Now what?

Soundboy: Towards a unified theory of starting up

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 21:44:06 -0700

Soundboy: Towards a unified theory of starting up:

Wired asked me to write something for the last issue about start-ups, aka that ol’ heartache.

Here’s my attempt at a unified theory for starting up:

1. Find the people you believe you could build something amazing with. These are your cofounders.

2. Find something you love deeply that…

Drewbot: The Difference Between Amazon and Apple

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 15:12:47 -0800

Drewbot: The Difference Between Amazon and Apple:

dbreunig:

Let the Kindle Fire reviews wash over you and you’ll notice a theme: the price is mentioned early and often. The price is employed as a caveat for both detractions and compliments.

Reading these reviews has helped me realize, or at least find the words to describe, the fundamental…

The $99 "Killer" Tablet

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 09:33:11 -0700

The $99 "Killer" Tablet:

parislemon:

Horace Dediu:

For the iPad to be vulnerable, it has to be way better than the mainstream users’ needs. Which asks the question of what needs are being served. If it’s book reading, it probably is more than good enough. But if it’s replacing a laptop computer, certainly not. Being too feeble is the most common complaint about the iPad. Being a bloated over-functioned and overly complex solution looking for a problem is definitely not on buyer’s list of concerns.

This is a great point as to why the “$99 tablet” won’t hurt the iPad. To make a tablet that cheap, it has to be built cheaply — it will have to lack some of the functionality that the iPad has. And the iPad doesn’t yet have all the functionality that everyone wants.

Yes, someone like Amazon could sell their tablet with razor-thin margins — or at a loss — to push their other products and services, but not even they could afford to sell it at a massive loss to take the price down to $99.

If someone does make a tablet that can be sold for $99 (and not in the HP TouchPad fire-sale sense) I can guarantee one thing: it will suck.

littlebigdetails: YouTube - Nyan Cat Progress Indicator on...

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 11:54:18 -0700

littlebigdetails:

YouTube - Nyan Cat Progress Indicator on YouTube

/via @smorgasbrod

See it in action here

"Just make people better at something they want to be better at. When your goals and your user’s..."

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 22:55:40 -0700

“Just make people better at something they want to be better at. When your goals and your user’s goals are truly aligned, you don’t need pixie dust. Don’t out-spend, don’t out-friend, and please don’t out-badge. There is a world of difference between helping someone *appear* more awesome and helping them actually BE more awesome.”

- Kathy Sierra

via bustr : Amber : Diana Kimball

(via msg)

The power of networking - Kevin Rose interviews Brian Wong

Sat, 14 May 2011 20:39:52 -0700

Really enjoyed the recent Foundation interview with Brian Wong. Here are some of the notes from it:

Counter Strike was a big help for Brian’s design skills….eye hand mouse coordination helped with his speed of design.
Brian seems like a master at the cold-call email. Just email and get to talk to people, for any amount of time, doesn’t even have to be about stuff related to your startup.
When guessing email addresses, put your best guess in the to:, and all the other guesses in the bcc line.
Don’t ask for what you want directly
He wanted to see the Valley with his own eyes, to understand what made it special….and his take away is that people “don’t come to SF to build a tool, they come to start revolutions.”
“Leveling up” is why people get sucked into games How can we augment the game achievement?
People who succeeded broke rules by not knowing what they’re doing (ie: the shitty poker player). Most of the things he was able to accomplish was because he had no choice.
For the 1st few months of the biz, just sit and listen with people who’ve done it before.
Don’t hide your authentic excitement around a business. Be grateful. When people see your honesty, they want to help.

"Our vision was to be reality TV celebrities"

Thu, 12 May 2011 22:35:00 -0700

Here are some of my notes from Justin Kan’s talk about the making of SocialCam at tonight’s Lean Startup Circle. They don’t cover all the things Justin discussed, just stuff that caught my attention. Full video of the talk is available here.

History:

They started with a live broadcast app for justin.tv, but nobody on their mobile was watching the videos live. People’s time of posting and the audience’s watching would rarely ever naturally sync up.
They noticed mobile users were only going live for a few mins at a time (vs. longer duration for desktop users)…and the type of content they were creating (with family/friends in them) wasn’t suitable to be shared to a global audience. Users weren’t comfortable sharing family/friend videos with youtube. This is interesting because some people are wondering which sharing dynamic will win out, 1:1 or 1:many - but I think it really depends on the type of content being created/shared that will determine which structure is best.
The Justin.tv team was so quick to build stuff without any proven market or need that it took them a long time to actually discover a “real world” problem (ie: other people wanted to broadcast their life, not just watch Justin’s).

