Cutie Matt Mullenweg (thanks for powering my blog) gave a talk on scaling your product as your community grows.
The first hundred thousand are always hardest, and in this session Matt Mullenweg will discuss strategies for scaling your community, support, and servers from 1 to 100,000 users and beyond.
Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software that runs much of this site and thousands of other sites around the world. He enjoys photography, writing, and playing the saxophone and piano.
Mullenweg also founded Ping-O-Matic and the nascent Global Media Protocols Group.
Notes:
- Matt just started programming 3 and a half years ago! OMS!
- wordpress, akismet, etc. all started w no users
- First 100k are the most passionate and unique. They are also the hardest to get to. If you can get to 100k in a good amount of time, then your growth after that will be easier.
12 RULES
1. Be your first user
2. Get off the computer — get stuck in your tools – limit your thinking. you’re in the mode of the tool you use. the act of writing things on paper frees the creative juices.
3. Obsess about the details – try ever email client, broswer – make sure you know how other ppl are going to experience it
4. Do your own support, make it as easy as possible for ppl to contact you – need feedback to make the site better
5. Blog every step of the way
6. Have a tagline — one for the site, also have contextual taglines aimed at your audience -
7. Say what you do for the user “We make it easy for you to podcast.”
8. Get out 1.0 as fast as humanly possible – what ppl end up doing and being successful at is not what they start out doing. ask ppl to try it out and get feedback, esp from ppl who don’t end up using it. push the limits of what you’re doing.
9. measure your success – you have to have metrics. if i get to x, i will succeed
10. Know what to do if you are successful — dog chasing a car doesn’t know what to do if he catches it.
11. Start strong and end strong. lead w the most compelling point why ppl should use your product or service. end strong. ppl dont remember the middle.
12. Be a painkiller, not a vitamin. painkillers make way more money (tylenol vs vitamins). address a problem that ppl are having. askimet.
{ 5 trackbacks }
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
this set of notes is totally inspiring / worth bookmarking. huzzah for matt.