Werd I/O

Imagine a global social network that nobody owns, where your profile can be uniquely your own, and you have full control of your identity.

In May, Erin Jo Richey and I started work on Known as a full-time startup business. Our mission is to empower everyone to communicate from their own websites. We love social networks like Twitter, but we think there’s a lot to be gained by controlling the form as well as the content of the spaces that represent us online.

We quickly found allies in Matter Ventures, who invested $50,000 in us as a participant in their third accelerator class. From their offices, we did as much research as possible, in order to validate our assumptions and find a focused place to start. Everything big started small; our global ambition needed a village-sized launchpad.

We spoke to mothers who had shared beautiful photographs of their children with their extended families - using Posterous, which disappeared into the ether. We spoke to marketers who thought of Facebook as a frustrating black box that kept changing its behavior. And we spoke to students, whose class content was deleted from their campus learning management systems as soon as it was complete.

While each of these groups resonated with us, we chose to begin with students. We had an unfair advantage in higher education: my previous project, Elgg, was one of the first social platforms to be used by universities, and is still heavily relied upon worldwide. Harvard, Stanford, Oxfam, NASA and the World Bank have all been Elgg users. Known builds on those ideas, so it made sense to get feedback from those institutions, too.

Educational technology is undergoing a massive change, informed by the wider change in networked software, and sparked by tools like Elgg. Learning management systems like Blackboard are costly, and cumbersome to use: while 93% of institutions run one, 65% of those say they have terrible usability. The total cost of ownership of one of these platforms is over a million dollars a year for a large institution. But most importantly, they don’t help you learn.

Just as many of us have moved from intranet platforms like Sharepoint to more social platforms like Slack, many educators are moving towards connectivism as a way to think about their teaching. It has been shown that self-reflection makes a meaningful impact on a student’s grades. A growing number of educators have been choosing to use blogging as a major component of their courses, encouraging students to reflect on their learning, and comment on each others’ reflections. They’re called “connected courses”, after one of the most popular.

Known makes this easy. We had already built a beautiful, social profile that you can run on your own website. We sell a hub platform that makes deploying these profiles at an institution easy, and creates class spaces that students can participate in from their own sites. Once you’re logged into your own site, you click once to see content from all your classes, and click again to see content from a specific class. You can post right there in the stream: short notes, blog posts, photos, audio, and more. You can also comment, star or share a piece of content, just as you might on Twitter or Facebook.

Of course, the difference is that this is all on your site, and it’s all under your control. Our platform is open source, or we have a fully-managed SaaS product. You can run it on your own server, or you can leave all of the technical infrastructure management to us.

It’s not a million miles from WordPress’s business model, which is intentional. WordPress powers 23% of the web, and we love their platform, their attitude towards their customers, and the way they look at the world. We also think there’s an opportunity for a personal social platform to grow in a similar way.

I’m proud of what we’ve been able to put together using a small amount of investment. It’s also been exciting to see peoples’ reactions, and to hear what they want to do with it.

Most gratifyingly, we’re already getting a lot of interest from outside education. We’ve heard from individuals who want to use Known for their own publishing, and from organizations who want to use it to run communities. And the cool thing about open source is that our community has built integrations to scratch their own itches, expanding our product to fit their needs: links with WordPress, Buffer, Diigo, LinkedIn and more.

We stole one of our best features from Pulse, the iPad reader app that was bought by LinkedIn last year. They launched with a little heart icon at the top right of their app, through which any user could send the team immediate feedback. We now have a similar feature: if you’re logged into Known, you see the heart on every page. Whether you’re self-hosting or running your Known site on our service, you can send us direct feedback in a click. We do our best to reply to every message quickly, because we learn something from every interaction.

We’ve had a lot of interactions. Each one has allowed us to become a better company, and build a better product. The feature took us less than an hour to build, but it’s one of the most important things we’ve ever done. We’ve gained customers through it; we’ve discovered new opportunities; we’ve learned about bugs. Most importantly, we’ve heard a lot about which features are valuable to people, and, most fundamentally, why people use Known to begin with.

The result of that learning is Known Pro: a managed version of Known for professional groups and individuals.

Just as in education, we believe in growing our company through direct revenue, at a fair price. So this is an experiment for us: we’ve gathered together some of our most-requested features, as well as others that just made sense, and offered them as a pre-sale for 30 days. The total cost is just $10 a month, but the pre-sale is a discount on that: $96 for a year.

We considered a crowdfunding campaign, but selling our product directly just felt right. Unlike a crowdfunding campaign, we won’t charge anybody’s payment card until the product has actually been delivered and is in their hands. That means nobody’s asked to spend money for something they don’t have.

You can pre-order Known Pro right here.

This is the next step on our grand adventure. We believe in a world where everyone owns their content and identity online, and we would love for you to join us on this journey.

Eran Hammer discusses justifying the return on investment for open source development at Walmart Labs:

If this all sounds very cold and calculated, it’s because it is. Looking for clear ROI isn’t anti-community but pro-sustainability. It’s easy to get your boss to sponsor a community event or a conference, to print shirt and stickers for your open source project, or throw a release party for a new framework. What’s hard is to get the same level of investment a year, two years, or three years later.

If you're creating something that the community relies upon, it's important to also make it sustainable. Open source is a license and a way of thinking about distribution; it is not the opposite of thinking about software in business terms. If you're creating software in the context of a business, you need to tie it to business goals, including the license.

At Known, like Elgg before it, we know that open source distribution acted as a multiplier for the small teams of developers writing the code in-house. We talk about it as a strategy. The effect is the same - anyone can pick up our core code for free - but it's been done for a reason. Eran's metrics seem about right to me:

For example, every five startups using hapi translated to the value of one full time developer, while every ten large companies translated to one full time senior developer.

For us, a "startup" could be a university, a non-profit or a government department. The nice thing about open source is that while all good software is built in collaboration with its users, here the users can literally write some of the code. The result is a startup less constrained by limited resources, and a user-base that gets to use a more useful application. Everybody wins.

Interested in open source businesses? You should check out Known and add yourself to the beta list.

I started my career in education, writing e-learning tools for the University of Edinburgh. It was there that I met my Elgg co-founder, Dave Tosh (because they placed us together in an ex-broom closet with a window that didn't shut; a kind of gallows bonding experience). Elgg was designed as a community platform for education, that took the informal learning that was happening on the nascent social web in 2003 and applied it to the formal education space. It did well, and it's still in wide use in institutions today. Through Elgg, I've written and spoken widely about social learning environments.

The educational technology community has developed the dual concepts of the Personal Learning Environment and the eportfolio. The first is a tool that puts students at the center of their learning; the second is a way for them to represent themselves and their learning, to themselves, to their peers at their institution, and to the outside world once they graduate. In an educational setting, I think Known is very clearly both a PLE and an eportfolio:

• Known profiles allow you to post to a space that represents you, using a variety of media, from any device
• Known's syndication feature lets you post to your own profile, while syndicating to external sites and applications - like your campus's Learning Management System.
  

Educators agree. The Reclaim Your Domain project is a particular evolution of eportfolio thinking, where members of a campus's community own the domains that represent them (just like indieweb!), and we've developed a good relationship with this community. And we're discovering that more and more institutions around the world are coming to us, because they see how Known can help them to empower their students.

Universities have discovered that providing a social space that allows for personal reflection allows for deeper learning than a Learning Management System can provide. Known provides a layer for this that can either work with a campus's LMS or as a stand-alone product. It's easier for teachers to administer, and because it uses the latest modern web technologies, it works with the mobile devices that students are using to access the Internet more than 50% of the time.

Known works well as an educational product. Our experience building awesome social tools for education over the last decade allows us to more quickly understand the challenges involved, and to provide something that fits in with the culture of education. We're also aware that there are startups whose aim is to own a part of the education stack, and our grounding in indieweb and open source means that we reject that entirely. We have an open project that we have designed to empower; the intention is to provide more control, not remove it.

I couldn't be more excited to work deeply with educators to help them make electronic learning a more personal experience - and we want to hear from you. Software is a collaborative experience, and we couldn't think of better collaborators than the people who are helping to make the world a more informed and educated place.

1. Elgg: a social networking engine for education.

In November, 2004, we released the first version of Elgg to the world. We originally called it a learning landscape: an educational software platform that took its cues from the emerging social web rather than rigid classroom structures. In many ways, it was as much a reaction to Blackboard and WebCT as it was to Livejournal and MySpace.