Building SocialCam:

When it came time to build Socialcam they applied their lessons learned from Justin.tv. First up, they didn’t start building stuff until they had specs. Another interesting point - you don’t often hear about spec / requirements as part of today’s startup development, but it’s still relevant and can help save time down the road.
Justin himself was a self proclaimed shitty coder and decent web developer…and he didn’t know jack about mobile development.
His lack of knowledge about mobile development turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it forced him to use his time thinking about what the app was going to be about…to define a mission statement for the app’s purpose. In general, they wanted to build a “social camera”, hence the name.
Their team consisted of:

-2 iphone engineers
-1 android engineer
-1 product designer
-1 backend engineer
-1 project manager, aka cheerleader / editor (Justin)
-Other peeps on helped with marketing, server set up, etc…
-Total of 6 full-time people over 4 months

Their one designer worked on both OS’s and the website, which in hindsight was probably asking for too much, spreading design work across three platforms.
After defining the app’s purpose, they thought about what features they’d need to enable the app’s goals and deliver the type of engagement they wanted.
Their specs covered:

-specific features and how’d they’d work
-user flow mockups
-a rough cut of screens
-then higher fidelity versions
-and then development came in at this point

Spec/requirement writing took about the first quarter of total project time
Some of their keys to getting the product out quickly:

-they invested heavily in writing out a spec
-they had everyone on the team use the product a lot. they did a weekly team meeting where everyone on the team had to contribute a video, and the whole team watched the best ones.
-they had their prod designer engaged early, providing lots of revisions/high fidelity mocks.

Marketing:

When doing Justin.tv, they believed that PR didn’t matter. Early on, press was positive cause of their unique story. When attention wore off or turned negative, they didn’t really do much to address it.
With Socialcam, they started to write blog posts about the product even before development was done…and submitted them to hackernews and techcrunch.
They put together a calendar of 8 weeks before launch. each week had multiple promos going on. 50% got no attention at all. But overall they were successful at generating a lot of buzz before launch.
They had expensive promos and cheap promos. Some of the expensive ones: planned to give out a trip to fiji for best video at SXSW, made expensive promo video (which he really thought was wasted money). They had a launch party, but in a twist, people at the party had to use the app while at the party.
They have a running tally of how much money they’ve wasted over the years.

Distribution:

One of their key product iterations was around tagging.
In general, they wanted to have FB photos-esque tagging for videos, but at first it wasn’t a required step.
Making tagging users in the video a required step had a huge impact on distribution. Users could discover the app by being notified that they were tagged in a video. That’s how they were able to build distribution into the app experience organically.

Product vision:

With Justin.tv, they didn’t think too deeply about their overall vision. They weren’t trying to ride or create the “live video” wave. Instead, their “vision was to become reality TV celebrities.”

Android vs. iPhone development:

1 developer on android, 2 on iPhone (based on who was available at their company).
Their iPhone design was better than Android’s cause that’s what their designer used as his primary phone.
For android, it was easier to get stuff out. Easier to do beta releases and testing through android.
But iPhone feature development has actually pulled ahead, despite Android’s easier test/release cycle.
iPhone usage is still pretty dominant (60-75% of downloads)

Is Silicon Valley a meritocracy or rigged by insiders? Yes.

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:12:00 -0700

The other day something obvious (to some) and shocking (to others) happened. Mike Arrington “updated his investment philosophy“…which is to say that he decided his interests were no longer conflicted, and he was going to more openly invest in companies that he and his staff were covering on Techcrunch.

No surprise right? Arrington’s had a buddy-buddy relationship with lots of founders/companies that have received coverage on Techcrunch, so it makes sense that he’d invest in the people he knows best.

But other journalists are up in arms (or jealous?), calling it a “bombshell”. Traditional media people have known not to go near conflict of interest situations, for many good reasons, and they’re surprised/upset that Techcrunch seems to just walk right through the imaginary hurdles in place.

Alas, Techcrunch (and specifically Arrington) have never (admittedly) played by the traditional rules - which should have been obvious the first time TC reported on “off the record” incidents.

