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1. 80/20 rule from Noah Kagan Appsumo’s founder, Noah Kagan, notes that one rule of thumb that they follow is to use 80% of their marketing budget for things that are working and 20% on newer marketing initiatives. One more thing: they go all in when they find marketing channels that work. You can watch one of his presentations where he shares his experiences of growing Mint, Facebook, and AppSumo here.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate At Treehouse, we work remotely and as you might imagine. There are some that think there is no replacement to working in person while others support it. For us, we’re half and half – we have an office in Orlando and we also have a team up in Portland. The rest of us are distributed. But hey, it works because we communicate a lot. If you don’t feel like you are running enough A/B tests, speak up about it. If you feel like the team needs more developers, speak up. If you feel like an executive decision is going to cost the company money in the long run, talk. People might not always agree with you but it’s your job to communicate. You’re doing the company a disservice if you aren’t being honest. To get you started, here are some tools we use to communicate: Campfire Skype Google Chat Google Hangout GoToMeeting – we use GoToMeeting for our leadership meetings. It’s very simple to use and the video quality is pretty good.

3. Be a voracious reader Although there’s a lot of crappy content circulating the internet, there’s always going to be someone you can learn from. The key is being able to discern signal from noise. For example, if I’m looking to learn more on conversion rate optimization, there are great blogs such as Unbounce, ConversionXL, KISSmetrics, SEOmoz, and more. Just look at the detailed blog posts that they write: 10 Useful Findings About How People Use Websites – ConversionXL 5 Landing Page Conversion Killers – Unbounce The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization – SEOmoz If your goal is to squeeze every penny out of your website, you should be reading conversion rate optimization articles like the ones above. They cost no money to read and stand to help create original ideas that will eventually create more profit for you. This applies to any topic you’re interested in. Using the right tools can go a long way in helping you save time. If you’re on the go and don’t have time to read, you can use Pocket. To help you find relevant topics/articles via Twitter, you can grab curated lists using Listorious. Finally, I like picking off interesting topics from Inbound.org or Hacker News. Key takeaway: don’t read every single blog out there. Find the ones that actually add value and follow them.

"investors are in a sense "buying" your time, not much different than consulting"Brilliant. I've never heard the concept of investing in a startup phrased so well.

My company has a really good chance of succeeding, but I still face these doubts every day. Here are some of the things that make the game worth the candle for me, even if we end up failing: * I'm proud of the product we've built. Even if it doesn't take off, nobody can take that away from me. * I'm incredibly proud of my engineering team. We're "a bunch of kids" who've built something incredible. Even if the company ultimately doesn't survive, we will have done really well. * I love my work and I love the people I work with. There are conflicts, sometimes I have to deliver bad news, deal with stress and monotonous work, firefight problems, etc. but in aggregate the work I do and the people I do it with bring me joy. I will always remember this time fondly. * When I started, I was a good engineer and a terrible product manager. Now I'm a good engineer and a good product manager, which makes me 100x more valuable. There is a bazillion other things I've learned, but this alone makes everything worthwhile.

* Facing doubt every day made me face the darkest corners of my soul. I stopped being an obnoxious cynical windbag and started appreciating the nuances of life, people, art, poetry, strength of human spirit and true magnitude of human dignity. * We're taking a real shot at building hard, sustainable technology that has a good chance to change the world. Even if we fail, I'll never regret taking the chance. * I met hundreds of people on my path. I dismissed some of them, but in retrospect I've learned from them all. I appreciate humanity a lot more now, and I understand where the dark parts of it come from much better. * Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. If you start a company you gain a lot of perspective. I could keep going, but I hope I've made my point. I'm not trying to sugar-coat anything -- failing may very well be the worst thing you've ever experienced emotionally to date. But keep everything in perspective and don't get cynical. You might still change the world in a big way. You might still change it in a small way. It doesn't matter. Enjoy the people around you. Get into adventures. Try to do something meaningful. Do the best you can -- things may not turn out how you wanted them to, but they'll probably turn out ok.

Designing Basically, designing means how your software looks and how it works. The purpose of designer is to make software that's better than what already exists. A designer makes sure that a software is as simple to use as possible, execution is smooth and bug-free, and user never has any confusion in achieving his goals when he uses that software.

So, here are some skills and qualities that may help you in having a better life as a programmer. Social This is probably the most obvious one and that's why it's highly ignored. I can tell this from my personal experience. Whether you are in college or a company, being social always works in your favor. Often times, we ignore small things like saying a simple 'Hi' to a coworker or greeting them with a simple smile. I had this problem during my school days, and also for some part of college life. 

A programmers aim shouldn't be to simply write good programs, rather it should be developing really great products. Even the basic knowledge of designing can help a long way in accomplishing that. Recommended book : The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.