I'd been building web communities since 1995, so when I arrived at the University of Edinburgh to work on elearning software, I was appalled at what I'd found. Every single person who used the dominant learning management systems, from the administrators down to the students, hated them. Students only used them because they were forced to; as it turned out, administrators only used them because they were forced to.

And yet, people were learning from each other on the web all the time. Through platforms like Livejournal and Delicious, people with different skills and contexts were colliding and creating a new kind of culture. The web had made it possible for anyone to publish as long as they bought some web space and learned HTML. Suddenly, anyone could publish, as long as they could connect to the Internet at all.

Elgg took the social web, applied it to education, and wrapped the whole thing in an open source license. It took off like wildfire.

From the beginning, it was important to us that users got to control their own space. They could choose their own theme, and hack it, if they wanted to. Most importantly, they could choose exactly who could see each and every post: long before Mark Zuckerberg declared that the age of privacy was dead, our research indicated that students felt more comfortable with web publishing if they could keep tight reigns over who could see their work.

We knew Elgg was bigger than education when non-profits in Columbia got in touch to let us know they were using the platform. Soon afterwards, schools in Bangladesh were featured by the BBC for using it. Over time, as more non-education users emerged - more non-profits like Oxfam and Greenpeace, alongside Swatch, BMW, hedge funds, and the rugby star Will Carling - it evolved into a social networking engine that anyone could pick up and use. We started with a very specific use case - reflective learning in higher education - and widened into something much bigger. To date, Elgg users have included Harvard University, NASA, Hill & Knowlton, the federal governments of several nations, and the World Bank.

I made the choice to move on to new pastures a few years ago. Today, Elgg is managed by a non-profit foundation. The current team is doing an amazing job, and, under their stewardship, the platform has transformed again, into a programming toolkit for people who want to build social applications.

2. Known: the easiest way to own your own space on the Internet.

Meanwhile, individuals are in need of spaces that they truly control more than ever before. In the old days, we thought this was important to help them feel more comfortable with posting their personal reflections to a public space (not everything has to be about maintaining your "personal brand", after all). While that's still true, sites like Facebook are pointing to a more imperative need: a place to publish where you won't be experimented on without your permission, where you won't be spied upon, where you can move your content at any time, and where your content and conversations aren't owned by one of a very small number of corporate silos.

Known is a platform for a new kind of social web. You can think of each Known site as being a single social profile, either for an individual or a group. Each one can interact with each other in a decentralized way (using indie web technology), or they can interact with all the other sites they use - including Elgg, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and all the rest of them. Educational institutions are already asking us if we can integrate with learning management systems like Canvas - and the answer is, yes.

We have privacy, too. Known site owners can choose who can see their content, and they can choose the look and feel of their sites, including what kinds of content they want to publish.

We know that over 50% of Internet use happens on a mobile device, and any new platform has to take that into account. We've made Known fully responsive, so it works on any mobile device with a web browser, including your iPhone, Android phone, Windows Phone device, iPad, tablet, and so on. Even your BlackBerry works with Known. Because mobile usage leads to new kinds of content, Known supports location check-ins and posting photos while you're moving around. And, of course, individuals and organizations can roll their own content types using custom plugins.

On any device, ownership of your site and content, combined with an understanding of your community, gives you a new kind of clarity about your online self. You know exactly who can see each item you post. You know who's responding to you on which networks, and you understand which kinds of content your audiences are interested in. Known is both a safe space to reflect, and a singular site that represents you on the web. And more than anything else, it's respectful software that puts you at the center of your online world.

Known is open source. As a company, we're providing software and customization services to make it easier for organizations to administer, as well as support subscriptions for everyone who uses Known. Finally, we're also working on providing managed infrastructure for anyone who wants to run Known, either individually or for their organization, without the hassle of server administration.

I've been privileged to spend over a decade working on open platforms that empower people and organizations to control their own spaces on the Internet. The pendulum is swinging back to a world where users are asking for that control, and I'm looking forward to making Known the definitive way to own your content online.

If you've read this far, you should definitely check us out: at withknown.com, on Twitter, and on AngelList.

I'm having a good time at the Reclaim Your Domain meetup in Los Angeles this weekend, organized by Jim Groom of University of Mary Washington's Domain of One's Own initiative.

