Pek Pongpaet

7 Tips To Hosting an Awesome Hackathon

2013-01-24T02:27:26Z

So you are thinking of hosting a hackathon but you’ve never done it before or could use some tips. I’ve been a part of many hackathons as both participant, spectator and judge. Some hackathons were great, some were so so and some were just awful. Here are some things to consider when holding a hackathon.

Connectivity One thing we NEVER want to worry about at a hackathon is connectivity and bandwidth. That’s a given. We should only have to worry about our hackathon project, not trying to find a wifi signal or futzing around with the Wifi password. Along with that, there should be plenty of outlets. We really hate going to hackathons and having to fight for power outlets.
Clear schedule / agenda We want to know when things begin, when code freeze occurs and judging takes place. When lunch and dinner is served is also very important.
Prizes What’s going to motivate a developer to give up his weekend to code on your API? I would venture developers who come to hackathons already have side projects. They probably command a decent salary or consulting rate. Prizes have to be compelling or worthwhile. Having multiple prizes also helps so it’s not a winner take all situation.
Multiple categories/judging criteria Having multiple categories for prizes is another great motivator. There could be different prizes for Best Overall, Best Design, Best Mobile, etc etc. This way someone might feel like they might have a shot at winning if one of the categories matches their strong suit.
Make sure it works If you are holding a hackathon where developers use your API or code library works. The hackathon is NOT the place to be debugging it. The developers are not there to find your bugs. It should just work. Along with that, make sure that the API key and whatnot are readily available.
Good food Pizza and red bull are great but many people I run into have special dietary needs. Some are vegan, some are vegetarian. Often times these developers are totally neglected when it comes to their dietary restrictions. Make sure you take care of these folks. Make sure you also have enough food. On especially long hackathons, snacks are always welcome.
Clear/accessible location People hate getting lost. Make sure to provide adequate instructions to finding the location. It also helps to have signs saying “Hackathon” pointing in the right direction. If the location is locked down because it’s the weekend (as hackathons are often held on weekends), then make sure that there’s someone to let people in.

ShelfLuv PostMortem

2012-10-29T05:01:05Z

ShelfLuv launched over two years ago and I’m sad to say the time has come to shut the service down. It was a very simple idea, to be a better way to search for books. I was a very voracious reader then and wanted to create a very nice interface to find and show off the books I’ve read. A little later (like 6 months), I revamped the site and made it so you could not only create a page you could share of your books but could view a feed of people’s reading activities.

It had some great coverage early on. The site looked nice. I was pretty proud of it from a design perspective, but there were many problems with it. There was no real traction or usage. It was probably up for longer than it needed to be, mostly because I was too lazy to shut it down. It was easier to just do nothing.
However not all is lost. I learned some great things from it.

Final Stats

Total Registered Users: 3,290
Bookshelves Created: 712
Books Added to Shelves: 30,046
Books Searched: 1,209,627
Comments Created: 1,345
Users Followed: 1,573

We used Facebook registration to simplify the onboarding. That probably was both good and bad. Some people do not like to use their Facebook account to sign up for services.

Users added about 10 books to their shelves on average. In reality it was a bit more skewed. I myself had over 300 books added. Some users had even more than that. Basically it was one of those 80/20 rules. Most users signed up and did very little while others got it and got into it.

One of the right things I did was letting people search without having to have an account. As you can see, people did search for books. People weren’t required to login or register to immediately use the beautiful infinite scroll instant search. Also, because we made it “instant”, it would do the searches as you typed, thus lowering the barrier to searching even more.

So what went wrong? If I had to pick one thing it would be we moved too slowly. It took a long time between just having instant search and launching the profile features and feed. We didn’t iterate fast enough. There were many reasons for that. For one I didn’t have much in terms of tech. Although I did all the front end coding and design, I didn’t have a full-stack developer on my team. Out-sourcing that took time and money.

