FOWA: Kevin Rose - What I learnt about startups

This is part of a series of posts with my notes on various talks I attended at the FOWA conference in London. Here are my notes from Kevin Rose's talk on what he learnt while starting Digg and Pownce:

What I learnt about Startups - Kevin Rose (Digg/Pownce)

Kevin Rose advised that if you can bootstrap then you should. In the beginning, he invested some of his money into Digg and acted as if he was an investor in the company. So, he looked for metrics to decide if the progress was good.

He then went to elance.com and got a coder. And it took them one and half months to get to a Beta version for Digg. One mistake that he admited making, is that he didn't prepare for scaling and for the long run, and which was a lesson he learnt.

Kevin Rose also suggested that it is better go for rented machines or clusters rather than build them in-house. This way you don't have to worry about the hardware and networking problems. For Digg they tried Calpop (which he liked), Ev1 server and Media temple. He also mentioned that Amazon S3 was a pretty good service.

About design, he pointed out that if you find yourself using Photoshop filters, it is time to hire a professional design person. Digg was originally built with a geek design (like Del.icio.us), and later Daniel Burka came in to improve the design.

Features that worked for Digg and Pownce:

• Import contacts from address books all over the web (outlook, gmail, etc). There are code widgets that do that for you.
• An 'Add Friends' button wherever you are on the site and the page. (Single click done deal)
• A 'Share this' or 'Shout it!' underneath each story.
• Emailing a story. (Add icons for email clients, etc to make it easy to understand how this works)
• Have an 'Add friends' directly after registration, and connect them there first hand. Don't force them to do it though.
• On Pownce, the Recommending Friends to each other feature is popular.
• News links on Digg got indexed by search engines, and so many times the first link from a search result for a topic would be the Digg story. This lead to a lot of traffic for Digg.

Scaling recommendations:

• Use Memcached to cache data.
• Hire a DBA to review your db schema.
• Hire an Admin to review your Apache config.
• Visibility: Use Google Analytics and build a custom admin page to review all your stats. Use utilities like Nagios for downtime reporting/messaging.