sell what you've got

Early stage companies thrive on the speed of idea generation and prototyping. You start with a reasonably good idea, test the market, iterate on the idea to make it a great one, and deliver on the first stage of the product.

At this point you've got your first sellable merchandise. You also have another wheelbarrow full of additional ideas where you can take the product based on customer feedback and the natural evolution of the original idea. It is tempting to keep selling the dream. Unless the first incarnation of your product is ill received it is important to sell that concrete thing which you have just completed building. Now it may have a few warts and one of the arms isn't quite fully developed, that's OK. Sell what you have and co-opt your customers into helping you define the next stage of the product.

If you are continually selling the dream (or the next generation of the product) your trial periods will extend indefinitely. This will result in much slower revenue (and revenue recognition) and effectively shorten your runway. So do not short change yourself. Sell what you have today, execute to over deliver what you've sold, and your happy customer will help you refine and pay for your ideas of tomorrow.

MWL

Is it possible to not be myself? A physical object in the universe, a man, a sentient being? What is life, but an aggregation of discrete moments, meaningful, connected by the vast slippery dark matter of meaningless moments in five dimensional space? Who are you but a reflection of my one true self, the summation of existence, my molecules mixing with your molecules?

To recognize that transience as simply transformation has power. It has power to guide the transformation as a regeneration of three dimensional space, the sameness of thought yet the evolution of thinking, leaving indelible marks as blips in the filmstrip of the universal record. What comes next is a self assured dream of what comes next.

web 2.0

If any of you haven't caught up on the latest craze out there, it is web 2.0 (my appologies for the clarity of the Meme Map image. A better one can be found by the author at the previous link). Web 2.0 is service driven. It fulfills the needs of the long tail ( another link). It listens to the collective wisdom of information by collecting, transforming, analyzing, and summarizing. Web 2.0 encourages participation, knowing that it's strength grows with interactivity. Web 2.0 is more than a craze, it's the inevitable evolution of the web as it blends into our lives, making information more accessible and participatory.