Why I wake up and start building each day.
I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create. — William Blake
Create
Written by Ariel Seidman on November 28th, 2011Passion for Adventure
Written by Ariel Seidman on November 25th, 2011“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
Chris McCandles (aka Alexander Supertramp)
How the Luxury of Distribution Creates Bad Habits
Written by Ariel Seidman on July 23rd, 2011Distribution is not my problem
As a product manager, engineer, or designer at any large scale 20M+ users web consumer company you have distribution. Vic Gundotra said it well “We are Google. We can get anybody to kick the tires of a product.” Somebody many years before you figured out the distribution problem that took the company from a few thousand to 20M+ users. So you spent 95% of your time focused on building products and 5% on distribution – if that much. Distribution is a dirty problem that the business development team has to deal with you tell yourself – I just build awesome stuff. The process of designing, iterating and shipping new features becomes second nature to designers, engineers and PMs, and they take incredible pride in shipping delightful product experiences. The moment you leave BigCo to startup your startup those 20M+ users don’t leave with you, but your habits do, and that is where the trouble begins.
Distribution is Sexy
Building an awesome and delightful product is a necessary but insufficient way of building a successful web consumer product. It used to be that you could build a crappy product with great distribution and be successful, that is a very rare breed these days. Yet, there are hundreds of superbly executed products with limited traction, because the distribution problem hasn’t been solved. A well designed and executed set of features may get you a talent “acquisition”, but not much more. If you are focused on building a business you need to believe that solving the distribution problem is sexy.
Wait…but Apple is just about incredible design?
I was having a conversation about distribution and somebody responded, well Apple just builds awesome products and everybody just buys them. Even Apple understood that it needed better distribution and so they spent heavily on building up Apple Stores (it was a rather unpopular decision ten years ago), and today these stores deliver billions in quarterly revenue.
The luxury of built-in-distribution is a crutch
Folks like Brian Chesky & Joe Gebbia (co-founders of AirBnB) never learned the bad habits that come with being a designers or product managers at Google, Facebook, Yahoo. He never had the luxury of working for a company with millions of users, so he had to figure out how to rise above the noise and market and distribute his product from day one.
Busy building Gigwalk
Written by Ariel Seidman on May 4th, 2011I haven’t been posting to my blog much lately as I’ve been busy. Very busy building Gigwalk with my co-founders Matt and David and our founding employees Joel and Pushkar. We haven’t talked publicly about Gigwalk much till today…
Today, after a few months in private beta we’re thrilled to publicly launch Gigwalk and announce our seed funding. Our free Gigwalk iPhone app is in the App Store, and starting today you can post Gigs for the Gigwalk mobile workforce. continue reading
Windows Phones is Still Part of the Conversation
Written by Ariel Seidman on March 20th, 2011Last week I had dinner with thirty entrepreneurs and former entrepreneurs (mostly VCs now) — founders of Pandora, DropBox, and lots of other companies that you will hear about in the next few years. Everybody in the room are making mobile platform decisions on a weekly basis — i.e. they are the folks on the ground deploying capital and building the next generation of mobile applications and services. Apple, Google, Microsoft, HP, and RIM are all trying to sway them to build on their platform.
Everybody agreed that you have to build for iOS (Apple) and Android (Google) – every company will sequence development for these differently based on their monetization strategy, demographics, and geographical focus. The only other mobile platform that is still part of the conversation is Windows Phone. Yes, they have a unique product experience, but do they have the distribution horsepower to reach a critical mass of users to make it a must for application developers? Not yet. But given Microsoft’s cash position and its distribution smarts (Nokia) nobody in the room would bet against them.
Peak Noise. Managing Noise at Startups.
Written by Ariel Seidman on March 14th, 2011Every few months the drumbeat of tech news and Twitter chatter reaches peak noise levels during large events like SXSW.
The noise generated is dangerous to your startup as it:
- Lures You into Group Think: Memes’ get created and elevated to a “cool” status. Your product starts to chase these shiny new memes. Then we end up with a world of sixty mobile messaging and thirty mobile photo-video sharing apps.
- Pushes You into React Mode: Over-reacting to a few glowing articles and Tweets about a related startup is a recipe for disaster. Do this enough times and your startup culture becomes defensively minded, when you need to be playing offense on your terms. Have a strongly held point of view and product and marketing plan – and execute it. Then let your customers decide whether you’ve built something interesting.
- Clutters Your Mind: Your mind becomes cluttered with what everybody else is doing leaving little time for your mind to focus on what you want to do. A poor state of mind for designing and building innovative products.
- Tricks You into Thinking that Being a Startup is Enough: With all the excitement of the press, bloggers, and Tweets you start to believe that this is the goal. Stacey at GigaOM says it perfectly: “Somehow the act of creating a startup has become the goal instead of the building of a business.”
The best companies, entrepreneurs, and athletes learn how to tune the noise out:
- Apple doesn’t participate in most conferences nor does they blog or Tweet much. They announce products on their timeline.
- LinkedIn: Reid Hoffman never attended SXSW until this year (the year LinkedIn will IPO).
- Michael Jordan and other great athletes talk about getting into a ‘zone.’ Doesn’t matter how noisy the stadium becomes. They don’t hear it.
Do not construe my comments as encouraging putting blinders on. Do stay networked and aware of what is happening around you. Blogs, news aggregators, and social tools are designed to suck your attention, so you need to monitor consumption. Once you’ve consumed for the day, spend time synthesizing these small bits of information into macro trends. If you don’t, you’ll end up pulling at threads.