Why I Record These Videos

Why it’s hard to keep up with innovation

Farmville, Foursquare, Grooper – we are bombarded with the new “it” services regularly. I design internet products for a living, so it seems a no brainer that I should be on top of all of the new services, and it should be really an easy thing to do for someone like myself.

On the contrary, I find that I don’t want to let any new service into my life. I’m fine as it is, I’m super busy, why would I go out of my way to check out Foursquare? And the thing is that even if I do check it out, I frequently don’t get it.

When I checked it out a few months ago (on the web!), Foursquare seemed stupid, boring and useless. Fastforward 3 weeks ago when I finally installed Foursquare on my phone and started using it. Shockingly, I got it. It took some time of actually using it and a couple of articles about Foursquare’s advances into services for small businesses. Suddenly, I started bringing Foursquare up in conversations and advertising it to people as the next big thing.

Clearly, the pace of change is speeding up. In a recent fascinating article on Techcrunch, Michael Arrington talks about “The Third Disruptive Wave”. The highlights from the article are:

• John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm that invested in Google, Amazon, AOL, etc., calls Zynga “the fastest growing business Kleiner Perkins has ever invested in.” and “Zynga’s Farmville grew to 75 million users just a few months after launching last year, and the company went from near zero revenue a year ago to hundreds of millions of dollars today.”
• The internet is a business accelerator, but Facebook makes it possible for a business to explode.
• Groupon was able to fine tune their social growth model to expand via Facebook ads.

( http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/23/the-third-disruptive-wave-tcdisrupt/#ixzz0p0b2EdJf)

Alright, so a crazy amount of change is happening, and I have to face the question: why is it so hard to adopt and understand these new services?

I think the answer is in the fact that they cannot be understood by checking out the service website once.  Just as I had to actually USE Foursquare to “get” it, Pek Pangpaet talks about trying to “get” Farmville. He says:

“In my quest to figure out what the big deal with Farmville was, I had spent about 3 weeks playing it now. I have to admit, I didn’t get into it till a week or so ago” (http://blog.pekpongpaet.com/2010/01/02/what-makes-farmville-so-sticky-and-viral/ – great article, by the way).

For a good number of us, many of these services are not something naturally appealing. Foursquare sounded terribly boring (I dismissed it entirely when visiting the site first), Farmville is a social game (I’m not into games on Facebook or even Facebook apps, for that matter), I’m not currently interested in Groupon (even though I’ve registered), Polyvore seems a waste of time, and the list just goes on and on for me.

So it seems a decision is needed. Either I choose to stop evolving and be a late adopter, or choose to try to keep up with the change. If I choose the latter, I have to simply decide to do the following:

1. check out and sign up on these new sites. just freaking do it.

2. use them for long enough to understand the value. use them even if, initially, I couldn’t care less.

As a closing thought, I’m thinking about Jeff Bezos talk about Amazon being a customer-focused company, not a competitor focused company (he said it somewhere in this long video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKfFHuouzA&feature=related) . This statement struck a chord with me. As we are keeping up with ever-accelerating change, keeping up with the competitors is becoming more and more pointless. Keep up with the change so that you understand what’s possible, but stay focused on your customer because that’s where real innovation can happen.

On working with a personal coach

Learning from Balsamiq.com/blog

Another day at a startup – May 21 2010

On Designing Wanelo.com

How successful startups gain their first users.

Deena talks about launching Wanelo and strategies for gaining first users

The importance of bad music

Following my previous post on NOT writing definitively and not preaching, I present you with my first definite and preaching post. Good luck.

* * *

No matter how much big-picture perspective we have on our lives, as “human machines” we cannot help but periodically get caught up in the dynamics and stress of the human life.

For example, I do what I do, which is build businesses (two at the moment) because it’s the most fun I personally can have with my life. To me, entrepreneurship is about creativity, problem solving, challenges, and continuous growth. Yet, in spite of all this wonderful motivation, I cannot help but get intensely stressed out and loose my beautiful perspective. Yes – what do you know? – I’m only human.

I believe that we all need to work continuously on retaining and resurrecting perspective. This applies especially strongly to people who are intelligent enough to have a big-picture perspective in the first place. Why? Because those are the people who have the tendency to take life more seriously and overthink everything.

The importance of bad music.

I grew up with a certain elitist attitude towards really popular music (stemming from my parents). My music tastes are pretty diverse, but I’ve since come to embrace pop and some really cheesy music because it’s my antidote to taking life too seriously. I believe that we all need “bad music” in our lives.

The recipe.

(This is the part where I tell you exactly how to live your life.)

1. Figure out your big-picture perspective.

2. Arrive at the conclusion that while it’s good to work hard and strive for a fulfilling life, stressing out and having a bad time in general is just not worth it in the long range.

3. Find your personal ways of reminding yourself to not take yourself or your life too seriously on a regular basis. What’s your bad music?

Write a blog to provoke, not to preach

I’m a discerning blog reader. I actively read many blogs (saved and new) and manage my blogs in Google Reader. Every so often a blog makes it into my “favorites” folder. Yesterday, I came across a new instant favorite – “A Smart Bear,” a blog by Jason Cohen.

I was immediately impressed not only with the quality of posts, but with the quality of the conversation following each post. Can I be friends with all of those people, PLEASE?

My own attempts at writing a blog have been highly intermittent, but I know it’s something I really want and need to do for myself. Since yesterday, I’ve found about 20 pieces of stimulating advice from Jason,  one of which is this:

“For me, the point of blogging is not to preach, but to provoke. I’m successful when I make you think — not when I get to you agree but when I cause you to reconsider and clarify your own position.”

This resonates with me. One of the main barriers to blogging for me has been my perceived need to write definitively and one-sidedly.  Refocusing on provoking and raising questions makes more sense to me and is inspiring.

This also relates to another post by Jason called Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias. In this post, Jason highlights that the difference between good and bad advice is that those who tell you definitevely what you need to do with your business are wrong. Even if they are experts, it’s unlikely that they know your business better than you. So a rule of thumb for entrepreneurs – if the advice you’re getting is definitive, run and don’t waste your time. The whole point of your starting a new company is precisely to do something new, not to repeat what some expert has seen succeed in the past. By contrast the kind of advice you need is the kind that focuses on getting you to think about important questions about your business and perhaps to help you weigh the pros and cons of the various answers to those questions.

I’m excited to develop this blog and to see what happens next. Happy Tuesday, everyone.