I’ve wanted to redesign the Highrise sidebars for a long time. They’ve felt cluttered and messy to me, and as we add more features to Highrise the mess will only multiply. So I was glad to have the chance this week to redesign the sidebar modules. The visual side of the redesign was straightforward, but implementing the design in code required a few tricks. Here’s a look behind the scenes at the coding decisions we made for the new Highrise sidebars.
“Subjects” in Highrise
Which sidebar modules am I talking about? In Highrise you can keep track of People, Companies, and Cases. These all have the same basic code and UI. You can keep notes about them, set tasks for the future, and manage some common types of metadata. Since People, Companies and Cases share so much plumbing, we’ve abstracted them as subjects. A subject is anything in Highrise that you can attach notes and tasks to. When you look at a subject’s page, you see a sidebar with some modules for adding or editing metadata such as contact information, background information (a kind of static text description), dates to remember for that subject, and more. The screenshot below shows a subject page with the sidebar modules highlighted.
Redesigning the modules
Each module has a header like “Contact Bob” or “Dates to remember” and data below. In the original design, modules can be either “active” or “empty” based on whether they have any data in them. Empty modules have a grey header and an “add” link floated right. Active modules have a light blue header and an “edit” link on the right. We made this distinction so your eye would more easily catch active modules when you’re looking for information. The idea was good, but the original implementation looked messy with its mix of grey and blue, scattered red action links, and lack of separation between modules.
Continued…
Wanna feel ripped off today? Sign up for an online virtual service that charges a one-time activation fee. It’s a special feeling to hand over $35 for nothing.
I’d almost understand if there was actual work involved. Or hardware was manually set up. Or someone had to climb some stairs and walk down a few halls to flip something on.
But to charge me $35 to “activate” my account by adding a few records to a few databases, well, that feels like… You know what that feels like.
Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:
Highrise
Top magic site thrives due to Highrise and Getting Real
“The real crux of our system is Highrise. We use it in managing projects, production, post-production, and marketing. We use it to stay organized. We use it to manage our authorized retailer clients around the world. And we couldn’t breathe as well or sleep as well without it.”
Backpack
All about tags in Backpack
A tag is a simple label or keyword you can use to categorize your Backpack pages any way you want. Then when you click a tag you can see all the other pages that have that tag. It’s a great way to keep your pages loosely grouped in ways that make sense to you.
Scottish wood floor company runs its business using Backpack
“Our first task was to store documents that we use on to our ‘Important Documents’ page. Traditionally these documents were stored on our company server but it was sometimes problematic accessing these via a VPN if we were working from home or abroad. Accessing them on the cloud via Backpack has simplified this task and we are now working faster and with less hassle.”
McKay Hardwood Flooring, a Backpack customer, installed the flooring throughout the National Galleries of Scotland.
Basecamp
Embedding a tutorial video into a Basecamp project
“I used the same idea to embed our Camtasia videos into our Tutorials project… solves a huge issue for me since before I could only add a link to the video … I have attached a image of how it looks. It was a great help.”
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The other day I went to sell some books at The Strand bookstore. They have a separate desk in the back for selling books. I brought in a bag and two clerks started sorting through them.
Then another guy lined up behind me. One of the clerks said to him, “You here to sell books?” He said, “Yes.” The clerk responded, “Wait in the line outside.” The guy went outside.
Thirty seconds later he was back. The clerk repeated, “Wait in the line outside.” The guy said meekly, “There is no line outside.”
The clerk sighed, looked at the other clerk, and sarcastically said, “There is no line outside.” The other clerk said gruffly, “If you can’t figure out the line, then you can’t sell books here.” The potential seller walked back outside meekly.
A minute later, a girl walked up with books. “Wait in the line outside,” said the clerk again. She walked outside. A few moments later, she was back. “What are you doing?” She said, “Selling books.” He said, “The line is outside.” She walked outside again. The clerks laughed. “Let’s see if the Mensa society out there can figure out how the line works!” And they laughed some more. As if both these customers were complete morons.
Lucky for me, I had arrived moments before these other two. Because I sure had no idea there was a place outside to wait in line. Or that “there’s a line outside” actually means “form a line outside.”
I think a lot of people who work in customer service make a similar mistake in laughing at customers or making fun of them behind their backs (PEBKAC comes to mind).
It can be a dangerous trap. Sure, any one customer might be stupid. But if multiple customers are repeatedly making the same mistake, maybe it’s not a mistake on their part. Maybe it’s a mistake on your part. If no one can figure out where to wait in line, maybe that’s a sign that you’re not doing a good enough job explaining it.
I’ve been poking around a lot of architects’ web sites lately and I’m thoroughly surprised at how bad they are. It seems almost without fail that they are either blowing my browser window up full size, asking me to read light grey 9px text, overflowing with obfuscatory flashterbation, teasing me with custom designed scrollbars that don’t behave as you’d expect, or asking me to evaluate their work based on postage stamp sized photographs. It really feels like 1998. I see I’m not alone in this observation.
Architects have so much to gain from the web. Big huge photographs of their work, clear statements of who they are and what they believe in, easily linkable and sharable portfolio pages, daily links of interest.
As it stands today, if you want to show someone an interesting piece of work you usually have to give them a step-by-step guide on how to get there: First go to the home page, wait for the countdown timer to expire, then hover over the logo, then grab a magnifying glass, then squint, then click the 4th tiny icon on the left (I can’t really tell what it is), then use that custom scrollbar that looks like an elevator, then take a screenshot, then pull that screenshot into Photoshop, then zoom in about 8 times so it’s all nice and big on your screen, then take about 10 steps back from your computer, then look.
I’m only half kidding.
Come on, architects, get with it! Anyone got any links to a great architect’s site that bucks this trend?
The next 37signals Live will be tomorrow, August 26th at 11am central time.
The first two Live shows were general Q&As. This time we’re going to narrow down the focus to chapter 13 of Getting Real: Promotion. Generating buzz, getting press, promotion without a budget, launch, etc.
Come armed with questions and we’ll fire back answers. We’ll see you tomorrow at 37signals Live!
“How Design Can Save Democracy” is AIGA’s attempt to identify common design problems in election ballots and offer improvements.
Problem (excerpt)
Solution (excerpt)
More details.
Is it an improvement? Sure.
But the real crime here is how terrible the original one is. Looks like a bunch of lawyers trying to figure out Quark. It’s tough to have much faith in your government’s ability to solve truly complicated challenges when it seems so inept at dealing with relatively simple issues. Hasn’t this been a known problem for eight years now?!
It’d also be interesting to see what ballots look like in other parts of the world.
Update: Julien links to this can’t miss ballot used in Quebec.
For the unenlightened, Git is a distributed version control system that’s recently taken the software development world by storm. It’s what we use to manage all of our source code at 37signals. GitHub is an online service providing Git repository hosting and collaboration tools (we featured them recently on the Product Blog).
Rails, Capistrano, and Prototype are already hosted on Github, and we’re going to be releasing some of our internal libraries and plugins there as well. Feel free to follow, fork, clone, and contribute!
Darden Studio
Even though it works like typical lightboxes, the lightbox at Darden Studio (example) feels different due to design choices the firm makes.
The loading screen has custom typography centered on a black bezel:
And then check how using a non-browser typeface, including the x on the upper right, and the arrows in the lower right spice up the design of the lightbox itself.
ShoeGuru
ShoeGuru makes shoe shopping elegant.
Cymbolism
Cymbolism is a new website that attempts to quantify the association between colors and words. You can search for a word and see what colors people associate with it. The goal is to “make it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect.” Here are the results for the word spring.
I’m a big fan of swearing. Not in the derogatory, directed-at-you kind of way (“hey, fuck you!”), but as verbal marker to underline key concepts, create emphasis, and express passion. It certainly doesn’t work in every environment nor should it, but there are plenty were it does.
The first place where I’ve found it to be useful is between coworkers (“fuck, that’s awesome”). A team of British researchers found a while ago that profanity at work can help build solidarity and release stress. Couldn’t agree more. When people feel comfortable enough to let their emotions bare with the use of profanity, I’ve found the resulting atmosphere to be so much more relaxed and pleasurable. It’s not the profanity itself (although I adore “fuck” as one of the most versatile words in the English language), but what it says about the knitting of the culture.
