Lots of people talk about starting companies and building products, but Eric Ries designed a framework for replicable product success. Eric's Lean Startup movement has ignited a new wave of startups to find their markets without spending much money. Instead of blowing VC money on incorrect hypotheses, Lean Startups are poised for success when they find their product/market fit. Read More
He's literally given new definition to the word "pivot," the moment when a startup tries something new, and made it a sign of progress, not a badge of failure.
After speaking worldwide to audiences of eager entrepreneurs, now he's working on publishing a Lean Startup book. But he's been DOing since he first discovered computers. While you were dinking around the mall in high school, Eric was teaching himself Java and co-authoring The Black Art of Java Game Programming. He founded a recruiting firm while still in college, and was the founder and CTO of IMVU, where he first developed his constant deployment engineering practice.
Entrepreneurs can be inspired by almost anyone - a loved one, a former professor, or even a complete stranger. Leah Busque was inspired by her 100-pound yellow Lab named Kobe. Faced with the predicament of needing to pick up dog food while waiting for a cab, she wished there was someone out there who could run this errand for her, and thus TaskRabbit was born. Read More
Founded in 2008, TaskRabbit has grown into a vibrant community of runners willing to perform paid tasks, effectively pioneering a social trend she likes to call "service networking." Through TaskRabbit, Leah is "enabling all these mini-entrepreneurs to have their own businesses and set their own schedules," which she sees as "a whole other level of entrepreneurship."
Before launching TaskRabbit, she was as a software engineer at IBM for 7 years, where she worked on products that millions of people around the world use on a daily basis. "My passion is really in the engineering and the product and technology," Leah says, "and we have some big exciting features queued up." Of all the runners that are a part of TaskRabbit, Leah may be the biggest DOer of them all.
In 2003, long before the official API, in the days of the my-hacks.php file, Nick Momrik was hacking on WordPress. He didn't complain about the code, he didn't wait for the proper API... he got to work. "I'd look at the DB tables, figure out what I want to pull out, and write my own API functions just for the plugins," said Nick. Words of a DOer. Read More
His hacks caught the attention of Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and creator of WordPress, who quickly hired him. "My resume was a list of the plugins I had written," Nick noted. Nick went on to write the official Twitter plugin, one of the most popular WordPress extensions, as well as the Twilio-powered blog-by-phone extension for WordPress.com. "Matt wrote the blog-by-phone prototype at a company hackathon", said Nick. "I finished it up in a day or two." From prototype to production on millions of blogs in just a few days, Nick gets stuff done at Automattic.
Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, builds for himself. While building custom websites in the early 2000s, they noticed that client collaboration was too difficult, so they built Basecamp. As it turns out, everybody thought client collaboration tools were lacking, and Basecamp has become a standard tool for web development worldwide. Read More
Then Jason and team noticed that keeping track of their clients and contacts was too difficult... so they built Highrise. Needing a collaboration tool for their remote teams, they built Campfire, online group chat tool. Oh, and as a side project... Jason's co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, extracted a whole web development platform from Basecamp, and open sourced it. Yes, Ruby on Rails, the wildly popular web framework that ignited the pace of Web 2.0 development, powers Twitter and nearly every other new web property, was just a byproduct of their DOing. On the side, Jason and David have authored two best-selling books, their blog is a profit center, and they hold regular courses teaching DOer skills to companies eager to learn from their success. Jason, David and the 37signals team are DOers. They see a need, they build a solution, and they sell it.
In June 2006, Patrick was working a 9-5 job, but on the side was inspired by how the Internet had lowered the barriers to starting a software business. After his friend, an ESL teacher, noted how useful Bingo Cards were as teaching tools, but how difficult it was to make custom bingo cards... he set out with an ambitious goal: build a micro-ISV with $60 and launch in exactly 8 days. Read More
And BingoCardCreator.com was born after just 8 days of DOing. He learned the tricks of SEO, SEM, credit card processing, and more, blogging about his findings along the way to an eager audience of other entrepreneurs.
What began as a side project became his full time job in 2010, when he started his second micro-ISV project: AppointmentReminder.org. AppointmentReminder uses Twilio to help service businesses (think salons, doctors offices, etc.) remind clients via phone calls, text messages and emails of their upcoming appointments. With both sites, Patrick has applied the same formula: launch fast, iterate often to solve a problem for a large market. Patrick is learning fast and DOing... and living his dream as a micro ISV... and a DOer.
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