Tell HN: I'm launching in 30 days. No matter what. Hold me to it
First off, I'm sincerely grateful to this community. You blow me away with your generosity and honesty. I don't remember how I stumbled on HN but my life is better off because of it, and certainly my business.
I've been working on a web app for over a year now. It's more than a web app, it's a business I truly believe in, and have given all my heart and effort into. I've lived off our savings, and I've been procrastinating launching trying to get things perfect.
That's over now. I'm committing to launch in 30 days no matter what.
And I'm telling you this because I know that it will help keep me accountable.
Thanks for reading!
Edit: I guess we just launched. I was looking for a kick in the ass and I got it. Thanks! Here it is: http://rm.bettermeans.com/
135 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadMaybe there is such a thing as too early of a launch.
-As someone else posted on the site, attempts to create a new workstream meet with a 403/not authorized despite being logged in.
-It may just be a placeholder, but the "Browse all enterprises" and "Browse all workstreams" seems to be an unwieldly way to discover new enterprises/workstreams, since after the launch is well underway, that list will explode in volume. The search box is nice to find enterprises you already know about, but really what's needed to make it easier to find new enterprises (IMO) is some way to hierarchically categorize or tag your organization. And also those "Browse all..." type pages should definitely be paginated; they're way too long already.
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/482#
http://rm.bettermeans.com/projects/bm/dashboard
That said, it's an amazingly functional interface. But I'm hoping some degree of permission was obtained first.
FWIW, it looks like BetterMeans is using JQuery-UI and PivotalTracker is using YUI, and I don't notice any commonalities in their source with a quick review... so it may well just be mostly that bg image (which they may have both gotten from a common & free source).
Dunno if you see a smoking gun somewhere, but I haven't thus far.
As I write this I'm arguing with myself about the power and value of genuine transparency, it's something I believe in deeply but done asymmetrically, as you are doing verses your competitors or as our governments are doing verses the private sector does provide a huge soft underbelly for easy attack.
What we lose by the competition reading our every move, we gain by having a large, engaged team.
I don't think it's for everyone, and there's definitely a place for stealth, privacy...etc. But I do think that businesses can afford to be a LOT more transparent than they are today. Hopefully it doesn't blow up in our face.
Members can nominate contributors to become members (this voting happens in private) and then they can have binding votes. It's a mod of the apache foundation governance and it's baked into the platform.
I wish you the best of luck, but I have to admit I don't think I would find your tool to be very useful. If people working for me are that unhappy that they feel the need to resort to anarchism, then maybe they should question whether working for the company is something that they should even be doing. Put another way, if I were working for somebody and felt like a pawn, I'd choose to work elsewhere if trying to engage the leadership and persuade them on issues failed.
...I've been procrastinating launching trying to get things perfect.
If you're the only one who has used the site, you'll see both of these as mistakes in about 37 days. Just launch.
It allows people to work together on a project with a meritocratic governance as opposed to command and control.
I think the HN community just launched your service for you :~).
We turned around and I'm thinking to myself "shit, I just launched"
Opera on Ubuntu
Do this very quickly so that you can get as many email addresses as possible from the many people that will see you on the home page. You're the top story right now.
If you're willing to please check this out, and shoot me an email
http://bettermeans.org/front/?page_id=253
We're an open enterprise, so everyone who asks, and agrees to our governance model can join.
All dev worked is tracked here: http://rm.bettermeans.com/projects/platform/
To everyone: Shereef is cooking something great. Make sure he ships in 30 days!
Will bitch in t-minus 30 days and counting.
You say an awful lot of what you do but no where could I find the "HOW" and I, personally, hate high-level BS talk.
Get to the point and put verbs in your sentences that say how you do these things.
Guess I didn't need 30 days! This is totally overwhelming. Thank you everyone. Please be generous with your feedback.
http://bettermeans.org/front/?page_id=312
Would love your feedback
http://bettermeans.org/front/?page_id=19
with more of an introduction here:
http://bettermeans.org/front/?page_id=306
What would a worker coop look like if it was designed with the internet in mind. And what if the governance was baked into the project mgmt tool.
Here's a detailed doc explaining what we're trying todo: http://bettermeans.org/front/?page_id=306
It's a long read, and we need to make it shorter, but you're spot on.
No, I'm not plugged in to the worker co-op community. Loop me in.
This is the governance model we've come up with: http://bettermeans.org/front/?page_id=312
That's really intriguing, congratulations! If done right this can probably have a profound impact on the way businesses are run. The best of luck to you, sir!
All I know is that you "exponentially increase my agility" (which is most likely untrue). If I'm a worker you apparently also engage all of my humanity (which, as everybody knows, is made of passion, purpose and creativity). And as an entrepreneur, I feel that you are somehow trying to offend me ;)
Maybe a description of what exactly your product does (screenshots are better than stock images and icons) would be more helpful.
I'm not in your position so I don't know your product or what state your product's at, so I'm just basing this off the statement that you're been in the state of "perfecting" the web app.
Do not try to be 100% technically accurate. That leads to long, unreadable text. It's ok to rely on your reader's imagination to convey a message.
http://skitch.com/jackowayed/dq24n/bettermeans-popular
Feel free to be sponsortive :p http://zemanel.posterous.com/
btw, I looked hard for a sponsor link but couldn't find one. might want to make it more visible
I read a bit of your "open enterprise manifesto" (which is way too long to read in my opinion, but that may not be your goal), and found conflict with this statement:
"We made our government democratic, and our corporations everything but..."
Actually, we made our government a Republic, with a set of laws and inalienable rights. The process for changing those laws was made democratic, but the system was created as a Republic to protect the rights of individuals from the arbitrary force of government.
I don't understand why so many people focus on the "greed" and "corruption" inherent in "top-down" corporations, but ignore the greed and corruption inherent in centralized government. Those who operate the government are no different than those who operate corporations. They're all human.
If you can't trust corporations, then you DEFINITELY can't trust government, because they are all run by humans of the same nature.
The reference to it in our manifesto is that we at least see the value of democracy in our attempt to govern ourselves politically, but have made very few strides in that in our attempts to govern our businesses.
I would trust our government much more if it ran all its work transparently on bettermeans, and allowed me to vote, discuss, and comment freely.
Also, "greed" and "corruption" are IMHO not a function of human nature, but a function of poor governance systems that we find ourselves in.
Our entire model is based on an inherit trust in our nature. That given the right circumstances, and a fair, transparent, accountable system we can rise above "greed" and "corruption"
We wrote a post about it here: http://bettermeans.org/front/?p=565
I really like the application you built. I need some more convincing on the model and how it would work, without reading the entire manifesto, do you have a document that explains it in much shorter form?
Great job on the design, it LOOKS like you spent about a year on it :)
Therefore government actions are much more dangerous that corporate actions, and they are far less often held accountable for the results of their actions.