Programmer

Lego has a Computer Programmer minifigure in its Lego Minifigures Series 7. This programmer has some mad skills from debugging a server in ten seconds to recovering data from completely melted drives. Here is the complete description of the Lego Computer Programmer:

“Hello, World.”

Other computer whizzes can argue all they like about what kind of computer or operating system is the best one – the Computer Programmer knows that the only way to be a real expert is to master all of them. He knows everything there is to know about computers and how to use them, from the biggest old-time mainframes to the tiniest next-generation nanotech prototypes, and he’s always glad to share his expertise with anyone who needs his help – which is just about everyone eventually!

He can debug a server in ten seconds flat, track down and wipe out even the toughest viruses, recover data from completely melted hard drives, and yes, he will help you set up your e-mail signature. In his spare time, he programs his own video games, catches up on the latest posts in his favorite web forums, and hangs out with his pet robo-cat. When you’re a skilled Computer Programmer, the future is always today!

Photo: Lego Group

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Making a major horizontal product thatas useful in any walk of life is almost impossible to pull off. You canat charge very much, because youare competing with other horizontal products that can amortize their development costs across a huge number of users. Itas high risk, high reward: not suitable for a young bootstrapped startup, but not a bad idea for a second or third product from a mature and stable company like Fog Creek.

Forgive me if I now divert into telling you a quick story about my time spent on the Microsoft Excel team way back in 1991. (Yes, I know you were not born yet, but I assure you that computers had been invented. Just hop up here on my knee and shut up.)

Everybody thought of Excel as a financial modeling application. It was used for creating calculation models with formulas and stuff. You would put in your assumptions and then calculate things like aif interest rates go up by 0.00001% next year, what percentage of Las Vegas homeowners will plunge into bankruptcy?a For example.

Round about 1993 a couple of us went on customer visits to see how people were using Excel.

We found a fellow whose entire job consisted of maintaining the anumber of injuries this weeka spreadsheet for a large, highly-regulated utility.

Once a week, he opened an Excel spreadsheet which listed ten facilities, containing the name of the facilities and the number 0, which indicated that were 0 injuries that week. (They never had injuries).

He typed the current date in the top of the spreadsheet, printed a copy, put it in a three-ring binder, and that was pretty much his whole, entire job. It was kind of sad. He took two lunch breaks a day. I would too, if that was my whole job.

Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call acalculations.a Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.

(Irrelevant sidenote: the few customers we could find who were doing calculations were banks, devising explosive devices called aderivatives.a They used Excel to maximize the bankersa bonuses on nine out of ten years, and to cause western civilization to nearly collapse every tenth year. Something about black swans. Probably just a floating point rounding error.)

What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.

Bing! A light went off in my head.

The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.

Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing awhat-ifa analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.

Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.

PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images.

Some people saw Trello and said, aoh, itas Kanban boards. For developing software the agile way.a Yeah, itas that, but itas also for planning a wedding, for making a list of potential vacation spots to share with your family, for keeping track of applicants to open job positions, and for a billion other things. In fact Trello is for anything where you want to maintain a list of lists with a group of people.

There are millions of things that need that kind of data structure, and there hasnat been a great alist-of-lista app before Trello. (There have been outliners, but outlines are, IMHO, one of the great dead ends in UI design: so appealing to programmers, yet so useless to civilians).

Once you get into Trello, youall use it for everything. I use about thirty Trello boards regularly, and I use them with everyone in my life, from the APs (Aged Parents), with whom I plan vacations, with every team at work, and just about every project Iam involved in.

So, ok, that was the first big difference with Trello: horizonal, not vertical. But there are a bunch of other differences:

Itas delivered continuously. Rather than having major and minor releases, we pretty much just continuously push out new features from development to customers. A feature that you built and tested, but didnat deliver yet because youare waiting for the next major release, becomes inventory. Inventory is dead weight: money you spent thatas just wasting away without earning you anything. Sure, 100 years ago, we had these things called aCD-ROMsa and we shipped software that way, so there was an economic reason to bunch up features before we inflict aem on the world. But thereas no reason to work that way any more. You already knew that, of course. Iam just sayingaI stopped using Visual Basic about five minutes ago. Brave New World.

Itas not exhaustively tested before being released. We thought we could get away with this because Trello is free, so customers are more forgiving. But to tell the truth, the real reason we get away with it is because bugs are fixed in a matter of hours, not months, so the net number of abugs experienced by the publica is low.

We work in public. The rule on the Trello team is adefault public.a We have a public Trello board that shows everything that weare working on and where itas up to. We use this to let customers vote and comment on their favorite features. By the way, while Trello was under development, it was secret. We had a lot of beta testers who gave us customer feedback so that the development team could use lean startup principles, but the nine months we spent building version 1.0 in secret gave us a significant lead in a competitive marketplace. But now that weare shipping, thereas no reason not to talk about our plans.

This is a aGet Big Fasta product, not a aBen and Jerryasa product. See Strategy Letter I. The business goal for Trello is to ultimately get to 100 million users. That means that our highest priority is removing any obstacles to adoption. Anything that people might use as a reason not to use Trello has to be found and eliminated. For example:

Trello is free. The friction caused by charging for a product is the biggest impediment to massive growth. In the long run, we think itas much easier to figure out how to extract a small amount of money out of a large number of users than to extract a large amount of money out of a small number of users. Once you have 100 million users, itas easy to figure out which of those users are getting the most value out of the product you built. The ones who are getting the most value will be happy to pay you. The others donat cost much to support.

The API and plug-in architectures are the highest priority. Another way of putting that is: never build anything in-house if you can expose a basic API and get those high-value users (the ones who are getting the most value out of the platform) to build it for you. On the Trello team, any feature that can be provided by a plug-in must be provided by a plug-in.

(The API is currently in very rudimentary form. You can already use it to do very interesting things. It is under rapid development.)

We use cutting edge technology. Often, this means we get cut fingers. Our developers bleed all over MongoDB, WebSockets, CoffeeScript and Node. But at least theyare having fun. And in todayas tight job market, great programmers have a lot of sway on what theyare going to be working on. If you can give them an exciting product that will touch millions of people, and let them dig deep into TCP-IP internals while they try to figure out why simple things arenat working, theyall have fun and theyall love their jobs. Besides, weare creating a product that weall be working on for the next ten years. Technology thatas merely astate of the arta today is going to be old and creaky in five years. We tried to go a little bit beyond astate of the art.a Itas a calculated risk.

None of this is very radical. TL;DR: Fog Creek Software develops an internet product using techniques that every Y-combinator startup has been using since spez was sleeping with his laptop so he could reboot Reddit when Lisp crashed in the middle of the night. If you havenat tried Trello yet, try it, then tell me on twitter if it worked.

So, are these conferences worth it?

Letas look, individually, at the two big promises of the conferences: exposure to VCs and exposure to the press.

Are VCs at these conferences? Absolutely. Does going to one of these conferences get you funded? Itas complicated.

• If you have a brilliant product, a great team, and youare eminently fundable, but you donat know any VCs yet, and you launch at one of these conferences, you will meet a bunch of VCsaeven some top notch onesaand the conference may actually get you funded. At the last TechCrunch Disrupt, the finalist judging panel consisted of some of the best investors in Silicon Valley. If you made it to the finals, these folks now know who you are and what your product does, and if your company is fundable, theyall all take your call.
  
• That said, if thereas some reason your product is not fundable, all the conferences in the world canat help you. Yeah, you may have a chance to present to a bunch of unknown VCs wandering around looking for investment ideas, but most of them wonat actually invest in you and those that will may be more trouble than theyare worth.

Iave been tossing around the word fundable without defining it. Every entrepreneur thinks their aMint.com for Laundry Ticketsa is the most fundable idea ever, and all VCs should be dying to invest, if they would only sit still for the brief 62 minute demo!

No. Technically, whether youare fundable has to do with things like traction, the total size of the opportunity, the quality of the team, whether you build moats (?), and a bunch of other gibberish that VCs like to tell themselves in their heads so that they donat think theyare just spinning bottles.

But itas too hard for an entrepreneur to evaluate their own fundability. So hereas a working definition of fundable which is all that matters for you as an entrepreneur:

• If youare knocking on VCas doors and they all seem to be opening, youare fundable. If you keep getting more meetings, more introductions, and good vibes, keep going. Youall get funded.
  
• If youare knocking on VCas doors and they all seem to be closed, youare not fundable. These days most VCs will just tell you why. If you canat get a second meeting with anyone, just stop. Youare beautiful, youare smart, and youare going to change the world, but you happen to be non-fundable, so just stop. Either change the company or the product, or find a way to make your product popular and successful without investors.

So, that said, if you donat know any VCs and think you might have a fundable company, a conference like Launch or Disrupt will get you your first intros.

Now, on to the other promise: Press and publicity.

It is possible, nay, common, to launch at one of these conferences and get NO press whatsoever. Zero. Nada. At Disrupt youare guaranteed at least one mention in TechCrunch, but youall soon discover that TechCrunchas tech-industry insiders may not really be the audience you need.

Yes, there are a lot of journalists at these conferences. Disrupt probably had about 200. When we launched Trello this week, you know how much press we got?

Four stories.

And every one of those stories came because I knew the reporter and emailed them before we launched, and pre-briefed them on our product under embargo.

Yep. There was not a single reporter, from the 200 that were registered, at Disrupt who saw our presentation and said, aOh cool, Iam going to write about that.a

You know why? Because there were dozens of companies launching in two days, and reporters usually file one or two stories a day, so they all focus on one or two companies they find interesting (and at this last conference, they mostly wanted to talk about Arringtongate).

