“Hot sauce must be hot. If you don’t like it hot, use less. We don’t make mayonnaise here.” (David Tran, Founder of Sriracha Sauce)

Last Friday, we were in Auburn to select the new user interface design that will transform ArchPatent from a patent search engine into a patent portfolio analysis tool. It was an amazing day with all the designs exceeding our expectations. Ben Bloodworth’s design was ultimately chosen and he is now working with us over the next couple of weeks to revise his design and test it out with a group of incredible ArchPatent users. Below are a few photos from the day and I will continue to provide updates on our progress.

Ben Bloodsworth

Auburn Design Team

Getting Down to Business

Insight of the Week

I highly recommend reading the Techcruch blog post about David Tran. Within the article, Mark Suster, highlights the following product lessons that can be learned from the Vietnam refugee who makes chili sauce:

• Extreme product passion
• Uncompromising product quality
• Guiding principle for the company
• Focus on the customer and provide value 
• Provide something distinctive

Perhaps the old saying really is true that we are what we eat. In this case, please pass the Sriracha sauce!

Paradigm - a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulate.

As I discussed in a recent post, we have been working with a group from the Auburn University Industrial and Graphic Design Department to radically transform ArchPatent from a patent search engine into a patent portfolio analysis tool.

On Friday, we are going to be in Auburn selecting the “winning” design so I decided to recognize all the designers this week by sharing a photo from one of our visits to meet with the team.

Insight of the Week

I have been captivated by the following quote over the last couple of weeks by Donald Miller, “the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.” As I reflect on innovative projects I have been involved in, it is clear that the individuals involved did not lose their individual identify; however, the result was not solely the vision of one individual. Yes there will be one “winner” on Friday but the product you all get to enjoy in a couple of months will have the ideas of many others woven into it.

When I asked Professor Tzeng to describe the Auburn design experience from her perspective she indicated, “Patent searching is time consuming and painful, but it often brings great value to the human being – and that’s why we need to do a good job designing the NEW ArchPatent Website”. Clearly she gets it!

Paradigm – a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulate.

I love it when technology keeps working when I punch out at the end of the work day. This is why ArchPatent goes to work at night analyzing all the new USPTO patent applications, issued grants and assignment changes issued during the day. By 7 AM EST, the ArchPatent data set is updated and all new alerts are delivered to the workspace of ArchPatent Pro subscribers. Unlike a lot of the competition, we understand you need to have the most updated data set.

Insight of the Week

This past week I got the chance to re-charge my batteries while spending two days with amazing students at Hope College. With a tremendous amount of work to do leading up to my visit to campus, I was again reminded of a valuable lesson. If you are struggling with a task then you might want to “sleep on it” instead of trying to plow ahead ignoring exhaustion. Our brain never stops working and it is amazing the work I am sometimes able to accomplish while I am sleeping.

Paradigm - a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated

Jason, Tony and I (the Founders of ArchPatent) took a personality survey a while ago and then met with a leadership coach who analyzed the results. We learned a lot about team dynamics and also had a riot going through the results and teasing each other. The biggest take away was that Tony was the only one of us that listens. Perhaps this is why we always thought he was the quiet one!

Insight of the Week

I highly recommend reading “Four Steps to the Epiphany, Successful Strategies for Products that Win” by Steve Blank. It outlines in detail the specific steps needed to validate initial product assumptions while moving full speed ahead with the development process. It has implications to project management in large and small organizations that I think you will find helpful. We have been reshaping our business around the principles found within this book.

Filters

ArchPatent is undergoing a transformation and the left rail filters is a great example of this process. When we launched ArchPatent, we thought filters would be a great feature but we did not talk to a lot of users to really understand the value within their workflow process. We have been spending a lot of time listening to many of you and believe many of the recent site changes reflect this new insight. As we work through the new site design with the Auburn Industrial Design Department, we are interested in hearing thoughts about filters versus search syntax similar to the USPTO Advanced Search Page. We would welcome the opportunity for you to visit the ArchPatent site again and sign up for a 24 hour trial and share your thoughts with us at info@archpatent.com.

Paradigm - a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated

Perhaps like some of you, I find myself taking things said by others out of context. The ArchPatent Patent-In-Context™ will not keep us from taking things out of context but this new feature will speed up your patent analysis by visually showing when a patent was issued in relation to other patents in its USPTO classification or sub-classification. This allows an analyst in seconds, to see if the patent is “early” or “late”. An “early” patent means it was granted at the leading edge of the technology innovation, which could be good. A “late” patent could be the definitive patent of that technology that blocks any more patents from being issued, which also could be good. Patent-in-context helps frame the analysis based on the context.

Insight of the Week

About every six months, we pull back as a management team and talk about how much time we should be spending together in management meetings and make any needed adjustments. Let me share one of our recent changes, after every management meeting I now update a column in our task tracker based on the decisions made during our meeting. I then will not touch this column until it is updated after our next management meeting. There is a second column for additions/subtractions/adjusted between meetings.  We have found separating this information helps control “the boss” (aka me) from adding lots of new tasks to the team’s plate and then asking about them without putting it in the proper context. In case you are wondering, we have no agenda or meeting minutes as the layout of the task tracker eliminates the need for those two documents.

Paradigm – a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated

Do you remember the days of dial up? For those too young or anyone looking for a good laugh I recommend this link. Website speed is very important to me and so like many of you I was finding our own site running very sluggish based on recent rapid traffic growth. My hat is off to Jason and Charlene who architected several long term solutions based on advice from helpful experts who offered their insight. They solved this problem instead of just asking for more servers which would have been the easy short term fix. More “speed” is on the way because we are geeks that can never have enough of that stuff. I think you will enjoy the fruits of their labor!

Insight of the Week

Running into your own website speed problem? Take a look at CPU load from website crawlers. We found search engine robots were accounting for a significant portion of our CPU utilization. This is not the typical data you will find from normal metrics.