Kill the HiPPO - a book

Hello! Val Mullally from my writer’s accountability group launched her new book yesterday. It’s her fifth self-published book. The launch was a Zoom event hosted by John, a colleague of Val’s, who was simply excellent as a host. It was a paid event, to keep the trolls away, but pay-what-you-want. Val personally invited many people, sending them a code for free participation. She also promoted the event through two work-related organisations she’s an active member of. The “it’s paid but here’s...

Hello! Here in Spain, August is a month of Very Serious Holidays. Much of society shuts down - including many neighbourhood shops, most school holiday programs, and even my favourite cafe. It is hard to achieve anything. As an immigrant to Spain, every year I fight against this. I try to get work done, believing I can magically fit things into the non-existent time on my schedule. And every year I fail at this. I thought I’d be able to keep up my routine of writing these newsletters each...

Hello! A short newsletter this week as I’m on holiday with my family in Andorra, the little country in the Pyrenees, sandwiched between Spain and France. The one thing I want to share this week: I was recently interviewed by Craig Hewitt on the Rogue Startups podcast. I’ve known Craig for many years, so the conversation flowed easily right from the start. You can listen via your favourite podcasting app, or directly on the Rogue Startups website. From the podcast episode show notes: If you’ve...

Hello! It’s your product and you can run it any way you want. That’s one of our conclusions from interviewing founders and product managers from 10 bootstrapped software companies while writing Kill the HiPPO. I went into the project assuming there would be some “best practice” system in use by the founders I admire and look up. Our aim was to identify these best practices, along with the popular prioritisation frameworks founders use. After the first three interviews, we suspected that this...

Hello! Marketing and self-promotion are not things that come easy to me; I’d much rather fire up my IDE and spend the morning coding. So aiming to get this newsletter written and sent every week for one year is a good exercise for me. Having said that, I missed writing last week’s newsletter because I was at an industry event in Brighton, UK. I’m trying to go easy on myself, accepting the reality that I can’t do all the things all the time - especially here in the Spanish summer where the...

Hello! This week I have a podcast appearance to announce, a stellar Amazon review to share, and my thoughts on why it is so hard to get feedback for your product - and some creative ways that might work. Kill the HiPPO arrives in Singapore Kill the HiPPO is available in just about every Amazon regional site—except for Amazon Singapore, and I have no idea why. My co-writer, Siew Ann Tan, lives in Singapore, so she was unable to get author copies of her own book! I ordered some additional...

Hello! Ever built a feature you thought your users wanted, only to find that no one uses it? If you’ve been running a software company for long enough, this will have happened to you at least once. The strange thing is it can even happen when you received lots of requests for the feature. The “popular” feature no one used The integrations in my product, Feature Upvote, are popular. Slack, Jira, MS Teams, Discord - almost every customer adds at least one of these integrations to their account....