This is part one of a five-part series on “Rise of a startup: Cruiseable.” Today’s installment looks at the decision to hire an overseas development team, Coders Mill.

Target audience: Entrepreneurs, startup teams, angel investors, venture capitalists, developers, businesses, innovators, educators, students, journalists, travel analysts.

During the past 16 months, as longtime readers know (and this blog goes back a long way, to May 2001), I’ve gone full throttle into startup mode, working with my co-founder Giacomo Balli on a travel tech startup called Cruiseable. We’re out to make it much easier and more fun for people to discover, plan and book great cruise vacations.

Over that span, friends, colleagues and strangers have asked me to write about our journey. And while I don’t lay claim to unlocking major new business processes or media insights, I do think some of what we’re doing will be of interest to other entrepreneurs (current and aspiring), as well as journalists, innovators, analysts and anyone interested in how the travel tech and cruise worlds work.

Unlike most startups that come out of Greater Silicon Valley (which includes San Francisco, which now spawns more startups than the original Silicon Valley), we decided not to spin out a few prototypes, test them, iterate and move on to something else if things didn’t immediately click.

That approach doesn’t work if you’re setting your sites higher — and we’re out to bring some rockin’ new social and mobile innovation to the $38 billion cruise industry. So we spent the first few weeks not coding, but researching. Learning. Absorbing all kinds of reports about the connected traveler, millennial travelers and the next generation of collaborative and empowered travelers.

The plumbing & development process come first

We decided to pursue Gretzky economics. Skate to where the puck’s gonna be.

Game plan in hand, target audiences identified and branding solidified (I managed to purchase the cruiseable.com domain a few months earlier), our next step was not to build out a team, or whip up some prototypes, or invest months of time in pursuit of angel investors who shared our vision of empowered travelers.

No. We began by finding a great development team that could help construct the basic scaffolding for Cruiseable.

We knew we wanted to be a “mobile priority” startup. While the rest of the world is moving to mobile, discovering and booking cruises is chiefly done on the Web. So we decided to create a single database that would simultaneously feed both a mobile app and our website. Any action you take on the site would be instantly reflected on the app, and vice-versa.

We did it, and it’s very, very cool.

With that single-database, no-jerry-rigging requirement in mind, we looked around for a solid development house. My co-founder is an all-star mobile app developer, but Objective C for iOS is a completely different animal than Python, PHP, Joomla and all the other code bases and development frameworks out there. (And from my years as the chief executive of Ourmedia, I sure as heck knew we weren’t going with Drupal.)

We had a finite budget and big ambitions. The quality of overseas development houses has risen markedly in recent years, especially in Poland, Ukraine, Romania and elsewhere on the Continent. I had given a talk in Krakow, Poland, two summers ago on The Social Startup to a large audience of developers and entrepreneurs. So it didn’t take much convincing from Don Dodge of Google Ventures, one of our advisors, to point us to Coders Mill, whose CEO put on the conference I spoke at.

Settling on Python and a development process

After several deep dives into our vision for the site and app, we agreed that Python was the most industrial-strength programming language and code base that could scale to thousands and eventually millions of users.

We’ve developed quite a relationship. Giacomo has flown to Krakow and met with the team, and the Coders Mill COO, Ela Goczyńska-Han, flew to San Francisco in March to meet with me and attend the Launch Festival. (In fact I introduced Ela to Launch founder and longtime friend Jason Calacanis.)

The language barrier reared up once or twice early on (my Polish is limited to the occasional Na zdrowie), but it was really just a communication rhythm that we needed to establish. The developers’ English is quite good. We’ve been using Trello as our project management system, to good effect, supplemented by emails and monthly “sprint calls” over Skype, where we discuss the deliverables for them to tackle in the next sprint. (In fact, the latest one just ended, at 2:30 am, a few minutes ago.)

We use Moqups as a prototyping tool, a beta site before pushing code to production, Google docs for listing and checking off tasks, Github as our code repository, Linode as our hosting service, toggl for tracking hours, and Scrum as our incremental agile software development method. (Hey, after working at Microsoft and at three startups, I actually know what all this stuff does. And it’s awesome.)

