Modern testing for modern stacks

I think this essay applies a lot more to our (product based) clients than (services based) Qxf2. But I think there is some overlap with the services market too. It helps calibrate your expectations about what to expect from startups. I feel like the current portrayal in the newspapers and CNBC is not really accurate. I do like the emphasis on the early stage - before the startup gained traction. When you are doing something laborious at a client and are frustrated and think "Is this really the kind of thing I should be spending my time on", check to see if any of the key takeaways from this essay help. Key takeaways for me: finding early clients is laborious, all startups are necessarily fragile at the start, you need to pay extra attention to make your initial clients happy, start with a niche, consider consulting and sometimes don't build software yet.Aside 1: I also like the warning about 'big launches'. It is counter-intuitive to many people that come from larger companies.

I had the privilege of being an early employee in the two companies which i have worked so far. The author speaks about some good ideas on doing things which do not scale. I have involved in doing things which do not scale at first in both these companies. So i feel the points which he makes are important. At Qxf2 when i started i was into R&D, writing Blogs etc. Though at first it seemed i was not adding much value, i saw the benefits of those tasks later like our framework, blogs being useful for getting projects as well for internal use. In a personal front also conducting Meetups and spending time of new topics will help us scale in our career. Some of the clients which we have got are with reference from the people who had worked with us earlier.

This is an amazing article. When says "do things that don't scale".It means as a startup we will have to do lot things all by ourself. Go out and manually recruit the early users, even if it seems tedious and inefficient. Though there are so many obstructions are there while starting, after some time we can gradually reduce it by doing ourselves.Usually, a startup is extremely fragile and can break at any point. One of the biggest reasons a startup can break early on is a lack of confidence in the founders. He also mentioned ,focus on a narrow market.It's not enough just to do something extraordinary initially. we have to make an extraordinary effort initially," .But this is not scalable for the long run but necessary to kick start.

This article "Do things that doesn't scale" is a amazing article which talks about what is expected from a startup companies. The author feels that as a startup you will have to do lot many things all by yourself. It can be anything like sales, marketing, recruiting, sometimes even cleaning the office and he also feels this is only for a short period of time and not needed in long run but these are necessary to kick start.The author first talks about the startup challenges like acquiring the clients. He feels that the founder of the company just have to go and market and sell and make customers use the product. Initially there will be many hiccups.Generally the Founders/CEO find it as laborious work or feel its not their job to do the marketing. Doing it manually gets more benefits than automation. Now technology is changing so much that everything is automated even sending a mail to the user is automated. This builds a gap. The author advises to pay personal attention to the clients. He also feels that just finding the users is not sufficient but keeping them happy is one of the biggest challenge. Because by engaging directly we get a good feedback and it is the one of the biggest factor that makes the product good. The author also feels that the startups must focus on narrow market just like Facebook who just started targeting a certain group of users like Harvard students instead of including the whole world. Also planning for big software launches and partnership with big companies is also not a right choice unless and until the startup puts up the extra effort initially. As the company grows, new methodologies can be implemented like trying new marketing or sales approach.

I think this article focusses more on making the experience of the primary clients better and it is more related to product based startups.I will relate it to my previous experience,wherein we had some enterprise clients from the date the startup was founded so we used to experiment many things with them and they used to give us feedback.Even sometimes when we wanted to test some functionalities live on production ,they used to help us with live orders to test functionality.Sometimes requirements told by them were needed for other clients as well and that helps in developing a standard set of functionalities.So two Unscalable things which i liked from the article were the Delight and User Experience .Also I would say that Initial customers are like your assets dont loose them.

In this article Author speaks about some important things the start up must follow.Actually startups take off because the founders who initializes . There may be many sources just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. Author gave a example about cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.At beginning of start up people think that they newborn baby and concluding "there's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything." So we should not bother about negative vibes , just need to work on what we are.You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy. Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made. Its not that the startup must blend throughout , but at least to some period of time till the company gets some reputation.

This is an interesting and informative article, more from a client's perspective. Here is my view on the points mentioned: Fragile - agree to what he says about being fragile. He talks about recruiting manually, gives an example where he hired design bloggers. which made me think who we should hire.Delight - I agree with him that most of the engineers are not trained on customer service. He says existing customers should be kept happy. Also says since you are small, you can do what other big companies can't do, I believe in this.Experience - informative & learning points given here too. I could relate to my work with clients where we should be giving them something at the end of the trial.Fire - nice example here too.Meraki - talks about hardware, where he says you should be in the factory to learn things you'd never have known otherwise.Consult - it's always key to use consulting where you should think like a user & then view the product to build further.Big - agree that you have to make a big extraordinary effort initially.