The other thing that was obvious in hindsight was that people just don’t consume books as much or as fast. Not as many people consume books compared to people who post photos for example. The turn around time to consume “content” and produce a piece of content is just long. If I had come up with ways for people to engage with the site other than adding books and commenting, people might have interacted more.

Your App That Nobody Uses Doesn’t Need a New Design

2012-09-17T15:21:57Z

Every so often I get approached by someone who wants me to redesign their app / website thinking that will be the solution to their problems. They’ve gotten as far as getting their idea realized, launched and it’s tumbleweeds. Nobody uses the app; nobody cares. They get frustrated and think a fresh new look will draw in the crowd. More often than not, it’s mostly a cosmetic redesign – or pretty-ing it up. I hate to break it to these people, but for most cases, a new design will not do much.

The reason it will not do much is because usually the problem doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not people think the app looks pretty or not. It’s usually a more fundamental problem than that. If you were to judge a site like craigslist, reddit or lolcats by their design, they would fare pretty poorly but they are all top sites.

When nobody uses an app, it comes down to several issues, none of which have to do with design. The number one reason is it doesn’t sufficiently solve a problem. Maybe the problem isn’t big enough or painful enough. Maybe the app doesn’t provide enough delight. Also it could be that the app isn’t that big an improvement over existing solutions. Once people get into a habit of using something, it’s really hard to dislodge that incumbent unless it’s significantly better.

Another reason is maybe not enough people know about your product. A fresh new design will not help with that either. You actually have a marketing problem, not a design problem. There are so many web and iphone apps out there now that it’s just noise to the common person. There are actually over 500,000 apps in the iPhone App store right now. That makes it really hard for your app to rise above the rest.

If you get past all this and still nobody uses your app, maybe you do have a design problem and a fresh coat of paint isn’t going to help either. Maybe using your app is too painful, meaning there are too many steps, too much friction. By that I mean maybe your app makes the user jump through hoops to derive value whether it’s to produce content or consume content. In this case, in order to solve the problem, we really need to understand user behavior first and foremost. What are users actually doing on the site or app? Where are they giving up on your app and dropping off? If we don’t understand and know this for a fact, we really don’t know what we are solving for or how to fix the problem. What you need here, is not a new “design” but data and lots of it.

One of the first things I recommend doing is gathering intel. Figure out what users are doing. You can do this several ways. Install a tool like Olark and talk to your users. You will learn so much. Pain points will crop up over and over. Observe your users. Do this by simply asking people to test your software and stand behind them watching what they do. Resist the urge to guide the users or tell them what to do. Let them figure it out or struggle. Look at the analytics. See where people are leaving your page / site. Use tools to figure out if people are performing the desired behavior on the page they are on. If people leave, figure out WHY they left. Did they find what they needed and leave? Did they give up in frustration? Did they find out that this wasn’t what they were looking for?

Let’s illustrate some concepts with an example. I’ve changed the topic of the site to protect the innocent. There’s a certain recipe site a client wants to improve. People don’t seem to be spending too much time on the site. People browse recipes, find something and leave. Looking at the recipe page itself, it’s easy to see why. They have one call to action – add recipe to My Recipes. That’s it. People look for something they want, find it, get what they need and leave. One of the first thing I suggested is to take a page off Youtube. On the right hand side, they have recommend videos or related videos. Perhaps the recipe site should include recipes that go with the recipe they are on. Or maybe show other recipes based on similar ingredients on the side. That way, when users come in, see what they want, they might see something else they might like.

Another reason why the recipe site is languishing could be because they also only have a few recipes. Maybe people come and cannot find what they want and leave. There’s just not a lot of content there. It’s like going to a party and seeing nobody there. A redesign would make it much worse – now you have a fancy party that looks dead. Look at the analytics; what happens when they search? Do they search and leave? Do they search and try to look through all the search results? In this case, their efforts would be better spent seeding the site with more recipes.

If you require your users to sign up, how many are abandoning the sign up process? Perhaps you need to rethink the sign up form. Figure out what’s the bare minimum information you need to create an account and then let the user play with your app ASAP. Maybe you can even switch it around and let the user play with your app before ever needing to create an account.

In short, when wanting a new design, it’s important to understand why you need that new design and whether or not that will actually solve your problem. The solution could be as simple as moving things around or adding some relevant content to keep the user engaged.

Grads: Want a job? Do a project.

2012-05-28T16:04:17Z

So you just graduated and are looking for a job. The problem is your classmates just graduated as well and they are just as qualified as you if not more so and they are also looking. What do you? If you really want to show your employers what you are capable of, you create a project for yourself. If you are a writer, start writing; if you are an illustrator, start illustrating, if you are a designer, start designing; if you are an MBA – well I don’t have all the answers.

The point is instead of talking about what you can do on your resume, just show people what you do. Of course this is going to be a problem for people who can talk a big game but can’t deliver the goods, but that’s the point. You are trying to separate yourself from that crowd.

Every time I launch a new project, I always get a flurry of job offers. When you take on a project, that is infinitely more tangible than a line in the resume. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a project’s gotta be worth more than that. Employers can see what you have to offer instead of having to infer it from a piece of paper, among a huge pile of papers.

So I tell you, recent grads, if you want a job, starting putting out work.

What Do People Do On Pinstagram?

2012-05-07T22:40:54Z

One of the coolest things about having a popular site like Pinstagram is the ability to get meaningful data about user behavior. We integrated MixPanel to track every type of user activity including any clicks, and scrolls. Without getting into actual numbers, but rather percentages, we can see some really cool user behavior.

43% of all activities are scrolls
16% of activities are zooms
15% of activities are tab clicks
12% of activities are likes
1.3% of activities are comments
1.7% of activities are searches

Another great data point is that our users average about 10 scrolls each. By scroll I mean, they reached the end of the page, and we present them with another set of photos. That’s equivalent to 10 pages views. I doubt that if instead of an infinite scroll UI, we had next page buttons, that we would have had 10 page views per user. What this means is that the infinite scroll paradigm is really low friction. People don’t mind scrolling down, but pressing buttons is somehow more work.

Likes make up 12% of all activities. But comments make up a measly 1 percent. The ratio makes sense to me since Liking requires a click and requires some effort compared to just scrolling. Commenting requires even more effort and thus is an order of magnitude less than Liking.

Go With What You’ve Got

2012-05-05T23:07:38Z

There seems to be a very hacker culture here in the Valley that favors the builders and developers and engineers are basically impossible to find. They are put on a pedestal of sorts and rightly so to the extent that they can build things – they can make your idea a reality.

However I would encourage people who have website / app ideas who do not have the ability to program or code not to let that stop them. There’s so much more to having a product or service apart from the ability to code it up.

I’m a designer. Everything starts with the design for me. If I have an idea, I start designing it. I code some – mostly just the front end – the stuff people see. I don’t necessarily have the ability to code it all from end to end. I don’t let that stop me. I’ve launched a ton of sites despite my lack of backend coding skills. How have I done that? Usually I’ve managed to convince people to help me – either by paying them or partnering with them.

Brandon agreed to help me with Pinstagram only AFTER he saw what I had designed and built and that it was good. If all I did was just talk about it, I sincerely doubt he would have taken me seriously and that he would have been so enthusiastic to help. Once he saw that my vision of the product had potential and I had put skin in the game, then he was on board.

In my journey as an entrepreneur, I’ve seen many ideas and businesses take form, and they weren’t necessarily started by tech people who “built” stuff. Groupon started from The Point, but the initial version of Groupon itself was supposedly a WordPress plugin. Dabble was founded by a couple on non-techies and I love it. I love that they started out with just a WordPress site – and the sign up form was a WordPress contact form plugin. By the time I talked to them they were having classes everyday with people paying $20 a class. They had no tech.

I love the folks at DealDecor. They have what can be best described as a Woot/Groupon for furniture. They were moving tons of furniture by the time I talked to them and they still didn’t have a tech team. Amazing!

