Jason Doucette's Business By Bootstraps
Daily thoughts from the trenches of a self-funded company
OK, if your character is making a 911 call, then yes, show the network logo on the phone:
However, if your character is arming an explosive device via his cell phone, then no, do not show any branding:
Lastly, if a mobile phone is being used to detonate explosives, take the whole faceplate off just to be sure we don’t imply that mobile phones can do anything bad:
(Why oh why can’t I just enjoy some television like normal people do?)
In lieu of something significant (has it been a month already? I swear, between blogging and bathing, I don’t know how anyone gets anything done,) I found the Google ads around the feed around this story about being sued by the RIAA somewhat amusing (bear in mind I’m in Canada):
No, these aren't clickable.
It’s been about a month since I read Appetite for Self Destruction, and I was almost feeling optimistic about the music industry, but something’s been holding me back from posting about it. Probably the fact that they still make a business around suing their customers. And how the music retailers (what’s left of them, anyway) think downloaders should be sued but then are shocked when they’re asked to pay fees for playing music in their music stores.
The fact of the matter is, there’s basically an infinite amount of music out there. Check these poorly-researched stats: as of April 2007, Myspace had 25 million songs. Hosted. I have no idea how many of these were duplicates, but that was over two years ago, so cut me some slack and assume a lot more indie bands have uploaded their songs to the service since then.
This means that if I lived to be 100 and listened to Myspace tracks nonstop, I still wouldn’t hear them all.
Once there’s more than you can use in a lifetime, I reckon that’s infinite.
Sure, if we crowdsourced the problem, the population of Canada alone could listen to the whole inventory in about 3 minutes.
But we wouldn’t have any shared stories.
Music gains power when more people listen to it, and that’s the blessing and the curse for the industry: they don’t have the same issues of scarcity-based pricing that other companies have. In a certain sense, the more people that listen to a track, the more valuable it becomes, while at the same time the cost of distribution stays relatively static on a per-listen basis. The margin against this hypothetical value grows with every listen.
While some companies have experimented with the Dutch auction style of pricing, like how Amie Street prices songs progressively higher as they get more popular, encouraging early music discovery and adoption, you’ll have a hard time finding a consumer who’s willing to pay $1000 because they’re the 70th million person to “discover” a track. Indeed, in today’s market, people who are late to the party usually get a discount on items that aren’t hot anymore.
I don’t know the legal term for the argument (it’s probably in Latin,) but people being sued by the RIAA need to figure out how to explain how while they might have 60,000 tracks on their hard drive, the number they would have downloaded if they were worth even a penny each (to the downloader) would be about 6.
In the meantime, I’m considering taking Google’s advice and downloading as much as I can before declaring bankruptcy. You know, as long as I can still enter the USA. I hear they have vegan doughnuts.
Suppose it’s the early 1730s, just after the discovery of electrical conduction. Installation of power lines won’t take place until the 1880s, and the first long distance telephone line won’t be installed until 1877 (which puts it in the wrong order, chronilogically, but that surprised me so much I won’t edit this paragraph.)
In this context, suppose further that you’re approaching some entity with lots of money (a King, a church, some merchant consortium, what have you) with a crazy plan: you’re going to string wire all over the country on wooden poles. What will it be for? You answer honestly: I have no idea, but I’m sure the users will find an application.
I think about this kind of thing when I read the umpteenth article questioning how Twitter’s going to make money. The thing of it is, lots of companies are founded on this basis – there’s something there, and we don’t know what it is, but it’s worth a try just for the sake of finding out.
I have no idea how much it would have cost, in today’s dollars, to wire up even a portion of the United States in the 1730s. What’s interesting to me is that today’s investments in social infrastructure aren’t necessarily a bargain in comparison (millions of dollars are still millions of dollars,) but I wonder how speculative some investments of centuries past were according to the wisdom of the time.
Tom from the office (our office, not The Office) sent me a link to a NYTimes article about hyperlocal sites. Surprisingly, I had to log in to the site to read it, which I don’t remember having to do in a while. More on that in another post.
I hadn’t been tracking this area in a while, mostly because 1) most of these efforts are for US cities, and 2) most of them suck, so it was a good chance to see where things were going at a high level.
Sadly, not much has changed, and it’s a bit unfair to say they suck, but the thing of it is that it’s hard enough to get an audience of dedicated early adopters for a given subject area, but adding geographic constraints to the problem makes it even harder.
An analyst named Greg Sterling has a good quote in the article that explains a lot of the core problem: “When you slice further and further down, you get smaller and smaller audiences… Advertisers want that kind of targeting, but they also want to reach more people, so there’s a paradox.”
And it’s not just advertising, content suffers the same issue. At the moment, the people who want to read this kind of site are the exact same people who are working to feed it.
So let’s allow for the time machine to zip forward to a point where any given neighbourhood has a thousand voices and ten thousand readers (hey, will these numbers happen anywhere outside of a condo farm?) – what’s the difference going to be between something like this and the local community paper? We have one in our neighbourhood, the area it covers keeps growing, and it’s biased as anything else you can imagine. The loudest voices are going to win here, just like anywhere else.
