Matt Collins is a London-based product and technology consultant and entrepreneur, helping companies build profitable digital products and services.
We’re at an interesting but confusing point in time. AI agents are good enough to be useful but setting them up can be frustratingly hard. And setting them up to be both useful and secure? Good luck with that. I’ve been trying to figure out how best to set up my own AI agents and […]
Cloudflare’s ‘Code Mode’ got some attention in the AI developer community recently, thanks to a popular blog post about it. It’s based on the ‘CodeACT‘ pattern for AI agents which is something I’ve been interested in for a while now. These are my initial first-hand impressions of using it. What is CodeACT? Most LLM-based AI […]
Heard of ‘AI slop’? There’s something else I’m worried about these days and I’m calling it “AI splurge.” What is AI Splurge? AI splurge is the output of AI coding agents when they get overzealous and create more code than you need. It can take many forms, but here are a few I’ve seen a […]
I’ve heard a few people say that, since generative AI systems can hallucinate, we’re alway going to have to double-check their work in great detail if we want to be confident it’s correct. I disagree. Why? Because AI systems can do much of this checking themselves. And, when the cost/benefit tradeoff is right, I believe […]
Journalists sometimes get things wrong. Wouldn’t it be nice if AI could help us spot when they do? I recently prototyped an LLM-powered fact checker (using web search APIs) to see if it could do just that. It looked promising! In case you’re interested in learning more, I gave a talk to the MLOps London […]
It is now clear: AI is transforming how software is developed. Anyone leading software development teams needs to be keeping a close eye on this to understand the tools’ rapidly evolving capabilities as well as their limitations and risks. Here’s a snapshot (as of January 2025) of how I think AI tools currently fit into […]
What if AI could help you generate ideas for products and build them? That’s what happened when I used AI tools to create Flowdrafter—a writing app that solves a common problem for writers. (It even became Product Hunt’s #1 productivity tool of the week!) Can AI Coding Agents Help with Marketing? My wife is a […]
I heard about FastHTML a few months back and was immediately intrigued by its pitch: “Modern web applications in pure Python Built on solid web foundations, not the latest fads – with FastHTML you can get started on anything from simple dashboards to scalable web applications in minutes.” https://www.fastht.ml/ This sounded like something I could […]
Lots of people are starting to explore what can be done with agent-based AI systems. It feels like there’s huge potential in them. But getting an agentic system to work reliably enough to use in practice often turns out to be very hard. Here are a few techniques that can help with reliability. Technique 1: […]
As of 27th September 2023, the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) has ended its strike with the big studios, having reached a tentative agreement with the big studios that will now be voted on by the WGA’s members. The deal has some key terms about AI and could be a sign of what will be […]
[Edit: I wrote this a while ago and I’d now recommend you look at the idea of ‘evals’ as a way to approach this.] A challenge when developing software that makes use of large language models is writing automated tests for it. With traditional software, you tend to know exactly what output you expect to […]
If you’re looking to name a new company or product, it can be tricky to know how to go about it. Arielle Jackson of First Round Capital shared a great process for coming up with a name on Lenny’s Podcast. 1. Figure Out Your Positioning Fill out the following positioning template: “For (target customer) who (statement of need […]
The idea of product-led growth is an appealing one to many company leaders. But is it really viable for your product? Elena Verna, an expert on product-led growth shared some great insights into this question in this episode of Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast. Here’s a quick run-down of some of the main ideas. Product can contribute […]
How do you feel about your company’s product vision, product strategy and product roadmap? These are high-leverage areas where many companies could sharpen their thinking and ways of working to become more effective. One of my favourite product management experts, Marty Cagan (author of Inspired), was recently interviewed on the ‘This Is Product Management’ podcast about these topics and […]
One of the interesting things about online marketplaces is their inherent network effects. They’re hard to get going (not least because of the chicken-and-egg problem) but — if successful — can become very valuable as it’s hard for other businesses to compete. As a result of this defensibility, online marketplaces have been popular with VCs. […]
Solving the chicken-and-egg problem is a key one for any marketplace business. Here’s one hack that uses scarcity to help with solving it. What is the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem? When you’re starting a marketplace, you typically have no customers and no suppliers. With no customers, it’s hard to get suppliers on board. And, having no […]
