Ariel Seidman

Moving Day

Ariel Seidman — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:24:31 +0000

I started using Tumblr on the side. Just for quick little posts to share. Inevitably this simpler tool also become my main blogging tool. For what I do it is superior to WordPress. So, I will no longer be updating aseidman.com, but will keep it around as-is.

Instead please check out my blog on arielseidman.com

Create

Ariel Seidman — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 07:13:57 +0000

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

Passion for Adventure

Ariel Seidman — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 07:42:36 +0000

“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

Ariel Seidman — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 22:41:41 +0000

Distribution 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

Ariel Seidman — Wed, 04 May 2011 21:24:33 +0000

I 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

Ariel Seidman — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 16:55:50 +0000

Last 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.

Ariel Seidman — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:28:07 +0000

Every 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.

My New Tumblr “Blog”

Ariel Seidman — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 21:00:24 +0000

I have been following Tumblr’s progress for awhile. Tumblr ties pieces of classic blogging, social networking, and Tweeting with a heavy emphasis on photos and videos into a beautifully designed package. Unlike Twitter which does one thing very well, Tumblr does many.

I will continue to post longer thoughts here, but for quick “appetizer” notes and things of interest I will start posting them on my Tumblr blog here. If you want my stream of conscious check out Tumblr, if you want some well formed ideas this is the place for you.

Are Users Aware They are Running Android?

Ariel Seidman — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 02:07:42 +0000

Android’s strategy is to provide both hardware and software diversity to spread Android globally and quickly. So far, it’s working. A hardware diversity strategy for non-niche markets (greater than 300M units) works – Microsoft used this successfully in the PC market. The question remains whether software diversity is a good long-term strategy for Android. Are they building brand loyalty and experience lock-in that will stand the test of time.

(1) Users don’t know they are carrying an Android powered device.

As part of Gigwalk recruitment we ask users to provide us with the type of phone they own. Here is the exact wording of the question

If you don’t own an iPhone, what kind of operating system is your device running?

That means that the vast majority of users don’t know they are using an Android device. I was curious so I dug deeper and asked some users who did not include the term Android in describing their phone what they thought Android was and here are some of the responses I got:

Android is a place to buy apps
Android is a specific kind of phone (but I don’t have one)

(2) No Experience Lock-In

Longer term this software diversity strategy hampers Google’s ability to lock-in users to the Android platform. One of the last remaining ways to lock-in users over extended period of times is experience lock-in. Getting a user to switch from Windows to Mac is hard as most don’t want to re-learn how to use an operating system – that is experience lock-in. The same thing will happen for mobile operating systems; as users develop gesture muscle memory around common mobile tasks (calling, texting, emailing, photos, etc.) they are not going to eagerly switch devices. By inviting hardware partners to customize the Android UI (e.g. HTC Sense) they are introducing software diversity into the ecosystem. This software diversity means their are no consistent experiences across Android devices. When a user upgrades their device switching from their HTC Incredible (Android device) to a Samsung Galaxy (another Android device) or Windows Phone is nearly as much relearning work for the user.

The Mobile Hardware Diversity Strategy

Ariel Seidman — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 07:16:17 +0000

Recently Marco Arment made the point that Android suffers from too much hardware choice. This is really an argument against the hardware diversity strategy. I have purchased two iPhones and will likely purchase another one in the future. Yet, to argue against the hardware diversity strategy is a mistake. Here’s why:

5 Billion Mobile Subscribers
- Ultimately all 5 billions of these subscribers will be buying a smartphone. Some people will buy two so it could be more. While I really like my iPhone, in a market of this size a lot of people won’t agree. Some won’t like its price, others its size, , some won’t buy because of a missing feature(s), and the list goes on . I think you will be hard pressed to find a non-niche market (>300 million units) in the tech consumer space where a single product dominates.
Calling a Game in the 1st Inning
- The smartphone revolution has only started — their are only a few hundred million devices out there. Drawing conclusions on the hardware diversity strategy at this stage is like calling a baseball game in the 1st inning with the score 2-1. The hardware diversity strategy takes many years to fully play out.
- To suggest that the hardware accessory market won’t develop because of hardware diversity seems is wrong. Samsung sold 10M Galaxy Android devices in about six months and the accessory vendors jumped on board.
Big Bang vs. Constant Drumbeat
- iPhone takes the big bang approach to marketing. A single big launch every year a frenzied build-up. For most people who don’t follow technology that big Apple event quickly fades from memory after a day or two – they simply don’t keep this stuff top of mind. Whereas the marketing power of Android and Windows Phone is a constant drumbeat in TV, web, radio, billboards, etc. The aggregate marketing spend of the hardware vendor, mobile OS provider, and carrier is going to be huge.
How People Buy Phones
- How techies buy phones is very different then normal people. Head to a Verizon or AT&T store in Waukegan, IL and watch how normal people buy phones. That will give you a sense of how normal people make phone purchasing decisions. If they see a huge and sexy Windows Phone display and the sales guy is talking up the Windows Phones’, normals are going to play around with a few of the Windows Phones and buy one of them.

Additionally, Android and Windows Phone are not using the exact same strategies. Android is taking a hardware AND software diversity strategy – they allow their hardware partners to layer on custom user experiences. This is a dangerous long term strategy as users never mentally develop brand affinity towards a single user experience. Whereas, Microsoft is only employing a hardware diversity strategy, and even there its taking on a slightly different form than Android. Specifically, Windows Phone hardware specs are very strict compared to Android.