Inter-sections.net : Category business, everything about business

Announcing Woobius and Scribbles

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:30:00 +0000

I’m working on the part 6 of the hyperbrain series, but it’s not finished yet. It takes time, of course, and in the meantime I’m working on many things, including my business, and the future blog that will replace inter-sections.

Perhaps it’s worth finally mentioning that business here! Fancy that, I hadn’t actually done it before. Incredible.

So, without further ado, I’d like to introduce: Woobius, and its associated blog, on which I write regularly: Woobius Scribbles.

What is Woobius?

Woobius is a collaboration tool tailored for the needs of the construction industry. In the process of designing and building any sort of building, architects, consultants, engineers, and a whole lot more people have to exchange large numbers of files that need to be kept track of. If you would like more detail on this, do have a look at this article which I wrote on Woobius Scribbles: Document Control - how hard can it be?

This can become a huge problem, because there are a lot of those files and they have to be shared between dozens of companies. Most common file sharing solutions (like usendit, box.net, or even Dropbox) are not well suited to this, because they completely fail on the “collaboration between companies” part.

There are some industry-specific solutions, but without exception they’re slow, bloated monsters that try to control every aspect of the project, and end up pretty much requiring full-time staff just to deal with them. They’re very hard and slow to use, so people end up bypassing them at every corner. And they’re extremely expensive, too.

This is where Woobius comes in. It’s designed to be intuitive and easy to use, automates most common tasks to save time, and is more than an order of magnitude cheaper than the competition.

So, this is what I’ve spent most of the last year working on. The good news, since I did follow most of my own tips, and since I work with a fantastic team (I know it’s cheesy to say it, but it’s true), is that it’s going quite well. We have a good many users within the construction industry who are using it every day for live construction projects. Growth has been steady and viral, despite the economic conditions in the construction industry, from 50 or so users 10 months ago, when we launched the first kernel of functionality, to over 2000 today, almost all of it through invitations by our users themselves.

That’s all very, very exciting, and I’m really looking forward to the next year, as we grow to profitability and help many more architects with their projects.

The only other thing I’d add about Woobius is that, like every start-up, it could use more publicity. If you know some people who work in the construction industry, let them know — not because I ask you to, but because it is genuinely useful (our users tell us that!).

And if Woobius sounds useful to you and you don’t work in the construction industry, don’t let that stop you from giving it a try. It’s a really handy tool, and although it was designed with specific users in mind, I would be the first one to be surprised if it wasn’t useful to many others too.

What is Woobius Scribbles?

Scribbles is simple the company blog for Woobius. I write there regularly, about business and technology related topics, so if you like what I’ve written here in the past, I encourage you to check it out and, maybe, subscribe. It’s got a strong architecture slant, so not everything will be of interest to non-architects, but since I myself am not an architect, and I like to write things that I find interesting, there will be many posts there which will not be related to architecture.

That’s it for this meta-announcement. There will be another one like it after the hyperbrain series is complete, about the future of this blog. Thanks for reading!

Good scams, bad scams, and terrible scams

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:00:00 +0000

If you define a “scam” as a system designed to trick people into purchasing something they didn’t really want to purchase, the internet - and the real world - are rife with scams. Almost every business, no matter its size, uses every trick it can think of to convince people to purchase its products.

Scams are not created equal, though.

Terrible scams

I define a terrible scam as one which most of the target audience can see through right away, and which makes them distrustful the minute they spot it (which is pretty much instant). That’s pretty terrible, because it creates huge amounts of bad will. Even if you’re a professional scammer (as opposed to a legitimate business trying to sell a product by all means available), you want to avoid those - although somehow, a great many professional scammers (e.g. 419ers and other viagra spammers) seem to specialise in it.

Spam is a great example, but so are all those “get paid to work from home” websites out there. They’re scams, preying on desperate people, and the vast majority of people out there can see right through them and immediately distrust the originators of such schemes.

Being so transparent, they’re not all that effective, really. Perhaps the reason why professional scammers specialise in this lower grade of scam is because they can’t do any better. Those who can at least create a bad scam will work for real companies.

Bad scams

Bad scams are those which still breed resentment when seen through, but which most of the target audience doesn’t see through. A great example of this would be bank charges. Most people won’t even begin to think that the banks are scamming them by applying over-hefty charges for non-existent “administration tasks” linked to overdrafts. They’ll resent it a little when they pay, but they won’t see it as an outright swindle and challenge it as such.

Another good example would be high-interest credit cards. In the past, these were called usurers. Today, they run credit card departments in large stores worldwide.

Yet another example: some real estate companies often spam free property search sites with attractive listings that aren’t actually available when you call them up (try going through findaproperty and calling up the agencies, you’ll see). Most people seem not to figure this scam out, but when they do realise it, they generally don’t feel very happy about it at all.

Bad scams are not terrible, because at least most people don’t figure them out. We all wish they didn’t exist, but the companies that use them at least get some returns out of them from a majority of their target market, so, unlike viagra spam, they’re at least not completely boneheaded.

Good scams

And then, finally, there’s also good scams. Those are the ones which few people figure out, and which those who see through them don’t mind so much. What could that be? How could anyone fall for a scam and still feel good about it? I’m not quite sure, but I suspect it’s all about creating the right emotional blanket around the scam.

Let’s have an example, then. Mobile telcos (at least in the UK), have become masters of the good scam. They scam consumers from at least two perspectives.

The first one is free minutes. Almost any monthly contract in the UK will include some number of free minutes, which are basically prepaid minutes that expire at the end of the month. It’s a blatant scam - you’re paying for something so intangible that it doesn’t even exist until you use it up. And of course a large number of “free” minutes go unused by the time the end of the month and expire silently into the pocket of the telcos. Yet, and this may be hard to understand for people in countries where this is not the norm, most people would feel at least a little distressed about being offered a contract that doesn’t include any free minutes.

