chandika

I'm curious to know how / at what point you decided it has failed? What metrics helped?

I was a heavy evernote user a few years ago and then migrated to OneNote. I think one of the challenges that is causing evernote users to drain off is as its organization model for notes is broken unless you are highly disciplined in using tags.

As your usage grows the product becomes worse for you for non-search navigation and discovery.

MS OneNote on the other hand feels like an upgrade from evernote in terms of its ability to provide a simple hierarchy for organising and navigating between notes and notebooks.

A key thing for any productivity tool is to balance between it being easy to adopt for new users and continue to improve its utility as usage grows over time. Very few companies have managed to do this effectively.

I'm struggling to understand the purpose of this compared to other collaboration platforms. Could you elaborate why this should matter to a team above and beyond other collab platforms out there?

This is such sage advice and almost never mentioned. As an entreprenuer who's obviously over optimistic about the startups probability for success and the speed that it occurs you usually skip and sacrifice a lot in life.

One thing I learnt the hard way is that the best way to ensure personal success is to plan your life's goals as if you have a 9-5 job with secure income. Major investments (housing, loans etc) and relationships should not be on hold till the next company milestone. Having a spouse kind of forces this upon you, but getting a supportive parent/mentor to help you plan your life apart from your startup will really help.

Platforms like Node become a necessity as you'd rather be faster to market and be more agile vs. being caught out building something that is useless in a nicely scalable platform over a longer period. Lean startups FTW.

Same applies for things like Meteor.js which are based on Node.

Lot's of people dabble in it but to truly know how to not screw it up when building something bigger it takes patience, experimentation and serious effort.

This is somewhat compensated by the speed of development you have with such platforms and is a tradeoff.

Awesome! Also - wouldn't it be better if Ratings, Votes were not ranges but had lower bounds? Ex. 7+ rating and 50K+ votes.

I saw that you can choose multiples, but you'd rarely search for a 7-8 rated movie and not want to see a 9-10 in the result set :)

This is great. I've found a lot of success with emailing users with a single question in a short email. (~30% response rate).

Do you have any numbers on people responding via clicking survey links vs. normal text responses?

The key is to find customers first. If you have a hunch that something should work, there is always a possibility that you can uncover some pain points that you can build a business around.

You need to speak to enough customers and iterate on what you offer to figure out the validity.

Coding stuff up is always a lot more comfortable, and a no-touch approach like adwords based validation is 'easy', but really, you need to be in front of people to understand if there is any validity to your thinking.

Open ended conversations around the problem area usually results in great insight and can lead to some valid ideas you can work off of. Also, speak to more than one person in a given problem area and it's not too hard to ask 'do you know anyone else that has this kind of problem?' to find a common theme and get an idea of a market size thats worth your time.