It can be really depressing to see all these young tech folks from MIT, and Stanford, or exGooglers and exFacebookers come up with an idea, get lots of funding if you are not a tech person and want to pursue the same dream. However I’ve also seen nontechnical people prove the business before they even had tech. I’ve seen business analytists able to raise money from their business plans; I’ve seen writers leverage their internet fame to fund their ideas.

Leverage the skillset you have. If you can code, great – code. If you can design, then design. Use the skills that you have as a starting point, a foundation to what you need to build. Use that to show others the idea has merit and rally people to your cause. If you think you have a good idea, just start doing what you know to make it a reality.

Pinterest + Instagram = Pinstagram

2012-05-02T14:11:12Z

So what do you get when you combine a billion dollar company (Instagram) with a $500 million company (Pinterest)?

I love using Instagram. The problem with Instagram however is their web experience is non-existent. I’ve been frustrated that the only way to consume Instagram is through my iPhone. Lately, Pinterest and Instagram have been getting a lot of press because of Instagram’s 1 billion dollar purchase by Facebook and Pinterest’s hypergrowth.

My cofounder Brandon and I were having a discussion on startup pitches, especially the ones that go “we’re an X for Y” and thought a hilarious VC pitch would be “we’re a Pinterest for Instagram”. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. I liked Instagram, and this was a real need for me. There was nothing like it out there that I would use. So last weekend I decided I would make it a weekend project.

I spent a few hours putting something together using my design and front end skills. I was able to show the popular Instagram feed using their API in a Pinterest-like UI. I showed this to Brandon which quickly convinced him this was a good idea and together we started clobbering together the project. By the end of the weekend we had something that basically worked. You could log in with your Instagram id and view your feeds, your photos, what’s popular and search.

We found that Pinstagram was really useful. I actually consume Instagram a lot more through this. It was an easier experience and I can see a lot more photos faster. Brandon told someone the idea and they wondered why anyone would want to use such a service but as soon as they tried it, they immediately realized that it was very useful.

So without further ado, it is my pleasure to present you:

pinstagram.com

The site does integrate with Instagram and will require that you have a valid Instagram account.

For those of you interested in how it was made. It’s a very simple Ruby and Sinatra app. It doesn’t even have a database. The front end was built on Twitter Bootstrap. Haters can hate me for not building the html from scratch but I prefer to build my house using off-the-shelf tools instead of having to go and chop wood in the forest. The Pinterest style layout was built using Masonry, a very useful jQuery plugin. All this of course was also made possible using the Instagram API which was very well documented and easy to use.

Some details of the controls and what happens when you hover over a photo

Top 10 Quotes from Mark Cuban

2012-03-05T17:31:42Z

I recently read Mark Cuban’s book “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It”. It was a short read but full of valuable nuggets of insight on his approach to business. I was also pleasantly surprised to hear that he’s been on the show Shark Tank which I also enjoy.

Here are some great quotes I highlighted from the book:

Lesson #1: Always ask yourself how someone could preempt your products or service.

Always run your business like you are going to be competing with biggest technology companies in your

The only thing any entrepreneur, salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.

Everyone has got the will to win; it’s only those with the will to prepare.

Win the battles you are in before you take on new battles.

Treat your customers like they own you. Because they do.

Moral of the story: Make your product easier to buy than your competition…

The best salespeople are the ones who put themselves in their customer’s shoes and provide a solution

Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies.

It’s not in the dreaming, it’s in the doing.

MVT: Minimum Viable Team

2012-03-04T22:17:15Z

There’s a pretty big movement in the tech startup world now around the idea of a lean startup. Terms like customer development, continuous deployment, and mvp (minimum viable product) are thrown around. MVP refers to the most bare bones version of a product you can build and release and still call it a product. The idea is to not spend two years locked in a closet building the “perfect” version of the site, do a massive launch, only to find out nobody wants it and it doesn’t solve anyone’s problems. Build the most basic version, put it out there in front of customers and see if the thing has legs and iterate.

I think the MVP is a great idea and eliminates waste. What a lot of people don’t talk about is team makeup. What’s the minimum required amount of people and what roles do you need in order to build a successful web product.