From the initiative's homepage:

A Domain of One's Own provides domain names and Web space to members of the UMW community, encouraging individuals to explore the creation and development of their digital identities.

Reclaim Hosting, which was created by Jim Groom and Tim Owens, supports Known (as well as Elgg). It was set up to provide educators and institutions with an easy way to offer their students domains and web hosting that they own and control.

We're excited to be in the mix, both in terms of the services at UMW and elsewhere, but also in the wider conversation. Schools and universities are in a perfect position to talk about data ownership, so it's inspiring to see them doing just that. While Jim Groom and the other members of the Reclaim Your Domain community are ahead of the curve, I expect many others to follow. Their work provides an obvious benefit to both students and faculty at the institutions that adopt it, in a way that previous eportfolio initiatives didn't necessarily achieve. (Elgg emerged from work Dave Tosh and I were doing on electronic portfolios in education.)

Empowering individuals at institutions to own their online identities makes us very happy. And we're excited to learn from the students and faculty that make their homes on the web using Known.

While Known is an open source application (released under the Apache 2.0 License), institutions that choose to use the software won't be going it alone. They can get full support from us, if they like, as well as software to make it easier to manage Known sites on an organizational basis, and bespoke solutions for their specific use cases. We're keenly aware that one size doesn't fit all, and one institution's (or one school or course's) needs don't necessarily apply generally. Known is a flexible platform that supports a great deal of individual customization.

It's not just for education, of course: anyone can use a Known site, and we're excited to be working in journalism, technology and other verticals. However, edtech is a great example of a community motivated to empower its members to own their data, and we're delighted to help.

Journalism and the indieweb were made for each other.

Because of the way we've been describing Known - particularly focusing on our ability to syndicate content to third-party social networks and important social interactions using brid.gy - we've received a lot of feedback that this is how we should describe ourselves as a business:

Known is a social media marketing application that allows marketing departments to justify ROI using aggregated data from audiences across multiple platforms

For all kinds of reasons, this isn't what we want to do. There are solid business reasons - social media marketing is a crowded market, for one - but there are deeper reasons, too. It's not why we got into this. It's not, on a fundamental level, what we're trying to do.

After all, this is how you could describe the product:

Known lets you own your own social website without having to give up talking to your friends on the web.

I believe in the indieweb as a movement that will empower people to own their own representations on the web. I know that will have broad implications over time, and that the success of these ideas and technologies will make a profound impact on the way the web works. I also think that running a commercial business based on indie web principles is a great thing.

I also think that certain groups of people are ahead of the curve when it comes to privacy and ownership - and journalists are very much among them.

There is a long-term trend towards greater ownership and privacy. Partially this is due to post-Snowden sentiment, but it's also driven by factors like generational differences, a growing commercial dissatisfaction with Facebook, and security breaches at companies like Target. Providing a service that is as easy to use as Facebook, while being respectful to its users, mindful of privacy, and yours, is a good idea. There will be a tipping point where people will be looking for something new, and we will be there for them, alongside other software in the indieweb ecosystem.

But there's also a growing need for this right now. Edward Snowden's whistleblowing was, of course, an important moment in journalism. We participated in a workshop run by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism on newsgathering in a post-Snowden world this week, and were inspired by the renewed focus on protecting sources and swiftly building stories, while being simultaneously dismayed by the lack of effective software to support them. Journalists value ownership, privacy, control and ease of communication - which, of course, are indieweb fundamentals.

We're investigating how Known, and the indieweb, can be effectively harnessed for journalism. This includes heavy research into the workflows people are using today. My experience with latakoo (which is used by professional newsrooms around the world) has told me that every organization is different - but then, my experience with Elgg tells me that it's possible to build a light-touch tool that allows people to customize it for their own needs. In fact, that's what Known already is, whether you take the open source code and build on top of it, or use the hosted service we'll launch this summer.

Journalism is fundamental to democracy. We need to know what's happening in the world around us to make effective democratic decisions. We're also living in a world where journalism is being pinched by changing models and rapidly evolving audiences. If we can help, we would love to.

If you're a journalist, or if you work in a media or news organization, we would love to talk to you. You can email me at ben@withknown.com.

