Peter Vidani on the Evolution of the Tumblr Dashboard
Ministry of Design senior minister Peter Vidani lays hands on every aspect of Tumblr’s visual and usage aesthetic. Initially contracted to work on theme creation, he came aboard full-time in 2009 and has steadily advanced his design philosophy of utility and simplicity. One of his primary, perpetual obsessions could be considered the real face of Tumblr: the Dashboard.
Source: storyboard
Turntable.fm Would Be A Killer Live Music Experience
Some Background
In February, pandodaily featured a blog on Turntable.fm: It’s Time for Another Turntable.fm Pivot. Author Erin Griffith wrote
“The problem is, for all its hype, Turntable is proving to have the same problems as Stickybits. It’s really cool. No one is denying that. Stickybits was cool too. But ultimately, it’s a novelty.”
I agree with Erin, especially for the mass audience who listens to top 40, 80’s music, or other stuff you can easily find on the FM dial, on Pandora or Spotify. Turntable.fm loses it’s excitement after a few days if this is your favorite music.
I use Turntable.fm almost everyday. I never listen to Pandora or Spotify. The lasting value I get from Turntable.fm is because I listen solely to live music (which is not found on those other channels). Whether is it Phish, other “jam bands”, or classic rock, that’s pretty much all I listen to. I’m not alone. Take a look at the top rooms on Turntable.fm at noon on a Tuesday
Do you recognize any of those artists? No, neither do I. It turns out that Turntable.fm is appealing to fans of music who don’t listen to the Top 40. These listeners appreciate music that is different, that changes everyday, and new artists who embody that spirit. Even though I mostly like rock, I’ll jump into the Ambient room here and there because I can appreciate some good improv.
So Here’s My Killer Idea - Virtual Live Concerts
I’ll graciously give away my killer idea to the folks at Turntable.fm :-). I think Turntable.fm should focus on these users. My hypothesis is that all of them share something in common: they like “different” music, really appreciate a good live track, and probably see their favorite bands a number of times live each year. They’d love to discover new music in their genre, but might not have enough time to get out.
On nights that Phish plays, the PhantasyTour Phish Message Board is on fire. Links are shared to people using their iPhones to stream the live concert over uStream. Setlist threads are topping out at 499 posts every 5-10 minutes.
How Would It Work?
Phish would be a great band to target because of it’s rabid fan base and the band’s general willingness to turn the other cheek when someone shares their music. They understand what the web has done to the music industry so they are willing to give away their music because they really make their money on the live concert experience and merchandise.
For the next Phish concert, get one of the many tapers in the audience who is sharing a live audio stream to pipe it to Turntable’s servers so one or more rooms can be made featuring that stream. Let people make rooms so they can chat about the show, click the Awesome button, change up their avatars to stand out, etc. You could even have people spinning some pre-show and setbreak music in between the live sets.
Not only would this bring in an influx of new users, I think it could prove that Turntable.fm could be a viable platform for live concerts. Since the music industry is moving towards live shows as the monetizable product, Turntable.fm could be the primary platform for niche bands and eventually the big names too. It’s fun, interactive, and allows people to (virtually) experience the best about music: live shows.
Agile is a Sham
thats SCRUM and TDD and all the rest; it is all those new ways of managing development projects and being super-productive and modern and buzzword-compliant; all the sprints, scrums, playing cards nonsense.
The management pitch is that by getting programmers to follow some process rote you will get good, predictable results out.
See, the thing is, the success of the coding-part of a project is dependent on the calibre of the engineers doing that coding and not the process they follow.
Source: williamedwardscoder
Learning From Failure: A Presentation To Lean Startup Circle Boston
About a month ago, I was invited to speak to the Lean Startup Circle Boston. I gave the presentation last night. After attending many of their meet-ups, I didn’t want to give one more talk about building an MVP, using Agile/Lean/Kanban, or doing Customer Development sessions. I wanted to offer the group a different perspective that they could learn from.
I settled on identifying themes in failure. Looking back on my career, I pulled out some recurring themes that foreshadowed failure of a new product or startup. The two most prevalent I’ve seen are what I call The Services Death Spiral and The Rationality Trap.
The Services Death Spiral
You have an early product with some interested customers. Instead of saying no to their feature requests, you fill the gaps in the product with professional services so you don’t distract the product team. Over time, the professional services team subsumes the product team until you have an unsustainable and unscalable business model.
My prior startup, Permission TV, where I led the product/engineering team, fell victim to this. We had a few million in revenues and some unbelievable customer implementations, but we couldn’t scale it without more people. This is not good when you have VC’s with $20+ million in and expecting a 9-figure exit.
