Matt Bernier

Truth be told, I was not going to go to StartupWeekend-Boulder last weekend.  I was going to go camping with my Fiance.  However, the weather worked out so that was a bad idea (wet tents and apartment life mean lots of mold).  Not only that, but my friend Jason was all over me about StartupWeekend.  At one point he seriously said,

You MUST go if you are serious about startups.

My first reaction to this was that Jason was just being obsessive. Turns out, my gut reaction was way wrong.  I thanked Jason probably three different times for harrassing me (about 12 emails… seriously) to go.

Why did I thank Jason?  Because, not only did I go, I pitched an idea that I had essentially thrown in the garbage and it took.  By “it took” I mean that after we were all done pitching ideas, I had 4 people talking to me about it almost immediately. I didn’t have to make a political rally type sign or anything.  I will say though, that if this didnt work out, I was very interested in @penguin’s idea for “Pools I can jump into, and parties I don’t have to clean up after”.

So, to backtrack a little, this is how startup weekend went for me:

Friday 9:00 AM

2 more emails from Jason about stupid Startup Weekend

10:00 AM

Signed up and registered after finding out about the weather, getting permission from the Fiance, and talking to Jason AGAIN about StartupWeekend.

5:00 PM

Jason shows up at my office, on the dot no less, and we leave for Boulder

~6:30 PM

I pitch my idea, LivingOffCampus to the group.

~7:15 PM

I have a group of about 4 guys who are interested in exploring the project more.  We start talking, planning, scheming.  I keep pitching to people who stop to talk.

Later that night

Bar time.  Delicious Raspberry Wheat Beer

3:00 AM

Bed time, after talking about this idea that I was now completely invested in again.

Saturday morning through Sunday 6PM

Seriously, these two days are a blur.  We planned, we coded, we planned, we ate lunch, we coded.  By this time there were a solid 6 of us cranking out business plans, logos, functionality, market analysis, a WordPress plugin, an API, marketing ideas, logo, slogan, and T-shirts. Yes, T-shirts. Oh yeah, a slogan and a pair of shorts with our slogan placed right on the butt. (when you see the slogan below, you will understand)

By Sunday afternoon there were probably 8 or 9 of us who were seriously putting 125% into the idea.  It was amazing.

Sunday 6:00PM

Everyone joined back up in one of the Leeds Business School’s classrooms that was build like a miniature auditorium with stadium seating, projectors and everything.

By this time, we all had our new SpotGrab.com T-shirts on and were standing in front of the rest of StartupWeekend-Boulder ready to present.  Did I mention that the guys put together an amazing presentation on PowerPoint?  Or that they had figured out, with our initial pricing estimates we came in 5-7x less per month in cost than our nearest competitor?

We presented the core product, the features we had, the wordpress plugin, threw out the extra T-shirts and the shorts.  They all said, “Find your spot and grab it!”.

————

I talked with the group and everyone seems excited to continue with the project.  It is an amazing thing, and it seems to have traction and momentum.  Both of which I lacked when the project was called LivingOffCampus.

I hope that I continue to get to work with this great team that we put together, I have never seen so many people get so much done in such a short amount of time.  The amount of drive, innovation, and tenacity that came with this group is unrivaled.

A couple of the amazing things that came out of the project:

SpotGrab Logo

SpotGrab Shorts

Best Marketing Idea. Ever.

Logo and “Best Marketing Idea. Ever.” Courtesy of Grant Grigorian

“SpotGrab Shorts” Pic courtesy of @heyrich

T-shirts and shorts put together by Dave Mayer

Startup Weekend

Also, just for good measure: Thank you Jason for pestering me to go to Startup Weekend.  (Follow Jason on Twitter, he finally found some use for it!)

These are all of the features I would like to see in a single twitter app.  If there is a twitter app that already has all of these features, then tell me, so I can STFU and get my perfect app.  I would love it if this could happen.

Twitter Features

• Following/Unfollowing
  • Allow me to follow or unfollow people from the app. I know the API has this feature.
• Search
  • Yep, I want to be able to search.
  • Yep, I would like the results to be in a time line like my normal feed
  • Yep, I would like to have multiple searches
  • Nope, you don’t have to keep these running in the background, just run them when I look at them.
    • Please try to get all the ones since the last one I looked at, or allow me a limit, or tell me about a limit, of how many you will pull if there are too many since the last time I looked.
• Hashtags
  • You’ve got reply functionality, now link the #hashtags to the search page for them.

App Features

• Always on top
  • Give me the option. (Thanks pwitter!)
• API limitations awareness
  • know your limitations, compensate.  If I get 100 tweets per minute, you still don’t need to check every minute, if it means I am going to get 100 error messages from your app.  I would rather it be late, than see how your algorithm for pulling tweets is broken. (had problems on twitteriffic once an hour and pwitter 3 times in the first hour I used it)
• Multiple twitter accounts in one feed
  • I choose the outline color for each account
  • Click the reply button in the feed item and replies from that account
• Reply button functionality
  • I know why the @username always goes to the front of the twitter post I am writing, but I would like the option to turn that off.  I want the @username to go where my cursor is in the message. Having to copy/paste or write it out myself sucks.
• Retweet option
  • I want to be able to 1-click to put a whole tweet in my typing box, with the letters RT and the original twitterer’s name
  • Don’t use via, seriously wtf!?
• Mark feed items as read
  • Many of the programs out there do this, many don’t (pwitter I’m looking at you)
  • Also, when you get more items from my feed, please remember where I was, and leave the last tweet I touched in the active window
    • I don’t know about you, but I don’t watch my twitter feed.  I take mini vacations from work to check it.
• Idiot Proofing
  • I have a feeling most of my request fall under this, but bear with me anyways…
  • I always send half a tweet, because my enter button is too close to my quotes button ( ” ), so ctrl + enter option is really nice (thanks pwitter)
• Status Updates
  • Update my status on Adium, iChat, etc.  Twitteriffic does this with style.
  • Would be cool if it would update my status on FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc. too

