At Giantnerd we are constantly innovating to improve our member experience and deliver our nerds progressive developments ahead of the competition.

Giantnerd Core Value # 11:  Fast and Effective Is Sometimes Preferable to Perfection: While it is an undying dream to achieve perfection in everything we do, the people at Giantnerd know that to be perfect is impossible. To be first to market on a new innovative idea, however, is perfectly within our grasp. Giantnerd works in an agile development process. Everything that we do at Giantnerd is done to the highest standard and must be done with the discipline to surpass our competition. Sometimes this means being fast, effective, and first instead of being perfect. 

The Nerd Herd has been working double time and we are proud to announce the recent launch of new and exciting features. We completely revamped our item page to make it more intuitive, friendly and feature rich. Highlights include: enhancing the social section “the social wall”, better video display, improved nerd recommendation zones, and implementing the first phase of Facebook social plugins. Big shout out to our friends at Facebook for their continued assistance and support.

With Love,

The Head Nerd

Randall Weidberg

@GiantnerdCEO

I just watched a live presentation from Threadless CEO Founder Jake Nickell. Jake leads his company out of the great city and Giantnerd HQ’s of Boulder, CO. I am impressed with Jake as an innovator and happen to be a big fan of Threadless!

After watching Jake, I did a little due diligence and found his personal blog. His most recent blog post parallels the Giantnerd philosophy of incremental development changes to our platform. Jake starts off his post by quoting Mark Twain. “Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” Jake goes on to say:

“We are working in short intervals on small chunks of things really quickly…like a few days or a couple of weeks max. After each chunk, we hope to be able to launch whatever the things is we are working on…It’s a fun way to work and in the end, i think you end up with something even better as it is a constantly evolving work in progress rather than something you go into a vacuum on for a few months and hope it works when you launch it.”

In essence, Threadless and Giantnerd are making small changes quickly rather than large changes slowly. In the end, we feel our members benefit from a platform and company that is continuously improving with timely enhancements making for a better overall member experience.

With Love,

The Head Nerd

Randall Weidberg

@GiantnerdCEO

In an effort to post more often I promise to keep my posts short and sweet. When I look at the evolution of the Facebook homepage i am reminded that it is not so much where you start but where you end up. You simply cannot allow your management team to rest on their laurels and past achievements no matter how successful or arduous a task it was to achieve. Strategic improvements must consistently be identified and executed speedily and effectively.

Facebook has grown to become one of the most dominant internet players of our time but they sure didn’t start out that way. Facebook set their site on what many proclaimed experts thought to be an insurmountable goal. In addition, their behemoth competition including Friendster and later MySpace didn’t view Facebook as much of a threat as these companies dominated the marketplace.

So, why did Facebook have a meteoric rise while their competition time and again lost market share?  Facebook did many things right and their rise didn’t happen by chance. What is most notable to me is the path of continues improvement and incremental changes Facebook made to improve their platform including opening it up to application developers (smart move) once it launched. This is in sharp contrast to the closed environment with lack of enhancements and strategic improvements Friendster (just typing this name gives me the creeps) and Myspace took.  In essence what you do with the platform and the changes and enhancements that are made once you launch are actually more important than what you launch with.

We are extremely proud of the current state of the Giantnerd platform and our launch but we are not naive. We have a lot of work to do and need to make the categorical improvements that will catapult Giantnerd ahead of our competition.

Giantnerd has a lot of exciting features that will launch in the next few weeks. We will simultaneously be working on both stabilizing the commerce experience and making the platform more social. From a best practices ecommerce perspective keep an eye out for improved search and navigation and a more efficient checkout process. From a social standpoint we are working on more intuitive ways for members to interact and participate in the social shopping experience.

In yesterday’s 4 hour marathon whiteboard meeting, (@jefflesser made the brilliant decision to supply us in the 25^th hour with skittles to keep our sugar levels high enough to stay focused. ) we detailed a plan to make incremental improvements to the groups, Q and A wall and email notification functionality. We discussed a lot of ways to improve the platform but in the end, our highest priority items are ways to increase participation in the Gianterd community.

I will conclude this post with what is most important to our decision making process at Giantnerd. Nerds, what features do you want? We need your feedback so we can work tirelessly to make Giantnerd the webs best social shopping platform.

With Love,

The Head Nerd

@GiantnerdCEO