The Rationality Trap
You have a brilliant idea. When you get out of the building to do Customer Development, you receive overwhelming response. You build the MVP and nobody uses it. You might have people sign up, but nobody makes it part of their ongoing workflow.
This has happened to me more that I want to admit. I’ve learned to obsessively measure quantitative metrics in addition to qualitative. It doesn’t matter if customers “love it” or even buy it. If they don’t use it, you’re dead in the water and ready for a pivot.
The full presentation is below. Enjoy!
Eric Ries at Lean Startup Circle Boston
I had the opportunity to see Eric Ries give his latest Lean Startup presentation as part of Lean Startup Circle Boston. I’ve seen Eric speak a number of times and he always brings some fresh material to get your brain working. I also manned the video camera and did my best to capture the essence of the presentation. NOTE: I’m not a videographer so don’t complain about the quality. I did my best. :-)
Here’s the video. I suggest watching it in its entirety…good stuff:
Lean Startup Circle Boston - Eric Ries from Matthew Mamet on Vimeo.
SLP Boston Kickoff With Bill Warner
This blog was originally posted on the Startup Leadership Program Blog. I was fortunate enough to be selected as one of the fellows for the 2010 Boston class. This was a great first class and I’m excited for the rest of the year.
The SLP Boston chapter kicked off their first class on September 21. After some great kickoff presentations from Program Leader Michael Mullins and Director Anupendra Sharma, we were lucky to be joined by Bill Warner, best known as the founder of Avid Technology.
Bill immediately made all of the new fellows feel comfortable. Instead of a lecture format, he sat at the head of the table with more of a fireside chat feel. After
introductions, Bill shared some stories on the history on Avid, including how he launched it on $50k and spent about 40% of that money on unique office space in an old factory. “The one thing that friends always remember about the early days of Avid was the office…our visitors sat on the waiting room on my Minivan’s back-seat”, Bill recalled. Bill didn’t make a lot of calculated moves in the early days of Avid that you’d expect for such a successful entrepreneur. He instead relied on instinct and gut feel. He advised the fellows to do the same: do things quickly and if it doesn’t work, fix it just as quickly.
Bill contrasted his experience bootstrapping Avid with his launch of Wildfire Communications, which he did on $2MM of VC money. With $2MM, he didn’t have financial constraints so he lost his ability to say no. Even with all of his experience growing Avid into the market leader, Bill eventually failed with Wildfire after 8+ years and a lot more VC money.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the session was when Bill spoke about his philosophies on developing new products. He said the #1 thing to focus on is your “intention flow” to “your people”. When building a product, ask yourself the following: “I intend to help people _____”. In Avid’s case, the video editors were his people, and Bill’s intention was to make it much easier for editors to do their job. He repeated several times that “your people are not your customers. They don’t pay you anything.” This was an interesting contrast to the cliche “listen to your customers” philosophy that is in most business literature.
So, if you’re only focusing on your users, and they don’t pay you, how do you make money? This is where Bill pairs “Co-Flow” with the intention flow. Co-Flow is another flow for the folks who pay money because of what you do in your intention flow. The classic example is Google. Their intention is and always was to have the best search so that “their people” can quickly and easily search the web. Ad Words is their “Co-Flow”. Google is paid by advertisers who want access to the users who are simply searching on the web.
It was a great class and we couldn’t have kicked SLP Boston off better. Lots of great stories and good advice from Bill. We are already looking forward to the next class on October 25!
Great presentation by David Cancel: Data-Driven Startups
On Thursday night, I went to the monthly Boston Lean Startup Circle Meetup to see David Cancel from Performable speak about Data-Driven Startups. I went in expecting to hear about his philosophies and practices around A/B testing, analytics, etc., but the best parts of the presentation had nothing to do with any of those topics.
My takeaways from his refreshing talk:
- Reading books & blogs and listening to talks are good, but it is time to jump in and do it. Get started now!
- Your #1 goal in an early stage startup is to figure out “Does anyone give a shit about your dumb idea?”
- Every business is different. There is no recipe or secret. You need to learn by doing.
And a few takeaways on the main topic:
- Collect data only if it helps you to make business decisions. Don’t waste your time on data collection and analysis if it doesn’t.
- Every startup should have an operating dashboard, a customer funnel, and a cohort analysis. I honestly never heard of a cohort analysis.
- Don’t try to automate your business analytics. Do it manually until it is painful. You’ll learn more that way.