I’m not sure why exactly that is. I guess it’s a combination of using the word “free” and of emotional associations generated through clever marketing, but somehow, most people in the UK, even when they realise that free minutes are a scam, don’t mind so much, and actually want to be scammed. If you have any better theories, please do share them in the comments.

The next one is the monthly contracts that sponsor the price of the phone. In absolute terms, it’s a scam. People are paying more than they would if the “buy a new phone every 12-18 months” virus was not injected into the contract. And it also strongly encourages consumers to actually buy a new phone (and lock themselves into a new contract) every 12-18 months. Yet, once again, it’s nice to get a new phone “for free” or at a large discount, and the result is actually that a lot of people have cool phones even though in a more rational world they would choose to spend their money on something else.

So once again, most people who fall prey to that scam don’t mind, and would even feel bad about the scam being taken away, even when they do realise it’s a scam. That’s brilliant.

What do you think? Is a good scam more ethical than a bad or terrible one? Would you prefer if most scams were good rather than bad or terrible? Would there be a benefit to the world at large if scammers learnt to create better scams that actually make us want to be scammed?

Technology recruitment in an early start-up

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:00:00 +0000

So, you have an idea for a startup, but need a tech guy to build it… how should you find him?

Last week I ripped into a job advert with, I hope, some good comical results. Some people asked, more specifically, what I would do in Redline’s place (Redline was the company that produced the advert). How do you make that first technical hire?

Of course, you want the company to sound personable and friendly, and that was probably the noble impulse that drove the poor anonymous job ad writer to write that awful ad. A formal, stiff job ad is indeed not going to attract good early employees - let alone a start-up CTO, which I believe is what they were trying to hire in this case.

First of all, let’s define our terms a little. Everyone has different terms for these things, but there’s two general stages to recruitment of technical guys in a really early start-up (one with fewer than 10 techs). Please note that when a company grows beyond that size, things shift and evolve. This applies to very small technology start-ups only and, as ever in the start-up world, there are and will always be exceptions.

The CTO

The first person that needs to be recruited is what I call variously the start-up CTO, the technology director, or the technical co-founder. For a technology start-up whose bread and butter will be developing a technical product that people will want to pay money for, this “hire” is the most important that the founder can make in the entire history of the company. Here, I’m assuming that the first founder is non-technical or not technically strong enough.

Strong enough to do what? Well, to develop the whole product by himself! Wait a second… can anyone develop a whole product by themselves? It depends on the product. I’ve done it. My best friend is doing it now on his own start-up. My current start-up employs only two people to build our product. So yes, it is possible, if you’re using the right technologies and if you’re building the kind of product that is amenable to being built by a very small team.

You might decide to hire more than just this guy, even though he can build the whole product by himself, in order to speed things up a little. After all, if your cofounder can write the whole product by himself, but it will take him 3 years to get to version 1, that’s probably not good enough. But you won’t be struggling to hire his team - he’s more than capable of doing that himself. Ah yes, that’s another thing a start-up CTO needs to be capable of: finding and attracting other technically talented team members to joint the start-up.

What else? Well, he also needs to have a good head for business, to understand where the start-up is going and be able to pick the technologies to meet those goals. He needs to be capable of working with maniacal productivity despite the chaotic, highly constrained environment of an early start-up. He needs to have enough managerial skills to manage the early start-up team once it comes into existence. What you (as a business-minded founder) might be doing for the business, i.e. pulling the entire thing from a mere idea into existence out of your sweat and determination, he needs to do for the product.

It’s worth emphasizing here: I’m not saying this guy will build the whole product by himself, only that he needs to be able to do so if need be.

He’s a One-Man IT Department. He’s the person on top of which you’ll build your company. He’s not a rock star. He’s a rock, and on this rock you can build your company.

The early employees

Early (technical) employees also need to be very competent, flexible and driven, but less so than the technical co-founder. They can specialise a bit more, and can focus on getting things done without quite so many business distractions. It will be the CTO’s job to figure out what technical skills are needed to continue to grow the start-up, once there’s budget for other people, and to find and hire the right people to fill those holes.

Early employees do need to be willing to have a go at whatever needs to be done at the moment. If it’s network administration that you need to do today, so be it. But they don’t need to bring all those skills to the job - it’s something they can learn from their colleagues, from howto’s downloaded from the web, books, etc.

As a start-up CTO looking for early employees, you should look not for someone who can do your job, but for someone who is reasonably well rounded and flexible, but more importantly is better than you in one of the key areas that really matter to the start-up.

Where to find them

So, where do you find these rare and wond’rous creatures? Let’s start with the CTO. Most important hire in the company. Defines the product that you will build. Is a job site a good place to look for one of those?

Of course not. You find technical co-founders the same way you find any co-founder: through personal relationships. If you want to start a technology start-up and you’re not technical, you need to locate your technical co-founder amongst your network of friends, and if there isn’t one there, you need to expand that network until there is. Until you have found your technical cofounder, your company cannot be started (at least not with any reasonable chance of success). Maybe there are even better ways of finding co-founders, but I don’t know them. Paul Graham’s experience seems to agree: “Usually the founders have been friends for at least a year before starting the company.”

I’m sorry if you were expecting a simple, easy answer, like “Go on find-a-CTO.com”. In my experience, the kind of people you want as technical cofounders are either doing it already, or productively employed. Finding your technical co-founder is hard work, but the pay-back from this work is huge.

What about early employees? Well, those are a little easier. At least, you can let your CTO do most of that job. He or she should have the network to find the people that he wants to hire. There, as well, I’d recommend networking as the primary means of finding great people to work with. However, for early employees, in some rare cases, you might use a carefully constructed job ad to fish for possible hires. Bear in mind, though, that at this stage, it’s usually better not to hire anyone than to hire the wrong person.

