Voidnothings

Francesco Di Lorenzo, an iOS developer, wrote to me1 a while back:

Last week, I released a Photoshop script that I’ve been using to make icons and rounded rectangles for my iOS 7 app updates. The script generates shapes using values that I reverse-engineered from Apple’s UIBezierPath class. If you’re creating rounded rects for user interface elements, the shapes it produces are a near-exact match. If you’re creating icons, the match is really, really close.

Then, a couple of days ago, I received this tweet from Nick Heer:

Great question, Nick! It looked great when I overlaid the generated icon in Photoshop a while back, and that’s essentially how I replied to his tweet. But Nick’s question got me thinking…how great is it?

I recently gave a talk at SmashingConf in Freiberg. I wanted to share the story of our startup Lanyrd and some lessons learned along the way. This article is based on that talk, the abstract of which is:

Natalie launched the first version of Lanyrd.com with her co-founder and husband Simon Willison, while on honeymoon in Casablanca. As the site took off, they realised their side project was destined to become something much bigger.

This talk will tell the story of Lanyrd from a two-week proof of concept to a fully-fledged startup, the lessons learned along the way about building and launching a product, running a company, raising investment and the entrepreneurship journey. This is the talk she wished she heard before getting started! In September 2013, just a week before the SmashingConf 2013, Lanyrd was acquired by Eventbrite.

Our startup story begins in June of 2010 with our wedding - a rather unconventional beginning to be sure.

(Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chuckp/21394313 )

Simon and I met in the first week university, 10 years before we got married. In our time together we had already built and launched several side projects.

After the wedding, we quit our jobs, gave up our flat in Brighton and set out on honeymoon overland through Europe and northern Africa. Our intention was to travel as long as we could, whilst earning money from freelance projects on the way.

When we got to Casablanca in Morocco we fell ill with food poisoning.

It was Ramadan so we couldn’t buy food during the day, and we were too ill to continue travelling so we hired a flat and hacked on a prototype of Lanyrd, an idea I’d had that we had been discussing over a few preceding weeks.

We built something that we wanted to exist. A week later, when we launched the first possible version that worked to our friends in private alpha, we realised it was something other people needed too.

Lanyrd is a social conference directory: we help people and companies find the best conferences and professional events to go to, help them get the most out of them whilst they are there and provide a space to collate slides and videos after the event.

Remember when Sacca was buying Twitter stock like a boss because the founders preferred him to VCs? There’s now an app for that.

Simple stock option calculator – I used this for all of the calculations in this blog post

Alec Holowka tweeted something that rings pretty true when it comes to Going Indie.

I feel like a lot of people are considering going Indie and I’m not sure they really see how much work it is.

— Infinite Ammo (@infinite_ammo)

June 17, 2013

And I replied:

Almost 2 years ago today, I quit my day job and started building something. After months of customer development, discussions with my wife about my plans, savings and sleepless nights, I finally decided to take the plunge.

I’m glad I did

PG is so good

The bus you need to be on is sitting in traffic. You are at the bus stop, stuck waiting in the cold. Your frustration is rising. Sound familiar? Schedules are helpful, but you want to know when that bus will REALLY arrive.

The Golden Gate Bridge.