Source: Techcrunch

1. Get your domain and e-mail working: “When you register your name, you should register the misspellings as a .com, you should register the primary and the .net or .org or it will be sold back to you for thousands of dollars later…”
Approximate cost: $160

2. Produce some mock-ups: “You want to show the key functionality that you’re trying to bring to the marketplace…You just need three sort of pivotal experience screens that will demonstrate your core idea or three…mock-ups of the physical product…you’re trying to capture how it will be done.”
Approximate cost: Free

3. Logo and materials: “Get a good looking logo so at least you look legitimate…” says Ressi who recommends 99designs. After you pick the winning design, “you contact him [the designer] offline, you say I want you to do my business cards, I want you to do my Power Point backup and I want you to do my mock-ups. Now for not so much money you’re getting everything you need to appear somewhat legitimate to the world.”
Approximate cost: $750

4. Pitch deck: “You always want to have a pitch deck, even if it’s bad…you need something to start with to go on that refining path.”
Approximate cost: Free

5. Create a landing page: Ressi recommends Unbounce.com, which is a drag and drop landing page.
Approximate cost: $60/year after free trial

6. Create a company blog: “I recommend doing blog.yourcompany.com…it keeps it in a consistent place as your company scales…You want to be posting on your blog, at this phase, one or two times a week.”
Approximate cost: Free

7. Test marketing: “First thing I strongly recommend is immediately test marketing using Facebook and Google ads. Not so much for the value of driving people to your bullsh*t website, but to understand what messages resonate with your target audience and then so you can then refine your marketing messages.”
Approximate cost: $250

8. Survey customers: “So now you’ve got these leads coming in, survey them… you want to understand, the demographics, who are they. You want to clarify what the pain points, like why did they sign up, were they just stupid and duped into it or did they really feel that something was valuable and what was it that they find most valuable.”
Approximate cost: $200

9. Create a sticky note roadmap: Write all of your company’s features on separate sticky notes and then group them in logical buckets. “What I do, is I put on the left side I put the most important group and then at the top, the most important features. So on the top left is the most important thing I have to do…When you have that roadmap in front of you, you can sort of visualize the one thing that flows through everything and usually there’s an unknown around that.”
Approximate cost: $100

10. Ghetto launch. Test the unknown. “Whatever you can find that can test out your core stuff that’s free…Identify the metrics, collect the data and validate…”
Approximate cost: $250

Below are two more Founder Institute videos, the first one is on establishing your startup’s vision and the second explores the challenge of researching your idea. If you would like to officially enroll in the Ressi academy (aka his startup accelerator, Founder Institute) you can apply for one of eight locations online.

Software versions can sometimes be difficult to understand. And, in my experience, it’s even harder to find a clear explanation on how to version your own product releases. So, after searching for clarification, I found some reasonable guidelines to follow. Let me know if they’re helpfull in your projects.

The standard version schema will be as follows: X.Y.Z.P-Stability Status#

• X - Major version number - Major version changes, which include adding and removing features and functionality. These releases will provide an upgrade path to allow users to upgrade, and will have minimum backwards compatibility to previous major versions.
• Y - Minor version number - Minor version changes, which include the adding of new features and bug fixes. Upgrades should be straight forward. The release should have maximum backwards compatibility to previous minor versions.
• Z - Revision version number - Bug fixes and minimal new features. Upgrades should be straight forward. The release should be fully backwards compatible to current minor version.
• P - Patch version number - Urgent bug and/or security fixes. Upgrades should be straight forward. The release should be fully backwards compatible to current minor version.
• Stability Status# – How stable the release is (e.g. rc, beta, alpha), where # is the stability status number. The higher the number the more mature the release

Stability Status explanation:

• Alpha - A suffix of ‘alpha’ means that this is a preview release of the upcoming version. It is not recommended in any way to be used in a production environment and does not guarantee that any of the features, functionality, API or code will be available in the stable release of this version. Business decisions should NOT be made based on this release. It is released as a first look into the upcoming version and might include major bugs and issues. It is intended for the use of developers and testers that want to have insight into the core development.
• Beta - A suffix of ‘beta’ means that this is a more mature release than the alpha releases for this version. It is not recommended in any way to be used in a production environment. Since it is a more mature release there is a better chance that features, functionality, API and code will not change in the stable release of this version, but this is not guaranteed and no business decision should be made based on this release. Developers, testers and users are encouraged to test this release in a non-production environment and provide feedback on any issues they might find. Extension maintainers and developers are encouraged to test their extensions for compatibility with this release.
• Release Candidate (rc) – A ‘rc’ suffix means that the release is getting closer to being stable. It is not recommended to be used in a production environment but all features and functionality are locked in for this version. Code and API might change slightly to accommodate for bugs or issues that are found in this release. Developers, testers and users are highly encouraged to test this release and provide feedback on any issues they might find. Extension maintainers and developers are highly encouraged to test and update their extensions as needed for compatibility with this release.
• No stability level specified – If a release version number is not followed by any suffix from the above this means that this release is production ready and stable. We still highly recommend testing your site on a non-production environment before upgrading your live installation directly. All extensions should be updated to be fully compatible with this release.

Update: jQuery Plugin

HTML5 WG has implemented an input or textarea attribute feature named “placeholder.” It acts similar to suggestive pre-populated input text that clears on element focus.

While developing jQuery’s Simple Clearfield I discovered a way to test for the browser’s support of the placeholder attribute. Here’s the code:

function placeholder_support (){

     var i = document.createElement('input');

     return 'placeholder' in i; // returns true if supported

}

CSS Inline-block is a great CSS property that enables grid-like designs without all the hacks of using tables. This property, however, is not cross-browser friendly. A quick search can provide a ton of information regarding the typical support for this property. For now, here’s a cool workaround that works with most a-grade browsers using descending definitions:

Use a class, like .iblock, to apply the following css styles to the elements you need to be inline-block. Please note, this does not validate because it uses proprietary browser definitions.

<style type="text/css">

.iblock {
	display: -moz-inline-stack;
	display: -moz-inline-box; /* https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/display */ 
	display:inline-block; 
	zoom:1; 
	*display:inline;
	/* Alignment Fix */
	vertical-align:top;
}

a {
	width:50px; 
	margin-right:12px; 
	background:lightblue; 
	margin-bottom:12px;
}
</style>

<a href="#" class="iblock">Inline Block</a>
<a href="#" class="iblock">Inline Block</a>
<a href="#" class="iblock">Inline Block <br />With Two lines</a>
<a href="#" class="iblock">Inline Block</a>
<br />
<a href="#" class="iblock">Inline Block</a>
<a href="#" class="iblock">Inline Block</a>
<a href="#" class="iblock">Inline Block <br />With Two lines</a>
<a href="#" class="iblock">Inline Block</a>