That said, you can get exactly the burst of publicity you need from launching at one of these conferences, if you do it right. You have to:

• Prebrief friendly media (under embargo)
• Get the bloggers in your area to write about you
• Have a sensational demo that gets retweeted
• And do this all at exactly the same moment when itas newsworthy.

We did all that and leveraged 6 minutes of fame into 130,000 eyeballs.

The thing entrepreneurs often forget about news media: Itas supposed to benews. They want new things. As a startup, you are only going to have two or three new things that happen, ever:

1. Launching your product
2. Raising money from a VC
3. Reporting insane traffic or revenue (optional)

Thatas it. Those are your chances to get news. Under no circumstances can you expect to be covered because you take a walk in the woods with potential employees… youare not Mark Zuckerberg. (Unless you are, in which case, Hi Mark!) Youare not getting font changes on the home page covered, unless you used to work for Mark Zuckerberg.

In short, you only have two or at most three chances to got coverage unless thereas Mark Zuckerberg involvement.

Well, wait, thereas one more way. If you are very lucky, you will have some famous people involved in your company, and some of them will have tawdry affairs with prostitutes that are captured on video. That will get you a fourth story. Otherwise, youare not news. Get over it.

Also important: the news cycle is 12 hours, tops. If you call journalists the day after you release your product, itas not news. They wonat care. You have to call them two days before you launch, tell them youare going to launch in two days, and offer to pre-brief them, so that they can run their story when itas actually newsworthy. The bottom line is that you have to get all your coverage within a period of a few hours which means you have to plan ahead and work hard. This is not the time for incrementalism. Donat worry about DDOSing your own server. Thereas no choice: you canat spread out the newsworthiness of your launch.

Because there are so few opportunities for a startup to get press, you have to make the most out of each one. Thatas why I am still a big believer in athe big launcha even though the Lean Startup ethic today is all about trickling things out to your users bit by bit and pivoting a million times.

Hereas the story of Trello. We wrote the first line of code last January. By the time we hit 700 lines of code, the product was useful, and we immediately started dogfooding it in-house. We probably could have brought it to market after three months. That would have been ever so lean. There was a strong temptation just to dump it on the world super-early and spend the next year iterating and improving.

We didnat do that. We worked for nine months, and then launched.

I couldnat stop thinking that you never have a second chance to make a first impression. We got 131,000 eyeballs on 9-month-old Trello when we launched, and it was AWESOME, so 22% of them signed up. If we had launched 3-month-old Trello, it would have been NOT SO AWESOME. Maybe even MEH. I donat want 131,000 eyeballs on MEH.

Still, I do, firmly, believe that a completely new product has to go through what Steve Blank calls customer development to find aproduct/customer fit.a I.e., you have to get real people really using your product and you have to watch them and listen to them and make changes to make your product better, and you have to do this very, very early.

How did we reconcile this? Through the old fashioned method of a closed beta. We got a hundred of our best friends to use Trello and tell us what they thought while we iterated and polished and improved.

So the thing we launched, nine-month-old Trello, is really kind of slick. And we got a little initial bit of publicity for it, but then that publicity became massively viral. So those four news stories caused a few people to check out the product, and they liked it, because it was AWESOME NINE-MONTH-OLD TRELLO, and they wrote amazingly nice tweets. Thousands of amazingly nice tweets.

So, the story so far: if your product is really good, launching at one of these conferences is an incredible catalyst. If your product is ameh,a it wonat help.

But waitathereas one important, bonus reason to launch at a conference, and itas a good enough reason to do it even if you donat need the publicity or the VC at all.

Itas all about your team.

When you launch at a conference, you have an incredible hard deadline. This deadline forces you to ship. It forces you to make decisions about what has to be in version 1.0. It’s actually an incredible team-building exercise to work your butt off, together, for the weeks leading up to the conference.

The morale boost youall get will be incredible. After months of toiling away, the feeling you get from seeing real-world people actually start using your product is the best feeling you will ever get as a software programmer in your professional life. These are the great moments that make it all worthwhile. We *made* something. People used it. It matters.

It’s like sex, with clothes on.

The members of our team who came out to San Francisco for Disrupt (including two summer interns who skipped a week of classes to join us) had a blast. It was the best week, ever. The members of the team who stayed back in the office, watching the conference piped in over the Internet, had a blast. It was the best week, ever.

Work has to matter.

The stuff we create canat just be bits on a hard drive.

Brett, Daniel, Bobby, Justin, Ian, and Aaron built something with their bare hands that will be a part of how the future works.

One company that just launched at Disrupt is trying to fix medical bills. Another wants to bring fresh produce from farmers direct to households. Another company built the universal translator from Star Trek. Good software developers invent the future.

This is what matters: launching products, getting them in the hands of users, and hearing them get value out of it. Thatas why we stay up late, ruin our wrists and our eyesight, and drive our families crazy. Itas all about shipping.