Project Idealism

Vote for our Startup!

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Wed, 02 May 2012 19:40:09 +0000

There’s a great organization called Built in Chicago that celebrates startups and the digital community here, and they’re having their first annual awards ceremony called The Moxie Awards.

I’m asking people to consider nominating Tula Software, our yoga studio software, for a few categories. I’d be super appreciative if you’d consider taking 2 minutes to put Tula Software into the nomination form for the following categories:

Best B2B Startup
Best Bootstrapped Startup
Best Overall Startup

I don’t normally get into awards, and I definitely don’t usually ask people if they’d be willing to do me a favor on my blog, but as they say, there’s an exception to everything.

Thanks a lot for the help.

A redesign that increased conversions by 400%

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 21:06:01 +0000

If you follow my blog regularly, you know that we’ve been hard at work on a yoga studio software that helps independent yoga studios manage their students, class attendances, schedules, and all the other things someone needs to run a yoga studio.

From an engineering standpoint, we’ve done some really awesome things, from allowing instructors to find subs via text messaging, to deeply integrating with Stripe so that our customers can start taking credit cards in minutes.

But as we know, engineering is only half the battle.

And being a small Rails shop one of the things I’ve come to terms with is that while we’ve gotten quite good at designing page layouts, application flows, overall user experience, and making important decisions about what to put in and what to leave out of a product, we’re not as good at bringing in what I’d call ‘the shine’ to a complex web application or it’s marketing pages.

So, I enlisted the help of Rand Media Group, a small marketing and design company in Chicago. Disclaimer: they’re run by my buddy Ryan Evans, and we happen to inhabit the same co-working space as well. Though, that should take nothing away from my praise.

Visually, the results are obvious. Our application was taken to the next level in that it had a much more polished feel, and the landing page did a great job not only of engaging site visitors, but also of telling the story of how we built this product after my wife opened her yoga studio.

But none of that would matter if our signups weren’t improving. Luckily, they’re even better than I had hoped for. We’re converting new visitors into trial users at 4 times the rate we were previously, and they’re far more engaged on the site when they do visit, visiting twice as many pages.

Check out the before and after below, and our site at www.tulasoftware.com. And if you’re a startup in need of some design help, I can’t recommend Rand Media Group enough.

Before

After

The size and scale of porn sites

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 04:25:08 +0000

Just how big are porn sites?

It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet.

I had been wondering why Rick Santorum thought it was a good idea to campaign against porn. This article shows just how flawed a strategy it probably was – at least in terms of gaining votes.

Via hacker news

Web 3.0

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:33:36 +0000

My favorite definition of web 2.0, which I believe I found on the Wikipedia article but doesn’t seem to be there anymore, went something like this: “Web 2.0 applications assume that a user is familiar with, and knows how to use the internet.”

Meaning, these applications make certain assumptions about what users already know how to do. The creators of these applications then were freed from needing to teach users certain things they might have felt obligated to teach them 5 years earlier.

I love this definition because it focuses not on the technology, but instead on the technical literacy of internet users.

What then, is Web 3.0, and what does it look like?

Most of the definitions I’ve read have come by way of the Wikipedia article on web 3.0, seem to focus on the technology. They include predictions about how geo-coordinates come into play, new screen technology, virtual displays, content created by computers as opposed to humans, and other things likely to be seen in the future.

While these may indeed be the future of the internet, I don’t believe they accurately define web 3.0.

Instead, I actually think web 3.0 has already arrived.

Like the definition of web 2.0 that I mentioned above, I prefer to think about web 3.0 in terms of what assumptions we can make about the users of the applications we are making, how that impacts what we make, and where we focus our creative energy. Here’s how I like to define it:

Web 3.0 applications assume that a user already has specific web assets, and they provide users with the ability to build upon and expand these assets.

As design gets better, and interfaces become more and more intuitive, it can be tempting to think that the lesson is to assume users are less computer savvy, and to treat them as such. I think that approach is a mistake though. Users are becoming smarter, not dumber. In fact, users are smarter now than they every have been, and they will continue to become smarter. And of course, we’re also learning more about how humans interact with technology.

There are a number of great examples of web 3.0 applications, but I’d like to focus on two.

Formstack, which I’ve written about before, is a huge inspiration to me. The reason is because while their core offereing is completely unsexy (online forms), they are at the forefront of what the internet is becoming. They assume that their users have other web assets. Whether it’s a website, a blog, or something else, they make it easy for people to put their forms INSIDE their own web assets. And, they assume their users might also have an email provider, a CRM system, and maybe a merchant account too.