Here’s the thing about the Valley, it’s both a meritocracy and a good ole boys network. Unknown engineers can burst onto the scene becoming billionaires and insiders can abuse their personal relationships to make similarly-sized piles of money via early access to investment opportunities (only it’s not called insider trading because so few of today’s dot coms go public anymore).

It’s inspiring and depressing to be an outsider looking in.

To know that with the right breaks you can enter a world where everyone’s friends with people who are funded by famous VCs, who then help to get you funding, which leads to press, and then attention, and then popularity, which leads to more growth and more funding.

Or with the wrong ones seemingly identical ideas surpass your own, leaving you scratching your head wondering why some startups take off like a rocket while yours struggles to stay above water.

Nobody said life is fair, and the same goes for Silicon Valley. All people in the startup game ask for is an unfair advantage.

Want to build a site/app with mass market appeal?

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 17:29:00 -0700

Make something that captures a meaningful signal.

For inspiration, here are some existing popular and meaningful signals:

The Query (what I want)
The Social Graph (who I am and who I know)
The Status Update (what I’m doing)
The Check-in (where I am)

And some startups emerging with new valuable signals: Quora, Square, Instagram.

To quote John Battelle:

“I’m on the lookout for new Signals. I’m quite certain we’re not nearly finished creating them.”

"Inactive" vs. "not yet active" users

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 19:55:04 -0700

There’s been some discussion lately around Twitter’s number of inactive users and what a bad sign it is for the site. Of their 175 million registered users, there over 50 million Twitter accounts following no other accounts, and almost double that for accounts with no followers (stats via lukew).

Despite their hundreds of millions of users (and continued growth), people think these inactive totals signal trouble in the Twitterverse. But unlike most other sites, an inactive user on Twitter isn’t quite the same lost cause.

For whatever reason, it takes some (most?) people a long time to get comfortable with Twitter - not only that, but that lack of comfort is sometimes labelled as annoyance.

“Twitter annoyed the hell out of me for the first year and a half.”

-Mike Arrington at Startup School 2008

While people are in this annoyance phase, they naturally look for reasons that the service will die, so they don’t have to put up with it anymore. But a strange thing happens - people keep talking about the service (maybe because it’s so annoying). Other people continue to sign up, and before you know it - you start to engage with them or others.

Even though their growth has been nothing short of meteoric so far, I predict continued big things for Twitter in 2011. Those 50-100 million “not yet active” users will continue rediscovering the service and its increasing utility.

Neven Mrgan's tumbl: Redundant data in the Weather app

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 22:20:28 -0800

Neven Mrgan's tumbl: Redundant data in the Weather app:

mrgan:

If you’re a serious weather junkie, you might use a special weather app to get your daily klimate kick. And if you’re Edward Tufte, you might think the iPhone weather app is “a bit thin”. Me, I don’t mind it - it’s a nice, big dashboard view of the weather features I care most about.

But here’s…

Criticism isn't progress

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 23:57:36 -0700

says @rands.

But it is so damn easy to critize others’ ideas and worse, insulting others’ idea seems to be one of the main paths I take to prove that I’m smarter than them.

The goal going forward is to try and spend my energy more on highlighting what others are doing right vs. how other people and their ideas are wrong. Not expecting it to be easy because of this:

“Positivity is complex and draining yet fruitful. Negativity is simple and lazy yet worthless.”

A smartphone retrospective

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:14:52 -0700

A smartphone retrospective:

This is what high-end smartphones looked like in 2007:

Smartphones were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.

Then this happened:

Other manufacturers had…

"Creators who consume lots of media as ‘research’ and ‘inspiration’ are generally ‘procrastinating’."

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:56:20 -0700

“Creators who consume lots of media as ‘research’ and ‘inspiration’ are generally ‘procrastinating’.”

- Ronen V
(via msg)

"Very few of the top performers at the company had any prior experience with payments, and many of..."

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:10:21 -0700

““Very few of the top performers at the company had any prior experience with payments, and many of the best employees had little or no prior background building Internet products.””

- from an article with a collection of answers to the question: Why did so many successful entrepreneurs and startups come out of PayPal?

PayPal had a strong bias toward hiring (and promoting/encouraging) smart, driven problem solvers, rather than subject matter experts. Very few of the top performers at the company had any prior experience with payments, and many of the best employees had little or no prior background building Internet products.

Is Quora a hole that Twitter can fill?

