But your meta-comment grabbed me:

“One of the downsides to a large number of blog posts is that older stories tend to get buried and hidden. Categories and indexes on the web pages aren’t quite the right metaphor or substitute for random access.”

Steve — if only you self-hosted, you could use the “Trailmeme for WordPress” plugin, built by my team, to comprehensively solve this problem . The words you use are pretty much EXACTLY the “blogger problem hypothesis” for us!

See it in action on my blog. We are trying to get wordpress.com to support it, but that could take a ‘discovery’ iteration or two. If you are curious/interested, I can tell you more offline and maybe help improvise a solution somehow, for next time, using the hosted version of trailmeme at trailmeme.com (here, for example, is a trail on lean startups and product-market fit which includes your book

Your 4S2TE book, which I recently began using for the Trailmeme project (an incubator venture within Xerox), has been a lifesaver. While I’ve been using an ad hoc and improvised personal version of “customer development” since the beginning, the lack of discipline and conscious self-awareness around why what I was doing by instinct made sense, was hurting us quite a bit. I was doing more “random acts of marketing” than I like to admit. Thank you for writing it.

One area where it was illuminating was in helping me make sense of the “Grabowksi ratio” (marketing/engineering spend in early-stage product launches). Historical stats show that launches are nearly certain to fail when M/E <0.1 and pretty much free of all controllable risk when M/E = 1. M/E has been another lighthouse concept for me, like CD. The problem I had was figuring out where/how to spend the M part of the budget to get it to match E. Simply trying to match engineering to marketing dollar for dollar any old way is dumb, obviously, so I was navigating by gut trying to get M/E to 1. Your CD process came as a relief, since it made it clear where the scarce resources should go: M=CD.

Venkat

thank you so much for your incredible posts. I believe that this is one of the most important blogs i read.

brgds and congrats.

best,

steve

You should be able to use other verses from Tolkien’s “The Riddle of Strider” for others in the series:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

You and I share a blog birthday of sorts, my first post was Feb 22, 2009. It feels like a lifetime ago, as time has graciously slowed to a crawl while I feverishly search for traction with my first web startup, Victus Media.

Grateful for all your shared wisdom, and perspective.

Possibly. But it seems to defeat the purpose.

steve