The second place I’ve used profanity to great effect is at conferences where you feel you know the audience enough to loosen your tie and want to create a mental dog ear for an idea. Of all the presentations I’ve given, I’ve generally had the most positive feedback from the ones that carried enough passion to warrant profanity and it’s been very effective in making people remember key ideas (“they sell fucking shoes”).
It seems that profanity can work as a record button for the brain. It brings people to the edge of their attention as they’re trying to figure out whether they’re supposed to be offended or inspired. And then the content warrants the emphasis, the idea seems to stick better and longer and with more affection.
As with any tool, it can certainly be misused and applied to the wrong audience. But you can cut yourself with a great steak knife too. Use profanity with care and in the right context and it can be fucking amazing.
I just noticed Apple changed the logout feature in the MobileMe app UI. It used to be a power button icon. Now it just says “logout.” Another triumph of clarity over cleverness.
American Bungalow magazine (my current favorite periodical) has republished my post on their article “Bringing Back Stinesville.”
Since reading that article and posting about it here, I’ve visited Stinesville, and even started on a quest to buy a historic property in my hometown of Placerville, CA. I’m far, far away from ever being able to buy a home of my own there, but it’s become a goal I’m tacking to the top of my list. Being the change you want to see goes far beyond politics and societal pressures, it starts with our consumption and our landscape and our luxuries.
The folks at American Bungalow were also kind enough to send over a PDF of the article for everyone to read. (Although you should still pick up your own copy!) Find it at Whole Foods or a Borders near you.
After wading through over 500 applications, meeting some great people, discovering some serious talent, and evaluating people on a variety of levels, we can finally announce our new designer. He’s Jamie Dihiansan.
Who’s Jamie?
First off, Jamie is a great guy. Kind, generous, curious, honest. We all get along well. He’s a good cultural fit. Without that nothing else matters. He’s also local which will be handy.
I’ve actually tried to hire Jamie a couple times before. Once about nine years ago when we first started 37signals (he didn’t want to leave the cushy confines of Big Agency life at Organic) and once a few years ago (we couldn’t afford him). This time the stars aligned.
For the past 7 years Jamie has been working at Crate & Barrel Online. First as a senior designer, later moving to the Senior Art Director role. He’s well steeped in designs that sell, clear communication, and understanding consumer behavior.
Why did we pick Jamie?
Part of the hiring process involved asking the leading candidates to redesign the Backpack home page in one week with no direction (we paid them for their time). We really liked Jamie’s take on it. It was the biggest departure from how we design our marketing sites today. It introduced some elements that we were hoping to see and surprised us with things we hadn’t thought of before. Down the road we plan on sharing all the designs submitted by the leading candidates.
We also picked Jamie because of his background, his artistic abilities (as much as I don’t like graffiti, I can see the art in Jamie’s work back in the day), and his approach to problem solving through design. He’s a clear thinker and an objective player. Good icon designer too. We liked all of those things.
We’re really excited
Jamie starts in September. We’re really excited to see his influence seep into our marketing sites and product UIs. The first major project will be reviewing our existing marketing/public sites and working on a universal redesign.
So, everyone say hi to Jamie Dihiansan!
There’s a piece in Forbes called Why A Four-Day Work Week Doesn’t Work that suggests:
But there are serious drawbacks. Packing 40 hours into four days isn’t necessarily an efficient way to work. Many people find that eight hours are tough enough; requiring them to stay for an extra two could cause morale and productivity to decrease. As for saving on the cost of commuting, it likely isn’t true.
The article is right: More hours in fewer days is not an efficient way to work. That’s why this article misses the point.
The point of the 4-day work week is about doing less work. It’s not about 4 10-hour days for the magical 40-hour work week. It’s about 4 normalish 8-hour days for the new and improved 32-hour work week. The numbers are just used to illustrate a point. Results, not hours, are what matter, but working longer hours doesn’t translate to better results. The law of diminishing returns kicks in quick when you’re overworked.
Besides, very few people work even 8 hours a day. You’re lucky if you get a few good hours in between all the meetings, interruptions, web surfing, office politics, and personal business that permeates typical work day.
Fewer official working hours help squeeze the fat out of the typical work week. Once everyone has less time to get their stuff done, they respect that time even more. People become stingy with their time and that’s a good thing. They don’t waste it on things that just don’t matter. When you have fewer hours you usually spend them more wisely.