Taking on a cofounder: final note

One last note on cofounders: you can’t treat them as employees. They’re not employees, they’re cofounders. You want them to feel that it’s their company, and to do that, you have to give them equity - not options, not promises of options, but actual founder’s equity. Don’t feel like you’re giving stuff away here. If you’ve got the right person for the job, ensuring that they feel ownership of the company will ensure that your share is worth something. It’s better to own 70 or 80 or even 51% of something than 100% of nothing.

I hope you’ve found this post helpful! Comments are, as always, welcome.

How not to write a job advert

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Recently, I found a Craigslist job advert that made me chuckle. It seems to manage to do almost everything wrong, from the point of view of recruiting the kind of person it appears to be targeting.

So, in the spirit of improving the web, here’s my blow-by-blow description of all (or most of) what’s wrong with this job ad.

Here’s the advert, first, in case it’s taken down:

Senior Rails Developer (Toronto)

Reply to: jobs@redwirenation.com [?]
Date: 2008-08-26, 9:12PM EDT


Working Role Title: Senior Rails Developer 

Why People Want To Work for Us: RedWire Employees Are Rockstars 


Enabling Entrepreneurs To Connect on a Global Scale 
As far as missions go, ours is pretty cool. How many people get to say their job is to help others be successful? 

Innovating at Warp 9 
We are a small company, but we are driven to change the world. Our reason for being is to help entrepreneurs realize their ambitions. We are innovative, relevant and user-friendly, and we use these qualities to equip business owners with the tools they need for success. 

Fun-zilla 
Working for RedWire means being passionate and creative. We want awesome people to work with who will be contributing members of our team of rockstars. 

The top three reasons why working at RedWire rocks: 

1) You get to do good. People helping people—it’s a beautiful thing. 
2) Brainastics, whiteboards, candy and lots of coffee. Sometimes we have to remind our employees to go home. 
3) Flexible work hours. We don’t do “9 to 5”. 
Nuff said. 

We realize that a start-up environment doesn’t appeal to everybody, but if it works for you, then, please, read on. 


Current Needs: 

¼ Network Engineer 
+ ¼ Electrical Engineer 
+ 3⁄8 Senior Open Source Software Developer 
+ 1⁄8Mathematician 
= 1 RedWire Senior Developer 

We are looking for an in-house doer-thinker-fixer-betterer whose superpower is to fulfill all the functions of an IT Department. We need an autonomous and resourceful guru to join us in our quest and manage all things IT. You must be ridiculously passionate about the web, love the idea of working in a start-up, enjoy variety in your day-to-day and be able to handle the stress of being the go-to resource. 

Role Overview: 

This is a pivotal role for an ambitious, highly enthusiastic developer who’s excited at the thought of working in a fast-paced, high-growth web start-up. 

In this position, you will demonstrate your mental prowess as you coordinate a diverse flow of projects and initiatives. 

You will be responsible for: 

- Web application development 
- Network administration 
- Information storage 
- Network functionality 

In addition, you will also be responsible for helping set up email distribution, as well as any other relevant technically related projects as they arise. 

We are looking for a goal-oriented, naturally eager person who can work effectively and efficiently under tight deadlines and who is able to manage multiple projects at once. 

Qualifications:
• Provable guru status and devoteeism of Ruby on Rails with experience actually deploying applications 
• Strong experience with MySQL, version 5+ and beyond 
• Background in developing and optimizing GNU/Linux, *nix, and *BSD platforms for mission critical production environments 
• Familiar with network infrastructure and design concepts for small networks (<25 machines). 
• Proven experience in designing security-hardened web applications, using open cryptographic standards 
• Familiarity with hardware prognostics and normal accident theory 
• Expertise in open-source programs and development 
• Familiarity with content versioning systems (e.g., Hg, SVN, CVS) 
• Experience breaking stuff 
• Experience fixing what you’ve broken 

If you are the personification of our long-winded wish list, then we’d celebrate your email’s alerting us to your existence. Interested potential rockstars should send their résumé to jobs@redwirenation.com.

Right. *cracks knuckles* Let’s get started, shall we?

Rockstars helping people for brainastical whiteboard candies

The first problem: Why people want to work for us: Redwire employees are rockstars.

Really? Ok, I’ll sign up, but I want to get some free tickets to their concerts. Many employers still feel like calling future employees rock stars or ninjas is going to attract better developers. Here’s some news for you: most of the great developers you’re interested in can’t stand the term “rockstar programmer” (or ninja, or whatever alternative you may care to come up with).

Next: How many people get to say their job is to help others be successful?

Well, let’s see… off the top of my head, every single employee in the world? By definition, employees help others be successful. That’s what “having a job” means. Most people who join start-ups do it because they’d also like to help themselves be successful somewhere along the way, or because the work is more interesting. In any case, if you want to excite start-up developers, you’re gonna need a better “mission statement” than that (ideally, just scrap the mission statement altogether).

Fun-zilla

Well, nothing says fun like Fun-zilla, right? Who are you trying to hire? 10 year olds?

“We want awesome people to work with who will be contributing members of our team of rockstars.”

*puke*

Top three reasons:

1) You get to do good. People helping people—it’s a beautiful thing.

Oh puh-lease, I’m getting all teary-eyed already. Of course. How could I not see it? Tell you what, it’s such a beautiful thing, I’ll work for free too. Every start-up believes their goal is the best, the most worthwhile of them all, but your job in a recruitment ad is to convince other people who haven’t drunk the kool-aid that that’s so. This kind of vague nonsense isn’t going to help.

2) Brainastics, whiteboards, candy and lots of coffee. Sometimes we have to remind our employees to go home.

Translation: long hours, no concept of work/life balance. That’s acceptable for a start-up (though perhaps it shouldn’t be), it’s understood that you may work long hours on a start-up. But you shouldn’t brandish that about as a key selling point for your company, much in the same way that someone who’s changing jobs might be doing so because their current job sucks, but they probably shouldn’t say it outright in the interview. And since when are whiteboards a perk?? What’s next? “Our state-of-the-art office premises include a quality toilet seat”?

