Elise Kovi from SoftArtisans interviewed me for their Women in Tech series. Reposting here with their permission:

This is the ninth in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame, at the very least, statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. This time around we chatted with Abby Fichtner (t|ln), better known as Hacker Chick for her devoted work with Boston startups. Recently named Founding Executive Director of hack/reduce, a non-profit big data hacker space, Abby is in constant search of shaking up conventional wisdom and finding out what lies beyond. If reading her story inspires you to share yours, please feel free to email me.

Hi! I’m Abby Fichtner – although more people probably know me as Hacker Chick. I write The Hacker Chick Blog on how we can push the edge on what’s possible, and I’m about to launch a non-profit hacker space for big data called hack/reduce.

Prior to this, I was Microsoft’s Evangelist for Startups where I had the most incredible experience of working with hundreds of startups. I’ve been alternately called the cheerleader and the guardian angel for Boston startups. I love this community and am super excited to launch hack/reduce to help Boston continue solving the really hard problems and keep our title as the most innovative city in the world.

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After an amazing couple of years at Microsoft as their Evangelist for Startups, I found myself ready to move on. To step it up. I fell in love with Boston’s startup community and wanted to do more.

I spent months trying to figure out what my next thing would be. Talking to to people, brainstorming ideas. I wanted to help the community – but how? What did I know? What could I possibly do as an individual that would make more impact than what I could do with the resources of a big company behind me?

And then, when I figured it out, it was so obvious:

I need to build a hacker space!!

And so, I’m crazy excited to be launching hack/reduce. hack/reduce will be Boston’s big data hacker space with the mission of helping Boston create the talent and technologies that will shape our future in what I believe will be a very (big) data-driven future. A non-profit that I’m creating in partnership with the State of Massachusetts and a kick ass board, whose sole mission will be to help Boston retain it’s title as the most innovative city in the world.

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Eric Paley of Founder Collective facilitated an awesome panel at the 2012 Nantucket Conference around startups whose businesses are built on the contributions not of their employees but of people in the communities they’ve created: uTest (testers in-the-wild for software), Skillshare (learn anything from anyone anywhere), and GrabCAD (GitHub for engineers).

In each case, without their community (testers, teachers or engineers, respectively) – there is no business.

Getting the Community Engaged

The general rule, per uTest’s CEO Doron Reuveni, is 99:1. You tend to get 90% stalkers (“just watching”), 9% of your users do a little, and then you have 1% that are really active. If you want a thriving community, you need to tap this 1% and really engage them. uTest’s top testers proudly sport uTest t-shirts, meet up at conferences, and help spread the word.

“Find these guys and they’ll lead the way for everyone.”

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You’ve got your vision of what you want to build.

You’ve also got a ton of unknowns and uncertainty. You know you can’t just go build it and hope they will come. You have to do it iteratively. Put a little bit out there, see how people react, figure out what to do next.

But where do you start? How much is enough to start getting feedback?

Josh Seiden gave this awesome talk at Boston’s Lean Startup Circle on replacing requirements with hypotheses. And it occurred to me that what he’s really talking about is hypothesis-driven development, which I love.

In Agile, we drive our development with tests. We say, “okay, I know what the product needs to do, so let me write the test first.” It’s an automatic check. If I accidentally develop the feature incorrectly, the test will fail and I’ll get immediate feedback that the feature isn’t ready yet.

But what about in a startup where we’ve only got guesses for what the product should do? Then the tests should not be whether features are implemented correctly. Who cares if nobody wants them?

What we do care about is creating a successful business. So those tests aren’t for if the product works, they’re for whether it’s the right product. Now we’ve got an automated check. We don’t waste our time & money building something until we’ve validated it’s the right thing to build.

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