So don’t think 4 days means cramming the same amount of time a shorter week. Longer days isn’t the goal. Think 4 days means a shorter week with less time to get things done. And that’s actually what you want.
Bret asks:
I often see people on forums telling complainers to shut up with the “vote with your wallet” line. How does 37signals feel on the matter? Is it better to have a vocal customer who’s willing to stick with the product despite a perceived shortcoming or would you prefer that such a customer move on?
The first thing I’d say is this: It’s tough to be 100% happy with anything. Sacrifices rule the day — each person needs to figure out where their limits are. So if it’s one thing that’s really bothering someone, maybe they can find a way to adapt (or we can find a way to improve). But if it’s one thing after another, maybe that product just isn’t a good fit for that customer.
The second thing I’d say is this: You can learn a lot from a vocal customer. Even customers who continually bash your company or your product have value. So the goal shouldn’t be silencing them, it should be listening to them. You don’t have to do anything they say, but being aware of what they’re saying can give you insight into a perspective that you may otherwise not have had.
We hope you’re happy here
What’s most important to us is that people who use our products are happy using our products. If someone is unhappy with our products, we’d love to hear why. Maybe we can make them happy. But maybe we can’t — that’s certainly possible too.
So if we don’t think we’ll be able to make them happy, and they’ve found another product that makes them happier, we encourage them to use the other product. Sometimes we’ll even recommend an alternative if we can.
Don’t fight a losing battle
At a certain point there’s no sense in trying to make someone happy who you can’t keep happy, and there’s no sense in someone suffering endlessly when they constantly run into things that don’t work for them. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit. Luckily there are a lot of choices, different approaches, and alternatives out there. Choice is on the side of the consumer.
Be honest up front
This sometimes comes up in pre-sales emails. People will ask us why our product is better than this or that product. We may riff on the fundamental advantage of simple, focused tools like ours, but then we’ll say something like: “There’s really no way for us to tell you what’s best for you. We encourage you to try all the products you’re considering. That’s the only way you’ll ever know for sure which product feels right. We hope it’s our product, but if it’s not we understand.”
Some salespeople may say that’s a terrible strategy, but we prefer to give the most realistic answer, not the “obviously we’re the best no matter what” answer. Because in the end, what feels right is what works best. Comparing products by comparing features isn’t really an effective way of making a decision. You have to compare the experience and you can only compare the experience by trying the products.
So yes and no
So, yes, I do encourage people to vote with their wallet, but at the same time I don’t encourage companies to chase all wallets either. Every wallet isn’t going to be a good fit in your pocket.
Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:
Basecamp
[Case Study] Marketing firm BKWLD loves Basecamp because it’s “intuitive, easy to use, and easy on the eyes”
“Private messages and to-do lists were a godsend for one client. This was a particularly challenging project for an extremely difficult client. Private messaging in Basecamp gives us control of our client’s perception of their project, while still allowing us to be explicit with its nitty-gritty parts all in one convenient place. Sometimes the work gets a little ugly, but keeping a professional facade is extremely important to some clients. Basecamp accommodates this nicely.”
BKWLD’s Dashboard.
How Blutique uses Litmus and Basecamp to deliver page and test results to clients
Silas Peterson of Blutique, an interactive consultancy located in New Orleans, Louisiana, writes in to tell us about how his team uses LitmusApp inside of Basecamp to deliver page and email platform test results to their clients.
Litmus and Basecamp.
Backpack
“Backpack has changed my life”
“I’m able to use this extremely affordable system to manage small projects, allow people to collaborate, image files, create lists, assign tasks, edit and share calendars and more…I think this is an excellent solution for small companies and start ups.”
Highrise
How do I build a bulk mailing list in Highrise?
You can do this by giving each contact you want on the mailing list the same tag and then exporting the list…Click the “Tags” tab and click that specific tag to bring up all contacts on your list. Then click the “Export” link in the sidebar. Choose the format you want and save the list. You can then import this list into the application that you use to send group emails, create mailing labels, etc.
Multiple products
Less Accounting, more Basecamp and Highrise
“Accounting sucks. Less Everything makes it suck less. Our flagship product, LessAccounting.com was built with ease-of-use at the core of the accounting software, which caters to small businesses and freelancers. The app just got even better by integrating with Basecamp and Highrise to make importing contacts ridiculously simple.”
