It probably emerges from a feeling that since you’ve reached a certain age you’re expected to be knowledgeable about things. However, when you’re pretty young you know that no one expects you to know much about anything. So you see yourself needing to learn things so that one day you can be knowledgeable about them like the older folks who seem to know their stuff. This makes you naturally curious and highly willing to absorb information. But as you get older, the willingness to learn new information starts to rapidly decrease. You could blame it on ego, the heaviness of seasoned knowledge, or whatever.

I find it pretty interesting that humans are wired this way. As you get older, you gain knowledge and that means intelligence increases. If intelligence doesn’t decrease with age, why do we become less willing to learn? The more intelligent you get, the faster you’ll understand something, so learning new things will actually be faster. So why does our attitude change? It’s certainly not a positive trait. How does one fight it?

I haven’t figured it out yet. But, a quote from Steve Jobs comes to mind: “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again”. Even though what Jobs said seems more related to his risk-taking abilities, it fits in my discussion aptly. “The heaviness of being an expert was replaced by the lightness of a being a noob”.

That said, I think the solution might stem from the idea of staying a noob. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” This famous quote is pretty deep, but most people just say it without introspecting or realizing what it really means. I think I’m one step closer to realizing its true meaning.

When a soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

-Rumi

Imperfect things are real. There is no absolute perfect anyway. It’s all a matter of perspective. You can’t please everybody. You can’t even please yourself if you’re always in pursuit of perfection.

Work hard to achieve great things in life. But always appreciate imperfect things. I’m talking about imperfect people, imperfect friendships, imperfect experiences, imperfect achievements, imperfect products and most importantly, the imperfect self. Because one day you might realize that the imperfection is perfect, in some way.

Constant pursuit of perfection till the day you die leaves you unhappy. What’s the point of that? You only get one shot at life.

(“Wabi-sabi” is a Japanese world view centered on the acceptance of imperfection)

Now, that might piss a lot of you off. Sure, go ahead and call me a solipsist but I think we as a society are inherently solipsist. It’s not just me. We care the most about ourselves than anything else, and it won’t change, at least not anytime soon – we’re just hard-coded that way, get over it. Of course, don’t get me wrong, I don’t encourage producing kids if you can’t afford to sustainably provide them a decent education and a lifestyle that you’d like them to have. So, I feel sort of significant and insignificant at the same time. Significant because I was alive when the population was less than 6 billion, and I’m still alive when we have surpassed 7 billion – and there’s only about 6,999,999,999 others. I mean, think about what it’s going to be like a thousand years from now. So much bad shit is going to happen – I just feel lucky that I can be safe and sound, and I can have the freedom to do whatever I want in life. That makes me feel like a significant dweller of this era which has, in fact, spanned two millennia. I feel insignificant because (now the irony will be thick here) there’s fucking 6.9 billion of you – I am essentially a speck of dust to anyone who’s creeping our planet from somewhere far away in our galaxy (btw, if you are that person on that planet, you should totally add me on Facebook, or whatever you guys call it over there). The thought of me being so tiny in the big picture of things is just depressing. Though, I have the perfect song that makes me feel better.

But, anyway, I didn’t write this post to convey my emotional misgivings about our planet reaching 7 billion people. Fuck that. I wrote it because I would like to highlight what this means for entrepreneurs, hackers and people who design stuff for, well, other people (and themselves …hey, check this out, I’m not all talks).

7 billion people means 7 billion potential users if you build consumer products. Of course that’s not a reality right now, but one day it will be. Out of those 7 billion potential users, 36.3% live in India and China. A whopping 36.3%! That means, you need to have some sort of product strategy for these emerging markets. And the biggest mistake that entrepreneurs make is to think that emerging markets are exactly the same as Western markets. They’re not. I think Groupon’s failure in China is the best example how products just fail if you don’t build a strategy that is geared exclusively towards an emerging market. It also can’t be the same strategy for India and China – they have to be two different ones, though, they will be similar in many respects. So, how do you do it?

1. Understand the culture of the emerging country really well. I can’t stress this enough. Go back to its roots, learn the history, learn what motivates people, what are their most important values, what are the aspirations and so on. Master the culture.

2. Then demographically categorize your knowledge obtained from the above. Figure out the differences between people in villages, people in cities, young people, old people etc.

3. Determine the core values of your product, and put them in a list – call it List A. Preserve these values from this point on. Put the rest not-so-core ones on another list – call it List B.

4. Study products that entered the market and failed. Two good examples are Gaopeng (name Groupon operated under in China) and Barbie. Barbie was a complete failure in China. They had opened a flamboyant six-story, $30 million store in downtown Shanghai that saw a lot of visitors, but never sold any barbie dolls. Carefully study what caused such high profile entries to fail.

5. Only after you’ve done 1-4, figure out how to translate your product into a Chinese or Indian version. Don’t change the core values from List A in #3. Localize everything in your List B from #3. I’m not just talking about the language. Truly localize your product. Some major consumer brands such as Pizza Hut and McDonald’s have nailed it by Indianizing their products. McAloo Tikki Burger and Paneer Pizza, anyone?

6. When you have a decent strategy to penetrate these markets with your new, localized product, start thinking about a separate marketing strategy. But remember that a great, localized marketing strategy won’t make a shitty product successful. Great products will tend to market themselves. This is how Apple and a dozen other companies, including Dropbox and 37Signals, became so successful. They built such great products that they didn’t need to spend a great deal much on marketing. Definitely don’t spend too much on marketing at the start. If you spend too much on marketing at first and the initial version of a product fails, those initial users will never come back. I personally believe iteration is how products, especially software, should be built. Ambitious marketing campaigns come later when you’re a trusted brand among a subset of the society.

