Simplicity Rules

Webvisions has come and gone. There were plenty of organization things that could have made the conference better, but I’ll save it for the survey. Overall, I think it was pretty good. One way to tell is that I missed an awesome session by Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the Wordpress blogging platform. How did I miss it? I was in another awesome session.

Luckily, Micki Krimmel took some good notes. The session was titled, “Scaling for Your First 100k Users,” but a friend of mine who attended said it wasn’t really about scaling, but making a product for a user. Matt has twelve rules on making a Web product and Micki wrote them all down.

Here are my three favorites:

• Get out 1.0 as fast as humanly possible. This goes hand-in-hand with bootstrapping. Get something done, make it public, and tweak from there.
• Measure your success – you have to have metrics. Everything that is watched improves.
• Know what to do if you are successful — dog chasing a car doesn’t know what to do if he catches it.