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 -
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…
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.
YouTube - Nyan Cat Progress Indicator on YouTube
/via @smorgasbrod
“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.” —
via bustr : Amber : Diana Kimball
(via msg)
(via msg)
Really enjoyed the recent Foundation interview with Brian Wong. Here are some of the notes from it:
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:
Building SocialCam:
-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
-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
-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:
Distribution:
Product vision:
Android vs. iPhone development:
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.
Make something that captures a meaningful signal.
For inspiration, here are some existing popular and meaningful signals:
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.”
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 -
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…
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.”
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’.” —
(via msg)“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.