If you make a product and assume that your users don’t have a website, and wouldn’t know how to embed things into their web pages even if they did, you end up with a very different product than a company that assumes their users have websites and do know how to use embed code.

Both can be great products by the way, it’s just that one is a web 3.0 application and one is not.

Another great example of a web 3.0 application is ifttt.com – which stands for “if this then that”. Their entire product is based on the assumption that their users have OTHER web products. Their application allows users to easily hook things up without having to write any code. For example: “if someone uploads a file to my dropbox account, then send me a text message.” It’s a very cool app that’s bringing programming logic and thinking to users without the need to write a single line of code.

The opportunity this presents, and of course the challenge too, is to identify the web assets that our users are already likely to have, and to create things that work well with those assets.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because we’re working on some big new features for our yoga studio software and we’ve made a few key decisions based on the fact that I want it to be a web 3.0 application. These assumptions include:

Our users already have websites, and they want these websites to maintain their current aesthetic.
Our uses would prefer to have control over their customer’s credit card data, instead of us having control of this information.
Our users will either know what an API key is or we will be able to teach them what an API key is.
Our users will be able to “hook up” our application to their payment provider by using API keys.

These are not trivial assumptions to make about users. And for some users we’ll be wrong, and that’s okay, because I want to try and skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is.

I firmly believe that web users are becoming more intelligent, not less. Certainly, they will continue to demand a clear, easy to use interface. But the systems they use to run their businesses and their lives will become increasingly complex, and their toolsets will become increasingly fragmented.

Hooking together applications, either via API keys, usernames and passwords, or some other means, will become as commonplace as downloading apps and creating blogs. Identifying and integrating with the assets that your users have, or would find useful if they don’t already have them, is the future of user experience design.

And as web 3.0 applications begin to take over, people will choose products not based on how many things they do, but by how well a product does the one or two things they need to be done really well, and whether it fits in neatly with the other tools they already have or are thinking of using.

The opportunity this provides is amazing because it allows application makers to focus like a laser on a nitch that they can be awesome at, and then hook into other systems (or allow other systems to hook into them) that they might not have as much domain knowledge about.

The long tail is only getting longer. It turns out though that as users, we have multiple tails we need to connect.

Applications that connect, and that can be connected to, enabling users to create their own systems – that is web 3.0 to me.

It’s already here, and it’s all around us.

Flying bird man hoax

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 04:58:14 +0000

You know when you get to the age where you’re pretty sure you know there’s no Santa Clause. You know the reality, probably, but you’re sort of holding on to hope that there might actually be a Santa?

That’s how I’ve been feeling all day about that Human Birdwings guy that I mentioned yesterday. I was skeptical, but I was so hoping it was real!

Looks like the video is the work of computer-generated imagery, more commonly known as CGI. Gizmodo has the breakdown of the video, and Wired has been updating their story as well.

I can’t believe the internet lied to me.

Man flies like a bird. Maybe?

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 04:08:06 +0000

Wired reports that a man flies with birdlike wings.

Using videogame controllers, an Android phone and custom-built wings, a Dutch engineer named Jarno Smeets has achieved birdlike flight.

Both the Hacker News thread where I saw this and the Wired story have comments full of doubters.

There’s a pretty long comment thread going on at Gizmodo as well.

I so want this to be real though.

Dissecting Pando Daily's Hack Job Covering the Chicago Startup Scene

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:36:51 +0000

After writing this post yesterday, where I commented on the article titled The Midwest Mentality, I took some time yesterday to read all the articles that Trevor Gilbert has put out so far covering the Chicago startup scene.

The short version is that his coverage is a hack job, completely undeserving of a place in Sarah Lacy’s new publication. In all seriousness, Sarah, please go back and read through each article, beginning to end. I think that if you’re honest with yourself, you will see that this coverage is totally undeserving of being published in Pando Daily.

And I’m not talking about whether the things about Chicago were good, bad, or indifferent. I’m talking about writing interesting, compelling stories, that people might care about.

Let’s break down the coverage. Trevor spent two weeks in Chicago, and so far he’s written 5 articles.

His first article, My first time in the Second City was published on March 3rd, and it’s essentially an introduction post.

