So I’m launching a little club and since I’m a relentless ego-maniac, I’m calling it the RyanWaggoner.com iOS Apps Club (takes 5 seconds to join up).

Why would you join such a thing?

Before I get into the benefits, I have five promises to make:

1. I will never share your email address with anyone, ever, for any reason.
2. I will never spam you.
3. You can unsubscribe at any time with a single click.
4. I will not email you more than twice per month (and likely only once).
5. I will only email you the kinds of value-packed emails I would like to receive myself.

So what do you get for signing up?

1. Sneak previews of apps before they’re released
2. Promotional codes for new apps (read: FREE STUFF)
3. Priority support if you ever have any problems or issues
4. The chance to ensure that my apps have that one MUST HAVE feature from day 1
5. Insider knowledge of what it’s like to be an indie app developer

I think this will be a really interesting project and I’m hoping you’ll join me. I’ll make sure it’s worth your time.

Click here to sign up in 5 seconds

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I have a list of things I’ve been putting off for awhile. Stressful, unpleasant things. Things like calling the IRS with a question about our taxes. If you’ve never had to actually call the IRS, it’s horrible.

And none of these things are things that really needed to be done by a certain date, so they’ve just kind of hung around. And hung around. And the stress of having them hanging over my head wears on me, but I don’t really think about it consciously most of the time.

I think stress is often one of those things that creeps up on us over time and we somehow adjust to it. It’s like we’re on a hike and someone is gradually slipping pebbles into our backpack. A single pebble doesn’t make much difference, but when you have twenty or thirty extra pounds that you’re lugging around, you start to get worn out faster and faster, without really knowing why.

Yesterday it all came into sharp relief for me. I saw a blog post about another startup founder who let a dental situation get further and further out of hand, until he finally couldn’t bear the pain any more and went in for emergency surgery. They said if he had waited, he likely wouldn’t have survived the weekend.

Yes, you read that right. He almost died because of a tooth infection.

This got my attention because I have a tooth that needs extraction as well. And while it isn’t causing me any pain, it’s not a good situation and I have no good reason for not taking care of it. So after reading that post, I made a promise to myself that today I’d call and make an appointment.

And immediately after deciding that, I felt a little lighter. Just by acknowledging this thing that I was avoiding and putting a stake in the ground to deal with it relieved a little bit of stress I didn’t really know I had.

So I started thinking about what else I needed to take care of that I’ve been avoiding. I came up with a whole list. And I declared that I will not enter the 2nd month of 2012 without tackling these items.

January has been an awesome month for me, figuring out where I want to go this year, adjusting my goals and habits, and moving forward. And it’s working; I’m seeing forward progress.

But my pack is feeling a little heavy these days. Time to lighten the load and make sure I’m ready to tackle the next 11 months.

What single super stressful thing are you avoiding dealing with? Why not just suck it up and deal with it now? It’ll feel lousy and stressful today, but tomorrow will be so much sweeter.

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I’ve been doing web development full-time for the last four or five years, and in 2010 I started learning how to create iPhone and iPad apps. I switched to doing iOS development fulltime in early 2011 and I worked on a number of client apps throughout the year.

However, I haven’t released any apps of my own…until now.

My very first app just hit the App Store. It’s called SignPad, it’s iPad-only, and it’s pretty much the simplest app I could think of creating. I wanted my first app to be simple, and to give me a taste for the process of submitting an app to the app store, marketing it, etc.

The concept

You know how you see those people at the airport holding a sign with someone’s name on it? I thought it’d be cool to create an app that takes whatever text you type in and displays it on the screen as large as possible.

But I had a few criteria:

1. I wanted the text to automatically scale to be as large as possible, breaking text into multiple lines and scaling optimally to ensure that the text is as large as possible while keeping all of it visible. So typing in “Hi” should result in a very large font size, while “Hey there, good looking” would result in 2-3 lines of text, so as to maximize the area of the screen used.
2. I wanted the font, background color, and text color to all be easily customized.
3. I wanted it to be beautiful.

I feel like I hit all those items, and I just got my very first review today (4 out of 5 stars). Can’t tell you how exciting that is

What’s next?

My goal for 2012 is to release one app per month. I have a list of about 150 app ideas, and I have selected the apps for February, March, and April, and have a couple of those at the rough prototype stage. If you’d like to be a beta tester for future apps, shoot me an email and let me know.

