Application too complex to design for mobile. Try harder.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard someone say over the last 10+ years in software ‘that would never work for our industry’. Rubbish. What they really mean is I could never make that work for our industry, another to add to the list of self-fulfilling prophecies. After hearing this enough times you swear you’ll never say it yourself but late last year I found myself saying exactly that. I had the good fortune to meet with an amazing UX designer (and overall product guy, Andrew Chen) who...
read moreStartup? Marketing matters
First let me say.. Traction, product, users, and all the numbers that represent this going from bottom left to top right are most important.. I’m not going to suggest they’re not. I’m a product guy, I’m interested in building things and getting those things in front of people and getting them used. So everything I’m about to say assumes you’re building something The not so eloquent but utterly apt saying we have in Australia is ‘you can’t polish a turd’ … of British origin originally...
read moreDreams, Deserts & DMVs – the Planwise road trip
The Roadtrip – events, experience and lessons learned For anyone following the story up until now, it has been all a little too quiet from the fanfare pre-trip last week. Firstly, this post will give everyone an update on just what happened but like anything that appears to have gone wrong it is never completely wrong, there is always more to the story. I thought about doing this as a video but the story took place over a few days and the pace at which things happened is so much better served with a written narrative. I hope you have the...
read more1 website via three website design tools in one weekend? who came out on top?
Launching! So here at Planwise we are getting ready to launch, super! ready! Which is exciting. A key part of our launch is a roadtrip that I”m going to be doing over a 15 day period taking me from San Francisco to New York City via the southern states and eastern coast. More on that later, but no point doing the trip if we weren’t ready to blog about it. Our previous blog was one that we (me and our designers) put together super quickly when we launched our new brand about 6 weeks ago. Functional, basic and fit for purpose...
read moreonly upside – why creativity in art knows no bounds
Solve a problem, a real customer problem.. heard it? I design software for a living, I’ve done it for my entire working life.. in fact I left university to start a software company over 11 years ago and have been finding & solving customer problems ever since. I have long held in the belief that software design is a hugely creative pursuit, the day coders stop talking about elegant code is the day I’ll change my perspective on that. I vividly remember sitting on a plane in 2007 next to a lady who, in a conversation every...
read moreAmazing People
On the weekend just gone I was fortunate enough to have one of the most valuable single meetings since moving to the US to progress my new startup. In a nutshell I was able to get a meeting with an individual who had a huge amount of hands-on exposure to a variety of businesses playing in the same space as planwise, Consumer Internet. I expected a 30 min coffee so was stoked with the 2 hours afforded to me. In terms of how to get meetings like this and how to get value out of them I can only offer my experience which was > Don’t...
read moreWhy twitter is DOS … and facebook is apple?
(n.b. this post was written before Google+ launched – published it after but decided to leave it as is although will probably revisit some of the ideas in another post) Twitter, in my opinion, is throwing down the gauntlet to facebook in the social network stakes. No longer content with being the plaything of the famous and those that would follow them I believe twitter has worked out their true calling which is to be come the internet’s social fabric. They are to end up becoming to social what google is to search. A toll...
read moreDon’t over complicate things – learning from our intern
There is a certain irony in the title of this post, which probably should have read ‘make things simple’ – I decided to leave it as it helps to make the point about learning Last week we had a new person join our team, Ryan Paredez, who came on as an intern a few hours a week. Bringing new people into a venture is always interesting, especially at such an early stage. You really get a feel for how good your story is when you have to explain it someone who is not coming out of the business/technology world… and to be...
read moreAlways Learning
Wow I made it down to the Bases product showcase in Palo Alto during the week. (more here - http://bases.stanford.edu/) Basically current and former students of Stanford showcasing product innovations. Everything from software to solar powered water filtration for the 3rd world It was attended by some Silicon Valley royalty as well a handful of venture capitalist, always inspiring but I was determined to leave with more than just inspiration, but tangible learnings for mifii in mortgage education. This was going to be a challenge, hard...
read moreThinking forward
Originally posted at http://blog.mifii.com Isn’t funny how so of the most mundane decisions make for the biggest impact and conversely the ones we fret about the most can be virtually unimportant. There is a great talk on Ted.com (http://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_mohr_builds_green.html) which talks all about the choices a couple made when building a new home in the context of environmental sustainability and energy use. I won’t go into the specifics here but the video is certainly worth a look. In any case the video...
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