His second post, written on March 8th, was titled Breaking News: Chicago is Windy. After spending 5 days supposedly investigating the Chicago Startup scene, he ended up writing a 958 word post about Chicago’s weather. That’s right, the weather. Although, we also learned that Trevor is under the age of 21. He writes:

While I was living on the streets without a place to stay and slowly recovering from my illness, Sarah decided to allow me to stay a couple of nights in a hotel, which is great. Guess what I found out about Chicago? Approximately 90% of the hotels here require you to be 21 or older to check in.

So wait, let me get this right. Pando Daily wanted to cover the Chicago Startup Scene, get the ins and outs of the community, see what’s up and coming, and she sent someone who can’t even go grab a beer with a few founders? Are you kidding me?

I’m not knocking age here. I’m knocking an editorial decision to send a reporter who can’t legally participate in what is obviously the most natural place for someone to hang out and learn about the startup community: Bars.

In his third article, titled Trunk Club is Locking it Up, Throwing Away the Key trevor writes about a Chicago Startup that is trying to change the way men shop. It’s a fine article, but there’s nothing all that interesting or remarkable about it. He writes at one point when talking about the founding team:

Spaly was asked to join the Trunk Club team as the founding CEO. After noticing some accounting irregularities, Spaly made some changes and was left as the head honcho at the startup.

Oh really? That sounds interesting. What kind of accounting irregularities? What happened? Did someone steal money from investors? Did something else happen? We don’t know because that’s all the information the reader is given. And that basically sums up all of the author’s reporting on Chicago. Very surface level stuff. No depth. No inquisitiveness. No asking questions to get to the bottom of something.

In his fourth article Enterprise: The Chicago Kiss of Life and Death we again see the author’s lack of creativity. When opening the article, he says:

When I first joined PandoDaily way back in the day, one of the things Sarah mentioned to me was that she wanted to report on the stories that other reporters were ignoring out of lack of pizzazz (my word, not hers), and inability to reach the top of TechMeme. The attitude was a little more inclined to cover companies that are rocking it, and less inclined to cover companies because they are the latest mobile photo sharing app.

This means enterprise.

Actually Trevor, no, it doesn’t. In Chicago, this means trying to find the next 37signals, or the next Threadless. It means trying to find the bootstrappers who have turned down $400k from Lightbank because they think their product will be better without investors. Covering startups in Chicago is going to be hard because there’s no steady ticker of who invested how much money into what startup. You need to actually investigate.

But let’s go ahead with your premise though. Let’s talk about all these Chicago Startups that are making products for the enterprise. Some excerpts:

People in Chicago, as they are starting companies here, all want to have a revenue stream immediately — rather than take investment and figure out a revenue model down the road — and the best way to guarantee a revenue stream is to sell directly to businesses. Therefore, startups that don’t want to be ostracized go the enterprise route, even though they could be changing the world in a bigger way by taking bigger risks.

The second issue with being so focused on enterprise is that potential talent isn’t convinced of the importance of the ecosystem. Ask an engineer to choose between staying in the Valley and working for a hot new, untested, consumer product like Twitter and an enterprise company that already has a steady revenue stream that provides marketing simplification for insurance companies, and they will choose the hot new startup.

All of that being said, enterprise is largely the only option open to Chicago at this point. However, being the only option currently available doesn’t an excuse make. Sure, founders can sit back and say “well there are so many companies here to sell to, it makes sense to do enterprise!” That’s not a very good reason though, however pragmatic and however Midwestern. It makes sense from a business standpoint, but from an ecosystem standpoint it doesn’t.

After all this reporting on Chicago Startups, in this 1,125 word article, how many Chicago companies that are following this strategy did he mention and link to in his article? Zero.

How many founders did he quote about why they took this strategy, and how it’s worked out? Zero.

How many of their customers did he interview? Zero. How many of these startups, selling to the enterprise, are working on their own products on the side? We don’t know because he probably never asked that question.

In fact, we don’t know whether this was even reporting at all, because there are literally zero sources. Hack Journalism at it’s finest.

And then there is latest article The Midwest Mentality which I wrote about yesterday.

The only thing I’ll add to what I’ve already written is that it’s clear the author has absolutely no understanding about how challenging it is to build one’s own self sustaining business. If it was easy, wouldn’t we all have our own small self-sustaining businesses?
This part magnifies his ignorance:

Work a 9 to 5 job and see steady, predictable growth over time. You get a salary, and you are possibly acquired. You spend time with your family and get to send your kids off to college.

As the founder of a small web development company, and as the husband to a woman who owns a yoga studio, let me tell you, this is such bullshit I can hardly stand it.

