Massive Mouse

As the days count down to launching Sales on Rails, I’ve started doing some usability tests. In my first usability test, I learned a lot about my sales site for Sales on Rails in addition to a ton of useful information about some of my competitors. Best of all, it only took 25 minutes. A [...]

In a recent post, I hinted at how much I’ve learned while building a web application over the past year. A huge lesson came when I decided to do the third version of the design myself, which is what I should have done from the very beginning. Over the last year, I’ve learned enough HTML [...]

People are often surprised that I never consume traditional media (newspapers, TV, etc). I call it “selective ignorance“. “Selective” because I pick and choose what my brain gets exposed to, and “ignorance” as a joke. Why be selectively ignorant? Because the mainstream media is worthless, sensationalist, ill-informed and devoid of any intrinsic obligation to deliver [...]

I’m getting ready to launch Sales on Rails, a simple sales order management tool, after nearly ten months in development. If I had made better decisions, I would have been able to do it with half the money in half the time. If I had focused on the minimum required, launched the product and then [...]

Technology is changing our expectations of writing and it’s a change for the better. The immediate access that the Internet, cell phones and fast food have conditioned us to expect is lowering our tolerance for the historically slow, painfully dry and overly academic approach to writing. I’m glad for the change. When I was in [...]

…under many commonly encountered strategic situations, growth in sales and even growth in earnings add nothing to a firm’s intrinsic value. This statement seems to contradict an article of faith about a company’s sales and profits—[that] growth is good. However, as we explained earlier, growth on an even economic playing field creates no value. It [...]

“Approval, though, is not the goal of investing. In fact, approval is often counter-productive because it sedates the brain and makes it less receptive to new facts or a re-examination of conclusions formed earlier. Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.” — Warren Buffett, in his 2008 [...]

I’ve always done my best work when I’ve had to come from behind. You need that sense of urgency. You need that heightened state of anxiety, that state of awareness and focus, to get your creative juices flowing. That’s when you dig deep and find solutions. It’s a condition that plays an important role in [...]

The fourth dimension of any stock investment involves the price-earnings ratio — that is, the current price divided by the earnings per share. In the attempt to appraise whether the price-earnings ratio is in line with a proper valuation for that specific stock, trouble begins to arise. Most investors, including many professionals, who should know [...]