Lately I’ve been thinking about the reasons I’m in the startup world. I had that feeling that besides record sales something was going in the wrong direction. I realized this upon seeing the consequences of company losing focus.
A few years ago I could go on and on, strategizing about how this and that could work together, and how this add-on product would create value to that segment of customers. Skalfa folks never complained and pulled one crazy project after another.
In the end of the day, I was forgetting that a small team was only capable to do one thing. I’ve been guilty of this for the past several years, and now it’s time to re-evaluate what we do, and most importantly, why.
The only true reason for us to exist is to create a meaningful impact, to make a difference for our customers. By losing focus my company ended up in danger of not achieving that goal.
Lesson learned? Never forget about the costs of losing focus. You may not realize them until it’s too late.
I’d like someone to walk me through the rationale of Twitter’s latest effort. How does liking a band’s music make me want to read its tweets? Or vice versa, if I like to read Trent Reznor (I don’t), does it make me care about Nine Inch Nails?
The iOS app is well crafted and “overdesigned” and is all about showing who’s following who, and how everybody is listening to everybody. Oh, and let’s throw Spotify and Rdio there. Just in case.
I guess, this is what happens when you hire all designers you can find (out of fear of Facebook), and no clear ideas of what to do next. As a Twitter user and a music listener, I just don’t see how all of this is better than standalone Spotify or Last.fm.
Maybe it’s too early to judge, after all. The use of Twitter itself was unclear at the start, and look how it turned out. Maybe we are witnessing the birth of a new way of discovering music online. Or maybe it’s just another initiative to make a quick buck of iTunes affiliate sales.
Boredom is the brain’s way to tell you you should be doing something else. But the brain doesn’t always know the most appropriate thing to do. If you’re bored and use that energy to play guitar and cook, it will make you happy. But if you watch TV, it may make you happy in the short term, but not in the long term.
Funny, I recently started playing guitar more instead of spending time with my iDevices. Guess what? It made me happier even short term.
You would think it must be really easy to find something to obsess over instead of checking what strangers have to say. Why do people fall for it? Does it mean we are so fundamentally unhappy about ourselves to chase every possible distraction?
Starting with 1.5.2, Oxwall no longer supports IE8, and this is good news for everybody: 1) if you are still using IE8, here’s a nice little reason #598453739842035609 to drop it and download a better, newer, more secure browser, such as Google Chrome or Firefox. 2) if you don’t use it, you will enjoy faster development cycles from our team.
A good salesman sells everybody. A great salesman sells everybody but himself. What made Steve Jobs think different was not genius, passion, or vision. It was his refusal to believe sales and customers meant nothing was broken. He enshrined this in the name of Apple’s campus: Infinite Loop. The secret of Steve was that he was never satisfied. He devoted his life to asking, “Why doesn’t it work?” and, “What should I change to make it work?”
I can relate to this. Design process is exhaustive to the extent you choose. Whenever you decide to stop because “that’s the thing”, you can still find something to change for the better. Just think deeply one more day. It’s one crazy infinite loop.
I told my kids, “You’re always complaining about school. If you don’t like school just don’t go. I don’t care at all.”
You should read some of James Altucher to get another perspective on just about anything in life. He’s exaggerating his every message but how else is it going to work for masses?
Google shutting down Google Reader. That’s gotta be a huge bummer, but what does it have to do with you, apart from finding another host for your RSS feeds?
Do the same. Spring-clean now.
I suggest everyone to develop a good habit of taking an “extra critical” look at anything you do. At what you are. At least once a year.
Whether it means to bury an idea that doesn’t work out, throw out old garbage from the house, clarify messy relationships, quit your dead-end job, your “household” most probably needs some maintenance.
Too bad we stuff our lives with piles of garbage that we sometimes can’t see over. We need simplicity, it makes us happy.
Yet when you “criticize in private” for behavior that occurred in a team meeting or affects the team, you undermine team members’ accountability to each other. You send the message that team members are accountable only to you, not to the team. You also send the entire team the message that they don’t need to hold each other accountable — you’ll do it for them. In short, you shift accountability from the team to you.
— Android documentation for:
ActivityManager.isUserAMonkey()
(Source: haseman)
So when is the freemium model worth it? Freemium services tend to work best when these four conditions are met:
- The population of free users enhances the value to those who pay.
- The two types of users — those who have a willingness to pay and those who don’t — are easy to differentiate.
- Some premium functionality matters a lot to paid users but its deprivation doesn’t impair free usage.
- The product is viral enough that any cannibalization is, on the whole, offset by faster growth.
I’ll add #5: The cost of having free users is under control. It’s generally irrelevant with shipped software but with cloud services it can kill you. I got burnt by it.