Oh, and I’ve been using Bank of America quite a bit to wire funds to Krakow, until we find the right set of angel investors who have the insight to join us on our quest for world domination. (Here’s our impressive team — more on them, and other tools we use, and the launch of Cruiseable, in our next installment.)

Would I recommend Coders Mill to other startups? Yes. It’s always good to work shoulder to shoulder with your developers, but when funds are limited, a development house like Coders Mill is a life saver.

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Learn to measure what’s truly valuable to business development

Target audience: Businesses, entrepreneurs, startups.

Whether it’s the minimum viable product (MVP), pivots or continuous deployment, entrepreneurs love quoting the tenets of The Lean Startup movement.

“The Lean Startup is more than just the parts that fit on a bumper sticker,” said Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and co-host of the third annual Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco.

Ries admitted that these Lean Startup maxims are good as buzzwords, but it’s time for the movement to move beyond that. “If you want to improve entrepreneurial outcomes, you have to improve the accounting. Yes, I said accounting. The math of how we hold entrepreneurs accountable,” said Ries, who admits it’s a topic that nobody wants to talk about. But startups need to account for progress differently than their enterprise counterparts.

“Unfortunately, most of the accountability and accounting systems used today — which work great for an established enterprise — are denominated in what we call vanity metrics,” he said. Vanity metrics refer to those very visible numbers that you pull out to show your levels of improvement and try to play off as success. Metrics such as pageviews and numbers of users for a fledgling company are often not representative of the true business model. At the beginning of the conference, Ries even joked that we should boo any presenter that presented such metrics. The crowd took him at his word and did (in jest) actually boo a couple of presenters.

Ries explained that you need to take a closer look at these metrics to understand what really matters to growing the business. For example, total number of users is not as valuable to business growth as how much a user would be willing to spend or how important the product is to a customer. If you’re measuring these variables correctly (even with just a few hundred users), you can start to see signs of progress before the vanity metrics come into play.

Validate your development against business goals

“All management revolutions have been led by engineers for a reason. And that’s because management is human systems engineering,” Ries explained. “When we’re thinking about ourselves as developers, we’re not thinking about management, we’re thinking about code. But humans write the code and humans use the code. So there’s no way to escape the human part of development.”

Our decisions are played out in code. As a savvy development group, you may have a whiteboard with stories (planned feature releases) queued up — backlog, in progress, completed — but Ries advised developers to add a fourth column: validated. After a story is done from a code complete point of view, move it into the validated column. Don’t remove it until you have evidence that it was a good idea to have done that story done in the first place, said Ries.

“We want you to start measuring productivity not in terms of how many stories did I crank out code-wise, but how many experiments do I learn from,” said Ries. “And I’ve seen that one simple technique have revolutionary impact in a lot of different software teams.”

This video was produced at the Lean Startup Conference where I was reporting for New Relic. Original post can be found on the New Relic blog.

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Target audience: Businesses, entrepreneurs, startups, general audience.

Bragging that you’ve worked a 16-hour day doesn’t actually increase your bottom line. Success comes from being smart about how you work, which doesn’t necessarily mean you have to forgo sleep and family to be successful.

Much of the advice Eric Ries’ book “The Lean Startup” speaks to working smarter, not harder. At The Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco, we asked attendees how they plan on working smarter, not harder this year. Check out this 1 minute 16 second video to see what they’re going to do. Will you do the same?

This video was produced at the 2012 Lean Startup Conference where I was reporting for New Relic. The original post can be found on the New Relic blog.

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If you’ve ever tried to start a business, you know that you get thrown into a world of unknowns. Most of us are dependent on mentors and others to guide us through a realm where we’re bound to make tons of mistakes.

At The Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco, I asked attendees and presenters, “What’s the best advice anyone ever gave you about starting a business?” We edited down our favorite answers to create a video of the best crowdsourced advice on starting a business.

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Advice from three startups on the digital creation process

In any project you decide to embrace, there are key ingredients that must fall into place to build a solid foundation for success. We caught up with a number of new mobile and Web app startups and a user experience design expert from the agency side to pick their brains on the key ingredients needed to make that perfect risotto. That is, to build a startup from the ground up.

After years of working with brands and startups, it amazes me how great ideas get muddled when it reaches the execution phase. When I was part of a product management team, it was a challenge to convince executive management how design needs to be an integral part of the process. $3 million down the drain later, they’ll circle back and say, “Jessica can you show us those architectural sketches again?”