How do you find and hire a CTO for your business? As a business owner you might be looking to find a CTO for a number of reasons: You have an established business and are looking for someone with the experience to help you use technology more effectively and strategically. You’re looking to raise money […]
If you’re interested in how to start a successful marketplace, Matt Mickiewicz is a man to study. Matt has previously started two successful marketplaces: Flippa and 99designs. His latest business, Hired.com, is a job marketplace which — after just three years — is doing tens of millions of dollars in annual sales and has raised over $70 million in funding. […]
What makes some online marketplaces billion dollar successes and others costly failures? Uber and Airbnb are forging ahead relentlessly. Yet Homejoy, having raised $40 million in funding, ended up shutting down. Why? How much is down to execution and luck, and how much to fundamental differences between the industries they chose to play in or their precise business […]
How do you build an online marketplace from scratch? Thumbtack, an online marketplace for local services, yesterday announced a $100M funding round led by Google Ventures. Building a local services marketplace is a notoriously difficult problem that has beaten many entrepreneurs. So how did Thumbtack get where they are? What tactics are behind their apparent success? The founder of […]
What churn rate can you expect for your subscription box business? What’s a good churn rate? What’s a bad churn rate? If you haven’t yet launched, what number should you put in your business plan? I wrote in a previous post about typical subscription e-commerce retention rates and how, when considering launching a subscription box businesses, your assumptions about retention […]
You have a WordPress blog or website. You want some changes made to it, so you need to find someone who can help. But who? One effective way to find a WordPress developer is through a freelancing website like oDesk or Elance. But finding the right person can be very time-consuming and error-prone. How do […]
I always like hearing how entrepreneurs have managed to launch marketplace businesses. TechCrunch recently posted this interview with Michael Karnjanaprakorn of Skillshare, a platform for online education, about how they seeded and grew their marketplace. He described two main phases in a marketplace’s journey: Phase 1: Seeding Where you “Roll up your sleeves up and […]
PandoDaily have been running a series of articles lately on ‘ecommerce 2.0’, featuring video clips from a dinner with the CEOs of some of the top ecommerce startups: Birchbox, Warby Parker, One Kings Lane and Jack Threads. I’ve rounded up the clips from the series here as they’re worth a watch if you’re interested in […]
iPad Share of Visits Up 23% In the month before Christmas, 13.2% of our unique visits came from iPads. In the seven days since Christmas, that has leapt to 16.2%. That’s a whopping 23% increase in a matter of weeks. I guess plenty of our customers received iPads for Christmas! Is It Just Technophiles? Who […]
Screen Pages, a UK ecommerce agency, publish some great data on their blog. Their latest post is about Magento e-commerce checkout conversion rates. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons: It gives some useful benchmark conversion rate numbers. It shows how conversion rates can and do vary significantly between sites with checkouts that are functionally […]
This is a great TED talk: Rory Sutherland makes an entertaining case for thinking more about psychology in the way we design and enhance things (and less about technology). One example: one of the best improvements to the London Underground in ROI terms did nothing to change the trains or how they ran. Instead, it […]
According to an email I’ve just received from Google, they are today rolling out Google +1 Recommendations to all users. When you hover over a +1 button, you may now see a popup showing other pages on the site that your friends have recommended via +1. My account has been in the beta test for […]
What’s a typical retention rate for a subscription commerce business? If you’re trying to model a potential new subscription box business, or just wondering how profitable an existing business is, retention rate is a key variable. What retention rate should you assume? The answer, of course, is “it depends.” But you need something to plug […]
The latest Grovo ‘Expert Series’ video is an interesting one. Tom Critchlow is an SEO expert and talks through what you need to know about video SEO. (And he’s a Brit, too, which makes a nice change!) Here’s the video series. There are 13 snippets to go through, so it takes a while to watch. If […]
Working out how to accept payments online is a pain. What do you need, exactly? Which payment gateway should you choose? How much will it cost? I’ve set up a few online businesses now, so I think I have a pretty good idea of it all, but I remember how confusing all this payments stuff […]
It’s 11.38pm as I’m starting to write this, so I’ll keep it brief. The latest startup interview from Grovo came out today. It’s with David Tisch who runs the TechStars incubator in New York. David sees lots of startups from an early stage, so has an interesting vantage point on things. Here’s a quick rundown […]