I don’t work 9 to 5. I don’t have a “steady salary”. Sometimes I have to deal with clients paying me 60 days late. My wife and I have taken what would be our retirement and invested it in our own businesses and our own products. We’ve taken risks and the “pragmatic” thing for us to do would have been to work for Accenture. Being able to send our kids to college with these investments in ourselves is anything but certain right now.

I wouldn’t have it any other way, but to call what we’re doing as “pragmatic” is complete ignorance.

The author’s lack of understanding about what it’s like to build a sustainable business is something that Sarah Lacy and Pando Daily should be utterly ashamed of. Sarah has written entire books about Entrepreneurs. She should sit down with her reporters and tell them what it’s like sometime.

Because the thing is, you know how sometimes you read an article in the paper about a subject you know something about, and they get it all wrong? And then you ask yourself, if they got this wrong, what else are they getting wrong?

That’s how I feel about Pando Daily right now.

And I hope Pando decides to keep covering Chicago. Because I still think they’re kind of awesome. But Sarah, do us a favor, if you’re going to cover Chicago, do it right or don’t do it at all.

And if you are going to cover our startup scene, please send someone we can drink a beer with.

Pando Daily and the Chicago Startup Scene

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:01:22 +0000

Pando Daily, a fantastic new site about technology, startups, and other tech-related news published a post today titled The Midwest Mentality. In it, the author Trevor Gilbert outlines some accurate, and some not so accurate, observations about the Chicago tech scene. (note, he wrote a post that he’d be in Chicago, willing to meet with anyone that wanted to chat with him. I missed that post so shame on me a little.)

He writes about why a Twitter or Facebook would likely never be born here. Citing, among other things, an unproven business model and being dependent on multiple rounds of financing.

The whole article is well worth a read. Unfortunately though, the main point he makes around “the problem” with the Chicago startup scene, and the thing he bases his entire article on, is wrong. Or rather, it’s incomplete. He says:

Understanding the Midwest Mentality is key to understanding the entire Chicago ecosystem. It affects how startups are created, who gets funded and who gets accepted into the ecosystem. It is the glue of the shoe, the plugs in the boat and the sandy foundation all wrapped up into one.

He goes on, to state his main point:

Although I’m coming from a different perspective, it appears to me that after having looked at the ecosystem from an outsiders’ perspective, the entire concept can be boiled down to one term: pragmatic.

This single statement shows me that the author misunderstands the motivations of most Chicago tech entrepreneurs. It’s true, many of us are pragmatic. But why we’re pragmatic seems to be irrelevant to him. Without using the exact words, he touches on the whole “Lifestyle Business” dig that people often make:

Sure, being pragmatic has its benefits. Work a 9 to 5 job and see steady, predictable growth over time. You get a salary, and you are possibly acquired. You spend time with your family and get to send your kids off to college. That’s fine, but its not revolutionary, which is something that the technology industry – regardless of geography – is based upon.

If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you know this kind of tone makes my blood boil. See Every business is a lifestyle business for more on that.

Here’s the thing he’s missing. Chicago Entrepreneurs are independent. Surely, sometimes to a fault, but understanding that it’s this independent streak that causes the pragmatism is fundamental to understanding Chicago entrepreneurs.

Having to answer to investors seems not all that much better than having to answer to an employer. Building a business without a revenue stream means we don’t have the ability to sustain ourselves, and are therefore not independent. Not being able to live the life you want to live because you’re busy trying to make something “go boom” seems absurd.

The other thing is that a lot of tech entrepreneurs here don’t think of themselves as “startups”. We think our ourselves as small businesses. Technology is the vehicle, not the destination.

I guess my fundamental criticism of the article is that it seems they didn’t ask “why?” nearly enough. They think they found the “why” – we’re pragmatic! – and what our goals should be – GROWTH! – and are viewing everything from that perspective.

The biggest problem with the Chicago Startup scene is the same problem we have with everything else, whether it be sports, business, or architecture. We have an inferiority complex. Unfortunately this article is going to do nothing to help with that. But the biggest mistake the Chicago tech community could make is to try and be like the valley.

It’s true that the next Twitter or Facebook might not be born in Chicago. You know what else wouldn’t be born in Chicago though? Color. I’m just saying.

Mr. Gilbert mentioned that he’d never been in Chicago before this trip. And I appreciate that Sarah Lacy and PandoDaily genuinely seem curious about what’s going on in Chicago. But if they’re sincerely interested in Chicago’s startup scene, they need to keep coming back, they need to keep digging, and they need to ask ‘Why?’ a whole lot more.