Today, my epicenter is the San Francisco Bay Area, but it wasn't always so: in 1997 I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, to do my bachelors degree in Computer Science. In the end, I lived there twice: from 1997-2004, and again for a year in 2010. The first time, I started Elgg, the open source social networking platform. The second time, I worked for latakoo and was the first Geek in Residence at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab.

I miss The Forest Cafe, which, to me, is a symbol of Edinburgh's artistic cultural anarchy. I love that about the city: clubs and art shows occupy every nook and cranny. Of course, the big kahuna is the Edinburgh Festivals: twelve official festivals (and more unofficial ones) that double the size of the city and turn it into a melting pot of arts and creativity. The excellent social safety net doesn't hurt: healthcare is basically free, and Scottish students can go to Scottish universities without paying a penny. The marvelous Scottish Book Trusts mails childrens books to every new family, promoting an interest in reading. You can experiment without worrying about what's going to happen to you if you get ill. My circle in Scotland very much fit my values: compassionately left-wing, embracing of diverse sexualities and gender identities, secular, and questioning of cultural norms. Exactly how I would prefer the world to be.

On the other hand, money is tight there. It's just the way it is. You can make a good living, and costs are low (particularly when you factor in health insurance, or the fact that you don't need to own a car). But if you want to form a startup, as I did, you're going to have a harder time.

A sample of things we were told when we tried to get Elgg off the ground:

"It won't work."

"What about your pension?"

"That sounds like it's for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms." [Their words, not mine, I promise.]

I lost count of the number of times people who had started successful businesses told us to move to Silicon Valley. While culturally there was a lot of ambition, business ambition was looked upon less kindly. Scotland - like England - is very heavily influenced by the banking sector, and technology businesses were not a part of that mix. Despite having the opportunity to move to Silicon Valley, I chose to move to Oxford instead. "Why," I thought, stubbornly, "should tech startups have to be in California?" More on this in a bit.

I returned in 2010, shortly after I left Elgg. The environment had dramatically improved, as evidenced by the existence of the Geek in Residence position at the Edinburgh Festivals. When I did my computer science degree, our labs were literally in the basement next to the boiler room. The School of Informatics indicates a renewed focus on technology. Meanwhile, events like TechMeetup provide a focal point for the incredibly-talented local tech scene. The Edinburgh Hack Lab ticks the hackerspace box.

One of the clearest signs that Edinburgh is connecting its unique cultural scene with its technologists is Inspace, which is the Scottish counterpart to the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. The space actually sits inside the University's Informatics building, and is the most amazing playground I've ever seen for artistic technologists, led by Mark Daniels, a passionate, smart curator.

Since I left Edinburgh for the second time, TechCube has opened to provide a space for tech startups. I've heard great things.

There's no less creativity in San Francisco. In fact, it being a much larger area, there's a lot more - but it's different. Whereas the safety net (and other cultural reasons) meant there could be unencumbered creative exploration, here even the art is entrepreneurial. Arts organizations are largely funded not by the government, but by patrons: this changes the dynamic entirely. Whereas in Scotland galleries and museums are free to walk into, here you must pay. Culture has a paywall.

At least sometimes. I've been consistently delighted by Oakland, which has the kind of anarchic, widely-embracing spirit I love. Consider Oakland Nights Live, a live theater variety performance / on-stage talk show: the first time I attended, it was in a backyard, and I walked in to see a man in a viking helmet playing a see-saw like a musical instrument with a saw. Another episode was held on BART, which saw passengers become de facto audience members. These days it's at the Sudo Room, the kind of artistic / technical space that we have in spades here. I also regularly go to music events at the Firehouse Arts Collective, which owns an experimental space on the border between Oakland and Berkeley.

Nonetheless, in San Francisco, most of the art I've seen has had a commercial element. The flipside of that is that most commercial business has an artistic element. While the financial district certainly exists, a lot of the startups and tech businesses can also be thought of as art projects, and many of the great ones have been created by people with an artistic, anarchic bent (even if this is ebbing away with ever-rising costs).

There are intense, worsening social problems here, which have been written about at length elsewhere. I find them jarring. It's hard to walk through a BART station filled with homeless people and not feel some kind of intense emotion (for me, sadness and anger). People seem to have become hard to it, though, or worse, blame the homeless people for being homeless. That's foreign to me, and I find it disgusting. These people need help. (It must also be said that they are getting help, and San Francisco remains a very progressive city, by American standards. I don't understand the American resistance to socialized services, but it's less pronounced here than in most places.)