3) Flexible work hours. We don’t do “9 to 5
Nuff said.”

Normally, that would be fine, but in conjunction with the previous statement, it’s highly suspicious. “We don’t do 9 to 5” could just as easily mean “We do 10 to 10”, in this context. Nope, not “enough said” - more detail would have been preferable.

One cup of flour, two cups of milk, two eggs

1/4 Network Engineer
+ 1/4 Electrical Engineer
+ 3/8 Senior Open Source Software Developer
+ 1/8 Mathematician
= 1 RedWire Senior Developer

Oh boy. Maybe add another 1/32 janitor while they’re at it? What the heck is up with the /8 fractions anyway?

We are looking for an in-house doer-thinker-fixer-betterer whose superpower is to fulfill all the functions of an IT Department. We need an autonomous and resourceful guru to join us in our quest and manage all things IT.

Ok… so, what emerges here, is they’re looking for a CTO. That’s what a CTO is - a one-man IT department. But either they can’t afford one, or they haven’t figured out that’s what they’re looking for, or they don’t know that hiring a CTO in a company like that is the most important hiring decision in the whole history of their company (and should be achieved through intense networking, not through free job ads). Or perhaps, more likely, they just don’t really have a clue what they want, beyond the fact that it’s someone who knows stuff about IT.

In this position, you will demonstrate your mental prowess as you coordinate a diverse flow of projects and initiatives.

You will be everyone’s IT bitch.

…ambitious, highly enthusiastic…

And you will enjoy it!

Responsibilabilities and Qualifimications

You will be responsible for:
- Web application development
- Network administration
- Information storage
- Network functionality

Wow is that it. Oh wait, you’re not finished. Please continue.

In addition, you will also be responsible for helping set up email distribution, as well as any other relevant technically related projects as they arise.

Didn’t we cover this already? If you want someone with that breadth of skills, you’re hiring your CTO cofounder. And you better give them equity - lots of it. And you will never find them via a craigslist job ad. Also, what the heck is “Information storage”? Does this “Senior Rails Developer” also have to manage the shared drive, perhaps?

Provable guru status and devoteeism of Ruby on Rails with experience actually deploying applications

Devoteeism? Guru status? Come on, I need some lines that I can make fun of. This is so self-contained, I can’t possibly make it any more ridiculous than it already is.

Proven experience in designing security-hardened web applications, using open cryptographic standards

What does that even mean? My guess is, it translates to “is capable of setting up an SSL certificate on apache”.

Familiarity with content versioning systems (e.g., Hg, SVN, CVS)

Is it even possible to be a “Ruby guru” and not be “familiar” with source control? Another hint that the person who wrote this job ad doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Experience breaking stuff
Experience fixing what you’ve broken

It’s always a good thing to let your company’s personality show through your ad. Well, not always, I guess. Not in this case, for example. After this litany of unintentionally awful propositions, this “joke” doesn’t really go down well.

In conclusion

Now, it’s possible that actually, Red Wire is a perfectly fine company, and they just happened to get someone’s friends sister to write and post up the job ad because they were too busy and, heck, craigslist is free anyway. But this is a terrible impression to make to prospective start-up employees and, if they indeed lack a CTO, it’s no way to hire one.

If you’re in a position to hire technical people for a start-up, try not to make quite so many mistakes.

Blizzard should be ashamed

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Recent news has pointed out that gold farming in China has become a $500m industry.

Blizzard should be ashamed.

We have many challenges in the world today. Entertaining people (as Blizzard does with their main products) is a worthwhile activity for a business. Hard-working people do need it, and even though there are some extreme cases of “entertainment abuse” (similar, in many ways, to drugs abuse), the abuses of the few should not limit the many from enjoying a perfectly healthy, if somewhat fruitless, activity.

However, gold farming is not entertainment. Gold farming is an entirely sterile activity. It produces nothing other than a transfer of wealth from one part of the world to another. The “gold” that is being farmed is purely artificial. It represents no value creation whatsoever. It is merely a symbol of time that has been wasted on a pursuit that is designed to be entertaining. Each piece of gold farmed represents a small amount of wasted productivity for the human race. In aggregate, the $500m gold farming industry represents $500m of wasted human productivity.

Moreover, Blizzard could very easily stop this trade, by creating an official gold market where people can exchange dollars for gold. There would still remain some market for rare items, but those are necessarily less fungible than gold coins, and so would at least greatly decrease the $500m black hole.

If anything, Blizzard should see its own self-interest here: if it can get even a 10% slice of this $500m market (and there’s little reason to think that it couldn’t get 100%), that would represent $50m - not an amount to be sneered at. From a business sense, Blizzard should be ashamed not to have opened up a gold market yet.

Making money off facebook

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Here’s an article from VentureBeat waving about some figures about how much money can be made with Facebook apps. Although the figures are a bit anecdotal, and I hope for their sake that no VC’s ever invest based on such hand-waving mathematics, the real gem is at the end:

Either way, the many naysayers suggesting that it’s impossible to make money on Facebook might want to think again.

I don’t know if anyone’s ever suggested it’s _impossible_ to make money from Facebook. The main backlash against Facebook applications as a business model has really been against the gold rush mentality of the early Facebook app “golden age”. In those days, the mental processes went a little bit like this:

Facebook has lots of users
Facebook is inherently viral
If I make a Facebook application, it will be easy to reach millions of people
An application that can reach millions of people is bound to make money.

That’s a nice story, and it explains why some many people (myself included) rushed into Facebook application development last summer. Since then, most of them have pulled out, and for very good reasons.