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Design Jobs
Obama for America is looking for a Web Designer/Developer in Chicago, IL.
Apple Inc. is looking for a UI Engineer in Cupertino, CA.
Best Buy Co., Inc. is looking for a Front End Web Developer in Richfield, MN.
Crain Communications is looking for an Interactive Designer in New York, NY.
Zillow.com is looking for a UX Designer in Seattle, WA.
TripAdvisor is looking for Web Developer in Boston, MA.
Flirtomatic is looking for a Interaction designer/architect in Soho, London.
HUGE is looking for a Art Director in Brooklyn, NY.
Business.com is looking for an Web Designer in Santa Monica, CA.
Check out all the Design Jobs currently available on the Job Board.
Programming/Tech Jobs
Brandissimo is looking for a Senior Web Developer / Internet Jedi in Los Angeles.
Teehan+Lax is looking for a Senior Front-End Developer in Toronto, Canada.
Janus Health, Inc. is looking for a Web Developer Extraordinaire in San Diego, CA.
Serious Business is looking for a Rails Engineer located in San Francisco, CA.
OHSU is looking for a Web Applications Developer in Portland, Oregon.
Leapfrog Online is looking for a Ruby/Rails Software Engineer in Evanston, IL.
Rockstar Games is looking for a Web Developer in New York.
Auditude is looking for a Front-end Web Engineer in Palo Alto, CA.
Polar News Company is looking for a Front-end Developer in Soho, New York City.
Check out all the Programming Jobs currently available on the Job Board.
More jobs!
The Job Board is flush with great programmer and designer jobs all over the country (and the world). The Gig Board is the place to find contract jobs.
Compass Bank is currently running a special promotion that gives you 3 months free of Backpack Plus (normally $49/month) when you open a new Compass Business checking account.
If you’re interested in offering Backpack (or Basecamp or Highrise) to your customers or members as a value-add, please email me direct at jason@37signals dot com.
The pizza at Di Fara Pizza on Avenue J in Midwood, Brooklyn is amazing (among the best in NYC). Owner Domenico DeMarco has run the place for over 40 years and makes each pie by hand.
The place is a restaurant consultant’s nightmare though: The wait for food is over an hour. Sometimes two. You can’t call up and order a pie either. You have to do it in person. Ask how long your order will take and you get a shrug. There’s a permanent line all the way out the door yet the only person allowed to touch the pizzas is DeMarco. He grows his own spices on the windowsill and cuts the basil right onto the pies with a pair of shears. Prices are double what other neighborhood pizzerias charge: A regular pie costs $20. A slice costs $5 (but you can only get one of those when DeMarco feels like it). Also, the place is a mess. No one wipes the tables after meals. Stacks of used bottles line the walls. Smoke from the ovens clogs the whole room.
I’m sure if you asked restaurant business experts, they’d say he should take phone orders and reservations. He should expand to a bigger location and hire others to work with him in the kitchen. He should clean the place up and buy some nicer tables. But it’s pretty clear that DeMarco doesn’t give a shit.
The freedom of small businesses
DeMarco doesn’t care about experts, franchising, or expansion because he doesn’t have to. That’s what you can do when you run your own small business. You can stay small. You can create your own thing and keep it the way you want it. You can take pride in what you’re creating and oversee everything that comes out of your oven. If people don’t like the wait, they can go somewhere else. If they don’t want to pay extra for the ingredients you grow yourself or import from Italy, that’s fine. You can be a perfectionist and take as long as you want. And the customers that care about what you care about will flock to you.
The reward: You get to satisfy customers and make money. But beyond that, you get to love what you do. Your work doesn’t feel like a job. It feels like art. You get to feel passion. Instead of counting the days to retirement, you keep working. Because you’re already doing what you love.
“There’s no money in the world they could pay me for it”
In “Charred Bubbles, and Other Secrets of the Slice,” DeMarco explains:
Nobody taught me to make the pizza. You gotta pick it up for yourself. All of these 40 years, I keep experimenting. My pizza is good, because I use fresh tomatoes. They come from Italy, from Salerno. Then I started to get mozzarella from Italy, from my hometown in the province of Caserta. It’s $8 a pound, and this parmesan, it’s $12. It comes twice a week. This might have been made two days ago, or three days ago.