In the meantime, check out SignPad and if you like what you see, please leave a review and tell a friend. Thanks!

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Check out our first post below, and make sure you subscribe!

How Cheating Has Opened the Door for Real Learning

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The other day at Starbucks, I watched the person in front of me get smoothly upsold from a cup of coffee to a $20 tea sampler set.

I’m not saying that the guy was pressured into buying it; he wasn’t. I’m not saying that he got ripped off; he didn’t. On the whole, he looked pretty happy about his purchase as he left.

But he came in for a cup of coffee, and the chances of him seeing and then buying that sampler set were almost nil. Until he was asked.

You have to ask for what you want. And a surprisingly high percentage of the time, you’ll get it. Maybe not high in the sense of 80% or 90% (though you might, depending on the circumstances), but getting what you want 10% of the time is better than getting it 0% of the time, especially when all it took was you asking.

This is similar to the maxim that if you want to date supermodels you need to be where they are. That’s necessary but not sufficient. You also need to ask them out. Talk to any practitioner of “the game” and they’ll tell you it’s a numbers game and if you have zero going into the top of the funnel because you’re not asking, you’ll get zero in return.

Yes, this is kind of a ridiculously simple observation.

And yet we don’t do it. We don’t.

Most people don’t really negotiate for their salary. Do you know how much simply asking for more is worth in this situation? (BTW, here’s a fantastic post on how to do it right).

I did it too; my first job offer out of college was at a large tech company, and I took the salary they offered without pushing back. That was incredibly stupid of me. I could have easily landed 10% more by pushing back a little. As it was, it took me almost a year to wrangle the 10% raise I should have had from the beginning. That’s thousands of dollars of income that is lost, forever. If I had simply asked for more, I would have gotten it. Let’s say I then put that raise into my retirement account (which I was severely underinvesting in at that time). By retirement, that would be worth a quarter of a million dollars.

$250,000.

For not saying the words: “Based on my research, this position is worth closer to $X”.

Decide what you want. And then start asking for it.

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There’s a recent guest post on Zen Habits about how you shouldn’t set goals. The headline was intriguing enough to pull me in, and then I was dismayed to find that the author had setup the story as a conflict between goals and habits. And concluded that since people fail to accomplish their goals, habits are the answer.

First, not everyone fails to accomplish their goals. I have set and achieved hundreds of goals over the last decade. Yes, I’ve failed at some, still working at others, but I definitely didn’t fail to accomplish any of them.

But the bigger point is that habits and goals aren’t alternatives to each other, but completely different tools that complement each other.

This almost seems too obvious to even have to say it, but you need both habits and goals to make effective forward progress. Without habits, your goals are just dreams, because they don’t propel you forward. And without goals, your habits end up taking you places, but you won’t know until you arrive if it’s somewhere you’d like to be. Plus it’s hard to know what habits you want unless you know where you want them to take you.

I used this picture of the half-sunken Costa Concordia because the disaster that befell her is an apt metaphor for what happens when you only have habits but not goals. Habits are the engine behind growth and change. You can’t actually accomplish goals on a weekly or monthly or yearly basis. Those are the timeframes, but all that work eventually comes down to a series of “today”-’s (no idea how to punctuate that, but you get the idea). What are you actually going to do today? And habits are an extremely effective way to answer that question. But having only habits and no goals is like having a ship with a powerful engine, but no rudder. The Costa Concordia foundered not because her engines failed, but because they pushed her into the wrong thing.

Also, I suspect that most people (perhaps including the author of the Zen Habits post) have little success with goals because they don’t set very good ones. Judging by the habits he mentioned, I’m wondering if the goals he’s setting are vague and open-ended, instead of SMART.

Have you had success with goals?

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If you’re curious about DailyPath, you can check out the video of my talk below (it’s just a few minutes long). Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out, but I’d love any feedback on how I could have made the talk more engaging, or how I could do better as a presenter.

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I’m very excited about DailyPath and the opportunity we have before us, but there’s a powerful group of lobbyists and corporations out there that have backed two bills in Congress that represent an incredibly grave threat to the free and open nature of the Internet. You have probably already heard of these bills: SOPA and PIPA. If these bills pass, it will give large corporations the power to squash new startups like mine before they really get started, destroying job growth, economic activity, and amazing innovations for millions of Americans.