Here’s an upside for a Monday: yes, I think these things will all fail, at least in their current approach. That said, I think a lot of great lessons are going to come out of it, a lot of new features and gizmos are going to spin off, and in the meantime, maybe I’ll find out what’s up with that pothole across the way.
I haven’t been following Chris Anderson’s work too closely. I read (and enjoyed) The Long Tail, and I caught his intro piece on Free in Wired a while back, but I don’t read his blog regularly and most of the news I get these days comes from Twitter, which skews differently on any given day.
What I’ve caught so far, and I’m sure there are more sides to the story, is that data’s starting to come out that challenges the Long Tail theory, and today I see what appears to be some backpedalling on the Free concept.
I’m not trying to critique either of his theories here. To me, this all falls into the “here are some examples of how a concept works except where it doesn’t” style of business books, and there are a lot of them out there. You know what? That’s OK.
I didn’t learn a single thing about the Long Tail from the book. I got some new words for my vocabulary so I could better communicate ideas around the concept, and I found out a bit about how retail works. It was worth the however many hours and dollars the book took from me. I’m sure Free will give me similar value.
I think, in this business ADD environment, there’s a market for a new kind of self made guru: all you need to do is queue up your books for the next cycle. Start writing a book today about how businesses ran things 2 years ago. In 2 years, do it again. I figure after about six years you’ll have established a pipeline that you can start publishing, with minimal editing, every two years for the rest of your life. It’s the whole what was old is new again thing.
Business books serve two purposes for me: one is to get that vocabulary up and running, as mentioned, so I can frame new ideas and discussions in a way that people will understand under the meme/zeitgeist of the moment, and the second is to put my brain in a trance-like state from which related ideas will come out.
From that, if someone wants to churn out 200 pages on how digital oranges are going to take over the new wave of RFID wikis, I’m going to save myself the effort of deciding at the checkout and just buy the damned thing without worrying too much about whether or not I’m getting scammed. I’ll find a way to make it worth my while.
So it looks like Scoble’s discovered the joys of hiring via Craigslist: the signal to noise ratio is off the charts bad. I don’t know if this is the first time he’s tried it, but judging from the helpful list of tips for job seekers, he probably went through the standard emotional ride:
Step 1) Wow, 90 responses for free! Take that, paid job posting services!
Step 2) Wow, how can people be so bad at job hunting?
(Though actually, I’m not sure if he’s posting in one of the areas where ads cost money – all sections are free here in Toronto.)
I’ve hired via postings on Craigslist three times, and I’m interviewing someone else tomorrow that I found on their “gigs wanted” section, so there’s certainly some good stuff on there. The first time I went through the process, I was over the moon happy. In my last job at a big company, I managed to get all of 5 resumes from HR, and none of them were particularly stellar. Now here I was with 50! That I found myself! For free!
Of course, most of them were crap. In hindsight, all but about 3 of them, actually. Pretty much everything Scoble says not to do, someone did. And I doubt it’s a problem with Craigslist – if someone’s looking for work there, they’re probably also looking for work on the paid posting sites.
So here’s the secret to successful Craigslist postings: add as many hoops and puzzles as you can.
If you want a job with our company, you have to send a picture of an LOLcat. I won’t look at a resume that doesn’t have one. It’s a simple test of knowledge of either a) internet culture or b) Google.
Then I ask for something else, like a list of 5 reasons why you’re awesome, because why would I want to hire someone who’s not awesome? Sometimes the answers we get back are more reasons not to hire than to hire, which was unexpected.
I’ll also usually make up some technology requirement that I can’t find on Google. I haven’t seen someone take credit as an expert in B495 Gaussianization Protocol R yet, but it’s big bonus points if someone admits they don’t know it or asks what it is.
I stopped at the “send me a video of you explaining algorithm X” stage, but you get the idea: if someone’s not willing to do some basic work to submit a resume, they’re probably not going to go the extra mile when things go south on a project. Showing up to work might be a stretch task for some people – I’ve had interviews where I had to do everything in my power to not ask “so, do you actually want a job?”
Speaking of interviews – these posting steps are all pre-screen techniques, but if someone passes the initial tests, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to do a phone screen next. There are all kinds of reasons why someone might be a bad fit, and a 20 minute phone call is a much better use of everyone’s time than an hour or more of in person discussion, plus prep, clearing schedules, etc.
Any other ideas to help job posters? Got any examples of cool job postings that pre-test the candidates? Post ‘em in the comments or ping me on the Twitter.