I do this as an art. I don’t look to make big money. If somebody comes over here and offers me a price for the store, there’s no price. There’s no money in the world they could pay me for it. I’m very proud of what I do.
Continued…
Fellow Chicagoan, great programmer/journalist, creator of the Django framework, talented guitarist, and genuinely nice guy Adrian Holovaty and his Everyblock hyperlocal news and information site grace the cover of this Sunday’s Chicago Tribune Magazine. Adrian, his site, and his crew deserve all the ink they can get.
Venture capitalists are glorified gamblers in the Ace-from-Casino sense of the word. They try their best to collect intel on the players, but ultimately still just place bets. Bets that usually fail more often than they succeed. It’s the 1-in-10 blowout payoff that makes sure the piano keeps playing for them while the tune goes mum for the rest of their bets.
Those are potentially good-enough odds for a VC to make a decent return for their investors. Lots of VC’s can’t even pass that bar, though, and end up net-negative for their backers. But let’s just take the guys who do make it. What’s their seal of approval worth?
According to Adam from Heroku, it’s much more valuable to get the peg from these gamblers than actually having sales in the shop:
When you’re doing your own thing, you have very little feedback on whether your path makes sense. You’ve got users/customers, sure. But for any random thing you might build, you’ll always be able to find some weirdos that want it, and maybe are even willing to pay for it. Whether those people represent the vanguard of a sustainable customer base, or whether they are a niche too tiny to build a real business on, is impossible to tell early on.
But convincing investors of the viability of your idea – enough to place a monetary wager on it – provides early confirmation that you’re on a viable path. It may even provide some course-corrective feedback. This is why VC-backed companies tend to get more respect than non, all other things being equal. A firm whose sole purpose is predicting technology trends believes that there is a reasonable chance that this company’s product will be the next big thing.
It’s funny, I have the exact opposite take from the same indicators.
Real customers who use their own money to pay for your products seem like a much better, much more real confirmation that you’re doing something right than getting pegged by a VC using other people’s money to fish for 1-in-10 chances of a monster trout.
To me, convincing a VC to give you money only confirms that they think your outfit is capable of having a long shot of making a big sale down the line. And that they can dilute you successfully enough that they’ll get the lion’s share of the spoils. As a confirmation of a real business? Meh.
Separate users from customers to determine success
I think the confusion comes from how callously users and customers are conflated. I absolutely agree that if you’re just giving away your shit for free, then interest is only an indirect indicator for possible success at best. Who knows if these freeloaders can actually be made to turn a profit? Better take the money upfront and run for the exit before you have to find out!
But if you stop thinking so much about users (or eyeballs if we’re talking early 2000s) and start focusing on customers, the game opens up. Real customers not only confirm directly that you have a compelling product (rather than the by-proxy way of a VC), they also help fund your operation from the get-go.
You don’t need outside bets to launch a web business
Most web startups don’t have high costs outside of labor that can’t be linked at least linearly (and preferably better than that!) to the growth in customers. If you need lots of servers, it’s presumably because lots of people like your product and if you’re treating your users as customers, that means you’ll be having plenty of dough to bake a profitable cake.
All that being said, it’s certainly possible that being on the receiving end of a VC bet can lead you to the jackpot. The wheels in Vegas wouldn’t keep turning if some people didn’t see a big bucks ringing of cha-ching sometimes. So if the idea of trusting VCs over customers appeals to you, just roll your dice and hope you don’t roll seven!
An electric knife:
A juicer:
An iron:
More disassembled appliances in this Flickr set.
Farhad Manjoo (who wrote a cover story on 37signals for Salon.com a few years back) is now writing for Slate. This time he wonders about the Google Black Hole.
Farhad plays “Where Are They Now?” with some of Google’s recent higher-profile tech acquisitions. He focuses on mojo-heavy companies and products like Jaiku, Jotspot (Sites), Dodgeball, Measure Map, and Grand Central. Some of these died, some of these slowed down, some of them were still not open for new customers a year after the acquisition. Some people are wondering if Feedburner (Google), Upcoming (Yahoo), and Delicious (Yahoo) might belong on this list.
The astute Dare Obasanjo wrote about this phenomenon in detail a few days ago. His Application Rewrites after Acquisitions: How Large Software Companies Destroy Startup Value article is well worth a read.
