Global Nerdy

Abby “HackerChick” Fichtner is a friend whom I met at the DefCon 8 conference back in 2000. We caught up in person a little more recently, when she joined Microsoft as a Developer Evangelist for Startups while I was a Developer Evangelist for web and mobile. She works out of the Boston area and while she’s a mobile worker, she does hold some office hours at Microsoft’s NERD (New England Research and Development) Center in Cambridge, the inaugural location of the BarCamp Tour.

Her focus is on helping startup become lean startups and lean startups thrive. According to Wikipedia, lean startups are born out of three trends, which Eric Ries (who coined and even trademarked the term) states are:

1. The rise and use of free and open source software
2. Application of agile software development methods
3. Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process

Lean startups embrace continuous deployment, where new code gets pushed to production daily, if not multiple times a day. From that approach come a number of follow-up approaches, including:

• Testing in actual production environments instead of mock production environments
• Getting user feedback from observing user behaviour in the production environment instead of soliciting opinions from users running demo versions
• Saying “We don’t even know the problem”, in response to the agile statement of “We don’t know the solution”.

In the video above, Abby summarizes the lean startup approach in a quick — I even daresay lean — two minutes and thirty-seven seconds. If you’d like to see an expanded version of this topic, see her slideshow below, Lean Startup: How Development Looks Different When You’re Changing the World, a presentation she gave at Agile 2011:

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

If you build stores, apps or themes for the Shopify ecommerce platform and are in the Montreal area, you should come down to the Irish Embassy (1234 Rue Bishop) on Thursday, September 1st at 6:00 p.m. for a Shopify Meet/Drinkup! Organized by Mitch Amihod and Dave Lazar, this is your chance to talk shop, exchange tips, trick and ideas and just generally get to know the Shopifriends in Canada’s liveliest city. There may even be some Shopify swag for those who attend!

Mitch says that while RSVPing isn’t necessary, you should drop him a line on Twitter (his handle’s @meeech) or email him just so he knows how many plan to attend and can book space accordingly.

There’s also a distinct possibility that Edward or I (or the both of us) will hop in a car and make our way to Montreal to catch the event. Stay tuned!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

If you’ve ever kicked yourself for not “getting in on the ground floor” of a great business opportunity, here’s your chance to make it up. Ecommerce, which we’re in the business of helping you with, represented almost 48 billion dollars of retail sales in the United States…for the second quarter of 2011 alone. And that’s not even the holiday quarter, when Black Friday happens! Even more impressive is that ecommerce is just getting started, as it represents less than 5% of all retail sales in America and it’s trending upward.

These figures come from a pretty reliable source: the U.S. Census bureau. Go ahead, read their PDF report, or if you prefer, here’s my quick summary:

• Total retail sales in the U.S. for second quarter of 2011: $1.04 trillion
• Increase in retail sales over first quarter of 2011: 1.2% (+/- 0.5%)
• Ecommerce sales in the U.S. for second quarter of 2011: $47.5 billion
• Ecommerce sales in the U.S. for second quarter of 2010: $40.4 billion
• Increase in ecommerce sales from 2Q 2010 to 2Q 2011: 17.6% (+/- 2.5%)
• Increase in total retail sales from 2Q 2010 to 2Q 2011: 8.1% (+/- 0.2%)
• Fraction of total retail sales that is made by ecommerce: 4.6%

The growth in ecommerce sales was double that of total retail sales over the past year, and it’s still a small, but growing piece of the retail pie. If you’ve been waiting for that “get in on the ground floor” opportunity, it’s ecommerce, and it’s happening now.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.