While it's important to recognize the drawbacks, let's be real. The food is incredible, the city is beautiful, and although I have a lot of ambition to travel and live in different places around the world, I would also be happy if I stayed here for the rest of my life. Just the light is incredible: in Scotland the sun rises at 8:45am and sets at 3:50pm in January. Here it's steadily bright all year long. The people are friendly and helpful. It never freezes, but never gets too hot.

It's also the best possible place to start any kind of technology business. That stubborn resistance to starting a company in Silicon Valley? Ridiculous. Don't repeat my mistake. Just about everyone is here, which means - in combination with the general friendliness - that it's easy to meet just about anyone for a coffee. And people will be interested in what you're doing, and try to connect you with people who can help. There's no cynicism towards ambition, and no desire to put you down. The culture is collaborative and open-minded.

Sometimes, I find this open-mindedness challenging: I'm used to a more secular culture, but the US is much more friendly to religion. In other parts of the country that often translates into conservative bigotry, but not here. It's just friendly. Correspondingly, I'm often challenged by my bias against religion; something I want to acknowledge, and be less of a jerk about. Anil Dash wrote a great piece about this.

I'm glad for my years in Scotland, which gave me a perspective I'm proud of. I sometimes struggle with the more individualistic culture here (and the absurdly hoppy beer). Tef's guide to San Francisco for Londoners is completely accurate. But at the same time, I'm so glad that this is where I landed. The tech industry has some well-publicized problems, but this is a place where you feel like you can make a difference, change the culture, and create a better future. While I feel like a fish out of water a lot of the time, I also feel like I belong.

The other day I got an email from someone asking about being a founding CTO of a tech startup. I replied with some brief advice, but it got me thinking: I've been doing this for a decade now, and was creating projects on the Internet for a full decade before that. A hallmark of the teams I've been lucky enough to work with has been the ability to punch far above our weight: online magazines edited by 15 year olds that ended up being distributed by the established press; the number one linked-to site on Blogdex (remember that?); a social platform used by the most prominent universities in the world, as well as national governments and Fortune 500 companies; and a video platform used by some of the world's largest broadcasters. These are solid achievements for groups and companies that, for the most part, contained fewer than 10 people.

The web is rife with articles giving universal advice based on subjective experience. For whatever reason, there's a tendency for technical people to think, "this worked for me, so why aren't you doing things the same way?" I don't think that's usually truthful or productive, so take this post with a pinch of salt. These are my opinions, not a manual.

Nonetheless, if you're just starting out, with few resources, what advice can I offer? Here are a few things I hold to be true.

Enjoy yourself.

Few things are as exhilarating as creating your own thing from scratch - making something from nothing - and releasing it into the world. People will notice if you're loving the experience. Don't lose your joy.

Focus on people.

For "people", read: your end-users, your customers (if they're different), your coworkers.

Your satisfaction must come from pushing code to the user and building something that creates value, rather than the act of programming itself. If you don't like people, and you don't want to interact with people, don't found a startup. If you're starting a business, you need to be relentlessly social (in the human sense), communicate well, and love getting feedback. Otherwise, do something else.

This is a refrain I'll repeat many times below: communication, communication, communication. You need to communicate clearly, and you need to listen, both to your customers and your team.

This is, of course, in addition to having great technical skills. These things together will allow you to build great software.

Understand your responsibilities.

As a co-founder, you are jointly responsible for the direction of the company, and creating an awesome, valuable product.

As the technical lead, you have a lot of responsibilities and pressures on your shoulders. You need to make sure your product or service is technically as good as it can be. You need to ensure that the technical side of the operation is able to meet business objectives. You need to be a software architect, and an infrastructure architect, and a technical designer, and a lead developer. As you grow, you need to be a product manager, ensuring that everyone in the engineering team understands the business goals (and hits them), and ensuring that everyone in the business team understands the technical challenges (and has a sense of the technical realities of your projects).

Ultimately, the technical buck stops with you. If the technology doesn't work, it's your fault. That's fine, but it's therefore doubly important that you are candid with everyone in the team about technical challenges that you might face, and the requirements for success.

