First four weeks running the show

Jul 28

Posted by Andrew Machado in Technology | Comments off

Awhile ago @monaghandi told me this post she read about being a napkin entrepreneur.  Steve Blank in the post discusses how its easy to start a part time project nowadays with technology and the internet, but it takes a lot more effort to quit your day job and focus fulltime on one idea you have.  Steve is dead on with this.  I debated doing Open Home Pro fulltime for what felt like a year, but after the second version released and interest started growing I decided to take the plunge.

So what’s happened in the first four weeks?

Quite a bit, but I’ll just mention a few things.

1.  I committed a significant amount of code to the website, listing pages and even a few bits to the iPad App.

When the going gets tough the tough must get going. I don’t have much engineering help currently so I have to use what I’ve got.  It’s been challenging and a bit humbling, but the sense of accomplishment after each thing starts to come together has been great. Extra special thanks to @kkrewink who helped add a few key features.  The guy runs in one mode….100% beast.

2.  Growing Site Traffic and our User Base

If you are going to spend every waking moment on something I sure hope you improve the business and the user base.  Site Traffic is up 40% since I’ve started doing things fulltime and the user base is growing right along with it.  In the last two weeks alone we’ve double key metrics inside the app by simply communicating better with our users.  These kinds of things I simply didn’t have the time to pay attention to before going full time.

3.  Started Aggressively Going After Funding

When you are doing things part time the feedback you’ll get often from angel investors is you need to be fulltime on a project for them to invest.  I heard time and time again on Angel List amongst other feedback that unless you are fulltime its a no go.  Now that I’ve removed that barrier its time for me to put my money where my mouth is and get some people to believe in what I’m doing.

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5 Things to Watch in OS X Lion

Jul 10

Posted by Andrew Machado in Technology | Comments off

I’ve been running Mac OS X Lion (10.7) for the last 5 days and thought I’d share 5 observations about the release.

1. The forced change in habits

After installing Lion I was forced to deal with the reverse scrolling being enabled by default (when i scroll down on my trackpad the content on the screen scrolls up. Similar to your iPhone) and the new view in the Finder where you can’t even sort by your Hard Drive unless you go up to the Go menu and select it.

Seems very ballzy by Apple to force feed these behaviors down your throat, but then again better to be opt out then opt in if you wan’t to get as many people as possible to use something.

2. Crappy Wireless Performance on Wake From Sleep

One of the main features of Snow Leopard was how fast it will resolve your wireless connection so you can quickly get on the internet. In Lion I’d say that feature is now gone and we are back to the system taking 5 seconds or so to resolve your connection.

3. Startup Times Improved

My machine boots faster than under Snow Leopard. If i had to estimate I’d say its probably 15% to 20% from Snow Leopard to Lion

4. The Death of Front Row

If you loved Front Row on your Mac then don’t upgrade. It’s now gone forever. I won’t miss it, but I’m sure a few of you out there will. My hunch here is Apple wants people to buy Apple TV which is a dedicated device to do functions like media on your TV…not to mention sick integration with the iPad and iPhone.

5. How Little Has Changed

Overall just not that much is new for the average user. It feels almost like a Placebo effect for my $29.99. I think Apple has finally hit the point of being unable to innovate enough in a desktop operating system to claim a price tag beyond $29.99. I wonder how many people worked on Lion…was it less engineers than Snow Leopard? Did some features slip that shouldn’t of hence the replacement of Bertran?

As someone who has run OS X even in beta (Anyone remember the Public Beta?) I’m just sad to see an update thats supposed to be this significant feel so underwhelming. I remember the days of 10.3 and 10.4 having these killer features you ran out to buy.

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Closing Time

Jun 30

Posted by Andrew Machado in Technology | Comments off

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end.”


Semisonic - Closing Time by hushhush112

I walked through the doors of Apture June 29th, 2009. I was so excited to work there I showed up two hours early and hungout in a coffee shop across the street until someone showed up from the team. I started on the team as a Community Manager. You can see my thoughts on being a Community Manager here. Over the last two years I’ve learned so much that rambling on and on for paragraphs wouldn’t be fun to read for you. So I thought I’d do a list of my 3 favorite moments of the last two years with the team.

1. Apture Magic Search Bar aka “The Prestige”


Late one night at the Apture office @kurafire , @tristanharris and I were banging our heads on the desk about how to build this really magical search experience on publisher pages when we had that aha moment. And the Apture Magic Search Bar was born. By SXSW 2010 we had shipped it. This ranks slightly ahead of #2 simply because of the excitement of the night we came up with it. At one point we called @kansteven and made him drive all the way from Menlo Park to the office in San Francisco at midnight to partake in the development.

When we showed the team a mock of it the next day @cansar heavily breathed into a bag to contain his excitement :)

2. Apture Hotspots

As of yesterday we unveiled Apture Hotspots to the public. This to me is the culmination of the vision set back for Apture from the beginning. The idea of fundamentally changing the way people browse the web. We are empowering readers and publishers to work together to make articles smarter, more engaging and more connected. For example if enough readers look up the term “Angkor Wat” on your post Apture will automatically insert a Hotspot for future readers allowing them to instantly see what “Angkor Wat” is without having to leave the page. What this does is essentially connect the web in a whole new way, keeping readers engaged and happy on publishers pages.

It’s the best product I’ve ever had a hand in building.



3. Hiring Angelo DiNardi

If you don’t follow Angelo’s twitter stream you should. You’ll often see him yelling at Microsoft to die in a fire. His passion shows through on everything he builds. Without him the front end of Apture especially the New Search Experience simply wouldn’t have been possible. I think back to all of the projects he’s had a hand in helping with and like a team player he always executed and delivered something that’s world class. Quite simply he’s a gem.

Starting Monday I’ll be down at the DogPatch to work on my former side project Open Home Pro fulltime.

Still reading? Watch me get flying arm bared below.

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Chart Beat Got Me

Jun 23

Posted by Andrew Machado in Technology | Comments off

I signed up for ChartBeat today.  In a nutshell Chartbeat is a real time analytics package for your website to traffic everything from page load speed to how many users concurrently are on your site.

I actually ended up at ChartBeat because an Apture user reported a conflict with our script and their’s.  I had never heard of service, but I got one look at their real time dashboard and was in love.

With a simple piece of javascript and $9.99 per month I’m able to see from my iPhone or browser how many users are on my site, if traffic is spiking and what my most popular articles are.  It’s just great.

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