Thumb Blogging...

I haven't tried this before but I've been seeing more and more bloggers posting via their BlackBerry's. I definitely don't enjoy this mini keyboard for drafting long form copy but if it helps me post more frequently/consistently then I can certainly make due.

My new phone, BlackBerry Bold (thanks baby!), is also a lot easier to type on than the older model BlackBerry I had been using. They've done some amazing things with this keyboard: better "bounce" when you press a key, ergonomic keys, etc. I've definitely been enjoying the experience all around.

The phone's camera is also pretty tight, I'm not sure what the specs are off the top of my head (I'm typing this while on the train) but it was good enough to inspire me to (finally) setup a TwitPic account. I see so many random, bizarre or funny things in a typical New York day, I'm pretty psyched about having a way to capture and record them now.

Almost at my stop on this train...let's see if this "test post" actually goes through now.


Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Happy Birthday TickerHound!

I can hardly believe it's been a whole year!  But WOW, what a year it has been.

12 months ago to the day, George Zhao and I pulled back the curtain and brought TickerHound.com to life...

...and within 15 minutes the site crashed.

Needless to say we've come a long way since then.  

Instead of the single cheap-o box we were running on when we launched, the site is now 100% hosted "in the cloud" on Amazon's EC2/S3 platform.

Thousands of investors have asked thousands of questions and submitted thousands of answers to the site.  Our members are the best in the world - and I can say that because I've personally met and had drinks (alcoholic and non) with dozens of them this year.

We've forged partnerships with a handful of financial media companies such as Investor Place Media, Agora Financial Publishing, Business Financial Publishing, Tycoon Publishing and the list goes on.

And the best part is, we're just getting started!

We made our 3rd hire only 2 short months ago  --  welcome aboard Lou!

We have our largest partnership to date launching in a few weeks -- you won't want to miss this one -- which is why we've been absent from most of the NY Tech events for the last 2 months.

So it goes without saying that we're VERY excited about TickerHound's prospects for 2009. 

But this won't be an easy year.  Then again, when is it ever easy running a start-up?  :)

Our country is entering one of the most challenging economic times we've ever faced.  The crisis before us started in the financial markets, so for a financial-tech company like TickerHound the impact of these tumultuous times becomes apparent very quickly.

We're witnessing a fundamental shift in the financial services industry and I'm excited to be a part of it, but at the same token it's certainly added a level of complexity to our business that we hadn't aticipated when we first launched.  However, the important thing to remember is that in times like these we're presented with once in a lifetime opportunities to really make in impact on our market.  Some of today's greatest companies were forged in the fires of the last downturn.

I firmly believe that now, more than ever, individual investors need to become better educated investors.  Relying on stock brokers and money managers (and even $50 billion-dollar-stealing hedge fund managers) has to become a thing of the past.

With tools out there like Covestor, StockTwits and Wikinvest, an individual investor can level the playing field and manage their money as they see fit.  They have unprecedented access to data, stock ideas and educational material that was once trapped behind high-priced pay walls.

Times they are a changin' and I'm proud and honored to be playing a small part in it.

Here's to another 12 months of sleepless nights, tumultuous markets and some of the most exciting times of my life!

Happy Birthday TickerHound!

Steve Forbes & Eric Schmidt Look Like the Head Vampire!

Here's a picture of Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google):


Now here's a picture of Steve Forbes:


And now here's the Head Vampire from the 80's classic, The Lost Boys:


Any questions? I think not.

Feature Sequencing

One of the biggest mistakes I've seen companies make over the years is improper sequencing of feature sets.

For instance, if the users themselves are the hubs of a social network, then why would you launch a social networking application before giving people a reason to come to the site in the first place? That's like saying, "Hey, come to my nightclub tonight...nobody's here, you won't meet any women/men, but it'll be popular one day so just drop by and keep coming back until we get hot!"

FAIL!

I prefer to think through feature roll outs in a very methodical way -- I don't take any credit for this either, it's been done many times by many successful entrepreneurs over the years. I just happen to enjoy copying what successful people have done in the hopes of one day becoming successful as well.

In fact, I once attended a talk given by Joshua Schachter of Del.icio.us fame and he pretty much said the exact same thing I'm about to share with you...building the right features at the right time is critical to the success of a product.

In my mind this can be boiled down to a three step framework and if applied properly, could mean faster roll outs, higher quality products, greater user satisfaction and more opportunities for revenue generation.

Here's the framework in a nutshell:

Utility - First create a product that's useful for a single user. For instance, Del.icio.us was valuable long before you were able to see other user's bookmarks. In its first iteration Del.icio.us simply allowed members to store their Favorites/Bookmarks remotely, thus allowing them to retrieve these pages from any computer they happened to be on. Later on they exposed the social content discovery components that turned the service into the viral success it has become today.

Network - After you've made a product that's useful for a single person, there's a good chance that MANY individual people will find it useful. When you attract a large audience of individual users then all you have to do is pull back the curtains and allow them to start interacting with one another. It's obviously more difficult than that, but you get my drift.

Ideally you'd want it so every piece of data one of these users contributes to your site somehow adds value back to the whole network. For instance, on Del.icio.us, each time a user bookmarks a URL it adds to that URL's popularity across the system which provides all kinds of useful information for new users, visitors and members who already have that URL bookmarked. It also allows like minded people to find one another and use these new connections as a way to discover new content (e.g. if another member has a handful of the same bookmarks as me then there's a good chance I'll want to see what else he has in his favorites).

And then this leads to (hopefully) the final step in the feature sequencing framework: Revenue.

Generating revenue has become an all elusive component of this framework. I think there are a number of reasons for this but first and foremost it's because most people save this step for last while it should probably be right up there with the problem you're trying to solve.

While this may be the final step in this particular framework, it should be one of the first things a businessman thinks about. Granted, you can have a wildly successful product (and ultimately, a wildly successful business) by simply building something people love, locking them in through the network effect and allowing the revenue model to reveal itself as time goes on, but in my experience you'll dramatically increase your chances of monetary success if you think this through from the beginning and iterate on it just like you would the software.

Ultimately you'll want your utility, network and revenue models to dovetail nicely into one another - e.g. Google and contextual advertising - so it'll pay to think through this framework in a holistic manner.

What This is NOT

This is not a bullet proof way of thinking through your product development plans. It doesn't even begin to address the many nuances of conceptualizing, building and launching a product. It doesn't address user needs, market size, etc.

Simply, think of this as a "back of a napkin" way of testing your product roadmap. Conceptualize your utility, then figure out how that contributes value back to a network and then think about how to monetize that.

I know it may sound simple and probably pretty obvious, but I can't tell you how many times I've been sitting in on product development meetings and someone is pounding the table demanding that every feature plus the kitchen sink be included in "Product Version 1.0".

By testing your product roadmap against a time-tested framework like this one, you'll stand a much better shot at getting a successful product out the door in a shorter period of time, period.