fixed the problem. And the good news about Flash is that you didn’t have to install any software to run a Flash application.
But at the time there wasn’t any good way to do automated testing of Flash applications. The whole thing about agile development that makes it work is not just embracing change but doing frequent builds and just pressing a button to run all these automated tests to make sure you didn’t break anything. We weren’t ignorant about these agile methods, but given the choices we made about Flash, it was harder to adopt them.
X: In your post, you also admonish companies to “iterate in the marketplace, not the conference room.”
CH: I almost cry thinking about the time we spent agonizing over some feature of the product that we would finally get to market and then the customer would yawn. The guys at 37 Signals wrote a book about their development process and one of the pieces of advice I remember from it is to “make every feature fight for its life.” We put in way more features than our customers could absorb. In hindsight, we would have been better off to go to market sooner with a smaller number of features and waiting until customers asked for the others.
X: What personal lessons are you drawing from all this? Would you think twice now before joining another startup building Web-based software?
CH: Not at all. I’m already talking to some people about another one. But I think the hardest thing to remember is to trust your gut instincts. If you are sitting there in a meeting and everybody else seems to think that some product or feature is going to be a big success and you just can’t imagine why anybody would want to use it, go with your instinct. Stand up and say “This is not going to work.” Or go and work for somebody else. More often that I would care to admit, my instincts were right. Every time something hasn’t worked, I can think back to a point where I said to myself, “I know this isn’t going to work.” But the people around me thought it was a good idea.
X: Okay. Well, thanks for talking with Xconomy, and for writing your post. It seems to me that there’s this phobia of failure among entrepreneurs and investors in New England, and it’s never going to change if people don’t talk about it.
CH: Ask me in six months whether that experience worked out.