I told you about an interesting interview with the Bonobos founder last week on a site called Grovo. Well, Grovo’s next interview with a founder of a successful Internet company is now available and it’s another good one. This week’s interview is with Ben Lerer, the co-founder and CEO of Thrillist, a daily email city […]
Google AdWords has revenues of $30 billion or so a year. With that sort of money involved, you might think the AdWords ad review system would be pretty good. It seems it could still do with a bit of work. One group of scammers has been fooling Google for at least 6 weeks now. I […]
I came across an online education website called Grovo this evening. Perhaps you’ve heard of it already? Grovo has lined up a series of what promise to be interesting interviews with successful figures in the world of online business. Their first interview (and only one for now) is with Andy Dunn, one of the co-founders […]
I want to like Google. They have all those free services: search, Gmail, Analytics… what’s not to like with those? And I’ve been a customer of Google’s for a long time, too – spending money on their AdWords ads since February 2007. Google does a lot of good things and I’m sure most people who work […]
There’s been a lot of interest in the subscription e-commerce business model lately. It’s a model that I think is particularly powerful. Getting Someone to Buy is Hard Anyone who has run an e-commerce website will tell you that getting a website visitor to buy something is hard. Think about what’s involved: First, you have […]
You’ve started your business, but money’s tight. You haven’t got much cash to play with. Here are 23 tactics you can use to be frugal and save money: 1. Use Lean Startup Methodology Credit: quinet under Creative Commons license Make sure you’re building something people want and will pay for. Don’t spend time and money building it […]
People sometimes ask me if I’ve found having an MBA helpful in starting businesses. So is it? If you’re thinking of starting a business, here are seven reasons why you might not want to do an MBA first: MBA Costs are Potential Startup Capital: Doing an MBA is expensive. If you’ll be putting your own money […]
If you’re setting up a web-based business in London, there are lots of resources that can come in handy once you know about them. I thought I’d share some of my favourites here in case there a few you don’t yet know about. This is a selection of everything from interesting events to attend and […]
I’ve recently launched a new subscription e-commerce business and it turns out we’re in a hot space again (as we were with DealBunch and the daily deal phenomenon last year)… Boudoir Privé is all about meeting the desire that a lot of women have for beauty products. Each month, we send out luxury ‘beauty boxes’ with […]
Are you thinking of setting up a two-sided marketplace business? It’s a hard thing to do, so you’re going to need all the help you can get. Why not learn from how other people have managed it successfully in the past? One challenge of creating this kind of marketplace is that you’re going to have to […]
What will local advertising look like a few years from now? BIA/Kelsey recently released slides about the local ad marketplace in the US. A few interesting points they make: It’s Big – The local ad market brings in $133 billion annually It’s Fairly Traditional – 92% of local ad spending still goes to traditional media […]
Google today announced ‘Boost’ a new, simplified self-service ad offering. It’s in beta for the time-being and only available in a few cities in the US, but it could be an interesting step in helping small businesses get started with online advertising. Google have, for some time now, been encouraging small, local businesses to set […]
Patrick over at Micro ISV on a Shoestring has a fantastic post summarising lessons learnt at the recent Business of Software 2010 Conference. He goes through highlights of a number of talks and it’s good reading for anyone in the business of selling software. Here’s one nugget I found particularly interesting that’s potentially handy for […]
I was just making a payment via PayPal and discovered that PayPal have a new checkout page. Here it is with the payment via PayPal option showing (this is the default for people who already have a PayPal account): As before, those who don’t have a PayPal account are instead prompted for credit card details: […]
I spend a lot of time with people who know a lot about the web. They’re either building online businesses or they’re 30-something friends who live in London and who use the internet frequently in their day-to-day lives. That’s why I found it interesting recently to work with someone who’s outside of that circle, to […]
Could you be saving yourself time and money with a PSD to HTML service? PSD to HTML services allow you to send in the design for a web page as a PSD file (the kind of thing your web designer will create in Photoshop) and give you back a set of HTML and CSS files […]
Very soon, together with my co-founders, I’m going to be launching a new venture. Like VouChaCha, it’s going to offer local deals. And like MenuLover, it’s food-related. This time, though, there’s a new twist: group buying. The group buying bit works like this: When you sign up for our service, we use the bargaining power […]