2 weeks ago we walked away from $160,000 in seed funding because we decided after taking advice from many folks, including Joel from BufferApp, that we should get profitable before we take funding to get a better valuation, not rocket science I know, but as it was our first experience with investment the temptation to say yes was definitely difficult.The problem we're solving was born out of our own frustrations of managing the content development process. As I'm sure you can imagine playing email-tennis with word/google documents, and attachments is incredibly unproductive.

The question The main question in play here is: How thick should clients be? Let me define my terms: I define the Client as the thing which is used by exactly one user, which interacts directly with that user, and which is probably physically close to that person. I define the Server as the thing which is shared by multiple users, which interacts directly with the Client, and which could be physically located anywhere. I define the Pipe as the connection between the Client and the Server. I define the notion of a Thick client as a relative term. Thicker clients have more app-specific code and are less dependent on the Server. Thinner clients leave more of the app-specific work to be done on the Server. There are two main variables in decisions about the thickness of clients: The quality of the Pipe: This includes bandwidth, latency, availability, reliability, and cost The Client side costs: This includes cost of hardware, software development, deployment, upgrades, and maintenance. And, there are two laws which apply: As the quality of the pipe goes up, the client can get thinner. As the client side costs go down, the client can get thicker.

why does the thickness of Clients vary? Because varying Client thickness creates opportunities to compete in the marketplace. You can differentiate yourself from your competition by making your Client thicker (more expensive) and talking about performance and a better user experience and stuff like that. Or, you can differentiate yourself by making your Client thinner (less expensive) and talking about lower Total Cost of Ownership and easier installation and stuff like that.

This issue is not new Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when we only had mainframes and minicomputers, there was a distinction between smart terminals (thick clients) and dumb terminals (thin clients). In the 1980s, we got workstations (really expensive thick clients, purchased by people who perceived them as cheap compared to the mainframes and minis) and microcomputers (far less expensive thick clients, purchased by people who previously didn't have a computer at all). In the early 1990s, the high cost of workstations gave rise to X terminals, thin client devices which couldn't do much more than display the graphical user interface. My manager bought one of those fancy new 19.2k modems and actually tried doing Motif widget development from home. In the mid 1990s, web browsers appeared. For a very brief time, this technology was regarded only as a way to collaborate on hypertext documents. This phase of the web lasted for most of an afternoon. Meanwhile, back in Champaign, Illinois, the Unsung Hero and His Eminence were busy building a web browser which had more "stuff" in it. What kind of stuff? The sort of stuff that made web browsers into a platform for delivery of apps. And the technologies of the web have been moving primarily in that direction ever since.

The question The main question in play here is: How thick should clients be? Let me define my terms: I define the Client as the thing which is used by exactly one user, which interacts directly with that user, and which is probably physically close to that person. I define the Server as the thing which is shared by multiple users, which interacts directly with the Client, and which could be physically located anywhere. I define the Pipe as the connection between the Client and the Server. I define the notion of a Thick client as a relative term. Thicker clients have more app-specific code and are less dependent on the Server. Thinner clients leave more of the app-specific work to be done on the Server. There are two main variables in decisions about the thickness of clients: The quality of the Pipe: This includes bandwidth, latency, availability, reliability, and cost The Client side costs: This includes cost of hardware, software development, deployment, upgrades, and maintenance. And, there are two laws which apply: As the quality of the pipe goes up, the client can get thinner. As the client side costs go down, the client can get thicker.

This issue is not new Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when we only had mainframes and minicomputers, there was a distinction between smart terminals (thick clients) and dumb terminals (thin clients). In the 1980s, we got workstations (really expensive thick clients, purchased by people who perceived them as cheap compared to the mainframes and minis) and microcomputers (far less expensive thick clients, purchased by people who previously didn't have a computer at all). In the early 1990s, the high cost of workstations gave rise to X terminals, thin client devices which couldn't do much more than display the graphical user interface. My manager bought one of those fancy new 19.2k modems and actually tried doing Motif widget development from home. In the mid 1990s, web browsers appeared. For a very brief time, this technology was regarded only as a way to collaborate on hypertext documents. This phase of the web lasted for most of an afternoon. Meanwhile, back in Champaign, Illinois, the Unsung Hero and His Eminence were busy building a web browser which had more "stuff" in it. What kind of stuff? The sort of stuff that made web browsers into a platform for delivery of apps. And the technologies of the web have been moving primarily in that direction ever since. Java applets (developed a fatal disease called Swing) ActiveX (declared dead seven years after it went missing) Flash (murdered by Steve Jobs) Silverlight (murdered by HTML5) In the late 1990s, people (Oracle, I think?) tried to sell something called a Network Computer. It was a little PC with a video card, some RAM, an ethernet card, a web browser, and no hard disk. Thin.

HTML5 arrived. Actually, the spec is still a long way from being finalized, but nobody knows that. People needed a name, so they started saying "HTML5" before it was fully cooked. Common usage of the term "HTML5" is actually fairly accurate, at least compared to the way telecom companies use the term "4G". And now, this war has moved to the battlefield of mobile. Smartphones and tablets.