Breakthrough on turning ideas into splash pages
I had an amazing day, yesterday. Met with another entrepreneur to work on a new project. For the first time in my life I was an active contributor on the creative side of the process. He had many creative ideas for this product which is geared toward the Indian matrimonial process. I was able to listen and synthesize graphic images to test the different ideas.I cranked out logos, logos with gradients, different colors, sizes, letters kerned. Then we looked for imagery around Indian weddings. Grabbed examples and synthesized images to go on the splash screen. We ended up here:

Managing queues can make a big difference for product creation
I read a book called The Principles of Product Development Flow. I do not recommend this book for the casual reader. It is filled with math and graphs, but the ideas are pretty interesting and very applicable to startup entrepreneurs.My first question when I am reading about something new is, how can I apply this to give myself an advantage in whatever I am working on? So I called up a friend of mine that is working on delivering web sites to small and medium businesses.I launched into the central idea: how long it takes you to get individual projects finished and out the door determines how quickly you see the economic benefits. The studies and math show that

How an engineer started learning more about design
I had someone ask me what path I have been following while learning design. Like any engineer I started by breaking down the problem into components so I could tackle them individually.My first problem was the classic chicken and egg issue of tool versus techniques. I didn't know any design / graphics tools because I wouldn't know what to do with them. Then I didn't bother learning any design principles because I couldn't implement anything without a tool.So I decided to start with Adobe Fireworks / Photoshop. Feel free to substitute your own tool here. I read through a basic book on how to use these tools. I tried not to get too hung up on specifics, but focus

I've been solving the wrong problem
My background is industrial engineering. So I constantly ask myself, "How can I do this better, faster, cheaper?" I have spent the last 2 years concentrating on how to build products faster and better. At first I focused on how to create basic functionality faster. I got faster and faster an creating functionality that worked but looked terrible and probably didn't have very good user experience.Then I realized building terrible looking products faster, wasn't working. So starting at the beginning of this year, I started focusing on design and usability. I'm not saying that I became a world-class designer, but learned the basic ideas behind design. It allowed m

Starting to work on how to iterate on products faster
After working on an idea with Cindy Alvarez at Startup 2.0, I realized that there is a dramatically easier way to test product ideas. So this week we brainstormed up a new product idea for helping teachers connect with each other and share resources. Normally to test something like this I would have worked several weeks on creating a simple version of the idea and run customers through it to see their reaction.Instead, I generated a splash page with our value proposition: