste.  If it’s not designed to be enjoyed in the first fifteen seconds, we’ll just go off and find something else more aligned with our interests, or that provides a better first fifteen seconds. 

Does a world without acquired tastes make us better or worse off?

Small Talk

Congratulations!  You aced the phone screen, survived the (potentially grueling) interviews, and your offer letter is in the mail.  Awesome!

You should absolutely go out to celebrate, but before you mail in your acceptance, you may want to figure out what if any strings are attached to the offer.

I was too naive when I got my first job offer to think about things like employment agreements (or even to do a good job negotiating my salary!), but you shouldn’t be.  As part of the program we’re in for startups, we’re meeting with a bunch of lawyers and a bunch of entrepreneurs who left corporate America to start companies.  We’re learning as we go through the program that the employment agreement we signed after only halfway reading it could have caused a lot of trouble.

When my partner and I started at Big Semiconductor Company as part of our first-day schedule, we met with HR.  In addition to handing us a giant stack of documents about the 401K plan and health insurance benefits, they asked us to sign agreements that were incredibly restrictive and waived an awful lot of our rights.   At this point, having accepted their offer and stopped interviewing months before, we had no leverage.  We both needed the money, had no idea what those forms really said, and had no other job offers on the table.  We signed the forms.

I think that was a mistake; if we had started a company doing anything related to our previous work instead of something in a totally different industry, it would have been game over.  According to that employment agreement we signed, Big Semiconductor Company owned any ideas we came up with that related to their business while we were employed, regardless of whether or not we worked on them during work time or free time.

That’s not a big deal at a startup company, where the scope of what relates to the “business interests” is pretty much the product you’re working on – where the company HAS to own the IP you create.  But an agreement with a huge semiconductor company has a much broader scope – pretty much any circuit, big or small, relates in some way to some part of their business.  And if we’d worked at an absolute behemoth like IBM or Cisco, our startup options that don’t relate to their business would pretty much consist of biotech and opening a bar.

If I had it to do over again, I would have asked for all of the agreements up front.  I should have negotiated the terms in the employment agreement when I had the high hand, instead of when Big Semiconductor Company KNEW that they had me where they wanted me.

The moment I received my job offer was my moment of maximum leverage with the big company.  When a big company makes an offer, they’ve already spent all of the effort to screen, interview, and make an offer to someone.  They don’t want to have to spend that effort again.  I hadn’t yet stopped looking for work and interviewing, so my ability to walk away was still reasonably high.  Had I gotten a copy of the employment agreement and crossed out all the parts that were objectionable to me before I accepted their job offer, I wouldn’t have needed to worry.

I also should have done a much better job negotiating my salary.  According to a friend who worked in the hiring department of a big consulting company, it’s not much of a stretch for a new employee to negotiate a 20% increase in starting salary.

Negotiating the salary and the employment agreement will definitely be an awkward conversation, but I’ve never heard of a company that retracted a job offer for negotiating.  It can’t hurt to ask, and it might make things easier down the road.

Small Talk employment agreements, negotiating

What do an irrational fear of rejection, the inability to talk to girls at a bar, and a startup in “stealth mode” all have in common? 

I was riding the Orange Line en route to our Central Square offices last week, and I saw a sign advertising a study on Social Anxiety Disorder.  They asked if you worry too much about what other people think, worry that people might secretly think you’re stupid, and get more nervous than seems appropriate before meeting people for the first time. 

To be honest, my first thought was that if I didn’t have a company to start, I should go try their study.  But on my second thought, I realized that the same symptoms seem to apply to a lot of startup companies, ours included.

We were very shy at first about sharing our idea – maybe a competitor would get there first, or maybe we wouldn’t be able to deliver.  We got over that one, but it is still terrifying to think that we might do all the marketing right, get press and customers excited about our product, then end up disappointing and/or angering them.  It’s also in the back of our minds that we might “peak too early” and get all of our buzz before the product is ready to impress anyone. 

But the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to think that we shouldn’t worry.  There is so much noise and so much going on that nobody cares what some dinky startup does.  If we put out a product that doesn’t work very well, we won’t get bad press – we just won’t get any press. 

We’re not Microsoft; nobody has the energy or the time to skewer us.  And if they do, nobody has the energy or the time to remember it after they read it.  If we make something subpar, we won’t be noticed.  And if we make something great, then we’ll get customers today.

Some of the evidence from other startups backs this up.  If you tried the first version of Loopt on the iPhone 3G, it was incredibly easy to inadvertently text message every single one of the people in your phone’s contact list with a your location and an invitation for Loopt.  Several of the early versions of Plaxo made it incredibly easy to accidentally email everyone in your address book and ask them to give all their contact info to Plaxo.

Loopt apologized.  So did Plaxo.  Neither of these companies is in the deadpool.  They still have funding, and they still have users.  Aside from a handful of people who make knowing these things their business, my guess is that nobody even remembers. 

An even better example is Hyundai. In 1986 when they released the Excel in the US, it was nothing to write home about. 

Yeah, it looked like that.  I wouldn’t have bought one either.  But by iterating and improving, they’ve turned into an elite car company.  One of our mentors mentioned hearing about how cool the Genesis is on a golf course.  Hyundai really is now a company people associate with luxury cars.  And they had a sense of humor about the whole thing too.

So why are we so worried that our product will fail to impress?  If we make a bad first product, but get better, people will give us another chance.  If our third or fourth version is incredibly useful, they just don’t have time to hold a grudge that our first version wasn’t.  Our biggest problem is going to be apathy, not grudges.  It’s just not personal.  And if we never make the great product that will earn us a second chance, then we shouldn’t succeed.  I believe we’ll get there.

Of course, I have an ulterior motive for bringing this up now.  We’re sending our Baydin ForONE Technology Preview to friends and family on Thursday.  I’ll be honest – it’s not ready.  We have tested it on a whopping two configurations, the results need some work, and the UI isn’t as polished as we’d like.  It also comes with the caveats that it might insult your mother in law, or start crashing some untested, semi-patched versions of Outlook.  Before we’re ready to call it a 1.0 release, we’ll make sure it doesn’t do any of these things.

My arguments about SSAD were only so persuasive, though.  Despite my best efforts to make us a wild man company that releases it to whoever wants it and lets God sort ‘em out, we’re doing a limited release Alpha launch.   If you want to give it a spin, shoot us an email, and I’ll see that you get a download link.

Small Talk experience, philosophy, startup life