Facebook became much more protective of its users (and quite sensibly). A large part of the changes to Facebook in the last year have been to protect its users from over-greedy and spammy applications
Many changes entirely nerfed the virality, making it much, much harder for an application to magically spread from 10 users to a million within a few weeks
Therefore, it’s become very hard to reach any large number of people on Facebook
Even applications that did benefit from the early “golden age” conditions didn’t manage to make that much money. Their business models are still being proven. Slide and RockYou may have a few very successful apps, but they also have many developers, and it’s unlikely that their Facebook revenues cover their costs yet (though I’d love to hear some hard numbers on that).

The truth is, yes, it’s possible to make money with a Facebook app. But, and this is the key, it’s no easier than making money with a non-Facebook app. In many ways, it’s harder. Working with the Facebook platform and its many limitations is a challenge in and of itself. Even if you’re a consummate start-upper outside of the Facebook bubble-world, you’ll have to learn application development all over again in this new, different environment. That’s not a huge deal, but it should give pause to people who think they can just “make a Facebook version” of their otherwise successful application.

More importantly, building a Facebook application puts you in the thrall of Facebook. That is a huge deal, because Facebook is their own business, and they will always do things to their own advantage, even if that involves doing something that will completely destroy your business. The internet is fickle enough as it is. Do you need the extra risk?

Bad bloggers copy, great bloggers steal

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:05:00 +0000

“Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?” - Thomas Mann

Whenever working on anything remotely artistic, I feel compelled to try and be original. After all, what’s the point of creating something just like everything else that came before? That seems like a noble aim: add something new to the world, rather than re-hashing the same old thing. It’s a desire that all artists share, to an extent. History appears (on the surface) to recognise those who brought forth something entirely new, and, particularly, to recognise them for the very reason that they brought something entirely new into existence.

Recently, someone wrote an adaptation of a famous Russian fairy tale by Alexander Pushkin, ”The fisherman and his wife”, adapted to the topic of greedy SEO tricks, and called it ”The web developer and his wife”. On YCNews, someone commented: “Sometimes it is better to not make bad copies of good things.”

I couldn’t disagree more. In fact, I believe that this is the exact formula for making great things.

Bad artists copy

“Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”

Quick. Who said this? Ah, of course, Picasso. Or was it?

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”

That one’s from TS Elliot. Ok, so they both said. it. Wait a minute… what’s this?

“A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”

Damn. This one comes from Stravinsky.

This is just from ten minutes of googling. It is likely that this quote can be traced not only to many contemporary artists, but also to many before them. There are many deep, interesting, worthwhile ideas in the world, but the world has existed for a long time, and mankind has been thinking up ideas for well neigh on ten thousand years. Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine author who wrote many interesting, mind-bending short stories. He was also the Head Librarian in Buenos Aires and spent much of his time researching ideas.

I am not an erudite scholar, so I cannot reproduce the intimately wide knowledge of the history of ideas that Borges was capable of. However, to illustrate the depth to which one can go when looking for the true origin of an interesting ideas, here is a passage from André Maurois’ introduction to Labyrinths, a fantastic collection of Borges’s short stories that I warmly recommend:

“[Borges’s] sources are innumerable and unexpected. [He] has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: ‘Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.’ Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): ‘We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.’ But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): ‘God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’”

Nothing new under the sun

Thousands of years ago, an unknown writer (purported to be Solomon the Wise) complained :

“What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.”

In today’s world, that seems hard to believe. Nary a week goes by without some new-fangled gadget or website. This especially affects the start-up world. Everyone is always trying to come up with the Next Big Thing, and here again, it is easy to confuse and merge the quest for success with the quest for newness or originality. As with art, the latter is misleading, dangerous, and futile.

There were auction sites before eBay. There were classified sites before Craigslist. There were money transfer sites before PayPal. There were social networks before Facebook. There were search engines before Google. Each and every online success had precursors, some of them very successful. None can honestly claim that they did anything really new. At best, they can claim that they did something better.

The truth is, being the first to come up with a great idea for an online site would be more a curse than a blessing. If it happened to be a really good idea, it would burn a hole in your mind and never let you rest until you had seen it implemented. However, any idea that is truly completely new would likely be alien and bizarre to most people. You would need many years of bashing people on the head before they finally realised your genius. In a way, having such an idea would condemn you to decades of never-ending failure until the world finally caught on — and by then it would probably be someone else’s implementation of it that took over. This is the hidden sting beneath Howard Aiken’s quote, “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

Is it even possible to come up with something completely new, or was Solomon truly wise on this matter too? It all really depends on your definition of new, of course. What about the first person who created an online social network site. Well, it was new in the sense that it wasn’t online yet. But was it truly new? Hardly. Social networking is such a powerful concept on the web only because it is such a powerful concept outside the web. There have been many sorts of organisations, both businesses and others, who have focused on allowing people to extend their social networks. Societies, clubs, cafés, pubs and gala events, etc, are all social gathering places where people reinforce and extend their social network. Facebook, in a sense, is like an online club which optimises that process, but it is only new in small, ancillary ways.

Power concepts

The point that I’m driving at (and that I failed to quite explain in this comment thread on YCNews), is not that it’s impossible to come up with a new idea. Of course it is possible. Google’s PageRank algorithm was new in its application to search engines. I’m not denying the creativity of people who come up with new businesses or artistic creations. In fact, creating a successful new business doesn’t take one creative idea - it takes many thousands.

However, when you look at the ecosystem of ideas as a whole, there are only a few really powerful ideas out there. Depending on how you slice the cake, that “few” can be literally a handful or hundreds, but all of the key ideas have been uncovered already, and successful “new” business ideas are merely extensions and variations of existing, powerful business ideas in new directions. eBay is just a marketplace — that’s existed for many thousands of years — spread to the whole connected world. Facebook is the fireplace in the middle of the encampment — virtualised onto every computer. Craigslist is the town crier — multiplied by ten million.

When you’re looking for that new business idea, don’t bother trying to be original, or to come up with something completely new. If your idea is really different from each of those power ideas, chances are it won’t be a successful business. Far better to link your idea up to some powerful, key human concepts than to try and keep it separate.

