// Richard Hart / Hates_

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The Lean Startup

books, business

I finally finished reading The Lean Startup. The main gist is that we need to be creating fast feedback looks for products/changes we make, so that we can quickly see what is and isn’t working. It’s a good extension of what to do once you have you minimum-viable product up and running, as it’s easy to fall into the trap of just adding features, without actually adding any value. I especially liked the parts on doing a cohort study of your users. Instead of measuring figures like engagement as a total for a specific time, you would track engagement for people who signed up in January only, then sign ups in February, then March, etc. This gives you a better picture of whether you’re actually improving your service or only appearing to improve because of growing figures.

Overall the book wasn’t too bad. I felt that perhaps the first half was a lot more “actionable” and my interest fell off once past the half way point, so I ended up just steaming through after that. Definitely worth reading if you’re in the startup arena though.

I’ll be getting another copy soon anyways as I’ll be seeing Eric talk when he comes to London in January.

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The only limit, is the one you set yourself

life

Once you train yourself to seek out the limit in all endeavors, you’ll get better and faster at correcting the inevitable oversteps, and hit that peak performance.

This recent post from 37Signals reminds me a lot of the brilliant post by Derek Sivers on there being no speed limit.

Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me “the standard pace is for chumps” – that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than “just anyone” – you can do so much more than anyone expects. And this applies to ALL of life – not just school.

It can be hard at times to know how hard you should be pushing or how fast you should be going. It’s easier to go with the flow rather than to push ourselves to see what we’re truly capable of.

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SEO from the start

internet

My generic SEO strategy for a startup is a) be the best on the Internet for b) as many topics as you possibly can be that c) matter to your paying customers – Strategic SEO for Startups

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time learning about SEO and how to go about applying it to our day to day business. There’s a lot of stigma attached to doing “SEO” and while a lot of it is very shady, once you learn how to do things properly, it’s not as dirty a subject as people would have you think. Personally I’ve found the whole learning experience absolutely fascinating.

It’s very easy to think that SEO is something you do to your site. Adding keywords, making sure things are tagged correctly etc, but the real meat of SEO comes before all that. Researching competitors, finding keywords to compete on and own, building trustworthy and relevant linkbacks, etc. The SEOMoz Beginners Guide is an excellent resource for learning the basics while the link at the top is a a great way of learning how to apply the concepts to your startup/site.

For anyone thinking of hiring an “SEO Expert”. Be extremely cautious. There are a lot of people out there dying to sell you their black hat techniques to drive your search engine performance up, there are also a lot of people out there who really don’t know what they’re talking about. If someone offering to give you advice doesn’t first ask to see your analytics and your content, but rather focuses on technical changes (especially things like LOC and embedded Javascript), I’d personally look elsewhere for help.

There’s no point having the best content in the world if people can’t discover it, and really SEO is all about making that content discoverable.

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PDFKit not displaying £ (pound) signs properly

programming

I’m generating PDFs with PDFkit/wkhtmltopdf on a current project. While the output is fine in the browser, £ (pound) signs in the generated PDF were showing up incorrectly as:


  £

The fix was relatively easy as PDFs have their own view layout, so all I had to do was add an extra meta tag to the head:


  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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Half in the Bag: Jack and Jill

movies

RedLetterMedia review Jack and Jill

How anyone can think that Adam Sandler isn’t a fraud after his latest film “Jack and Jill” is beyond me. RedLetterMedia do an excellent job of talking about the poor storyline but also about the production back story of it’s funding and product placement. I haven’t seen the film myself and have no intention of ever doing so, but how it’s staggering to learn that it’s budget was $80m, which is nearly half of what James Cameron’s Titanic had. Fair dues to the guy, he get’s at least $25m a film, but I can only assume he has no shame or self respect. Personally I couldn’t live with myself while making that much money by basically swindling my own fans. If you want to get to the real meat of the Adam Sandler “scam” skip the first video and watch the second part.

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