Of course there have been success stories. Innovation at big companies often comes from the small companies and teams they swallow whole.
But with the odds of a big-co buyout nearing lottery proportions, a good chance of neglect awaiting your product on the other side, and a “I can’t wait until my employment contract is up,” feeling lingering your every work day, I hope entrepreneurs think twice about building to flip.
Related: David’s The secret to making money online talk at Y Combinator’s Startup School 2008.
CD Baby founder Derek Sivers interviews Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek. Fascinating stuff. Below are some of the most interesting Ferriss bits from the interview.
Why you shouldn’t view changes as permanent:
So what would happen if you eliminated this? Let’s just say 48 hours, seven days, one month? What would happen if you did the opposite? Those are two very, very useful questions. Most people avoid certain actions because they view changes as permanent. If you make a change, can you go back to doing it like you did before? You can always reclaim your current state in most cases. If I quit my job in industry x to test my artistic abilities in a different industry, worst case scenario, can I go back to my previous industry? Yes. Recognize that you can test-drive and micro-test things over brief periods of time. You can usually reclaim the workaholism that you might currently experience if you so decide to go back to it.
He tested titles for his book via Google Adwords campaigns:
Then I ran a Google Adwords campaign, where your ad appears based on keywords that people were searching for. I ran a dozen different ads with a dozen different potential titles as the advertising headline, with the potential subtitles as the ad text. The click-through page was nothing, but I wasn’t concerned with the conversion or cost per acquisition. I was only concerned with the click through rate – which of those dozen headlines was most popular. So for less than $150 in one week using keywords as a fixed variable, I was able to identify “The 4-Hour Workweek, Escape 9-to-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich” as the most successful title by far.
On scratching your own itch:
If you have something that you would like to make and you just don’t know how to test it, make sure you’re scratching your own itch. Like Twitter: Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey created it in two weeks as a way to scratch their own itch. He said, “At least that way you know that one person is interested in having it.” It’s amazing how many otherwise smart, well-funded companies will use awful statistically-invalid focus groups, then say, “Well, no one in this room likes the idea, but our focus groups tell us that we should make it,” so of course the product comes out and it fails.
You can’t fix an overwhelmed feeling with more work:
That’s a good point – recognizing you can’t fix an overwhelmed feeling with more work. Overwhelmed is not due to lack of time – it’s due to lack of priorities, right? Another flaw in most time management systems is they focus on filling your time – every minute of every day should be filled with a work vision of some kind. Or they don’t instruct you on how to minimize the work. Especially if you tend to wear overwork ethic as some kind of badge of honor, which I know many artists do. Laziness is not less action. Laziness can mean blurred priorities and indiscriminate action. You can be very busy running around with a cell phone to your head 24 hours a day and still be very lazy because you’re not taking the time to prioritize.
Continued…
Years ago I read a book about guitar effects pedals. Something the author wrote in the intro stuck with me: “Tone is in your fingers.”
He went on to explain: You can buy the same guitar, effects pedals, and amplifier that Eddie Van Halen uses. But when you play that rig, it’s still going to sound like you.
Likewise, Eddie could plug into a crappy Strat/Pignose setup at a pawn shop and you’d still be able to recognize that it’s Eddie Van Halen playing.
Sure, fancy gear can help. But the truth is that your tone comes from you.
I often think of this story when people fixate on gear over content. You know the type: Wannabe designers who want an avalanche of fancy typefaces and Photoshop filters but don’t have anything to say. Amateur photographers who want to debate film vs. digital instead of what actually makes for a great photo. Startup folks that worry more about software and scaling issues then how to actually get customers and make money. They all miss the point.
Aspiring podcasters consantly ask Gary V about the tools he uses. He responds:
It’s not the camera that I use, it’s not the blogging software, it’s not the widgets, it’s not the SEO. It’s the two C’s: content and community…There are so many crap podcasts out there with billion dollar cameras and editing tools for days. It’s about giving from your heart with content you really understand and, more importantly, giving back to the community that supports your show.
Figure out what you have to say that’s interesting and then unleash it. Use whatever tools you’ve got already or what you can afford cheaply. Then go.
It’s not the gear that matters. It’s you and your ideas that matter. Tone is in your fingers.
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