If you’ve already taken action and contacted your representatives to voice your opposition, thank you. If you haven’t, please take a moment to do so now. Google has a great guide on what you can do, as does Wikipedia. Wikipedia, Reddit, Wired, and hundreds of other very-high-traffic sites are blacked out today in opposition, and Google and other sites have posted requests for help in opposing these pieces of legislation.

Finally, it can often seem that bills like these are abstract and it’s hard to see who they’ll help or hurt, so here’s something to make it more concrete: my name is Ryan Waggoner, I’ve made my living via the Internet for the last seven years, and these bills will eventually wreak havoc on my livelihood and the future of my company. 

Please help me stop them. It’ll take you a few minutes, but it’s incredibly important. Help us stop SOPA and PIPA now.

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Background

For the last four and a half months, I’ve been in a startup incubator (for my startup DailyPath) in Portland called PIE (the Portland Incubator Experiment). PIE is a project sponsored by Wieden and Kennedy, and our batch of eight startups also had Google, Target, and Coca-Cola as brand sponsors.

If you’re not familiar with startup incubators, they basically give fledging startups a little bit of seed capital, mentorship, and in our case, office space and access to networking opportunities with investors, press, industry professionals, etc. Our program ran from Sept 1st, 2011 through Dec 15th, and throughout that time we had investors, entrepreneurs, and advisors come in 2-3 times per week to speak to the group and/or do 1-on-1’s with each startup.

Our demo day is today, Jan 17th, and all eight startups will be presenting to a theater full of investors, press, and friends and family about how we’ve spent the last four months and where each of us are going from here.

Since we’re wrapping up with PIE, I thought I’d write up a few thoughts on the experience, what Ben and I have learned from it, and what to be aware of to maximize your own incubator experience, should you choose to do one.

1. Be careful about doing an incubator at all

There are tons of startup incubators out there, and new ones are popping up every day. And while there are a lot of potential advantages to joining an incubator, there are also downsides.

The primary advantages of a good incubator are access to investors, access to a group of experienced mentors, and being in the company of other serious startups. While you get some money, it’s usually not enough to make a huge difference. Most incubators give out $15k – 25k for teams of 1-4 founders, which isn’t much for the three or four months you’re in the incubator.

That said, I don’t think the average startup would be best served by an incubator approach. The amount of cash is too little, the mentors are generally accessible in our industry via an email or a tweet, and you can get the camaraderie of being around other startups via a coworking space. As for access to investors, AngelList has become the way to raise money as a startup, and with some hustle you won’t need the incubator to make connections for you.

For us, our program being sponsored by the largest independent ad agency in the world (W+K), as well as Google, Target, and Coke, was a huge factor in why it’s been good for us. But while there are a few “domain-specific” incubators out there, I don’t think most of the generic ones outside of Y Combinator, TechStars, and 500 Startups are probably worth it. You’d be better served finding a coworking space with other legitimate startups that you can be around without giving up equity. And then there are some that are just pure scams.

2. Be careful whose advice you take

Image by Gregory Taylor

One thing that became immediately clear to us was that we weren’t focusing on a lot of things that desperately needed our attention. Speaker after speaker came in and gave us a list of things that we had to be doing, like working on getting press, or building financial projections, or practicing our public speaking, or doing marketing communications (blog, twitter, etc).

The next thing we realized is that most of these people were well-meaning, but wrong. Yes, all those things are important, but the people giving these talks are specialists and domain experts. They’re not generalists like entrepreneurs have to be, and they have the luxury of focusing on one specific area. We’re constrained for time and capital, but mostly for time. So some of these things simply didn’t get done, and that’s ok. The important thing is to be aware of what you’re choosing to ignore for now, and to make sure you understand the tradeoffs.

One more thing to mention: startups are by nature ambitious, and they attract ambitious people. Ambitious people are generally quite opinionated and aggressive, so startup environments are full of people with strong opinions that they can’t wait to share with you. Be very careful to look at the results of the person giving you advice, and don’t mistake the force with which advice is given with the value of that advice. The squeaky wheel isn’t always the one that should get the oil.

3. You are not a big shot

When you’re accepted, it can be tempting to let that go to your head, and get an attitude that you’re too important to meet with this person or that person. You’re not. Or at least, you’re not because you got into an incubator. Just like raising venture capital, getting into an incubator doesn’t mean much. You haven’t built a business yet, you just took a tiny step.