If anyone could do it well they could, and the Chicago tech community would be better for it.

One can hope.

The man who broke Atlantic City

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:01:26 +0000

Fascinating Article in The Atlantic about Don Johnson, who took three casino’s for $15 million.

When casinos started getting desperate, Johnson was perfectly poised to take advantage of them. He had the money to wager big, he had the skill to win, and he did not have enough of a reputation for the casinos to be wary of him. He was also, as the Trop’s Tony Rodio puts it, “a cheap date.” He wasn’t interested in the high-end perks; he was interested in maximizing his odds of winning. For Johnson, the game began before he ever set foot in the casino.

So Awesome.

(via Hacker News)

Why is everyone talking with so much authority?

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:46:17 +0000

Something’s been bothering me lately.

It seems as though everywhere you look, there’s someone telling you exactly how you should build a product, how you should start a company, what kinds of tests you should run, when you should raise money, when you should keep bootstrapping, when you should sell, when you should push through the dip, how you should get PR, how you should promote yourself, etc, etc. etc.

The thing that’s wrong isn’t that the advice is necessarily bad. A lot of times it’s very good and often inspiring. My issue isn’t with people sharing their knowledge and lessons about what has worked and what hasn’t.

It’s that in almost every situation, it’s far too premature for people to be claiming that they know what they’re talking about with so much authority.

People working for unprofitable funded startups, who have never started their own business, are writing posts with huge amounts of authority about how to run companies. How to get PR. How to hire. How to increase conversions.

And by the way, there are bootstrappers too talking with authority about how VC money is bad, and it’ll ruin your idea. I’ve said this before, but really, it’s just my opinion at a moment in time, subject to change whenever something else makes more sense.

Maybe you’ve reached a point where in order for your product to thrive you need to focus on it 100% of the time and raising money is exactly what you should be doing. Or maybe raising money would kill your baby!

Maybe, Maybe, Maybe. That’s the real answer to most things, isn’t it? Not everything, but a lot of things.

Stella Feyman of Fee Fighters, who seems to be a genuinely nice, smart, intelligent woman engaged in the tech community and a co-founder of Entrepreneurs Unplugged wrote a post titled 3 businesses models to avoid in 2012, one of which was virtual currency.

Fred Wilson on the other hand, one of the most influential Venture Capitalists in the tech industry had this to say about virtual currencies.

But Bitcoin or something else, I’m confident we’ll see the emergence of currencies that are not controlled by nation states in my lifetime. Whether that is a good thing or not remains to be seen. I think it is, but there are significant ramifications that will result from the decoupling of currencies from governments. And one of them is an interesting investment opportunity that we hope to participate in.

One of them sees virtual currencies as a business to avoid. The other sees it as something that could be so disruptive that we can’t even begin to fathom the ramifications of that business model’s success. Who’s right?

I. Don’t. Know.

Mark Zuckerberg famously turned down $15 billion dollars from Microsoft in 2007. Had he taken that money, surely he would be speaking about building and selling a startup.

But would that have been a “success”? We certainly would have thought so at the time, but knowing what we know now, would it have been good if he sold? Maybe. Maybe not.

The reality is, there are so many nuances, so many factors that apply to just you, or just me, or to a particular moment in time, that the more likely scenario is that we do a very good job of identifying correlation, and are far worse at identifying causality.

It seems that all advice could also be spoken as “here’s what worked for me, at this particular time in my life, at this particular time in history, and it may or may not work for you considering where you’re at.”

I’m still going to share my opinions. I’ll keep sharing what works, and what doesn’t work, for me and my business. But I’m also going to try and share more facts. More information about how things can be done, and what tools exist that we can leverage to do things differently.

And when I am sharing my opinions, I’ll be just as opinionated, but I’m going to try doing it with a little less authority.

Creating your own path

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:55:42 +0000

One of the greatest joys of my life has been watching my wife Maile build her awesome yoga studio. Writing about her fears on creating a teacher training for herself:

I am in the unique position where I don’t have to interview/audition for a job when I’m done with training, therefore I can more easily seek my own path in learning how to teach yoga.

This is liberating and at the same time, a bit scary. Why am I so scared to do something different? Because in America, it is ingrained in us from an early age that we should attend ‘prestigious’ schools, learn from master teachers, hold certifications, obtain the right credentials, build beautiful resumes and look good on paper.