Back to square one - the world inside your head

Let’s step back to the art world for a few more inspirational thoughts. Art is not just about what you express, but also about what the viewer, reader, listener — the appreciator of the art — takes in. A hundred million people throughout the modern and ancient world have probably said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. Even if your work seems unworthy, even if is is a bad copy, someone might see something in it.

Some years ago, I watched a movie, Jakob the Liar, which finished with a puzzling proposition. The protagonist was dead, shot in the head by a nazi officer for refusing to deny the hope of the people in the ghetto, and those people were packed into trains. The movie proposed two possible endings. In one, they ended up all dead in a concentration camp; in the other, they were rescued by Russian tanks halfway to Auschwitz. I’m grateful to this movie, as it presented a very powerful idea.

The world inside your head is yours to do what you please with. If you see something that is clearly a “bad copy of a good thing”, instead of putting it down, look for the good thing hidden inside, and see how it could be a better thing yet. If you feel so inclined and are capable of it, perhaps you should take that opportunity to make your own, better copy of that good thing.

Next time you catch a bad movie in the cinema, see if you can improve it in your head. You will be rewarded immediately with a better movie.

The web is an amazing thing for many reasons. One of them is that it makes the copying process quasi free and inherently allows anyone to copy anyone else. The result is a fascinating vortex things both great and appalling, many of them copies of copies of copies of something that wasn’t worth much in the first place. Start by making a copy of a good thing instead of a bad one, and you’re one step ahead already.

Even if your creation is imperfect, or even downright bad, let the world judge for itself. Others may see more into it than even you intended or imagined. I’ll close this with a translation of Yves Duteil, a French singer, from his song Regard Impressioniste:

“The world has the beauty of our own gaze upon it
      The garden of Monet, the sun of Renoir,
      Are only the reflection of their vision of things
      For which each of us can be the mirror.”

Awful marketing campaign

Wed, 28 May 2008 14:53:00 +0000

Sometimes, marketing efforts go awfully, terribly wrong. Sometimes, it’s nobody’s fault - it’s just the way things turned out.

However, sometimes, it’s absolutely and clearly someone’s fault. Some ad campaigns are really badly designed. They don’t necessarily come out of an obscure, inept company. The ad campaign I’m going to talk about today is from Forbes.

So, I was taking in my daily news intake, browsing a blog article that I picked up on Hacker News. At the bottom of the article, I saw a Flash advert that actually puzzled me. It seemed interesting, worth at least a click to see what it was about. After all, Forbes is a respectable company, and I figured they wouldn’t advertise something like this unless there was something reasonably cool on the other side of that click.

So, expecting some information about this “most innovative and smart blog community”, I clicked. Woe unto me. This is where I landed:

No information, just a dubious, unfriendly signup form. I don’t know the exact stats, but I’d wager that they lost 99% of the click-throughs on this page. Way to go, Forbes. Such appalling ineptitude seemed worth poking a bit further. What exactly was this thing they were trying and likely failing to get people to sign up to? Fortunately, there was a help link in the top right:

I clicked it. Information about the service? Nah, of course not.

More clicking…

Perhaps now…

Fantastic. A completely useless blurb. Let’s give it one last shot. Adify’s website:

Dear god. Even their website is a failure. The only sentence 90% of people are likely to read if they ever get that far is “Are you ready to Adify?”. More than half of the above-the-fold space is wasted. Now, I don’t know about you, but my natural reaction to this is to close the window. Nevermind the text below that perhaps holds some sort of amazing information that will change my life. I’ve clicked about 10 times to get to this page and it still fails to tell me what I need to know to decide what this Forbes thing is all about.

This is doubly ironic considering that “Adify” is plainly some sort of blog advertisement venture. That an advertisement venture would fail so spectacularly at even advertising itself is just plain sad.

What should they have done?

How about make the advert link to a page with a clear set of straighforward, 5-7 words bulletpoints that immediately explain to the would-be member why they should join. Then, below that, a simple sign-up form asking people to just enter their email address to get more information. This isn’t rocket science, it’s just very basic online marketing.

If you’re going to pay good money to get people to click on your adverts, make sure you have an effective, self-contained, simple page on the other side that visitors can grasp and interact with within 5 seconds. Because most people will leave after about that amount of time if their interest hasn’t been piqued.

Perfection does not exist

Mon, 19 May 2008 12:44:00 +0000

1. The idealistic path to ‘perfection’

You’re sitting at your desk, alone with your idea. Or perhaps you’re with some friends or colleagues or both. This is a great idea. You’re excited! Now all you need is to implement that perfect vision, and you will become rich and famous.

You’ve heard that ideas are nothing without implementation. You’ve heard that ideas are a dime a dozen, you know that what will make or break your idea (and your business along with it) is how well this idea is implemented. The devil is in the detail, and you’re going to make damn sure that every detail is right. All you need is to make something people want, to make it the best damn implementation out there, and you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank!

Unfortunately, there’s a fatal flaw in your plan: you and your brilliant idea. You, I’m sorry to say, don’t have the first clue what your users really want. Oh, you have some vague idea — and at this stage, a vague idea is a pretty good start — you know roughly where you want to go, but the truth of the matter is, if you took your vague idea, concretised it, and implemented it perfectly as it is currently in your head, it would be a very, very bad product, a monumental flop. This is true whether you have detailed knowledge of the business domain, are a technical expert, or both.

The real “perfect” implementation is somewhere else. This is easily illustrated by the following diagram:

Even if you can go from A to B directly and perfectly, that won’t do it, because, in fact, you want to be at C, but it is impossible for you to have any idea where C is.

2. The practical path to ‘perfection’

I’m sorry to say, but there’s another flaw with your plan: you again! You’re not alone in this one, though: your whole team is guilty! Real projects are fickle, difficult things. It takes all the willpower and social skills of a competent project manager to keep them aiming roughly in the right direction. Even then — especially if you’re lucky enough to be working with very smart people — there will be many side-steps, jumps and skips along the road. These are all perfectly natural and to be expected.