Here is a summary of the advice from all three startups with perspective from my personal experience in the digital creation process.

Timing is everything

When the visual search startup Search Me launched in 2005, the tech world was excited! $43.6 million later and only 1.8 million users to show for it, they had to shut down. The world was not ready for visual search at that time.

However, timing has worked very well for Tango.me, a free mobile video calling service with 6 million users available in 135 countries and on 45 different mobile devices. Uri Raz, founder and CEO, adds that “the improvement of smart phones and video was excellent timing for Tango.me. Why limit video calls on the PC when improvement in mobile technology makes it more accessible and convenient.”

In the million and one ideas that you have in your “ideas” folder, look for one that the market is ripe and ready for. Observe the changes in the space that you would like to service, do your research, find the gap and improvements you can implement, then make your bet.

Find your product’s focus

Most startups don’t find the sweet spot of their product the first time they launch. It takes a number of prototypes, many days of testing, collaboration and iteration to get to the phase where it is finally ready for public consumption. Uri adds: “When your product is able to provide something useful to a massive group of consumers, you won’t need to convince them about its usefulness — they will make sure you succeed by supporting your product.”

A powerful example of this experience is when Tango.me first launched in Korea. “Korea is one of our first adopters,” Uri says. “When we first launched, there was a flaw in our platform. Our system was not working with the structure of Korea’s phone number system. A user discovered a way around this and posted it in his blog. The next day Tango had 120,000 downloads. We’ve fixed that issue, yet this memorable act of love from our users is a testament to how our product is connecting lives.”

It should be a natural expectation that after you release a product to the general population, changes will occur. There will be user improvements that you will unearth by carefully observing how your community is learning about your site, mobile or Web app. Combine that information with your understanding of the market, and you’ll be able to make a solid decision around your product strategy. Often you’ll steer away from the original idea, but if your community loves it, then just go with the flow.

User experience and design

User experience and design is key to a product’s success. Design in a product regardless of whether you are building a website, a mobile app, a restaurant or a supermarket is integral to how well your product will perform once you open its doors to prospective customers.

I asked a dear friend and colleague his opinion on the matter. Peter March, a professional user experience and design professional, adds: “In my experience, the basic methods and practices of UX still apply in pretty much the same way as they do for regular websites. Make sure you know the platform specifics for the mobile platforms you’re developing for (Blackberry, iPhone, etc.), and be careful not to design anything that the platform isn’t capable of supporting.” The same rule goes for screen gestures and interface actions.

Execute with focus

Next, build, test and see how your consumers are responding and listen. Assess, evaluate and execute on the changes that will strengthen your product’s core. Research and data are cornerstones of your product’s success.

The Hotlist, a location-based startup, is a learning platform for events, venues, meeting and making new friends. (Disclosure: I work for The Hotlist as their community manager.) Their first success came when they won the NYU Stern Business competition with $25,000 in cash to start their company. Today the Web app has grown to 160,000 users and financing led by Centurion Holdings. Giann Martirei, co-founder and COO, shares these tips: Build something people want, make sure you are not the only customer of your product. Apply agile development. Deliver something new to your users every six weeks. Move fast.

If they come, then you can think about revenue

Once the core of your product shows longevity in the marketplace, then you can start pushing your business strategy. Brainscape is a learning platform from New York-based Bold Learning Solutions that integrates well with any topic or medium. Andrew Cohen, CEO and founder, says, “Building my idea into a product meant I had to go back to school to learn new skills in education technology.” The first Brainscape prototype was built during his studies while studying for his masters in education and technology at Columbia University. Today, the platform has more than 70,000 users and was briefly No. 1 in its category on iTunes without any marketing spend.

Obviously, revenue is a consideration you need to think about during the early stages of the process, yet it should not be the focus of your energies. Keep it in the background until your product is embraced and supported by a strong and growing consumer base. Andrew’s advice is this: “We always have to make decisions whether we care about making some revenue now, or instead focus on the long-term platform creation that will lead to lots of revenue in the future.  We believe that this will pay off in the long run.”

Do you own a startup or are you thinking of launching one? What did you learn from the experience?

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