Great packaging is what pulls people in, but a superior core product is what will make them stay. In the physical world, it’s pretty clear what is packaging and what is the actual product. Take soap: the packaging is the plastic, and the core product is the soap itself. The packaging may influence your decision to buy the product — it may market the product to you — but ultimately

You can’t be a parent and an entrepreneur — right? In the tech community, there’s a stereotype — unfairly magnified by the media — that the ideal entrepreneur is young, unattached, and capable of working 20-hour days for months or years on end without letting anything get in the way of their product. It’s true that creating and running a company requires unrelenting devotion and long, difficult hours of work,

Okay, I’m going to come out and just say it. I’m not a real entrepreneur. (It’s true.) Sure, I have a successful side project that’s a SaaS. And I’ve started a few revenue-generating projects before this too — hey, something that generates revenue is a business, right? I like to think I’m an entrepreneurially-minded person who has ideas and makes them happen. But I’m not a Real Entrepreneur, and here’s why:

Note: I wrote this in 2014, six months after launching Geocodio. Side projects are an alluring prospect for many developers: you can have total control over a project, try new things, and reap all of the profits. No pesky product managers or dealing with other people’s code. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Here are a few of the lessons we’ve learned since launching Geocodio in January: Take care of the the