Comments on: How to Succeed In A Startup http://www.bigdoor.com/blog/how-to-succeed-in-a-startup/ Free gamification platform that helps companies increase their traffic and revenue through social rewards Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:02:26 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 By: Kevin Lam http://www.bigdoor.com/blog/how-to-succeed-in-a-startup/#comment-40 Kevin Lam Fri, 25 Jun 2010 07:23:04 +0000 http://www.bigdoor.com/?p=735#comment-40 Great post Ben. Biggest lesson (and hardest learned) for me was to stay focused. As a fellow software engineer it's so easy to get distracted and start poking around in this technology and that technology. The day I decided just to focus on X instead of X, Y, Z, A, B, C and 1, 2, 3 ... our productivity and self-satisfaction shot up. Not to mention our product improved in quality by leaps and bounds. Second biggest is to be customer-obsessed. As a software engineer it's so easy to design and implement "cool technologies" the way we think we would like to use it and lose site of the actual end user, making them delighted to use your software. The typical approach is to design, implement and then shove it down the customer's throats and see how they like it. Some of the most successful companies I know take the opposite approach and they find out what customers want even before they write a single line of code and then design around fulfilling the customer's wants/needs. Again, great post Ben. --Kevin Great post Ben. Biggest lesson (and hardest learned) for me was to stay focused. As a fellow software engineer it’s so easy to get distracted and start poking around in this technology and that technology. The day I decided just to focus on X instead of X, Y, Z, A, B, C and 1, 2, 3 … our productivity and self-satisfaction shot up. Not to mention our product improved in quality by leaps and bounds.

Second biggest is to be customer-obsessed. As a software engineer it’s so easy to design and implement “cool technologies” the way we think we would like to use it and lose site of the actual end user, making them delighted to use your software. The typical approach is to design, implement and then shove it down the customer’s throats and see how they like it. Some of the most successful companies I know take the opposite approach and they find out what customers want even before they write a single line of code and then design around fulfilling the customer’s wants/needs.

Again, great post Ben.

–Kevin

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