4. Don’t judge a book by the cover

Related to the point above about how you’re not too important to meet with someone, one of the best things about an incubator is that it brings you into contact with a lot of interesting people who can help you get started in your business. But some of these people may appear from a distance as if they’re not relevant or helpful for what you’re doing. Be really careful with this attitude. I’ve had multiple experiences of wavering on canceling a meeting with someone because I just didn’t see what could come out of it, and then they ended up being extremely valuable connectors, partners, or sources of advice.

The key here is to limit your exposure to the risk of it being a waste of time. I’ll write more about this later, but try to tease out more via email, get them to meet somewhere close to you, just do a quick cup of coffee, and try to get *something* out of the meeting if it turns out they’re not valuable.

5. Leverage to the next level (more press, more funding, etc)

Incubators are stepping stones, so make sure you leverage them as much as you can. Right after we got accepted, we used the social proof of the incubator to raise some more money from friends and family. And while we’re not fundraising right now, most of the other startups in our batch have raised or are trying to raise additional funds coming out of the incubator. There’s a multiplicative effect here for investment and press that you should squeeze as much as you can.

6. Avoid blinders or narrow-minded thinking

As I mentioned above, we’re not raising money. We’re the only startup in our batch not raising money, and I’ll write more later about why. But this was a tough decision for us, and partly because we’re in an environment where it’s just assumed that you’ll raise money. There are real, hard-core advantages to raising money, but to claim that it’s the only way of building a company is just sloppy and myopic. So we made it a point to seek out the advice of other entrepreneurs who had bootstrapped their companies.

There are other examples, but suffice it to say that while you’re surrounded with dozens of people just like you for 14 hours a day for months on end, it’s worthwhile to talk to: a) non-technical people, b) non-funded technical entrepreneurs, c) non-technical entrepreneurs, and d) people who are very good at what they do, whatever the space they’re in.

Bonus #7: Get a good pair of noise-canceling headphones

If you’re in an incubator that has a shared space, like ours at PIE, make sure you get some good headphones because it’s really loud sometimes and when you’re in the zone, being in a noise and visually distracting space is the worst. Ben and I also come in pretty early (usually before 6am), which gives us hours of quiet time before anyone else gets to the office. So do whatever you have to do, but I recommend headphones.

Overall Takeaways

We had a great time at PIE and we’ll be sticking around in the space for a little while longer. If I could do it again, I definitely would.

If you’re headed into an incubator, above all, remember to have fun. Life is short and if you’re not having fun with what you’re doing, what’s the point? Enjoy the privilege of being able to focus on your new startup, being able to touch every piece of it yourself, and being surrounded by startups and mentors who want you to succeed.

If you’re thinking about trying to get into an incubator, that’s awesome. A lot of the success or failure of a startup is mental, so you can gain tremendous benefit by being surrounded by supportive mentors and peer startups, like the environment an incubator offers. Just remember that most successful companies didn’t join an incubator and didn’t raise outside capital. That’s not to say you shouldn’t, but you definitely don’t have to. Take a hard look at the options, talk to people on both sides (especially people who have been on both sides), and make the best decision for you.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or curiosities about the incubator experience. I’d love to chat more about it.

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Every week on the political segment of “Talk of the Nation”, they pose a political trivia question. These questions are often very specific and obscure, I think to make it hard to Google. For example: “When was the last time that a political party gained control of a state legislature in the same year that the state’s university went to the NCAA playoffs?” And yes, that was an actual question.

So people call in and try to guess the answer. And what’s amazing to me is that Mr. Rudin apparently knows the history of every single political race in this country, ever. Seriously, he knows the history and life stories of candidates who ran and lost in obscure house races before he was born. These people probably don’t rate a Wikipedia entry, but he rattles off the stats and history without hesitation.

What’s more impressive to me is that he’s not at all partisan. I truly have no idea how he would vote in an election. He simply presents the facts and tells both sides of the story. His grasp and recall of the political arena are that much more impressive when you consider that he’s not there to promote an agenda, but because he loves the subject.

I bring all this up just because I really admire people like Mr. Rudin and I love observing mastery and great skill in action.

I don’t know that Mr. Rudin will ever read this, but if he does: I tip my hat to you, sir. You clearly love what you do and have worked very hard to master it, and that’s inspiring to watch.

Who do you admire for their mastery of a skill or subject? Extra points for being someone obscure.

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