Pivoting your Startup with Phil Haack
When should you pivot your startup? Carl and Richard talk to Phil Haack about his experiences with Abbot - the chatbot designed to work within Slack. Phil talks about starting with Abbot focused on ChatOps, where Abbot would help with automation around the deployment of applications. And while there were some customers, it wasn't enough. The pivot was to customer support that also depends on tools like Slack. The conversation digs into focusing on understanding where customers have challenges and learning to solve them, rather than trying to offer a platform for everything!
Guests:
Phil Haack
Phil Haack has over twenty years of experience in the software industry. Prior to A Serious Business, Inc., he was a director of engineering at GitHub and helped make GitHub friendly to developers on the Microsoft platform. Prior to GitHub, he was a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft responsible for shipping ASP.NET MVC, NuGet, among other projects. These products had permissive open source licenses and ushered in Microsoft’s Open Source era. Phil is a co-author of GitHub for Dummies as well as the popular Professional ASP.NET MVC series and regularly speaks at conferences around the world. He’s also made several appearances on technology podcasts such as .NET Rocks, Hanselminutes, Herding Code, and The Official jQuery Podcast. You can find him sharing his thoughts at https://haacked.com/ or on Twitter https://twitter.com/haacked.
Links:
- DALL-E https://youtu.be/alJdw4JDJ4o
- ab.bot https://ab.bot/
- Crossing the Chasm https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61329.Crossing_the_Chasm
- Let's Encrypt https://letsencrypt.org/docs/client-options/
- Azure Front Door https://azure.microsoft.com/services/frontdoor/
- CloudFlare https://www.cloudflare.com/
- OctoDNS https://github.com/octodns/octodns
- DNSimple https://dnsimple.com/
- Azure for Startups https://azure.microsoft.com/overview/startups/
- Github Codespaces https://github.com/features/codespaces
- JetBrains Rider https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/
- Visual Studio for Mac https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac/
- Phil's Blog http://haacked.com/
- Json.NET https://www.newtonsoft.com/json