It's About the People, Not the Product

I was recently interviewed by Loreta of Enter Silicon Valley about the humble beginnings of ZURB and the hardships and mistakes that have helped us grow over the past 13 years. Loreta asked a number of questions, one of them hit close to home — one piece of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Focus on people, not the product. It's funny, but many young entrepreneurs still think that their business is about the thing — the product — the features they are building. In reality, your business is not about the product, it's about the people.

Most of us occasionally get carried away, focusing solely on feature lists and the product we're building. People don't buy products — they buy solutions and they buy outcomes. How does your product benefit them? How does it help them achieve their goals or improve their lifestyle? It's about the people, not the product.

Which brings us back to ZURB's relentless focus on people and our purpose — Help People Design for People. We've been helping people do that in numerous ways: through our consulting services; through sharing tips, ideas, resources, and plugins; through speaking and teaching people the skills they need to build products; through our suite of product design apps; and, most recently, through a job board to help people find talent to build great products.

But enough of that — let's get on with ZURBnews!

Helping People Prototype Faster For Any Device

Let's face it, the landscape of devices is changing rapidly — new mobile phones, new tablets, and other Web-enabled devices are being sold every day. Traditional web design, with 960px Photoshop templates and comps, no longer applies.

People are craving a coding framework that supports a workflow that looks at designs in different sizes and orientations, and can quickly translate them into something functional.

We released Foundation — an easy to use, powerful, and flexible framework for building prototypes and production code on any kind of device to help with this very issue. We built it after we realized other existing front-end code and frameworks weren't up to the task.

See How Foundation Works

Help Take the "Suck" Out of Websites

There are 525,998,344 websites in the world as of this month. 22,000,000 new websites went online in October 2011 alone! Believe it or not the majority of websites out there just plain old suck. We've seen too many websites bite the dust, we decided we had enough, something needed to be done. We have launched a service where designers, usability experts, and everyday people who are passionate about making a web a better place can sign up to take usability tests and help improve the websites of some of the biggest brands out there.

Enroll to Improve the Web

Helping People Hire Design Talent

It's tough to find awesome product designers, especially on jobs sites such as Craigslist, Monster and HotJobs. Every week we have someone we know ask us if we can recommend a great designer for them to hire internally. We've been searching for designers to hire here at ZURB for years as well. Great designers are simply very hard to find.

We've accumulated a large following of talented designers who can help many companies design their products. We want to make it easier for companies to find those folks. This is why we launched ZURBjobs job board. It's currently in private release and we already have a number of postings on the board. Check out some of the latest ones below.

Fog Creek is Looking For an Interaction Designer

UserVoice is Looking For a Graphic Designer

Justin.tv is Looking For an UI Designer

MediaFire is Looking For a Web Designer

Check Out Other Listings

Playing With the New Lytro Camera

Our friends from Lytro stopped by to let us play with the world’s first light field camera which will only hit the stores in early 2012. It was exciting to play around with this slick new camera, as we discussed it's design, their target market and the upcoming features currently in the pipeline. The ZURB team took tons of silly pictures and had a blast hanging out with the Lytro folks.

See the Lytro Pictures and Camera Details

Our Soapbox Talks Are Getting Crowded

It's fun to see the soapbox series grow over the years. When we first started our soapbox talks, we held them in our Lion's Den and had about 10 guests attending them. Nowadays folks are packing our offices to learn the takeaways from failures and hardships of entrepreneurs, designers and angel investors.

More than 220 people showed up for the soapbox with Ron Conway, the godfather of angel investing, in October. Ron gave lots of advice. One takeaway that hit close to home is the advice to avoid angel funding in the early stages of product development. He advised entrepreneurs to bootstrap it for as long as they can (even if they have to use their credit cards).

Dave McClure, founding partner at 500 start-ups, gave some stellar advice on how entrepreneurs can avoid being in the 75% bucket of folks who run out of money without having any material outcome.

Listen to Takeaways From the Latest Soapbox Talks

Stumping for Design

We had the pleasure of speaking at SEOmoz MozCon not too long ago on the psychology of web users and the patterns that drive action from website visitors. We illustrated how marketers and designers can think beyond a single landing page and earn powerful bumps in sales through conversion actions by sharing what we've learned from working with start-ups these past 13 years.

See Where We'll be Speaking Next

Let People Take a Joyride of Your App

As product designers, we want people to get the most out of our apps. This can be difficult when adding new features or iterating on designs and functionality. People can feel frustrated or lost and might stop using the app. What if there was a way to make sure that people understand your app and use it to the fullest?

We released Joyride precisely for this very reason. Joyride is a jQuery plugin which lets you take users on a custom tour of your app, pointing out what they need to know without stumbling in the dark.

Check Out How Joyride Works

We're Hiring!

We're always on the lookout for talented people who can help us build great things. What we need is always changing, but it's our philosophy to hire people, not roles. Check out our lists of full-time jobs and part-time gigs. Think you've got the chops?

See What We're Looking For