Why Start a Startup? Dan Moves to Idaho. Glory is Ugly. - 09/18/2009 - 2:04 PM:
About a day ago I was asked to sit on a panel on the life and times in an American start-up. Boise State University had a group of German students interested in learning about different areas of business here in the U.S., and I agreed to the interview. I participated in this same event last year, with different students, and it always involves a lot of questions about how you got started, why you do what you do, and the advantages and disadvantages of working for yourself. It also inadvertently forced me to compare how I answered those questions last year, one year into the venture, with how I answer them now, more than two and a half years into this thing we call BookLamp and Novel Projects.
What's it like? What's it like working at a job that simply won't let you go home at night; that either keeps you at work until 7 or 8 p.m. on a regular basis, or failing that, keeps you awake until 1 or 2 in the morning mulling over the things you have to get done the next day?...
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New York, Ice Skating, and Dooooooooooooom... - 07/31/2009 - 6:01 AM:
By Aaron Stanton
(the title is funnier if you're an Invader Zim fan...)
Dan has a much more technical style to his posts than I do, but I suppose it gives you another lens to see into what we do. Not only do we jump up and down in the parking lots of large international companies, but we also spend a lot of time approaching books differently than most people. In Dan's case, through numbers.
As always between my posts, a great deal has been happening. Our trip to New York was quite positive, and we'll be returning, soon. New York is quickly becoming very familiar to me; I no longer need to check the subway map every time I fly into the airport. I just know the way. :) When I was in high school, I remember writing somewhere that I'd know I'd become successful when I could afford to fly to New York City spontaneously for no purpose other than to go ice skating in Central Park. (I was an odd duck in high school...)
Every t...
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New York - 07/13/2009 - 4:51 PM:
By: Dan Bowen
This week Aaron and crew find themselves in New York for follow-ups with the many publishers who've shown interest in BookLamp. Actually, to date, I can't think of a single firm we've approached that has strictly dismissed the potential that BookLamp offers. Aaron's pitch has been that BookLamp is an 'un-scary' technology for the publishing industry... it's not that unbelievable to think that the subjective field of literature could be a bit turned off by the empirical approach that BookLamp offers.
Publishers have been surprisingly open to BookLamp's ideas, but are looking for solid ground on which to apply them in their current practices. Lately the industry has been suffering a bit, due largely to the internet content and the market's transition to electronic texts. This is precisely where BookLamp fits. Though these are tough times for consumers and the industry alike, publishers will survive - market demand ensures it. This is cert...
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Boise, Tallahassee, and Books - 07/03/2009 - 2:33 PM:
By: Dan Bowen
Hello world, my name is Dan Bowen. I am a Data Analyst for Novel Projects (BookLamp), and have been with Aaron and crew for about a year now. Things in Boise seem to get busier by the day, so Aaron has asked me to pick up on some of these posts.
Currently, I am in Tallahassee, FL and plan to be living and working full-time in the Boise office by the end of the summer. I have a bit of a different perspective on things being at a distance, but I will do my best to tell it how it is. This post will serve as a bit of an introduction, with a few updates; so here goes...
Being so far from home base has its downsides. Particularly when it comes to communication. Skype has been my daily commute since last September and it's great (very enabling), but not like being in the office where I can throw a comment to someone, without distracting everyone else. First, I can't be sure how loud I am in the room through Skype, so I have les...
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Back From Vacation. Added a New Team Member. A Thank You for User Ratings. - 06/22/2009 - 3:26 PM:
By: Aaron Stanton
I've been out of town for the last few weeks, but I'm back now. For future trips, I've asked one of our team members, Dan Bowen, if he'd be willing to help keep the blog on target (meaning, helping writing posts, and also pushing me to write posts) when life gets hectic. I haven't gotten a response from him on it, yet, but I think he'll be agreeable.
In a way, these last few weeks have been a watershed moment for Novel Projects. Specifically, a year ago I couldn't have left the company for two weeks and expected much to get done. The fact that I could take my first vacation in 3 years and leave for two weeks without the world crumbling at the home base is a good sign. Between Paul, Tony, Eileen, and the rest of the crew, things functioned as they should. Business phone calls still got made. Work was still done.
In fact, it turns out that so much got done that when I got back, my office had been moved into another roo...
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We Could Use a Tiny Bit of Help With Our Feedback Tool. - 05/20/2009 - 3:21 PM:
I have a favor to ask. Dan, one of our statisticians, has been going over our the results of our Feedback Tool. The Feedback Tool is designed to let humans rate a paragraph's score on action, density, pacing, dialog, and description, which we then analyze to help improve our formulas. This helps us make sure that our "action" being measured by the computer is the same thing that most people consider to be "action" in reality.
We have a fair number of feedback results in that tool already - roughly about 3,000 ratings. But we recently updated the code to track a new metric, something that we were not tracking before. So we need more data points now, and we need it in a fairly short period of time. As in, two weeks, if possible! Not much time at all.
He asked me if I'd put a request out for some help, so here I am. :)
This is just a really quick request - if you're a fan of the project an...
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The Innovator's Dilemma. Why Working in a Startup is Fun. - 05/06/2009 - 10:00 AM:
I'm reading a book right at the moment that is extremely encouraging to startups, or at the very least, should give you an interesting perspective on the role of startups in any given industry. It's called, The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen. Now, I tend to read business-related books almost at random. I go out and find a bunch of them, and then work my way through the list on the assumption that I'll come across some nuggets of useful information.
I almost stopped reading The Innovator's Dilemma, because it specifically focuses on how to develop disruptive technologies inside of a large corporation. Since we're not a large corporation yet, I was tempted to pass it up. But I didn't, and I'm glad I didn't. We deal with large corporations on a daily basis, and I figured that understanding things from their perspective was well worth the effort.
What I found was actually a few nuggets of wisdom that I think every startup employee or owner...
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