Like everything in life, it depends. There are also a lot of counter examples that I think it’s hard to make a generalized statement. In Apple’s case, the minimum was an engineer and a business guy: Woz and Jobs. I would argue though that the particular business guy also had an eye for product and that’s not something you always see. Which brings me to my point.

More and more, I see the really successful ones require you to have strengths in these 3 roles: technology, design, and sales/marketing. These are in no particular order. Without technology, you can’t make the product work. Without design, it’s not intuitive, easy to use, and aesthetically pleasing. Without sales or marketing, nobody knows about your product or you can’t get people to buy it. I’m not saying you can make a successful company if you don’t have those 3 components, but it will sure make it a lot easier and increase your odds.

You might say, Larry and Sergei were two engineers and Google isn’t exactly known for design but we’re talking about edge cases here. Not everyone can be like them. A lot of developer types would like to think that they are the MVT. Being able to build the product is just one leg of the successful stool. Sure you can sit on that stool, but it’s wobbly. Design is another leg of the stool and I’m glad to see that nowadays, user experience and design has become a key component in many companies. That’s still only two legs and is not stable. I think the biggest and most crucial piece of the ingredient is sales. Sales is what makes everything run.

Being on the design and tech side, I’ve always thought that if I could just build it, people would use it and somehow it would build on itself. I’ve come to realize that organic viral growth is the exception and not the norm. The antidote is of course great marketing and or sales. I don’t think enough people realize how important sales is in the tech industry. People giving you money to make their problem go away is absolute validation to what you are doing.

And there you have it – the three legs of the stool that is the basis of a successful startup.

How To Get a Technical Guy To Work For You

2012-03-01T17:32:54Z

I recently went to a networking meetup and met someone who had an app idea and was looking for a technical guy to be a partner or a cofounder. Invariably people chime in and say that you should go to the Rails meetups or some other technical ones. You’ll definitely find technical guys there but I think that’s just scratching the surface of the problem.

The real problem is convincing them to work for/with you. There seems to be a real shortage of developers and designers, especially in the bay area. There are so many exciting startups that have traction to work for not to mention the giants like the Facebooks and Googles. Those companies are offering great salaries with great benefits. On top of that, any able developer can apply to the numerous startup incubators and try to get their own idea off the ground. With so many appealing choices open to them, the idea of working for an idea guy for a few measly points is not going to be attractive unless you can show why they are more likely to succeed working or partnering with you.

How do we do that?
Prove the business. I love entrepreneurs who validate the business before investing a penny on tech. One great example is Dabble. People can take any class offered on Dabble for $20. Anybody who has a skill can offer to teach classes. When the site first started out this was a simple WordPress site with a sign up form widget. People sign up to teach classes and people sign up to take classes but there was no magician behind the curtains. When my friend Jessica Lybeck and her business partner started this site, they didn’t immediately hire a programmer to build the system. They just used WordPress and a WordPress plugin. A different entrepreneur would have build a pitch deck before starting this. Another entrepreneur would have probably spent a lot of money building the site so that people can sign up to teach and learn and built out this whole system.

Presell. I also love it when entrepreneurs have clients lined up to use the product. This maybe because they were presold based on a presentation or marketing material or they signed a letter of intent to use the product. Even better, sell – meaning get their money first before you even have the product – that’s the ultimate validation. They want it so bad they’ll pay you to make it happen. Sites like Kickstarter are great for something like this – it gets people to commit their dollars if they really like your idea.

Be open about your idea. This is probably the number one turn off for developers – when people come up and say I’ll give you a piece of the action only if you sign an NDA. News flash – your ideas are not new or original. I can’t tell you how many times people tell me an idea as if it was the next best thing since sliced bread and I tell them – oh have you heard of [X] app or [X] website? Do your homework people. Know your space inside and out. Who are the players, who are the competitors, what’s the market etc. Don’t worry about people stealing your idea. They are too busy doing their own idea.