You will discover new things along the way, and that’s a good thing! Those will shift your end goal, and they will shift your direction too. By the end, your history of targets will be spread over a large area.

Your path to your end point(s) is likely to look something like the following picture.

On the good side, this means that your product will be more practically consistent. On the bad side, there’s no telling whether those changes will actually bring you nearer to perfection. Consistency doesn’t make or break a product. Users do.

3. The use(r)ful path to ‘perfection’

What a disaster. Not only you don’t know where you’re going on a high level, but you also don’t really have a clue from week to week. Surely there must be a solution to this quandary. Someone in the world can tell you what the perfect product is. Just hire them and you’ll be sorted.

Problem is, you can’t hire them. The only people in the whole world who can tell you where your product is going wrong are your users. The minute users get into the equation, you suddenly have some way, as uncertain, fickle, and vague as it might be, to tell whether you’re going in the right direction. You need them to provide you with timely, accurate, effortless feedback throughout your development process.

If you followed my tips and released a beta, or even alpha, and listened to your users, your path might look a little bit more like this:

And if you do this, chances are, you will probably turn out a pretty damn good product.

4. But… perfection does not exist?

Now, you might point out that I’ve made a pretty good case for why perfection is very hard to achieve. However, what I haven’t yet done is to explain why perfection doesn’t exist.

There are two good reasons why a perfect product doesn’t exist.

The first one is that there is an enormous variety of users out there. What’s perfect to one will be unbearable to another. You can, with some uncommon concentration of talent, build something that’s almost perfect for a lot of people. Apple have done it. Google have done it. And there are many other unsung heroes (though none seems to be quite as consistent as Apple), delivering fantastic products that are almost perfect for almost everyone. But every single one of these products is flawed in some ways for some people. In this sense, “perfection” is meaningless, a red herring. There is no perfection, only a good fit for a common denominator.

The second one, much more vicious, is that all those diagrams tell a pernicious lie. They completely hide the vicious, dynamic, crowded, unpredictable nature of the marketplace of desires, of what people want and how they want it. People’s needs change. Trends change. Impressions, desires and public perceptions shift each and every day.

Even if you could build a product that would hit the sweet spot in everyone’s heart and feel just perfect to your entire target market, that sweet spot will shift, implacably relegating your ‘perfect’ product to the dustbins of time. In short, even if perfection was theoretically possible, if you built a product that was perfect today it would be imperfect tomorrow.

5. What to do about it?

The main point of this article is to convince you to stop chasing perfection as a concrete goal. Striving towards building the best possible product is a good goal. Striving towards building a perfect product is an illusion, and a dangerous one at that. Striving to achieve perfection (or its sneaky twins, excellence and near-perfection) every step of the way is a deadly mistake.

Once you make it your aim to “build the perfect product”, you find yourself paralised by lengthy design work, longer iterations, and significant periods of “making the features perfect” without releasing anything to the users. This can and probably will kill your startup. Don’t make that mistake.

A much better modus operandi is to aim to move forward a little bit at a time, to build small increments of functionality that you can show to users as soon as possible. This, incidentally, is also the way agile projects are supposed to work (but often don’t). Aim small, shoot often, re-adjust each time. You need to influence the culture of your project so that it’s ok to make mistakes, and to make them often. A development model that allows lots and lots of cheap mistakes is far superior to one that tries to achieve perfection at every step, and thus makes each mistake very costly.

My own projects have fallen into this trap regularly, so I think it’s not an easy one to avoid. In the contagious enthusiasm of having built something that users love it’s easy to fall into the perfectionist pattern and decide that because the users like the system now, we need to ensure that they like every single release of the system. This even applies to other things than products. It takes a lot of discipline to fight that behaviour and say something that may well resonate, to your coworkers, as “let’s build crap”, but in fact means “let’s just release something quickly, no matter how bad it may seem, and see what the users think”.

But if you want your product to succeed, it must be done.

13 Tips for creating a successful new online product

Wed, 07 May 2008 14:27:00 +0000

There is much talk these days about building a product for a niche and making a lifestyle business out of it. Much of the online literature about starting up is focused on how to create some fantastic product which will gather millions of visitors and make you a billionaire, and the “new wave”, so to speak, proposes that rather than taking a 1 in 10’000 bet that you can make billions, it is better to take a 1 in 10 bet that you can make millions.

Since I have started two such businesses already, here are thirteen tips from my own experience.

What to build

1. Build for someone specific

It’s very tempting to create a product for the widest audience. “Everyone can use our product, therefore if even a tiny proportion use it, we’ll be rich!” Beware the generalised product. If your product is not built for anyone in particular, it will not be good for anyone in particular. The worst possible market for a product is “small businesses on the web”.

On the other hand, if you build something that is directly useful for even just one real human being, chances are there will be others like that user and your product will have some success.

2. Don’t be afraid of targeting a narrow niche

Niches have numerous advantages. There’s less competition in niches, which means that your marketing dollars will go further to get you new customers. It’ll be easier to target likely buyers since there are probably already channels (blogs, magazines, trade shows) targeting that niche, that you can make use of.

Niches also tend to be very badly served in today’s world. If you look into almost any niche you will find a plethora of awful products that are just begging to be replaced by something better suited. Being able to build great products cheaply is a fairly recent development, and most pre-existing businesses have had to make do with duct-taped, poorly conceived solutions that are begging to be replaced. The smaller the niche, the lower the bar to success.

3. Solve a real problem that costs money

As DHH pointed out, the way to realistic profitability is not through gathering an outrageous number of eyeballs, but through creating a product that people are willing to pay for. The easiest way to get someone to loosen their purse strings is to convince them that using your product will pay for itself.