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 23:02:47 -0700

A while back, Fred Wilson wrote a post about the Twitter platform inflection point, with a takeaway that “much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product”, and that eventually Twitter would take care of filling those holes rather than on relying other companies to do so (see also: the inevitable showdown between Twitter and Twitter apps).

A lot of the holes that Twitter has filled so far have been minor (with the exception of search), but could they start to take on some bigger opportunities? For example, the Q&A space is red hot right now, with one example being Quora.

After using, and loving the site, I’ve started to come across tweets that I wanted to mark as “follow”, just like I would follow questions on Quora, ie:

“Is there some way to dissociate devices from your iTunes acct that you no longer have access to?”

Quora’s been a valuable service primarily because of the high quality of users it’s attracted. But if Quora’s core asset is its users, how can they make sure those users don’t start spending their time and contributing content elsewhere?

Push me

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 00:12:00 -0700

Note to self, as the web shifts to more touch-able interfaces, make use of buttons that look like they want to be touched, pushed, etc…

Fake work: the fuel that powers the Internet

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:49:32 -0700

Paul Graham recently shared a post called How to Lose Time and Money and he explained the dangers of losing time and money via “Fake Work”, which is something that feels like work because it isn’t fun, but it isn’t real work in a sense that it’s not necessarily taking you towards any meaningful destinations:

If I spent a whole day watching TV I’d feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.

Graham himself sees the irony, in that he’s a creator of and investor in sites that encourage fake work. And others have pointed out that, in a sense, Silicon Valley’s in a fierce battle to create the next great timewaster.

For those of us in the industry, how should we feel and what can we do about this trend of encouraging and enabling more fake work? As Aaron Swartz notes, “technology never solves things by itself. At bottom, it requires people to sit down and build tools that solve them.” So, who’s building the tools we need?

The Buzz Feels Good, But Funny

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:00:00 -0800

I was lucky to get to try out Google Buzz pretty soon after launch and after using it a bunch there are a lot of things to be excited about, some to be patient with, and others to be hopeful for. Overall, I’m bullish on Buzz because without a doubt it’s going to enable more people to share more things more often.

I’m excited about:

For the first time, there isn’t a huge gap between my real life contacts and my social media contacts…who knows how sharing will change with the new audience.
Buzz’s integration with Gmail. Buzz’s biggest achievement was eliminating the #1 hurdle to getting people to try out new web apps. Rather than having to get someone through a sign-up funnel, they’re only 1 click between a person’s inbox and Buzz-ing.

I’ll try to be patient with:

Non-Google products making it into the flow. I understand the one-way sharing of tweets from Google’s perspective, but not a user’s perspective.
Showing “just the right stuff”. After adding a few high profile people into my followers list, Buzz hasn’t shown as much intelligence as I would have liked for filtering content. Anytime someone comments on something from Kevin Rose, it’s buzzed right back to the top of my inbox.
There’s a big duplication issue for anything from Twitter or Friendfeed getting shared multiple times or having the text appear twice within a message.

I’m hopeful for:

A much better Google Profiles experience. When someone I don’t know comments on one of my buzzed items (or when I comment on someone’s item who doesn’t know me) its Google’s responsibility to make that introduction seamless. Make it easy for me to understand why this person might have left a comment, how I might know them, or why I want to get to know them. Right now Google Profiles seems like an afterthought, even though it could become core to a positive experience on Buzz.

Having been an early adopter to Buzz Beta (ie: Friendfeed) I think Google’s biggest challenge will be how they decide to resurface buzz worthy content. Will people be encouraged to act fast and light (leaving brief comments that don’t amount to much more than a ‘thumbs up’) or will there be more incentive for thoughtful and meaningful interactions? (and is that a problem that Google can even determine algorithmically?)

You can follow me on Buzz here.

Decisions & principles for the first version of Quora

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:21:51 -0800

Some interesting design thinking coming out of a new startup called Quora (drop me a comment if you want an invite). One of their designers shared their thoughts here. These notes stood out:

Picking a starting point is important because it will be the axis the rest of the design revolves around — but it’s not always the first page in the flow. You should start with the page that serves the most significant goals of the product.

Probably my first three months at Quora were spent designing and undesigning only the question page

A lot of decent features have been dropped or hidden or otherwise cut to help ensure that only the most important information is on any given page.

But it wasn’t until things got ruthless that any progress was made.

A user interface is the product of a design. A design is a set of decisions about a particular product. Those decisions represent the product’s goals and ambitions.