After having failed at my first startup, and having partially succeeded in second, I couldn't agree more on those two points.
The debt accrued on my first startup still haunts me. And I really wish, I slept more and worked out more during the period. It is really a simple advice, to sleep and to work out. But when you are a sinking ship, you could hardly follow it.
passion may be overrated when viewed under the "systems vs goals" umbrella: www.businessinsider.com/scott-adams-on-goals-and-passion-2015-2 (view as one page for a better experience)
To be honest, I never succeeded with goals. Those things that happen naturally , happens. Your comment made me self reflect, and I realised that , except point 4, nothing happened at my will. Point 4 happened because I found something that I enjoy doing. And finding something I love doing was a lot of trial and error. All the other points are just wishes.
I was wondering whether actually people set goals, remind themselves everyday etc, and go about to achieve the same. I think there is a lot of randomness in getting into a system and an outcome as a result of it.
Apart from one or two mental notes with a bigger picture, I am not sure whether the so called 'successful' people set those daily, weekly, monthly goals etc. I am genuinely curious to know if it worked for some.
Success is kind of subjective, maybe check out biographies? I know some people are absolutely nuts about these systems of goal setting.
I get inspired to goal set maybe once a year when I'm unhappy and I try to use the energy I have to establish a habit. The easiest way is singing up for a class, the better way is to have a bunch of friends who also have similar goals.
I am Indian. (I used to work for Oracle). If I were to hire, given everything else is equal , I would prefer an Indian to a non-Indian. You can attribute it to cultural bias, or whatever.
But hardly 'everything else' is equal. I hire people who can get 'shi* done' , and who are easy to be managed. Period. And I assume most of the managers would do so. So if Indians are easy to be managed, and are getting hired, it is not racism. Because, they were getting hired for the easiness of managing them, and not for the Nationality.
The issue of white males getting paid more is certainly racist. But the sad part is one cannot verify it, because one cannot isolate the 'merit' part of the salary , from the part attributed to the 'race'
(By the way, I never hired anyone while working at Oracle.)
We landed on our first paying customer on a product that we had been working for more than a year and half. And many more sign ups later turned profitable too. And about to release a major upgrade in the first weeks of 2017.
The down side was that I hardly had any holidays in 2016 and was consistently clocking 12 hour work days. So exhausted to the core as well.
At http://www.reportdash.com we use backbone with backbone layout manager and jade. We have been able to design a pretty robust report and dashboard builder with just a single front-end developer.
Never once did I regret the choice, nor has been limited by the choice. I pretty much could implement everything I thought with minimal effort.
I would say backbone with backbone layout manager has the bare minimal abstraction. It just boils down to picking the right pattern. I use a state variable to hold everything related to the dom, and re-render the dom whenever the dom needs to be updated. May not be as fast as 'react', but at least in my case, it is good enough. ( Since my 'views' are nicely factored, I often has to re-render only a small part of the dom)
Without the framework, I would have taken double the time for sure. And boy, the code is nicely organised as well.
I did have some experience in developing spa's using jquery alone. Well, that was in 2009. On any day, I would vouch for Backbone+ Backbone Layout Manger + Jade over simple jquery
I used to wonder why it hasn't been as popular as react or angular.
As someone who runs a startup,here are some personal observations.
I would say, a PM has to understand the user needs, and drive the product.
The former has got two parts
1. Understanding the user needs which the user can articulate
2. Understanding the user needs which the users cannot articulate.
I have had the opportunity to work with some of the best coders. Though I greatly admired their intellectual capability, I was not a big fan of their ability to think from customer's shoes. I have figured out that "Common sense is not so common". Now, having an MBA does not guarantee common sense, but if you think that, you can communicate effectively with your users, understand their needs, empathise with them, and can comfortably put yourself in their shoes, your are definitely adding value as a PM on Point No 1
Understanding the user needs which the users cannot articulate - This is where innovation begins. Now, if you are a PM without the ability to code, you may be at a slight disadvantage here. The ability to code, or perhaps the understanding of the fundamentals, would help you to structure your thoughts. It gives you a clear picture on what is possible and what is not possible at the present, from where, you can start to innovate.
Generally, PM does not need to understand user needs and drive product. It's a job for other people (product management, ux/cx analysts etc). The PMs primary function is to facilitate communication in the extended team, so that it will achieve the desired goals in given time, and this means his focus is internal, not external.
Shameless plug : We have been building http://www.reportdash.com with a similar target market.
Datastudio appeared to be our startup killer in the beginning. But I guess, we may narrowly escape owing to the usability advantage, and the deep integration we have for datasources like adwords, fb ads etc
We are working hard to give a fight. We are about to release a major update in the coming months which makes slicing and dicing data a breeze.
Yup. Truly understand that. Shall mail you a demo account. We are still work in progress, and many touch points are not the way we really wanted. A demo account is up there in our priority list.
Demo accounts are OK, but what you really want to do is avoid the empty account syndrome after signup altogether. The user is all excited to check out your product, but is intimidated by the blank slate state.
Instead, the first thing the user should see is a fully functioning realistic example of your value prop, and it is critical that they can edit and mess with it to their hearts content before they start a new project of their own. Designing for the blank slate is a quite well known design pattern in mobile UX, but I can tell you from experience it works wonders for SaaS conversion as well (check profile if interested in an example).
The debt accrued on my first startup still haunts me. And I really wish, I slept more and worked out more during the period. It is really a simple advice, to sleep and to work out. But when you are a sinking ship, you could hardly follow it.