This can be either by enabling them to do something new to earn money or by saving them time and effort (and hence money).

How to build it

4. Test the market with a working prototype as soon as possible

To win in this game, you need to build a great product. The problem is, no one on your team can tell you what the best product is — only your users can do that. You need a vision to get started on a product, but that vision is critically flawed in ways that you can’t see. User feedback is the most powerful force to point out those flaws, and until you have users (whether free or paying), you cannot use that force.

For this reason, it is important that you release something, anything, as embryonic as it might be, to people who can start to use it and let you know what you’re doing wrong. Listen to your users — and, to do this, give them a chance to tell you.

5. Develop iteratively

Your product is ambitious. It will solve many great problems for your users. However, if your product never gets finished, it will solve nothing. Be ambitious in your dreams, but conservative if your immediate goals. Aim for the result of each iteration to be useful in and of itself, but keep each iteration as tiny as possible.

Developing something small does not mean giving up your dreams, only delaying them. Cut every feature and every part of a feature that you can cut, but keep it on a list to work on later. If there is any way you can do it later, do so. Often, features that you thought were essential turn out to be unimportant when you have more user feedback.

6. Get things right, and be decisive in correcting the wrongs

As your product takes off (if it does), you will have less and less time to make up for earlier mistakes. As users pile on, it will become more and more difficult to make big, drastic changes. However you make your bed, that’s how you’ll sleep. As much as possible, take hard decisions early rather than letting problems fester. Don’t delay necessary change just because you’re already committed into a different direction.

7. Don’t spend the time correcting until you know what you’re aiming for

At the same time, it’s easy to end up spending all your time refactoring the codebase every time a new feature is brought in. Refactorings must be done to maintain development speed and build a scalable, clean product. However, a refactoring effort should consist of two parts: 1) figuring out what to refactor to, 2) doing it. The first part can take weeks, the second part is often a mere few days long. The first part should never be an excuse to stop work completely.

This applies to design changes too. If you realise that you need to change the direction of the product significantly, figure out your new goals for before implementing the change.

8. Don’t let your programmers design the user interface

I’m a programmer, among other things. Like many in this profession. I suck at designing UIs (though sometimes I believe I don’t). When you let programming-focused people like me build your user interface, you will get things like this.

Some people are naturally gifted at user interface design. They feel physically sick about adding a button that clutters the interface or messes up the user’s workflow. Make sure you have a gifted UI designer on your team (whether or not he or she doubles up as a different role — including programmer). It will make a world of difference when you get your first users — the difference between a lukewarm response and “Wow, it’s great! I love it!”

Who to build it with

9. Make sure every member of the development team is passionate about the product

Your development team is to your product like parents are to a child. If they do not care about your product, it might turn out well anyway — but the overwhelming likelihood is it won’t. Anyone who’s not passionate about building your product should not be involved in building your product.

For this reason, it is very unlikely that outsourcing your product development will be successful. Build your product in-house, and make sure the team is fully bought into the concept and committed to make it a success. It is better to give up 50% of your equity for a great product team than to give up 5% for a poor product team. 95% of nothing is still nothing.

In yesterday’s world, this was very hard to achieve, since even a relatively simple web application required a fairly large team to implement, and the larger the team, the harder it is to remain passionate. With today’s web development technologies, it is possible for a team of 2 or 3 to build an entire business within 3-6 months, but those 2 to 3 must be passionate and dedicated.

It is very hard to make up for your team’s lack of passion through your own passion.

10. Be sickeningly elitist about your development team and sickeningly inclusive about your users

No one should be considered too stupid to use your product. For each person who you know had trouble using your product, there will be many more who had the same trouble but never told you. It’s never the user’s fault, it’s always your product’s fault for not being clear and intuitive enough.

At the same time, your development team needs to be the best. You cannot create greatness out of mediocrity. These days, elitism is regarded almost as a flaw. Actually, it is the only way to greatness. If you want to create the best product, you need the best people.

11. The best hiring strategy is to hire no one

Hiring employees is a nightmare. There are a lot of legalities to be considered, and it is a lengthy, time-consuming, and expensive process. Fortunately, you don’t need to hire employees. You need to recruit a development team to work with you, not for you.

Your development team is like the heart and lungs and brain of your business. They should be as committed and passionate as you are. For this to happen, you need to treat them as equals, not as subordinates.

You don’t need job adverts, you don’t need resumes, and you don’t need contract negotiations. What you need is to network in the right communities, whether online or offline, to recognise the people you need, and to bring them in not as employees but as partners in your vision.

12. Include at least one target user on the development team

By development team, I mean the team involved in the day-to-day or week-to-week iteration meetings. If you fail to do this, it will cost you a lot to readjust when a real user finally approaches your application and, inevitably, finds it lacking. If you’re a small startup on a tight budget, this extra cost can kill you. Survival is worth giving up equity to get a target user on your development team.

13. Ensure everyone on your development team understands the problem they’re solving

Immerse your development team in the users’ environment for a short period of time and let them see for themselves just how bad the current systems and processes are. Presumably, you have some contacts who work in the niche that you are targeting (if you don’t, then it’s probably not the right niche for you). Convince them to let one or more of your development team sit in their office and experience the pain points for themselves.

This is the opposite of embedding an end-user in the development team. Embed your development team into the end-users’ environment — at least for a time.

Conclusion and Bonus Tip: Break any and all of these rules rather than do something stupid

Creating a new, successful product is like writing a book, creating a movie, or raising a child. It’s a fiendishly complicated task that requires great adaptability and creativity. Rules can only get you so far. No amount of advice can guarantee you success. Sometimes, the rules fail, and you need to adapt to those situations and do what needs to be done, even if it flies in the face of accepted wisdom. For every rule of product development, there is a dozen examples of teams which did it differently and still succeeded.

Good luck!

As ever, please do share your thoughts and additional tips in the comments below, or on your own blog (I have trackbacks enabled).