I read this article (from my backlogged RSS reader) this morning and found it very valuable, especially since I have been contemplating tackling the problem of budget & capacity constraints vs ambitions.
Personally I've come to the conclusion that along with working smarter, it's just a case of prioritizing one's time and chasing low-hanging fruit.
I absolute love the new Smiley campaign that 37Signals has implemented to track (and publicize) their customer satisfaction. Absolutely genuis!
In a recent article, they also share some insight into the data that they aren't publishing and the analysis makes for some interesting reading. As a 37Signals customer and someone that has tried to build his own business using the best of 37Signals knowledge, I love how I can actually see the team make a massive effort to get to 100% customer satisfaction. That is absolutely immense and I really appreciate how they are going about this in a very public, transparent and honest way, which just installs so much faith into them as a team and a company.
There's been a lot said lately about us replicating the Dot Com bubble all over again and even though a much-respected figure like Paul Graham has stated his believe that we're not in a bubble, the doubts remain.
I'm yet unconvinced by either to be honest; I understand all the reasons why people wouldn't think we're in a bubble, yet I'm very cautious about some of the valuations being thrown around in what may just be a very ambitious funding environment at present.
When all else fails though, fall back on what we know: years and years of data. The above-linked article highlights that (listed) tech companies at present trades on similar ratio's to other non-tech companies, which at least seems to indicate that people outside of the supposed bubble isn't throwing their money at it (which is what I understand happened in Dot Com).
What do you think about the bubble?
I've used a couple of CMS platforms in my life and I think that they are all great in their own way. Heck, I've even tried to build a business supporting multiple platforms.
I believe that the platform doesn't really matter and that every user should pick not the most popular platform, but the one that they feel most comfortable with and suits their needs best. Simple.
For my own projects... I'm happy to consider any platform as long as it's WordPress. :)
As most of you know, I made the switch from WordPress to Tumblr and then back to WordPress last year. The second migration back to WordPress being a relatively painful & manual-date-entry experience. If I had waited a couple of months, that would've been so much easier...
WooThemes launched our brand new Tumblr2WP tool last week, which basically exports any Tumblr account to WordPress and makes it immediately compatible with WooThemes' tumblog themes, as well as Express.app. Sweet. Heck, we even made it onto Mashable.
With more than 250 Tumblr accounts already exported since launch on Friday, I'd think that there's quite a few people that wants to marry the flexibility of WP with the awesome publishing experience that Tumblr has popularized in the last year or so. And this is exactly what we've been trying to create and enable at WooThemes: we wanted to replicate as much of the great functionality that has made Tumblr popular on our preferred platform (WordPress) and then give you the opportunity to decide which of these platforms you wanted to use.
If you haven't yet and have a Tumblr blog at present, have a look at the new tool and consider a switch...