7. It is important to only focus on one market first. Don’t try to do China and India both at once, because if you fail miserably, you’ll lose a second chance. If you only do one, you’ll have a spare life to apply all the things you learned from your failure. If you don’t understand this concept, go play some video games like Mario or Zelda. You’ll know what I mean.

So, the secret to success is really embracing the culture of the emerging market, and then creating a localized version of your product. It’s a given that you need to spend a lot of time in the country, blend with the people, make some friends, and speak the language. And definitely don’t forget to hire local people to run your business. Multinational companies who enter India or China and don’t hire Indian or Chinese executives who are currently living in India or China to run the subsidiary are doomed for failure. You might think you’re really know the culture well and you get it (especially if you have a Stanford MBA or something), but that doesn’t mean you’ll be successful in those markets. It’s important to hire seasoned, local executives who have led successful companies since they know their economy the best.

Now, I hope one day I can test out these theories on some product I build and see how they fare in an actual emerging market setting, which will most likely be India. Till then, I’ll believe in whatever I said above because I think I’ve got it figured out.

(This was part 1 in this series. Part 2 will go over what 7 billion means in terms of usability. Fun, fun. But I’ll write that on some other day.)

1. Create a div. Set its left border-color to a colour of your choice. Set top, right and bottom border-color to transparent.
2. Set border-style to solid, and border-width to 2 x (the height of your desired triangle).
3. Set width, and height to 0. And voila!

Just for fun, I created a fiddle to showcase triangles by mimicking a simple song player widget.

In case you want to learn how it works in more depth, check out this post by Jon Rohan.

P.S. Also, check out CloudDiary if you haven’t already – a place on the web where you can store your thoughts.

A Little History

Let’s go back to 2006. I got invited to join Facebook by a fellow Shad. Because my high school didn’t have a network, I got on through my friend’s school network, ironically an all-girls Toronto school, Havergal College. I didn’t care because at that point there was barely anyone I knew on Facebook. And then I discovered status updates, and the Wall. Writing on someone’s wall felt like talking to them in public. It was like others were in vicinity and were aware that I’m talking to someone. That summer, I instantly felt more social, and spent a lot of time talking to the friends I made at Shad through Facebook (and stalking them). Friendships flourished.

Signal vs. Noise

Back to 2011. Facebook is busier than ever, and due to the huge number of updates from a significant number of people I don’t know too well, and certain types of updates I don’t care about (“John Doe is now friends with …”), it’s not as inviting to log-in as it once was. The experience is nowhere as much fun and the audience is nowhere as much closely-knit as it once was. It seems some of us are approaching “Facebook fatigue”. And Facebook engineers are faced by a challenging question: how to reduce the noise and amp up the signal in someone’s newsfeed?

In the past, they’ve have addressed this question with variety of approaches: friend lists, grouping of similar posts, grouping of posts about to a particular event, smarter friend lists, and their most recent and significant innovation: the Subscribe button.

With the Subscribe button, Facebook has really hit on something big. You can unsubscribe people you don’t want to hear from without defriending them. This is a much needed innovation that took way too long to come out. But will it really solve the problem of not being able to only connect with your real friends (in the truest definition of the word)? It’s too early to predict, considering that this latest newsfeed innovation just arrived today, and probably hasn’t been rolled out to most people yet.

Moving Forward

As an early adopter, I’m still left evaluating options to make my Facebook experience as much fun and addicting as it was back when I started. Another friend clean up? With 500+ friends, it would be a gargantuan task, so I’m not really sure how I would go about it. Unsubscribing from a lot of people? Yeah, maybe, but “unsubscribing” updates from 200 of my 500 odd friends? Really? That seems a bit ridiculous. In fact, it begs an important question: Has Facebook has turned into something so crowded that will deter a big chunk of its old users away in the long run?

Not easy to say. It all really depends on what the Facebook engineers churn out, and how other Facebook-like services on the web get more popular. One thing is obvious – that, we will definitely be spending more time on the internet talking to people. But hopefully, the value of the time we put into a social life digitally will be recognized through some innovation within Facebook or outside of it that’s just around the corner. What I need is something that lets me connect more quickly to my real friends, something that’s private within my friend’s circle to some degree. Something that makes the social network experience fun. Something that’s not cluttered with updates from people who aren’t my real friends. And, Path might just be on the verge of becoming what I’m looking for.

This is coming from experience from being a novice designer while being highly ambitious, to be honest. Often you just have to keep a check on your ambition and get down to reality.

I’m not asking you to significantly change the way you think, because I know how that excitement feels of coming up with ideas and talking about them to people. However, use that excitement from your lightbulb moment to fuel your implementation efforts. A lot of the times you may be frustrated because your implementation so far doesn’t work anything like how you thought it would, but yeah, that’s what it is — converting ideas into working products is a hard job. I think millions, or even billions of great ideas with a lot of work put into it have failed to be of any value to people other than the person who built it, so don’t end up wasting years of work into something that you’re not sure will work.

I think the path to success lies in quickly churning out something that works and seeing the market response to it, or even how your friends react. They might like it, but do you find them using it? if not, then it’s most likely never going to be of much value to the world. That doesn’t mean it’s shit and nothing can be done about it. It just means you have to iterate and make your product better and just think technically from a user experience perspective why people aren’t using your product. It may even be the case that it’s how you’ve marketed your product that’s not attracting people towards it. This is why marketing is so important. Sometimes ideas you thought were shitty actually turn out to be good and even if they don’t seem that impressive, they make it big. Marketing efforts make or break a great product. How you brand something is very important for its success.

Anyway, I don’t really have any sort of track record of designing successful products, but I think this is something that a lot of people even well towards the end of their careers never realize: ideas aren’t nearly as important as execution.