gistfile1.md

Announcements:

• Global Day of CodeRetreat 2013 (Dec 14)
• Weekly hackathons in combination with Code for Hampton Roads, 757 iOS and Hampton .NET User Group

Lightning Talk by Ken Collins (@metaskils) on our 757rb marketing efforts

Introductions

Questions:

1. How do you develop your business model? What type of research do you do? How do you choose your market(s)?
2. Have you used crowd sourced funding (i.e. Kickstarter, etc.)? If so, how well has it worked?
3. What's the best way to create a balance when you're transitioning from client work or full time job to working on a product?
4. True or false?: Client work is a rite of passage or necessary evil to gain the knowledge/experience/authority needed to launch a product. 1.Can you build a business in the App Store?
5. How do you handle the sadness that results from working on a product making no money, when you could be consulting or woking full time for much more?
6. What sucks about trying to sell products? Is there anything that's not so great about selling products (vs. consulting or a full time gig)?
7. Describe a week of managing your product. How much time on customer support vs. customer dev vs. product dev/new features?
8. Any key tools that you can't live without for running the biz (i.e. customer.io or grasshopper.com, etc.)
9. How much of the Lean Startup stuff have you had success implementing? What do you measure and depend on for determining your success/growth? Do you A/B test every new feature? Remove unused features? Create "empty" features that lead to a voting matrix for guiding your future development? etc.
10. When would you give up or decide "it's not working"?