Monthly Archives: July 2011

various

Owner Site: quick guide to create your accommodation website

Leave a comment

This is a quick and dirty guide to let you get stared with your website in Adormo.

It covers just the basics but should be enough to have a nice website in a few hours.

Assumptions:

  1. You have created an account.
  2. You add accommodations (not other items such as bananas or services).
  3. You can write emails, add attachments and do these basic things online (you don’t need to be a genius or a computer expert).
  4. You are NOT using Internet Explorer 6. If you do, please contact us, you need serious help and should not be online at all for your safety and that of your family.

How long does it take?

If you have the text and other content ready, you could be up and running in less than 2 hours.
It will probably take more than that once you realize how many things you can do and try to make your website nicer and more complete.
We suggest to do a fast version first and then keep improving it forever. It’s free to change things.

Continue reading Owner Site: quick guide to create your accommodation website →

Managers

How to become a Manager

Leave a comment

When I first launched the Manager project I approached candidates as if I was going to hire them.
I spoke to the world and said “there’s 20 places and only the cream of the cream of the crop will get in. You need a very pure DNA and some of your ancestors must have at least invented something like the light bulb or the first laptop”.

The elitarian approach worked.
It triggered in some the “I got to get in before it’s too late” syndrome.
I had created demand by highlighting scarcity .
It was something close to Artificial Scarcity only that it was not artificial, as the number of places was really and honestly limited.
As a matter of fact I had chosen to create a small dedicated group first and a bigger one later, only when we had acquired enough experience.

Now the experience is acquired and digested and it’s the time to incorporate more Managers.
So I’m asking myself: shall I repeat this elitarian approach? Continue reading How to become a Manager →

Managers, various

Priorities

Leave a comment

I recently run a poll amongst managers to check on what the priorities are for them.

Here are the results and my comments:

New features (9 votes) vs better existing features (6 votes)

As you can see they are very close.
I read this as more or less “let’s not add new features fast just to have them, but let’s make the system stronger every day and also add new features”.

This may seem obvious but it’s not.
It goes down very well with the decision to develop incrementally, that is: built a new feature very basically and then iterate (improve, get  feedback, improve, get feedback …) quickly.
In other words, each time you get a new feature it will be a half baked product good enough to let you do very basic things.
But since basic things are 90% of real world usage it makes sense.
Often a new feature will generate a lot of work for you, so you tell us “come on, make this automatic” and if  your request is useful also for most users, we’ll do it.
The best thing of this approach is that we can avoid the sexy but unuseful functionalities, the ideas you get when you develop lost in your nerdy world with absolutely no connection to reality.
Those normally come out like “let’s do a calendar which auto generates rss and sends an email to every Owner except those who have a conversion rate lower than 15% and red hair, and let them order pizza online without even needing to know it because our algorithm decided they are hungry“. Continue reading Priorities →