- Multivariate testing is a waste of time. Startups don’t have enough traffic to warrant it. Stick to a simple A/B test.
- The entire company should get together weekly to review the operating dashboard. It will be painful, but it is worth it.
Here’s the slide deck if you are interested in learning more:
Marketers can learn something from “Lean Startup”
This article was originally posted by me on the VisibleGains blog on June 1, 2010.
On Thursday, May 27, many of us from the VisibleGains team went to the Rattlesnake on Boyleston Street for “Lean Into Spring with MassChallenge and Lean Startup Circle Boston”. It was a packed room with 250 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, and other Lean Startup practitioners. We’ve been practicing Lean Startup since the early days here at VisibleGains, so it was great to see such a vibrant culture of like-minded folks right in our backyard.
One thing I noticed was that there were a number of marketers from medium and large companies in attendance at the event. The marketing department, across every company size, often has autonomy to try new ideas, interesting campaigns, new technologies, etc. like no other department in the company. In selling to marketers, we’ve noticed that our product rarely has to go through the bureaucracy that other software products do. Marketers are expected to innovate, and the ones that don’t will lose their job in 18-24 months.
The question is: How do you innovate while reducing the risk of failure? I think one answer to that question can be found in the principles of Lean Startup. Look at the graphic above. Your job is to minimize time through the loop from an idea to a learning. So, if you have a great idea for a new campaign where you’ll have to spend $30k to build the interactive microsite, develop a killer product demo, video some customer testimonials, etc., instead try to focus on the minimum that you can do which results in validated learning from your market. What would happen if you bought some ads and nobody clicked through? All of the work you did on the microsite would be a waste (and might get you fired). In this case, you might be able to get away with a simple landing page that describes the offer, a few graphics that allow the visitor to visualize it, and lead capture form. If you bought ads and nobody clicked through, you would have wasted about a day of effort and minimal company resources.
A nice side effect of adopting a lean, test before you invest, methodology is that you are expected to fail most of the time. Most campaigns will be flops. But when one of them works, you’ll have the resources and time to focus on them to get even greater returns.
Video: My appearance on TheRiseToTheTop for VisibleGains
Back on March 23, I represented VisibleGains on TheRiseToTheTop: RISE #60: Turning Your Videos Into Customers With Craig Daniel From Visible Gains. I was really honored to be interviewed since David has had some killer guests on previous episodes. In addition, David is a great interviewer and he uses a really cool technique for live interviews over Skype. Check it out:
Working too much is harmful to your (startup’s) health
If you are familiar with basic lean theory, you know the goal is to maximize the throughput of a system while respecting it’s constraints. My current company practices the Lean Startupmethodology, which is all about iterating as quickly as you can to a scalable business model. You only have so much runway, so if you’re going to fail, it needs to be fast and early.
One would think that this means that you need to work 16-hour days so you can get as much experience in as possible in a short amount of time. The problem is that when you work 16-hour days, you effectively have no constraints. You trick yourself into thinking you can do everything. What happens when you do this in a startup is typically one of the following:
- You come up with an endless series of ideas, you implement them, but you rarely take the time to analyze the results and learn.
- You work on things that aren’t high priority because you’ll “make time” to get them done
- Your team is constantly playing catch-up to your last “all-nighter” where you had three new ideas for things to work on
- Worst of all, you get upset at your colleagues who are not working as “hard” as you, even though they may be getting more done
If you are going to effectively pivot from your initial idea, you need to collect your experiences, test results, and metrics to make an informed decision. Unless you are and experienced entrepreneur who can rely on your gut to make new product & company decisions, you will likely be failing until you run out of money.
I learned early in my career that I need to force myself to go home, have dinner with my family, and take a break to collect my thoughts, read blogs, etc. Sure, I log on before bed most nights and weekends to catch up on stuff I can’t get to during the day, but I rarely work in extended stretches because I know I lose discipline. I am constantly shocked at how many people I meet who have 10-15+ years of experience who work a ton of hours, never see their families & friends, and are always making sure everyone knows how much they work. I have yet in my career to meet one of these people who actually is successful in business. Also, they tend to be unhappy at home.
I’ve always favored productivity over activity, and given my roots in engineering, I love working with people who get more productivity out of less activity. One of the main reasons I gravitated to the Lean Startup methodology is that you measure productivity in # customers, not hours of work, lines of code, # specs written, powerpoint slides created, etc.
So, work a little smarter. Constrain your work day so that you prioritize what really needs to get done. Say no to anything that doesn’t really need to be done. Working more is not progress…it’s the result that counts.