Pick the right cofounder.

Before you begin working on a startup, it's also important that you check if your business co-founder or co-founders are able to bring something to the table to the same degree. If you're doing all of this and picking up a disproportionate degree of the business side, you will find yourself quickly burning out, serving nobody. Be a cog, not the engine.

One particular danger is that people see you as someone who can make their ideas a reality; that you will, essentially, build what they tell you to. (In one particularly toxic situation I was referred to as "the back-room guy".) This is an employee relationship, not a co-founder one. The company needs to be a true collaboration between founders, and everyone must have the skills and focus to participate more or less equally.

An oft-quoted metric for finding technical cofounders is if they have a past record of building things under their own steam, and an understanding of the intersection between business and technology decisions. Well, guess what? That applies to non-technical co-founders, too. Do they have a past record of starting their own ventures? (They don't have to be businesses, but their own projects, and so on.) Do they have an understanding of the intersection between business and technology, and the kinds of trade-offs you have to make? They do? Great.

Build small pieces, loosely joined.

Don't fall into the trap of building elaborate frameworks or overly elegant technical solutions. Your role as a startup founder is to test and change rapidly. By building too much of a framework around your code, you lose the ability to react to customer feedback. The ideal is that you can learn as much as possible from your users, and then shift your code to take these things into account.

Nonetheless: always, always, always make sure code is commented and well-documented, no matter how little time you have to spend. Comments are part of the code, not an afterthought, and the people who tell you that decent programmers should just be able to read the source are flat-out wrong.

That you should use decent source control, issue management software, etc, is obvious. When you're starting out, a paid GitHub account should work fine. (I've used Beanstalk, Assembla, and a bunch of other things, and GitHub is more stable, is easier to use, and has the best ecosystem.)

Be proud of your system's code, but be proud of how small, nimble and well-documented it is. Don't be afraid to plug in existing, well-tested frameworks and libraries, as long as they're well suited to your goals.

Don't be trapped into caring what the cool kids think about programming languages. The only material way your choice of programming language will affect your software (within certain bounds, of course) is in the choice of people you are able to hire.

Remember design.

User experience, interaction and interface design will probably come under your remit to begin with. They are the first impression that your product makes. Don't make the mistake of thinking of them as an afterthought (or, as more than one developer has expressed to me in the past, "pretty pictures"). Design is equally as important as architecture. You need to make sure every one of your engineers - as well as the business team! - is thinking in terms of the impression the product you're all making is having on its users, rather than a list of features and capabilities. If you can, bring a professional in to help you with design. It'll make a disproportionate amount of difference (see my note about the team, below).

Expect to scale.

If you're building technology, build it with an understanding of how it'll work when it has 10,000x the usage it does now. A few years ago, there were a lot of articles warning about premature scaling, which is a danger: you can easily sink all of your time and resources into building infrastructure that scales beautifully, when your focus needs to be on shipping as early and as often as you can. Nonetheless, not paying enough attention to scalability is dangerous. The old programming maxim - never assume you're going to be able to come back to anything - certainly holds true in a startup. Ask yourself what'll happen when you exceed the capacity of one server, or five, or fifty. When scaling becomes a business need, you'll need to do it very quickly. You'll have to do work in each case, but if you've thought about it and prepared while you were building, you'll be much more agile.

Again: small pieces, loosely joined, with queues and late binding. You'll thank me later.

Don't skimp on tech, but don't waste money, either.

I've written before about my long, slow journey to Mac. I just think they're better computers: more reliable, faster, and, crucially, more compatible with the software you're probably running on your servers. They're not more compatible than Linux laptops, of course, but there you'll still run into a world of hardware incompatibilities and time-wasting fiddling that you really can't afford. Leave the tinkering to your spare time. The last thing you want to be doing is fiddling with drivers or mucking about with wifi settings when you should be working on your product or your next pitch.

Think about what you actually need. My first Mac was a 2011 Macbook Pro that I upgraded to 16GB of RAM; theoretically it's blazing fast. In fact, though, the computer I use the most is my Macbook Air, which is less than half the cost, and theoretically vastly underpowered. It just works, and the battery is impressive enough to last a coast-to-coast flight. These things matter.