Display Features

• Timeline
  • Pull EVERYTHING since the last feed item I looked at
    • For multiple accounts, this means for the last item I looked at for each account, respectively
  • Pull items in the order they were tweeted, don’t add a bunch of crap at the bottom.  If you pull all the new stuff, you don’t have to worry about making sure I don’t miss something. (Twitteriffic pulls Replies and DMs to the bottom of your feed, why!?)
• Replies
  • Make sure that replies to me have a background color that is easy to identify quickly.
  • Also, please make sure that it is easy to identify when I have that feed item selected.
  • These should NEVER look like all the other feed items, they are special, so make them look that way
• Background options
  • Make as many colors as you want for backgrounds, but at least include black (spaz I’m looking at you)
• User Icon on left of twitter post
  • Do not wrap the twitter post around the icon, that’s annoying
  • Or allow me the option to customize this

Extras

• Image posting to TweetPic (again idiot proofed)
  • drag + drop into the tweet window would be amazing, I don’t really like having to use a browse/upload feature
• Tr.im support
  • I like tr.im because it is one of the shortest url smashers out there. Also, they are great guys
• Growl support
  • It’s great to have this, but please make sure it works.  Half the time, the apps I have seen have it, but the notifications never come up.

Bonus Points for Style

• Grouping My users
  • Tweetdeck does it, but I don’t like how they do it.  It would be better if I didn’t have to employ a monitor-sized window to see all my groups
  • Allowing me to group them across multiple accounts = super mega mega bonus points
• Make it free – also see 3rd item in “Plugins” below
  • I know this is a hugely tall order for all the features that I am asking.  BUT, if you can put ads in every 20-50 feed items you could make good money.
  • I understand you have to make money, and rightly so.  Putting an ad in for a free item is totally cool with me.
  • Now, if you can put in ads based on the content of the tweets around the ads…I might actually click them and not ignore them.
• Plugins
  • Make an interface that will allow for plugins. This way you don’t have to write ALL of this code at once, and you can allow 3rd parties to write code for you.
  • This will allow anyone to choose their own suite of features and customize your software to them.
  • You could charge for plugins.

I will probably think of more things I would love to have, I know I am taking a pie-in-the-sky approach to my feature requests…

Added After publishing

• I would like to be able to ctrl+click or apple+click to open the link without losing the twitter window. So I can open a bunch of links without having to track down my window or have my mouse lose focus on the current window.
• I want to be able to search within my timeline.  I am tired of losing quality twitter posts that I want to revisit or retweet.
• Suggestive features to choose a name from people I follow.  Could suggest as I type after the @ symbol, or just be a drop down.
• From @xstaticstacey: add the ability to see all replies all the time

This post is a continuation of my post about managing my tasks, projects, and responsibilities.  There are links to the other posts at the bottom of this post.

Email

I have clients that insist on using just email to communicate, which is fine with me because I use GMail, which lets me keep emails in threads instead of as individual emails.  This makes keeping a conversation in control very easy.  However, my inbox is constantly full.  For the last couple of weeks, I have noticed that when I empty my inbox out before bed I have between 20 and 50 emails waiting for me in the morning.  Most of them are status updates, automated messages, or twitter messages but it is still a lot of emails to go through in the morning and my inbox would get full of emails.

I needed a way to organize the emails, so that I could find them easily and reliably.  I also wanted the emails to be categorized automatically without missing them.  GMail to the rescue! They have a labels feature, which can be automated with filters.  I found that the filters got to be too numerous though, and I was wishing for nested folder (well labels here) functionality.  I quickly went searching and found a Firefox plugin that will turn your labels into “folders” and will allow nesting.  The plugin is called Better GMail.

All I had to do was format my labels like a directory path.  A good example is “Clients/Matt Bernier”.  When I view my Gmail account without the plugin this can be annoying, but I just make sure I have the plugin, and problem solved.

With the filters I am able to make them apply and still leave the label in the inbox, so I almost never miss an email. The only time I would is if it went to spam, which almost never happens.

Other Posts In This Thread

• Introduction

I ran into a problem with one of the blogs that I manage, there was no way to upgrade a plugin. It just wouldn’t get past the FTP information form.  I put the correct FTP information in, and that failed too.

I was out of options, so I went searching and found a plugin called “One Click Plugin Updater“.

This plugin actually saved me a ton of work, and trouble in the future because it has some amazing features.  First of which, is that if you have any plugins that need to be upgraded, it will upgrade all of them at the same time.  Secondly, it bypasses the craziness that WordPress runs into, which would cause you to have to figure out the FTP form.

All you have to do is put the plugin on your site, activate it, make sure plugins directory is set to the correct permissions, and go.

When you need to update, just hit the button at the top of your admin pages. You don’t even have to go to the plugins page.