Photo by psiaki This is final installment of a 3-part series covering my acquisition of HitTail. I’d originally planned on a 2 part series, but when parts 1 and 2 went to the top of Hacker News I received so many questions that I decided to add this prologue to answer them. Every question below has [...] Continue reading →

The following is a guest post from Karl Treier. Karl is a serial entrepreneur, currently with ProspectStream and SaaS Capital. He currently blogs at The Alien Entrepreneur.
Be Better Prepared for Technical Due Diligence
I have be… Continue reading →

Did you build your site thinking that googlebot can’t understand your javascript? I did, and I was a bit surprised when I learned I was wrong…

About a month ago, Starr Horne and I launched a reboot of OfficeSpace.com,
which is all about helping people who are looking for office space find it. We’ve had a lot of fun trying out various techniques and technologies, including trying
different approaches to analytics.

I was very interested in tracking on-page events, in addition to the usual page views, etc., so of course I implemented events tracking with Google Analytics. I also
wanted to track those events internally, so along with the call to GA, I make a post ajax request to a Rails metal controller that logs the events in Redis. For example,
when the map view gets loaded, pins get dropped on the map for buildings that have available office space, and a trigger is set on the markers to pop up a dialog with
more info about each building. When the click event fires, json is fetched, the dialog is displayed, and a post is sent to the stats collecting controller to track an
event for previewing a building. Since the request was a post and was triggered by javascript, I thought that only humans would trigger it. As I watched the logs, though,
and saw googlebot posting to the stats tracker with data from the pages it was loading, I realized how wrong I was.

So now I’m a little wiser and a little more rigorous about keeping bots from creating data they shouldn’t be creating. I’m also now more curious about just how much
dynamic content googlebot can index.

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Did you build your site thinking that googlebot can’t understand your javascript? I did, and I was a bit surprised when I learned I was wrong… About a month ago, Starr Horne and I launched a reboot of OfficeSpace.com, which is all about helping people who are looking for office space find it. We’ve had [...] Continue reading →

I’ve learned a lot by copying. In America we’re trained that all copying is bad; of course plagiarism is, but perhaps we’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Continue reading →

This is probably one of the most important talks you will ever see if you are an entrepreneur in any discipline. It was the opening talk at last year’s Business of Software. Registration for Business of Software 2012, (October 1-3rd… Continue reading →

Pat and I interviewed Professor Steve Blank, one of the key thinkers behind the whole Lean Startup movement, and that interview is up today! If you’ve wondered what Customer Discovery really is, if it’s more than a Silicon Valley buzzword, this interview will give you the facts from the man who created it. And if you are wondering what’s in …

You’re reading An awesome interview with Prof. Steve Blank from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

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I often get asked why I created a different adaptation from the original Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder. Lately, this question has bubbled up in frequency which is why I decided to take the time to outline the thought process that went into creating Lean Canvas.
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