The team’s friends in turn invited their friends. “Initially it very much spread through a word of mouth process. That was surprising to us because it’s a payment system not a social network so it’s not something you’d think would have any virality whatsoever. But it became clear that everything else was so bad and so painful to work with that people actually were selling this to their friends

Cool story. (via startupgrind.com →)

9. The only thing that matters is how good your product is. All the rest is noise.

Note how many more times product or understanding of building products (technology, ux, product design) is mentioned. If you’re a startup founder or CEO with no product building experience or understanding, you’re like a bus driver with no idea where to go. Then it doesn’t matter how fancy your bus is or how good the people are on it. You will never arrive.

(betashop.com →)

The idea with the first Kippt, was to build an easy way to share links between devices. We built it in about 8 hours for the Forrst App Contest (and won), by scraping every non essential feature (including password resets etc). It was received really well and probably my best users per development time used ratio to date.

For the past year, we’ve been frustrated with bookmarking products and decided to do something about it. So welcome the new Kippt. Making your bookmarking simpler, and it’s just the start. We want to built something great to help you to save, use and find great content.

You should give Kippt a try.

Kippt on other sites:
ReadWriteWeb: Kippt: A Bookmarking App to Watch
OneThingWell: Kippt
Brent Simmons: Kippt Seems Cool

“When’s the last time you had a creative breakthrough in a Monday morning meeting? Creativity springs from unexpected places and sources — from a walk in the park to the rare block of uninterrupted time — so thinking more broadly about the intrinsic motivations (autonomy, learning, etc.) that facilitate good work is likely to have a far happier outcome than the “latest” innovation in cubicles.”

— Allison Arrieff

Is there a simpler way to improve quality and responsiveness?
If you can’t sign it, don’t ship it.

— Seth Godin: Put your name on it

Agencies, departments, and organizations don’t do things — people do things. People’s names should be on things to foster both accountability and pride.

— Edward Tufte via Neurocooking

Well, you don’t want to show something that is weak, or poor, so you want to hold off until you get it right. And the trick is to actually stop that behavior. We show it every day, when it’s incomplete. If everybody does it, every day, then you get over the embarrassment. And when you get over the embarrassment, you’re more creative.

— Ed Catmull via Protoshare

And I haven’t seen any evidence that the rate of change in the industry is decreasing. I think it’s increasing. So what you’ll end up finding is those thousand people are the enemy of your next project. They may be able to bang out your current one, but they’ll get in the way of doing the next one.

But, seriously, if fifty awesome people knocked on the door, we’d hire them all.
We don’t hire to specific positions, we hire to standards.

— Gabe Newell on Valve

We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values—those who make steel, railroads and happiness.

— Dagny Taggard, Atlas Shrugged (by Ayn Rand)