Kevin Chiu » startup

The Web Startup Product Model

Kevin Chiu — Sun, 31 May 2009 08:53:23 +0000

I saw this great infographic over at Jude Gomila‘s blog representing one view of a generalized web startup product model.

Launching Climate Culture

Kevin Chiu — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:10:16 +0000

Launch early, launch often?

Funniest VC Q&A Session EVER

Kevin Chiu — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:02:06 +0000

My favorite:
14:25

A: We have patent.

drop.io vs getdropbox.com

Kevin Chiu — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 03:02:38 +0000

getdropbox.com wins, and here’s why:

* Syncing up to 50 gigabytes of content, seamlessly, across Mac, Windows, and Linux.
* Sharing individual folders, with per-folder “push-like” data publishing.
* Edit history, ability to un-delete stuff.
* Automatic organization of media.
* Other crazy awesome stuff.

What does drop.io do?

* Share a file. At least it’s easy.

I love Dropbox! It beats drop.io by leaps and bounds.

Disqus future strategy

Kevin Chiu — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:52:38 +0000

Disqus is a company currently doing hosted commenting systems, primarily for blogs. They should also do these:

* rating blog posts
* polls
* RSVPs
* colored labels (if you see a comment you really like, become a fan of the poster so that their comments are highlighted in the future.
* following (follow that awesome commenter)
* banning (make someone’s comments invisible to you)

that’s it off the top of my head…

A VC focuses on…

Kevin Chiu — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 03:50:35 +0000

1. Track Record – Your successes.
2. Proof of Concept – Your product.
3. Team – Your people.
4. Idea – Your vision.

… in that order

… in Serbia.

(Source: Milos, a cool guy who managed to sell a food service startup in Serbia.)

Agile Startup Tools

Kevin Chiu — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:52:40 +0000

Jack Po, an experienced entrepreneur and local friend of mine, just posted some tools startups might find useful. While I agree with most of what he has to say, some healthy horizon-broadening is in order.

I’m new to the startup scene, but I’ve always been a tech guy. Here are my tools:

Website Registration: 1and1 has free private registration that you can toggle on or off. $7 is the base fee for a .com.

Website Hosting: Engine Yard (for rails), SliceHost (for custom stuff), Media Temple (for shared hosting), Google App Engine (easily scalable, but has had hiccups…)

DNS Hosting: I stick with whoever hosts my site. I’ve never had any problems.

Email, Calendar, Wiki, Internal Messaging: Google Apps

Actual Website: Ruby, Java, or Plain old HTML/CSS/jQuery

Phone: Skype, Grand Central (but GC keeps deleting my old messages… boo!), iPhone

Conference Calls: Skype – easy and free.

Surveys, Spreadsheets and Documents: Google Docs – The coolest part of this suite is the real-time collaboration. Plus, there’s a form-filler mode for the spreadsheet app that you can use to conduct surveys.

Newsletters: Google Groups (for continuous conversations) or Gmail email aliases with BCC (for periodicals).

Project Management: Lighthouse, Github, Google Code, Sourceforge, or just plain old face-time. I’m actually itching to build a way more intuitive project management system. But for now, I can live with these. (I used to use Basecamp, but it can be abused too easily…)

Website statistics: Google Analytics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Google Sitemaps

Code Tools: Linux Shell, TextMate, Eclipse

Computers: Apple Macs.

Presentations: Apple Keynote

Graphics: Adobe Photoshop CS3, Omnigraffle