On the other hand, don't buy a peripheral, or something like an iPod Touch, unless you absolutely need it to test or run your software. You don't need to be awash in computers and technology. Just buy the things that affect your business directly, at least to start with. Most of us are gadget-heads to some degree; resist the temptation to buy cool stuff because it's cool.

Strong milestones are good - but it's okay to change the plan.

A set of strong milestones, with associated tickets, allows anyone in the team to get a good sense of the roadmap. I like arranging tickets onto a kanban board, so you can see what people are working on right now, as well as the backlog. Standups are great for this, too, as long as you follow the rules and do it standing up, for a short period. Don't be tempted to devolve into a long meeting; that's not going to get you anywhere.

Sometimes, you'll find that you need to change the plan completely, perhaps to take advantage of a sales opportunity, or because you've realized you need to take a change in direction. Early on, that's both okay and sometimes necessary. You need to be okay with not sticking to the plan, and you need to reassure your team that this isn't a terrible thing. As ever, good communication is key, and it's a good idea to go into the "why"s.

Your team is everything.

When I was working on Elgg, we knew we needed a designer to help build better interactions and interfaces, and create the brand identity for the company. When we found the person we wanted, we paid him more than our own salaries; we had equity, after all, and adding him to the team would create a huge amount of value for the company.

Do your best to hire well, and never hire someone because they're cheap. Sometimes they won't know their own value and it'll work out, and sometimes you'll find someone who is genuinely under-skilled. Either way, by paying them far below market rate, you're screwing them, and that's a lousy footing to start off a relationship on. It's certainly true that you'll have to pay less than many companies, but you can offset that with the freedom that a startup can offer. (Equity and the promise of value later on isn't enough; at this stage, most potential engineers are wise enough to know that share options are a lottery ticket.) If you're creating a corporate, hierarchical environment with all the resource constraints of a startup, and not offering anything tangible in return as people, you're creating a poor working environment. Freedom, trust, and a creative environment are all motivators. It doesn't have to all be about money, although money really does help; salary should be one of the first things you bring up when you can. Employees who are worrying about making ends meet are needlessly distracted.

It's okay to let go of someone if they're underperforming. You should do it early, both for your and their sakes. Sometimes, it's just not a good fit. Nobody likes working somewhere where they're doing badly, and there's no need to be nasty about it; if it isn't working, it isn't working. It's better to end an unproductive relationship quickly than let it limp on. This is, for me, a very hard thing to do. Nonetheless, it's sometimes necessary.

Be nice, by the way. Steve Jobs was famous for yelling at people, and he wasn't alone. It's completely unnecessary, and creates a poor environment. You and your team are allies, and if something's going wrong, remember where the buck stops?

By the same token, your team has to know that if you're asking them to do something, it's for a reason. While you should always be open to the idea that you could be wrong, and interested in listening to opinions from your whole team, everyone does need to know that you have the final say, and that they need to be adhering to the milestones you've set down. (If those milestones are realistic, of course; you need to be receptive to the idea that they might not be.)

Hire well. Get people excited. Be a steward of their well-being, and give them the space to build amazing things. Don't dictate tasks; your team are your collaborators. Talk them through what needs to be done, and why. Smart people question things, so give them reasons.

One last thing: part of communicating clearly is making sure people feel like they can approach you to talk about anything. Your workplace has to be a safe place. If someone is being harassed, or feels put upon for any reason, or they have any concerns at all, they need to be able to talk to you about it without fear of reprisals. Similarly, they need to feel comfortable. If someone's making sexist jokes, or otherwise making anyone feel uncomfortable, it's down to you to stop it.

Everyone should do support.

By which I mean, everyone in the company. It's important to understand the problems your customers are experiencing, and this is a great way for everyone to get a good handle on that. But it's also important for everyone in the company to understand how the product works - something that non-technical members of the team might have less of an understanding of, as they're not in its guts day in and day out. By ensuring that everyone takes support phone calls (if you take calls) and emails, you ensure good product & customer knowledge throughout the team.

It all comes down to empathy.

Good communication is empathic. You need to be able to understand your customers, your team, and your co-founders, and react when you sense that any of them are unhappy. Tech startups may have technology running through their veins, but more than anything else, they still have people at their core. A little love goes a long way.

Good luck!