Inside Lift

Our officemates at Obvious Corp are releasing some sort of new fangled publishing platform, Medium. When we saw it we thought, “Hey! We like writing. We should be here.”

So welcome to Inside Lift, a collection in Medium, which is about things we learned or are trying to learn in the world of startups. Collectively, Lift is our eighth startup and we still feel like we have so much to learn.

Here are some of the things on our mind:

Entrepreneurship. Everyone has a theory about what makes a successful startup. Ours is having a big mission and a long term outlook.

Design. Our app excels when it hits at a visceral level. We’re going from a clean, simple version one to a powerful, emotional version two.

Hiring. Our goal: talented, committed coworkers who bring thoughtfulness and diversity of experience. This is not easy.

Lean Startups. We believe in intuition backed by information. We’re constantly instrumenting product behavior and talking to users. You can’t split test your way to success though, so working in all this information is an art of its own.

Engineering for Rapid Iteration. We want rapid, daily feedback on our work and the insight to know when to prune a project and when to carry it all the way through to perfection. Continuous deployment for our web and iOS apps have been a nice start, but there’s so much more to do here (especially on the iOS side).

Pragmatic Technology Choices. Lift is an iPhone app backed by a Rails, MySQL, and Redis, running on Heroku, RDS, and S3. We like when a technology makes are lives easier and when we can understand how it behaves as we grow.

So hello to you, fellow startup enthusiast. Medium is a platform that doesn’t have a feedback mechanism yet, so let’s take this to Twitter.