I don’t think the fear ever goes away. We just learn to recognize it, and plow forward on the paths we create anyway. Kudos to Maile for having the strength to follow what she thinks will be right for her and her studio.

$2.50 plus what?

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:43:00 +0000

Remember when people who claimed the notion that we were fighting wars over oil was ‘conspiracy theory’.

This logo, which newt Gingrich proudly stands behind at his podium, can be seen as nothing other than a campaign promise to go to war in an attempt to lower gas prices.

The problem of course is, $2.50 plus what?

Who should die so we can fill up our cars for $2.50/gallon? We don’t want it to be anyone we know of course. Just make sure the people that die aren’t anyone we know, okay?

These are the campaign promises that American presidential candidates have resorted to.

The problem with lineage

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:45:35 +0000

For the past few months, I’ve sort of had yoga on the brain. If you follow me on twitter you probably know that my wife Maile opened up a yoga studio in Logan Square, the Chicago neighborhood in which we live.

This ended up in my company building a yoga studio software product that Maile uses to run her studio.

During the course of all this I’ve started to learn a bit about the yoga world, although I’d certainly still consider myself a newbie to it all.

One of the things I’ve found fascinating is the extent to which people in the yoga community focus on an instructor’s lineage. Who taught them, where they were taught, who taught their teacher’s teacher, etc.

It seems to me that this focus goes far beyond understanding what has influenced a person, what’s inspired them, and what things led them to who they are today.

Instead, the focus on lineage seems to define, permanently, what someone is today based on who taught them in the past. I don’t understand this, and I don’t think it’s all that healthy.

The problem with this focus on lineage is that it puts a greater emphasis on the past that it does the present. It presumes that who taught you is more important than the kind of teacher you are today. It seems to give the benefit of the doubt to a bad teacher with good lineage over an awesome teacher who was taught by their yoga instructor friend that no one knows about.

And unlike influence and inspiration, which encourage one to tweak, transform, experiment, remix, and reinvent – lineage seems to be steeped in a tradition that says there is a “right way” to do something. And to deviate from that is not only wrong, but potentially disrespectful to one’s heritage.

Inevitably, this leads to good people feeling the need to redefine themselves when they find out the makers of their pedigree aren’t everything they were cracked up to be.

Not because they’re suddenly worse teachers. Not because their classes are suddenly bad. But because they think their lineage is damaged.

Understanding where people come from, what their styles are, what influences and what inspires them – these all seem to be things we should try to understand.

But so much emphasis on one’s lineage, I don’t think that’s healthy.

After all, if lineage were what we cared about as a society, we’d all still be ruled by kings.

What a polarizing product looks like

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:30:19 +0000

A few weeks ago we launched Brytter, the platform on which I’m writing this post. We built it because I wanted a fast, easy to use blogging platform that did away with most of the things other blogging platforms offer.

The idea behind it is that while there are a lot of great blogging platforms already out in the world, most of them require the user to spend some time designing before they start writing. And, most of them have revenue models that are either based on selling advertising or selling themes.

Instead, I wanted to create a platform where people would not only be encouraged to just get started writing, but where they wouldn’t feel bad about not spending time designing.

Design is important of course. But what would happen when part of the design of the platform is that it takes care of the design for the writer? That’s what I wanted with Brytter.

The feedback was really positive. And really negative. In my opinion, the sign of a great product. We’re not trying to please everyone with this product. In fact, we’re not even trying to please thousands of people. But, I do think there is a small group of people who miss simply being able to write. And these people seem to be thrilled so far with what we’ve made.

Here are some reviews, both good and bad, that we’ve come across after the launch of Brytter.

My 100% honest opinion… there isn’t enough value at present to warrant a paid plan

You got to be kidding.

It’s only been a few paragraphs, but so far Brytter feels a bit like running in an open field: you are exposed, every step you take propels the next. So far, so fun.

I don’t think the world needs another super-simple blog tool.

I’ve been waiting for a super simple blogging platform and along comes Brytter. Have my dreams come true?

The point is, whenever you make something, some people are going to hate it, laugh at it, make fun of it, or whatever. But for every person that thinks the thing you made is ridiculous, there will be someone else who thinks it’s awesome.

I for one am having a blast writing on Brytter. But then again, I’m pretty biased.

Prior to February 5, 2012

andrew@idealprojectgroup.com (Ideal Project Group, LLC) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 16:09:47 +0000

Before moving my blog over to Brytter I was writing on Blogger.

Check out my previous posts at project idealism.blogspot.com for anything written prior to February 5, 2012.