Article: Drive development with budgets, not estimates

Great article from DHH:

A more common case is that you can get 80% of the feature for 20% of the effort. Which in turn means that you can get five 80% features, improvements, or fixes for the price of one 100% implementation. When you look at it like that, it’s often clear that you’d rather get more done, even if it isn’t as polished.


I would love to find a way to convey this more efficiently to clients, especially when writing project proposals. It should be noted that it can be tough to convince clients that a 80% feature actually answers all of their core needs when they have a 100% feature in mind.

Article: The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies

Interesting article:

As our conversation drifted from an update of my company to a deep discussion about life itself, I asked him what he thought was the secret to success. I expected the standard “never give up” or some other T-shirt slogan, but what he said took me by surprise. “The secret to success in business and in life is to never, ever, ever tell a lie,” he said.


On the face of it, it sounds obvious. Yet in practice, this is very difficult to do 100% of the time. Still pondering the implications...

Article: Entrepreneurship is 80% sales and marketing

Interesting thoughts from Dries Buytaert (developer by training, sales guy by necessity):

Other than the standard things (an idea, passion and the willingness to act), the most important thing that aspiring entrepreneurs need is the understanding that 80% of entrepreneurship is sales and marketing. If as a founder, you're not obsessed with sales and marketing, you're a liability rather than an asset.

From: http://buytaert.net/entrepreneurship-is-80-percent-sales-and-marketing