Fried: Obscurity is a good thing. If you can fail in obscurity, you’ll learn a lot more that way without being berrated by the public. Removes the fear of failure.

Less comes for free with a side business — people should be embracing. Conventional wisdom is you need to outdo competitors. “They have five features, so we need six.” Instead deliver products that are small, clear and simple.

Functional specs are political documents about covering your ass, not about creating a good product. Illusions of agreement — everyone interprets it differently.

Three types of less:

Less time is good. The more time you have, the more time you waste on things like overplanning and overthinking. Abstract work isn’t real work (functional specs), etc. More time encourages procrastination. Don’t worry so much about planning, stay small and get at work.

Less money is good. The only thing money really buys these days are salaries. Spending your own money makes you use it more wisely.

Less software. Build less software, build less well. There’s endless time to add later, but you can’t remove after you add. Less software is more manageable. Less things you have, the less that go wrong. Too many people focus on solving complex problems when the simple ones haven’t been solved: (Don’t build software that’s clever and tries to capitalize sentences, etc.)

Embrace constraints: “We need more people to finish the product.” Maybe the product has too many features. Easier to improve products when there’s less to change.

Use products or software as you build them. You’ll learn that you have things you don’t need, and need things you don’t have.

The companies that take VC money always seem to need more of it, but those who don’t take it always seem to have enough.

Don’t plan too far in advance, as you don’t know what’s going to happen. If you have to grow, you don’t have to get big.

Curiosity is much more important than bullet lists of skills on job descriptions. What people did in the past doesn’t matter.

Coudal: It’s easy to get lost in thinking what you’re doing is the only thing you can do.

Fried: When you make a change to a product, you’ll get a lot of noise from people. Do not react to squaking to change something back. It may go away as users get used to changes. Explain convictions, and don’t freak out when people get upset. Build the interface first and then start to use it as you build. You can look and agree on real stuff, but you can’t agree on abstract (functional) ideas.

Adding features to functional specs is easy, but not easy to implement in real life.

Coudal: If we get an RFP that’s more than two pages, we won’t do it. If they spent that much time on it, imagine how big of a pain they’re going to be when we get them as a customer.

Making it up as you go along is a good thing, and the whole deal for Fried’s and Coudal’s companies.

Fried: Write stories instead of functional specs. Write a story about how something should work, and then have someone design it. Usually works better than spec.

Fix budget and timeframe, and that’s version #1 of the product. Prevents scope creep. makes you focus on the most important things.

Beta tags are kind of ridiculous.