My Fascination With Reducing Development Iteration Cycles

I have, of late, been thinking a lot about the issue of how to make money on the Internet. And I have come to some very specific thinking about how I am wired, what appeals to me, and how that intersects with Internet money.

I like making tools that help people make things. I have primarily, in the past, made consumer technologies, but I think the idea of figuring out how to abstract my own processes has always been of interest to me. I think that one of the most valuable things you can do, whether its for yourself or for others, is figure out how to reduce the amount of time to go from an idea to an execution. Particularly in todays world, velocity of iteration is critical.

And so, if you can create tools for yourself that allow you to iterate quickly in whatever business you are in, that is incredibly powerful. If you can respond to new customer needs and requirements twice as fast as your competitor, that is an awesome advantage. It has always been of interest to me to try to build my products in such a way that this type of fast modification and enhancement would be possible -- not that I have always succeeded. But before my current efforts, I have never actually focused on creating tools for others that would increase their ability to iterate faster in *their* creative process.

Today, this idea seems more relevant than ever. When we are experimenting with business models, the one thing we need is to let the technology get out of the way so that we can figure out what is actually useful. Being able to blur the line between building a prototype and building real production software or services is critical to experimenting with and figuring out the much more consequential business model issues.

Indeed the world is clearly moving in this direction. But there is so much further to go. Figuring out how much smaller we can make iteration cycles for services that are not just prototypes but real scalable applications is what I find really fascinating right now. It seems to me it just might be profitable too.