The other day, I got to thinking about how starting a company can be like playing bridge. I know I’m speaking to an extremely niche audience here—the Venn diagram overlap of entrepreneurs and bridge players is not particularly great—but hey, this is my blog, so bear with me. Solo bootstrapping is playing 1 NT. You look down at your hand and see you’ve got an Ace, King, Queen or Jack

Deploy Empathy was Product of the Day on Product Hunt on August 20, 2021. Here are a few things people had to say about it:

Deploy Empathy is a practical guide to interviewing customers. The book was written in public as a newsletter and is now available to order.

When I started writing Deploy Empathy, I started writing it as a newsletter. The full newsletter archive is still available, and I occasionally write new issues. Here’s what I wrote when I launched it in February 2021: I love helping people figure out how to do customer research. But I find myself without one book to send people to help them get started and get over that initial hump of

The first year of a business can be the most precarious. You don’t know if things work. You don’t know how you’ll pay for them. You don’t know how it will turn out. So it makes sense that there is intense interest on how companies got started. I get questions about this often, so I wanted to break it down — with real numbers and cents — exactly how we

It’s been a hell of a week. I will not mince words: the news is all-consuming right now. And if your brain is like mine, when it takes a break from thinking about our public health emergency it jumps to the next big risk: the economy. And our business. And how things will go. And it’s scary to think about. We all knew the risks of working for ourselves. But

On Monday, I gave a short attendee talk at MicroConf Growth on how to conduct user interviews and usability sessions. It was only twelve minutes, though, so I had to focus it on the key point: Getting useful user feedback is all about how you act. To find your user’s pain points (and in turn opportunities for your business), you need to make them feel comfortable being open and vulnerable with you. This means you

Retrospective on 5 years of Geocodio at IndieHackers in January 2019. Read the original post on IndieHackers On January 21, 2014, Geocodio was officially launched into the world. By some miracle of luck, we landed on the front page of Hacker News for almost the whole day. In the pre-Product Hunt era, this was about as good as a launch could possibly go. The traffic surge quickly faded and not everyone had

It’s frustrating to look at your metrics and wonder why you have high dropoff, low conversion, or low engagement. Ultimately, there’s only so much digging you can do in Google Analytics or a spreadsheet before you need to try something different. Google Analytics will tell you that people are doing things. But it will never tell you why. It will never tell you their motivations, their frustrations, and what they’re trying to do.

This past summer, my husband/co-founder and I had the opportunity to speak at Laracon 2017 on Launching & Scaling a Side Project. In the talk, we talked about what we’ve learned launching (…and scaling!) Geocodio, which we started as a side project in January 2014. It’s been quite the journey, and we wanted to share what we’ve learned with others to fuel their own entrepreneurial efforts. We made sure to mention that