Digging my own Ditch

Archive for the ‘web 2.0’ Category

How to test your system with real users

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Aroxo recently turned a major corner in its development, we moved from closed functional testing to using real live alpha testers, people who’d never seen Aroxo before.

Without doubt, this is one of the most revealing, painful, and valuable stages in creating your start-up, so I thought I’d blog about it.

When launching anything you want ensure that not only does it work, but people find it easy and natural to use. Your own functional testing should cover the first objective, your alpha testing should cover the UI.

At Aroxo we’ve employed four different techniques to get the system ready for launch:

Test type

Description

How many people
Over-the-shoulder The main sticking points in the system. Where the system confuses users.
Start when functional testing at 80% readiness. Earlier with mock-ups also possible.		 10-15
Task-driven testing How well the system stands up on its own.
Start when the major usability holes uncovered in OTS  testing have been fixed.		 Start with 20-30 keep growing invites to 100 or so
Goal-driven testing End-to-end flaws across the system.
Start when functional testing at 95% system readiness with a slick UI.		 150-200
Beta testing The marketing points for the site, highlights future developments. If there are enough users it may also reveal performance issues
Start when the system is 99% ready.		 250+ including members of the public

Not only is each stage different but you get different learnings from it. I discuss each stage below.

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Posted in Aroxo, development, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, how to start, start-up, testing, web 2.0 | 4 Comments »

How to boot-strap your start-up

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

The aim of many entrepreneurs is to take a business idea and convert it into a professional and functioning business on a low budget. This is typically called “bootstrapping” and it is fraught with potential pitfalls and dangers, but when done well can really help get a company going fast, professionally and without the founders having to give up much (if any) equity or bankrupting themselves.

Over the next 5-6 posts I’ll outline the process which I’ve now followed at several corporates and which I’ve honed to work with my own start-up, Aroxo. I’ll discuss what skills you’ll need, how to write your requirements, how to source developers and designers, how much to budget, how to agree a development contract, how to manage your vendors, how plan your release, all the documentation which you need and much more.

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Posted in Aroxo, business, development, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, how to start, india, off-shoring, out-sourcing, start-up, web 2.0 | No Comments »

Web 2.0 for entrepreneurs

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

There’s a lot of talk about “Web 2.0″ on the Internet at the moment, in this post I try and cut through the hype and look, pragmatically, at what entrepreneurs need to do to use Web 2.0 to build exciting and valuable propositions.

In this post I’m deliberately looking at the impact which Web 2.0 has on users which makes it so appealing to a certain segment of the population. This information will help entrepreneurs know what to build into their propositions in order to take advantage of the opportunity today to steal a march on older style Web applications.

To bring the post to life I’ll be demonstrating how the principles I’ve uncovered can be applied to a classic Internet application – corporate email. I’ve arbitrarily chosen email as it is a example of an application which has not substantially changed in the last decade, by applying some of the Web 2.0 principles outlined below we’ll see how its feature set can expanded to make it more inclusive, fun and sticky.

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Posted in business, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, linkedin, start-up, web 2.0 | 5 Comments »

How we started our business

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

Over the course of the last two weeks I’ve started work on a new business (parallel running with Aroxo) and it occurred to me that getting to the point of starting the vendor selection process, from idea conception took around 10 working days. For Aroxo this process took something like 1 year.

I confess that when we were starting Aroxo I was working fulltime and so I only had evenings and weekends to spend on the business, but this does not explain the increased efficiency. This extra speed comes directly from the experience of launching Aroxo, quite simply for the new business I followed a tried and tested process which I’d already put through its paces for Aroxo (and other projects).

The process which I am about to describe is directly targetted at launching a business which is “bootstrapped” (i.e. self-funded) and where as much of the work creating the business is out-sourced. The process rough is:

Development process

Over the next series of posts I will detail precisely what we did at each stage, focusing in much more detail on what information was needed to get each stage started and what to look for from the output. I’ll provide examples for each of the stages and make it clear where it is possible to skip certain stages or where the process might differ for different project structures.

I’ve no doubt that others adopt different processes and I’m happy to carry comments to capture these differences and would appreciate everyone’s feedback.

Posted in Aroxo, business, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, start-up, web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

Thoughts on out-sourcing

Monday, March 27th, 2006

One of my contacts on LinkedIn recently asked a question about out-sourcing and I thought it might be useful to post my thoughts on this:

Having been through a vendor selection process which encompassed 32 different companies, some off-shore and some on-shore I’ve seen a massive variation in quality, costs and skills. I found the principle of caveat emptor very relevant.

My key learnings were firstly that off-shoring is not cheap, it is cheaper, but it isn’t cheap. Secondly there is a significant variation in quality which a properly run RFI and RFQ process can help select out. Many of the companies we included in our process I would use again, several I would not.

In my experience, there are two pitfalls to avoid when out-sourcing, both of which a professional client can avoid. Firstly the client must prepare a clear specification of what they want – in order to communicate precisely what needs to be developed across timezones and continents the client needs to know exactly what they want. My understanding from talking to off-shore developers is that they frequently receive little information about what needs to be developed.

Secondly, out-sourcing still requires time on the ground with your development team, all the technology in the world won’t replace the accuracy of face to face communication. In addition careful and close management is necessary – speaking to your developer on a daily basis helps to prevent costly errors.

I am also of the view that, assuming the development company has the basic technical skillset to deliver your project then any failure to deliver will be as much in the hands of the client as the developer.

In the end my company we went with a development partner based in India and so far we’ve been very impressed with their professionalism and skills.

See my LinkedIn profile to link to the full range of answers: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mrogers

Posted in business, development, india, linkedin, off-shoring, out-sourcing, start-up, web 2.0 | No Comments »

Aroxo is getting started!

Thursday, March 9th, 2006

I have some great news to share. After leaving fulltime employment just over a week ago, Aroxo has taken a very important step towards reaching the market.

Yesterday we reached a major milestone and I wanted to share the news with you. We have signed a development contract with an off-shore development company and we are leaving for India tonight to begin the development process. The functional specification is at the printers.

I am personally really excited to be starting the development process and can’t wait to be able to show you more of what we’ve been working on. Our next steps when we’re back we will be to start the patent drafting process, select our site designers and begin work on our detailed marketing plan.

We can’t reveal too much yet as the patent hasn’t been filed, but to give you a little more detail – we’re launching a new online trading exchange, behind it will be an entirely new way of buying and selling – something which has not been done before in the consumer space. You’ll be able to use Aroxo to buy and sell a range of tens of thousands consumer products at extremely competitive prices.

There’s much more to come, watch this space…

Posted in Aroxo, announcement, development, entrepreneur, india, out-sourcing, start-up, web 2.0 | No Comments »

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