Paul Miller

After some initial skepticism, I’m now much more into the lean startup way of doing things. Although I’d read a bit about it beforehand, it was one of our investors at School of Everything who really pushed us to follow the methodology rigorously. At first we found it really difficult but after a year of [...]

There are some bits of starting a company that everybody has to do, no matter whether their aims are to change the world or not. I thought I’d just write quickly how we went about doing the legal setup, banking and accounting for School of Everything because when we started out, I had no idea [...]

This is roughly what I said at Be Bettr on Friday 14th January 2011 at the Conway Hall in London. Thanks to Matt Jukes for organising! 1) When we hear the word education most of us think of a classroom, of a teacher standing at the front, of kids sitting at rows of desks. Perhaps [...]

Choosing who to work with is the most important decision in startup life. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s almost impossible to start something up on your own and so it really is worth spending time finding great people to work with very early on. There will be no formal interviews, CV’s won’t be [...]

When you’ve defined your problem, have a short description of your solution and you’ve started getting positive feedback from real people, it can be helpful to build a prototype of how your solution might work. The key thing here is that you’re not yet building the technology you will finally use. You’re using things that [...]

We’ve just started helping the first cohort of Bethnal Green Ventures projects and I’m using it as an excuse to write down some of the things I’ve learned about social startups over the past couple of years. It starts with a hunch You start the process of developing a startup with hunches about both the [...]

Paul Graham is a bit of a hero of mine as I think he is for many people who have had a go at creating a start-up. Not necessarily for his track record (which is also brilliant) but for his ability to put his finger on what’s important, particularly in the essays on his site: [...]

We’ve been going back to basics at School of Everything as we think about what to build next. Part of the process is creating a mini-manifesto that we’ll use to help us make decisions about the technology we build – here’s the work-in-progress version. It’s an evolution of these values we wrote down in the [...]

We’ve been doing a lot of work over the last few days understanding the people who come to School of Everything. We currently have just under 100,000 unique visitors per month who mainly come from Google search (about 85%). Here’s the demographic information that Google give us about our visitors: This tallies up with responses [...]