Dharmesh Shah regurgitating an entertaining mush of advice and lessons learned for startups.

“Sleep is that time you’re working on startup problems with your eyes closed.” Well said.

Whitney Hess asked software entrepreneurs at the monthly meeting of New York’s Ultra Light Startups pow wow for a show of hands: how many people sat down with a potential customer and did user experience studies in the design phase of a site?

Silence. Few if any. Her followup: why?

Because it’s hard. That’s the best answer I got.

There are so many horrible interfaces out there, and I’m afraid that I’m going to unintentionally create one. A bad interface is one in which there’s a mismatch between the model presented to the user, and the actual model. The problem with developers is that they have intimate knowledge of the actual model, and so it’s near impossible to step back in such a way that they can then see that the presentation doesn’t match.

Watch here for future usability testing experiences with S7.

What did I think about ULS? Though I have one startup behind me with a successful exit, S7 Labs is something entirely different, from both a technology and business angle. For one thing, Athena had the very nice property where we were able to stick our heads in the ground and code away, and within a few months we were profitable.

Standing Room, however, is a totally different ball game. I actually have to talk to people. The users are my lifeblood, and aren’t necessarily technologically savvy. It’s like Mars and Venus.

I figured I should explore this alien thing called networking, and thus I checked out the ULS group. They have a nice system going: introduce yourself by giving a 60 second pitch, mingle, then have a panel discussion with some experts. The pitches were all fantastic, and some of the ideas were pretty novel.

I immediately jumped to some conclusions about the group, mostly because my first night there mirrored my experience with writing groups. I’ll withhold public judgement for now. What I will say is that it was definitely an instructive experience, and I did meet some good people, which is precisely the point.

ULS meets monthly (usually the first week). Check out the website if you’re interested, and perhaps I’ll see you there.

I intend to grow S7 Labs into a multidisciplinary group that applies math and software technology to unmined areas.

Woody Allen said “eighty percent of success is showing up.” Permit me to riff on that: eighty percent of solving a problem is finding it.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Intellectual Ventures, a group of smart folk who brainstorm for problems and solve them. Gladwell gives this anecdote about one of the members, Nathan Myhrvold:

…the only time a physicist and a brain surgeon meet is when the physicist is about to be cut open—and to [Myhrvold’s] mind that made no sense. Surgeons had all kinds of problems that they didn’t realize had solutions, and physicists had all kinds of solutions to things that they didn’t realize were problems. At one point, Myhrvold asked the surgeons what, in a perfect world, would make their lives easier, and they said that they wanted an X-ray that went only skin deep. They wanted to know, before they made their first incision, what was just below the surface. When the Intellectual Ventures crew heard that, their response was amazement. “That’s your dream? A subcutaneous X-ray? We can do that.”

I asked a founder of Le Poisson Rouge, a medium sized music club in NYC “melding high art with alcohol”, if they could tell if an artist could sell enough tickets to fill the space. He said for someone they do not already know, the best indication they have is the song counter on MySpace, but that even then it’s a crap shoot.

The MySpace figure is severely flawed. New songs have low counts, and there’s no indication of whether those counts are fresh or not. An artist who goes from 0 to 300,000 plays in a month is bookable. One that took 5 years to get to 300,000 — they probably have steady day jobs.

For selling tickets, a better thing to look at is how many fans the bands have on their mailing list, and where these fans are. A venue could just ask the band, sure, and often times that happens, or there is an implicit threat in a first booking. “We won’t book you again if nobody shows up.”

So a venue might like to see the mailing list, but how do we do that with accuracy, accountability, and privacy?

Is that the problem? We can fix that. We can do so much more.

All we need to do is look.