Excerpted from a 1972 comic book page of ads:
Excerpted from a Google search result page (silly border added to highlight that it’s a screen shot):
Insert comment about distribution and target markets here…
On a related note, I’d love to see an e-commerce interface design based on those full page ads with the x-ray glasses, bald head wig, etc offers, maybe done up Zoomii style…
I managed to catch Democamp18 last night (or as Joey called it, Democamp “barely legal”) – the place was packed, so I spent the first half just outside the main speaking area with the rest of the crowd behind me steadily escalating the volume of chatter. The net result was Democamp – audio edition (since I couldn’t see the screen) which devolved into Democamp – Charlie Brown’s teachers edition by the end (since I could hear less and less over the noise – apologies to Kosta Zabashta, whose demo of IRC integration in DrProject was probably interesting, but I saw and heard nothing (looks like there’s a screencast though, I’ll check it out)…
One bit did catch my eyes and ears, which was the Blueprint Requirements Centre. It’s some kind of Eclipse specification generating tool that gathers requirements and links visuals together so you can end up with some kind of Choose Your Own Adventure demo for the client that links screens to branching possibilities. I’m totally oversimplifying, and I’m sure it does a lot more than that, but I couldn’t see everything. People at the front seemed really impressed, enough so that they were saddened by the price, anyway.
It costs $10,000. Possibly per seat, I couldn’t hear.
From a crowd that skews towards open source, that got a few chuckles. I heard one person saying something to the effect that they were wasting their time, because nobody in the crowd was likely to be in the market for a $10K product. That person probably thought that the only thing being demoed was the technology.
Pricing models need more exposure – there’s more to life than freemiums, ad supported, and “we’ll make money on the consulting side.” These guys found a market that’s used to paying good money for tools (Visual Studio Team System isn’t cheap either) and made something they’d want to buy. That’s the demo, folks.
Installable software has an edge in market perception – there’s a lot less “how long did it take you to make that” being asked by customers compared to shops that make custom web solutions, where the “how much would it cost me to hire someone to make that” question usually outweighs the “how much value would this give me right now” one they really should be asking. It can be crushing for smaller companies to have to spend 95% of their time trying to grind out enough billable work to cover overhead and then, you know, when they get to it, find ways to innovate and be really valuable partners with their clients.
Here’s a basic concept to get started: you own what you write. Let’s face it, you’re probably going to borrow code from past projects when you work on new ones (why write an email address validator every month?), so be up front about it and start positioning yourself as a solution provider instead of outsourced IT. If the client’s billing department makes you sign a contract that says they own everything you produce, just cross that part out and initial it before you sign it back. It might be an issue, it might not, but if you don’t at least put the concept out there, you’re letting yourself get robbed of any residual value of the work and anything you’ve done might as well have been in COBOL as far as your next project is considered.
This has been sitting in a tab for way too long, so here it is: Ryan Carson on 12 Things You Wish You’d Known Before Building a Web App. Blog post here, slide deck here, audio here.
The audio seems to be for a slightly different deck, but it more or less meshes. Lots of great advice, and well worth listening to a few times.
In the interest of actually getting off the pot, as it were, and posting something about this (and thus triumphantly closing some Flock tabs), I’ll just focus on a few points:
Thing 1 (slide 2): Keep one user database.
The idea here is that if you’ve got more than one web app, put all the users for all systems into one user database, so users of one app will automatically become users of another, thus reducing a barrier.
I disagree with this one. There may or may not be privacy concerns and/or potential security exposures to worry about, but I’m primarily against the idea from the perspective of an eventual exit strategy. Selling one site that contains user information that’s used on another site could be complicated if the sale doesn’t include all affected properties at once, which may not be the scenario that finally happens.
On the other hand, I’m mostly in agreement with the next slide/thing, which recommends having one e-commerce system. I only maintain one non-PayPal commerce system right now, and I’d love to be able to say that 10 years from now. Web users are pretty used to going to a separate site for credit card entry (I’m not sure, but it might even make things seem more secure that way), and keeping everything on one box lets you capitalize on split tests etc., provided your client sites are in roughly similar markets.
In both cases, of course, the back end can be common with different UI code and/or databases (same schema, different db).
Thing 3/Slide 4: Don’t have your coder do the XHTML/CSS
The timing’s funny on this – up until now one person’s handled the whole enchilada, partly because the design firm we usually work with does great Flash and PSDs but lousy markup, but also due to the company size. We just started a project this week where we had the option for the client to supply complete markup.
This was a bit of a gamble on our part (to be honest, I was inspired to go ahead due to Ryan’s talk), since the project timeline and other factors meant we’d have limited ability to send things back to be re-worked if there were problems, but it turns out the XHTML was passable – it wouldn’t validate, but hey, at least it had a doctype that said it was XHTML! The project’s still ongoing, but at this point it looks like we’ll get through it without having to open Photoshop, which is a huge win and has moved “in house designer” way up on my “to hire” list (yes, we’re experimenting with various levels of outsourcing and contractors, but this concept of separation of responsibilities has the potential to create enough work to justify a full time body.)
So a few quibbles here and there (but then again, we’re in a different part of the web industry than Carsonified is), but overall highly recommended. Check it out as soon as you get a chance – if you’re busy now, I can vouch that it sits nicely in a browser tab.
