Weekend Musings – The Lean Startup Movement Is Growing…Fast!

Hello and welcome to another weekend musings here on MorganLinton.com! This week has flown-by and I’m still playing catch-up after spending a week at sea on DNCruise. One of the great things about being on a cruise ship is that you have the chance to escape email and phone calls which is absolutely incredible…however, when you come-back there’s a lot of catching-up to do!

Yesterday Ron Jackson did a great recap of DNCruise 2011 on DNJournal, I definitely recommend you read this if you haven’t yet. I’m still putting-together my post as well which includes some underwater videos that I thought would be fun to share with all of you!

Okay, now onto the musings:

  • TechCrunch Disrupt SF was incredible! While I didn’t have the chance to attend the conference in-person they did a great job of providing solid live coverage and great daily recap videos. Since my days are packed I watched most of the conference through their recap videos. We are in an amazing time where building a real business that attracts real customers is easier than ever thanks to development platforms like Ruby on Rails. There were some unbelievably innovative companies at Disrupt and the winner, Shaker, is one I think we’ll be hearing about for years to come!
  • The Lean Startup Movement is Growing! It’s pretty exciting to see how much the lean startup movement has grown over the last year. What was once almost completely unknown is becoming a standard practice at many top web startups. This week Eric Ries, the creator of Lean Startup, released his new book – The Lean Startup, which I’m pretty confident will be on the New York Times best-sellers list in no time! If you aren’t familiar with the lean startup movement I would highly recommend you read Eric’s book.
  • Lean Domaining? Today I was reading a bunch of articles about Lean Startup and Eric’s book tour and I thought…what about lean Domaining? I started thinking about all the ways the lean startup principles could be applied to Domaining. The gears are turning – more to come!
  • Love your brands and always, always innovate. What I really enjoy the most about building brands is falling in love with the brand. At a certain point your brands will become more than just a domain name and a website, they will become a living breathing brand. This is also the point where you have to keep innovating, successful brands are successful because they work hard to grow and develop over time. I used to think a good brand was a website with a lot of good content, over the year’s I’ve learned that while content is king, your brands should bring more to the table than just articles.
  • SEOMoz vs. Raven Tools. This is more of an open question than a thought. I’ve used SEOMoz forever but have been hearing more and more positive things about Raven Tools which is a lot cheaper. Any thoughts from the SEO geeks reading my blog?
  • Content isn’t just text. We all talk about the fact that content is king, however so many times when people say this they are thinking only of text. Remember, photos and video are also content and I think that video will take-over as the most valuable content online over the next few years. Even now when I want to learn anything be it a programming language or a kayaking tips I search for videos, not text articles. I can learn a lot more seeing someone do something than just reading someone talking about doing something. Oh and it’s not just me, there’s some incredible data I’ll be publishing in a future post about the shift of consumers online towards video and away from text.
  • Exciting announcement next week! Next week I’ll be announcing a new partnership that’s been in the works for over a year. We’re pretty excited about it and I think you will be too. I don’t want to say any more, that would ruin the surprise, right?

I am writing this post in at Peet’s Coffee in Pasadena. Daina has a meeting at Cal Tech and I’m hanging-out bopping-around downtown Pasadena. This afternoon we’ll be going kayaking which should be a blast! I hope you’re all having a great weekend, stay-tuned tomorrow for Small Business Sunday!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton